Michael Green

Writer and producer

Small and simple

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I have worked on the little building with Michael Kelly for half a day each week. Mostly, we’ve been outside, in his narrow, paved courtyard. Courtyards fascinate him.

In the window of the shop, next to the flowerpots, a framed A4 printout is headed PRISONER GETS “LIFE”. It begins: “At a time when many young people are beginning a career or university, Michael Kelly was doing hard time for armed robbery. Life and death stood before him. He chose to make good use of his time in study, physical training and art.”

After prison, he was accepted directly into post-graduate study at the Sydney College of the Arts. The story continues: “In the years since, Michael has applied his art in a unique, hand-made building style.”

In jail, one of the benign things he discovered was that when one courtyard was uninhabitable because of brutal sun, another, on the shady side, might be too cool for comfort. “Courtyards can be their own little worlds,” he said one afternoon.

With a sideways, impish smile, he told me his incarceration might also explain why he had become so intrigued by small spaces. Planned and fitted out with care, they can enlarge even the most confined of lives.

At that time, I was reading The One-Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka. The book, first published in 1978, is the Japanese farmer’s manifesto on growing and eating food, and on the limits of human knowledge.

As Michael spoke, I recalled Fukuoka’s observation: “…if one fathoms deeply one’s own neighbourhood and the everyday world in which he lives, the greatest of worlds will be revealed.”

In the book, Fukuoka recounts his quest for simplicity in ‘natural farming’. “‘How about not doing this? How about not doing that?’—that was my way of thinking.”

One chapter explains the cycles in his rice fields and outlines his practices. “There is probably no easier, simpler method for growing grain,” he concludes. “It involves little more than broadcasting seed and spreading straw, but it has taken me thirty years to reach this simplicity.”

Michael’s design for the courtyard studio is the result of steady simplification, stripping out anything unnecessary in the structure. Each of the four wall frames is separate. The roof frame rests above, on a rectangular timber plate.

After the first day, in which we built the frame, we have worked on the cladding for the roof and walls. Using the thin strips of Oregon lath (reclaimed from demolished lath-and-plaster walls), we have built lightweight panels. We overlapped the lath, like pixie weatherboards. The whole building can be easily dismantled and moved.

That kind of elegance takes thought. On his chalkboard one day, Michael wrote, “There’s no wisdom on a silver platter”.

Courtyard

Wall and floor insulation

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Insulation works all around the house.

CEILING insulation is taking a lot of political heat this year. But while the federal government admits its rebate scheme was flawed, the insulation itself shouldn’t be left in the cold.

Caitlin McGee, from the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney, says good insulation is always a crucial part of construction. “It has many benefits: greenhouse gas reduction, better comfort and lower energy bills.”

And the ceiling isn’t the only spot for it. “The roof cavity is the most important place, but if you want to insulate well, you need to think about the walls and floors, and the building shell as a whole,” she says.

If you’re building your house, get the wall insulation right first time – it can be difficult and expensive to add later. According to Ms McGee, in existing homes, the best opportunity to retrofit is “when you’re renovating or pulling apart your walls for some other reason.” In all cases, it’s wise to consult a building sustainability assessor for detailed advice.

Because heat transfers in different ways, a combination of both reflective (foil) and bulk insulation (such as batts) works best. When you’re choosing a product, consider its green credentials, such as recycled content, as well as its performance, measured by the R-value.

In Melbourne, the building code requires that walls rate a minimum of R2.2. “Generally, the more extreme the climate, the more insulation you should have,” Ms McGee says. But she warns DIYers not to buy overly fat batts that must be squashed to fit. Bulk insulation works by trapping air; it’s less effective when compressed.

Another retrofitting alternative is to add the insulation outside. On her home, Ms McGee affixed polystyrene and cement panels to the external walls. “The material I used as my cladding is also part of my insulation strategy,” she says. “It’s worthwhile thinking about less conventional materials that have good insulating properties.”

Underfloor insulation is more straightforward, so long as there’s enough access space. Maurice Beinat, from home retrofitting business ecoMaster, says you need about 400 millimetres to work in.

Although floors cause less heat loss than ceilings and walls, insulating them can make a big difference to winter comfort. “The special thing about floors, particularly polished timber, is the contact your feet make with them,” he says. “Floors don’t need to be very cold to make you uncomfortable.”

He suggests that well-insulated floors should reach R2.5. (Uninsulated timber floors rate R0.7, and with good-quality carpet and underlay, they rate R1.)

Mr Beinat says there are two requirements for floor insulation: that it doesn’t hold moisture and won’t become a rat nest. For those reasons, he recommends polyester insulation (manufactured in a roll, rather than a batt, for convenience). Before stapling it in place, seal any gaps in the flooring.

In homes that have a lot of underfloor airflow, such as weatherboards, ecoMaster also fastens a layer of reflective insulation to the joists, making the sub-floor nearly air tight. They charge between $28 and $35 per metre, installed.

Mr Beinat says it’s a job well suited to DIYers, but with one serious warning: “The main danger is electrocution by stapling through wires. People do die underfloor.” He advises purchasing a double-insulated, electric stapler, rather than cheaper handheld models that won’t protect against electrocution.

Knowing how hard to push

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ON the first morning I worked with Michael Kelly, I arrived at eight o’clock, as agreed. “Let’s see how much we can get done in a day,” he’d said. He planned for us to complete the framing for a small timber studio, even if we had to work until dusk.

His shop-home is a model in the artful management of space. It has a narrow paved courtyard, only eight feet deep and fifteen wide. Yet Michael and Nadeen sort and store stacks of salvaged timber out there, and inside too, in neat overhead racks and shelves Michael has crafted. Chairs hang from hooks high on the walls until they’re needed.

We began. The studio was to be seven feet long and high, and four feet wide, plus a steep pitched roof. Michael assembled the simple tools: hand saw, tape measure, pen, set square, hammer and nails. He let me do the sawing.

“I’ve got a simple tip for sawing a straight cut,” he told me. “As you saw, lean the blade lightly against the inside top corner of the timber.” It worked like a charm – I guess it stops the blade wobbling while your elbow pumps back and forth. Next, I learnt to place the groove precisely, by steadying the blade with my other thumb as I began.

In Michael’s hands, the saw flowed over the timber like a stream over a stone. In mine, it stuttered and stopped. I didn’t know how hard to push.

Last year, I was caught up in melancholy and a longish writing project – perhaps the two go together – and didn’t often go outside. I grew unaccustomed to using my body. When I re-emerged in the summer, I wasn’t so sure how my limbs would respond to orders. One day, I watched some new friends practicing acrobalance, a kind of circus balancing act in pairs. I hung back because I had no idea how strong, or weak, my muscles were. I didn’t know what my legs would do if I tried to use them. Likewise, when I danced, I wasn’t quite sure how my booty would shake (this may be congenital).

That hesitance lingers. For people unused to making and doing, it takes practice to gain confidence in your hands. When I pushed on the saw, swung the hammer or lifted timber, the physics didn’t click. My reactions seemed less than equal-and-opposite.

We cut the first length from a long piece of timber and used it as a template for the others. When they were all done, we began nailing. The initial, unfinished frame was beautiful; so satisfyingly square and logical.

We worked diligently throughout the morning, stopped for a coffee, then worked through lunch. Michael regularly tidied our offcuts and swept up the sawdust gathering in the courtyard. Small spaces demand order.

The pitched roof required angled cuts. Again, we created a template – this time a triangle – and cut matching pieces and nailed them in place. By three o’clock, well ahead of schedule, we set solid the quivering ribs of our roof and manoeuvred the frames together: the studio’s skeleton assembled in but one short day.

Later, I walked home grinning stupidly, closed my bedroom door, turned up the music and danced my joy away, limbs flailing.

The frame

Asylum

In Culture, The Big Issue on

In a small room at Oregon State Hospital, in Salem, north-western USA, hundreds of shiny copper urns line up like cans on a supermarket shelf. Dating from 1920s and earlier, they contain the unclaimed ashes of the asylum’s former residents.

The image comes from a new book of photography by Chris Payne, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals. It is a room guarding burnt bodies and souls. Who were these people? How did they live? And why are they here, like this?

These themes fascinated the architect-turned-photographer for six years as he documented 70 decaying mental hospitals across 30 US states.

“I fell in love with the buildings and the places – the communities that the hospitals had been,” he says, “and with thinking about the thousands of people who had lived, worked and died there.”

Asylum is a grand, melancholy tribute to the lives spent in the institutions and to the astonishing scale and quality of the buildings themselves.

In 2002, when Payne needed a new project, a friend suggested he visit abandoned mental hospitals. The New York-based photographer drove to Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island. Opened in 1931, it was the largest hospital ever built in the world – at its peak, it housed over 14,000 patients. “I was amazed to find this abandoned city just sitting there,” he says. “I quickly learned it wasn’t isolated to one hospital or one area. It was all over the country.”

From the mid-19th to the early-20th century in the US, nearly 300 institutions were built for the insane – often designed by prominent architects and always set in spacious grounds. The facilities were intended to offer calm and comfort, to treat inhabitants by means of fresh air and beautiful surrounds. The hospitals functioned as self-sufficient communities, including farms, workshops and auditoriums, and in some cases, even cafés and bowling alleys.

But care diminished as hospitals became overcrowded and pressed by tight budgets. Then, as treatment came to encompass extreme methods such as electro-shock therapy, ‘asylum’ became a by-word for squalor and abuse.

Payne’s elegiac photos, with flaking colour and tender light, show beauty in places we least expect. “Every society has its asylums, but I think there is a misconception that the buildings are bad and should be torn down. In a way, the stigma of mental illness has been passed onto the architecture of the buildings,” he says.

His previous book documented abandoned substations that had powered the New York subway. His photography shows the architecture of an optimistic era, a time when industrialism promised human progress. “I’m fascinated with buildings that really had purpose. We don’t build like that anymore,” Payne says. “And I think it represents a shift in the way we function as a society. It’s sad we’ve lost that faith in building.”

Community gardens

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On the first Sunday of every month, the members of Dig In Community Garden hold a working bee. “We make compost and we tidy the place up,” says Ann Rocheford. “Then we retire to the barbeque and open the red wine – it’s good community-building time.”

The Port Melbourne garden, in Murphy Reserve, has been running since 2003. There are 51 plots and well over a hundred people who regularly stop in. The members reflect the mix of the suburb, from old-timers to newly arrived apartment dwellers. “In the garden they all speak a common language: it’s about how their crops are going. That helps people get to know each other,” Ms Rocheford says.

The plots range in size from four to ten square metres. “It’s amazing how much you can grow on a small amount of land if you look after it properly,” she says. On her plot, she grows “more than enough” for her and her husband. She has finished her winter planting and although it’s a slower time of year, she still tends her patch at least once a week: watering, harvesting and tormenting white cabbage moths.

“You have to be there regularly. It’s a constant thing – community gardens have a ‘use it or lose it’ policy. In summer, you’ve got to be able to water your plants three times a week.”

But the returns on that commitment are many. As well as reinforcing your sense of community, regular trips to the garden are good for your health. “Bending your back and doing some work is very beneficial – if you really want a good workout, try making compost,” Ms Rocheford says. “Also, the vegetables are organic. You pick them, put them in the pot that night and eat them. It’s terribly healthy.”

Ben Neil is the president of the Australian City Farms and Community Gardens Network. He argues that these gardens are a crucial part of the bigger push towards sustainable living. “If we are to face the challenges of climate change, then urban agriculture and community gardens have got to be part of the solution.

“They tick so many boxes: they give you an opportunity to meet your neighbours, improve your mental and physical health, and grow and eat locally produced, organic, fresh fruit and vegetables.”

Melbourne’s oldest community garden, in Nunawading, has been running for over three decades. At last count, in 2006, there were 75 gardens across the city. They’re sprouting. “There’s tremendous demand for new gardens,” Mr Neil says. “A lot of councils now are developing policy to deal with the requests.”

The start-up process is never quick and easy – establishing a group, finding land and gaining council permission is more likely to take years than months. (The South Australian neighbourhood house association, CANH, has released a comprehensive how-to guide.)

One thorny objection is that starting a community garden means privatising open land. Mr Neil says groups can keep the wider public involved by running regular tours, workshops or growing fruit trees anyone can harvest.

“But the reality is that land is going to become harder to find,” he says. “The natural progression is the sharing of backyards. Many people have more space than they need and are happy for others to use it.”