Celebrating 20 years of the Robin Boyd Foundation's custodianship of Walsh Street, the exhibition 'House Show' 15.02 - 23.02.225 brings together architects, designers and artists for an exhibition that diffuses process and discourse throughout Robin Boyd's Walsh Street residence.

Our exhibit is called ReUse 42. There is a model and an interactive game. The game allows participants to layout apartments and combine them.

ReUse 42 addresses two problems: both the surplus of office space in well-serviced locations, and an Australia-wide misalignment of household size and bedroom numbers. ABS data tells us our houses are under-occupied. In part, the housing crisis exists not because we have a shortage of bedrooms, but a misallocation of them. More than three quarters of households (77%) have at least one bedroom spare.

Why?: ReUse 42 is the adaptive reuse of a sturdy 1950s brick and concrete Office Building as housing. The apartments inside can be combined to make larger dwellings as a family grows, then divided to allow unused bedrooms to be reallocated as residents age in place. The project retrofits flexible apartment modules into an existing solid shell that can be remade again and again.

How?: Non-structural Intertenancy walls (soundproof and fire rated) and can be removed allowing apartments to be combined. For example, two one-bedroom apartments to be combined into a two bedroom apartment, or a one- and two-bedroom apartment to be combined into a three-bedroom apartment – then back again - to allow households to expand for families and contract as they age in place.

Photos: Michael Pham