reCLAIM | reTHINK | reBUILD

Entrant: 
William Nicholas Spalletti, Warren And Mahoney

Category: 
01. Student Design Award

This Master's Thesis is a single-bedroom timber dwelling designed for a rural site west of Auckland, conceived as a prototype for circular construction in Aotearoa.

New Zealand's build-and-dispose culture sends tonnes of timber to landfill annually, much of it treated with CCA preservatives that resist both rot and reuse. This house refuses that linear trajectory. Every decision, from foundation to finish, is guided by Design for Disassembly and Reuse: the building is designed to be unlocked, recovered, and absorbed into new cycles rather than demolished.

Timber was chosen as the primary material for many reasons. It is Aotearoa's most familiar and renewable building material, lightweight enough to work with a demountable foundation system, and uniquely suited to the mechanical fastening strategies that make full disassembly possible. The structural frame uses 140x45mm boron-treated radiata pine (H1.2), chosen deliberately over industry-standard CCA: boron renders the framing safe to handle and reuse at end of life without contaminating fasteners or adjacent materials. The frame is panelised and bolted rather than nailed, allowing wall and floor assemblies to be separated in reverse order of construction.

Reclaimed native timber floorboards are screw-fixed over recovered OSB panels as a dual-layer floor system, giving the interior a rich, aged patina while demonstrating that old-growth timber holds genuine value across multiple building lives. Construction off-cuts ordinarily destined for landfill are thermally modified and finished with shou sugi ban charring or controlled heat treatment to form the rain-screen cladding: a zero-waste facade of unique texture and improved durability. Furfurylated salvaged weatherboards make up a second innovative cladding zone, screw-fixed to allow any board to be replaced or recovered without damage. Recycled corrugated steel forms the roof. At key structural junctions, exposed timber joinery inspired by Japanese carpentry replaces metal hardware entirely, achieving moment connections through interlocking wood alone. These joints are reversible, reusable, and architecturally honest.

Timber added value across every measure. Constructively, the light frame enabled a demountable helical pile foundation requiring no excavation and leaving no concrete in the ground. Aesthetically, the layering of reclaimed, charred, and raw timber surfaces produces a warmth and material depth that manufactured products cannot replicate. The economic case for circular timber construction remains constrained by landfill levies too low to incentivise change, building codes that favour permanence over adaptability, and an industry yet to build the procurement networks and collaborative frameworks that would make reclaimed material mainstream. This project acknowledges that friction honestly, and proposes that architecture must lead where policy has not yet followed.

This dwelling is a manifesto as much as a design: an argument for the direction the construction industry must head, made visible at the scale of a single home. The intention is to show practitioners, clients, and regulators that the knowledge and the means already exist, and that what is missing is not capability but commitment.

Grounded in kaitiakitanga, guardianship of land and resource, it treats each piece of timber as something borrowed rather than consumed. When it eventually leaves, the site recovers. The materials continue.