Masa Noguchi
Associate Professor
University of Melbourne
University of Melbourne
Biography
Dr Masa Noguchi is an Associate Professor in Environmental Design at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Australia. He is a Chartered Engineer, Environmentalist, and Technological Product Designer registered respectively with the Engineering Council, Society for the Environment, and the Institution of Engineering Designers in the UK. In 2002, he also became a member of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, and today he serves as a Certified Passive House Designer registered with the Passive House Institute in Germany. Dr Noguchi is the founding coordinator of ZEMCH Network which consists of over 500 partners from nearly 40 countries and initiated a number of industry-academia knowledge transfer events. ZEMCH international conferences (from 2012), ZEMCH engineering design workshops (from 2014), and ZEMCH technical missions (from 2006) are amongst the events being organised by ZEMCH Network today in partnership with the regional experts centres based currently in Brazil, Italy, UAE and UK. At the Melbourne School of Design, he leads ZEMCH (Zero Energy Mass Custom Home) design courses, i.e. "Travelling Studio" and "Design Thesis Studio", within the graduate program. Before coming to Melbourne, he was a Reader at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, The Glasgow School of Art affiliated with the University of Glasgow, where he established a ZEMCH pathway within the Master of Architectural Studies program. His research is based on ZEMCH engineering design and socially, economically and environmentally sustainable housing community developments in developed and developing countries. Inventing a "mass custom design" system approach to sustainable housing, he developed a digitalised interactive mass custom design communication tool, which was demonstrated in the US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon's Canadian house 2005. In 2006, he designed Canada's first net zero energy home - Alouette Homes' EcoTerra house - built and commercialised in 2007 through the federal government's Equilibrium sustainable housing initiative/competition.
Research Interest
Environmental design, mass custom design