About

The Plant Room is the Wellington regional team competing in The Sustainable Habitat Challenge (ShaC 09), a national collaborative project for teams around New Zealand to design, develop, and build sustainable housing in their local community. The Plant Room is intended as a prefabricated room that bolts-on to a variety of existing apartment types, improving the quality of living, reducing energy and water use, and generally making the building more sustainable.

A Plant Room provides hot water for one occupant and a healthy growing space for herbs, fruit and vegetables all year round. It also offers a worm farm, a rainwater tank, an outdoor space and an enclosed room. 

It shades the apartment to avoid summer overheating and collects hot air to circulate warmth in the winter. It is designed to improve the quality of apartment living while reducing the energy and water use of it’s occupants. It could also be a suitable solution to office retro-fits. 

We have committed to build two plant rooms: 

The first will be a transportable exhibition to communicate the ideas of sustainable building to the wider community. It will be fitted to a shipping container and exhibited at various locations around New Zealand. The container will also provide a location for events where the technologies and products used can be fully explained. 
 

The second will be fitted to an apartment building. It will be occupied, monitored and tested to establish the base level of performance of the unit and to drive future development of The Plant Room as a potential building product/component.

Construction

The construction and consent documentation of the Plant Room is where we push the central ideas of the project into reality as we near the point where the project can be constructed! This process combines the experience and knowledge of engineers, builders, building scientists, future occupants, council representatives and manufacturers to name a few. Have a look over the emerging documentation below to see how it all comes together…

For a closer look download a copy of the documents…

You can help the plant room

Can you offer any services, materials, finance, transport or time? Let us know! 

You will benefit as we can:

• Align with innovative research
• Communicate with the community
• Demonstrate building systems
• Conduct product testing
• Be exposed to national media