[LifeStyle] Mushroom walls and waste-fuelled stoves: inside the self-sufficient home of tomorrow

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Joost Bakker believes a house can be more than a place to live: it can be a self-sustaining weapon against the climate crisis. A new Australian documentary explores his bold blueprint

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Max Veenhuyzen
Wed 9 Nov 2022 14.00 GMT
“The most destructive things we humans do,” says Joost Bakker, “is eat.”

In terms of sentences that grab your attention, the introduction to new Australian documentary Greenhouse by Joost is right up there. Then again, Bakker – a multi-disciplinary designer, no-waste advocate and the film’s eponymous protagonist – has long been something of a provocateur.As a florist, he’s turned heads by combining plant life with found electrical clamps and steel frames to create surprisingly butch flower arrangements. He’s used hay bales to build restaurants with rooftop gardens in the middle of Australian capital cities (plus inspired spin-offs further afield). He’s collected bones from Melbourne fine-diners, boiled them up and served them at a soup kitchen.

In 2020, the Dutch-born, Australian-raised designer’s two decades of high-concept sustainability projects came to a head when he hit go on the construction of Future Food System. Erected in one of the busiest areas of Melbourne, the off-grid, three-storey house and urban farm produced all of its own power and food. Even the cooking gas was generated from human and food waste (Google “biodigester toilet”). Ambitious? Certainly, but that’s how he likes it.“We can have it all,” Bakker tells Guardian Australia. “We can have houses covered with biology, plants, ecosystems and waterfalls. It’s not necessary for us to be destroying the planet or killing each other with materials that are making us sick. The infrastructure is already there. It’s just about reimagining our suburbs and reimagining our buildings.”

Shadowing Bakker throughout the project from set-up to pack-down, was film-maker Nick Batzias (The Australian Dream, 2040) who squeezes plenty of action into the pacy 90-minute documentary. While Covid and construction provide moments of drama, the bulk of the film focuses on the building’s green-thinking initiatives. Steam from the showers is used to grow mushrooms; the foundation-less building is anchored by self-watering garden beds filled with 35 tonnes of soil. Cameras take viewers inside the Ballarat factory that produces Durra Panel: a biodegradable, fireproof wall and ceiling panel made of straw.Although Greenhouse by Joost is released nationally next week, Bakker and team meticulously documented and shared the project in real time on social media. Jeremy McCloud, co-founder of Melbourne-based architecture firm Breathe, says clients have already approached him with requests to include rooftop gardens in building plans, as well as to build with Durra Panel. (While clients reference Future Food System in regards to the latter, it’s worth noting that other influential buildings around Australia have also used Durra Panel.) Although Breathe is a practice committed to sustainable thinking, McCloud says Bakker’s projects are on another level.

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“He does stuff that we as architects just can’t do … We could never have those aspirational conversations with developers or governments that he does.”

While McCloud is encouraged by the rapid uptake of some of the solutions offered by Future Food System, he’s also aware that widespread acceptance only comes with time. He points to his experience with induction cooktops, a key initiative in the move towards electrified kitchens and away from natural gas. Although Breathe has been incorporating these in residential projects since 2016, it’s only recently that the technology has become (somewhat) accepted.

 

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