In 2013, Professor Paul Cooper, Director of the Sustainable Buildings Research Centre (SBRC) spoke of how the SBRC “set out to achieve several sustainability and Australian building-firsts, including certification under the world’s most rigorous sustainability program – the Living Building Challenge.”
And on the 21st of November 2019, six years after the building’s completion, Cox Architecture achieved it.
The SBRC is the first building in Australia to achieve International Living Building Challenge compliance.
Here’s the story…
The University of Wollongong’s Sustainable Buildings Research Centre (SBRC) has achieved full marks under the world’s toughest sustainability standard for buildings, the Living Building Challenge (LBC).
The result confirms that the SBRC building has set a new benchmark as arguably the most sustainable building in Australia.
The LBC, administered by the International Living Future Institute (ILFI), certifies projects that meet ambitious green building performance standards through a framework of “Petals” around categories that include Energy, Materials, and Water.
“Living” Certified buildings have met the criteria for all seven petals.
There are only 24 buildings in the world that have met all seven Petals and are considered Living Certified; an exclusive list that now includes the SBRC.
SBRC Director Senior Professor Paul Cooper said the research centre’s design was based on the LBC regenerative design framework aimed at creating “living” buildings that make a positive impact on our society and our environment overall.
“The building has been carefully designed to generate positive health and wellbeing through a restorative and healthy coexistence with nature, including the use of green walls and native plants, creating a strong connection between the building occupants and the landscape,” he said.
The team used the LBC framework as a way to design and construct a building that is not just sustainable, but aims to be restorative.
“Sustainable means effectively you’re not doing any net harm overall – but restorative means you’re doing something that’s addressing some of the environmental damage that has been done in the past,” Professor Cooper said.
The LBC is “the world’s most rigorous proven performance standard for buildings”.
To earn the full seven Petals, the SBRC building was tested against stringent performance standards and metrics covering energy use, site utilisation, health and happiness, equity, beauty, water, and materials used.
“We had to track every single item and material that came into the building as part of construction,” Professor Cooper said.
“No ‘red list’ materials – formaldehyde, chromium, mercury, PVC, for example – are allowed during the building process. None of the materials or pieces of equipment or building elements are allowed to have red list materials unless an exemption has been given.”
“There were also sourcing restrictions on the building materials, for example steel and concrete could be sourced from no more than 500km away, to limit ‘embodied’ carbon emissions and environmental impact due to transport of the construction materials to site.”
The LBC certification process aims to inspire people to design buildings that are as “efficient as a flower; a simple symbol for the ideal built environment”.
Living Certification under the LBC means the SBRC building is the:
- 1st Living Certified Building in Australia
- 24th Living Certified project in the world
- 3rd Living Certified project outside the United States
- 1st project in Australia to achieve any level of LBC certification
“The certification process has been a long and difficult journey since the building was completed in 2013,” Professor Cooper said.
“This process has involved the extensive monitoring of all aspects of building performance, and sourcing difficult-to-access as-built documentation for every component that went into the construction of the building.”
“The final stages of this excellent work has been carried through by SBRC staff including Associate Professor Duane Robinson, Dr Craig McLauchlan, and Dr Leela Kempton, together with staff from the building architects Cox Architecture, and ESD consultants Cundall, and Hyve Projects.”
The SBRC is a haven for research and industry collaborations with the goal to make all buildings sustainable.
The SBRC building itself is a demonstration of the value of the research the SBRC team carries out.
It also has 6-Star Green Star certification and the building includes 468 solar panels to support net zero energy, an onsite rainwater system to enable net zero water performance, and use of environmentally safe and reused building materials.
Situated at the Innovation Campus, the centre’s Exhibition Foyer is open to the public during work hours.
“It is hoped people will explore the building and gardens, and be inspired to design their homes using similar principles,” Professor Cooper said.
Architecture and Design
Cox Architecture designed The Sustainable Building Research Centre (SBRC).
It is a structure that lives by its work.
Won by Cox through a design competition to house Wollongong University’s built environment sustainability research unit, the building’s primary purpose is to deliver evidence-based research into sustainability for Australia’s built-environment.
Designed to prototype a range of sustainable building technologies, designs and materials, the fabric of the building itself is a site for integrated research.
The SBRC needed to be water, energy and carbon neutral, socially responsible, equitable, nontoxic, and healthy.
All the while remaining beautiful, inspiring, and educational.
The site is located on a new campus immediately north of the regional city of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia.
It is beautifully positioned between a mountainous escarpment in the west and a mangrove wetland beach in the east.
The centre is split into two, resulting in two linked buildings that together frame and engage a water course and landscape corridor.
Metaphorically, this forms a ribbon between escarpment and ocean.
The Cox Architecture design saw the north building include a high-bay laboratory and the south building include research, education, exhibition, and workspaces.
The space between the two provides for outdoor learning and social interaction, as well as endemic landscape amenity, extended to an Indigenous urban agriculture bush-tucker garden.
This provides a powerfully simple connection to place and past site uses.
The new campus’ structure was based upon an existing north-sound pedestrian spine.
The SBRCs roof form actively engages and envelopes this spine, creating a covered public space inviting open social interaction between the SBRC and the broader campus community.
The building is dynamic, adaptable, and retrofittable.
Thin north/south floorplates and optimal orientation ensures effective natural ventilation and sunlight.
The buildings forms capture south-westerly afternoon and north-easterly sea-breezes, while eaves and sunshades are implemented to control solar gain.
The roof to the southern workspace and exhibition building acts as the primary energy wing, while the northern high-bays curved profile ensures solar access to the landscape space between buildings – accommodating a rooftop test area that provides a north-facing solar testing armature.
The material palette seeks to reveal the textural richness of the SBRCs coastal setting and celebrate place.
Bricolage guided Cox Architecture’s sustainability approach to recycling materials into the building.
Reused bridge timbers, steel railway tracks, abandoned telegraph poles and four generations of brick and local timbers were all used.
This fundamentally contributed to a handcrafted building that is inherently of its place with dense textural richness.
Project Details
Project size – 26,002 m2
Project budget – $18,000,000
Project Team
Architecture
Cox Architecture
COX is a design-focused contemporary architectural practice with studios located in every major Australian city and a history spanning 60 years.
Key to their ethos is supporting the public life of our cities. Cox does this by ensuring each project makes positive contributions to its public realm – giving more than it takes.
Engineering Systems and Design
Cundall
Positioned at the forefront of sustainability in the built environment, Cundall takes a refreshingly positive approach to providing professional services within the built environment from business level strategy and governance to building performance and design, their philosophy is to foster collaboration and creativity.
Driven by the consideration of people, design, environment, economics and technology, Cundall has proven that sustainability and commercial pragmatism are not mutually exclusive, but are inextricably linked by a symbiotic relationship.
Project Management
Hyve
Hyve are sustainability-focused project managers looking to help visionary clients delivery outstanding projects.
Photography
John Gollings
John Gollings has been the photographer of choice, the go-to guy for many Australian architects.
He is renowned for his ability to almost always compose the best shot, the one defining image that makes a building memorable, etches it into the psyche.
Photo Gallery
Click on a thumbnail image to enlarge.
Design © 2020 Cox Architecture. All Rights Reserved.| Images © 2020 John Gollings. All Rights Reserved.
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