Gerald said: 

 

"For me, this opportunity conveniently coincides with a career-long determination to somehow make architecture relevant at a lower economic level than that with which it is normally associated. I am forever offended by the casual assumption that architecture is the privilege of a plutocracy.

 

   So these small buildings compress architectural incident into confined areas in order to spatially release and ‘enlarge’ them into the context of their hinterlands. And - as their owners are not wealthy people - they must do this at an affordable cost.

  

   For reasons of economy, therefore - and with the necessary encouragement and tutelage of their architect - they have personally involved themselves in the construction process as ‘armchair builders’ (or project managers), a role and an industry entirely new to them. And one of the houses was physically built by its owner, also with very little previous experience. Compared to the prevailing arrangement of Fixed Price Contracts with licensed Building Contractors, this sort of intervention has the potential to save between 15-30% of costs, a difference in price to which each house owes its very existence.

 

    New Zealand is renowned internationally for its sheep farming, but it also farms timber as its primary building material. The majority of its houses are, therefore, timber-framed. 

 

    The buildings illustrated here share a deliberately limited palette of materials that are durable, low maintenance, and low-to-medium cost. Such materials typically include the environmentally friendly macrocarpa (an indigenous exotic timber which does not require any toxic preservative treatment), cement board, corrugated steel and Onduline (a corrugated bitumen-impregnated cellulose), and - occasionally - concrete block masonry. They also share similar passive solar techniques of window orientation and thermal mass, to keep them warm in winter and cool in summer."