Rethinking the Architecture of Bush Dwellings and Settlements

On January 25, 2019, the Swedish sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg warned World Economic Forum delegates, “Our house is on fire!” Eight months later, along the south and south-east of Australia from Melbourne to Brisbane, bushfires on an unprecedented scale and intensity exploded as if in answer. Australians were stunned by the loss of life, the quantity of houses and infrastructure destroyed, and the estimate of more than a billion wild animals incinerated. We had entered a new era of the climate regime that presaged major shifts in ecology that threaten the survival of dry eucalyptus forest.

Australia has always been a fire land, but in the spring of 2019 something new began. Prolonged droughts, we are warned, will be more frequent, bushfires longer and more intense, eucalyptus forest will retreat under intensifying cycles of bushfires and desiccation.

In the 1950s, growing up at Coffs Harbour on the north coast of New South Wales, I remember the town enclosed on three sides above the banana plantations by bushfire, a wildly dancing cordon of red and yellow against the black night, and the sound of exploding eucalypts, as loud as heavy artillery. Fire is a permanent quality of our landscape. Yet 230 years on, we still behave as though we live in a green and pleasant land like Kent or the English Lake District. Deluded, we construct our houses in defiance of our knowledge.

What occurred this summer was not inevitable. Houses can be designed that survive intense firestorms. This has been known for more than forty years. It involves nothing more difficult than the application of existing technology and straightforward bush knowhow. To rebuild the same as before would be disastrous.

Let me explain. Arriving back in Australia after a year at Washington University in St Louis in 1983, I discovered the newly completed local history museum south of Kempsey on the Pacific Highway. It was thrilling. Before this, Australian architecture was, for the most part, borrowed and imitated overseas architecture. Glenn Murcutt’s Kempsey Museum was none of that. It was fresh, new, and best of all it was authentically Australian in the sense of being indigenous in spirit. It was a revolutionary breakthrough in architecture.

The Kempsey Museum responded to the delicate quality of the landscape with a softly rounded roof and extended corrugated iron forms. It sat comfortably among the trees, not out of place, not needing an English landscape to validate it. It belonged.

When I was preparing my book on Murcutt, Leaves of Iron, I encountered two of his houses—examples of architecture that dealt with the fire problem directly. It had never crossed my mind till then that there might be an architectural solution, much less what might be its aesthetic consequences. Murcutt’s solutions, sadly, have been ignored.

Let me describe the Laurie Short House at Terrey Hills. The site of the house was two and a half hectares surrounded by Ku-ring-gai National Park, superimposed against a broad backdrop of twisted casuarina salt-stung scrub. Murcutt had just gone into private practice as a sole practitioner and saw the project as an opportunity to show his mettle. He did not disappoint. His design began as a homage to the German modernist Mies van der Rohe, and was inspired initially by Mies’s elegant Farnsworth pavilion at Plano, Illinois. No one who has been to Chicago could possibly mistake Plano, eighty kilometres north of Chicago, with its freezing winters, heavy snowfall, sylvan woodland and fiery fall foliage, for Terrey Hills. Mies took the marble Greek temple and re-expressed it as a transparent steel-and-plate-glass pavilion.

It required several designs before Murcutt found his métier and ultimately resolved the complex challenges of geography, landscape, climate and place, and crucially, dealt with fire. The Short house was half-buried and backed into the hillside, but it retained its original minimalist steel-and-glass aesthetic and some of the Farnsworth abstract purity and isolation behind large sheets of plate glass. Murcutt included additional refinements to the Miesian formula: the east-facing rooms exposed to the morning sun were shielded by sliding louvred screens mounted on tracks, and an open covered space on the north-east corner was shaded by deep-angled steel louvres.

The design adopted an improved approach to bushfire defence. It featured a flat concrete water-ponded roof (ten centimetres deep) and long entry wall clad with black ceramic for fire protection. Tiles are superb heat insulation and are used by NASA to protect spacecraft during re-entry. At first the plan was to screw-fix three-millimetre steel plate cladding on the entry wall, but after discussions it was decided to use black tiles instead to reduce the contrast between the black steel frame and the panel infill. The same black integrated the steel frame with the infill and gave the same handsome fire-charred appearance overall as the burnt trees surrounding it outside. The house at Plano was white against brilliant spring green; at Terrey Hills, it was black against the charred black of burnt bush. The bony look of the Short house echoes the boniness of its surroundings which is tough and adapted to fire.

The sky is important in our experience of Australian landscape: light reflected from the ponded roof was captured and directed into the interior through semi-circular hoods and bounced into the family room.

Soon afterwards, Murcutt’s fire precautions proved their effectiveness in a conflagration. Even as far back as 1972, Murcutt considered a sprinkler system around Laurie Short’s house as an additional layer of protection. In an interview, Murcutt remembered:

We developed a sprinkler system around the site … last fires that came, he rang me and said, “Look, that’s to let you know that the fires came right around the house, but I rolled a couple of forty-four-gallon drums of petrol down from the shed where I’d thought they’d explode, into the house.”

He just stayed in the house with his forty-four-gallon drums of petrol, and the house awash in water and nothing was damaged at all … and the interesting thing is Laurie said he was by himself, and my brother Gary was two sites away and had something like thirty firefighters trying to save his house, which they did do …

Laurie Short’s confidence was justified. The design not only saved the house, it eliminated the need for volunteer firefighters to attend and risk their lives.

A decade later, Murcutt designed a house for two painters, Sydney Ball and Lyn Eastaway, below a ridge above a steep valley at Glenorie, north-west of Sydney, which demanded extreme fire measures. In 1980 Glenorie was very isolated and there were few houses, an ideal location for two painters whose sole wish was undisturbed quiet in beautiful inspiring bush surroundings. Sydney Ball was a significant abstract artist who exhibited in New York to considerable acclaim. His paintings were large, and their hanging and display became the raison d’être for the design.

The house was framed around a single long wall, three metres high and six metres long, so placed it could be viewed frontally. The wall became the spine; to create sufficient depth for it to be seen properly it was located opposite the entry, and became the back of an equally long north-west veranda. Under an overhang below the house, Ball discovered hand stencils in an Aboriginal sandstone gallery. His house became its modern successor in corrugated iron art, Murcutt’s first all-corrugated-iron house.

The modest floor platform measured seven metres by twenty-five metres, and was elevated on steel pipes and floated over a series of sandstone ledges. The location of the art wall immediately behind the entry controlled everything. The couple’s two bedrooms were at one end and the painting gallery in the middle, which flowed into a single dining and living space separated by a fireplace, then extended outside onto the veranda.

The Ball Eastaway pavilion was simplicity itself. The bathroom, laundry and kitchen, each side of the entry, were behind the blank south-east wall facing the road. The house is narrow and long, open at each end, so positioned it slipstreams the sandstone rock ledges below it. It is near the road on the ridge for ease of access. Below the house, the hillside slips into a steep valley. In strong winds the threat from bushfires can be extreme. Preventive measures were crucial in determining construction and materials. Steel was used throughout for the structure and wall framing; two steel beams on ten-centimetre diameter columns support the floor, and the walls are hundred-millimetre and seventy-five millimetre metal studs. Corrugated galvanised iron, screw-fixed horizontally, was selected for the cladding outside over hundred-millimetre Insulwool. The internal walls are lined in plasterboard.

Unlike most conventional suburban houses built in the bush, Murcutt’s most radical innovation was a comprehensive drenching sprinkler system. Sprinklers are mandatory in high-rise office and residential towers. It was exceptional at the time to install them in a dwelling. To ensure complete drenching of the roof and walls, thirty-seven-millimetre diameter water pipes were mounted fifty millimetres off the roof and roof shoulders, running the entire length with twin-spray nozzles at intervals. Under extreme fire conditions and ember attack, their function is to drench the entire external corrugated building skin in a uniform water curtain. A diesel generator and electric water pump, supplied from an onsite water tank, is independent of the mains water.

Images of brave men defending their homes with a garden hose are ludicrous by comparison. The sprinkler system used equipment that was readily available, most of it standard in agricultural irrigation. None of it was high-tech.

Complete towns were destroyed in the recent bushfires. This raises the question of whether the design of settlements in the bush should be rethought to prevent such disasters in the future, and what might be involved. Could better planning, better defence measures, better equipment and differently styled settlements avoid such calamities? Moreover, if we put defence against fire on a war footing, could we put such events behind us?

We are at war with nature, like it or not. It is time we reconsidered how we intend to live in Australia, whether to adapt, reform destructive land use practices, how we manage, mine and farm land, and critically, how and where we build our houses and settlements.

The role of post-bushfire inquiries seems to be to dissipate public anger while doing nothing. But there is much that can and should be done to fireproof bush settlements. It will require a radical rethink about where and how people live in the bush that will involve drastic changes to the form and construction of new settlements. People choose to live in the bush for a wide variety of reasons, many to escape from the city, others on farms, others like the tranquillity of the bush, and others are loners. It is now obvious that we cannot take the Australian bush for granted, and nor can we live there willy-nilly.

Fireproofing settlements means they will need to be much more compact, like medieval European towns. Many people won’t take kindly to this, but there are social benefits: a communal lifestyle to compensate for loss of individual freedoms and autonomy, without greatly diminishing ease of access to wild nature.

What might such a settlement be like? Defensible bushfire settlements need to neutralise ember attacks and counter the intense heat produced by firestorms. A perimeter defence ring around settlements, configured to deflect wind-driven embers and reduce the force and temperature of the fire front, is an elementary requirement.

Throughout history, people have contended with marauding bandits, pirates and irregular armies seeking booty and captives. The better to defend themselves, people have built fortified, walled settlements for their common defence and abandoned previous patterns of dispersed scattered homesteads. Numerous instances illustrate the common features of compact settlements behind stone or timber fortification walls and moats. They usually have a single strong entry point and permanent and secure access to water. Examples spring to mind: Carcassonne in south-west France, Mykonos in the Aegean, San Gimignano in Tuscany, Dubrovnik on the Adriatic in Croatia. Bush settlements could adopt and update such features as compactness and adaptation to the topography.

A bushfire attack is an extreme, intense assault that usually lasts not much over half an hour. The essential requirement is an efficient practical defence against fire storms and the spread of fire from ember attacks. On the Catalonian coast the farmers, exposed to repeated attacks by Corsair pirates from North Africa, moved their villages inland. On Mallorca, the people built lookout towers and lit fires to warn of impending Arab raids. These were practical measures.

Australians love their freedom to build where and how they like. It’s individualistic and hedonistic, and comes at a price. The alternative is a more rational science-based approach: medieval walls can be replaced by an earth berm to deflect fire storms, topped by perimeter water lines with sprinklers that throw up a uniform water curtain to dissipate the ember attack. The cost of constructing such a perimeter defence will necessitate living in close quarters, in a denser layout, a sacrifice perhaps, but one that would bring unexpected benefits. The dwellings will have to be constructed of non-combustible materials, perhaps have water-ponded roofs, ceramic or plastered exteriors. The tightly grouped, long low dwellings might have lush gardens and a pond and larger garden at the centre, adjoining the emrgency bushfire refuge, a control centre for co-ordinating fire defence and medical clinic, partly underground, under a roof protected by a thick layer of earth. In the middle, a water storage tank, above that a bushfire lookout equipped with satellite connection for early warning, radio, fire detection gear and visual observation. Somewhere there would be a helipad for emergency evacuation.

Petra flourished for centuries in a kilometre-long gorge by harvesting rainwater captured by an ingenious system of channels and reservoirs. At its peak, it supported 20,000 inhabitants. Singapore is a more recent modern instance. Such examples show how, in an increasingly hot and desiccated Australia, aided by modern technology and science, we might succeed in meeting the increasing fire risk.

There are numerous ways to defeat bushfires, and each will have to be rigorously tested and evaluated. Once upon a time, the Department of Housing and Construction, later the Department of Works, operated the Commonwealth Experimental Building Station, which fire-rated building materials and tested the performance of entire wall elements and published Notes on the Science of Building, which sold for five cents. It was closed and sold off to developers! We need its equivalent, but better, to tackle the problems I have outlined and find the most efficient and economical solutions.

Public inquiries make recommendations, but these are no more than a beginning. What is needed are designs, tested and worked out in detail, to replace the forlorn burnt towns up and down the east coast of Australia. The worst outcome would to be rebuild as before, having learnt nothing. Other societies in the past have addressed similar challenges of decreasing rainfall, prolonged drought, and encroaching desertification, and found ways to combat them. If we are to survive the present crisis, we will need to learn and benefit from this experience and develop new paradigms for bush dwellings and settlements to meet the new challenges presented by fireland Australia.

Philip Drew is an architecture historian and a doctoral candidate at UNSW on “The Life and Sculpture of Thomas Vallance Wran”.