Abstract
Australia’s first prototypical autonomous house was constructed and occupied on the grounds of the University of Sydney between 1974 and 1979. This paper focuses on various concepts, actors, materials and technologies that circulated in the production of the house. The student designer-builders planned a structure integrating systems for domestic energy production, water capture and heating, waste treatment and food production. They patched together a set of concepts and technologies that ranged from the period’s fashionable international tropes in energy-conscious design (Trombe-Michel walls and methane digesters), to colonial Australian tactics for rural self-sufficiency (the Coolgardie Safe). The students’ travels, transnational countercultural ferment, and the global circulation of radical educators and key architectural texts, all played a part in the production of the house. The project fed back into international media circuits via publication in architecture and radical technology journals. This paper foregrounds the mediation of global and local concerns in the house, and reflects on what insight it allows into the circulation and materialisation of countercultural architectures – their reformulation and reconfiguration as ideas and bodies travelled across the world.
Published Version
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