The conversion of a corner of the Canterbury Agricultural Park into a Home Innovation Village, known as the Hive, is on course for a grand opening on the weekend of 21-22 April.

As earlier reported in Architecture Now this initiative, facilitated by hub organisation PrefabNZ, is first and foremost a response to the pressure on housing choices and options for Cantabrians displaced by the region’s extreme earthquakes.

An initial set of four houses are destined for the site and will act as a demonstration of PrefabNZ’s role as a catalyst for collaboration and incubator for innovation. Those houses and their collaborators are:

• The Smart House – Laing Homes and Wilson & Hill Architects  
• Rakaia house – Falcon Construction and Allied Concrete
• Park Terrace house – Keith Hay Homes and Architex 
• Little Wing house – Lockwood Canterbury and Strachan Group Architects (SGA)

“The pressing motivation here is to put these readymade, ready to go options in front of a community who are hungry to see more innovation happening on the ground in response to the crisis in Christchurch,” says PrefabNZ chief executive Pamela Bell.

“On the surface these collaborations might seem conventional, but the added differences are in the combination of principles being adopted and innovation-based details – from the simple but striking designs through to the adherence to universal standards for future-proofing houses such as Lifemark and the Green Building Council’s Homestar ratings.”

“At the same time, co-locating this range of show homes together for such a long time (through to February 2014) should really boost people’s understanding nationwide of how much building technologies have changed and are changing for the better. We need to communicate the nature and merits of those changes as vigorously as possible, and the Hive Home Innovation Village will certainly give us a platform to do that from,” says Bell.

“This initiative also happens to coincide around the time of the Productivity Commission’s final report on Housing Affordability. That’s really good timing given the fact that our industry members are becoming more integrated and positioned to deliver more affordable prebuilt housing design components more productively and sustainably”.

As identified in Bell’s Victoria University Master of Architecture research thesis, the door is open for the architecture profession to more successfully assert a leading role in the market dynamics of the next generation of prefabricated housing. For those architects who are willing to engage with future developments and adapt to the potential for new typologies, there is an opportunity to put a stake in the ground by creating exemplars of distinctively architect-driven and informed ‘kiwi prefabs’.

A précis of this research is available to download in brochure form here.