One person’s rubble might be potential material for Gap Filler’s new office. Sustainable Habitat Challenge (SHAC) and ReGeneration Trust New Zealand are collaborating to build an office for Gap Filler in Colombo St, Sydenham, with the help of volunteers and as many recycled or sustainable materials as possible. Gap Filler project co-ordinator Coralie Winn said [...]

“Anyone can build an eco-home,” he says, “but it doesn’t solve anything. There is nothing to stop them turning up the thermostat. What’s more interesting is the way people live and behave.” So the Triangle has allotments and polytunnels where people can grow their own food, and a car club and a scooter club that [...]

  Baltimorean Will Homan, along with Pernilla Hagberth from Sweden and Clementine Blakemore from England, took on the Auburn University Rural Studio challenge: plan, design, and build a $20K house in Hale County, Alabama that could potentially be produced as a viable alternative to trailers in the area and purchased with a 502 Direct Loan. Above you see the project, from beginning sketches to [...]

    Intelligent water cycle for active climate protectionHow ingenious it would be if we could store and reuse the heat from the run-off shower and bath water that we use each day before it disappears down the drain forever! Now you can – with a heat recovery system from Hansgrohe. The Pontos HeatCycle system is [...]

A few simple building rules could have saved billions of dollars and kept thousands of people in their own homes after the Canterbury earthquake, Far North Mayor Wayne Brown says. The problems showed the complicated building codes of recent years were no help, because they were ignored or not understood. The excellent performance of old [...]

12 office/studio spaces constructed from 32 recycled shipping containers on an abandoned strip in Providence, Rhode Island. There are also links to many notable container projects such as Container City, Illy Cafe, Puma City, and Adam Kalkin’s 12 Container House But the devil may be in the details – how are the windows be installed and flashed? And how [...]

Lyndall Hancock has spent a lifetime with a rainwater tank beside the house. Over the years, the Dunedin woman has used water collected from the roof – running down through pipes to a tank beside the house – for cooking, cleaning and even drinking, once strained and boiled. Now aged 80, Miss Hancock lives in [...]

VisionWest has seen one church grow to provide holistic care and support for all people physically, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. The Trust provides housing, a kindergarten, opshop, community care, for the Henderson community in Auckland. VisionWest Community Trust has been offering community-based services to people in West Auckland since the 1980’s. The Trust was formally incorporated [...]

“It is not enough to design purely for life safety,” says Auckland architect Barry Copeland. “A resilient house, as well as surviving structurally through an earthquake, needs to continue its function as a family home.” In response to the Christchurch earthquake, Copeland, working with seismic engineer Barry Davidson and wastewater systems engineer Ian Gunn has [...]

BedZed Development:   Freiberg Housing   Medium Density Housing, Christchurch:   Frankton Proposal:   Existing Housing in New Zealand:   What We Can Do (Roger Buck)   Bricks Work – After 22 Feb Earthquake:   Urban Growth – Two Examples of Another Way [Article Submitted to the Christchurch Press on Urban Form] Although the evidence [...]

Victory, Nelson is a long established inner city suburb. The Victory Community centre combines a school hall, health centre, recreation and social services. The school started out with a vision that to educate a child the entire family must be involved. “Victory Village, comprising Victory Community Health Centre and Victory Primary School, is a unique [...]

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CPIT is currently completing a scoping exercise to determine the size and shape of CPIT’s entry into the Shac 2011 competition. A brief has been given to students from CPIT’s School of Architecture to scoop and then present to the CPIT Shac committee. Current thinking on this project is that two units may be built, one with [...]