_Burwood Brickworks Tour

Collie was recently invited by Stockland on a tour of the Burwood Brickworks site in Middleborough Road, Burwood.  As the name suggests, the site was a former brickworks.

Today the site comprises a mixed-use development including a shopping centre, seven apartment buildings and over 200 townhouses developed by Frasers Property Australia.  The purpose of the tour was to inform environmentally sustainable design (ESD) measures for an upcoming Stockland project with the Burwood Brickworks and the shopping centre in particular, achieving a high standard in ESD.

The shopping centre comprises a Woolworths, a Dan Murphy’s, a six-screen Reading Cinema as the anchor tenants and 46 retail specialty stores with the centre having achieved the Living Building Challenge certification and is classified as the world’s most sustainable shopping centre.

Unlike a typical ESD project, the Living Building Challenge requires the entire construction process to be monitored including down to the detail of the internal fitout of each tenancy and certification can only awarded one-year post completion of the development.  As explained by our tour guide, a non-sustainable sealant was used on a concrete floor for one of the tenancies and as a result, the entire concrete floor needed to be ripped up and replaced.

One thing that is immediately noticeable when entering the centre is the amount of natural daylight the food court receives via the sawtooth roof design with the windows being operable to maximise airflow. 

Other key features of the project are the 1 megawatt solar system and urban farm on the rooftop of the building with the urban farm being utilised by the roof top restaurant as well as the childcare centre for educational purposes.

In addition to the communal handwashing basin in the toilet, other quirks of the project include the ceiling being decorated in indigenous art…

the internal façade of the Woolworths supermarket being constructed out of cork…

and the ceiling of the escalator being decorated with recycle timber.