Home Truth, Breathe Architecture’s installation for the 2024 NGV Architecture Commission, beckons a country that likes to live large to consider the benefits of smaller dwellings.

The average floor area of Australian homes was a whopping 236.7 square metres in 2020, according to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Our residences are among the largest in the world, ranking ahead of the United States, the UK, France and Canada.

Sustainable architecture and design firm Breathe has laid this truth bare in its installation at the Grollo Equiset Garden of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). It is the winning design for the ninth iteration of the NGV’s annual Architecture Commission, a briefless commission inviting architects to address issues of the time.

Home Truth

Opening to the public today, Home Truth takes the form of a ‘house-within-a-house’. It uses a 236-square-metre external frame to represent the oversized silhouette of the average Australian home. Within this frame, a quiet, reflective timber volume represents the footprint of a smaller-scale home. 

By contrasting these two structures, Home Truth intends to display “the insanity” of the average house size, according to Breathe’s design director Jeremy McLeod, provoking audiences to ponder how small-scale architecture can foster more sustainable, higher-quality and community-oriented living environments.

“It’s about trying to display the truth, trying to show the statistics in a three-dimensional way that people can understand and grasp viscerally,” he tells Australian Design Review.

The journey through the installation

Visitors are invited to enter Home Truth through the garage (the same way you might in a “poorly designed house”, says McLeod). They can then circulate through the labyrinthine ‘larger house’, passing uncomfortably tight corners while the sounds of construction noises play on overhead speakers. 

At the end of this passage, the dissonance quiets to a gentle ambient soundtrack as visitors arrive at a small structure made from breezy slats of Victorian-grown timber. With a footprint of 50 metres (exaggerated to double storey), this end space is representative of “a great one-bedroom apartment”.

“It has a beautiful outlook to the garden and it’s a moment of respite where you can sit down and get some relief from the labyrinth on the way through,” McLeod says.

As they wander through this maze, McLeod hopes visitors will understand just how much of the house is given over to the garage, as well as circulation around that garage and between all of the rooms “you may or may not ever use”.

“Part of it is trying to display that there’s a lot of waste in building too much,” McLeod says.

He stresses that nothing from Home Truth will go to landfill. Breathe designed the temporary pavilion for disassembly and reuse by builders on other projects, including the saveBOARD substrate in the external frame, made from recycled Tetra Paks.

Advocating for a return to smaller-scale living

This immersive commission aims to build a compelling vision for smaller-scale living in Australia.

“What we’re trying to say is that a great lived experience is not necessarily linked to size – or it’s not a linear connection,” McLeod says.

What Breathe is proposing is not a new model for housing; in fact, it harkens back to the 1950s.

“In 1955, the average Australian house size was 100 square metres and the average household size was like over four,” McLeod says. 

“Now we’ve got a diminishing household size, but the average house size is much bigger. So we’re using more space [and] more carbon, yet we know that we have a climate crisis to solve and that we have a housing crisis to solve. We know that interest rates are high and mortgages are high.”

By simply “displaying the facts”, McLeod says his team hopes to demonstrate the benefits of more housing options across suburban Australia.

“I think there’s this incredible moment of opportunity for those volume builders to say, ‘Is there a different way to approach this? Can we deliver beautiful housing outcomes with everything that someone could ever imagine – and much more – but can we do it more efficiently? Can we do it through intelligent design?’

“That’s our proposition. We think that there is lots of opportunity, but the answer is in an elegant design solution rather than throwing size at the problem.”

The commission that nearly never was

According to NGV curator Dr Timothy Moore, this year’s architecture commission received around 80 entries. Home Truth was selected from a shortlist consisting of Breathe with Tom Supple; Office of Culture, Technology and Architecture (OCTA); and Snooks + Harper, N’arwee’t Carolyn Briggs, and Philip Samartzis. 

Home Truth is a commission that almost didn’t happen. McLeod originally pooh-poohed the idea to pitch from Irma Del Valle Nachon and Marcella Palma on the Breathe team, questioning how entering a commission delivered on the studio’s mission for people and the planet. Now, he views it as a broader piece of advocacy.

“For us, the NGV platform was an opportunity to speak the truth about house size in Australia, our carbon footprint per capita, our housing options or lack thereof in Australia,” he says.

The 2024 NGV Architecture Commission Home Truth will be on display free until April 2025 at NGV International, Melbourne. For more information, visit the NGV website. 

Read our profile of Jeremy McLeod from issue 119 of inside magazine.