Design Principles Pod

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If you think sustainable architecture is mostly about energy ratings and lower carbon, this conversation will stretch your frame. We sit down with Indian architect Chitra Vishwanath, founder of Bangalore-based Biome Environmental Solutions, whose work treats buildings as ecosystems that belong to their climate, their soil, and their communities. Her approach is direct, grounded, and refreshingly practical: start with what you have, especially the resources already on site, and design so the building strengthens the systems around it.

We talk through Biome’s origin story in a rapidly changing India, then get into the hands-on realities of ecological architecture in dense urban conditions. Chitra shares how excavated earth can become compressed stabilised earth blocks, why testing soil composition matters, and what durability looks like when you detail for water properly. We also dig into craftsmanship and employment, and why “green building” has to include people, skills, and dignified work, not just materials.

Water becomes the turning point: rainwater harvesting, groundwater recharge, and wastewater reuse at both building and city scale. It’s a powerful reminder that urban sustainability can be regenerative, reducing flooding while bringing wells and aquifers back to life. We finish with a clear challenge for the next 20 years: practise architecture as teamwork, stay open, and don’t be afraid of risk when the goal is a healthier future.

If you found this useful, subscribe, share the episode with a mate, and leave a review. What’s one assumption about sustainable design you’re ready to drop?
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Follow us on @designpriciplespod on Instagram and if you wish to contact us hit our DMs or our personal pages. We love to hear from you it really encourages us to keep going and the ideas and feedback we get from the listeners is awesome!

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2030 is not a distant milestone, it is already colliding with the reality of long design and construction timelines. We sit down with Ewan Brown, Director at Tenant Brown Architects, to unpack what NZIA’s Kaitiakitanga 2030 strategy is really asking of architects, and why “we’ll get to it later” quietly locks in decades of carbon, water use, and overheating risk across Aotearoa New Zealand.

We dig into the practical heart of the strategy: moving beyond one-off “green” projects and making building performance measurement standard across every job. That includes operational energy targets (EUI), switching to all-electric buildings, lowering embodied carbon through lifecycle assessment, improving potable water efficiency, and designing for comfort by limiting overheating over a full year. Ewan also shares what he has learned from Living Building Challenge projects, where the process forces education and buy-in from the whole site team, including subcontractors, and creates a ripple effect beyond a single build.

We also talk honestly about what makes this hard: small practice capacity, tool costs, messy data, and fee structures that rarely support post-occupancy evaluation. The upside is just as real: shared, anonymised carbon data can build New Zealand-specific benchmarks by building type, and external drivers like green finance and future regulation will shift “nice to have” into business as usual.

If you care about sustainable architecture, regenerative design, and low-carbon buildings in New Zealand, hit play, share this with your team, and leave a review so more architects can find it. What would you start measuring first?
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Follow us on @designpriciplespod on Instagram and if you wish to contact us hit our DMs or our personal pages. We love to hear from you it really encourages us to keep going and the ideas and feedback we get from the listeners is awesome!

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Designing with people sounds like a slogan until you hear what it demands in real life. Recorded at the NZIA Institute Conference, we sit down with Sydney-based co-founders David Kaunitz and Ka Wai Yeung, whose practice has built an international reputation for socially responsible, culturally sensitive architecture with remote communities across Australia and the Pacific. The big idea is deceptively simple: stop designing for communities and start designing with them, even when that means the brief doesn’t exist yet.

We talk through how projects actually get off the ground when governments or organisations can see a need (like aged care) but the land, approvals, and community alignment are still uncertain. David explains why a holistic architectural role matters here: budgets, consultants, risk, and persistence are part of the job, not optional extras. We also unpack what respectful engagement looks like, including working with existing community governance while intentionally creating safe ways for quieter or excluded voices to be heard.

The practicalities are just as real as the principles. Remote work can mean 1,000-kilometre drives, repeated trips, and extended time on Country, plus the challenge of growing a team with the patience and temperament for long-haul trust-building. We also dig into delivery: why local materials and local construction methods matter in post-disaster reconstruction, how maintainability can make or break a building, and what “best practice” means when the goal is long-term community ownership.

If you care about community-led design, participatory architecture, Indigenous-led outcomes, and making architecture genuinely useful, this conversation will sharpen your thinking. Subscribe, share it with a designer who needs to hear it, and leave a review, what’s one way you’ve seen listening change a project?
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Follow us on @designpriciplespod on Instagram and if you wish to contact us hit our DMs or our personal pages. We love to hear from you it really encourages us to keep going and the ideas and feedback we get from the listeners is awesome!

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Two architects walk into a conference and we hand them a mic. What comes out is a fast, honest look at how New Zealand architects make decisions when nobody has time for fluff. We’re joined by Hamish McLachlan (Bowen and McLachlan Architects, also Architecture Zero Zero) and Rob Paulin (Paulin Studio), the two winners of our In:Situ ticket giveaway, for a quick-fire Q&A that turns into a surprisingly deep conversation about the design process and the built environment in Aotearoa.

We start where great projects actually start: the relationship. How do you tell if you’re a good fit for a client, and when should you walk away? From there we move into light and site research, why orientation still matters even with modelling tools, and what you learn the hard way when accuracy slips or QA gets assumed instead of checked.

Then we zoom out to the big stuff: designing for beauty and resilience in New Zealand, what “timeless” really means when styles and trends keep cycling, and why ugly buildings don’t survive because nobody fights to keep them. We also get practical about materiality and longevity, from mass timber and local materials to the renewed case for stone, plus why patina and imperfection can be a feature rather than a flaw. Along the way we talk prefabrication, rammed earth, affordability, and a simple A-B system for prioritising what deserves the budget.

If you care about New Zealand architecture, sustainable building, and making spaces that feel good to live in, press play, then subscribe, share it with a designer mate, and leave a review. What do you want to see change in NZ architecture over the next 20 years?
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Follow us on @designpriciplespod on Instagram and if you wish to contact us hit our DMs or our personal pages. We love to hear from you it really encourages us to keep going and the ideas and feedback we get from the listeners is awesome!

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In this episode we are talking with Dr Albert Refiti, professor at AUT and co-director of the Vā Moana Research Centre, about Vā: the relational space that holds people, culture, hierarchy, and belonging together. Once you hear Vā described this way, Pacific architecture stops being a set of shapes and starts reading like a living map of relationships across time.

We dig into why key forms and spatial rules have stayed so consistent for roughly 3,000 years across Polynesia, and how elements like platforms, posts, and the ridge beam carry social order and ancestral memory. Then we follow what happens when those systems move into the diaspora. Without villages, Pacific communities in New Zealand often rely on churches, halls, and civic buildings, and architecture can become an urgent marker of identity. That urgency also creates change, compromise, and sometimes misunderstanding, especially when contemporary building codes, materials, and procurement collide with cultural meaning.

Albert shares sharp reflections on projects in Auckland and Wellington, including what it means when a symbolic element disappears and how a “gap” can become an honest architectural moment rather than something to hide. We also turn to housing affordability, co-housing, intergenerational living, kaitiakitanga, and what Pacific communities might learn from papakāinga and the urban marae model. If you care about Pacific architecture, cultural identity in design, or building community-centred places in Aotearoa New Zealand, this one will stretch how you think.

Subscribe for more conversations like this, share the episode with a designer or student, and leave a review so others can find it.
Please Like and Subscribe it really helps :)
Follow us on @designpriciplespod on Instagram and if you wish to contact us hit our DMs or our personal pages. We love to hear from you it really encourages us to keep going and the ideas and feedback we get from the listeners is awesome!