Image credit (above): Daniel Ho
Guests:
Rachel MacIntyre is the Strategic Sustainability Advisor at Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects. Rachel’s career spans architectural practice and public sector roles in Copenhagen, London, New York, and Aotearoa, as well as lecturing at AUT’s School of Future Environments. Rachel is pākehā of Scottish and English descent, and Denmark is her second home.
Dr Emina Petrović is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainability in Design, Wellington School of Architecture, Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington. Petrović is recognised for her expertise on sustainability and toxicity of building materials, and more recently for the research on bio-materials. Emina is originally from the Balkans and calls Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, home.
Min Hall is a Registered Architect with a career spanning 35 years and is also a Lecturer at Unitec School of Architecture where her research and teaching focus on sustainability, particularly low carbon materials. Min recently began teaching Te Hononga Design Studio at Unitec, bringing her knowledge of regenerative practice and role as tangata tiriti together. Min is pākehā and based in Motueka.
Resources covered in this episode:
Whole Earth Catalog, 1968-2022.
Petrović, E. (2024). Sustainability Transition Framework: An Integrated Conceptualisation of Sustainability Change (Version 1).
NZS 4298:2024 Materials and construction for earth buildings
NZS 4299:2024 Earth buildings not requiring specific engineering design
Book pairing:
How to Loiter in a Turf War, by Coco Solid
DAxMA. Crafting New Materials full transcript with notes:
Nau mai, haere mai, dynnargh dhywgh hwi a nd welcome to a very special bonus episode we’ve recorded in collaboration with Material Acts. Material Acts was a two-day event held at Objectspace over the 12th and 13th of November. November, 2025. It brought together architectural practitioners, students, and making enthusiasts to join workshops and discussions with those working in material innovation. It was organised by Tessa Forde, Nick Sargent, Micheal McCabe, and Frances Joseph from Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau, AUT.
What you’ll hear today is a recording of Session 4: Craft Practices – A Dialogue about Crafting New Materials. Tessa Forde facilitates this dialogue with Emina Petrović, Rachel MacIntyre, and Min Hall, and they consider what it means to create new material processes, and how material crafting contains inherent political dimensions and potentials, including challenges with how new materials intersect with the marketplace, from BRANZ testing, to Building Standards, and our human role as kaitiaki caring for taiao the living world.
Tessa Forde: I’m very excited this morning to introduce this dialogue. We’re calling it ‘Crafting new materials’, but it’s also about all of the other stuff that goes into crafting new materials and how you might reckon with that, in the context of the government, and scaling things up (or not) and making decisions about how we explore alternative material cultures and practices in Aotearoa.
So we’ve got Min Hall, Rachel McIntyre, and Emina Petrović here. Min Hall is a registered architect with a career spanning 35 years and is also a lecturer at Unitec School of Architecture, where her research focuses on sustainability, particularly low-carbon materials. In 2012, she received a Master of Architecture degree for her thesis: Earth and Straw Bale: an investigation of their performance and potential as building materials in Aotearoa New Zealand. She’s also a member of the New Zealand Standards Committee, responsible for the suite of Earth Building Standards. Min’s teaching focuses on sharing her passion for low-carbon materials with students on their way to becoming architects of the future.
Dr. Emina Kristina Petrović is a senior lecturer in sustainability and design, the Wellington School of Architecture, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. Petrović is recognised for her experience on sustainability and toxicity of building materials, and more recently, for the research on biomaterials. Petrović emphasises the importance of informed building material selection for both the built and natural environment, calling for a more detailed consideration of building materials, for the totality of their impacts from ecosystem health to ethics of production, because knowledge itself is not enough. Petrović has also contributed a Sustainability Transition Framework and researches aspects of, behavior change in the building industry.
Rachel McIntyre is the Strategic Sustainability Advisor at Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects. Rachel’s career spans architectural practice and public sector roles in Copenhagen, London, New York, and Aotearoa, as well as lecturing at AUT School of Future Environments. In her current role, she supports architects by equipping them with the skills and knowledge needed to design with minimum environmental impact, focusing on low-carbon and circular design principles. She ensures practitioners have access to the tools. and resources required to drive positive change.
Alongside this, she actively advocates for sustainable and regenerative practices across the architectural profession and the wider built environment industry. Rachel is passionate about being a kaitiaki of the built environment and is committed to embedding the principles of kaitiakitanga into architectural practice and the broader community of built environment professionals, showcasing the vital role architects play in decarbonising the industry and addressing the urgent challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.
So, what a team! I’ll ask Rachel to go first. And so yeah, we’re just starting with a kind of five minute introduction of how they—what their work is, and how they got into kind of material practices.
Rachel MacIntyre
Rachel MacIntyre: Yeah, mōrena everyone. Great to see you all this morning. I apologise cause I’ve got notes. It’s early in the morning, and I’m on the decaf at the moment, so just in case my brain doesn’t engage. So I’ve got a few slides to go with a presentation. So my journey into materials and sustainability started at architecture school. It probably started earlier than that, but I’ll start at Architecture school. I was always drawn to the Whole Earth Catalog, and spent a lot of time in the library reading the Whole Earth Catalog (when I probably should have been referencing famous architects like Cobusier or other architects in my work), and trying to figure out how I could get these ideas into my design projects.
Another influence was Tony Watkins, who taught me about the vernacular, and one of my early research projects was on an adobe earth brick house in the Waitakere’s. I have always been interested in solving environmental problems, and I’ve probably always been fascinated by toolkits, catalogues, and learning tools. And putting the pieces of the puzzle together to enable others to create meaningful and impactful things.
My journey through my architectural career has progressively focused more and more on sustainability. For example, this project used the building as a learning tool for sustainability for the students. So we exposed the panels around the solar panels so we could see how much energy was being generated or how much energy was being used, all the services were exposed. Yeah, so basically, that idea of using a building as a learning tool. This focus led me out of traditional architectural practice and into a public sector role at the city of Copenhagen in building and urban renewal, focused on energy-efficient retrofits, district-scale solar strategies, product innovation, and working under the Copenhagen Climate Plan. My realisation in this role was that I could have a wider influence acting as a facilitator and a collaborator, bringing sustainability, architecture and the built environment together with policy and strategy, collaborating directly with citizens and the wider built environment sector and working towards common citywide sustainability strategies and goals.
So retrofit, adaptive reuse, and transformation are, I guess, my preferred types of projects to work with, and I see them as an untapped opportunity for architects. I’m a true believer in architects being more than creators of the physical form of a building. We can be so much more than this. Architects are systems thinkers. My practice has evolved over time, and I believe my strength lies in facilitating solutions to a problem. So I’m a bit of an octopus now, putting the pieces of the puzzle together, bringing the experts to the table at the right time, and generally doing this all through a collaborative process. Living in Denmark taught me a lot about collaboration. The Danes’ superpower is collaboration. Architecture is a collaborative process, and richer for it.
Part of my current role is to develop toolkits and resources, and educational programs. This includes a resource hub, with three Sustainability Series running currently. There’s one around carbon, one on the importance of energy modelling, and one on healthy and natural materials. So these are all series which include webinars, and complimenting the webinar series with hands-on workshops for our members. So these are free and accessible tools and workshops for our members. Also part of this is developing physical tools and resources.
So on the tables here, there’s some carbon cards and natural materials cards, which are free to use for our members. They can download them, and there’s lots of questions and sort of inspiration to how you can ask questions and research things on carbon and natural and regenerative materials. These were nationwide workshops which we held with our members. So we are looking to implement those throughout 2026.
Yeah, so that was a bit about my practice and my journey. So now I’ll talk about some themes that I’m really interested in, and once I’ve gone through these, I’d be really interested to hear if anyone else has other topics that I should be focusing on, as you know, the Sustainability Advisor at the Institute.
Architects as health practitioners
Rachel MacIntyre: So the first one is this idea as architects as health practitioners. For every dollar spent on housing, $5 is saved in healthcare. Architecture is more than aesthetics and shelter; it is a form of public health practice. Architects shape the environments we live in, and through considered design and material choices, they can influence physical and mental wellbeing.
Architects as repairers. So this is about change in the acceptance of a different aesthetic and embracing what is already there, change in the way we choose and procure materials. So it’s about the act of care and repair, and highlighting where the fabric of the building has been repaired rather than trying to hide that repair, that point of repair.
This idea is architects as innovators. Architects are really good at problem-solving and finding solutions to a problem. This project is a solution to infill housing. It’s addressing how to make high-quality architectural designed homes more accessible. So the project has a 32 square metre footprint. It’s the same size as a double car garage, and the idea is that it can basically be put on many urban backyards throughout Aotearoa. And it’s a really nice design, a good, good solution.
Architects as harvesters. We also need to see waste as a future resource for the built environment. Upcycling can strengthen the identity of a place and creates a narrative linking the old with the new. So this was a project—on the left corner there—a project I worked on in Copenhagen, where we retrofitted 800 windows. So we used those windows in a new build project, the resource rows on the garden houses on the top there, and we also used the windows in the garden house in the existing courtyard or garden of the existing building. And the building at the top—reused brick facades from the Carlsburg Brewery. So they cut the bricks out, made them into panels, and then placed them on the new building. So this idea of reuse and creating a narrative between the old and the new.
Next one is architects as regenerators. So the idea of growing materials on site, locally or regionally, creating buildings from rapidly renewable materials like straw and hemp. Um, this idea of combining lo-tek methods with bio-based materials and off-site manufacturing for scalable, low-impact architecture and this idea of fostering innovation. And then fostering that relationship between the building industry and the agricultural industry is also a key theme that I’m very interested in.
And last but not least, architects as community makers. In a discussion on community-led housing recently, we came to the conclusion that people do not sign up to co-housing projects for the building itself. They sign up because of the creation of community. A community is what will help and support us in the coming years as the impacts of climate change impact our homes and communities. So architects can play a key role in creating communities through the buildings and urban landscapes we design, and also through the facilitation of creating these communities. And it’s great to see Helle [Westergaard] here. She was part of Cohaus and designed Cohaus. So, yeah, that was the last thought.
Thanks.
Tessa Forde: Thank you, Rachel. Emina, would you like to go next?
Emina Petrović
Emina Petrović: Thanks. Well, thank you organisers for flying me over from Wellington. I really appreciate being able to kind of connect between different cities in New Zealand, in this conversation, which I think is really important.
What brought me to materials…last night I was chatting with Nick and we remembered one of the kind of points where we crossed paths some 20 years ago. Early in 2000, I coordinated a course about contemporary design. And in order to organise the material into that course, I looked into what was in contemporary design, and did very comprehensive review. And one of the areas that I identified was that we were thinking about materials differently, already in early 2000s. That’s what I was kind of noticing is one of the trends that was emerging.
So, that influenced me [in] choosing to do my PhD, some several years later, that was related to materials. The intention was to study how people respond to different materials psychologically, or culturally. Partway through my studies I needed to figure out how these things [were] kind of influencing wellbeing. And I was just going to look quickly and tick the box that we were doing enough when it comes to toxicity and harmfulness of materials— that was my plan— and I found that we were so not doing right.
I, as a mum of two little kids at the time, one was five months only old. I was putting stuff that is harmful and carcinogenic in their bedroom without knowing that it was harmful and carcinogenic. And for me, it was a huge wake-up call. If I, as somebody who has at that point not left the school of architecture—moved from one to another, and all sorts of things, but I have not left the places of where knowledge about our architecture is being generated—had no knowledge of this kind of issue, how do we expect the world to somehow self-regulate in that space? So a detour the topic of my PhD [to investigate] into the problem that I have encountered, which seemed much greater than the [original] problem that I still want to do—the [what humans] like one. But the [what humans] like one is, I think, far less fundamental than the fact that these things are very harmful for us.
So I did a PhD that had aspects of that nature, published one book [in 2017], last year [another book]. We had a book about sustainability and toxicity of building materials—that had more than 40 people contribute to the book—come out, and all of it keeps showing that there isn’t a [single] solution. That they’re complex issues and that almost all the materials that we’re using have impacts, generally very high levels of impact. I was lucky that concurrently with finishing that book project, we were already doing work on the project, on biomaterials that was funded by BRANZ, and I was running another project that was looking into synthetics.
So that duality of looking into bio-based products and looking into synthetics is really underpins some of the work that I’m doing right now. Because in a way, one is the problem and the other one could be the solution. And we need to think about that problem and solution because often we need something to inspire people to act. And, a problem is really good for alarming them, but then, once they’re alarmed, they’re freaked out and don’t know what to do. So, you need to give them, very quickly, the solution, and the bio-based materials are likely to be the solution. So as a team, those two are really important kind of levers that can be pulled together.
When it comes to biomaterials themselves, I mainly stepped into this space because master students started to ask me for supervision in these sorts of areas. And I started to learn through their work, what is happening. So for me, Maria Walker, and her work on bio-based, on mycelium-based composites, was really important. And then, Mike Murray did a thesis on Hempcrete, which was, again, really important kind of learning curve for me. And, and there have been a few others that have really helped me to kind of go into that space. So I’m really interested in how to activate the knowledge, because books sitting on shelves don’t necessarily achieve that.
We need them, and we need that kind of science to continue developing, because I look often into synthetics and the problems related to that. I’m quite aware that even a report from some five years ago in Europe says that, for something like 90—70 to 90% of chemicals that we currently have on different products around the world—we either have no idea what health impacts they have, or we have tiny bit of an idea what health impact they have. So we are dealing with a huge gap in knowledge that is external to architecture as a discipline, because that is somewhere ‘over there.’ Scientists need to figure out which chemicals are a problem, but how do we kind of work in the space of eliminating the problem, while this knowledge is being created?
Because we can’t wait for that knowledge to emerge. We are seeing that microplastics are creating problems worldwide, and we can’t be responding to the problem when it’s alarmingly big, right? We need to be intervening long before. So that’s where I’m kind of trying to work. And I’m quite interested in these dualities of problem / solution, and bio-based materials are emerging as a huge topic internationally at the moment because there are more people and more people seeing that this could be part of the solution puzzle, which is very exciting.
And a group of us that kind of emerged from the project that we have done funded by BRANZ—I need to keep acknowledging that without BRANZ funding that project, the work wouldn’t be quite where it is—right now, we are about to form an organisation. We had a beautiful pre-establishment meeting a handful of weeks ago, and in 10 days we are hoping to formalise an organisation for collaboration across New Zealand.
And intend to do a lot of (really annoying) kind of video calls as a way of connecting the whole country together, without too much of carbon emission and travel, and trying to kind of build it very low-key, but to increase opportunities for people to exchange information. And I was just chatting with Dermot about another idea, and I’ll be chatting to others about some other ideas of what we can do to kind of foster the conditions that can help us make the transition faster. Yeah, so that’s kind of where I come from.
Tessa Forde: Thank you, Amina. [I’ll] pass over to Min.
Min Hall
Min Hall: Kia ora tātou. I’m slightly daunted, following you two, but I’ll crack in. I’m the daughter of an architect, and so I was brought up in an architecturally designed house, and visited many. So I kind of knew what I was getting into, and I think about the sort of things that really shaped my career.
And like Rachel, for me, it was the first New Zealand Whole Earth Catalogue that my dad bought home when I was 15. And that was just—you know, it was an absolute light bulb moment. That’s never gone out. And it was really the idea about being able to do things for yourself, as well, and all these different materials that people were using.
So that was a kind of key thing. And then I decided, yes, I was going to not be a meteorologist, I was gonna be an architect (cause that was my other choice). And I went into it to Victoria [University] in that first intake, in 1975. And, you know, I have to say I was bitterly disappointed about what we were taught, because that school began as a sort of reaction to the very concept-driven Auckland School of Architecture, which was at that point the only school of architecture in the country. So, you know, the first design project I did was a piggery, and it was because we were studying, yeah, just the conditions inside a building. I mean, wow. My first project—I’m just thinking of this now off the cuff—my very first design project was the Murchison Abattoir, so maybe that did actually affect it, I’m not sure.
But just back to the point, is that when I left architecture school, I pretty well headed for the hills. And learned how to make stuff, because I knew I’d been taught about high rise buildings. This was, you know, the late seventies that we are talking about, and we are always a little bit behind the sort of counterculture movement here. So, I mean, I went in and learned my own way, by learning off builders, et cetera. But, another really key moment for me was that my final sort of mini thesis, that we did then—because I wasn’t learning about what I wanted to learn about, I decided to look at early settler housing. So I looked at Wellington Housing 1840 to 1870, and discovered that there had been a whole heap of adobe houses at that time.
Unfortunately, most of them got wiped out in the 1848 and 1855 earthquakes, but it got me interested in earth. And leading on from that, I got a job, which was drawing up three 19th-century houses for the book Restoring With Style. So one of those houses was an old cob house, behind Christchurch Airport, Tiptree. And so I had to get really, you know, up close and personal to these beautiful, big, thick earth walls. They sort of tapered from being about 600mm wide in the bottom story, down to being probably 200mm at the top. And so that kind of really got me into thinking about earth as a building material. This house, that that earth came from the site. And yes, there was some timber in it, but that really sort of stuck with me.
So, just kind of moving on a little bit, to actually make a living as an architect in Aotearoa: it’s pretty difficult to just stick to say earth and straw materials. And so by the time I was in my fifties, I counted up all my jobs, and I had less than 10 that were built out of earth or straw. And I had many houses that were second houses for people, a lot of them from overseas. And I just thought, “Yeah, well, I could keep on doing this for another 20 years,” but it was hugely unsatisfying. So that’s when I decided to do some research and then to get into teaching. And I think that was a really good decision.
And so then I’ve kind of—that idea of making, I think, is sort of hugely important. And, this sort of exhibit here, which is mostly of student work, although that little— that straw bale panel—is one that is a result of my research. I was looking into prefab straw, and at the same time as some practitioners were. So, I’ve actually been able to let that go. Cause it, cause it’s happening. But I did a lot of really, I think, important background research that is now feeding those people who are actually in the prefab world. But, you know, I think that’s sort of pretty important. But we can talk about these later, but this is a real sort of site for experimentation.
And for the last three years, I’ve been working with Kerry Francis on Resource Matters, which is our elective course. And we’ve come up with this idea of the students making stuff at a particular scale and then moving up. So that’s kind of what you’re seeing here. I’m not sure how much I—you know, I could go on for ages, Tessa, so you better just stop me—but just as an intro, we’ve looked at all sorts of things here, and I’m happy to discuss that as we go on with this dialogue.
And I’m really delighted that Rachel’s come to the NZIA, and really is just bringing this conversation to the foreground, which is fantastic. And also I think what Emina and her team are doing is fantastic. So, you know, I’m kind of at the point where I’m looking for other things in my life, and, I think it’s in really good hands. And I’m not going away in a hurry either.
The responsibility of architects to craft new materials
Tessa Forde: Well, maybe I will go turn it back to you Min, and then Emina, and then to Rachel. So, obviously you’ve got this kind of rich body of work spanning decades and exploring and designing and inventing new building materials. What do you think the role or the responsibility of the architect is in crafting these new materials, but also I think—just given what you sort of just said—the role of the architecture teacher and the student in that process?
Min Hall: It’s learning by doing, and it’s learning from people who are doing, I suppose. And so I think, you know, architects really need to embrace that they’re just one little cog in the wheel. And so, you know, so we go away from the ‘Starchitect’ idea. You know, these are all a result of teamwork, but they’ve also had input from Alan Drayton, who I’m sure many of you know, but he’s a fantastic builder and communicator and advocate. And he knows far more than I do, about all these things. So in terms of, you know, getting back to the role of the architects and creating new materials, I mean, this encourages people to look at different things.
You know, Myke Te Momo’s square here, with biochar, and cow shit and lawn clippings…I mean, how cool is that? That’s really encouraging the idea of looking at different things. And we’ve got also some work by Ruth [Baker], who’s here in the room, from this year where she has been looking at fern fronds and making a clay slip with them. And you can see her work over here.
So I think the role of architects is to be curious. And to collaborate, I guess. I’d have to say that, I, as a nervous sort of young architect, I never really wanted to push the idea to clients, “Hey, have you thought about building out of earth,” or “have you thought about building out of straw?” Because I was terrified of the liability of that, and because they were sort of —particularly straw— it was emerging. So I just kind of hung around people who were interested and [it] needed to be their idea, and then I was, you know, directly on board, but they needed to take on part of the responsibility of it. So, I think that’s—once again goes back to collaboration.
Is that answering your question a bit?
Tessa Forde: That’s good answer. All right, Emina, so you’ve recently produced this BRANZ report, as you mentioned. The report’s about biomaterials for low-carbon built environments. It’s very comprehensive. I recommend it. It’s here, if anyone wants to have a look, and we can pass it around. What are some of your learnings from researching barriers, drivers and enablers for greater uptake of biobased materials?
Emina Petrović: So, I was asked by EBANZ to join their event tomorrow, and they wanted some printed copies, which is why I printed it for the first time properly. And you can, by all means, see the same copy that EBANZ people will be looking at tomorrow. So, we’ll pass it around. The project was really interesting and eye-opening—and the same thing has happened kind of more than once, with the work that we have been doing in this space—you go and put a call for people to be interviewed and you get more responses than you expected.
You know, like for most surveys and interviews, you struggle to find the responses, but for bio-based things, you don’t, because people are passionate in the space, and they’re going to kind of invest themselves into it. And that’s beautiful. But then, as we analyse some of the kinds of barriers and kind of dynamics that are happening in there—the stuff that Min was just now talking about—that multiplicity of actors in the field, that are influencing the same decision, emerges really strongly.
And people thinking that clients actually have more of a say in—and I checked the data—architects are saying that, based on their conversations with the clients. But then, the client and the architect [are] working with what’s available on the market, what’s already kind of approved to be used in the building, or what do we have regulations for, so that’s also feeding into what can and can’t be done.
Multiplicity of factors and systems change
Emina Petrović: So there is this multiplicity of different factors that are really influencing, and it’s not one-size-fits-all. So, my sense that I took from the work that we were doing is that we need to nudge the solution and progress on a multiplicity of levels at the same time.
We need to be talking to builders and upskilling builders to do things differently. We need to be de-risking. That’s one of the things that emerged from the interviews. We need to de-risk experimentation. Currently in New Zealand construction settings doing something slightly different is [a] high level of risk for the builder. So they’re going to say no, or they’re going to charge a significantly larger premium, in order to kind of protect themselves from the risk of the unknown. So we need to find ways of de-risking that.
We need to have more knowledge put into the hands of students and educators and architects, so that we have new generations of people who understand these materials. That’s one of the things that emerged really strongly. We have to have hands-on experiences, because most of us have grown up or are working in spaces that don’t have these materials. So [an] exhibition like this, where we are showcasing these materials, and you can touch and feel and understand them better, [is] really important for people to actually understand how to work with them.
So there is a real multiplicity of levers. We expected that regulations might be playing a really significant role, and maybe they do, but I think we are not quite at the point where regulations are the obstacle. We need to increase the groundswell of momentum and upscaling of— in the terminology, that is talking about transition and upscaling and innovation— we need to increase the niche of innovators and early uptakers before we can continue scaling that up. So we need to build a swell of people like us, and to make it easier to exchange information in groups like this, before that can be taken further and scaled further.
But there is this burning sense of ‘we need this now.’ So, things might happen really quickly, and that’s where working on this multiplicity of levels can be really stimulating (I feel like I’m repeating myself, multiplicity of levels, multiplicity). But I do think it’s kind of like wherever we see an opportunity, we drop it in. And we drop it in. In whatever our kind of niche our work is, we keep thinking and dropping it in, as a way of maximising the potential to do the transition now.
Yeah.
Tessa Forde: Thank you, and Rachel, as you said, you’re currently the Strategic Sustainability Advisor for Te Kāhui Whaihanga. I mean, you mentioned a few of them already, but what are these kind of advocacy strategies that you’re currently deploying for the Institute? You know, do you have kind of recommendations for architects and students and others about the kinds of advocacy roles that they can take within the field?
Rachel MacIntyre: Yeah. I mean, from my point of view, I think advocacy comes in many different forms. Like, I think the immediate thought is that advocacy is about, you know, being in the media every day, and you know, making sure that you're writing submissions for all the consultations that are happening over the last couple of years. And I think at, you know, the Institute, we’re actively increasing our effort to advocate for architects and, you know, we really want to change that narrative about architects being or only designing houses for wealthy people. We are advocating for, you know, these themes that I’m talking about here are part of the advocacy.
But what I’m doing with the sustainability program, in terms of advocacy, I think it’s about providing the tools for our members. So the educational tools, which I’ve talked about here, and upskilling, which you are talking about, Emina. So you know, that would be—if it’s around bio-based materials—upskilling our members to understand those materials, and also have workshops where they’re actually getting their hands dirty to work with those materials, so they can inform their clients about those materials.
We are developing a sustainability strategy currently, and aiming to issue that next year. So that’s a sustainability strategy for the Institute. And I’m a big believer of not reinventing the wheel. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. So, looking to international institutes like the RIBA and the American Institute, they have a 2030 climate challenge Climate Commitment. You know, those ideas of introducing that to the Institute, to set targets, to set reduction targets for our members to aim for, and—yeah, I’m just sort of making a bit of a list here. We also introduced mandatory sustainability criteria into the awards. We did have sustainability criteria previously, but we found that not many people were actually answering those questions. So they are now mandatory, and we are gradually ramping those criteria up, every year. So that’s been a big move for the Institute, which is great to see.
And in terms of answering your questions around, you know, what can students or architects do in terms of advocacy? I think, you know, I think everyone here would probably be one of these people who continually learn throughout their career, and throughout their life. So it’s about that continuous learning process, being open to ideas, and new ideas. And, you know, through that learning process, you can begin to advocate to your clients, or to the people that you are working with.
So, yeah, I think, I think learning, education, is key to advocacy, really. So yeah. If that answers your question.
Crafting materials to connect to place
Tessa Forde: I was going to ask about institutions, but I actually want to go to this sort of less, tangible route for a second. Personally, I’ve been on a journey of also kind of discovering biomaterials and material practices. And I’ve found it’s kind of addictive. Like, you get into it and it’s like you kind of have to just go full force, and you get kind of obsessed with like clay and hemp and soap and glycerol and all these kind of like scientific Latin names for materials.
And then there’s also this kind of incredible power of these materials to both kind of connect you to place, and also to other people, in the process of making them. And I wonder if there’s an opportunity here to kind of reflect on those kinds of feelings or the potential for kind of creating belonging to place, through exploring material culture. And I think I’ll just point to the project on the right, which was a project to kind of rediscover raupo [building] practices in Aotearoa. Carin Wilson provided us those images, and I think it was part of a project at Unitec, a research project, in the early 2000s. And so yeah, maybe Min? If you’d like to start kind of on some...
Min Hall: Oh, I think that’s a good segue, because I think in terms of belonging and building as if you belong, you know, Māori really hold that space. As in, they’ve been doing that for a very long time. And so this work up here was one of the early iterations of Te Hononga, Māori Studio.
And for the last couple of years, the elective that I’ve been teaching, Resource Matters—we’ve collaborated with Māori Studio, and we are working down at Motueka Te Āwhina Marae. And I just sort of—it’s a real joy working in a space where people are so connected to their whenua. And I think this is a little bit of an untapped resource. And a lot of it is, probably, you know, out of fear. I’m a—I’m a colonial child, a product of, and…but once you…it’s actually working. We—we’ve got it happening within our, within our nation. And I think that we should build on that.
And just sort of as a parallel to that—and I might be going off piste here—but I think that we really need to be sort of collaborating, with farmers, with foresters. With the road-making industry. All these industries that have waste materials, or—you know— like, you carve up a piece of countryside to make a road, and often you see the most, you know, piles of the most beautiful clay. And, you know, why aren’t we working with? Why does that just go and get dumped, and [used to] fill in another hole to sort of try and flatten everything? So I think those kind of things, of thinking beyond the world of architecture is pretty important. Um, have I gone off piece?
No. So, I think it’s that thing about— going back to like in vernacular architecture—you know, you didn’t have a separate architect. People built things. They grew things. They dug and moved stuff around. And so I think that if we can find ways of doing that at scale, that’s the key. If we want to, sort of, have impact.
Tessa Forde: Yeah. Rachel, I wonder, just sort of on this note, um, I think it was in 2017 the Te Kāhui Whaihanga signed the Te Kawanata o Rata with Ngā Aho? And I wonder if you could speak to your role in relation to that agreement, and kind of how the Institute sees that, kind of pushing that agreement forward, within the sustainability sector.
Rachel MacIntyre: Yeah, so we’ve got the Te Kawanata, which is basically a partnership agreement between Ngā Aho and Te Kāhui Whaihanga. So, we have Ngā Aho representatives on the board, and I also work with a Kaitiakitanga Advisory Group, and we have a Ngā Aho rep on there as well. So, you know, they’re instrumental in our decision-making process and guiding the way that we work and make decisions.
And, you know, we use…I guess we are using Te Tiriti as a, you know, a foundation for everything that we do. So it is about partnership and collaboration. I think we are still working through how we work together. It’s always going to be a learning process, right? How you work together. But yeah, I think it’s incredibly valuable.
And what I would like to see is that, you know, that partnership can begin to draw out those things that Min was just talking about. You know, that relation to place and relation to whenua. How can we bring that more into architecture? Cause I guess as a architect, generally— I’ll generalise here— you are working on a project for a client. So it’s the client’s land that you are building on. So, potentially you don’t have that direct connection to place. So how is it that, you know, you can draw out that connection to place or to the whenua that you’re designing something for? Yeah.
Min Hall: Can I just chip in?
Rachel MacIntyre: It’s a bit a problem. Yeah, go for it
Min Hall: On that: is that, you know, I think that we really need to remember that the building that we are creating is probably going to last a lot longer than the designer, than the person who’s commissioned it, than the builders who built it. And so, you know, that should be—our first responsibility is actually to taiao, to the environment. And, it’s—it’s very difficult to do that, when you have got clients who don’t care. But I think if we can hold that as a kind of really strong motivation, then we will produce better buildings. Better built environment.
Creating change at scale
Tessa Forde: Yeah. I wonder, I wanted to come back to the word that you used, Emina, which was groundswell. And I think it’s nice that the word ground is in there. And I wonder, you’re starting this biomaterials network, like what are, how can we gather around these ideas? How do we...how do we create that groundswell? I mean, it’s a huge question, but what do you...what do you think?
Emina Petrović: Um…very big question indeed. As we were having this conversation right now, I was thinking, I mean, we are kind of seeing the groundswell. Rachel’s work, you know, the fact that [the] Institute is working in this space, and trying to kind of contribute to stimulating change is part of that groundswell, right? The fact that there are different us that are doing different bits of the work, students that are doing work and students asking us as academics to kind of respond and do more work in this space. These are all kind of elements that are showing that groundswell.
The question is how to scale it. And I don’t have a solution because I don’t think that there is a solution. We know from many theories that are looking into uptake of an innovation, that there is a point when it just becomes normalised, and it’s a bit of an uphill battle to get to that point of it becoming normalised. And we are not there. So it’s about kind of persisting, knowing that it’s a hard part of the work that is being done now.
And then there is a point when it’ll just naturally accelerate. Fundamentally, I think that all of this work is trying to challenge consumerism, and that’s a biggie. I think it’s maybe even bigger than architecture, because architecture has been always there. But how we build and how we think about things that we are consuming and using nowadays—we no longer know where clothes came from, right? The tag might give us the country, but it doesn’t give us all of the work that went into things.
And I think the invisibility of the work that goes into making something makes it so easy to dispose of the thing. The fact that many synthetic materials are so big, because you take crude oil, put it in the factory, and you have a synthetic piece, garment. You have a synthetic building material on the other side, and it’s standardised, industrialised, and made with very little labour. It’s machines doing stuff.
So bio-based materials totally undermine that. And they undermine it because it’s slow and it’s fiddly. If you are doing earth building (and I haven’t done it), but my understanding, based on research, is one lump of soil and another lump of soil are not the same. So, you need to keep working with the difference that you’re going to find even in the same site with the slight variation of the material that you’re kind of working with. You can’t have exactly the same straw, I would expect, on two different years, because it will be slightly different. Might be irrelevant difference, in this case.
So, we need to slow down and look at the particular material that we are working with, which makes us the makers of the materials in a way we are not when we are consuming industrial products. The beauty of that is that making the material and making things is psychologically beneficial. There is art therapy. They’re making therapies, that are given to people, as therapies. They de-stress us. They give a sense of connection and belonging, all by themselves. So, by doing some of these things, we are really kind of subverting some of the dominant paradigms in the world that we are living in: consumerism, buying materials that are ready made, et cetera.
It’s, it’s a big project on that level. Um, yeah.
Tessa Forde: I wonder if anyone from the audience has any questions.
Audience member: So obviously there are people that are thinking about mass producing biomaterials. And we’ve got hempcrete, so there are people that are keen, sort of outside the box, who are trying to make it a bit more mainstream. How does that dialogue sort of fit in with your moving away from a capitalism or consumerism approach? Cause I imagine hempcrete would need to be buying up farms to then build out, or farm a whole lot of hempcrete, or hemp, to be able to produce the hepecrete.
Tessa Forde: So the question is, how do these new material processes to make them mainstream, how do you resist kind of consumerist practices? Is that kind of the question? Or just like, intersect with capitalism?
Audience member: And with your ideology?
Emina Petrović: Yep. Cool. Excellent question because it kind of goes into the bit that I have found working on the data to produce the report, the more shocking bit of information that I have found. And I was thinking, how do I bring this into the conversation so now you have asked me the, you know, the question that brings it in. So, people say it would be fantastic to have biomaterials that are drop-in solutions and they just replace the existing systems. But then, when you look into the theory of how to make change, there is incremental and there is radical change.
Incremental change can become an obstacle to radical change. So, for example, fly ash being put into concrete to decrease the amount of cement that we are using in concrete can be seen as being positive. But then we are now arriving at coal—burning plants—saying, that they have to continue burning coal, because we need fly ash to continue decarbonising concrete. So, so that’s a lock-in that it’s a solution until it’s becomes an obstacle for further progress. So, if we build drop-in solutions, there is a chance that we are going to kind of create some solutions that are amazing solutions in nudging us in the right way. And then later on, we need to have another kind of push to eliminate that solution, that is a temporary solution.
And I don’t have a specific kind of example here. He we have that example of a SIP panel or SIP-like panel with straw. SIPs that are on the market with straw in them have more timber in them, and more treated timber, than you would need to produce a conventional building. So, I’m a bit on the edge. Is that actually progress or is it not? It’s certainly faster to build it. And because we don’t—no longer have combined harvesters that produce straw in small straw bales, you know, now we have those big round ones wrapped in plastic—we can’t actually build straw bale houses without building the straw bales ourselves. So, straw bale houses in that kind of conventional way are not really an option. So the question is: how do we still use straw? And that’s where, you know, something like this is a solution, but it’s a solution that contains other issues within it.
Now, when it comes to hempcrete, no, we are not going to end up in the problem. That one is easy to answer, because currently we are producing hemp for other purposes, and hemp hurd is the inner part of the hemp plant, which tends to be discarded, currently. So, that’s what the buildings would be using. So, for a good while we don’t have a problem, but I have real problems, and I have looked into this and there is a tiny section in the report looking into that.
What happens if we end up building all buildings only out of bio-based materials? Are we going to end up running out of land for growing food? Because there was a point in [the] early two thousands when [the] US started to stimulate uptake of bio-based fuels. People were experimenting with corn. Poor people in Mexico who were, who were eating the cheapest corn in Mexico, ended up starving, because that corn was sold for more money to the US to experiment making bio-based fuel. So suddenly, we had real problems and inequalities that got generated by doing this.
So, I only succeeded to find one study that has looked into that kind of total biomass flow, including what happens with buildings. And it’s a European study, from not long ago, because the world is really starting to look into these sorts of spaces. So they’re producing these reports for the first time. And the solution is not to eat meat, because when you look into the chart of how much land is used for different things, meat growing is using more land than anything else. And plant growing is using tiny little proportion of the land. So even if we all started to eat plant-based food significantly more—I’m not saying don’t eat meat ever, I’m saying eat less, less, less of it—but if we have a big drop there, then we will free land to build material,s on purpose, to actually create other things.
And I got Mike Murray to do an analysis, and it’s published in an ASA paper, that how much land you actually need to build hemp houses versus diets. And the proportion, there was one stagger[ing] proportion that he came up with: that it takes the same amount of land to build eight houses, as to feed something like—I think it was 16 meat-eaters, and to feed something like 30 or more plant-eaters. So we just need a few of those meat heaters to eat less meat, and we can suddenly build all of this. Right?
And then when I talk about this to my students, I say, and the first step is never ever to waste meat. Okay? So first of all, we don’t throw away meat, which I know happens in New Zealand kitchens right now. So first of all, we use every scrap of meat, very intentionally, and we start introducing some without-meat meals as part of our diet. So I have made changes of that nature for myself, but getting my kids to not eat meat is still a very big challenge, because they have been kind of brought up eating meat.
Yeah. So, see it—it kind of opens up another conversation, and it opens up another conversation, of…it’s a big system change that is needed essentially.
Tessa Forde: Well, I think, I mean, the other thing is if you just drop into a system that is fundamentally unsustainable in many ways, it’s kind of just perpetuating this idea of constant growth. And I wonder, maybe Rachel, you could speak to this, cause you talked a little bit about kind of harvesting, and this idea of retrofit. The UN predicts that the world’s built environment is going to double by 2060, which is just like, so disturbing. I don’t know what more to say about that, cause I get kind of freaked out whenever I think about it. But I wonder if you can comment on these kind of ways of just pulling the handbrake a little bit on this growth
Rachel MacIntyre: I mean, I know that there’s movements overseas. There’s the Building Stop Movement in Denmark currently. Basically the government was introducing carbon reduction targets and caps, and the bunch of architects got together and said that those caps weren’t enough. So they basically wrote the Reduction Roadmap. So you have to think of it in the Danish context. The building code is very, very good. It’s a very high level of energy efficiency that they have to meet. So, you know, these carbon targets were coming in, these bunch of architects said, well, the carbon caps that the government are setting are not strong enough.
They’re not low enough. So they basically wrote this Reduction Roadmap, and they got, it’s probably around 600 to 700 industry organisations and bodies [to sign up]. So that included architects, engineers, all the organisations, signed up to this reduction roadmap and said the government needs to be more ambitious in their carbon caps and targets, which was extraordinary. So, this was kind of this beginning of this movement. And now Australia, some architects there have written the Australian Reduction Roadmap, for the Australian context. So this reduction roadmap was the beginning, and now this group of people have got together and started the ‘Building Stop Movement,’ basically, when you translate it from Danish to English.
And a lot of them are saying we have to be very, very selective about what we are building new. So that might be hospitals, it might be schools, you know, the essentials that we need for society. But we need to move towards retrofit and adaptive reuse. And, you know, they’re doing all these studies to understand, how could you—you know, for a typical Danish house is quite large—and you could look at dividing that house into two, three, or four units or dwellings, and reusing the existing building stock to create more dwellings rather than building new. So it’s a really interesting one to follow. I can send a link out to people if you want.
So I think those kinds of movements are really, really important because they’re pushing the agenda that we need to be looking at retrofit, adaptive reuse, rather than only focusing on building new. And, you know, we can use bio-based materials in retrofit as well. I don’t know if that answers the question, but I think...I guess at the moment we are in this, you know, it’s a housing emergency crisis everywhere around the world, and we have a a really bad issue around that in New Zealand. So I think the focus is really on building new, but what’s the opportunity with retrofit in New Zealand, if we actually studied that and saw what is the potential in the existing building stock? Yeah.
Creative pairing: How to Loiter in a Turf War
The book I’ve chosen to go with this recording is How To Loiter in a Turf War. It’s by Ngāpuhi and Sāmoan writer, artist and musician Jessica Hansell, aka Coco Solid. And I chose it because it jumps between these large-scale systems like capitalism, settler colonialism, and how this lands in their everyday expression or reality. So, gentrification and watching shops or bus routes or communities and cultural expression disappear in the name of “progress”. And it’s about finding alternatives to this progress or growth and how important it is to do that as a collective.
The poetry included in this is fantastic, but the part I really enjoyed were the writings of a fictional academic Piopi Ruta-Chris. as always,if you head to this episode’s Substack page, you’ll find links to this book, as well as people, organisations, and projects that we’ve mentioned.
Finding people to support you (change is hard)
Tessa Forde: I wanted to ask Min, maybe one of the things that kind of gives me hope is that there’s people like all of us in this room who are interested in these things and are kind of part of this groundswell, but also the incredible work that EBANZ did to get the Earth Building Standard into legislation. And I just wonder, maybe, hopefully, it’s a kind of like inspirational note to end on, that like, it is possible to kind of get these practices into law effectively. Maybe you could comment on that kind of process and…?
Min Hall: Well, it is possible, but it nearly killed a few people. And still some of the Earth Building Standards are not cited as ways of satisfying some of the clauses in the building code, but it’s there. And we managed to sneak in straw and, and light earth as well, as appendices. So, you know, it’s there in an official document.
I honestly don’t think it’s tenable for that process to happen again. I mean, it only managed to get through because of people like Graham North, Thijs Drupsteen, Richard Walker, who had been there from the beginning. I mean, I was as well, but I did not put in nearly as much work as those guys. And I just think that, you know, you can’t really do that [again]. There has to be some other way of doing it. I kind of—it made me lose faith in the, the building regulations system, really.
So ...
Audience member: Why was that?
Min Hall: They—the MBIE were—were actually obstructive. Yeah. And they—what happened is that they pretty well wiped out the New Zealand Standards Organisation that sits within it. And I think that Standards Organisation consists of about three people, now. So before, you had people who were absolutely, that was—so experienced in writing standards. That was great.
So now it’s really the industries that can pay for it: concrete, timber, steel. They have the resources to finance something like this and to be paying people. But the Earth Building Standards is entirely voluntary. You know, we had some building inspectors; they would’ve been paid. I mean, I got paid for some of my time, because I was the Unitec rep. It’s, it’s…it’s not doable. So there has to be another way. Yep.
[inaudible]
No, no. You just—you have to find good ways of going for alternative solutions.
Emina Petrović: Um, May I interject? Uh, I mean, we got that in the report and interviews, that we can’t have the same organisation doing that again, because it was such a big tool, I totally get it. But maybe we need different generations? So that was one generation, one group of people, and I don’t think that that group of people should be put through it again, but maybe there is another group of people, that is ready to do another battle. You know, like we know that it’s going to be an uphill battle, but you know, like that’s how we nudge the system.
We take one little revolution at a time rather than the big overall revolution. And this standard is really important and really valuable, and it has opened so many doors within New Zealand to do things differently. So maybe we need more of them and kind of gradually working through it. So that’s an invitation for whoever has the right level of passion, rather than, you know, discouragement. Yes, it’s going to be a lot of work, but there is a lot of interest, and therefore there will be help and the work will be shared. You know? I think.
Rachel MacIntyre: Yeah, I—you know, I acknowledge the 20 years of work that EBANZ put into this. It was huge, and it has taken its toll, so it’s incredibly admirable, the work that they’ve done. For me, I’ll just say it again—it’s about education. You know, educating MBIE, and saying if we want a low-carbon built environment, we need these materials. And you can’t, you know, you can’t differentiate between putting carbon targets in and making reductions, and not acknowledging biomaterials in the economy. It’s...you can’t—you know, for me—you can’t differentiate between the two.
And MBIE, I know that currently, they were very active in the embodied carbon space, and you know, they’ve got methodologies, they’ve got everything like that. There was the Building for Climate Change program under the previous government that has now been rolled back, withdrawn. We don’t have a vision. We don’t have a way forward. There is no legislation currently. We’re kind of in this limbo as an industry, around carbon. So for me it’s about having that legislation in place, having a top-down way forward.
But then it’s also about the groundswell from the bottom. And that’s what we can all do. We can educate, we can talk, we can advocate, to people within the industry and build that movement. I believe we can. Yeah, and I think in New Zealand, we’re privileged, in a way, that we have two degrees of separation, because we talk to someone and they know someone, they know your cousin, they know your uncle.
And in that way, you can build a movement quite quickly. And I think we have that advantage. And just from my experience in Denmark, what I said before, the Danes’ are—their superpower is collaboration. Helle can back me up on that one—and I think New Zealanders are, as well. So if you can combine those two, and also Indigenous, intergenerational ways of thinking; if you can combine all those things into a beautiful combination, you know, we can move mountains.
So that’s what I believe today. Maybe tomorrow it might be different, cause things change, right? Yeah.
Frances Joseph: And Rachel, I also think there’s— particularly with harakeke—huge potential with local Māori economy, where you get those sort of interesting circles where harakeke stops runoff from farms going into waterways. So you start to build these really interesting sort of cycles; material cycles. And I think connecting with some of those organisations also then starts to—I mean they’re already lobbying government and getting projects and things underway. So that might also be another —sort of, I suppose, unlooked for supporters—who more collaboration would be really helpful .
Emina Petrović: And there is a new Bioeconomy Research Institute or whatever that the government has formed. So, maybe we can’t talk about it in the same kind of terminology, but talking about it from the bioeconomy perspective in increasing efficiency, because a lot of bio-based materials are using waste from another cycle. So, sometimes it is about changing the wording that we are using to argue similar points to what we would be arguing differently, in a different kind of political climate. But it’s still about persisting with the effort. I do feel like we are in that groundswell, rather than necessarily too much support top down. But there are little elements of support top-down. It’s better than it was. There’s more awareness than 20 years ago, for sure.
Tessa Forde: Yeah. Find the avenues that give you hope, and stay on them with other people. And invite other people into them with you. Alright, well, thank you very much, everyone, and thank you for coming. I think it’s a really important conversation, and it’s really nice to be in a space, kind of, full of makers and things made. Yeah. Kia ora tātou. Stay in touch, and hopefully we can start the groundswell…or continue it.
A huge thank you to our guests today: Rachel MacIntyre, Emina Petrović, and Min Hall. Thanks to Tessa Forde for guiding that conversation, and Frances Joseph, who contributed at the end there. From all of us at Dangerous Architecture and Material Acts, myself, Tessa Forde, Nick Sargent, Michael McCabe, and Francis Joseph: ngā mihi nui, thank you for spending the last hour with us.
Tīhei mauri ora.
