I visited Iredale Pedersen Hook’s (IPH) Swan Street house in December 2007, with the exterior 80 percent complete and the interior just starting to take shape. For much of that year I had been developing a position that placed the extension as a key project type in relation to issues of sustainability, and for that reason Swan Street house was of particular interest to me.

One of the problems with sustainability ‘going mainstream’ has been that the hard work required to convince society to genuinely consume less has been avoided in favour of the more palatable idea that we can achieve personal betterment via consumption. Disturbingly, this trend has been encouraged by many of the eco-practitioners within our profession, who, busy surfing the wave of liquidity that accompanies the distribution of ESD advice, encourage the consumption of supposedly ‘sustainable’ products, thus reinforcing the tendency of an advanced consumer society to deal with this issue by consuming more.

In response to this, I have suggested that sustainability is not only a technical issue, but perhaps more importantly an aesthetic one. That is to say that the consumer images we hold dear, the isolated bush shack, the all-white urban apartment and so on, are all reinforcing generally unsustainable positions. The reality of sustainability should be uglier – invoking the world of the parasite and the graft, the microsurgery that is involved in renewing something old and maintaining its store of carbon and, at the same time, minimising the extent (and thus the energy involved with) any adjustments or additions. This is quite a different approach to demolishing existing fabric and replacing it with a five-star or six-star rated project that, ironically, requires further mining, transportation and manufacturing than a small addition may do.

The extension as a type addresses sustainability on both energy and cultural grounds, but is constrained in its take-up by an architectural culture that struggles with the aesthetic of such projects. Thus Swan Street is important in my view as an exemplar that challenges the approach of those who have corporatised the sustainability agenda and its expression via twirling propellers and solar panels (see ‘Fatal Distraction’, AR105, pp 40-44). Swan Street also has a more specific significance in the context of the work of IPH, where it signals a development of the suite of extensions completed by the practice over the past decade or so. Its best-known early project, the Reynolds residence, located a pavilion with a curved wall/roof up against an existing bungalow – a sort of juxtaposition of something with the optimism of the 1950s (the addition) with an original house from the 1920s, all completed in the 1990s. This pavilion was unashamedly a formal variant on the existing bungalow and would fit all arguments about a project being ‘of its time’ and expressing its era and so on, while still being connected to the existing house via a deft inflection at the neck where the two join.