Arkadia is about community and sustainability, its about memory and place. Arkadia is about community, past, present and future. It started with interviews of the surrounding neighbours and a historical study of the working class community that existed there in the 20th century. The challenge was to design 152 places to call home - 85 homes for defence personnel and their families and 67 to be sold on the open market. The result is 4 buildings, with 4 identities and 4 communities. They are tied together to form a single sinuous skin, woven together from carefully crafted recycled brickwork. Each building has its own space to come together, its own productive garden, its own lift lobby, its own address and its own community. They share a rooftop and open out to the north to embrace a new park to share with the residents of Huntley Street and beyond. The buildings serve as a reminder of the sites’ industrial past and form a protective wall to the busy Sydney Park Road to the south. The building skin is designed not just as a memory of the history on the site but as a beacon to a low carbon future. Arkadia is the largest building in the country to be built with nearly half a million recycled bricks, an almost entirely carbon-neutral skin. Arkadia is designed to be fossil fuel free - the entire project is 100% electric allowing for an entirely renewable, carbon free energy source. Arkadia prioritises ethics with smaller footprints, less applied finishes, more robust materials and more efficient construction. Additionally, drought tolerant, indigenous plants populate terraces and communal gardens. At its heart Arkadia is about ecological sustainability and social sustainability.