Public House is an exploration of alternative ideas

The Climate Crisis is a symptom


 Why we want to build


Reuse: Creativity lies in the constraints The illness is a much larger beast, and can be approached from every part of modern life that is broken, framed by the Climate Crisis.

For our part, it is a broken built environment - an industry that erects buildings as assets to be sold for profit. Empty apartment blocks. Office developments with extraordinary profit margins, extraordinary low cost of construction, and extraordinary damage to the environment and irrelevance to society.

The Climate Crisis is also a (cultural) minefield. Take timber design and construction - there are massive contradictions around the organic waste produced when a tree is felled; the environmental degradation of monoculture forests; and who gets to count the sequestered carbon….

But this only highlights the more inconvenient truth: this is not just about carbon, it’s the impact of human life on the planet.

This is a fundamental, existential clash. It affects everyone and everything that is not valued economically. And that includes marginalized peoples everywhere.

No electric vehicle can fix this. Short-sighted government plans will continue to fail so long as capital must increase in value, so long as human survival means earning an income for the vast majority, and so long as success and life's pleasures are derived from consuming stuff.

We don't claim to have answers. But calling out the existential contradiction of this problem is pointing at the elephant in the room.

Public House seeks to engage in the complexity of the problem we face, go beyond the symptoms and tug at the roots of the issue. By embracing the contradictions, opening up to conversation and collaboration as new forms of collective, we hope to create alternatives.