Our post-pandemic ‘awakening’ seems perfect timing to address our environmental and sustainability goals. What are your plans for progressing the Architects Declare movement?

Judi Keith-Brown (JKB): We’re in the process of setting up a working party as a result of the Architects Declare motion that was put to the AGM and while we haven’t agreed on the team yet, it’s an impressive range of engineers, services engineers, architects, academics, a water engineer and a graduate as well. They’re already sending through ideas about what to do. We’re currently writing the terms of reference for that group. It’s number two on the agenda after the COVID situation.

What are the group’s aims and when will it start working?

(JKB): We’ll try and meet as quickly as we can. We want to make the findings available for architects working at any scale of practice and building. We also need to make our guidance practical, so that people can do it easily, whether it’s for the smallest house alteration or the biggest multi-storey building.

One of my areas of interest is fixing up our existing housing stock. So, some of the things that we need to do for that aren’t going to be perfect. There are things you can’t change easily. We can’t have a perfect scenario for every building type. We need to be sensible and practical about how we go about this so that people don’t get excluded and so it’s not too expensive and it’s not out of people’s reach.

For example, with the type of work I do, mainly house alterations and additions, I wouldn’t be able to do an energy model, for instance, on a house alteration, so we need to be wary that we don’t want to exclude the bulk of our architectural membership from being able to access this. 

There are currently four ideas tabled by Architects Declare as easy starting points, covering glazing, materials, energy modelling and lifecycle analysis. Will the group build off those ideas?

(JKB): Yes, we’ve looked at those and we’re working in with them. It’s definitely part of it but the panel that we’re getting together is going to have to work out the best framework that they can to get the best results.

Obviously, there are already lots of systems in place, from the Living Building Challenge to Green Star ratings and so on, and those are all great, and the good thing about using a wide range of architects and different specialists is that everyone can bring practical examples to the table, and we want it to be scientific. We want it to be measurable so that we can start influencing the building code and start talking to government about it at all levels, but particularly in our housing stock – our existing housing stock and the new housing that’s being built – we really need to step up our game in that area.

While the COVID situation has overshadowed a lot of what we’re going to be doing, at the same time, it’s been a good time to look at how our buildings and houses have worked in that time. 

Are we, as a country, working through our Architects Declare actions completely independently or looking to how they’ve done it in the UK and internationally?

(JKB): We’re looking at what people are doing all over the world because obviously it’s relevant. So the people on the panel will have had contact with people outside of New Zealand. But we’re really trying to make it so that it is about the New Zealand context because our climatic conditions are unique, as most countries are. We’ve got high levels of wind, especially in Wellington, and high levels of humidity and rain and so on. So we’ve got quite extremes and they are different down the whole length of the country. And we have to realise that we’re a pretty long, skinny country with a lot of very different conditions.

Why did you decide to take on the president’s role? Is there something, in particular, you want to deliver?

(JKB): I’ve done lots of different things in my life in terms of architecture. I started off in practice here and then worked in Scotland for three years. When we came back to New Zealand, I worked in a practice with John Daish who was a lecturer at the School of Architecture in Wellington and he asked me if I wanted to do some tutoring. I tutored and lectured for 10 years while raising our two young boys at the same time. I loved teaching.

In 2008, I went back into practice and set up a collaborative workspace with a group of different design professionals. During that time I was also an assessor for the Registration Board for people that want to become architects. So I’ve been involved in architecture in a range of roles and, during my time at the School, I had 10 years of really great students and I’ve kept in touch with almost all of them. And then when I was doing my assessing, I met another lot of really impressive young architects that came through to get registered. And so I’ve accidentally turned into a mentor for people and particularly young women and women in sole practice.

When Tim Melville approached me about the job, I thought about it and thought, well, a lot of our architectural population is female, there are more and more women, and a sole practitioner has never been president before.

What it is for me is I like putting groups of people together. I’m not the big ego with a big agenda. I want to make sure that the work that we do, that comes along, is dealt with and that we actually make progress. That’s really important to me – that we actually achieve stuff.

The government has just changed part of the building code so you can build a 30-square-metre building without building consent. What are your thoughts on that?

(JKB): I think if we get the word out that it’s not straightforward, that if you want to build something 30 square metres, there are quite a few rules you have to look at. Are you allowed to build one in your backyard? You need to look at the current District Plan and the rules that apply to your site: site coverage, height at the boundary, yard requirements etc. Where I live, in Mount Victoria, we couldn’t because our house is already at maximum site coverage of 50 per cent. 

But, if you do have room in your backyard, and you’re allowed to do it under the district plan, then you could build like a U-shape, courtyard-type building and have a studio at one end and an office at the other and a conservatory in between. 30 square metres is a good size and you could make something really quite clever.

My advice would be to get an architect or a graduate who’s working with an architect to help, for the design, the working drawings, arranging for the builder, including the contract and for observation of the work on site.

Given half of the profession and more than half of the students are women, what are you planning to do for them? There’s always been the issue that women don’t receive equal pay – do you have any ideas about how that can be rectified?

(JKB): That’s a really interesting question. I think architecture has a long way to go in terms of getting out of the mould that it’s in at the moment – it’s a very traditional mould. It’s hard to break out of that, especially now that we’re heading into a recession.

I’m an observer, particularly of the bigger practices. And I’m also an observer of the choices people make. A lot of women, to get high up in the bigger practices and to get the big dollars, make sacrifices that the guys have made as well. So, it’s not just that the women are being singled out if they want to succeed in those bigger, traditional practices… the guys have had to make exactly the same sacrifices to get there.

I keep saying to people and I’m pretty sure it’s true – it’s definitely true in Wellington and it’s definitely true of some of the really smart young women we’ve got on the NZIA Board of Directors – they’re in their early to mid-thirties and they’re bubbling up and they are going to be quite different. They want to work in a different way. They’re coming to it with smart minds and smart ways of working. But they’re setting up their own practices and I think that’s going to be the thing that’s going to start changing the way that people practice in New Zealand.

If you look at them coming through, people like Andrea Bell in Dunedin, she’s a smart woman and she’s going to go places. But she’s working out her own way of running a practice and she’s going to do really well. So I think the days have gone of people not getting places because they miss out on working in those traditional practices because I think those traditional practices are going to have to learn from these new models if they want to attract good staff.

I think the hardest challenge for female architects is the clash between having enough experience once graduating to go for registration and working out when and if to have children. This is a hot topic for female architects in their late 20s. Timing does not work well for them. Most finish their degrees aged 23–24, then, if they can find work, they work for 4–5 years before going for registration, and getting ready for this takes time and also assumes that you can get relevant experience across the full scope of architectural services.

So, from how a job is set up in the office-fee agreements, letters of commission, gathering site information, forming the brief, through to sketch plans, developed design, resource consents, working drawings for the building consent, right through to the final account for the project, often it is not easy to be exposed to this full range. It gets even harder when the economy is not doing well. Often female architects don’t get registered, which means they can’t practice as architects – they can’t even apply for a building consent (unless the work is to their own house). And, often, female architects get registered just as they are having their first child, which can make it difficult to keep current or to keep your job once you finish your maternity leave. I had exactly this type of conversation with a group of young female graduates yesterday. We need to make this easier for this group.

Can the NZIA help in any way by looking at that traditional practice structure and not just at flexible, part-time work for women but for men too. Would that help break down the gender division?

(JKB): What we can do is start showing some of the architects out there who are working in these different ways, who are under the radar now, who are doing really good work but they don’t enter the awards programmes. They just keep doing what they do, and they do it really well. But they don’t want to shine, they want to do work that pleases their clients.

So I think if we can show not just buildings when they are finished as an object, but if we can actually get people to talk about the process of design and how their practices are run and why they set them up and how they’ve coped with kids and partners, and if we can get some more of those people out there, then we’re doing our job. Not so much about the design philosophy behind the house or project but how did you establish your practice, tell us the story about your life. As soon as we can get more and more role models out there, people that aren’t the traditional role models, then we get different types of practice.

Like Matt French, who has been working for the UN in Nairobi, he’s been working in participatory design around housing and slum upgrading and Hamish Beattie has been doing similar work in India. We need to get these architects on a webinar talking about their work because graduates don’t know that there’s that type of work out there for them. So, especially at the moment when it’s hard for graduates to get work, if we can say, there are these other types of roles that architects have and can succeed at and do amazing things for their communities.

Even practices like ĀKAU, they work very much as facilitators and educators. When Hamish was working in India, he developed and worked with a bespoke game – Maslow’s Palace –getting people to use it to decide what they wanted to change within their community.

If we can get more and more people talking about what they’re doing, we can show students, graduates, architects and the public the many and varied ways that architects work.

I guess a lot of women will be expecting you to be an advocate for them and their role and while you can promote different structures and ways of working through the NZIA, there’s only so much you can do? 

(JKB): Yes. And it’s hard to know exactly what to say to people about how they can improve their situation. Male architects sort of have a checklist for everything you need to have to be a male architect and some men break the mould. There are practices out there that are a lot more flexible.

The problem is there isn’t one answer, and I wish there was. The main thing is that people have to be true to themselves and try and change things from within. When I worked in Scotland, I definitely changed the practice that I was in, just slowly but surely, from a pyramidal structure to a more horizontal structure and that was just from talking to the boss really. Nobody had talked to him much before and I just slowly but surely worked away until he finally realised that actually there were some really nice people in the office and we could talk more easily with each other.

If you can get into a practice and can prove your worth, then you can start talking to your bosses in a friendly manner and you can get involved and give advice, then you’ll be able to make changes.

When I talk to clients, I say it’s really important who you choose as your architect because you’re going to be with them for the next year or more, and perhaps even more important is the builder you choose. But with architects, it’s really important where you go and practice. It really shapes who you are and what you’re going to be like in the future. One piece of advice that I’ve been giving to graduates lately is go and find out as much as you can about the practice you want to work for and then try and develop a unique skill that will be useful to that practice. It might be model making, it might be sustainability and measuring carbon footprints, it might be part of an iwi that needs work done, you might offer to do work pro bono, collaboratively.

How do you hope to promote the role of architecture to potential students?

(JKB): Being an architect is an amazing job. Most people don’t realise the complexity of our jobs. They think it’s just about the design – they don’t understand the full role and I don’t think students do either. It’s not until you’re in practice that you understand that you’re taking a client through from their first phone call to briefing, design, drawings, consent, running it on-site and final sign-off. In between, you’re dealing with sustainability issues and buildability issues. It’s a complex job but it’s very satisfying. On the way, you’re going to meet the most amazing group of people – great architects, fantastic clients, you’re going to learn a lot from builders (they’re the greatest educators), specialist consultants – you meet a huge raft of fascinating people through your career. That’s one of the most satisfying things about being an architect.