Architect Bob Burnett holds forth from ground floor of his latest house.

“We’re tucking our kids into the fridge at night,” says Bob Burnett. “It’s not right.” Indeed, while San Diegans are enjoying (or cursing) the summer heat, many Kiwis, especially in this frigid, midwinter South Island of New Zealand, are fighting leaky-house drafts and diseases brought on by the damp. “[Many of us] don’t heat our homes,” says Burnett. “It’s another New Zealand here. Or if we do, it’s one room. It’s a living room with a heater. And the rest of the house has freezing cold bedrooms. And we don’t ventilate. We don’t extract the moist, stale air that builds up inside our homes. Inside air is often a lot worse than the air outside. The CO2 builds up. Humans breathe out CO2 and moisture, potentially creating a situation where black mold develops inside the construction. That can lead to asthma and other related diseases affecting elderly people and kids. Thirty thousand Kiwi children are admitted to hospital because of it every year.”

The good news? Burnett’s leading the charge to create “Super Homes,” ventilated but draft-proof, and yes, warm houses which don’t produce these toxins of the damp. Burnett is a leading New Zealand architect. He and I are standing against a temporary rail in a spectacular cliffside house-in-progress site that looks out from its aerie over McCormacks Bay, west of Christchurch.

Burnett is into an architectural trend well-known in Southern California: biophilia. Biophilic design “is an approach to architecture that seeks to connect building occupants more closely to nature.” He says it couldn’t come at a better time. New Zealand, population five million, has one million unhealthy, energy-hungry homes, and 80 percent of its air pollution these days comes from home heating. And yet, “The [winter] temperatures inside these homes are single digits. Not much more than outside temperatures. It’s absolutely unacceptable.”

Bob Burnett’s latest: it’ll be a million-dollar view when the scaffolding comes down.

Part of the problem, he says, is that New Zealand’s building regulations are ancient and inadequate. It seems the construction industry lobbies hard to keep things that way. But Burnett is trying to build this house to his standards, so that it doesn’t “cost” Mother Earth in carbon use. I ask him how he got so committed to becoming a “zero carbon footprint” architect. “I guess my backstory was that the big earthquake we had [in 2010] ejected me and my family from our near-new, warm, comfortable, home. We had to move around rental accommodations, and we experienced some ‘standard’ homes that were damp and moldy. And that really affected the health of our very young children. The three-year-old, particularly, developed severe asthma. The doctor said, ‘I think it’s your house.’ And we just realized that this is how half the population is living. We need to do better than that. So that’s what gave us the idea to start the Super Home movement, because then, and even now, houses are built to minimum standard, and not for purpose. These are not healthy homes. The way they are built, even the new homes can have quite unhealthy temperatures and condensation.”

In summertime, Christchurch fares better. It used to follow trends too common in Southern California, where 8 of 10 people — 32 million — lived in counties with unhealthy levels of ozone or particulate pollution in 2014, according to the U.S. EPA. In the early 200s, Christchurch, a pollution trap lowland, used to suffer from dangerous levels of air pollution for 50-60 “exceedance” days each year. But by 2017, they had got it down to just four.