Inside, outside, warm and cosy, lounge chairs, dining room chairs, bed ends, washing lines, sheets , towels and blankets. Wood, nails, bricks, paint and metal. Sunshine, rain, winter and summer. Growing things, collecting stuff, imagining, exploring, adventuring, climbing, sliding and hiding. A cubby is a wonderful chameleon place to play.

Beate Adfectus was selected to be a part of Eco Cubby 2011. It's been a really fun year, and I'm super proud of what the class has designed (by themselves might I add!).

From the Eco-Cubby web site:

"Eco-Cubby aims to raise awareness and bring sustainability issues and thinking into communities. The project provides the opportunity for young people to work with their community in the design of a cubby house embracing concepts of sustainable living – function, materials, shelter, enclosure, and resources."

I was teamed up Daniella Rosa and the 'Room Three' kids at Lady Gowrie Child Care Centre in Carlton. Our approach to exploring sustainable design was one without the bells and whistles. We didn't start by looking at systems of gizmos and gadgets. Instead, we started with the site. The sun, the wind, temperature changes, seasonal changes and material properties; we used the climate and the weather as our tools to design our cubby.

The cubby became a kind of monocle- a way of looking at our world in the best possible way. How could we get the best sun in? How could we protect ourselves from the heat in summer? How could we make sure the cubby could cool itself down? Could parts of the cubby work for us by collecting resources we could reuse later?

Once our environmental tools were understood, used and mastered, further exploration of enhancing our structure was explored. An innovative water collection system was designed to water our vegie patch. We designed exterior blinds to keep the summer sun, and the winter cold out. We put wind turbines on the roof. We have louvers that rotate to alter the internal light and air conditions.

Together we adventured through sustainable design by using the dazzling changes in our natural world as tools to create places that can be wonderful places to inhabit.