Lal Lal (Trunk House)

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RESEARCH BACKGROUND: Trunk House is a residential project in Victoria's Central Highlands, 90 minutes west of Melbourne. The brief was to provide a small house within a forest of extant stringybark woodland. Architects, landscape architects, an engineer and an artist all worked in close collaboration and made great efforts to touch the ground lightly to ensure the minimum disturbance to the environment. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: This project achieves a very low carbon footprint and is dense with ideas drawn from a lineage of local architectural and landscape experimentation. It's about how house and landscape can act as a type of architectural 'locavore', earning its sustenance - its structure and reason for being - from the materials and forms of its immediate surroundings. The project innovates with structural and landscape architectural method, carefully integrating the architectural project with its particular ecological niche. Fire authority, local council and state government agency rules shaped the work. Every tree had to be indentified and evaluated. Landscape architects picked out blueberry, pruned trees of dead wood, broadcast the chippings to feed the soil, ensured the roof collected adequate water and reused all spoil to build up the architectural floor plane. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: The significance of Lal Lal (Trunk House) is demonstrated by its multiple national and international prizes, reviews and exhibitions. Trunk House was exhibited at Palazzo Bembo, 13th Venice Architecture Biennale (2012) and at the Istanbul Design Biennial (2012) and included in the associated catalogues for these events. It won the International Architecture Award, The Chicago Atheneum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture and Design and Urban Studies, 2012 and it was shortlisted for the 2012 Victorian Architecture Awards. Professor Philip Goad reviewed it in Australian Design Review ('Trunk House', 8 March 2012).