Despite post-war research into passive solar house design, Australia’s sprawling suburbs are today dominated by non-climate-adaptive dwellings. But Tone Wheeler believes sustainability is finally becoming a desirable asset.

Tone is an Australian architect, author, educator, and consultant who has championed socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable design for five decades. He founded environa studio in Sydney in 1986 with a focus on triple-bottom-line sustainability.

We first spoke with Tone in season 4, episode 9 of Ecogradia. In our season 4 bonus episode, Tone outlined three waves in the promotion of sustainable house design to Australians through the decades. We revisit his comments here in greater depth with additional insights that time didn’t allow for in the final podcast edit.

Tone Wheeler
Courtesy of Tone Wheeler

Passive solar houses for all?

As an undergraduate architecture student with an interest in autonomous house design, Tone travelled from Sydney to the United States to spend time in communes in Arizona and New Mexico. He sought to deepen his understanding of the alternative technologies being explored there in the autonomous housing movement of the late 1960s.

At the time, he was reading American counterculture publications such as Whole Earth Catalogue, which had been launched by writer Stewart Brand in 1968.

He was dismayed to be met with questions about why a budding architect from Australia would journey around the world to learn more about sustainable homes. The country had, after all, published excellent guidance about passive solar house design. “I really had no answer,” says Tone.

Australia’s notoriety in the field of passive solar design had its roots in the years immediately following the Second World War. Explains Tone, “A young but significant architect [at the Commonwealth Housing Commission] at the time, Walter Bunning, was given the task of imagining what Australia would be like after the war. He published a book called Homes in the Sun in 1945. […] Already, he anticipated the idea of passive solar.”

The quality of design demonstrated in the book, laments Tone, was almost entirely ignored in the long term, at large. Australia’s cities began expanding after the war with homes mass produced for cost efficiency in suburban estates that ignored basic principles such as good orientation.

A mix of house styles and ages can be found in some Australian suburbs, such as Brunswick in Melbourne.

Scientific endeavour in Australia had been coalescing in the inter-war years at an Australian government research council, which came to be known in 1949 as the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). Home design was still on the official radar thereafter. Recounts Tone:

“[I]n order to get the best people to come and work for the CSIRO in Canberra, which was a fledgling, very much underdeveloped capital, they offered these chief scientists and professors a house on a block of land for free, designed by a leading Australian architect. There’s a book about it called Houses for Scientists. They were great modernist houses, but they were modest.

“As time went on, the CSIRO did research into passive solar. They produced […] booklets that had little protractors in the back. There was a book by Ralph Phillips, Sunlight and Shade in Australasia. It went all the way through the Commonwealth countries.”

It was Phillips’ book (first published in 1948 and today in its sixth edition) that Tone’s friends in the American communes mentioned to him with curiosity. Despite its international reception, the book’s principles hadn’t been broadly applied in Australia.

Back home and writing his graduation thesis about autonomous housing, Tone was stunned to learn from his mother that Phillips lived across the road. “I’d grown up in suburban Sydney in the same street as the guy who had written this brilliant document about sunlight and shade, but I didn’t know it. I had to travel all the way around the world to realise it,” he says.

Australian suburbia can also be found in regional towns, such as Schoalhaven Heads in coastal New South Wales.

From moral encouragement to lifestyle choice

Just why didn’t insights about passive solar house design and sustainability infiltrate Australian suburbia at large? As Tone views it, the mismatch has been linked to policy and market forces as well as cultural factors.

The first wave in the promotion of sustainable house design, he says, was the wave of moral encouragement. It lasted from the immediate post-war period to around 1980, using the significant scientific learnings of the CSIRO and figures such as Bunning as its basis.

“The first wave was the idea of: ‘If we show it, they will be converted.’ [It was] the idea that encouragement will happen. If you just demonstrate to the populace at large the value of a passive solar house […] they will automatically be converted to that idea,” he explains. They weren’t.

“It raises awareness of the issue amongst a small coterie, but it has no lasting impact whatsoever. The rest of Australia is building houses for themselves, and they’re starting to build what eventually becomes the property industry, not a housing industry,” Tone shares.

The financial pressures of home ownership and day-to-day life, suggests Tone, overshadowed the imperative to transition to more sustainable behaviours or designs. At the same time, the low cost of energy produced in coal-fired power stations meant there was little incentive to adopt passive solar design on the grounds of energy savings.

The suburb of Horningsea Park in the southwest of Sydney, Australia, was established in 1996. It is located 39 km from the central business district.

The second wave, Tone describes, is one in which government regulation is adopted as a means of making houses more energy efficient. Aware of Australians’ cultural disinclination to follow rules, however, there was a parallel attempt by government to disguise regulation. He recalls:

“They invented this idea of using a computer programme that had been built by the CSIRO. [It used] the algorithms of real-time weather data to tell you what’s happening inside a house. […] The idea of the regulators was to use NatHERS, as it became known — the Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme — as a regulatory tool. But to do that, you had to set limits inside it.”

An assumption about the use of air conditioning was one of those limits, recounts Tone:

“Well, for a whole generation of Australian architects who’d grown up on the idea of natural cross ventilation and passive solar, this was a complete anathema. It caused an enormous rupture in the architectural community […] [T]he general building community [was] going, ‘Look, you are making a complete mess of this.’ I served for 25 years on different committees trying to fix this idea of a beautiful computer programme being misused for regulation.

“The idea that energy would control things doesn’t work. […] Essentially over time, nothing changes very much in the housing stock. There’s no retrofit. So by the early 2000s, one third of Australian housing stock, which is all suburban houses, mostly doesn’t have ceiling insulation.”

The government then takes another approach, which is to offer subsidised insulation through a programme that came to be known as the pink batts scheme. It was named for the colour of the most famous fibreglass insulation batts available in Australia. The rollout, however, didn’t go smoothly, as Tone describes:

“The scheme unfortunately fails through using a market-based approach, and [because] they try to rush it out. […] [S]adly, four workers died of heat exhaustion in the roofs while putting the insulation in, which just ruined the programme. It gave the idea of sustainability as something that’s going to kill you to do anything about […] So the second wave fails; the regulation fails.”

Concluding in 2010, a failed programme for home insulation in Australia had offered to offset the cost of installing “pink batt” ceiling insulation.

While tax regulations favoured multiple home ownership among those able to afford it, sustainability advocates moved to a third wave: the wave of lifestyle. Says Tone, “And that is that you don’t encourage people to do it. You don’t say to people, ‘You must do it, and this is the regulation.’ You simply disguise it by saying, ‘It’s actually good for you.’”

The development of a website to teach people how to achieve a sustainable home was then on the government’s agenda. Recalls Tone, “A former student of mine who’d become a colleague […] Chris Reardon […] wanted to work out why proselytising for [sustainability] or regulating it didn’t work. He set out to do a doctorate. The very first piece of research he did at the Institute for Sustainable Futures […] was to ask people about their attitudes to sustainability.” He adds:

“He discovered to his horror that ‘GIGFEE’ was everywhere: ‘Green is good, but for everybody else.’ […] Chris won the contract to do [the new government website] by telling them, ‘Do not use the word sustainable. Do not use the word green. Do not tell people that it’s energy efficient or water efficient. Tell them that it’s going to give them a better lifestyle.’”

Talking about passive solar design in terms of a house that makes you more comfortable rather than one that saves energy was, says Tone, “a brilliant flip. […] [I]t becomes about wellness. It becomes about the occupant, not the house. And that’s the dynamic change that happens in that third wave; it’s that you start to talk about what is occupancy, rather than what the building is.”

Given the low level of rainfall in Perth, Australia, households are subject to temporary water restrictions and permanent water efficiency measures.

Rainwater tanks and rooftop photovoltaic panels began to proliferate in the suburbs. According to Tone, over 40% of homes now have solar panels, and the figure is growing constantly. This is due to their affordability, the reward of energy independence during blackouts, and the advantage of lower energy bills.

Rainwater tanks are allowing the enjoyment of swimming pools, green lawns, and food gardens even when municipal water restrictions are applied during droughts.

“[A]ll of a sudden,” he shares, “sustainability becomes a better option. At some point, and I think it’s probably fairly recently — in the last 10 years — the green karma runs over the brown dogma. And we’ve had a lot of brown dogma in Australia.” This, Tone has written, represents a fourth wave that he hopes will be a final stage of the journey to sustainability:

“The ‘alternative technologies’ of the ’70s are now so successful that they are more economical and more desirable than the conventional. You don’t have to encourage, or force, its adoption; it is winning people over in its own right.”

Around 40% of suburban homes in Australia have rooftop solar panels, says Tone. This suburb in New South Wales provides an example.

Will suburbia save itself?

The ‘secret sauce’ of such a shift in sentiment has been noted by other guests on Ecogradia. Back in season 2, episode 3, Bill Reed (Principal of research consulting firm Regenesis) recalled his experience of facilitating community alignment around a mixed-use development in Chile, which had the potential to turn around a trajectory of city decline.

Said Bill, “The secret of [regenerative development] is not forcing people to do it, not creating policies to do it, but to create a pull phenomenon where people say, ‘I want to join that party because people are actually getting something done.’”

The economic rationale for renewable energy production, meanwhile, was conveyed by Amory Lovins (Co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of sustainability research and consulting body RMI, formerly known as the Rocky Mountain Institute), in season 3, episode 1. Building and running new renewable power generators is now cheaper than building and running a new fossil-fueled power station in at least 95% of the world, he suggested.

Added Amory, “There’s no excuse for building a fossil fuel plant anymore unless there’s corruption or some other odd motive going on. We don’t need them to keep the lights on. We don’t need them to make money. And in fact, all they do is add risk and carbon.”

This drawing of a multi-residential building presents aspects of what Tone deems to be a ‘Goldilocks’ formula for sustainable housing in Australia.
Courtesy of Tone Wheeler

For Tone, a lingering hope is that, despite pushback to increased density and the benefits that would bring, Australian suburbia will to some extent ‘save itself’ with its capacity to support more sustainable lifestyles because they are more desirable. The adoption of electric vehicles (quieter and safer than their fossil fuel-based predecessors) provides a case in point, he says:

“The greatest penetration of electric cars is the furthest away from the city centre because it’s easier to plug the car in. You’ve got the panels on the roof. 80% of trips in Australian suburbia are 80 kilometres or less, [so it’s] very easy to have an electric car go for three or four days without being charged. […] So [in some ways] the outer suburbs now are very sustainable. It’s this kind of weird invert.”

Hear more from Tone Wheeler in Ecogradia season 4, episode 9, as well as in our season 4 bonus episode.