Combining pragmatic and poetic to create sustainable housing
Master of Architecture student Emily Newmarch recently won the New Zealand Institute of Architects (NZIA) Student Design Award, the top honour for architecture students in New Zealand.
Her award-winning work explores the ways architects can combine the pragmatic and the poetic to create sustainable housing designs and has also led to potential improvements in the software used by practising architects.
Emily’s project is called ‘Climatic Conscience for Dwelling Design’. During her project, Emily designed a small 10m2 cabin and a larger 100m2 house. These designs explored how timber houses could be sustainable, aesthetically pleasing, and architecturally appropriate for the surrounding landscape. Emily’s designs were developed to suit the area around Lake Moke, near Queenstown.
“I chose to focus on the Queenstown Lakes district for two reasons,” Emily says. “There has been an explosion in building developments in this area, so sustainable housing design for that climate is very relevant at the moment. Also, I have personal experience with the area, having spent time camping around Moke Lake. I wanted to bring this personal experience into my designs to improve the building’s relationship with the landscape.”
Emily researched the New Zealand Building Code and building codes from countries with similar climates to create a comprehensive criteria of sustainable building techniques to measure her designs against. To ensure her designs were both sustainable and aesthetically pleasing, Emily researched award-winning architecture in New Zealand over the last two decades and compared this work to architectural theory on how warmth is perceived through the sense of touch in space, and how the environment becomes a co-author of the architecture. This comparison helped Emily develop aesthetic criteria for her designs.
Using this background information, Emily developed her design and knowledge of energy calculations through her two housing designs. The smaller design for a cabin tested the thermal and energy performance of different design aesthetics and energy-saving construction techniques. Next, Emily created a larger house design that tested how these different aesthetic and energy-saving techniques would fit into the southern alpine landscape, as well as how they could accommodate a home and income model.
“The goal was to develop the performance-based aspects of the design to become part of the poetic language of the building. Ultimately, I aimed to make the houses energy-efficient and aesthetically pleasing and encourage a positive relationship between the building and the landscape,” Emily says.
Throughout her project, Emily used a software called ArchiCAD to construct her designs and test the energy-efficiency of different design elements. Emily knew from her previous work experience within architecture firms that this software (and similar software) had limitations, so another goal of her project was to test ArchiCAD’s performances against similar software called Revit to see how effective ArchiCAD is at measuring energy-efficiency resulting from timber construction techniques.
“In architectural practice the process to complete an analysis for code compliance can be a time-consuming and tedious task,” Emily says. Through testing the software during her Master’s work, she was able to “define some of the inaccuracies and develop solutions to getting a more reasonable result using the software as a tool to complete the analysis”.
This work has led to some exciting opportunities, including a presentation at a conference in Hong Kong and the chance to beta-test a new plugin for the ArchiCAD software that could be used to support energy-efficient eco-design.
Emily says her Master’s project is a culmination of all her previous practical experience and research.
“I wanted to pursue architecture because it combined my enjoyment in art and graphics with my abilities in mathematics and physics,” Emily says. “My work at a small architecture firm in Timaru and on a Summer Research Scholarship started my interested in timber-based design and sustainability, so when it came time to do my Master’s I combined this experience with my interest in poetic approaches to create my Master’s project. It was a challenge to combine all of these interests into one project, but with the help of my supervisors the scope of the project came together.”
“Ultimately, I wanted to create a design that combined both pragmatic and poetic approaches, with the hope to inspire others to consider both when creating their own designs, rather than having to exclude one at the expense of the other,” Emily says.
Emily hopes to get funding to pursue a PhD, and ultimately develop a career that combines academia and architectural practice.
Emily’s thesis was supervised by Dr Antony Pelosi and Dr Michael Donn and funded by BRANZ.