Design Principles Pod
Architecture. A hot topic, a buzz word, a realm for the rich and famous, or the thing that your step uncle does? We will be unpacking the good, the bad and the downright reality of the architectural and construction industry. With insights from industry professionals and personal anecdotes from our three hosts Ben, Gerard and Sam, you will be given a look behind the closed pages of those fancy looking moleskins. Tune in and redline out.
Design Principles Pod
Feel Good, Look Good: Performance vs Aesthetics in Architecture
What happens when award-winning architects and builders challenge the notion that sustainable, high-performance buildings must sacrifice aesthetics? This thought-provoking conversation brings together Passive House experts who are transforming New Zealand's built environment through buildings that are both beautiful and functional.
Architect Rafe Maclean shares how client feedback about a poorly-performing design prompted his journey into building science, while Joe Lyth reveals the heartbreaking reality of watching his children develop respiratory issues in cold, damp rental properties. Builder Josh Atkins describes his frustration with energy-inefficient new homes that cost homeowners thousands in ongoing expenses. These personal stories highlight why performance isn't just about sustainability—it's fundamentally about health and comfort.
The guests dismantle common misconceptions about high-performance buildings, particularly the idea that Passive House certification requires boxy designs with minimal windows. Through their work, they demonstrate how constraints often generate more creative, thoughtful architecture. As Joe explains, "If you've got a blank canvas you can do anything, and you don't necessarily need to judge all your decisions." The discussion explores how early collaboration between architects, builders and clients allows performance requirements to enhance rather than limit design possibilities.
Perhaps most compelling is their suggestion to shift terminology—referring to conventional construction as "low-performance buildings" rather than elevating better practices as "high-performance." After all, would anyone willingly purchase a "low-performance refrigerator" that might spoil your food? This reframing helps normalize better building standards as baseline expectations rather than premium add-ons.
Ready to experience architecture that looks beautiful and actually works? Subscribe to hear more conversations that challenge convention and inspire better building practices.
Key Links:
- https://www.rafemaclean.co.nz/
- https://www.welarchitecture.nz/
- https://www.compound.co.nz/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwuFra50HN8
- https://passivehouse.nz/
Chapters:
0:00 - Introduction with expert guests
14:44 - Personal journeys into high-performance building
34:52 - Performance vs aesthetics in design
43:15 - Constraints breed creativity
54:49 - Education and passive house perception
1:01:46 - Architecture education and closing thoughts
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This week's episode is brought to you by Parrot Dog, limited release 27. This scrumptious coconut stout is brewed with coconut and cacao nibs. Think a liquid bounty bar packed full of coconut and chocolate with just the right amount of sweetness. Nice, welcome back to the Design Principles Podcast. Ben and Gerard are on a break this week. Instead, I am joined by award-winning architect Rafe McLean of Rafe McLean Architects, jo Leith, founder of Well Architecture and chairman of the Passive House Institute of New Zealand, and Josh Atkins, director of Compound Builders and owner of Green Home of the Year 2025.
Sam Brown:These esteemed guests provide some serious insight into the realm of performance and aesthetics. Let's dive in. Thank you very much for deciding to come onto the pod, joe, josh and Rafe. It's awesome to have you guys here to chat. It actually stems from Joe, your message to me saying we should have a chat about performance versus aesthetics or performance versus design, and how they try and debunk maybe a few common misconceptions or frustrations that we have as designers, and Josh yourself as a homeowner and builder who operate and will try and operate in that more high performance realm. So welcome, all Lovely to have you here. If you guys wouldn't mind, rafe, I'll just take a sip of wine. I might start with you. Quick intro for those who may not know you, although you're pretty well known, would be great. And then we'll just go Rafe, joe, and then Josh, and then we can crack into it.
Rafe Maclean:Sure, yeah, rafe McLean. I'm an architect based in Wanaka, been in practice for I've been in practice for about 20 years now and, yeah, really into really good architecture that looks really good and feels good. I came across Passive House about 12 years ago now, I think, and upskilled myself and slowly moved down to my work and now we're doing quite a few certified Passive Houses and we do thermal modeling for our projects now. So, yeah, it's a really good topic that we're talking about today.
Joe Lyth:I'm Joe Joe Lyth. I wear a few different hats, so I'm a director of Well Architecture, which is my new firm. I said that last year. We do what I think is beautiful architecture that balances budget with buildability and also performance as well. I'm also the chair of the Passive House Institute in New Zealand, so try my hand at governance, which is entertaining. And then I also I teach the homestar, or I'm one of the teachers on the homestar designer course for new zealand group building council. I'm also a dad to three crazy kiwis and a husband to sarah um, and a yorkshireman through and through, despite moving away from yorkshire, god, 15 years ago or something, um, we got to new zealand in 2016 to travel for a few months, um, and then got sucked into this beautiful country, um, and had some kids who got sick because of the houses they were living in. So then we kind of deep dived into building performance what is a healthy building, how we get to it, um, and yeah, suddenly I'm here, which is a bit of a crazy journey.
Josh Atkins:Yeah, I'm Josh, director of Compound Builders down in Queenstown. I've been down here for 11 years of my building career and, yeah, started Compound after not sure exactly, but dove into the world of high-performance, energy-efficient buildings and passive house and that's essentially what we do. We've got myself and two others in the team now certified passive house builders. I built Homestar with you, sam, and yeah, I'm just really into high performance, energy efficiency and how that is brought to the built environment and managing that with budget and, obviously, design of the architects.
Sam Brown:And also a homeowner and builder of Home Green Home of the Year right.
Josh Atkins:Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, homeowner with my brothers, we own a house that I'm putting in, that we built and was team green architects and that was modelled and would be about low energy passive house, but I wasn't certified. And, yeah, about two and a half years we've got a five kilowatt solar system and we are net positive in terms of our consumption and exporting back to the grid, Still winning financially in terms of power, but I think the power companies are starting to bump those rates up. So, yeah, I guess our return on investment is just getting better and better.
Sam Brown:Joe, you touched on how your kids got sick and so you wanted them to live in a healthier home and it sort of led you down that path. And josh sort of touched on as well wanting to live somewhere warm and dry and um, and that energy saving aspect of it be interesting, just kind of, uh, from your guys' perspectives. What was it that drew you into this realm? New Zealand kind of seems. Well, it's still relatively niche, I'd say, but internationally is far more recognized. But what do you think it was that drew you into it and why? What was the big driver?
Josh Atkins:Yeah, I don't know. As I've gotten older and more into my building career or just life, I find I think quite deeply about things. I grew up in Christchurch in just this classic villa, so I kind of experienced what it's like to be pretty bloody cold, but never really thought much of it. Growing up we were building some really nice houses in queenstown and then you start living in one as well. They're just like noticing power consumption of houses or going into bathrooms that are freezing and brand new houses, and my mind just started ticking about like efficiency and energy efficiency and something's impact environmentally as it's built and for the rest of its life. Like plastic doesn't break down or I guess everything kind of every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Josh Atkins:I always think about so as a building. More does it take just to make that building really not impact environmentally but also on our resources for the rest of its life? I think about it in most decisions I make, like buying a vehicle. We buy Toyotas because they're just so damn reliable and cheap to run. Um.
Josh Atkins:But then um with the, with housing, is just building efficiently so that your home can maintain even temperature and be healthy but also just not require more and more input, um, and then that's more time for yourself, more time to put your effort into other areas. I'm not like chopping firewood at night, having to start the fire in the evening and then it's too hot, so then I'll open the door, or like moving around, just like small things like that, once I start thinking about it. So I got infatuated with passive house and just the data around it and design and get spreadsheets and then with with designers and then the numbers you can move around based on window openings and heating systems, and then, as I've kind of progressed, is now understanding that and the costs involved. I just don't like the idea of having to do something twice, like why hate a home more than once, or then over and over and over again, and then why I have to renovate a house again, why I have to upgrade it, why not just do it right once.
Joe Lyth:So that's just kind of how I got into it yeah, I mean, I, I kind of have a similar sort of story, josh. I mean I grew up in the yorkshire dales in a t's sandstone farmhouse with an open victorian range in the kitchen and, um, you know a fire in the living room, sort of thing, and we'd have the fire at night and you'd be falling asleep and have to open the door to let the heat out and then sprint up to your bed where there's ice still on the inside of the window in winter, sort of thing. So, um, I definitely didn't start from a performance perspective at all and then moved to london, worked with several architects uh, down there, um and then started studying after working for a few years and like the uni I went to, um was a great balance of design and technical aspects. So I did two years of classicism, so I studied the orders and Palladio and all sorts of bits and pieces, but then we also had to do building performance and we had to understand thermal bridging and we had to do professional practice and all of these within the same design pathway. So it was all part of the same holistic view of the building project.
Joe Lyth:And then, yeah, we, we came to new zealand just to travel for a bit and then enjoyed it. I mean, the first, the first house we stayed in was a really nice old villa and overlooking western springs park, and it had, um, one of those little grills in the bedroom ceiling and in winter it got so cold and wet you could see glow worms in the roof space above you, which was a quite an experience and it's interesting, you know, being being an outsider. I'm, you know, not originally a kiwi and from the uk, um, it's kind of like a when in rome, you know, because we learned about vapor control and thermal bridging in uni, um, and I did it for years before coming here. And then you get here and the first project I worked on was a two-story classroom block that had half a meter square concrete columns in the corners and it's like it's a skyscraper. So we didn't have, you know, earthquakes or anything like that in the UK to consider, but there was just no insulation anywhere. There was just slab edges exposed and big lumps of concrete and steel sailing through everything. And I was just told, oh, that's what we do, this is the way we do it. And you kind of go oh well, I'm new here, I'll do what I'm told to do sort of thing.
Joe Lyth:But it was. I mean it was kind of a mid-90s granny flat, so it was still single-blazed and pretty poorly insulated and it was just awful. And we had our first child and had the baby's room and we had a little ceramic panel heater on the wall and it would literally be, you know, on full pelt, and then you'd take two steps to the right and it would be 10 degrees because all the heat was just sailing straight out of the walls and it was dripping windows. So it got to like 10 degrees in winter with heating on, and then in summer, I mean we were in a back garden, basically surrounded by trees and houses, so even if you opened the windows, there was no airflow and the exterior air was 20, 30 degrees so we were sweltering. We. We recorded 36 degrees in the house once um, which was just oh man, baptism of fire, absolutely.
Joe Lyth:And yeah, we just, we just, and she was getting really sick and so, um, she ended up on an inhaler. And then we had a second child and the same thing was happening and we just couldn't do it anymore. You know, lying there at night listening to these hacking coughs that have been going on for a month, because it's so cold they just can't shake it, and so I kind of I was like, you know, I can't do this anymore, and so kind of harked back to all the stuff I'd learned at uni and then decided to do my passive house designer, um certification, go through that process, um, and it's just a rabbit hole. Once you're down there you can't get back out again at all because you just, you know, just recognize, of course, of course this makes sense, like why, why do we not all do this sort of thing? So I think, um, you know there's a.
Joe Lyth:I think a lot of people think you're indoctrinated into passive house, but once you learn it it's you can't unlearn that kind of side of things, um. So so my, my entire drive for this is health, basically, and, yes, absolutely energy efficiency and reducing energy demand and, um, you know, kind of the planet better materials, lower embodied operational carbon. But it's health, it's people, it's the outcome, it's making sure things interesting, joe, because I feel, like that's something that's probably not talked about or touched on enough.
Sam Brown:You know the focus is always on performance. You know of the building it's not often talked about the condition of the inhabitants. You know.
Rafe Maclean:It's a very hard metric to calculate health. It is I think you can't measure what's the temperature of your health. I think you can't measure what's the temperature of your health.
Joe Lyth:Yeah, there is a statistic, though, and it's a bit of a dark one, but houses kill more people in warm countries than they do in cold countries, because in a cold country, you know you're cold, you know, so the houses are designed to keep you warm. In a warm country, you're like, ah, I'm a bit chilly, and so it just kills you over a longer period of time, because we just don't feel like we need to consider that side of things. Yeah, sorry about that. It's not on a light note. Yeah.
Josh Atkins:You know I consider New Zealand being kind of warm, I guess, compared to the old harsh wonders of North America.
Sam Brown:It's very temperate.
Joe Lyth:It's warm, temperate, but even in Northland, according to all the NIWA data, we are still in a heating climate, which means that there are more days under 20 degrees than over 20 degrees. So even in our warmest place, we are still technically a heating climate. Based on the data.
Sam Brown:Rafe? What brought you into the fold? What indoctrinated you?
Rafe Maclean:Yeah, I think I was about 10 years into my own practice and we were doing lots of reasonably good work and I guess it was getting published and so forth. And I had feedback from one client and I've talked about this before but the feedback was that I thought this was going to be more efficient than it is because it's using a lot of power to be comfortable. And I took that really quite personally because it was a friend's family, their family house, and the engineer on that particular project was Paula Huggins, who is an engineer, a structural engineer in Queensland, and she was one of the first Passive House designers in New Zealand certified Passive House designers and she sort of kept sort of throwing little hints at me about detailing and stuff and she said this is what you do in a Passive House. And I was like I don't even know what a Passive House is, don't bother me about it. But I think some of those words sort of stuck in my mind and after that feedback I thought to myself, okay, I can do better than this.
Rafe Maclean:And there was just a slow realization that the New Zealand Billing Code is not doing what it should be doing. It's just not. I thought it was, I thought it was, but it just wasn't. So I researched all the different ways of improving my knowledge and Passive House sort of stood out for its I guess its rigour. It's just so scientific, it's all numbers. There's no waffly sort of tick boxes or anything, it's just. I really like maths, so that sort of was a sweet spot for me. So I went off and did the course for a couple of weeks in Auckland and then slowly introduced it into projects like ear tightness and mechanical ventilation.
Sam Brown:Was there like a reluctance from clients to kind of pick that up initially, or could you sell it pretty easily?
Rafe Maclean:Yeah, definitely a reluctance. I mean, firstly, no builders knew how to do anything at that stage. Proclima was just coming into the scene in New Zealand, so their products were quite sort of new and sort of a bit fancy. And then there was one I got this particular project. I was asked to do a talk at the Architecture Designers Conference in Dunedin and gave a talk about my thoughts and my education and the passive house thinking and stuff and show them some details and the Passive House thinking and stuff and show them some details. And one of the people on the stand they were selling stuff in the aisle on the side their products and stuff he saw my talk and he approached me afterwards and said I've got this section in Wanaka. I really like what you talked about. Let's talk more. And that was a bit above a breakthrough in that that ended up being the first certified passive house in the South Island, which house was that right George House.
Sam Brown:Oh.
Rafe Maclean:Yeah, so we've done two houses for them now, both certified the feedback from clients just on how badly their building was performing, that sort of triggered me. Feedback from clients just on how badly their building was performing, that sort of triggered me. And then just some lucky breaks got me into sort of you know, actually implementing those thoughts. And then later we moved to Dunedin for children's education and we were renting houses and two of my family members were asthmatics and we were trying to find these rental houses and we'd send them in first and if they came back within a minute, wheezing it was like a no-go.
Rafe Maclean:And there was just so many cases like that. So that triggered us to build our own house down there, and that was a passive house and the asthma just disappeared. So you know it's great. I think it's just building science.
Sam Brown:Yeah, it is, but it's so funny hearing you three talk, and the path that brought me into it was slightly different.
Sam Brown:I think I went traveling for a year and spent a lot of time in South America, europe and went to Antarctica as well and in that time saw just a huge amount of like receding, like glaciers, and a lot of environmental impact.
Sam Brown:And you know, you hear about the building industry being a 40% contributor to global warming and a lot of that is in operational carbon, and so that kind of like started to lead me down that path of why and what can we do better. So that's that's how I got to it. But it's kind of interesting hearing you all talk and about how, as soon as you've realized how beneficial it can be, there's no turning back. Basically, and whether it be health, whether it be like financial, whether it be like financial, whether it be environmental, it's a lot of reasons to kind of head down this path. What do you think has been and this is what I'm trying to lead to here is I'm trying to segue this into how we can tie this back to the aesthetic thing. Because, like, what do you think has been the reluctance to picking this up more wholesale across the board, particularly in housing.
Rafe Maclean:I think for us it's cost, it's definitely a premium, to do the best building and that's what we say to all our clients is that we can do the best building you can imagine. It'll be the most comfortable, healthy building you can have. But then there's budgets, right, yeah, and we're not. It really feels awkward saying that, but we're not a rich country and building is really expensive. So we're always trying to find shortcuts to getting people on the property ladder or getting people into the first home or retirement place. And if they can't afford it, you kind of have to turn down the dollar a bit sometimes and just do the best you can. But it's that difficulty of the priorities and what gives.
Joe Lyth:I always find, like, when we were building our house, um, I designed it so I mean it's a six house, so it's got a warm roof and we've got this big roof void up here we can use. But we had a tiny, tiny budget, um for what we wanted to do. So I designed it so it was going to be single story and we um, as a piece of floor we could take out to put a staircase in later so we could have extra bedrooms up here and stuff like that um. But the bank required a valuation because we had such a low deposit and they said I was sorry, it's not going to be worth what you're going to pay to build it. You have to make it, you have to give it more bedrooms, make it, you know, make it, make it look bigger, give it more bathrooms and there's all these kind of like. That has zero impact on the performance of the building and I've had clients who've come to me and said we want to do a passive house, but the valuation report says we have to have a fully tiled bathroom and we have to have an attached two-car garage and the subdivision consent conditions say we have to build something at least 150 square meters and it has to have at least two different types of cladding. So there's all these impacts on the priorities that people have to give to make projects achievable. But also, property is profit and property is a vehicle for wealth.
Joe Lyth:In New Zealand because our economy is basically built on houses. There's not much else going on a lot of the time, so they need to be worth a lot and when you see valuations it is. It is the size. We built the third biggest houses in the world behind australia and america. Um, if we made built them ever so slightly smaller, you know what? If that fourth bedroom was a third bedroom with a desk in it and a sofa bed or something like that for the in-laws, suddenly that 10 square meters is better windows and ventilation system easily. So it's kind of simple forms. You know, a corner is two and a half grand per corner when you're talking to builders. So rather than popping out wardrobes and all sorts of things and really complex roofs with gables and gutters and eaves all over the place, just think simply. You know, and if you can't make that beautiful and simple, then we're designers, we're, that's our job.
Sam Brown:But in saying that as well, joe and Rafe, I'd say that you've been a great proponent of that, like you've made not even necessarily simple architecture, but just architecture in general. I'd say some of the forms that you've developed in your projects aren't particularly simple, but they're still achieving this high performance thing. What do you think has been your success there, or how have you struck that balance?
Rafe Maclean:Well, I think most of our projects are really simple. They're just embellished with something yeah, nice, yeah, and you only have to do thermal modelling to sort of work that out pretty quickly. Keeping things really simple has been a motto, and so the budget does go further. Sometimes the sites are quite complex, right, and now I can get into talk about district plans and recession plans and stuff.
Sam Brown:That's a whole other conversation, yeah.
Sam Brown:It's a bit of a rabbit warren but it's interesting that the simplicity thing, I think for me, what I've experienced is the focus on simplicity to achieve performance often I've found, is a deterrent to potential clients because they go oh we're going to do a high-performance build or we're going to do a passive house, it has to be a square with no windows and we can't open the doors and all this sort of stuff, whereas I guess what I'm leading to is, like Rafe, you've counted that completely and, josh, I'd say, with your place as well, it's a great proponent of the fact that your house is essentially a two-story cube and it has, like you said, it's got this little bit of embellishment, but it's functional embellishment, josh, in particular with your house, you know, with the shading elements, but that really makes it a great piece of architecture. And I think what people don't, what potential clients or what the lay people don't understand, is that simple doesn't mean simple necessarily.
Rafe Maclean:Yeah, I think early on when I say early on, like five years ago, if you looked up Passive House on the internet, there aren't great examples of Passive House. The internet there aren't great examples of passive house. They're very well engineered but architecturally, in terms of aesthetics, it's pretty brutal. Some of the examples that you see. I think that's one thing that I'd really like to have more architects involved with passive house, because if you bring that into your toolbox and use it as a parameter in your designs, your designs are so much, so enriched with this technical background, your architecture actually works really well. So that's I think that's really important. That's why I personally got really into it, because I thought, well, there's a challenge there, because I see all these german european examples of passive house and like, like I said before, brutal, and here's us over here doing quite elegant little thin roof things that are applauded by the industry or the magazines and so forth. Can we find a middle ground, something that accomplishes the engineering but holds the architecture architecture stuff together?
Sam Brown:the sweet spot there that, um, we've been targeting, yeah, yeah and I think, like from a design point of view and and, josh, I imagine for you as well from like a builder's perspective, it's quite easy. I mean you can design something really incredibly beautiful, but it's basic and it's kind of overall function or it's detailing or something like along those lines. Or you can design something that's like all and considered and a beautiful piece of architecture, but it's really highly detailed, really highly considered. It's got all of these passive house necessary.
Josh Atkins:It's not necessarily achieving passive house, but like maybe you're using those detail methods or something, you're just understanding how to do something a little bit better and you're sort of more intrinsically involved in the design or in the build process and ultimately I think that has a flow-on effect to your general architecture in your general building as well yeah, I think when you're like rick was touching on in terms of keeping it simple but obviously still having architectural flair and design and using those methods, I think everyone here has done a house with good old-fashioned colour steel which is about a third of the price of some vertical clad timber but done well, looks amazing and is eye-catching and people don't look at cedar and would be like, oh, that looks three times better than than that palestine house if it's done well.
Josh Atkins:So I think those are really key wins in terms of, like material selection that can be used on jobs using a polished slab, but then we, we you know flooring and then that kind of helps reduce that expense that some clients might be spending on an underfloor system if they're using that, yeah, and then being involved like early and with that simple design and bouncing ideas with architects about how everything's going to work definitely mitigates the risk of that cost. It's been high performance.
Sam Brown:I think the relationship that we've developed, josh, and the way that we sort of work from from concept design almost, is like a true testament to that. Like it's quite particularly if you're probably dealing with a contractor that's not as experienced in high performance building um, you know, and you're detailing something that is, you know, that's to the standard, and then you're trying to have to explain it at a later date. That's always going to drive costs up and it's going to make things a lot more difficult.
Josh Atkins:Particularly for us, those projects are the successful ones and where the relationship is involved between the designer and the builder and even the client as well, some understanding what they're trying to achieve. We did another house. We did sips, panels, double story, real simple, modern building. On the outside that just looks like a big green box. It's 250 squares, I think, with a mezzanine floor. Every time I go in, I love it. There's two bedrooms and a big boat room, downstairs, laundry and then a master upstairs in the mezzanine, in a living room, and it just feels really big. But in terms of the performance it got and the floor area and just being quite modest with their selections, they just nailed a healthy, healthy, comfortable, energy efficient house on their budget. So, yeah, it's really nice when it goes that way and it works out well and it's just getting a really clear understanding of what people want to achieve. They didn't understand how nice it was going to be either.
Sam Brown:That's a nice one yeah.
Josh Atkins:I guess people just don't know.
Rafe Maclean:I guess until they've been in one or lived in one. Yeah, we're finding that with new clients who have visited past clients' houses and they just really liked it and they go. We want one of those.
Sam Brown:It's almost like you need to give them a you know, or like, organise an overnight stay or something, and in a house, because, you're right, it's not until you, because on the surface and you know, in the middle of a fine day or something, when the window's open, you can't necessarily tell the difference, but it's that overnight experience that then you're like, oh wow, this is quite remarkable. You know it's, it's, it's the waking up in the morning. You know, in particular, down down where you are, rafe and and Josh. You know it's the waking up in the morning, in the middle of winter, and it's still, you know, 20 degrees in your home. And you look out the window and there's just this blanket of fog everywhere, from fireplaces pumping out smoke. You know, to try and keep the houses warm. Where you can look out, you can see the framing lines on everybody's houses from the condensation and all that stuff. And you're just you kind of sit there laughing a little bit.
Sam Brown:Well that's a thing, because you're like I feel terrible for everybody else, but great for me.
Joe Lyth:That's a really good example of kind of the the unseen or unappreciated benefits of this sort of considering this performance. Because you won't be able to smell all of that wood smoke, you know you won't be able to hear um the traffic down the road. You won't be able to, you know you don't. You don't need to hear and experience things you don't want to experience, so like pollen for example. You know you don't have to try and rely on open windows. So if you've got allergies it's not an issue. Insects like I. I love leaving our doors and windows open all summer but come the evening I close them so I don't get bit into hell overnight. But we know we're still going to get a well-ventilated house sort of thing. So it's just answering those points.
Joe Lyth:At the times that you can't do things, I suppose I was going to say as well, constraints breed creativity. If you've got a blank canvas you can do a flip at anything and you don't necessarily need to judge all your decisions. So I cut my teeth doing loft extensions and rear extensions and little Georgian terraces in London. And somebody would come and say I want two bedrooms and a bathroom up in this roof space and it's a 20 degree roof and it's only two meters head height. How the hell are you going to fit that that in so kind of working within these constraints from a design perspective? So light, height and ratio, boundary or planning conditions and stuff.
Joe Lyth:You need to kind of really judge every decision you make and it makes you work harder to achieve the outcome. And that's the same with prescribing performance out measurable performance outcomes rather than she'll be right performance outcomes, because you have to work harder and make sure you're doing the right thing. So how big does that window need to be? Instead of just a massive wall of glass? What is it framing? Is it framing the view? You know? You kind of it pushes better design, I think, because you have to consider these decisions more than you would have done in the first place. Yeah, that's what I enjoy about it the framing, the view.
Sam Brown:One's an interesting one. I've I'm sure we've all probably got stories around this, but I've had numerous occasions where and it's in places that do have spectacular views where clients are like we want to wall of glass because we want to see everything and I'm like you can step outside and see everything.
Sam Brown:Like how about we cultivate a view, how about we create this horizontal low window? So when you're sitting down at your couch relaxing, you're getting this perfect view shaft out of this thing. And they're like no, we want to be able to stand there and have everything looking at me all at once and I'm like well, do you want it to be 50 degrees in here?
Sam Brown:in the middle of summer and most of them they're like yeah, we don't care, we just want the view. And it's such a hard sell to be like. Well, how about we actually do something a little bit more interesting and nuanced and it has a little bit more flavor and texture to it than just like here it is? Here's everything all at once. You know, it's like the supersized me of architecture in terms of a meal Like no one really wants that.
Joe Lyth:And it puts the view looking back as well, Like if you've got a really nice house along a beach or something, people walking on the beach are going to be looking back.
Sam Brown:That's fine to see blinds closed in the middle At the opportune time of day to actually appreciate the view is pretty horrific.
Rafe Maclean:Yeah. One thing that grates me a lot is seeing the bed from the street, but that's a different topic. Yeah, but I think if you present the data at design meetings, like how much it's going to overheat, and then here's the options to mitigate that external blinds or a triple glazing with a real low g value, things like that and then compare the capital cost versus the running cost, we often do that just like just to nudge the design decision into the, into the direction yeah, but then sometime on the same on the same.
Rafe Maclean:Presenting too much information to clients often can be overwhelming, we've noticed over the years. Is that not to talk about PassPass too much to say. Well, this is what we do.
Sam Brown:Yeah.
Rafe Maclean:This is how we do it, and you're going to be warm yeah.
Sam Brown:I mean that was something I think I mentioned to you, ray, from when we caught up. I mean that was something I think I mentioned to you, rafe, when we caught up. It's been. A slight concern of mine is that when you speak about operating in this space because a lot of people don't understand it, you instantly get quite pigeonholed and so a lot of people are like oh, I can't, I don't want to talk to them, I won't talk to this architect or engage with them because they only do passive house and I don't want a passive house. But it's not like that. We are just architects at the end of the day. We will try and probably encourage you in the right direction, but you know it's not.
Rafe Maclean:It's not like we're part of some cult that will like strike you down if you, if you don't agree but, it's an education thing yeah, I think, and that's um, say no to some projects as well, like there are people who want open fireplaces still Silly stuff. That's fine. Maybe I'm just matured through that and I used to get quite irritated by those people, but it's like, okay, we don't need those. We just work with people that actually want something, a decent home to live in and it's good on the planet.
Josh Atkins:Yeah, you get. I had a lot of the brush with the green side of things lately, or the we don't. We don't want a passive house. We got approached about quite a large home to have a look at and we're not greenies and we're not into the passive house and I had a review of their plans and I was like we actually if you're not a greenie you're incorporating some pretty good practices into your design, which your architect's done in terms of recessed window details and thermally broken slabs and the suspended slab with a double slab with insulation.
Josh Atkins:So I think the web is going a bit wider in terms of other architects that aren't necessarily back themselves on sustainable practice or energy efficiency or high performance. Just know that it's the better way to detail. Now, in this particular job they said all our neighbours it's in a quite large subdivision, big sections said they've got no problem with heating their home, with the energy systems, but their houses are all too bloody hot in the summer and they hate it. And I was like that's where Passive House, which they kind of like a taboo word, sometimes solve your problem quite easily and your design early on. So it's like I was thinking before Sam, you should get a psychologist on this podcast.
Sam Brown:Talk about the psychology of building.
Josh Atkins:Talk about the psychology of building and architecture. Oh God.
Sam Brown:It ended up just being a therapy session.
Josh Atkins:I say it's like the one thing in New Zealand that it's like, oh, how cheap is your house, how much did you spend? And like most of that has low their square meter raters, whereas people in that same circle wouldn't be going and telling their friends how cheap and unreliable their Range Rover is. That's a great analogy.
Sam Brown:It is interesting that you say, josh, that you're starting to see it come or see these better practices come from a wider field, and I think that's sort of evidenced as well.
Sam Brown:This year the measuring peg in new zealand for for great architecture is our awards program, and this year we've sort of seen for the first time that kind of have that um, sustainability criteria, although it was a requirement but not judged upon or not mandatory this year or something. I don't know, it's very confusing, um, but like, at least it's there and it's a consideration and it's, you know, it's starting, not judged upon or not mandatory this year or something. I don't know, it's very confusing, but like, at least it's there and it's a consideration and it's, you know, it's starting to be understood. And I think we are seeing that a lot of like our specialties, I guess, or what we've considered to be our specialties up to date, are now becoming a bit more of the norm. I don't know if that's challenging for us because we're less specialised, but I think overall it's going to result in a better built environment, which is fantastic.
Rafe Maclean:I think it's really good. I think it's what we've been trying to do, so it's kind of working, but slowly. I mean it's such good, I think it's what we've been trying to do, so it's kind of working, but slowly. I mean it's such a slow thing to change. I think. The awards thing yeah, it's quite interesting that one, because it all depends on who's on the jury and if they actually can read the metrics or not Understand them, yeah, and understand them.
Rafe Maclean:Yeah, because we've done that quite for a number of years, put forward metrics, because we've done that for a number of years, put forward metrics. But unfortunately the jury just didn't have very kind with my words here, just didn't have the experience to actually understand what the numbers were.
Sam Brown:Yeah, no, totally. I think that's a fair comment, Rafe, and it will be interesting, I think, to see moving forward if that's sort of a role in the jury is taken up by somebody who is experienced in that, in that area it'll change over time, but you know if you repeat that thing every year people people start to understand what what it's about.
Sam Brown:So yeah, it's a good move and even not yourself, josh, no home of you know, having having a green home of the year, you know I don't know how long that award's been running for now, but you know that itself, you know, recognising something in that realm with a higher honour, I think is pretty important because, let's be honest, the way that architecture is best presented throughout New Zealand is through those mechanisms. It's, you know, it's an easier way to kind of let it reach a wider audience than us kind of sitting there in one-on-one meetings or trying to convince clients independently. Joe, in your role as chairman now of Passive House Institute, have you guys got any plans, thoughts, deliverables or anything that?
Sam Brown:you're looking at KPIs, that's probably a podcast in itself again, oh it is. Your quick elevator pitch, like how are you guys looking to try and maybe like bring more people into the fold?
Joe Lyth:Yeah, I mean I agree to take on the role because yeah, it's really interesting being in the design community in new zealand and kind of seeing all the discussions around. You know what's happening the nz architecture forum, um, the feedback from the um, the sustainability criteria from from the awards and all sorts of things which I've been a bit involved with as well. And we did a survey a few newsletters ago around modeling and just asking you know, do do designers, what do you do to find out how your building's performing rather than just complying? Do you know there's a difference? Do you care there's a difference? That sort of thing. And there was an interesting response to one of them was um, I can't believe the nza is advocating for modeling women. You're going to make architects less relevant, and I find that a really interesting position because, as josh is saying, our clients are asking for it. They're going to only ask for it more. Surely it's going to make us more relevant. So so it's kind of like the sphere of some of the community not really thinking they should or need to be doing that sort of thing and seeing it was just like high for looting people put had a passive house on this flipping pedestal and they say it's this black and white thing, it's, you know, gold standard all the way up here too. Expensive lead size of insulation, all these bits and pieces and none of that's true.
Joe Lyth:Passive house is about the outcomes. That is literally what it is. It is these are the performance outcomes you need to achieve around every energy performance, comfort and air tightness. How you achieve that is completely up to you. You can do whatever materials you. You can do it with whatever materials you want. You can do it with whatever built form you want, whatever building.
Joe Lyth:There's parts of our swimming pools, there's parts of our schools. It's just about those outcomes, and those outcomes are based on science but also comfort. So they're based on the World Health Organization requirements of temperature. They're based on making sure we're getting the minimum air exchange. So they're kind of what we need to be comfortable, no more, no less. It is the Goldilocks zone sort of thing and, like our house up here, it's a certified passive house and it's got essentially 90mm walls, it's got a SIP roof which is a 215mm panel, and then it's got a 240mm suspended timber floor. So a lot of the elements are basically code minimum, if not lower. With the r6, you know we've got half 5.2, I think, in the ceiling. It doesn't need to be this r6.6 stuff that seems so simple.
Joe Lyth:Yeah, and it's just. You know, it doesn't need to be complex. We could have got away with double glazing. We went with triple glazing because it was only a thousand dollars more from the company in europe that we got the windows from, you know, so it doesn't need to be difficult the deniers of passive house and roof and eyes region just need to shift them to auckland and they'll be yes, 100, and that's the point.
Joe Lyth:That's kind of the point, because the other side of the coin is people saying, oh, it's a scandinavian design thing, that's for coal countries only. Passive house is completely site and climate and climate specific. That's the whole reason it works is because you're using the actual climate data based on the actual location. The passive house is not an excuse for crap design. You still have to consider good orientation. You still have to consider air, you know passive cooling through airflow. You still have to consider overhangs, all these sorts of things. But the modeling process and the qa process just makes sure you've got the confidence, you've made the right decisions and you've got an even higher level of QA checking it throughout the build process and then doing the air tightness testing at the end to make sure that you're actually achieving what you set out to achieve in the first place be better, basically. So so my sorry tangents, so my, my kind of.
Joe Lyth:I took this like a chair role to kind of take, try and take passive house of this over the top pedestal that people have put it on and just take it down and say, hey, we all just want to have healthy buildings. You know, we want to have beautiful buildings but we don't have healthy buildings, I'm pretty sure we won't have lower energy bills. These are the ways we can do this. It's not doesn't have to be complicated. If you don't make it complicated, it can be very straightforward. It's just these processes which add to what we're doing. We're not changing it. You know, passive house is based on the principles of passive solar. It's just given us the actual instruction booklet to make sure we're doing it right, rather than guessing, which is what we've done so far, sort of thing. So I just want to try and get more people into healthy buildings through that measurably healthy buildings.
Sam Brown:I like what you said, joe as well, earlier on about how constraints can often lead to great design solutions and sort of the outline of the principles of the idea as a passive house, like using those constraints to generate your architecture can actually lead to some really amazing outcomes.
Sam Brown:And I think people aren't really engaging with that yet because they don't understand it basically and they kind of see it as a barrier. But it's almost like if you what you've similarly to what you've done with the, you know the homestar design guide you've made a very simple, easy to easy to digest and understand for the layperson document. Well, you know the layperson document. Well, you know the layperson architect document that people can learn from. It'd be interesting, if you know, if Passive House was to do something similar. We basically have like a number of design limitations or ideas or concepts that you could employ in your architecture that is going to result in a better performing building without having to necessarily dive into it, Because I think that's a fear for a lot of architects is that I've got to like completely upskill on something totally new.
Sam Brown:I've got enough on my plate blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Joe Lyth:Well, like 70% of the respondents were sole practitioners.
Joe Lyth:Yeah right, I'm running my own company now and I don't have time to do frigging anything Like, and these people are probably panicking. How am I going to learn how to do modeling, all this kind of stuff? Yeah, so we're working with Finns, the NZIA, hopefully ADNZ and Ender GBC. You're all working together to do a cross-industry roadshow, I suppose you could call it around. What is modeling, how do we do it? And essentially, I'm going to do this presentation and then do an energy model in an hour and a half in front of people. And there you go, that's how we do it and that's that gives you the instruction booklets for the outcomes you're trying to achieve.
Joe Lyth:To try and just try and take some of the fear out of it, you know, ends up doing all these ones about embodied carbon at the moment and I helped with one in auckland and people like oh, so you're just measuring areas and then timesing it by the carbon intensity. Here's your carbon model. Yeah, it doesn't have to be difficult once you kind of start learning it. Yeah, but it's it's. It's given people the time, it's given people the tools. It's given people, you know the, the confidence to, to give it a go, I suppose. So, um, yeah, that's my kind of my kind of my bag.
Sam Brown:Baby, just try and get people on the journey I find that interesting, the comment that you made about, you know, the fear that it's making architects less relevant, and you know how you're saying you think it's actually making us more relevant.
Sam Brown:I totally agree, because I think we're a profession that prides ourselves on learning and growing and developing and understanding, like we not to put ourselves up there too much, but probably no, actually I'm going to we are the the highest level of design skill in the country. Let's put it that way, um, you know there's some great architectural designers and everything out there, but the, the rigorous, the kind of process that we've got to go through as architects to get to this point, you know, just kind of leaves us with a better, a better toolbox. And now upskilling ourselves in this kind of create got further, I think, further cements our importance to the built environment, where, you know, rather than diminish it which is a bit of a concern at the moment with certain um thoughts on the role of the architect but you know, like, if we're sort of all adopting this, or at least an understanding of it, I think it kind of, like you know, increases our importance.
Josh Atkins:I think it can become more relevant in making sure that design is done well. I'm not an architect, I'm a builder. I really dislike building ugly houses. It's not very satisfying, neither them, nor is it.
Josh Atkins:I feel like you've really contributed to the built environment, and then so it's even more important, I guess, the modeling. It means you're not going to be wasting your time as much on that because you're getting all the data and so you can spend your energy on what you're really good at, which is the creativity and what I do the job, um, with the data, to kind of back up and reassure you that your design is on track, and you can focus on the creativity and how the space is going to be used and how the people are going to live in it, what it's going to look like, and then just sitting in the back of your head is I know all these kids of this family are going to be comfortable, I know it's going to be healthy, I know the client's not going to be like this is too hot or this is too cold. Yeah, I think it just puts you guys more into focusing on what you're good at.
Sam Brown:Yeah, Rafe, you said something to me, quite an interesting thing to me when we caught up last. You said think about this, you're only as good as your last project, and it really resonated with me actually. Thanks for the comment. But in relating it to this, if you designed a really beautiful piece of architecture but you know it's going to cost your client $2,500 a month to heat or cool, are you happy with that outcome? Or likewise, if you've designed a really high-performance building but ultimately you're not that happy with the way that it looks aesthetically, are you happy with that outcome? Probably not. So it's now like marrying the two and having that balance and, like you said, it's always leaving the indelible mark, project after project yeah, um difficult question, I think.
Rafe Maclean:Um, I mean learning about passive house. You always have to reset your aesthetics and and your all the baggage that you've as architects bring from architecture school which is from my time it was big thing was deconstruction and and uh, post-modern you know, was coming back and it was just like everything was thin or or just out of control and shapes everywhere, so many corners and stuff. So you know, as soon as you sort of learn about um, thermo modeling and how, how thermodynamics actually work, works, you learn quite. You realize quite quickly that all those sort of thoughts don't actually work. The physics just doesn't work. So anyway, back to your question about latest project.
Rafe Maclean:Yeah, I think it's really important to um is to do the best work you can and try really, really hard to get the most performance of the project, as the project can afford, even if it's sacrificing stuff. And one thing that I often talk about with clients when we're trying to trim money out of the project, which always happens, is that, okay, these passive house windows they're twice as much per square meter as a double-glazed building code-compliant window. Okay, if they're double as much, they just have 50% of the area, so it would be the same cost and then that kind of thinking. You have to think like that. It's like well, instead of having all these windows, let's have just one big window framing that perfect view, yep, and that becomes actually richer than lots of windows. Like I said, it's a big reset and I think for architects to take on this, they do need to sort of lose some baggage from the education and just rethink things and restart and let the physics shape the building a bit more.
Sam Brown:Joe, you talked about learning about all of this at university in your time in the UK. How much of a role does our schools of architecture and design in New Zealand, how much of a role does the you know does our schools of architecture and design in in new zealand how much do they need to, you know play a role in this and this change, in this shifting mindset?
Joe Lyth:so much yeah I mean.
Joe Lyth:So it's just coming back to a race point as well. Like, yeah, when we were uni, you know we studied, you know the modernists, we went around vienna and looked at um, you know loose and corb and all sorts of bits and pieces, and you know, that's kind of the stuff that's lauded. So I think historically there's been quite a disconnect between form and function, and performance almost seem like kind of like different sides of it. So, like you know, the Ville Savoir is this incredible piece of architecture but there's famously a letter from the client to Corb saying that they just can't live in it. They can't live in it because it's boiling in summer, freezing in winter and there's walls, no water pissing down the walls all the time, you know. And yet we kind of celebrate that as a, as a, an item, you know.
Joe Lyth:But then we are architects, are kind of essentially health care providers, because we have the biggest impact on the health of people in the world. We design all of the spaces people inhabit, we it would be nice if architects designed all the spaces. Some of them aren't designed architects. That's probably even worse, because they're even less kind of considered spaces. And so we have the biggest impact on people's health, because you know we design the fabric of our cities and our homes and all sorts of things. So we should absolutely be taking that as our one of our responsibilities. You know our code of ethics literally says in it, you know, we should do no harm to others, basically, and if we are designing buildings without considering whether they're going to be harming these people, surely we're failing in that responsibility sort of thing. Um, so, yeah, so.
Joe Lyth:So so the union uk we did. We did passive house. We had a fantastic, um, you know, a 3d workshop, fantastic 3D workshop. I used a lathe to do my classical columns for one of my projects, and then I did Ramdurf and another project and it was just awesome. But on the flip side, we had ArchiLab, which was energy modeling, passive House, looking at thermodynamics, all sorts of bits and pieces, and you know we used to. I can think back to several projects we did where you're still trying to get that really nice thin roof line but you've still got the big steel which needs a thermal break and the vapor barrier and all sorts of things. So we just got on with it and we still designed pretty, pretty bloody nice buildings.
Joe Lyth:And, like I do, I've done a few lectures for unis here and I've got a couple more coming up, and for this one that's coming up in august, I kind of said, oh so which course is this? And it was the building sciences course. I said, oh, cool, so how do you guys tie into the design course? Oh, we don't really. There's a optional, an optional part that some students could do if they like, but then architects come out of uni basically like engineers. You know, I'd never done bracing design before I came here. I probably still haven't, to be honest, because I prefer to leave the structure to the engineers. But that's fine. You know, architects will come out of architecture school as designers and kind of engineers, but they'll leave the performance and the healthcare and the energy to other people and that kind of just doesn't connect with me. Yeah, maybe it's my OCD, but I like to have control of all of my elements, control within reason, all the little parts of the project, you know.
Rafe Maclean:That's amazing to hear, Joe. I really liked your education background.
Joe Lyth:It was cool. It was, yeah, kingston University West London smash on.
Rafe Maclean:I think we had a services paper in Victoria and that was. We learned about heating and cooling systems, just sort of like life support systems for architecture, but we never learned about fabric or you know the envelope of buildings and how energy goes through them and stuff. And I was just like in hindsight I was just like geez, you know who's running this show.
Josh Atkins:Yeah because, I'm missing peace.
Sam Brown:Yeah, I mean, the whole architecture education side of things is fascinating. It's the 101 things I didn't learn at architecture school. When you get into practice you know we talk about design, but often very little else.
Josh Atkins:There's a main architecture study done in Wellington and Auckland. Yeah, younger people. But I wondered what the graduate side of things do you guys see coming through?
Sam Brown:Yeah, so we've got a graduate. She's been working with with us. She worked with us through her time at university and she's just come on full-time now and she I mean because she's been working with us for the last four years, she's been exposed to all of this. But it's and it's interesting talking to her about her peers and their knowledge in this sector and they have none. They don't, they don't understand it at all. It's not They've got. No, I mean, they don't even really have an understanding of the building code, to begin with, let alone. You know, this is a level above it. So, yeah, there's a long way to go in the education sector.
Rafe Maclean:It's not Alron's starting at Victoria, isn't he Mm-hmm? So things might be changing.
Joe Lyth:Oh interesting, oh, that'll be cool, yeah yeah, I have heard before that kind of argument of shouldn't shouldn't design a university, be unconstrained so people could spread their wings and not have to. You know, you look at kind of some of the stuff coming out of the aa in london which is floating cities in the sky and all these crazy things. You know, push the imagination without having to worry about a client in a brief, which is absolutely sensational. We need that side of design. But also then they come out of the university on the other side and can't design a toilet which we also need to do, the ice bath of real practice.
Joe Lyth:And there needs to be a balance in there, you know kind of allowing our imaginations and design flair to soar, but also try and at least ground it in the realities of practice and commercial realities of timesheets and billables and you know all that kind of horrific stuff which we don't actually want to really think about but we kind of have to if we're going to run successful practices. You know most I think most practices in New Zealand are like between one and five people, aren't they? Yeah, so as designers we have to do flipping everything, yeah.
Sam Brown:Awesome guys. Well, we've just took over an hour, so thoughts on from all of you, um, just open floor whatever you kind of want to want to impart on on listeners.
Rafe Maclean:Um, yeah, yeah. One thing I referred to um high performance building and I was kind of thinking about it probably a bit too much, is that maybe we should shift the reference plane there and or the bar and just consider that normal, like normal building and then talk about low-performance building. Yeah, it's so true yeah yeah yeah.
Sam Brown:I'll start doing that. Would you like us to design you a low-performance building?
Rafe Maclean:Yeah.
Josh Atkins:Thank you, that's pretty off-putting. Yeah, I know, oh yeah, that sounds like a low-performance building what you want.
Sam Brown:Yeah, yeah. You tarnish it with that and from the outset it's just going to leave a sour taste in people's mouths. I like that idea because when you use the high-performance term, it kind of makes it sound like you're elevating it as something that's almost unachievable.
Rafe Maclean:If you go into a sales place selling fridges and people say, or the salesperson goes, place, you know selling fridges, you know. And people say, well, the salesperson goes, oh, would you like a low-performance fridge?
Sam Brown:And you go, I don't know, yeah, it may or may not curdle your milk, exactly, yeah.
Rafe Maclean:That's my fight, that's my word.
Sam Brown:I like that, ralph, that's great. I don't know.
Josh Atkins:I just encourage people to test themselves and if they're an architect or a designer and what they can achieve. And, um, you guys have definitely given away some pretty you know and awesome insights to how you learn, or what you learned over time and what you've developed. And, um, there's builders podcasts out there as well, giving away, like um, a lot of good information, so it's not like the information's not out there and even clients can do the research as well. But, yeah, patient house is not ugly architecture, um, and it can be done really well. And I think just finding the right people for your projects and just dare to be a bit different, don't be boring.
Sam Brown:Yeah, I like. One thing that I think as well on that, josh, is find the right people for your project. It's build the right team at the start as well. Have the designer, have the contractor, have whoever else you want to be involved structural engineer, even geotext, let's be honest. Have everybody there at the beginning and have them. You know aiming for that same goal of you know normal performance building, regular building as we're calling it now Because ultimately you know if everybody's on that same stream flow, you're going to end up with a good result. And you know that concern about cost and all of that sort of stuff ends up going away because it just becomes a norm for everybody throughout the course of the project. So I mean it's something that I think you and I have really put to the test and proven that it works and kind of hope to you know, continue to see that happen throughout the industry.
Josh Atkins:Yeah.
Sam Brown:Yeah.
Joe Lyth:Yeah, I really like the idea of low performance building right. We've been kind of because the problem is high performance. There's no measurement. It covers a multitude of things.
Joe Lyth:You know, it's low performance. One and two to 99 is high performance and then 100 is passive house, sort of thing. So we yeah, we've got a board meeting down in wellington on next week, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna propose that for low performance building. Yeah, um, I'll credit you, I promise. I suppose my thing is kind of coming back to relevance, like if we're designing a building now and, as josh said as well, you know are we gonna, and it takes take bloody long time to build a building in new zealand, let's be honest. So we're starting the design now, it might be finished in a year or even two years. If it's a really complicated thing. By the time that building's finished it's going to be no, no longer relevant because things are going to move. They're going to keep moving, performance standards are going to shift, the building code's going to continue changing um. So why not just aim for the top? Why not aim for the best level um of performance? And yes, there are absolutely conversations of kind of where that best level is. Because you know low energy building standard from passive house is 30 kilowatt hours. Passive house is 15 kilowatt hours, most new builds around 120. You know kilowatt hours of energy demand for heating. So even even 30 kilowatt hours is a significant step up from where we are.
Joe Lyth:Um, and there's all these kind of conversations around oh, is this, is this a relevant construction or design typology for our climate? It's relevant for every climate. There are Passive House dwellings in Antarctica. There are Passive House dwellings in Dubai. It is completely climate-specific. It just allows you to design and have the confidence you're designing correctly for that climate. So why don't we want to be better? Why don't we want to? You know, push ourselves, constrain ourselves?
Rafe Maclean:Just on that. It's quite interesting looking back at our grandparents' era, where they built the best buildings that they could with what they had. Yep, and now we don't seem to do that, we're just like tiptoeing around.
Joe Lyth:When I came to New Zealand, one of the first things I did I went to a lecture at ProGlymer and Thomas presented the timber tents that new zealanders build, you know, and it's kind of a timber tent. You know, we haven't really got much further past from a, from a. You know, we built sensationally believable buildings but from a performance perspective it is still a frame with something on the outside and the inside a bit of fluff in the middle. Um, and you know there is a lot of conversation. People think that passive house or high performance means loads of membranes and tapes and plastics and glues and all sorts of things. Um, but there are straw bale passive houses. Look at jessica's place down in guanaca.
Joe Lyth:Um, I was speaking to somebody that came up from germany last week and they were talking to a prefab builder who's um doing prefabricated passive house designs which are completely timber.
Joe Lyth:There isn't a single membrane, there isn't a single tape. It's 140 timber wall with sheep's, all insulation in a timber air barrier, wood fiber insulation, the services cavity, wood fiber insulation on the outside, which is also the um the weather tightness line, because it's free drains, ventilated cavity, then timber cladding, timber windows and all of the air, which is also the weather tightness line because it's free drains, ventilated cavity, then timber cladding, timber windows and all of the air tightness is friction fit because they're prefabbing everything. They can get a millimeter perfect so they don't even have to rely on tapes and membranes and stuff, so we don't have to go down those oil-based, overly complex lots of layers. We can still do it simply, but we just need to. Well, in the New Zealand market, we need to kind of drive to get these products in so we can actually start using them, to be honest, and get the market for them Awesome.
Sam Brown:Well, thank you so much, guys. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you all and thank you for giving up your time to chat in performance and architecture and aesthetics, and hope to see us all continue to push things in the right direction in New Zealand.
Joe Lyth:Thanks Sam, thanks Sam, appreciate it. Thanks Sam, thanks Sam, thanks Sam.
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