OT_142: Earthsong Eco-Neighbourhood — Common House Revised Floor Plan (doc 2010)

OT_142: Earthsong Eco-Neighbourhood — Common House Revised Floor Plan (doc 2010)

Source

https://www.earthsong.org.nz/resources/documents — original source (opens in a new tab; the file is not redistributed)

Earthsong Eco-Neighbourhood — Common House Revised Floor Plan

The as-designed spatial program of a NZ cohousing common house — grounds the D04 community-buildings sizing lever (engine params.py #12 common-hall m2_per_hh) and the earthsong_ranui case in a real worked example. A single-page annotated "Revised Common House plan / Floor Layout" (PDF authored "Andrew", produced Sep 2010; depicts the common house completed ~2005). IMAGE-ONLY PDF — pdftotext yields only the title "Revised Common House plan"; all content is a raster floor-plan drawing with green room-by-room callout boxes, read here visually. ⚠ The plan documents the room program (which shared spaces exist and their intended use) but no total floor area, room dimensions, or scale bar is legible on it — so it qualitatively corroborates, but does not independently quantify, the common-hall floor area sought by RT_327. context: both (D04 community-building sizing + thesis cohousing common-house design) → full ingest with key_claims.

Summary

A single-page annotated floor-layout diagram of the Earthsong common house — titled “Revised Common House plan” with the drawing header “Earthsong Eco-Neighbourhood — The Common House — Floor Layout” (PDF produced September 2010; the common house itself was built in 2005 per OT_098). It is an explanatory/communications graphic: a black-line architectural floor plan surrounded by twelve green-headed callout boxes, one per space, describing the design intent of each room. The plan shows a substantial two-level shared building serving the ~32-household community (earthsong_ranui): a covered entrance porch and lobby leading to a central gallery, with a common kitchen (domestic-style, “ergonomically designed for team cooking”, pantry + servery) opening to a large dining room for the cohousing shared meals, a sitting room, a semi-outdoor rotunda, a children’s room and separate teen room (each with its own porch), a guest suite (with mezzanine + en-suite), a common laundry/craft room (explicitly replacing “32 washing machines”), plus a verandah/pergola circulation spine; an upper level (“Upstairs”) holds an activities room (yoga/meditation/study/guest overflow), an office for body-corporate administration, and a balcony. The document is the spatial-program counterpart to the Earthsong Statement of Intent (which partitions the same rooms between internal-community and public/charitable use) and to the whole-project capital cost in OT_098 (Common house / Earthsong Centre, 2005, $1,402,000). Read visually from the raster plan; no dimensions or area figures are legible on it.

Key claims

- claim: "ROOM SCHEDULE (spatial program). The plan labels a two-level common house. GROUND-FLOOR spaces (drawing labels): Entrance Porch, Lobby, Gallery, Guest Room + Bath Room (the 'Guest Suite'), Children's Room, Kitchen + Pantry, Dining Room, Sitting Room, Rotunda Porch (the 'Rotunda'), Teen Room + Teen Porch, Laundry & Crafts, plus a Verandah and Pergola circulation spine, a WC, and 'store' and 'hwc' (hot-water cupboard) utility spaces. UPPER LEVEL (inset drawing headed 'Upstairs'): Activities Room, Office, and a balcony, reached by a stair. Twelve green callout boxes annotate the design intent of each named space (Teen Room, Guest Suite, Lobby & Entrance, Children's Room, Kitchen, Laundry/Craft Room, Upstairs/Activities Room, Office, Rotunda, Sitting Room, Dining Room). NO total floor area, per-room dimensions, or scale bar is legible on the plan."
  source_location: "Floor Layout drawing — room labels and callout-box headings (single page)"
- claim: "DINING ROOM (verbatim callout) — the shared-meal cohousing model. 'Optional shared meals are a defining feature of cohousing'; 'Two or three shared meals per week are prepared by a roster of small teams, which cook every 4-6 weeks'; 'Shared meals provide low key socialising opportunities with neighbours and visitors'; 'Residents can save the time and stress of preparing meals after a hard day's work'; 'Healthy meals, mainly organic, with provision for special diets'; 'The main room is easily cleared or rearranged for large gatherings or celebrations.'"
  source_location: "Floor Layout drawing — 'Dining Room' callout box"
- claim: "KITCHEN + LAUNDRY/CRAFT (verbatim callouts) — shared domestic services replacing per-household duplication. KITCHEN: 'Well appointed kitchen, ergonomically designed for team cooking'; 'Roomy domestic style as opposed to a commercial kitchen'; 'Pantry and air-cooled storage'; 'Mobility friendly work space'; 'Tea/coffee servery adjacent to kitchen'. LAUNDRY/CRAFT ROOM: 'Common laundry avoids the need for 32 washing machines'; 'Several eco-washing machines, tubs and a drier. Well lit work table'; 'Facilities for craft activities'; 'Opportunities for casual social interaction..the \"meeting at the well\" principle'; 'Situated adjacent to sandpit, play area and sheltered deck.'"
  source_location: "Floor Layout drawing — 'Kitchen' and 'Laundry/ Craft Room' callout boxes"
- claim: "SUPPORT & SOCIAL SPACES (verbatim callouts). GUEST SUITE: 'Visitor or family guest accommodation complete with mezzanine and en suite'; 'Saves every home having a spare room'. TEEN ROOM: teenagers' own space away from younger children and adults, noisy activities (e.g. practicing music) away from the family home, a sunny deck for indoor-outdoor socialising, and a kitchenette. CHILDREN'S ROOM: 'Safe and nearby to kitchen / dining. Soft furnishings & toys'; little ones playing in sight and sound of parents preparing the common meal; 'Attention to childrens' needs during neighbourhood meetings.' SITTING ROOM: 'Sunny area for brunches', library, soft furniture, 'TV-on-a-trolley for special occasions'. ROTUNDA: 'Semi outdoor gathering place for outdoor eating and meetings'; 'Wooden floor for dancing, performances and games.' UPSTAIRS ACTIVITIES ROOM: 'A room for smaller meetings and groups, eg yoga, meditation, study'; 'Occasional extra visitor accomodation - guest room overflow.' OFFICE: 'Small administration area for the ongoing body corporate management'; 'Possible shared photocopier/ fax and file server for community local area network'. LOBBY & ENTRANCE: 'Large covered main entrance on south. Another main entrance on the north'; 'Home to notice boards, pigeon holes, displays, coat racks etc'."
  source_location: "Floor Layout drawing — 'Guest Suite', 'The Teen Room', 'Children's Room', 'Sitting Room', 'Rotunda', 'Activities Room', 'Office', 'Lobby & Entrance' callout boxes"

Neobiome Intelligence relevance

This plan is the qualitative counterpart to the engine’s community-buildings sizing lever (D04; params.py #12 *_m2_per_hh, common-hall default 20 m²/hh — user decision 2026-07-12), the gap tracked by RT_327. Its value and its limit are both important to state plainly:

• What it grounds. RT_327’s common-hall default was anchored on the cost-derivation in OT_098 (Common house / Earthsong Centre 2005 = $1,402,000, ≈ 500–640 m² at 32 dwellings = 16–20 m²/hh) — but OT_098 does not state the common house’s actual floor area. This plan confirms the kind and scale of building that cost bought: a two-level shared house with a full commercial-substitute domestic kitchen + large dining room, a common laundry explicitly sized to replace 32 household washing machines, a guest suite, separate children’s and teen rooms, a sitting room, a semi-outdoor rotunda, and an upstairs activities room + office. That is consistent with — and independent qualitative support for — the order-of-magnitude of the 500–640 m² / 16–20 m²/hh estimate: a common house of only a few hundred m² could not hold this program. It is a real NZ worked example for the D04 community-building typology (what a ~32-household cohousing common hall actually contains).
• What it does NOT do (the honest limit). The plan carries no legible total floor area, no dimensioned rooms, and no scale bar (faint wall-dimension annotations exist on the drawing but are illegible in this raster). It therefore advances RT_327 but does not resolve it — the exact common-hall m² still needs a dimensioned architectural plan or the architect’s floor-area schedule. Do not enter any floor-area number into the engine on the strength of this document; the 20 m²/hh default remains an assumed value pending a dimensioned source.
• Case evidence. Feeds the earthsong_ranui case page as the common-house spatial-program record, complementing the interviewee testimony (INT_005/INT_006, which describe the common house as the community’s “home” and the centre of cohesion) with the documented room-by-room design intent.

Thesis relevance (context: both). A concrete NZ example of cohousing common-house design for the thesis’s cohousing/intentional-community strand: the room program operationalises core cohousing principles the callouts name explicitly — optional shared meals as “a defining feature of cohousing”, shared services that remove per-household duplication (one common laundry vs 32 machines; a guest suite so no home needs a spare room), passive-supervision adjacencies (children’s room in sight/sound of the kitchen), and casual-encounter design (the “meeting at the well” principle at the laundry). It pairs with the Earthsong Statement of Intent (which governs how the same rooms are shared between the internal community and the wider public) as the design-intent half of Earthsong’s shared-commons model.

Research targets

Documents to retrieve

• Candidate, not raised as a formal target: a dimensioned architectural plan or the architect’s floor-area schedule for the Earthsong common house / Earthsong Centre, which would state the actual gross floor area (and per-room areas) that this communications-graphic plan omits — the piece needed to resolve RT_327 rather than merely advance it. Likely held by the project architect (cf. INT_006) or in the WCC building-consent record. Low-to-medium priority (the 20 m²/hh default is serviceable as an assumed value; a real figure would upgrade it to high).

Research gaps

• RT_327 (advanced, NOT resolved): this plan documents the common-hall room program and corroborates the scale implied by the OT_098 cost-derivation (16–20 m²/hh), but states no floor area — so the quantitative residual (an actual common-hall m² for params.py #12) remains open.

Notes

Primary Earthsong design/communications document, read visually from the raster floor plan (image-only PDF — pdftotext -layout returns only the title “Revised Common House plan”; the page was rendered with pdftoppm and read as an image). Downloaded as an authoritative file within the Earthsong document collection (PDF authored “Andrew”, Word → PScript5 → Ghostscript, produced 29 Sep 2010 — the same production chain as the sibling Earthsong governance primaries); not AI-prepared / not agent-retrieved → no ## Retrieval provenance block required.

data_quality: high — a single authoritative primary Earthsong design document, NZ-relevant, read directly (not AI-synthesised), but standing alone (not triangulated), which keeps it off verified per model_design.md §2 (the verified↔high line is independent corroboration — a second source or a recomputation — not merely that content traces to the raw). It carries no quantitative figures at all (a room program, not a metered dataset), so a “does every figure trace to the raw” test is vacuous here; high matches every sibling Earthsong ot_ page (OT_092, OT_093, OT_094, OT_098).

⚠ Image-only PDF caveat. Because the plan is a scanned raster with no extractable text, the room labels and callout wording in key_claims were transcribed by reading the rendered image at 200–400 dpi. The labels and callout text are legible and transcribed verbatim (minor original typos preserved: “Mobility friendly” appears as “freindly”, “accommodation” as “accomodation”). The wall-dimension annotations on the drawing are NOT legible at available resolution and no scale bar or area total is present — hence no floor-area figure is asserted.

Sibling to the other Earthsong primaries in the corpus (Interview V [INT_005], Interview VI [INT_006], OT_078, OT_092, OT_093, OT_094, OT_098, LIT_018) and to the Earthsong governance instruments (Statement of Intent, Trust Deed, Body Corporate rules, membership + cohousing agreements). All are aggregated by the case page earthsong_ranui.

Connections

Links to

Sources (6): LIT_018 · OT_078 · OT_092 · OT_093 · OT_094 · OT_098

Cases (1): Earthsong Eco-Neighbourhood

Referenced by

Sources (2): OT_143 · OT_240

Cases (1): Earthsong Eco-Neighbourhood