“A house must be a machine for sustaining life if we are to survive the next 100 years,” says Clinton Cole, referencing Le Corbusier’s famous statement: “A house is a machine for living in.” Clinton is director of CplusC Architectural Workshop, and his new family home in Darlington, Sydney, integrates nature, energy, water and food into the architecture, so that it generates and stores solar power; harvests and recycles rainwater; and produces fruit, vegetables and fish. “This house brings meaning back to architecture and connects people with landscape, food production, energy and rainwater capture,” Clinton says.
The house is located on a 90-square-metre wedge-shaped site that Clinton would walk past on his way to University of Sydney where he studied architecture. He long had his eye on the derelict property…