Breathe challenges Australia's large homes in Home Truth pavilion at NGV

Architecture studio Breathe has created a house-within-a-house for the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne to draw attention to the potential of small homes.

Named Home Truth, the temporary pavilion was made of two frames – an external structure made from timber framing that represents an average Australian home and an internal one that encloses the volume of a small house.

With the average Australian home being 236 square metres in size – ranking the largest in the world according to a report released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2020 – Breathe aimed to draw attention to the ethical and ecological impact of the large homes by presenting the contrasting sizes of the two structures.

"Home Truth highlights how small footprint housing could help curtail suburban sprawl, lessen the environmental impact of housing construction and create a better quality of life for communities," said Breathe.

"We approach design with a mantra of build less, give more," the Melbourne-based studio told Dezeen.

"We design using a sustainability of reductionism, we take out what is unnecessary, strip back to the essence of the building and focus on an effortless, elegant, honest design solution."

Only two materials were used for the construction of the project, in order to reflect the current housing construction methodologies.

The frame of the larger house and the tightly arranged slabs that form the rooms within were made from framing pine, a ubiquitous building material. While silver flecked Saveboard, made from 100 per cent post-consumer waste, was added in between the frames.

The small-scale home at the heart of the project was informed by the apartment complex and design-conscious terrace houses under 100 square metres built in the 1900s in Melbourne, to provide affordable housing for inner city workers.

Breathe hoped the historical reference of small housing would help people to foresee a future of smaller living spaces.

"Our proposal is not part of some unattainable imagined future, but rather a return to a more thoughtful and appropriate scale of living that responds to the needs of others and the planet," the studio said.

"Housing of the future, to me, is well designed. It's efficient, it feels spacious and warm, it will have a net zero carbon footprint, it will be an exporter of energy, it will be manufactured, not constructed to a high degree of quality and sustainability," it added.

"Importantly, our housing of the future will be focused on the human experience, not the automobile and it will look to deliver on sustainability, community and long term affordability."

"Home Truth speculates that overconsumption of space and materials translates into ecological and social consequences – for both us and the planet," Ewan McEoin, NGV's senior curator of Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, commented on the project.

"But importantly, it offers a provocative vision of a new way of thinking about building – seeing the value of living in spaces that are of smaller scale – a vision that prioritises people and planet," he continued.

Home Truth is the ninth installation created for the NGV Architecture Commission, an annual pavilion series that began in 2016.

Previous designs include an inflatable sphere by Nic Brunsdon in 2023 and Temple of Boom by Adam Newman and Kelvin Tsang in 2022.

The photography is by Derek Swalwell.

Home Truth is on display at NGV in Melbourne from 13 November 2024 until April 2025. For an up-to-date list of architecture and design events, visit Dezeen Events Guide.

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