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The Janus House is uncompromising in addressing one planet living. This idealism in construction and place making is not an ambition or a luxury. It is a necessity to be embraced, by not later than 2030.

All team members had a profound understanding of the need to design with global accountability and to enfold within that our professional responsibility for safety, security, affordability, health, comfort, supporting communities and enhancing biodiversity. Thinking Globally – Acting Locally.

Janus takes as a given the recent, overdue, commitment to decarbonize the electricity grid using cost effective, reliable technologies that obviate the need for local, short life, inefficient, expensive, high embodied carbon, renewable bling.

The Janus house combines traditional bio-based construction materials with modern 21st century techniques to create homes that are designed for a post fossil fuel age. Our buildings store more carbon than they emit, contain no toxins, are 95% compostable and are long lasting and healthy whilst also achieving PassivHaus levels of thermal performance. At the heart of our design thinking is a re calibration of our relationship with nature with the explicit aim of creating strong local communities.

Janus leapfrogs the ‘take-make-waste’ culture of the last 70 years to define a new era of ecological building and professionalism. An example of our approach is carbon sequestration in plant based materials - cheap proven science. Where sequestration in underground caverns is a willful, unproven, technological fix that has potential to expose greed, incompetence, dysfunctionality and sharp practice. We choose to follow the science not techno-optimism.

We are content that further proof of concept should be required by any team aiming to deliver 2030 Homes and believe this will lead to design innovations and modifications. It is an absolute necessity that this competition reach well beyond its current boundaries to be within the capacity of our industry to be part of the solution. No-one should underestimate the extent of change required, nor the challenge this represents. We do not. We cannot any longer spend time fixing the stitching on the deckchairs of the titanic.

We have proposed radical solutions but none without precedent.

Let us build the future as we need to build it. To fail now is to fail forever.