It might look like a half-finished home, but this architectural installation in Melbourne is designed to deliver some hard truths about Australia’s housing crisis.
The Home Truth exhibition, by sustainable architecture firm Breathe, clocks in a footprint measuring 236 sq m – the size of the average new Australian house.
But as you enter through the garage and make your way through the pine framing’s maze of corridors and rooms, you’ll stumble across a more modest, self-contained wooden dwelling nestled within the larger structure – with a footprint of just 50 sq m.
Dwarfed by its massive exterior, this shocking contrast between the two homes is the whole point of the firm’s latest architecture endeavour, with founder Jeremy McLeod hoping the exhibit would inspire homebuyers to ‘think smaller’ to help ease the housing shortage.
According to recent ABS statistics, new Australian houses are some of the biggest in the world, measuring (on average) bigger than the United Kingdom, France, and even the United States and Canada.
And Breathe wasn’t only taking shots at the size of Australia’s homes, but also how they’re constructed.
Home Truth is entirely made from just two primary materials – the ubiquitous framing pine seen on thousands of home builds across the country and the silver-flecked ‘Saveboard’, made from recycled post-consumer tetra packs, symbolising the “too-thin” layer of foil insulation used in modern construction.
The difference is that these have been put together using only nails and screws, so in a few months, the materials will be re-used on other housing projects.
With the conservative home Inspired by small-scale Melbourne housing projects in the twentieth century, McLeod insisted that their proposal wasn’t part of some “unattainable imagined future”, but rather a return to a more thoughtful and appropriate scale of living.
Beating out 80 other entrants for the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2024 Architecture Commission installation, senior Curator Ewan McEoin said the exhibit held up an eerily accurate mirror to the current state of Aussie home construction.
“Home Truth speculates that overconsumption of space and materials translates into ecological and social consequences – for both us and the planet,” he said.
“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.”
“Through its clever play on scale and materials, this thought-provoking work of architecture sparks a fascinating conversation about housing and sustainability in this country,” added Director Tony Ellwood.
If you find yourself in Melbourne, Home Truth will be on display from Wednesday until April 2025 at NGV International.
