How climate change is turning remote Indigenous houses into dangerous hot boxes

The Conversation have published an excellent article by Simon Quilty and Norman Frank Jupurrurla on climate change and the impact on remote Indigenous housing. In many ways it summarises the conversations we’ve been having in our practice in recent months. The video interview with Mr Jupurrurla tells us just about all we need to know about designing in remote communities: https://bit.ly/TheConversation_ClimateIndigenousHousing

For too long architects have been pre-occupied with using passive design principles to mitigate the need for air-conditioning. Design in the north of Australia has often been done through a lens of ‘thermal moralism’ –  seeing the need for air-conditioning as a failure of good design. But as this article (and other research we’ve contributed to [ see here ]) describes, living without air-conditioning is becoming increasingly difficult and this will only worsen as temperatures rise across the north.