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Hello and welcome to Design Principles podcast episode four. Today we'll be talking densification with a very special guest, Ben. Do you want to introduce?
Ben Sutherland:Guy Marriage. Yes, welcome, guy, welcome to the pod. So, guy, for those of you out there who don't know Guy, he has spent about four years for fostering partners over in the UK one of the largest firms probably in the world Seven, five, sorry seven years at Studio Pacific, one of the bigger ones in Wellington. He's been a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington for over 20 years, founding partner of First Light Studio and an absolute prolific writer and author of numerous books, such as Tall, the Design and Construction of High Rise Architecture, modern Apartment Design a guideline to designing of modern apartment buildings. And medium, which is basically a technical design guide for creating better medium density in New Zealand, and the recent one which is only released last week, sustainability and Top City of Building Materials, which is amazing.
Ben Sutherland:Just quickly welcome to the pod Guy.
Sam Brown:Just quickly, Guy, you've got a book called Tall and a book called Medium. What's the next step? Are you going low or small?
Guy Marriage:No well, somebody said to me that I should be one on small, but look, I'm anything but small, so I'd say they're going to be large or extra large.
Ben Sutherland:Yeah Well, speaking of extra large, have you heard that foster partners are designing a two kilometer high skyscraper in Saudi Arabia?
Guy Marriage:I did, yeah, and it just looks like a big rectangle. So it hasn't even got any pointy bits, it's just like very tall. But it is almost at the edge of insanity because I know that when I was doing some study on the current tallest building, which is the Burj Khalifa, they actually have to do some checks to make sure that it wasn't going to cause damage to the Earth's crust beneath it.
Gerard Dombroski:So they were worried that such a concentrated low in one spot.
Guy Marriage:They thought it might set off earthquakes and things. And it actually did set off some small earthquakes as there was localized, fractured.
Ben Sutherland:So yeah that's it. That is mind blowing. To put things into perspective two kilometers. The Skytower, the Auckland Skytower, is 328 meters high and that's like at the very peak. So this tower is. Was that six or seven times the size of the Auckland Skytower? So imagine that.
Guy Marriage:A lot of load in that.
Gerard Dombroski:That's the lift commute time. Yeah, that's the thing that's densification yeah you probably don't on something like that.
Guy Marriage:You probably don't even want to come down from the building. You wouldn't commute to it to go up it to work. You'd probably just live in the building all the time and travel up and down, because it'd be a half hour commute up some of the escalator banks possibly to get to the floor you want to go to. So it's quite a nice high focus, doesn't it yeah?
Ben Sutherland:Yeah, imagine doing the feasibility study for something like that. You've got okay. The top 100 floors are going to be $330 million. No, probably more like $100 million apartments There'd be no view.
Sam Brown:You'd be so high, you'd just be above the clouds the whole time.
Guy Marriage:Yeah, that's awesome, though that's a view, so there may not be much cloud but a lot of the time, you would have no effective view. You'll just see the curvature.
Sam Brown:Yeah, desert haze yeah.
Guy Marriage:So moving oblivion with a floating skyscope, that's what unlimited money can do for you, which I suspect is not a problem that either I nor any of your clients have got a problem with too much money.
Sam Brown:No, unfortunately yeah that's good.
Ben Sutherland:All right, let's get into densification. I guess so. Does anyone want to give us a quick overview of you know densification? Maybe a quick explanation what urban densification means and why it's particularly relevant to our cities?
Sam Brown:Guys, be expert. Do you want to take us away?
Guy Marriage:Well, yeah, sure, I mean. The thing is, as you probably know, we all live in a very undense country. New Zealand's actually quite urbanized. We've got more proportion of our society lives in urban situations than most countries, so we're something like 80% urbanized. China is only just over 50% urbanized. So we think of lots of people living in China and the big cities, which they do, but there's still a hell of a lot more that live out in the country. Our country is largely given over to sheep and weeds and cattle.
Guy Marriage:You know there's nothing much apart from birds and trees that live in our country side and all of us, as you probably know, all of the small towns are going bust and falling away because we just don't have an economy that supports that sort of network of small towns. So we're a very urban country but all that aside, we're actually a very sparse country. If you look at the whole country, we've got really low population densities. So you can't actually look at it from a country point of view or from a city point of view. To get a real feel for density you need to look at it at a neighborhood point of view. So it comes down to and we have some areas of New Zealand are sort of normal neighborhood densities for, compared to other parts of the world, others are obviously lower, but there are some parts of some of our big cities which are getting up there, so getting to be more reasonable densities. But even our cities you know technically because you know if you look at Wellington, our density is really low, even though we know that there's quite a bit of building. I'm looking out the window, several ugly apartment buildings around me but the density is still quite reasonable because we've got so much green as well. So when they're counting the city limits they're counting all the green belts and the outer town belt and all those sorts of things. So brings statistically. So you can say anything with statistics.
Guy Marriage:But what I'm trying to I guess what I've been pushing is that New Zealand gets up from its quarter acre mentality. So one house per quarter acre, which gives you, gives you a density of about 10 houses per hectare to 10 dwelling units per hectare, which is statistically really low. So what we should be aiming for is probably something in the 150 to 200 to 300 dwelling units per hectare. And there are cities overseas where their figures are in the thousands. So places like Hong Kong would be sort of 3000 or higher, and in parts of the world there's some really density located in the multiple thousands per hectare, so where they have many, many people, household units, living together. So we need to get more used to living closer together, but it still doesn't mean that we're going to be crowded by any means.
Sam Brown:They're giving up with a quarter acre dream things, probably one of the biggest clinch points when you think, guy, I mean, where's Kiwi still? Hold on to that? And actually before you jumped on the conversation, we were talking about it with Ben and he was saying that a lot of the developers that he works with works with considering a lot of the purchases as well, considering resale and with that sort of seeing medium density. Is that stepping stone, that middle ground, that one or two year ownership before they move on to that quarter acre dream. So that still seems to be that end goal for a lot of New Zealanders.
Guy Marriage:Yeah, and I'm not really sure why, because most people around the world don't have a quarter of an acre. It's a very unusual sort of thing to have and actually it's a pain in the neck. I'm not sure how many of you guys live in a place where you have to mow the lawns. Tell you what I hate. I just play some of the children I haven't yet trained them to mow the lawns, because they're actually toddlers.
Sam Brown:It's the admin right. So all the maintenance, yeah, you just don't have the time.
Guy Marriage:There's a lot of maintenance and that's the great thing with my apartment that I've had for the last 20 years Haven't done an ounce of maintenance on the outside of it. Don't have to. You know, it's weatherproof, it's it doesn't leak, has no maintenance. I don't need to repaint it. I just live there and that's fine. If I want to go away for the weekend, I shut the door, that's it. You know, don't need to lock anything up, turn anything off, just. It's a very simple lifestyle and I think gradually, people are realizing that they too can have a simpler lifestyle and less spending every weekend at home mowing the lawns, doing the, mowing the hedges, doing the verge on the, on the berm at the front, all those sorts of things.
Ben Sutherland:Yeah, I'm, I'm definitely on the fence with with this because I 100% agree with you. Like most of the time, at convenience wise, it's so much easier just to have, you know, even just a townhouse situation where it's something that you can just close the door and walk away. But at the same time, growing up on a farm, I'm just like, oh, wouldn't it be good to have some space for some backyard cricket and some massive vegetable gardens? We can be self sustainable and, I don't know, live the Kiwi dream, I guess.
Guy Marriage:The backyard cricket? Is that because you have children or you want to have children?
Ben Sutherland:That's just because you know summertime. Yeah, that's true. I've got friends though I have got friends, you can invite them round for a barbecue. Barbecue is such a huge part of the Kiwi culture.
Guy Marriage:I have a barbecue on my back.
Ben Sutherland:I have a barbecue there.
Sam Brown:That's an interesting point you make though, ben, because I think what you're kind of referring to is that the social aspect of the quarter acre house, whether that be with neighbors, friends or your own family do you reckon that traditionally medium density or even high density apartment living in New Zealand hasn't had that amenity associated with it, and so people sort of have created this negative view of those sort of developments?
Ben Sutherland:Yeah, that's the trick really is how to bring those medium, those quarter acre features into a high density environment. And maybe we don't need them, maybe not every place needs them, but I'd say especially for more of a medium density design. A lot of people are after the same features, I guess, but at a smaller scale.
Guy Marriage:Yeah, I mean I think that what New Zealand seems to have leapt into. We've gone from having quarter of an acre of land and a house on it and then we've said, okay, and now we can go into tiny, tiny apartments and there's a lot in between. We don't have to go from that to that. There's all this stuff in here and those are the options. I mean, one of the first sort of apartment buildings that went up in Wellington in recent times in about 2000, I think was what's known as the Galleria on Tori, I think, designed by Arkhouse Architects, and that was marketed. I remember at the time they marketed it as something like have your quarter acre section in the city and because they had big front yards and big I don't know if they had backyards, but they almost had like a picket fence up the front, so it gave the impression of being suburbia in the city two stories up. I'll leave you to figure out whether you think that was a good idea or not.
Sam Brown:Anyone seen this building? It's interesting, to say the least.
Guy Marriage:Yeah, but then I look out the window what I've got out the window which are also designed by Arkhouse. A lot of the apartment buildings in Wellington have been designed by this one firm, but they've gone for what could euphemistically be called the Asian student market. In other words, there's a mentality that perhaps students, and perhaps especially students from overseas that may not know about the quarter acre, lusting that they may be amenable to accepting a smaller living space, and to me that's a problem. It does a disservice to our immigrant families, it does a disservice to students. The only thing it does do is that it produces a very small apartment in theory for not much money, but actually they're paying really high rents, I think proportionately for the square meter of space they've got. And again I would say there's a lot of space in the middle in which we could explore.
Ben Sutherland:Yeah, that whole space in the middle, that medium density. I guess would it be fair to say that it's kind of crazy, but I guess medium density is relatively new to New Zealand.
Guy Marriage:Absolutely totally new. There's been a couple of apartments, apartment buildings both in Wellington and Auckland which were built about 1920 or so. So there's Courtville in Auckland, which is very well designed, very desirable even now. It was desirable 100 years ago, still desirable now Mayfair apartments in Parnell and down here in Wellington there's a couple, but not very many, of apartment buildings that have been well designed, that are sought after.
Guy Marriage:But then the attitude was from a lot of people in, I guess, in officialdom but also just generally the people is that they didn't want to have apartments because apartments were bad. And I go into that in this book here on modern apartment design. So there's a chapter in here by Amina Petrovich which comes from her thesis that she did, which was all about the history of the apartment building, and so there's a lot of discussion as to whether apartments are a good thing or a bad thing. I mean, they originated in Italy and France and what they had in those days they were designed around multi-family use, so one family would live in a building and so you'd have a whole lot of rooms and people would live in different rooms on different floors. And it's interesting how we're now coming back to that in a way, and a lot of people are saying we need to have multi-generational living and that's what was designed and intended a couple of hundred or 500 years ago.
Sam Brown:We've been talking about apartments. It would just be interesting for listeners, by differentiating what an apartment is versus what we're thinking or what we're referencing as medium density. Is there an easy particularly for the layperson is there sort of like an easy metric that we can refer to?
Guy Marriage:Yeah. So brands did a whole lot of research into this and in the end they said look, what they found out is that of the different government departments, each government department had their own definition of what medium density was. So some of them were about area, some were about height, some of them were about the number of units in a building etc. So what they said is medium density is anything any multi-unit dwelling up to six stories. And they said that's medium density. But so that includes three categories. So one category is one to two story townhouses, the next category is two to three story townhouses and the next category is sort of three to six stories in apartments. So they're sort of within that. But so all of those in theory are medium density.
Guy Marriage:It's only when you really start to get to people living vertically above each other that you get more density. That really happens. So the first one, where you just have townhouses, it just means you're missing out the side yards. You might still have a little bit of backyard or front yard, so it pushes up the density a little bit. It might double the density from what you had, might get up to 30 drilling units per hectare, but then if you go to apartment buildings. You can really start to get up there. So my apartment building that I live in is about, I think about 150 drilling units per hectare.
Sam Brown:Which is what you were saying, is sort of the optimum number that we need to try and.
Guy Marriage:Yeah, of course, I designed the perfect apartment building which I live in.
Gerard Dombroski:Naturally.
Ben Sutherland:Going back to that change in medium density is sort of becoming more of a thing now. Why is that the case? Is it sort of like an environmental thing? Is it more of like a housing affordability thing or a community thing? What is that shift that is kind of swaying it more to medium density or high densification now than in the past.
Guy Marriage:I think a big part of it is the price of land.
Guy Marriage:So if you look back in the 1950s and 60s, then land was really cheap when people came back from the war, from fighting over there. And land was cheap in the 50s so you could buy a section for I think trying to remember what my parents paid, but it was something like 50 pounds or something ridiculous like that and then build a house for 300 pounds on the piece of land. But you know, so you gave that phenomenon of the really cheap land. Now that also meant, obviously, that somebody was doing the developing of the land, so putting in the infrastructure systems, the roads, the pipes and things, and on those days you just you'd have a developer, I think, divide up the land and put that in, and then the council would come along and put in the infrastructure.
Guy Marriage:Now, as we all know, our infrastructure has reached the end of its life in many cities, especially in Wellington, and so there's a huge bill involved in redoing the infrastructure in all of these places and nobody wants to pay for the infrastructure anymore. That's what when you develop something. That's what your development fee goes to Contribution fees yeah nobody wants to do that.
Guy Marriage:But so now, typically if we have a site, then the site might cost half the total cost, instead of just being a tenth of the cost of the house. It might cost half. So that means because the land cost is so much, you need to use less land. So we're compacting down, and also because as cities grow they get further and further out. So you know, and the outer reaches where people are trying to build way out here on the perimeter, it means there's a long way to travel in and out and all the water and sewage needs to go in and out. So there's a huge amount of infrastructure. So by building things more compact, we actually have a better running system.
Guy Marriage:But the problem that we have at the moment is we're starting to densify on the outer edge of the cities. So, for instance, in Wellington there's not that much densification happening in the inner city, but there's a huge amount happening in Upper Hut, which is not really what the densification did happen, Because you're still going to jump in their cars. There might have many more people living out there. There's not enough public transport, so they're going to jump in their cars and drive into town to try and find a park here where there are no parks, so when you're talking about yeah.
Ben Sutherland:I've done that drive.
Sam Brown:It's fun so when you're talking about infrastructure upgrades, we're not just talking about the well documented issues with pipes, particularly in Wellington, but we're talking transport, we're talking green spaces, we're talking like amenity schools, all that sort of thing as well.
Guy Marriage:Absolutely. Yeah, it doesn't cost that much more to double the size of a school because you can just add in more prefabs, but to produce a whole new school and then build up the cost of that, it's proportionally. It costs a lot more to do that. But of course they'll be doing that on green space land which is very cheap. So they'll be building a school miles from anywhere perhaps, you know, or on the edge of town where the land is cheap and where the kids can run around.
Guy Marriage:I mean, interestingly, when I lived in London sorry, I'm going to probably huck on about that quite a lot, but when I lived in London, lived in Central Soho, and there was a school near me and the next to the entrance was between the local church and Anne's and the local brothel owned by the Porn King, and there's a doorway in between which said it's an Anne's school. So this doorway, just the standard sort of 900 wide doorways where all the kids went in to play inside the school. And if they had a playground I think it might have been up on the roof, but they had a fence off but possibly on the roof where they could play handball and stuff like that. So you know, there's not enough room right in the middle of the city to do big things like schools.
Gerard Dombroski:Yeah, that's crazy. You get quite a nice, interesting city. Was that overlapping of history and yeah, I love it.
Guy Marriage:I mean a lot of people would say you know you can't bring your your children up in an urban situation and that's complete rubbish. You know there were generations and generations of kids who were really good, well sorted kids, very street wise. Obviously you know they knew who the hookers were and who the bad guys were and who the policemen were, and they, you know you can't pull the wool over the eyes of a Londoner, you know because they've grown up with this sort of stuff. So there's a definite advantage to being street wise and being brought up in that sort of area. But the one thing they didn't have was room to run around on a green field outside and kick a ball. So none of them are going to become footballers or play rugby, but that's not the most important thing in the world.
Gerard Dombroski:Absolutely, I guess it's quite there's, with the whole densification thing. There is that huge scale of city and out of town, like the one to two dwelling to three to six, right up to apartment, like it's such a huge conversation. Yeah, I guess appropriate approaches in particular parts of town.
Guy Marriage:Yeah, it is a big conversation and I think that I think that we we have a lot of people talking in it who don't necessarily know what they're talking about and they don't live the talk. So I would say that probably most people who are designing multi unit housings in New Zealand they're probably not living in multi unit housing, so they don't actually they're not really standing up to what they are saying. If you're designing something for somebody, you should design something and be happy to live in it yourself. So the apartment building that I worked on, that I live in, we designed 29 apartments which were all really nice to live in, and so there's a range of different sizes of them, and it's been a very popular building ever since it was made because of that, as opposed to the ones nearby which have got really small, ugly, awkward, uncomfortable apartments in some cases, and so they're not as not as popular. They may be popular because they're cheap, but they're cheap because they're tiny.
Sam Brown:So it's interesting that. It's interesting that point you made there, guy, about designing something that you'd be happy to live in yourself. I think that's almost like the basic basic course for any designer, right? Like why would you design something, regardless of what a client's brief is, that you're not happy with at the end of the day?
Guy Marriage:Yeah, well, that's what I think.
Ben Sutherland:Yeah, for money.
Guy Marriage:unfortunately, but also there's a sort of perception in perhaps in New Zealand that multi unit, medium density housing is is only suitable for poor people, or only suitable for poor people, or only suitable for squashing students in, or only suitable for people that don't deserve to have better. And again, I think that that's wrong because, again, if you look at the work being done overseas, you know most people in London, nearly all people in London possibly, live in medium density, multi unit housing and the most expensive, most expensive houses are all around Kensington and things, and there's a huge amount in Kensington where you know the five stories high I mean, I lived in there for a while as well and so there's 10 or 10, perhaps 10 different households in the one building which is only five meters wide or six meters wide, and so you've got a whole lot of people living in this one building and those are the most expensive dwellings in London, apart from the, obviously, the palaces and things like that for the ultra rich.
Ben Sutherland:That's really interesting. So, in your opinion, what does make good medium density architecture? Is it just like you know about the design, the layout, the functionality? Or, yeah, what is it? What's the crux of it?
Guy Marriage:I think there's more to it than that. So I think that you've got to have something that's amenable, got to have something that really works for people, and you have to have something that is generous and not mean spirited, but at the same time, you need to have something which is built well in terms of the standards that it's built to. So one of the most important things that you can have is to make sure that a building is soundproof, because what you do not want to hear is your neighbors.
Ben Sutherland:You don't want to hear them above you walking around.
Guy Marriage:You don't want to hear them next door to you farting. You don't want to hear them below you with their base speakers you know playing some music at two in the morning. You don't want to hear your neighbors at all. You might like your neighbors, you never want to hear from your neighbors at all.
Ben Sutherland:We'll see them, I guess. So I guess privacy is a huge one as well, isn't it?
Guy Marriage:Privacy is a huge one, and the other one that goes with that, of course, is fireproof. You need to have some really good inter-tenancy walls to withstand sound and fire, but also inter-tenancy floors to withstand sound and fire, so those are really important basics. So I love my apartment because I never hear anybody, except for one person, which we might talk about later.
Ben Sutherland:And the gigantic construction site across the road.
Guy Marriage:Oh, there is that yes.
Sam Brown:We covered this often conversation a couple of podcasts ago about the group home builds and what we challenge there is whether the actual building regulatory framework New Zealand building regulatory frameworks good enough to raise the quality of that sort of group home or that entry level housing area You're talking about. You know two aspects here, guy fire and acoustics. Do you think that the building code is sufficient in addressing those or is there something that we need to consider a little bit more there?
Guy Marriage:We certainly need to consider it more. I mean, one of the things that you have to remember is that the building code sets out the very minimum that you're allowed to build to. So when people develop a say, you know, we've built this to the building code, it's like your big bloody deal, mate, you know, if you don't build it to the building code, you should be in jail, yeah. So when you build it to the building code, that should be the minimum standard that you're aiming for. So that's what we tried to do. In this book, medium, which is all about and it's got the central pages which are colored blue you can see a whole bunch of different solutions and one of the things we note there is the as much as we could, where the manufacturers gave us the information was what is the fire rating and what is the acoustic rating of your system. So you know we get some systems might just improve two decibels on what's in the code, or they might improve 10 decibels on what's in the code. If they improved 25 decibels, then there's a vast amount of improvement over the standard. And you know, one of my first jobs I did when I was back in New Zealand was a project where we were, or I was just somebody else had designed it. I was just running it on site.
Guy Marriage:But the afterwards one of the people involved one of the ladies. She rang us up and she said I think my apartment is haunted. Well, like what do you mean? Well, I can hear footsteps in my apartment when there's nobody in my apartment. And she freaked out one night when she thought that her boyfriend was coming home. She could hear the lock in the door opened up. She had footsteps down the kitchen and then going to come around into the bedroom and she looked and there was nobody there. And of course it was her neighbor, because the noise was traveling straight under the wall, because they had to score the bottom of the wall and it was concrete so that all the sounds were telegraphic through, and so she could hear everything in the neighboring apartment as clearly as she could in her own apartment.
Guy Marriage:It wasn't actually haunted, but it was beveled by really bad construction, sadly, which I was too late to the party to do anything about. But so you know, I love the fact that in my apartment I can't hear where my neighbors come or go. I do have this one curious quirk, though, that for a while I had a neighbor who was the second trombonist in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, which is a fantastic thing, of course. Michael, hello Michael, if you ever see this. Michael did have a habit after an NZSO concert, you'd come home and have a few friends around and then you play on the trombone and that comes through the wall at two in the morning, clearly.
Sam Brown:I figured trombone sounds probably not something that we designed to that regularly.
Guy Marriage:You could hear it clear as a bell and you know I could yell at the top of my voice. Shut up, of course he couldn't hear me.
Ben Sutherland:I heard you, he just didn't care.
Sam Brown:There's kind of two points that you've touched on, guy. I just want to just kind of return to them. One, it's that building to the minimum standard thing, and then the other thing was like pushing this medium density housing to the out of fringes of cities and not putting it in the center. Do you think that has an impact or do you think that's influencing that public perception that you mentioned about medium density being for that lower socio economic group?
Guy Marriage:Well, yeah, it probably does. I mean it's. It's interesting because you know there are in Wellington, and certainly in Auckland as well, there are some rich people that live in medium density housing and down a winyard quarter in Auckland there's a lot of medium density housing going up there, some of it quite nice. In Wellington there's a lot of medium density stuff which is happening in places, perhaps along the waterfront, but all the stuff back from the waterfront is perceived as being not as nice and it doesn't have the view or the sunshine and things, and so therefore, if it's not as nice, there seems to be this attitude that therefore it can be as shit as you want, and that's where I disagree. It should be good quality, good should be the basic quality, and then we go from good to better to excellent, but we should never go less than good. There's no point building anything which is not good.
Sam Brown:How do you get this, you know, these thoughts or this approach in front of developers? Because we as architects obviously can provide. You know, our desire is to provide the best that we possibly can in the built environment, but often we're constrained or confined by what our brief is and what our clients' pockets, our deeper clients' pockets are and things like that. I mean, how do we change that sort of client level, that top tier developer level, so that filters down to, you know, ultimately the end user?
Guy Marriage:Yeah. So that's one thing that's sort of interesting in Britain, because a lot of the housing over there is built as public housing, so they call it, I guess, council housing, which it would have been, and there are both some terrible examples of that, but also some quite good examples of that. But what they're all working to is a common space standard. So this was done from a 1961 report called, which is known as the Park Morris Report, which you may have read, I'm not sure, also known from a book, something like Our Lives, our Homes or something. But it was written and he said look, these are the minimum standards, size standards, this is how big the smallest living room should be, this is how big the smallest bedroom should be, this is how big the kitchen needs to be and all this sort of thing. So they set out these minimum standards and that's what the British worked to.
Guy Marriage:Ironically, the British system is the smallest, the smallest sizes in Europe. So most European countries have got bigger sizes. New Zealand doesn't have any sizes at all. So we've sort of said make it up, go for your life, I don't care what you build. So it's permissible to build some really small, shitty buildings here in New Zealand which we're not allowed to build in other cities, in other countries. So in America there's no rules as well.
Guy Marriage:You can build what you like in America, but in New Zealand we've said, yeah, we don't mind what you build, which means that you do get some builds which have got apartments which are less than the legal minimum.
Guy Marriage:So they've got through it by being clever or being stupid. But so you have these apartments which are 20 square meters, which should be banned in New Zealand, and yet by some clever jiggery, pokery with the front door key, you can say it's all part of a dual key apartment and that people can live there. And actually it's really horrible. Their apartments are about the size of this room that I'm in, which, as you can see, is a little crown full of stuff, and if you imagine somebody's living in that apartment the entire day for the rest of their lives, which includes a kitchen and a toilet and things like that, it gets very, very crowned and there's just no need for that. The government needs to have balls and say, no, this is the minimum, and we mean that's the minimum. You need to be building this size or bigger, and if developers are faced with that, then they will build to those sizes or bigger. But if developers are allowed to build smaller, they will build smaller because they know that they can sell it, because people are desperate.
Gerard Dombroski:Yeah, there's certainly some good developers that work hard to have a nice outcome, but what?
Ben Sutherland:are you?
Gerard Dombroski:talking about.
Guy Marriage:Can you name any good developers?
Gerard Dombroski:I think, all right, we'll run through some good options. I live in the Peter Bevin on Tinnacore Thorne News. That's fantastic, beautiful, yeah, absolutely amazing, like it's got density, but then it's an intriguing set of spaces and you kind of wind through it like sort of like a little courtyard streetscape-y. There's little pockets of interest where people could hang out.
Guy Marriage:You're a very lucky man that you can live there. It's great, it's a great development there.
Gerard Dombroski:It's very cold in winter. Our particular one doesn't get a huge amount of sun and we're up against that hill, so yeah, but the development itself is amazing. And then I think Jill Parsons on Pyrrhe Street, I think, is a beautiful example, so must have had a pretty awesome developer to pull that off. I think that's an amazing example of densification and like maintaining the integrity, I think, of the character.
Guy Marriage:Yeah, absolutely, and I mean that's an interesting one. You probably know about it, but the Geds building in Pyrrhe Street, known as what's it known as the Zed, I can't remember it. It'll come, sam's going to Google it and find out what it is. But that was an interesting one because there was one house on a Cotoraker section there, or possibly even smaller, and they said that they wanted to redevelop it and put eight units there and the council said you can't put eight units. That's shocking. And Victoria Residents Association said no way, that'll be awful, be awful. And Gerald Parsonson persevered. He was doing it for the clients whose name was. Can you tell us?
Sam Brown:Zavos, zavos pardon me, zavos Corner is the name of the development.
Guy Marriage:Yeah, so Zavos, referencing the Greeks and the clients with Greek. I can't remember if their surname was Zavos or not, but yeah, so they persevered and in the end they got permission to build eight units on that site and an underground carpark, and it is by far the best development in Wellington. It's fantastic.
Guy Marriage:And now the council takes all their overseas visitors there and to show it off and say look, how several our Wellington architects are. They're the goods on like this. What they don't mention is that they fought tooth and aliens for years. So yeah, it's ironic.
Gerard Dombroski:I think Park Muse as well.
Guy Marriage:Yeah, Park Muse by Roger Walker.
Gerard Dombroski:Brilliant project.
Guy Marriage:It is yeah.
Gerard Dombroski:And then F Fields, one at the top of up past the embassy or Sat Street.
Ben Sutherland:Oh yeah, Madri.
Gerard Dombroski:Banks. Oh yeah, yeah, madri Banks. So there's definitely like awesome examples. Something that really frustrates me about the sort of newer multi unit stuff is the copy paste, and I think you lose that intrigue of spaces and like ownership of space, so like you've got minus.
Gerard Dombroski:The one was the add some more quirks in there and yeah, I think, yeah, we don't build in New Zealand everything in a factory, so, like the thought of I will build all the same to make life easier, probably makes the drawing side and predictability of what the labor is a building easier. But I think in the grand scheme of things, man, a little bit of variation would be a lot better.
Guy Marriage:It's been both things in a factory, doesn't it?
Sam Brown:No, you can use it.
Gerard Dombroski:I built more things in a factory.
Ben Sutherland:I just want to jump in there for us to get in, gerard, because I kind of see both sides. Basically, from my understanding, it's more around like resource consent is the reason that makes pushes people to build replications of the same thing, as opposed to designing something more like. What was it called?
Sam Brown:Zalos Corner.
Ben Sutherland:Yeah, and the reason is because you know, as soon as you get sort of shared spaces or shared roof or anything that overlaps, you start to need a body corp, and developers are just trying to avoid body corps at all costs, because obviously the end user doesn't really want a body corp if they don't need to. So the resource consent doesn't really fit that mold quite well, and so it kind of stares you into one direction, unfortunately, from my opinion.
Gerard Dombroski:Does that just mean you have to have a clean roof? You do need a clean roof.
Ben Sutherland:You need to be able to everything within your. The compound of your certain building needs to be yours and not affect your neighbor at all. Otherwise you need a body corp. It's seen as one big building as opposed to. You know you can't freehold your section. You have to have it across lease situation, at the very least.
Gerard Dombroski:There's certainly design answers in there, though I don't think it's fully restrictive.
Ben Sutherland:Definitely.
Gerard Dombroski:I think just repetition is easier and people don't want to pay perhaps more architecture fees for a more complex design process.
Ben Sutherland:Yeah, definitely. I think the resource consent process is far too tick poxy, though, and so when you're trying to put it in it like for me, it's my experience of it so far as just being where projects go to die, there's so many jobs in resource consent at the moment it's crazy, and that it's just a tick boxing situation, and if you're not kind of ticking all those boxes, then it's pretty hard to get through, unfortunately.
Guy Marriage:Yeah, one of the chapters in this book was by one of my colleagues here at the School of Architecture, hannah Hopewell, and she's a wonderful, really, really interesting person and she's written this chapter which is called Community and, as she argues, the most important thing about designing for a medium density situation is to actually think about the community first. So think about the community of people that you're going to be creating and design the spaces or allow for the spaces around which you can arrange the houses that later they will be inhabiting, and fulfilling that community. So she has things which she talks about like spaces of primary circulation. You need to think about the primary circulation routes, spaces of shared utility, spaces of primary recreation and sociality and so all of those sorts of things, and there's a lovely one spaces of primary repose.
Guy Marriage:So where are you going to be? So like, if there's, as she says, it may be that the site has a tree where a bird sings every morning, or on a bench could be put underneath it so you could sit there and listen to the bird, or particularly part of the site that gets lovely light in the late afternoon or early morning. So you need to think about these really subtle gestures which can actually really make a site, and so that you're probably getting that up at Jed's place on the on Tinnacori, where you get some really lovely spaces in that central courtyard. You're certainly getting them on Roger Walker's thing, park Muse, where there's some really interesting spaces in between the buildings there, and that's so different from plonking a tower and making it as high as possible or twice as high as you're legally allowed to and just going up and up, because that just doesn't help anybody.
Sam Brown:I mean the key thing there's stakeholder involvement right and it's, and it's stakeholder involvement before the design process even commences you know, if you're designing something and then putting it out to the public and being like I hope you like it Half the time they don't. It would not be a better objective for designers which I don't think we do enough as getting people in the door just the general public to give feedback on proposed development before you've even put pen to paper. I mean that would be an interesting way of tackling things.
Guy Marriage:Well, it would. But part of the problem with obviously, if you're designing for a client, then you just talk to them, but when you're designing for a group of people in the future who may or may not buy them, it's impossible to know really who the client is. So, in a way, you have to design for this faceless, shapeless client that may. But when you're doing that, like if you design something which is full of one bedroom apartments, then you can virtually guarantee that all of your clients are going to be the same, because they're all going to be in the situation. They're all going to be single people or perhaps a couple, but you're not going to get anybody with children in a one bedroom apartment. You're not going to get any old people, retirees, in a one bedroom apartment.
Guy Marriage:So you define what the people are. So that's why people are designing student apartments. That means horrible single units that aren't big enough to have a friend around. And so if you can actually think about what sort of people would we like to have living here? It's like, well, if we want to say, look, I'd like to have some families living here with three children or four children each, then you have to design buildings that have got room to have three or four children staying there.
Ben Sutherland:Yeah, we don't want those students to have too much room. All they do is have parties all the time. They don't spend any time at university doing the work.
Guy Marriage:That's right. One of the metrics that I came up with which I had hoped would have been widely adopted by now but sadly doesn't appear to have been, is the metric I think I called it the feline metric. So there's the old expression is not big enough for room to swing a cat. So if you think average arms length and if you add average cat to the end of that, that's a circle of about 2.7 meters in diameter. So if you're swinging a cat around, you need to have 2.7 meter, depending on the breed of cats.
Gerard Dombroski:Yeah, if you have a bigger cat, then you need it.
Guy Marriage:That's a minimum size I say for any room. You should be able to get a circle 2.7 meters in there to swing a cat.
Ben Sutherland:So what do you call that? What do you call that? Sorry there.
Sam Brown:The feline. Metric the feline metric.
Ben Sutherland:Oh, that's good.
Sam Brown:We've talked a lot about the social and urban sort of impacts of these sort of developments. I'd be interested to just kind of get your take, guy and others on sort of the sustainability or the sustainable side of medium density. Obviously you know you like using less land is more sustainable, but is there any other key aspects that you can identify?
Guy Marriage:Well, if you build those places centrally then you don't need to have carparks. So some of the buildings nearby don't have any carparks. Our building, the ground floor, had already been converted and mainly concreted for stiffness, so we couldn't really have anything on the ground floor. So we actually do have carparks, but while 20 years ago people would use all the carparks all the time, now there's several other carparks which are just sitting there empty because the people who are in the apartments actually don't have a car, don't need a carpark. I use mine mainly for storage. I do have a car so I can get away every now and then, but mostly the carpark just sits there sort of unused most of the week. So, deleting the fact that 29 apartments with the possible 50 people in the building or more, there are very few use of cars within that. So most people in our building just walk to work or take a scooter or take the bus.
Sam Brown:You'd have to argue that you, that transport infrastructure, needs to be on par to support that as well, though, and I feel like that's not the case in a lot of places, particularly New Zealand.
Guy Marriage:Yeah, so for instance, if you built, yeah you're putting that out in Upper Hut, yeah.
Gerard Dombroski:And you've got some lemon keg.
Guy Marriage:They're working on it, yeah they're working on it, but if you go to the apartment buildings that are going up in Upper Hut, there's a huge amount of cars on the streets nearby.
Guy Marriage:So one of the things that made it more affordable was the Wellington Council saying you don't need to have any, you don't need to provide any carparks, and providing carparks is one of the major reasons why things are so expensive. There's actually a book which I'm reading at the moment, which I don't think I have here, which is called the High Cost of Free Parking. Basically, it's a number of years of study in America where they're saying that if you provide free parking, then it pushes up your land cost or pushes up the amount that you need to spend on your site, and so it pushes up the cost of the sale of the unit to somebody in the end. So all of these sorts of things. So parking is a major part of it, and if we can reduce the amount of people driving, and so that's why the argument is that we should be building centrally rather than building out of the hut.
Sam Brown:Yeah, I guess there's actually just on that point, guy, there's a really good 99% invisible podcast that summarizes that exact topic that you're talking about. So if listeners like podcasts, do you have to check out? What about materiality and sustainability of materiality and medium density? I guess often you're sharing walls and therefore there's less external cladding and things like that. Surely there's sustainable sort of positives in developing medium density houses.
Guy Marriage:Absolutely yeah, and one of the key ones, I guess, is heating and cooling. So I have no side walls, I have no skylights. I have got people on five, four sides to me. There's nobody at the back. There's a corridor at the back, so the only sunlight and daylight that I get is from the north. So my apartment needs no heating. It's never had any heating and so I say it stays between 17 and 23 degrees.
Sam Brown:Through winter as well.
Guy Marriage:Yeah, through winter and that's where the window opened. So it just stays at that sort of very stable standpoint and that's Wellington. Wellington is a reasonably stable climate, but our things do go up and down a lot more than that. But ours just goes pretty much level, which means that I don't need to have air conditioning, I don't need to buy jerseys, you just get used to living at a very constant temperature, which is quite good and, I would argue, very eco-sustainable In terms of the materials that it uses. Obviously, if you're building a multi-story building, then you're probably likely to be using some steel and some concrete. It is possible to build buildings, as Ben will tell you, using good new timber products like CLT, where you could build the whole building out of CLT. But CLT, while really good for multi-story buildings, it is quite resonant because it's a lively structure and so you need to try and dampen it down or stop the sound propagating through the building. So there's an element of that as well.
Sam Brown:Just quickly on the CLT thing. The guy, the extra of yours, jordan Robinson, I had to bear with him the other day. He works for XLam now.
Sam Brown:And he was saying that the new airport hanger for Air New Zealand at Auckland that's all massive, huge curved CLT trusses. He said that I think he said it was something like the amount of timber that's going into that would only take something like four weeks of regrowth to replenish, which is insane. There's a crazy statistic on how sustainable that is. I sort of challenged him. I was like you need a lot of timber in comparison to steel or concrete to achieve sort of the structural requirements of these timber frame builds and I was like how sustainable is it? And he helped me with that sort of metric.
Ben Sutherland:And I was like Jesus. The density of the timber is nowhere near what it used to be back in the day, though. Yeah, accelerated growth.
Sam Brown:Four weeks of regrowth, nothing, and it's all carbon sunk as well, so you know it's pretty impressive.
Guy Marriage:Yeah, yeah, that's the great thing Very eco-friendly using timber. So it really does just sequester that timber away. Now some people who are anti timber will say, yeah, but what happens in the end when you have to pull it down and put all that stuff in landfill? I don't think you're going to pull it down, I don't think you're going to put it in landfill. I think because CLT is so easy to join together to erect into a structure. In the unlikely event that you come to pull it down Dismental 200 years later, you just take the screws out or saw the screws off and reuse those bits of timber. I would suspect we won't know for 200 years, but I think that it'll be readily able to be done.
Gerard Dombroski:We're a series of decks and carports and a little backyard sheds made out of giant CLT. I look forward to that yeah definitely, hey guys.
Ben Sutherland:so yeah, we've had a good chat about densification. It's been amazing just talking about timber and you know what's happening in that realm. Why don't you just give us a well, the audience a quick rundown on your new book? And that's what we're doing.
Guy Marriage:So this book, so this is a project really being run by Amina Petrovich and Mautengirda and Fabricio Sheikah and I joined her as editors. But so sustainability and toxicity of building materials.
Guy Marriage:So I think this is the first book in the world which has really gone into a hell of a lot of detail on the amount of issues that the toxicity especially, but also the sustainability of building materials. And so in that I've got two chapters on timber, one on just looking at the trees and one looking at them in use, so looking at the glues that we glue, things together with the treatment that we you know whether H3 or H1.2 and different sorts of treatments and things like that, and how toxic that is if there are alternatives and things. So it's really looking at those aspects of timber and then also written in the chapter with Mauteng on metals. So we're looking at all the different metals that are used on a building site or that could be used on a building site and looking at how toxic they are. And so some of them are. Obviously, you know, most of them are perfectly neutral to use on when you're on site, but some of them the mining of the materials, you know, creates huge problems.
Guy Marriage:So you know, we might even like a lithium ion battery for your, for your, ratchet gun. You know, getting the lithium, as we know, is a real problem.
Ben Sutherland:Yeah. So after doing your research and writing that, what is your opinion on treatment levels in the building code? You know, especially in New Zealand, for example, higher H3.2 treatment levels around wet areas, kitchens, that sort of thing.
Guy Marriage:That's a real problem for New Zealand, because we're one of the few countries in the world that still allows us to use CCA as a treatment for H3.2. So copper, chrome and arsenic. Arsenic is obviously the poison, but also the types of, or the isotopes of, copper and of the chromium that they use are also incredibly toxic, which is why they're so successful in a treatment.
Guy Marriage:So you bath, bathe the piece of timber in this sort of toxic mix and the bugs don't want to eat it because they'll die. So they go. Ah, I don't want to touch that, and so that's why it works, that's why you can bury these things. It stops rot, stops bugs. But it also means that you've got a permanently poisoned piece of timber which, in the case of when you have to, if you're doing any off cuts and things like that you can't even you can't burn them in the fire or anything like that you have to actually take them into a toxic waste area of the local dump and bury them wrapped in plastic and things. So that's a very non non-friendly type of thing. And so there are some answers, which are the easy answers. We should stop using CCA and we should use other methods of treatment.
Ben Sutherland:So our OSP, which is, you know, light organic solvent preservative, which is basically our only other option at the moment.
Guy Marriage:No, no, there are some other options, so one of them is copper Azole and one of them is micronized copper. So so there's a way, a different way of doing the copper, so using micronized copper. And there's also those of you watching might be yelling out at me, but there's another copper system, so copper Azole, and I forget that.
Ben Sutherland:I guess it comes down to the accessibility once again, though, because H3.2 and H3.1, which is your LOSP and your CCA are readily available off the shelf at your local hardware store.
Guy Marriage:Yep, they are, but they're banned in Japan. They're banned in the USA. They're banned in most of Europe. They're available in New Zealand, Australia and Africa.
Ben Sutherland:That's crazy Interesting man. We need to. We need some updates there.
Gerard Dombroski:Yeah, that's my point.
Ben Sutherland:We've been cleaning it all day. Yeah, I know, yeah.
Guy Marriage:I mean, how often do you guys, when you're on site, how often do you wear goggles and a mask and wear gloves when you travel on H3?
Ben Sutherland:We don't know if you've been here for years and I never did.
Guy Marriage:Yeah, if you read my book, you'll want to start. You don't want to find out what it does to the size of your testicles.
Sam Brown:Oh, that's why, Damn it, it's reproduction function.
Ben Sutherland:Oh, that's horrible.
Guy Marriage:Yeah, that's a conversation stopper right there, isn't it? Yeah?
Ben Sutherland:it is, yeah, it is, it is, oh, no, no, no, but yeah, it's too real, it's not too real.
Guy Marriage:It's not the testicles. We should be able to. No, I mean, some of the treatment levels are. You know, it's not the testicles. Some of the treatment levels are not on that, but on the use of tin. I think it was, which we used to use on corrugated iron. Roofs would use tin, the use of tin on the bottom of ships, so they use it as an anti-fouling paint. It affects the sex of snails and crabs, fix them to such a degree that they actually become hermaphrodites, so they grow both male and female genitalia and obviously can't breed successfully with either side. But it's causing serious problems at the bottom of the ocean. And we're still human, we're still animals, so it affects us. Not in quite the same way, but it's not good for your gonads to have these sorts of things.
Sam Brown:That's fascinating, I mean. I think a lot of this comes back, well, comes back to a key thing, and that's well, it's policy change, right, I think?
Guy Marriage:you're going to say it's be good to your gonads. That's what this is all about.
Sam Brown:What I was going to say is I mean both medium density thing and interestingly enough the new governments scrapped the MDSR and also this treatment thing like how do you implore the people at the top, the governments or policymakers or whatever, to make these changes to better our environment, both built and natural? What are your guys' thoughts on that?
Guy Marriage:I know what I think. I want to hear from you, Ty.
Sam Brown:I mean, from my perspective, I think all you can do is what we need to do as architects is be the better man, in a sense, and make sure that we are specifying products that are not using these treatment methods and looking for alternatives and make that change from the base. I think that's from a material point of view, and then I also think from a development point of view. I think we need to implore our clients to be more considerate in the quality and also the design and layout of the medium density developments. That's my two cents. I don't know.
Gerard Dombroski:Yeah, I think architects have kind of a duty of care to make sure they're not making rubbish and to design the best you possibly can with the tools you've got at the time.
Gerard Dombroski:I think the thing that probably most of New Zealanders struggle with is like it's so different to the quarter acre dream, or they perceive it as so different because they haven't seen the spectrum of alternatives, because it is such a huge spectrum. Then within that spectrum they probably haven't seen many good examples, because I don't think there's that many truly good examples that most sane human beings would go inside of and be like, yeah, shit, I could live here. I think it's a voting scheme, I guess as well the better work we do, the more likely people are going to enjoy and continue to thrive and live in these communities.
Sam Brown:Sort of a base up change rather than a top down change.
Gerard Dombroski:Yeah, but I think a lot of architects just do what they're told, whereas you kind of need to make sure you're making good spaces.
Sam Brown:Yeah to roll, for us to be a little bit more confident in our approach.
Gerard Dombroski:We can't just pull her off to the client and say, oh no, they didn't let us.
Ben Sutherland:The problem is it's not really the architects I'm worried about in this situation. I'm sure anyone any architect that is designing higher density buildings is doing better already. It's the policy that, as Guy previously said, the minimum standard at the moment. That's allowing developers to build not so nice products. So I guess that's kind of where I see the issue being at the moment, not so much the developer driven projects.
Sam Brown:It's almost like and I talk about this quite a lot because it's something that's close to my heart but you need those sort of external influences that aren't necessarily policy based, but things like Homestar or GreenStar, neighbours, all those sort of external things, and once public recognition of those starts to increase and people realize that you can't build to code because they're not going to meet those standards, those standards- are probably the ones that are going to look to drive quality a little bit more.
Guy Marriage:Yeah, and from my point of view, one of the key things that we need to get, and probably one of the reasons why we have such poor outcomes at the moment, is that we don't have anybody in government that has any knowledge or understanding of the sector. So we didn't have under labor, there was nobody really, that there was no body with any architectural training. We don't have anybody under national enact that's got any understanding. So we've got a new minister, minister Pink, who's apparently a really nice guy and used to be the commander of a submarine in the Australian Navy, which I'm sure is fantastic. Sure, I'll meet him one day and he will be nice, but he doesn't know. Bugger, all about buildings.
Sam Brown:So any architects out there want to get into politics?
Guy Marriage:Well, that's what we need. That is honestly what we need. We do need people with architectural training to stand for various parties, either labor or green, or even national hopefully not for act. That would be too sad.
Ben Sutherland:I know.
Guy Marriage:I'd like to actually stand and put the hand up and be involved in politics, because we actually need some people who know what they're talking about in politics and who can talk from position of power and knowledge and sensibility People like David Seymour. He's totally clueless on a whole bunch of things which he's unfortunately got a large amount of sway in making the decisions on. His attitude is too much red tape. Get rid of the red tape. But, as we all know, as architects, you actually do need some red tape because otherwise things can go really badly wrong on site. So we do need to have some standards that we're working to and things like that and the system in place. So it's important to have people that know what they're talking about within the system.
Guy Marriage:So, yeah, I look forward to seeing. I'm too old for that. I'm a very old man now, just about retire and move on to my smoking a pipe on the porch. But you guys are all young so and you're full of verve and zip and Jared's full of something God knows what, but he's full of extra energy his whole life. Maybe he should give up making furniture and run for run for parliament and that's you become the MP for Wellington Central.
Sam Brown:There you go, there you go, jared.
Ben Sutherland:I'd vote for you.
Gerard Dombroski:Jared, I like taking jokes too, joe.
Ben Sutherland:All right, guys. Well, thank you so much for coming on and having a chat with us about densification. I know I've definitely learned a lot. I'm sure the others have as well.
Sam Brown:Yeah, it's been great, thank you.
Guy Marriage:Well, thank you for inviting me. It's been great fun and I hope your podcast goes well and continues to grow and grow.
Gerard Dombroski:That's all for today. See you next time. Once again, big thanks to Condom and, for the visual art, jacob Marshall for the sound, and don't forget to rate and review.
Sam Brown:Thanks, guys, peace. Thank you Bye.