This little building at the corner of Queensberry and Bouverie streets, Carlton, is an incubator for all things green. Known as ”Pixel”, it is builder Grocon’s experiment in producing the greenest building in Australia and, apparently, the only carbon-neutral office building of its type in the world.
Erected on a tiny parcel of land on Grocon’s massive Carlton Brewery redevelopment site, Pixel is what the company has dubbed its “Future Office”, a prototype for the kind of buildings the world is going to need when a carbon-constrained environment demands that architects and builders squeeze as much energy efficiency as they can out of our buildings.
In anticipation of the move to carbon-neutral buildings, Pixel has been designed to generate more energy on site than it uses, offsetting carbon generated to run the building. In time, the building is expected to become carbon positive, giving any extra energy it generates back to the grid.
Designed by Studio 505 Architects in association with environmental sustainability design consultants Umow Lai, Pixel ticks just about every “green” box imaginable. You could say the book of sustainability has been thrown at it just to prove how easy - or hard - it is to be green. Some of the features packed into its four storeys include a roof planted with native grasses for water collection and filtering, fixed and sun-tracking photovoltaic panels on the roof, a bank of three vertical wind turbines (interestingly, locked down on the day I visited the building, despite a gentle breeze), reed-bed ledges around each of its four storeys to filter grey water and shade windows, night purging of warm air for cooling of interiors, ammonia refrigeration, vacuum toilets, radiant cooling and development of a structural concrete, with a high proportion of recycled and reclaimed aggregates in its mix, that uses about half the embodied carbon in its manufacture.
All this is concealed behind a colourful facade of fixed shading panels that are cut from sheets of recycled aluminium, designed by Studio 505’s Dylan Brady and Dirk Zimmermann, who cut their teeth resolving the complex facade system at Federation Square.
And here lies the problem. This coat of many colours, like Joseph’s, serves mainly to screen what you could argue is a piece of non-architecture, a simple glass and concrete box filled to its gills with green features. Arranged and attached to a fairly crude galvanised steel frame, this skirt is in essence a piece of applied decoration, a bit of flim-flam, disposable even, created to draw attention to what is a modest and expensive, at $6 million, little building.
It is, you could argue, architecture as advertising, a supergraphic to be discarded and replaced once it reaches its use-by date or goes out of fashion. It is a pity, really. For all its theatrics, there’s nothing in this facade to signal to the casual observer that here, on this tiny 250-square-metre site, stands Australia’s greenest building.
The most apt observation perhaps remains with American architect Thom Mayne, a recipient of the Pritzker Prize for architecture, the world’s top architecture prize, who delivered a talk at the University of Melbourne for the Australian Institute of Architects just before Christmas. Wandering around Carlton, he came across the building and commented to his audience at how vibrant the facade looked but wondered if it would still be there in five years.
