Sydneyside with Janet Parr Life underground for architect

Press, 24 August 1977, Page 16

Sydneyside with Janet Parr Life underground for architect

“Underground” is a word that can mean a lot of different things at different times. A Londoner, for instance. would tell you it is his city railway system while in wartime Europe it stood for a substrata of resistance to occupation. To go underground, unless you happen to be a mole, a rabbit or a badger, usually means to lie low — with all that that means.

But when Mr Syd Baggs talks about going underground he has more in common with our little furry friends. He talks about it in terms of going home. Mr Baggs is a Sydney architect. He has been an architect for 25 years. Two years ago he dissolved his own company and became a lecturer in landscape gardening at the University of New South Wales, running a course for "environmentallyaware young people.” But he became interested in underground living 11 years ago and since then has collected a swag of research material to reinforce his conviction that life underground could cut energy consumption and release surface land for open space — although he says he does not want to design underground buildings until he has finished his research work and sorted out some of the problems. One piece of research he means to do is to make a survey of the opal-mining town of Coober Pedy where, he says, half the people live on the surface and the rest under ground. He hopes to find out about any psychological barriers to underground living. Mr Baggs says all kinds of houses, flats, factories, schools, and shops could be built below ground.

ENERGY-SAVING Energy consumption would be reduced by a third, he says, because there would be less need for heating and cooling. He started recording cave temperatures when he became interested in underground living and has found that the earth gives an insulation as good as that of the best man-made insulator. It absorbs heat in the summer and gives off stored heat in the winter. Mr Baggs sees reduced energy consumption as the biggest advantage of underground living although people would benefit too, he says, from having a cleared

surface which could be replanted with trees and grass to provide open space. If old houses in cities could be replaced with underground houses money budgeted to acquire inner-city land for open space could be saved. Sydney at the moment has a S4M budget to buy innercity land. Although Mr Baggs has no specific designs at present he does have some ideas about what might be possible. He sees houses built into hillsides so they would have as much light and air coming into them as conventional surface houses. On flat land they could be built into “valleys” or have mounds of earth round them. For arid land he visualises “atrium living.” The living areas would be built around a sunken courtyard. And the courtyard could be used to grow plants that could not live on the surface'.

Mr Baggs quotes American experiences in underground living, which he says was gone into without prior research but has found many practising enthusiasts for all that. He also sites the case of an underground school in New Mexico where the children were claimed to be getting better results than other similar children in schools above ground. If the concept of underground living does get off the drawing board Mr Baggs and his family will probably be among the first to move in.

He has a married daughter who already wants him to design an underground house for her and another daughter] living at home, who says she is quite ready to move down below.