Day 1:

The containers are delivered and positioned on site.
The containers have been pre-fitted with the Greenhouse kitchens.
The buildings frame (the blue steel shown here in the foreground) is pre-fabricated using the FrameCAD system to roll form the steel trusses and columns- ready for assembly. Some say it’s much like a huge Meccano set.

Day 3:

The frame assembly begins

Taking shape at a rapid pace

Day 5:

The sun is shining, the building’s frame is complete

Joost’s A-team: Ivo Baldari, Mario Napolitano and Garry Gray – these guys build like a BOSS!

More to come!!

Find out who won here at CSIRO News Blog

and witness the fire test in the video below

Joost and his building team, headed up by Ivo Baldari, recently constructed a purpose-built house, using Joost’s unique building system (A 100% recyclable steel frame structure, using strawbales as insulation and MGO board cladding) at the CSIRO fire testing facility in Bateman’s Bay, New South Wales.

The 38 square metre house was erected in 7 days, and today was subjected to a bushfire simulation, monitored and measured by Mr Justin Leonard, the project leader for bushfire research at CSIRO’s Sustainable Ecosystems.

In addition to what can be studied visually, the building is specially wired with sensors to relay detailed performance data to the CSIRO computers.

The test has been commissioned to cerftify fire safety for a house Joost is building for Shannon Bennett and his family in the Victorian Otways – a bushfire prone region.

See the pics below coming through live from the testing facility (thanks to Greg H.  for the fancy polaroid-esque shots!)
- and stay tuned for more info and news of the results!

1:00pm – Final inspections of the building before the test

1:30pm -The team receive a Safety briefing

2:00pm – Joost is geared up in the fire suit as the test begins

The fire begins a few metres from the structure to simulate 30 minutes of radiant heat, as with real bushfire.

The fire is intensified and engulfs the building in flames…

HOLY #*?% !!!!

The fire subsides, revealing the immediate effects of the exposure…. minimal damage!! …. the test data will reveal more…..

By Joost CEO Greg H. looking pleased with the results!

MORE TO COME!!

UPDATE:

Justin Leonard and Alex Webb from CSIRO kindly had a chat with us this evening and shared some interesting facts about how the test works and some preliminary results of the House by Joost performance.

The test today was a simulation of a MAJOR FIRE FRONT, the worst case bushfire scenario.
(The measure of the fire behaviour is ‘fire intensity’, which represents the rate at which energy is released, and is measured as kilowatts per metre (kw/m²) of fire front)

To accurately simulate a real bushfire scenario, staged heat and flame exposure was rendered in the following sequence:

The test initiated with the first stage of ‘radiant heat’ exposure to the building, inflicting radiant heat at 2.5kw/m² stepping up to 5, 10, 20, 30 and then 40kw/m² at the 30 minutes mark.Image © CSIROnews

After the radiant heat exposure, the fire was intensified to full flame exposure to the face of the building (over 100kw/m²) for a period of 110 seconds. (simulating a MAJOR fire front)

Image © CSIROnews
At this time, the external temperatures reached 1000 degrees celsius.
The internal building temperature reached only 35 degrees celsius in this time.

Image © CSIROnews

- The fire intensity was then reduced back to 2.5kw/m² for another 10 minutes of radiant heat exposure, simulating the fire front passing by.

House by Joost withheld the extremes of a major fire front scenario

Image © CSIROnews

The team inspects the aftermath.. 
Image © CSIROnews

- The steel frame of the building approached 100-110 degrees celsius during the test and maintained integrity
- The MGO (magnesium oxide board) cladding performed incredibly well and there was no significant damage
- The glazing remained intact and there was no breach to the interior

Stay tuned for Joost’s re-cap of the experience….

by Garry Tippet

How the waste was won – a new pop-up restaurant for the Melbourne Food and Wine festival, which combines art, food and ecology, is about creating a sustainable world.

NO DOUBT there’s a more polite, even more technically accurate, way of phrasing this, but it doesn’t get the message across half as well. And Joost Bakker is very much about sending the world a message.

So when the celebrated artist/gardener/environmental designer/eco-entrepreneur pops up his Greenhouse restaurant concept for the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival in March, he will be well and truly taking the piss. Literally.

No disrespect to the great chefs who’ll be cooking there — including arguably the world’s No. 1, Denmark’s Rene Redzepi — but here’s what Bakker is most looking forward to: “The world-first thing, and the most exciting thing for me, is that we’re harvesting urine.”

Bakker, 38, is almost beaming as he explains the plan. He is working with Dr Steve Cumming, who invented the dual-flush toilet for Caroma, to build and install eight urine-diverting toilets, including waterless female urinals.

The 5000 litres — no piddling amount — he expects to be collected will be trucked to a farm at Daylesford and drilled into the soil as fertiliser for a crop of mustard seed.

And, completing the circle, pure mustard seed oil will be used to fuel the cutting-edge generators that will provide the restaurant’s electricity. A signature hanging garden of strawberries, cress and herbs festoon the walls and roofs of Bakker’s Monbulk home, and the restaurants he designs and builds, and his imagination, are similarly fertile. He bursts with ideas and enthusiasms, and at the moment the bright prospects for the world’s pee is among those.

“Urine is incredible for nitrogen,” he says. “In Melbourne’s waste water, 70 per cent of the nitrogen content, which is problematic in treating it, comes from urine — which only accounts for 1 per cent of the volume. It’s so valuable, you only need 25 people to provide fertiliser for a hectare of crop.

“So think about Australia’s 20 million people providing fertiliser — think about the world’s 7 billion!”

Bakker says he has always seen possibilities in what most of us consider waste. When he was a child in Holland his parents grew sick of him collecting “crap” and bringing it home to make something. As an installation artist he mixed found objects and flowers into unexpected combinations — a Christmas tree he designed for Melbourne’s GPO Centre featured 500 olive oil cans, each filled with a blue spruce stem.

He built the concept into a home built almost entirely of eco-savvy or recycled — and recyclable — materials, such as hay bale walls, and he is constantly refining his ideas with his restaurants, the first of which was a pop-up in Federation Square in 2008.

Others have followed in Sydney and Perth, and there are plans for permanent restaurants in both cities.

He has used conveyor belting for floors and irrigation pipes as chairs; jam jars as glasses and mulchable wooden cutlery. There are no rubbish bins, and all waste is composted.

At the Melbourne pop-up, at Queensbridge Square, all wall cladding and structural bracing will be all-natural, formaldehyde-free plywood, using glue made entirely from soybeans.

The philosophy extends to the food. The only fish on offer will be South Australian mullet — “it’s the only UNESCO-certified sustainably harvested fish in Australia”. Except for a champagne, there will be no bottled drinks. Biodynamic wine will come in kegs and beers, ciders and even mineral water will be on tap. Bread, pizzas and pastas will be made from wheat ground each day in the restaurant.

“My philosophy is everything is related, it’s holistic,” says Bakker. “You can’t be passionate about doing one thing a certain way and not worry about the rest of the things in your life.

“That’s why the restaurant is so good, because I can nail every single component and put my philosophy on it.

“I believe it is possible to have a completely zero-waste world. It’s not far-fetched. I don’t think we’re far away from it at all. People will change very quickly when they see it can work.”

Melbourne Food and Wine Festival chief executive Natalie O’Brien says this is one of the most ambitious Greenhouse projects yet by Bakker: “The Greenhouse’s philosophy of sustainability is particularly exciting, as it represents where our industry at large is currently heading.”

More info and image gallery here:  http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/all-he-is-saying-is-give-pee-a-chance

To celebrate the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival’s 20th year, Greenhouse by Joost will ‘pop up’ on the banks of the Yarra River for 20 days from the 2nd to the 20th of March.

Event info at Melbourne Food & Wine Festival here

Greenhouse chef Matt Stone will be serving up breakfast, lunch and dinner using fresh, seasonal produce sourced daily for use. Wheat used in bread, dough, pasta and pastries is freshly milled onsite (a healthier and superior tasting alternative to store-bought wheat products); oats are rolled to order; herbs are cut from the garden; and yoghurt and butter are made fresh from organic milk and cream delivered in returnable buckets from a local dairy farmer.

In 2012, the design of the Greenhouse restaurant offers a few key new features, all conforming to the nature of sustainable design.  All electricity is generated and fuelled by pure, unrefined canola oil, and wall cladding and structural bracing is all-natural, formaldehyde-free plywood, as the glue is made entirely from soybeans-a first in the building world.  Additionally, visitor’s urine will be collected from purpose built lavatories to be used as soybean and canola crop fertiliser (Fact: The urine from 25 people can fertilise an entire hectare of land!), which will then be used to power and build next years Greenhouse!

Click here to see the Greenhouse Melbourne construction process, updated live.

Straw is one of the world’s largest and most problematic waste products and is typically burnt off, emitting carbon into the atmosphere.

Straw from wheat, barley and rice is naturally resistant to termites and has proven to perform well in fire tests in Canada and Europe. We are now working with the CSIRO here in Australia to undertake fire testing of the Greenhouse structures. We will build an entire Greenhouse building – especially to burn down! We are excited to share the results – stay tuned for an update!

In addition to the environmental benefits of promoting straw as a building product, it also creates another income stream for farmers,

“I don’t believe there is such a thing as waste. This is a fantastic use for what farmers currently describe as WASTE!” – Joost

 

A day on the farm, collecting our building supplies:

The dry stalks of straw are harvested, after the grain (wheat, barley, rice or oats) and chaff has been removed.

A baler is used to compress the cut and raked crop into compact bales that are easy to handle, transport and store.

The best looking waste product on earth!

Straw bales are stacked and covered to keep them dry and pest free, in holding.

Our building frames are pre-fabricated and ready to go (the blue steel components are shown above) and stacked with the strawbales (the building’s insulation), ready for transport to the building site.

DATES

Thursday December 1st to Sunday December 4th 2011.
Open 10.00am – 5.00pm, over four days only.

 

ONLINE SHOP

December 5th – December 18th 2011.

THE DESIGN FILES OPEN HOUSE will operate an online shop for 2 weeks during December – almost everything in the house will be available to buy online during this time.

All orders will be shipped within Australia in time for Christmas!

In October 2011, Joost was invited to share the Greenhouse by Joost concepts, as guest speaker at PICNIC, an annual creative conference held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

PICNIC is about innovative ideas for business, people and society. It is a platform that brings together people from diverse backgrounds who like to exchange ideas and insights and are keen to expose themselves to ideas outside their own area of expertise.

www.picnicnetwork.org

Full length video of Joost’s talk can be viewed here:

Hi everyone! Thankyou to all the supporters of the Greenhouse by Joost while we were in Sydney earlier this year. I was actually sleeping on the floor of the Greenhouse for 6 weeks – and after packing up at the end of March, boy was it good to get home to my beautiful wife and daughters and sleep in my own bed!

The response to the Greenhouse both locally and internationally has been fantastic and I have recently returned from London where I took a look at some very exciting sites for the next Greenhouse installation which will be the first Greenhouse by Joost location outside Australia. We are also in discussions about the next permanent Greenhouse by Joost in Melbourne. Watch this space! If you did not get the chance to visit us in Sydney, please take a look through the blog posts on this website. I’ve pulled some of my favourite posts up to the front page of the website for you to enjoy. More from me soon!

-Joost

wood roasted baby carrots, beetroots, pistachio

crushed baby peas, ortiz anchovy, mint

quinoa, radish, avocado

sydney rock oysters, natural with lime

fried spiced cauliflower

woodfired pizza

seared mullet, mixed tomato salad