2024 NGV Architecture Commission opens, revealing home truths

A pine-framed, Saveboard-clad house silhouette has been unveiled within the garden of the National Gallery of Victoria. Concealed inside its 236-square-metre footprint, a 50-square-metre timber pavilion provides a template and meditative space for contemplating smaller-scale dwelling solutions amidst Australia's current housing and climate crisis.

As Jeremy McLeod, director of Breathe, explained, "Size matters, and I just want to have an honest conversation with Australia about that."

Breathe's winning design for the 2024 NGV Architecture Commission, titled Home Truth, interrogates Australia's trend of building big. By capturing the actual footprint of Australia's average home - the largest on earth - the design aims to reveal the ethical and environmental realities of oversized homes: including suburban sprawl, environmental degradation and social inequity.

Rather than provide a specific solution to the problem, the design offers a reflective, timber volume, representing a small-scale home. As McLeod noted, "It's meant to be a moment of respite to consider, what possible future could there be?"

In making their point quite literally at scale, Breathe has been mindful to conserve resources where possible, seizing the NGV Architecture Commission as an opportunity to further their research into (and advocacy of) closed-loop construction and material production while also experimenting with spatial qualities of a minimal material palette.

For McLeod, the 90 x 35 millimetre proprietary pine frame of the external home ordinarily represents "some of the bleakest housing outcomes in our country [but] when you put it together in a particular way and you catch the light and shadow it becomes this beautiful thing."

The frame's skin of silver-flecked Saveboard is made by heating the Tetra Pak packaging of almond and soy milk cartons. "The whole thing is held together with screws and nails so that at the end of the Commission it can be dismantled," McLeod added. "The framing pine will go back to the builder that assembled it [who's] going to use it to frame other homes," a case in point to build with less.

Home Truth will be on display from 13 November until April 2025.