Disruptive Innovation

Tukanga - A Living Process for Reverence Architecture

How can architecture radically disrupt outdated systems to reimagine design as a living, regenerative process that restores balance for people, place, and planet?

I have developed The Immersion Process Tukanga to create Reverence Architecture. This process is transformational in that it opens itself to life. It is cyclical, and ever evolving, and shifts away from a linear, fragmented model to one that works from an indigenous lens. The purpose of the process is to activate potential of people and place. To step away from harm and move towards balance, connection and positive life-giving benefits to people, to place and to the surrounding community.

Reverence Architecture awakens this potential by weaving the foundational frameworks of Regenerative Practice, Living Buildings, Biomimicry, Sacred Form and Tikanga Maori. These foundations are embedded into Tukanga, which starts before design begins and continues throughout its lifecycle. The agreed values and guiding principles helps the myriad of decisions shift from fear to ones made with aroha. In this way, the process itself becomes transformative - you cannot create Reverence Architecture otherwise.

Tukanga mimics nature and follows a lifecycle, starting with deepening relationship through conception, gestation, emergence, existence to death/rebirth. It slows down the design process and purposefully creates a space to deepen relationships with place, people and community. This creates the conditions for Story of Place to emerge, guiding the brief, design, and material choices. This also opens the way to biomimicry, materiality and biophilia that is connected to the land and the people which helps energetically and physically bring the brief into form. All this is done with intent, as we work with conscious understanding of materiality, carbon footprint, positive energy, positive water and ecology of place.

This regenerative approach means that as we learn to emulate nature we unlearn our destructive behaviours. We take the time with each other to reflect, to challenge and support each other to grow. We check that we are making decisions from aroha and that we are meeting the regenerative fundamentals we have set ourselves. The process seeks to collaborate at all times, to ensure open communication and trust as we work towards agreed guiding principles, values and goals – both specific and intangible. We purposefully imagine the lifecycle moving anti-clockwise to re-shift our conditioned patterning. The experience of this process has been summed as one where the right hemisphere of ourselves is embedded into the left hemisphere – where the right serves the left rather than dominates it.

Through this process, circular principles are embedded at each stage. Waste is designed out, materials and products are chosen with intent, and we seamlessly integrate the built form into the land as we simultaneously work to regenerate to enable all of life to flourish.

This shift is urgent. The construction industry is one of the world’s biggest drivers of environmental collapse, responsible for 42% of global carbon emissions (architecture 2030), an unprecedented rise in new building, and a destructive take-make-waste culture. The industry is in crisis but generally is in denial of the breadth of this crisis. It is only through disruptive innovation that we can make a real difference. Tukanga reframes practice from short-term, linear, and extractive, to long-term, cyclical, collaborative, and regenerative. It is meaningful disruption, demonstrating that another way is possible.

This way of working has the potential to grow. We are deeply fortunate to live in Aotearoa New Zealand, where this holistic way of being and doing is embedded in mātauranga Māori. This enables a readiness and openness to the full potential of others within the construction industry to take this mantle of change, to find their unique offering to help others reconnect to themselves and to all of life. To help spread this exponentially, education and sharing is key. This is another important aspect of this work. This shift within the construction industry is vital and can only be achieved through radical disruption of an outdated system, one project at a time.