Top research targets waste, leaky facades
Two academics, one dedicated to fixing leaky buildings and another to reducing construction waste, have won two of the construction industry’s biggest research prizes.
Professor Robyn Phipps and master’s student Ged Finch will each receive $10,000 as inaugural winners of the New Zealand Institute of Building Charitable Trust’s annual scholarships.
Phipps, an internationally recognised teacher and researcher, specialises in assessing facades to ensure they will not leak and meet modern requirements.
She said there were a limited number of facade engineers in New Zealand because there are no home-grown courses of study available, and they currently had to obtain their qualifications and experience overseas.
Phipps will use the award to travel to the University of Waterloo in Canada, a centre of excellence in facade engineering, with the aim of helping to bring facade training to qualified building practitioners here.
She said Massey University was investigating the feasibility of adding a new subject major in facade engineering to its existing master of construction degree.
If it went ahead, the course would be open to those with an existing building-related qualification such as architecture, construction or engineering.
But there were also other options such as short courses to enable New Zealanders ‘‘to upskill in this highly specialised but critical discipline’’.
The other award winner was Gerard (Ged) Finch, a student member of the NZIOB and currently completing a master of architecture degree.
Finch’s research is aimed at avoiding waste at the end of a building’s life cycle by designing it at the outset for disassembly.
About half of all New Zealand’s waste – about 1.6 million tonnes every year – is generated by the construction sector, and Finch believes that much of that waste could be avoided by planning for parts of the building to be sold on and reused.
The award will allow Finch to conduct full-scale tests of structural and architectural systems at the University of Victoria‘s School of Architecture and Design.
Finch said he hoped his system would not only be ‘‘waste-free’’ but also cost competitive and attractive to homeowners and property developers.
It also had the potential to create ‘‘deconstruction’’ jobs and energise the secondhand materials market, he said.
Gina Jones, the chairwoman of the NZIOB Charitable Trust, said the awards were designed to encourage ‘‘aspirational thinking’’ which might advance design, construction or building management.
The awards are open to applicants from a trade, technical or professional role who want to pursue a project linked to building through research, practice or professional development.