Category: MicroArchitecture

How many houses are being built in New Zealand? And where?  This question and more can be answered using SHAC’s Building Activity app.

Imagine, if you take a cold and damp house, and then wrap it in extra insulation and draughtproofing.  What do you get? A warm and damp house.  The extra insulation and draughtproofing reduce the air circulating in a house, which is a reduction of the ability for a house to dry itself.

How do we get a warm and dry house?  Capture the sun, add heating to the house, and add ventilation. This can be as simple as ensuring the windows of a house are open during the day, especially when it is sunny out.  Or you can add some sort of ventilation system that takes in outside air into the house.  Your heat pump does not do this – all a heat pump does is recirculate the damp air that is already inside your house.
On the whole, outside air is dryer than inside air, especially once it is heated to inside temperatures. This is why bringing outside air into the house helps to dry the house. There is some cost to heating outside air, but the benefit is a dryer, healthier house.  Also, if a ventilation system is used, this cost can be reduced if a heat recovery ventilation system is used. Of course using windows for ventilation is the cheapest option of all!

Most of the moisture (>85%) in a house is in the furnishings and building materials in the house. Simply removing moist air once will not dry a house, as dampness will just evaporate from furnishings and building materials, and the air will quickly become damp again, within minutes. A damp house needs repeated flushing of the air within the house so that the furnishings and building materials within the house slowly begin to dry.
Read about our recent research with the Valley Community Workspace community group: ValleyWorkspace.org-BuildingMoistureStorage (PDF)
Also see “The Wetting and Drying of Timber Framed Walls“

… Climate activism has primarily manifested as “Blockadia.”  Why? Blocking and shutting down bad projects is easier to organize around than efficiency or carbon pricing. And maybe that’s fine. Maybe it isn’t the role of activists to imagine and bring about a new world. Maybe that’s for policymakers, designers, engineers, artists, and entrepreneurs.

Source: Architecture and Climate – what critics misunderstand about climate activism

“The project was for 9 single person homes on a small plot adjacent to a disused canal in Peckham – to be self built by local young people in housing need. The build was linked to a local training centre where the self builders were trained up to NVQ level 2 Carpentry and Joinery.

Consortium, a local umbrella group of housing charities, employed a worker to research the project and get it off the ground. This worker stayed on for the build process and acted as a support worker to the self builders. The site was managed by a full time site/project manager who had built on a previous self build scheme and who had youth work experience.

On completion of the scheme the builders became tenants of South London Family Housing Association, who had acted as development agents for the project

A very thorough and honest review report on the project is available from CSBA”

Source: Consortium

The cities of the future, which is what many urbanism conferences talk about, those cities that grow fastest, are not constructed out of glass and steel, but out of straw, recycled plastic, scrap wood, and bricks made of construction waste. Housing there isn’t built by the building companies, developers and policy makers who attend the conferences, but by people building for themselves.

Source: BSHF | Learning from informality

The temporary projects which popped up on newly vacant land around Christchurch after the earthquakes have a lot more value to a traumatised public than we may think.Dr Andreas Wesener, a lecturer in Urban Design at the School of Landscape Architecture has just published research on transitional community-initiated open spaces (CIOS) in Christchurch and says they have a range of benefits that might strengthen community resilience.His paper discusses benefits, possible long-term values and future challenges for community-initiated temporary urbanism in Christchurch.“Resilient people have been described as being able to find positive meaning and display positive emotions even in times of crisis, and introducing positive stimuli and engaging in positive activities have been considered vital in distressing post-disaster situations,” Dr Wesener says.There is evidence that people’s participation in temporary projects has encouraged positive emotions and creativity, strengthened social capital, such as community gardens, and fostered community empowerment within a challenging post-disaster situation, he says.“On an individual level, community members who lost jobs in the aftermath of the earthquakes reported that working on temporary projects had provided opportunities to cope with post-traumatic stress, remain active, learn new skills, establish new networks and in some cases job opportunities have been created.“Even passive passers-by without direct involvement in community-led activities may experience positive emotions solely by noticing that ordinary people are recreating and rebuilding structures within a destroyed urban landscape.”
Source: Temporary projects leave long-lasting legacy