I think I and my fellow owners of our plywood bach were very lucky that Tāwhirimātea, the weather god, looked the other way as it passed down the coast of Northland, sparing the bay the worst ravages of wind-driven rain. Unlike Cyclone Bola when I experienced, with mop in hand, the poverty of my very basic sliding-door detailing, the little box seemed to survive this February’s deluge intact. The bach was barely completed when Bola slammed into the long-legged gable form, shaking and shuddering it, and coating its glass with wind-driven spume from the waves 20 or so metres below. The detailing is pretty basic, water blown and sucked inside is then allowed to drain back out: well, most of it. Since completion, the only modification to the assembly has been its occupation by a gang of spiders whom I credit with having augmented the weatherproofing, stopping up gaps with what we might charitably call biomorphic weather seals.

Gaining a consent for the building 36 years ago was a mission, not on account of its minimal detailing but because of its location above a slip that, rather unfortunately, occurred about the hour the permit, as we then called it, was lodged. A complex three-year negotiation with the county engineer concerning effluent disposal and slip stability followed, before being resolved by a bit of legal cunning, and the permit emerged.

The application would likely not be accepted across the counter today, and neither it should. Though a sublime place to enjoy the intense summer sun or to curl up during winter storms, the bach’s reliance on the regular replacement of building elements to keep the water out is no way to treat the earth’s scarce resources. This is abundantly clear when I hole up with a project team in our studio. Though I bridle at the avalanche of code variations seemingly intent on making all our work lumpy and layered in order to address past failures of waterproofing, material lifespan and thermal comfort, I appreciate and applaud the imperatives driving such considerations.

We have plenty of agencies observing our work on Ross Island in the Antarctic but they are, thankfully, global protectors of the heritage sites who exercise authority through a network of international acronyms. These agencies are focused on the conservation and maintenance of the explorers’ century-old buildings, thankfully without building inspectors, tick boxes and the immutable clauses and sub-clauses that challenge our studio’s work further north.

The freedom from local authority vigilance allows the interdisciplinary project team to act to the very best of its abilities as it seeks to counter the deleterious effects of time and, increasingly, of global climate change. The huts were temporary affairs, meant to last a year or two as bases from which expeditions were launched in the race to the South Pole at the beginning of the last century. The buildings have each withstood many aggressive assaults in the past. The more obvious include dry, wind-driven snow eroding exterior timbers and finding any minute penetration to funnel in and accumulate over the long periods between visits. There is, too, the slow, inexorable accumulation of ice from groundwater gathering under the huts, water vapour boiling off and saturating the building fabric and the artefacts the huts contain. There have been faster, more-catastrophic events, such as a sudden warm spell in mid-summer flooding the interior with snowmelt: then freezing to coat everything inside with a thick mantle of ice, that has to be painstakingly chipped away.

That they have survived so long is testimony to their robust construction, the ministrations of earlier generations of amateur conservators and a marginally more benign environment. It seems bizarre to talk of the ruthless katabatic blasts of those regions as having been part of a more benign past, yet, though the icy blasts continue unabated, recent climate changes have presented some new and profound challenges. Many of these are familiar and visible: sea-level rise threatening the lowlying huts and the storm-driven erosion of the nearby shorelines, among others. Many are hidden, their effects insidious: the lowered levels of ground permafrost and the appearance of injurious microbes, for example. There are changes coming from the greater number of visitors to these isolated buildings, too: little concealed data-loggers show spikes in humidity as groups of tourists visit from ice-hardened cruise ships. These are complex matters of both vast global change and highly localised issues of gas exchange, dew points and air pressures.

We are all dealing with these in our daily labours, too. Those affected by the post-cyclone destruction of the Northland and East Coast flooding are clearly hard up against the tragic consequences of an event that must have given pause to even the most cynical of climate change doubters. For most of us, though, we are dealing with a longer game as we calculate the thermal efficiency of wall and roof assemblies while desperately trying to avoid having the finished concoction look like a yeti with an overly thick brimmed hat.

Along with trying to articulate the lumpy and the layered, we have, within the studio, been trying to calculate the carbon content of various works under way and something of a competition between project teams has emerged. Our understanding and control of the measurement systems involved, and our proclivity for employing bespoke construction assemblies, makes the process time consuming. Empirical calculations have been undertaken with erratic and, at times, frankly unbelievable results: a modest offgrid forest cabin being shamed by a fully tricked-out four-bedder on the beachfront. We will, of course, get better at this but the process has, as intended, raised myriad questions that are both philosophical and detail driven.

We are pleased to take up our spreadsheets in the cause of more responsible use of materials and are generally grateful for the insistence of government agencies through which political policy is squeezed. We do think, though, that those agencies might provide a little more hard data to occupy Excel’s cells or, perhaps, provide exemplar methodologies and prototypes. Perhaps candidate Luxon’s recent targeting of consultants sucking at the government trough might be extended to include contractors, too. Maybe, rather than subbing out work to the market, more is brought back ‘in house’, a ministry where the skills and lessons learned from national infrastructure, be it dam, road or school, are not lost but accumulate as a national resource of skilled architects, engineers, carpenters, digger drivers et al. If this seems a fanciful notion, perhaps we might reflect on the construction of the nation’s infrastructure prior to the 1988 dissolution of the Ministry of Works under the direction of a cell of rabid, free-market ideologues in the Lange government.

There were inefficiencies and failures in ‘the ministry’, and its unconstrained authority over land acquisition would not be acceptable today. For all that, it was responsible for much of present-day Aotearoa’s critical large-scale service structures, such as dams and highways. In addition, its aggregation of construction skills helped create a centre of excellence, the long shadow of which is still to be found in some older members of the trades and professions involved and which we sorely need today.