The Bob Marshman Building is Australia’s first certified Passivhaus training centre at the Construction Training Centre Campus in Salisbury. The client approached Deicke Richards to deliver a new training centre on the campus’s visually prominent site and established strong sustainability ambitions for the project from the outset to be built as a Living Laboratory exemplar demonstrating how high-performing, carbon neutral buildings built with traditional building materials could become the new norm within the construction industry. Subtropical design principles such as orientation, rainwater collection and passive design strategies were key to the project’s design from the early concept stages. It was critical to create a testing ground commercial building almost vernacular in nature with sustainable, easily available materials that dealt with the particulars of subtropical climate and could easily be replicated in future using familiar construction materials.