Living House

There is an affordable housing crisis in NZ as there is in many countries of the world. The number of people sleeping in cars has risen from 100 to 500 since 2017. 4000 children a day in NZ wake up in government paid motel rooms with their parents waiting for emergency housing. 27,000 NZers are on a waiting list for social housing. Auckland has the 7th least affordable house market in the world. 10.8 times the household income. NZ is still building houses with 19th century technology, with heavy carbon materials and extremely high labour costs. Government funded social housing is entirely built by private companies that subcontract out 80 % of the tasks leading to margin upon margin. Labour is 40% of the cost of a typical new house. Living House proposes to completely rethink of the methodology and materiality of building a 3-bedroom standalone house in NZ. Starting with analysing the cultural traditions of habitation priorities withing the NZ demographic, then optimizing the spatial and surface area analysis, we have developed a 3-bedroom house that requires the minimum quantity of material and can be built with the minimal quantity of labour. We have designed a flat pack CLT Carbon Zero house comprising only 18 panel components in total. We have optimised the labour component to reduce from 5000 hours (typical NZ house) to 500 hours for the Living House. And the unit construction price from £275k (typical NZ 3-bedroom house) to £110k. Yet, it has the highest architectural qualities of scale, volume, natural light, ventilation with world leading integrated PV solar power and heating systems, making it is net zero operational and embodied carbon zero at end of construction.