So I grew up in southeastern Tasmania,

and if you allow me a few moments of nostalgia,

I'll show you where I came from

in order that you better understand where we end up.

For a few of our early years, we lived in a tent

at the end of a lush valley by a river.

Later my brother and I built our own tent

We milked our own cows, worked the lands

and grew vegetables and fruit that we lived off.

We felled our own trees, and we milled our own timber

to build the house I grew up in.

We lived a self-sufficient lifestyle

and what I thought sustainable at that time.

Many years later in London when I was teaching,

the head of my department, gave a lecture

and she used this book, The Rabbits, to illustrate her talk.

I'm gonna read a few pages from this book to you now.

It's a story of colonization in Australia

where the colonized are depicted by the native animals

and the rabbits are, the colonizers are depicted by the rabbits

an invasive damaging species which is responsible

for much of the natural devastation in Australia.

So, from the book

At first, we didn't know what to think

They look a bit like us.

There weren't many of them.

Some were friendly.

They didn't live in the trees like we did.

They made their own houses.

We couldn't understand the way they talked.

They ate our grass.

They chopped down our trees

and scared away our friends.

And the story goes on

Rabbits, rabbits, rabbits.

Millions and millions of rabbits.

Everywhere we look, there are rabbits.

And the book ends.

Who will save us from the rabbits?

So as I was listening to the lecture

I began to think that I was probably a rabbit

and my brother was a rabbit too.

And I realized I didn't want to be a rabbit any more.

So I thought, it might be better to be like a chameleon,

able to adapt and change, and blend with our environment

rather than conquer it

As designers, we are able to practice globally in our networked world

We move from village to city, to country to continent with ease

and we practice using a common global language.

But if we were chameleon designers,

we would adapt that language to each new environment

that we practiced in.

This is the scheme we're currently working on

in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania,

a series of small pavilions

placed around the existing trees on a small site

The stiff roofs with air vents to catch the sea breezes

allow heat to escape and shed monsoonal rains.

Much of Dar es Salaam is built on ancient coral reefs

and these coral reefs are mined to create aggregates in lime

and we are discussing using some of these coral

for the walls of this building

About 500 meters away from this site

is this coral mine

and most of the aggregates here are crushed manually

and they are used to make

limestone and aggregates for building materials.

To the north of Dar es Salaam,

there's a cement factory off in a distance

and some of these aggregates are taken into this cement factory

and here they are used to make high-quality Portland cement,

mainly for export.

It's rumored that Roald Dahl

once sat underneath the tree on the right

and gazed across at this cement factory

as I did when I took this photograph

and it was this cement factory

that was the inspiration for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,

an icon of decadence and excess.

Sadly, this is a new-built house in Dar es Salaam today.

It's built using mainly imported low-quality cement,

imported roof tiles and other imported building materials.

It has virtually no relationship to the site on which it is

and there's nothing that tells us this house is in Dar es Salaam.

We believe we can do better than this.

Our practice cell studio has been working predominantly

in East Africa for the past three years,

and we've been fortunate enough to have clients

that encourage us to respect local traditions, values

and to create an experience born of the place.

We use nature as an inspiration for our work.

This roof on the right here

was inspired by this amazing cloud formation

I saw one morning

created by the morning sun heating the mist

that falls in the valley overnight.

Our roof structure has a spiraling structure

that leads up towards a skylight

and the skylight brings light down into the center

of the covered outdoor terrace.

Working in harmony with the nature,

this Bougainvillea on the left has been trimmed

onto a simple timber structure

in order to create a shaded place to sit and work

or pass the time throughout the day.

Our building on the right

uses this as its model

So we created a thick shaded insulated roof,

timber pole, and it allows the space to be used freely below

and let the air to pass between the wall and the roof

Or a simple eave shade structure that we simply grew

a passion fruit vine over

so that people enjoying their breakfast in the morning

can pick fresh passion fruit as they eat their fruit salad.

And we also use man made objects

as an inspiration for our work.

This is a house in a slum in Kampala,

Uganda's capital city,

and it's constructed using old, unfolded oil tanks

and fuel tanks and car bonnets.

And it's this type of work which is an inspiration

to us, for us because it's born of necessity.

The building on the right

is a small ancient pavilion we were building

and it's clad using recycled materials

This small work is a hut on the edge of a cotton plantation

next to our site.

It's a perfect template for us when we are building

some accommodation units

The thick insulated roof protects from the equatorial sun,

it's oriented to protect from the seasonal rains,

there's a shaded open space to look out across

the cotton plantation for security.

Our building attempts to do the same.

A thick insulated roof,

covered outdoor spaces,

a closed site to the rear protecting from seasonal rains

and openings towards the magical views beyond.

We use two types of timber in the construction of our projects there.

In the top left-hand corner

you'll see Eucalyptus, an invasive Australian species

somewhat like myself,

and in the top right-hand corner, you'll see

an East African satinwood.

Both timbers are available locally

so we use these timbers for all parts of the building,

for the structure, for the framing, for the joinery and so on.

We didn't waste any parts of the trees.

The branches left over from the East African satinwood

we used to create handrails on the decks of this building

whereas the offcuts from the timber,

the Eucalyptus poles we created for framing,

were sliced into smaller pieces and used to line

the underside of this ceiling on the veranda.

And the pathway on the left, typical in the villages and slums

throughout Uganda to protect from the mud in the rainy season,

was the inspiration.

Our projects were far away from cities,

mainly at national parks,

and transport was sometimes unreliable,

as basic as services such as water and power.

So we tried to do everything manually.

Here you can see some of the tools we had to work with:

there's an old car seat belt which is used as a tool belt,

a rake made of old timbers and rusty nails,

and a hacksaw, a hacksaw handle made out of a piece of bent metal rod.

And the materials, we source locally as well.

Everything we found there such as thatch, recycled metal,

and locally fired clay bricks.

All of them unique, no materials the same

with their own texture and color and quality.

And most importantly the people we worked with.

So, we sourced all of our labor from the areas surrounding,

and we taylored and adapted our design techniques

and construction techniques to the skills that we found.

So we found masons and carpenters and weavers

and we worked with them to understand what they could do

so that our designs could reflect that;

and we also taught new skills,

so that the knowledge transfer process was two-way.

We were learning as much as we were teaching.

We also use local community groups to undertake task for us.

On the left is a weaverbird's nest,

the site is on the edge of a national park in Uganda

which has the highest number of bird species in Africa

and we asked the local women's group to make two hundred versions

of this nest for us.

We then created a lighting installation out of the nests.

You can see the original weaverbird nest tree on the left,

our nests hanging in the middle,

and at night, the installation setup twinkling with the stars.

So we had a magical landscape to work with

and we didn't want to intrude on it

and it would have actually been better to do absolutely nothing at all.

So what we decided to do is try to blend our buildings into the landscape.

Here we physically traced the lines of the horizon,

used them to slice through our building

and we built each layer of the building

with one of these bricks, local bricks that we found

so we developed sort of a strata through the building.

And we carried this onto the inside of the building

trying to blur the distinction between inside and outside.

This is one of my favorite juxtapositions in Uganda.

It's an ancient vocano which is being draped with the tapestry,

a patchwork quilt of fertile farmland

each patch with its own different texture and color.

And in the foreground, you'll see the shining corrugated iron roofs,

a symbol of progress

on one of the most commonly found building materials.

Around that project, we realized that there were a lot of houses and schools

and buildings which were using... which had

old corrugated iron roofs that has past the use-by date.

They were leaking. They weren't doing their jobs anymore.

People couldn't afford to replace them.

So we worked with local charity

to set up a program which we call the "Rusty Roof Exchange"

where we built new roofs

for those in need, and we took their old metal roofs.

And the locals thought we were mad

But we wanted to take this product

and see if we could give it a new life, to upcycle it.

So we used, cut it into thin strips

and we used it to weave lamp shades,

we cut them into smaller pieces and used them to clad parts of our buildings.

And we actually draped it across the roofs of our buildings

to create our own patchwork tapestry.

I'm sorry it's a bit dark, this image,

but effectively there's a patchwork quilt of corrugated iron

laid over the top of these buildings

which create an air gap between the layer below

and yeah, also protects the waterproofing membrane below

so it gives a longer life.

We wanted our buildings to disappear into the landscape

as they are in this image, rather than contrast it.

And our roofs took on new lives.

They change color and texture and pattern throughout the day

They are constantly evolving.

So to end,

we believe that to create architecture that is born of the place