Roofs as a Liveable Space

[Shane Clarke] Morning everyone, this is just the 30 second pause of death before we officially kick off, we just wait for people to enter the room. We'll kick off in about 30 seconds. Excellent. All right. Kia ora, tēnā koutou whānau. Welcome to Nuralite’s Education Series webinars. I think this is our eighth webinar, which eight's a lucky number for some people so fingers crossed we get this one right. I'm pretty excited about this one to be honest. It's been subscribed very, very heavily. I'm sure it's not because of the host but it's great to see so many people there. And today we want to talk to you about using roofs as living spaces. So you've gone to the lengths of creating this fantastic flat roof, in our opinion, and we want to talk about how we can maximise the use of that. As some of you may or may not be aware, our webinars we try and make them interactive as possible. Otherwise, I see a picture of me talking to my face for half an hour and it's not fun. So, please feel free to ask questions in the chat function or the Q&A. We'll do our best to answer them towards the end. We've got a couple of minutes towards the end. Now we've only set this to 30 minutes, we appreciate your time is very, very important. We don't want this to drag on. So we're going to run the first poll now and then I'll just introduce who our sponsor is today. I'll just run that first poll. Feel free to click your answer and then while you're doing that, for every participant that comes to a Nuralite webinar, we donate $10 to a worthy cause. So in the past it's been Kids Can etc, Auckland City Mission. Today's charity is Fair Food. So it was established in 2012 and it's Auckland's first food rescue charity. What they do is they go around and they collect fit food to eat from primary producers and retailers and then they distribute it to other people who have difficulty getting food on their table. So they feed people, not landfills. So pretty proud of that charity today and thanks for all the attendees. You've already made the world a better place. Well done. Excellent. So thanks for the first poll there. Now I just want to introduce some of the panellists today. Some pretty heavy hitters here in my opinion. Our first panellist is Joseph Nichols, who's our architectural representation, particularly around the Wellington area. Joseph's been with Nuralite for about four to five years now. Feels much longer. Prior to Nuralite, Joseph was an architectural designer. He's got 12 years experience working around the globe as an architectural designer, including stints in Australia and in London. After his degree, Joseph sort of worked on offices that focused on sustainable design and we see Joseph's passion for that coming through in his daily work here with Nuralite. Also on the panel with me today, we have Professor Andrew Barry. He's our professor in architectural and planning. He's an architect formerly based in Tokyo. He's worked as a project architect in one of Japan's most innovative and influential architects. Upon returning to New Zealand, he worked with Cheshire Architects. Along with a stunning array of letters after his name, Andrew has also published several books and won numerous design awards here both here in New Zealand and Japan. So, first of all, I'll throw to Joseph. Joseph's going to have a chat to us about why we should consider and think about using roofs as living spaces. He's going to give us some very local and some international examples. He's also going to touch on the sustainability, solar plant and functions that we can put on a flat roof. So, Joseph, over to you, mate. [Joseph Nicholls] Thanks, Shane. So, look, before I jump into this one, the previous slide, everyone, was the Grace Apartments in Auckland and that's a first case study that you'll see there, some appealing looking outdoor area. And the one you're looking at right now, by the way, I'm only going to be about four minutes of the four slides, so it's a quick intro to move things on to our case study with Andrew. But this one that you may be familiar with, it's a roof here in Wellington. It's an award winning design, beautifully built by Dorset Construction, who are also the client on this job, and the architectural patchwork. And what you're looking at there is that you cannot beat Wellington on a good day, basically. It's a beautiful example of giving the rooftop over to a space for living. And also, you'll notice that little shelter is there just as a testimony to Wellington's other weather conditions. And basically, we're really proud to have our Nurajacks supporting that deck. Now, next slide, please. The next part was looking internationally to find inspiring examples of life unfolding on rooftops. And basically, what struck me was the, what do I say here, the innovation and the creativity by the way people have used rooftops over the years in different ways. And what really struck me was that it often wasn't the designed intention of the roof. That's my observation, at least. And so it got me to thinking, our roof space is a bit like a blank canvas for living in, much in the same way you design a living room. We don't ask people how to live in it, but they do crazy things in it, presumably. So that's what you're looking at there is yoga class, outdoor cafe. This rooftop in the UK has an outdoor cinema where you sit in a hot tub. And I'm pretty sure that the original designers of that roof were not expecting that. So next slide, please, Jade. So rather than give you a montage of all the exciting designs around the world, I just wanted to focus on that principle, basically. What it seems is that the way we live our lives changes over time. And here you see rooftops being adapted for solar capture, urban agriculture. There's a lot of rooftop bars popping up. And I think successful buildings can adapt over time to the needs of the society. For instance, 50 years ago, they didn't think we'd be all doing yoga on rooftops. And the next point really is that flat living space is a bit of a commodity. In urban areas, especially, it's hard to come by. And so if you respond to a design brief with, say, a flat roof, it's a real gift to maximise the use of that land area and the site. So really only a flat roof can do that. And the obvious point there is that a pitch roof really does the bare minimum of keeping the weather out. And this leads to a question, which is, well, in our towns and cities, what potentials for living are we potentially seeing in our next design brief? And next slide, please, Jade. Just to try and make this memorable for you, I think the answer is that we don't know. And I can pretty much assume that this is a New York University fencing club in 1923. And that's Roger Federer playing Andre Agassi, I think, 2002 on a helicopter pad, probably unpredicted at the time of design. And so that's what I want to leave you with. And also a little disclaimer that with our Nurajacks, I've got one here, I'll show you later. If you're going to land a helicopter on them, talk to us first about how many you might need. And also fencing clubs, we're trying to avoid sharp pointy objects on membranes. But the good news is that a floated deck protects the membrane for decades, so thank you. [Shane Clarke] Excellent. That's great, Joseph. A real sort of overview here of what we can do with a flat roof. You're limited by your imagination there, really, aren't you? Yeah, that's some pretty impressive stuff. Right, I'm going to hand you over to Andrew, who's going to give us a bit of a run through, although very briefly, on the Cathedral Grammar School in Christchurch. He's going to give us some background and context and some inspiration for the project, some challenges he's experienced, and just run through some photos of the finished solution, if you like. And this is our sort of our case study on how we can turn a roof into a usable space. So thank you very much, Andrew. [Andrew Barrie] Okay, thanks for inviting me today. Great to be with you. So I'm going to be talking about the Cathedral Grammar School project, which attracted some attention, I guess, particularly for the timber work, but there was also an amazing job done on the roof. And so you can see that it's a primary school and it's mostly all on one level, but there's an occupiable roof deck over a part of the building. And if we just go to the next slide. The reason for that was this project was done in collaboration with Tezuka Architects, who I spent some time living in Japan, and so they're all friends of mine from my Tokyo days. And so we did the project for this building in collaboration, and they are particularly well known for the school that they designed in Tokyo, which is a kindergarten with a huge oval shaped roof deck. And you can see there that it's reached by a stair that runs down into a courtyard and then the kids can slide down a slide back into the courtyard. And the school, Cathedral Grammar School, was really keen on having that in their project as well. And so if we go to the next slide. So this is the kind of the competition stage scheme. And you can see that there are actually four buildings and that they would be joined together by a colonnade and all of the buildings would have trackable decks. And so part of the project for this one, given that it was the first building built to be built of the series, was that we would have some roof deck, but we needed to allow for the addition of further kind of space a little bit later on in the project. So if we just go to the next slide, which is the plan. So you can see a very, very kind of simple plan of the building, just three blocks of classrooms joined together into an L and a pavilion which sat on quite a prominent site in the corner. And you can see there in the middle of the slide and the ladder which go up to the roof deck which sat over the top of that pavilion. So we go to the next slide. And so you can see this is the kind of the vision for the building when it was finished. But initially, due to budget constraints, what we did was put the roof deck over just the corner pavilion. But we had to allow for deck to be added later, which is the kind of tricky thing. This was a building that was being built after the Christchurch earthquake. So we go to the next slide. So you can see there's the roof. So you can see lots of kind of timber construction down below. And then this very, very kind of shallow membrane roof on the top. And you can see the Nurajacks would sit on top of that kind of, on top of the membrane which sat on a plywood roof structure. And one thing to note in there is the kind of, is the insulation that's wedged in between those two very close together layers. So very shallow roof space. Onto the next one. And so we needed to be able to provide in a very kind of neat way for the future addition of the deck. But also provide a really kind of solid grip. I mean, this is immediately after the earthquake. So we didn't want this roof deck kind of shooting off into the street should there be another quake. And the solution that the engineers came up with was that we provided a little narrow kind of ridge member along the middle of the roof. And that provided a fixing point which the roof could be added to later. You can see part of the roof under construction there on the corner pavilion. And so what's in there, that ridge member is sitting underneath that. And then around the outside is another set of fixings which hold the deck down at the end. So if you go to the next slide. So you can see there's a kind of simple detail that shows the balustrade on the edge. And you can see in the middle, there's that timber member which sits on the apex of the roof with the membrane just shooting straight over the top of it. There's some equal angles on either side of that. And that allows the decking posts to shoot across the top of that at right angles. And then out around the perimeter of the deck, there was a pipe that ran around the edge. And off that pipe were brackets that picked up the other ends of the joist. And all through the middle of that were the Nurajacks holding that all up. We haven't shown those, but those are actually doing the heavy work of holding the deck up and all the rest of it is basically to stop it shooting off in the event of a tornado or an earthquake. You can see some clever detailing there to get that penetration through. So all of those members were fixed right down into the main structure, right down through the roof. Some heavy duty screws running right down to hold that deck on around the perimeter. So if you go, there are a couple of other kind of really tricky things. I mean, what we were trying to do was just solve all of these technical problems in a way that is kind of simple and clean as possible. So we had this kind of tricky problem of the stair and the slide that were going up onto the roof deck. And those are the bits, of course, that the kids love the most. But if we go to the next drawing, we had to find some kind of clever ways of making those sit structurally. And we had actually two different solutions. So you can see because of the stair needing to be level, the stair actually connects structurally into those kind of studs that run around those vertical steel members that come up through the membrane and support the balustrade. And the stair actually connects to a couple of those. In the case of the slide, we needed another solution because designing a slide is quite a tricky thing. There's all sorts of amazing compliance things. So we couldn't make that level. It had to have a kind of step up onto it. And so in that case, the slide actually sits on top of this perimeter steelwork. And it's kind of propped up from below. The other kind of really tricky thing to solve was to do with the ventilation of the space underneath the membrane. Normally that's solved with those mushrooms that kind of pop up at pretty regular intervals through the roof. But of course, having this deck sitting very closely over the top of that roof, we couldn't cope with those. So if we go to the next slide, you'll see that underneath of that, you know, in this very shallow roof space was a kind of waffle structure of pieces that were supporting the plywood top surface of the roof that the membrane sat on. And there was also a whole lot of insulation that needed to go in there. The building's quite heavily glazed, so we needed to pack a lot of insulation into that space. So it was a real kind of problem figuring out how we were going to get ventilation through that. And so the Nuralite folk were helpful in figuring that out. So we sent them a bunch of options and they talked us through it. So if we go to the next slide, you'll see what we did was the interior of the building, this kind of waffle structure of timber that sits under the plywood. And so what we did was put vents on either side of that in the soffits, and then came up with this very elaborate system of small holes that were cut into the blockings and the furrings in order for air to be able to transfer from one side of the building to the other over the top of this kind of insulation layers. So you can see that those blue lines are showing the airflow from one vent to the other. So it came into the vent, went through, went up, went sideways, went across the roof and then back out again. So if we go to the next drawing, so this is how we had to figure that out. So we had to plot the positions of all the screws that were going to go in holding the plywood down, and then figure out with the contractors the easiest way to cut all the different holes, given they were slightly different thicknesses of insulation in the different squares of the waffle. And so we ended up plotting the position of every screw and drawing essentially every piece of timber that was part of that roof structure in order to get those little gaps for the air to flow through. So it was all pretty exciting doing all of that. But the result was that we got this very kind of clean top surface. The installers, H2O, did an amazing job. I've never seen anything like it. They were completely fantastic. [Shane Clarke] Amazing. Yeah, a lot of work and detail into that, that's for sure. [Andrew Barrie] Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of like figuring out. Yeah, this was a real 1am job, that particular drawing. [Shane Clarke] Yeah, right. Now there's a lot of engineering going into that slide too, which I'm not sure how scientific it is, but I can attest to it because I've slid down it myself. Obviously your calculations were right. No, that was fantastic. Hey look, really appreciate the overview of the Cathedral Grammar School. Andrew has to run away in about two minutes, so if you've got any more questions, feel free to fire them through. Now, Joseph's going to quickly touch on the Nurajack solution. Just before we do though, I do have a question that's come from the field and you guys can fight over who answers it. So the question is, could you use a warm roof as a livable space also? Is that still an option as well? We'll take that Shane. [Joseph Nicholls] The answer is yes, absolutely. The Nurajack floated deck system runs over the cold roof or as we're seeing more and more over the warm roof system. No problems there. In both cases, your membrane is protected and you can have a wide range of different surfaces on the floated deck. OK, excellent. [Shane Clarke] Alright, thanks again Andrew. I really enjoyed visiting that job myself. It's out of town, so it was great to go and view. Joseph, you're just going to touch briefly on the Nurajacks and how they help provide a solution for a livable space. [Joseph Nicholls] For anyone who hasn't seen a Nurajack before, this is what they look like. They're a range of different heights and they are adjustable and that's a timber head, but there's also a tile head option. These are pedestals that support the livable area on top of your membrane deck and they also allow it to have access for maintenance and allow the water to run unimpeded off the membrane. What I want to just point out there is that in this slide you're seeing it over a tapered warm roof over concrete, but of course that can go over any membrane substrate combination that you want, as long as it's engineered to suit. And what we're seeing more and more is a combination of both timber and tile. And I've seen jobs we have in New Zealand where there's sand pits, play areas, astroturf, rubber safety surfaces, etc. So it's quite flexible with what you can do. And Nurajacks have their own website and Nuralite have all the details you might need for that. And we're here to help with any specific challenges you might be facing with the design. [Shane Clarke] Excellent, thanks mate. Another couple of more questions have come through. Got one from Chrisley here. She's asked, would a warm roof have removed the complexity of your ventilation? [Andrew Barrie] Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well particularly being able to do that kind of tapering. The engineers would have still had a challenge of trying to figure out how to fix the roof down through the foam into the roof structure. But you can imagine that would be a much simpler exercise than trying to do all of that work with ventilation and you know, triangular holes and vents and things. [Shane Clarke] Excellent. A question here for you, Joseph, I guess. We've said the word insulation. Someone here wants to know what is the insulation? It's a very valid question. What is it? [Joseph Nicholls] Well, looking at the slide that's on screen now, that is the Enertherm PIR, which is a polyisocyanurate. It's an excellent insulation material for its high R values in relation to thickness. So yeah, it's actually a fully, the benefit of a warm roof is that it gives you your roof insulation on the outside of the structure. It's continuous and unbroken and it really enhances the performance compared to the way we used to do. [Shane Clarke] Excellent. That's a good answer. Now, where are we for time? We've had many, many questions come through and we won't get a chance to answer them all. So what we'll do is that at the end of this, we've obviously recorded this webinar. And then when we send it out, we'll also send out the Q&A as a document to answer all the questions that have come through. Unfortunately, we don't get a chance to, probably in another half an hour or so here. And we are very appreciative of your time. So what I'll do is I'll wrap this up. Oh, sorry, the questions keep coming through. I apologise we can't answer them all now, but they will come through in the final document. Right, so I'm going to throw out a second poll of the day. So if you've figured out how to do those things, which is if you can rate our presentation, we want to know how we're doing. We want to know if we're hitting the mark, whether we should keep doing these or don't give up your day job. So by all means, pop your answers in there. Our next webinar is on the 20th of August. And what we'll be talking about then is roof penetrations. I guess one of the advantages with a membrane roof is the flexibility you have, pardon the pun, on how we can deal with roof penetrations, whether they be for solar panels or chimneys or fall arrest systems and things like that. And it is one of the, I guess, weak points in a roof because the membrane comes out of the factory. It's perfectly made and then you go and put a hole in it. So we're going to talk about how we deal with those types of issues. All this webinar, along with all our past webinars, are also available on our education page on the website. And I'm going to run the third poll before I leave you all. Just would you like a follow up or anything that you're working on now that we can help you with? And while that's running, I'll just a quick shout out to Stephens Lawson Architects who have many, many participants in the webinar today. So thank you very much. We appreciate the support. And I guess the challenges for the next webinar, if we get the most participants, we'll also send you morning tea. So enjoy that as well. All right. Hey, thanks again for your time. Thank you to the panellists. Thank you, Joseph. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you to the wonderful producer, Jade, keeping the buttons flying. It was great. And thanks very much for your time. And we'll see you on the 20th. Thanks very much. Thanks very much.