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Karen Manson likes thinking about and designing housing, not just houses.
With over 15 years of design experience, include 10 years overseas, Karen now has her own practice in Christchurch. She focuses on high performance houses, including Passive House.
I had the opportunity to chat with Karen at the pro clima HUB about her journey. In this episode we discuss the urban design, keeping it simple and what can be learnt from the process of designing standard, code compliant buildings.
What’s the Purpose?
When a client comes to Karen with an idea, she listens but she also digs a bit to discover the real objectives behind the project. Clients often come with a preferred system of building, like SIPS or panelisation. This is based on the research that the client has done. Karen tries to put these specifics to one side right at the start, and focus on the end goal. What’s the purpose of the building? What does it need to be able to do now, and into the future. This is about defining the ‘what’ and ‘why’, before focusing in on the ‘how’.
There’s an ethical obligation… to provide houses that are healthy and warm and secure.
Designing Housing, Not Just Houses
Karen spoke a lot about design housing, as opposed to houses.
Design housing means looking at the wider needs of the community, not just the immediate wishes of a single family or client. It’s a nice gig if you can get it and a lot of Karen’s experience in this area comes from working on large housing projects in the UK. Typically these projects would include house numbers in the hundreds, so urban design is an integral part of the overall design.
Make the Complicated, Simple
Houses are really complicated, Karen explained and it’s tempting to overcomplicate them. A fundamental skill of a good designer is to include the needs of the client and simplify the form of the house as much as possible. There will still be plenty of complexity in the detailing and the multitude of components, but the best performing buildings usually have a fairly basic form.
Make the Simple Look Good
Simple doesn’t have to, nor should it be, boring. Passive House designers tend to be conscious of dispelling the myth that Passive House buildings are ugly boxes with tiny windows.
So once the good designer has simplified the form, their next challenge is to make the simple, look good.
Learning from the Basic
Through word of mouth, Karen is attracting more and more clients looking for healthy, energy efficient homes. Occasionally though Karen still works on basic, code compliant buildings. It’s easy to be critical of houses built just to code minimums, but Karen provided a useful perspective on the experience.
Building to code minimum, using Acceptable Solutions, is really easy. It’s the path of least resistance. Rather than berating this situation, we can learn from it. What would it look like to create a consenting and building process where creating better buildings is encouraged rather being the harder, longer and uncertain path to take.
Building a code compliant house requires much less paperwork, raises far fewer questions from Council and is much simpler to procure materials to build. Building something different, something better, requires a motived client, a willing designer and a patient builder.
CK Architecture
To get in touch, and keep up to date with Karen’s work, you can find her on Facebook.
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