studio 2

New Zilland currently uses 1991 (with the odd amendment) law to control building quality throughout the country. The 1991 code is well-meaning but falls short of providing an adequate, enforceable standard. To complicate things, there has been a public furore over “leaky building syndrome” – a knee jerk reaction to the problem which has politicians covering their asses and legislators doing their best to stop up the gap.

Enter the latest proposed changes to the NZ Building code.

These make a lot of sense on the whole (they promote good practice, but offer a “recipe-book” approach to many building problems). Problem is, councils (Wellington City Council for one) are jumping in and treating the building code changes as law already – prescriptive approach notwithstanding.

Anyhow I went through the code changes (particularly with reference to those dealing with preventing the ingress of external moisture) – no real problems there, other than needing to use the green/grey-coloured CCA preservative on external exposed plywood (I’ve been hoping to use LOSP (a clear treatment) with a drained cavity over external to the main insulated structural cavity).

Ray Patton also mentioned that getting a GeoTechnical report would take a while (due to the recent surge in building activity), and that the council would demand a report as the slope is over 30°. I started wandering about different load-loading scenarios on the slope, one thing led to another as I was doodling away, which caused me to have another look at the site envelope.

Diagram showing allowable site building envelope: the yellow plane denotes the max 8m height limit, with the red planes denoting a 45° plane from the boundary offset vertically by 2.5m. An impossible profile: the steep slope negatively exacerbates the allowable building envelope rules. Council just say “we deal with the merits of each case individually”.

The deal is that you need neighbours consent if you stray from the allowable building envelope, and although we have not met our neighbours yet, we’d rather try and prevent snags before they happen.

Introducing the madHouse: a long / thin / bridge of a design, effectively a truss which follows the slope up the hill – gaining good views and more sun from the top of the site, and bringing the front door down the slope to the road (a good thing: not as far to walk in the rain). Cool! The entire truss can be dropped in by chopper, and we can then clip on all the other prefab bits…

I started exploring the idea, looking into the geometry of the solution. It would be possible to treat all interior floors etc as adjustable lightweight componentry, with (possibly) adjustable hangings from the roof to add segregation to house zones.

I explored plywood slats as shading to hollow structural polycarbonate sheeting. That was until I found that the highest R-Value you can get using the latest sheet technology from Germany is only 1.0 – nowhere near good enough. I want R2.5 at least for the walls.

I brought over some ideas from the earlier design, and introduced the edge wall blades – effectively allowing us to control the view (and block out the ugly green brick etc)

madHouse with LOSP slats on CCA walls. This thing is starting to look like a monocoque.

madHouse in context (apologies for the electric spinach green).

That was yesterday. I’m now exploring the detail planning side of things, and this idea certainly has legs… I have big ideas for this sucker… check back in a while to see my pencil doodles…