Innholdsfortegnelse for July-August 2020 i Architecture NZ

ONE OF THE MANY THINGS WE DIDN’T see coming with the arrival of Covid-19 to our shores was the nationwide protest on Queen’s Birthday in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. Sparked by the brutal video of George Floyd’s death – a sickening public lynching – it’s not surprising that so many would want to take a stand against such inhumanity. But that so many would do so in the midst of a pandemic – here, in breach of Alert Level Two mass gathering and social distancing rules – was, depending on your point of view, either selfless and incredibly brave or dangerous and irresponsible. The sentiment played out in solidarity with protests across the world. Perhaps the pandemic has heightened the sense that we…

GOOD THINGS TAKE TIME Several years in the making, the Wanaka Community Hub opened its doors to over 65 community support organisations and agencies in the Upper Clutha area late last year. Built on land gifted to the Wanaka Community House Charitable Trust by the Anglican Diocese, the building sits opposite the historic St Columba Church. “The curving timber clad wall of the auditorium is a direct response to the client’s desire to maintain a prescribed distance from the historic church,” explains architect Barry Condon of Condon Scott Architects. “This shape, in turn, lends itself well to the form of the 150-seat auditorium – narrower at the stage end and wider towards the body.” The curved auditorium is offset with an opposing curve of splayed metal fins, which forms the…

AUSTRALIA’S DEVASTATING 2019–2020 bushfire season was a regional wake-up call to the link between climate change and increased extreme events. However, any actionable learnings from this tragedy (i.e. global warming boosted the bushfire risk by at least 30 per cent), have been eclipsed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Our country’s reaction has shown we can all make dramatic change to the way we live, work and play when needed. We are now borrowing billions from future generations for our recovery. But, what of the other, much deeper emergency facing our planet: the continuing rise of temperatures and carbon-dioxide concentration? The Covid-19 lockdown gave us an eerie glimpse into what fighting the climate crisis might look like – cities no longer belching pollution, empty roads and clear skies. These lockdowns around the…

FROM ABOVE, THIS 8000M2 BUILDING IS A simple composition: a large, two-storeyed rectangular form bisected vertically (north to south) at ground level by a smaller, thinner version of the first. On the outside, this secondary arm introduces a materiality of warm, cedar battens to an otherwise industrial palette of glass, glazed aluminium and concrete (with a vertical pattern echoing the timber). Its northern wing is surrounded by a public park and it houses meeting rooms and hospitality areas. Its southern wing (adjacent to a small car parking area) acts as a porte cochere that leads to a compressed (3-metre tall) arrival sequence, which then erupts into a dramatic, internal verticality. It is here, at the main public core just above the intersection of those two rectangles, where Warren and Mahoney’s…

AMONGST THIS YEAR’S NZIA AUCKLAND Local Architecture Housing shortlist – almost exclusively a mix of large houses in affluent suburbs and affluent holiday houses on beautiful coastlines – the Bowden house by Belinda George Architects, in association with Mandeno Design, is the most intriguing. The semicircular plan, timber shingle roof and diversity of pathways in the ‘hero’ photo above (not to mention the backgrounding of what is likely an epic coastal view) lead one to ask: “What is going on here…?” This holiday house sits on a clifftop edge on the Tutukaka Coast, north of Whangarei, on the side of a hill that slopes down to the north and parallel to the sea. The house forms an enclosure with the bush that it faces – a feeling of encampment that…

The fallout from the global pandemic has highlighted the fragility of the hospitality industry, public spaces, public infrastructure and other critical environments facilitating social interaction. As policymakers scramble to catch up with the spread of the pandemic, architects and designers are placed in a unique position to re-shape our public spaces and hospitality industries by analysing spatial opportunities and identifying flaws within the current regulatory framework. To date, there are no formal design guidelines or building codes that specifically respond to Covid-19 or other pandemics. But, the pandemic has exemplified the inextricable link between architecture and regulation. In Aotearoa, the immediate impact of government restrictions enforced on existing spaces was highlighted in the chaotic transition between Level 2, Level 3 and Level 4 lockdowns. Current precautions taken to protect people…

WE HAVE RIGHTLY BECOME concerned, if not obsessed, with matters of public health. We have become familiar with statistics, as we listened to the 1pm Covid data and understood that it was not just the daily score that we needed to understand but the trend – that the shape of data curves might reveal more than simple numbers in measuring our success in stemming the bug’s advance. We have learned to compare numbers of infected against those cured and are wise to the critical importance of the number of tests undertaken in assessing a country’s infection rate. More recently, we have begun to focus on other figures, those that measure the injury to our economy and the wellbeing of those whose livelihoods have been obliterated in the drastic measures undertaken…

TOP AWARD FOR TAURANGA CAMPUS NZIA Local Award-winning project, the University of Waikato Tauranga Campus, has also picked up a top education award for its innovative learning environment design. The Jasmax-designed campus won the ‘New Construction/Entire New Educational Facility’ category at Learning Environments Australasia’s 12th Annual Awards for Excellence in Educational Facilities, up against a shortlist of projects from New Zealand, Australia and Singapore. The new campus – a building massed into two volumes, linking two streets with a pedestrian laneway – embeds bicultural design and storytelling throughout the project. The judges said the campus was a statement of the importance and opportunity for educational buildings to fully and comprehensively understand and engage with their cultural context. “It is a learning environment that engenders a deep sense of belonging that…

LOCATION 400 Maunganui Road, Mt Maunganui NUMBER OF STOREYS Four (including basement) TOTAL FLOOR AREA 8000m2 CLIENT Zespri ARCHITECT Warren and Mahoney PROJECT TEAM Bren Morrison, Asha Page, Rod Rudduck, Hannah Thompson, Greg Hughes (Architecture Page Henderson – site observation) TIME SCHEDULE Design: 24 months Construction: 36 months BUILDER/CONTRACTOR Hawkins WORKPLACE STRATEGIST Veldhoen + Company ACOUSTICS Marshall Day Acoustics PROJECT MANAGER Beca FAÇADE ENGINEER Thermosash; Peer Reviewer - Lautrec INTERIORS Warren and Mahoney FURNITURE Vidak, Zenith, Unison, Modern Office, Statement ID, Unison, UFL, Kada, Fletcher Systems, Simon James, IMO, Aspect, Harrows INTERNAL WALLS Prime Panels, Gib, Autex, Asona INTERIOR PRODUCTS Skope, Fisher and Paykel, Zenith, Metal Concepts, Laminex FLOORING Forbo by Inzide, Jacobsen, Advance Flooring DOORS Dormakaba, Etsy UPHOLSTERY Camira/Textilia, Maxwell Rodgers, Khadrat, Maharam…

FROM AFAR, IT IS SOMETIMES HARD TO believe that Queenstown is real. The Remarkables really are remarkable, the sky and vistas huge, the landscape beautiful. Throw in all those new and ready to publish cedar-schist-and-glass houses with exquisite furniture and, to those of us elsewhere, it can feel a bit like an Instagram feed. Increasingly, it seems smaller houses are making their way into our remote view of southern life. There is beauty in small, and especially so in Central Otago, where it would take a Herculean effort to make anything half as epic as the landscape. We can all picture small gold mining cabins, holiday cribs furnished with Monopoly and hopefully a blanket, those rural sheds that Grahame Sydney paints in the wonderfully clear, low light. These buildings don’t…

The brief was complicated to say the least: to co-locate Christchurch’s Shirley Boys’ High School and Avonside Girls’ High School; two single-sex schools with almost 150 years of history between them, each with a fairly conservative outlook and pedagogy. According to John Sofo, director of ASC Architects, the firm that eventually carried out its design, there was a large and vociferous group of people that was “staunchly firm that they wanted to remain identifiably separate, with separate cultures, separate ways of working and physically divided”. To add to this complexity, the project was conceived under the Public Private Partnership model, which, in broad terms, requires the architect, alongside other stakeholders, to act as developer and lease the asset back to the government for 20 years. Every material choice was scrutinised…

LOCATION Lake Hayes, Otago FLOOR SIZE 265m2 ARCHITECT Anna-Marie Chin Architects PROJECT TEAM Anna-Marie Chin, Ngaio Hart, Sam Austin BUILDER/CONTRACTOR Ross Brothers Construction PROJECT MANAGER Project 360 ENGINEER Lewis Bradford INTERIOR ARCHITECT Client QUANTITY SURVEYOR Project 360 INTERIOR, KITCHEN AND BATHROOM DESIGN AMCA and client WOOD BURNER Yunca PRESSED METAL PANELS Ico Traders WINDOW JOINERY Eurotech WinDoors PAINT Resene FOOTNOTES 1 Wainwright, Oliver. ‘The case for never demolishing another building’, The Guardian, theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/13/the-case-for-never-demolishing-another-building 2 Koolhaas, Rem. Preservation is Overtaking Us, edited by Mark Wigley, Jordan Carver, Rem Koolhaas, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Planning Columbia University. Graduate School of Architecture and issuing body Preservation New York, NY: GSAPP Books, 2014. 3 Jencks, Charles, Nathan Silver. ‘Adhocism, The Case for Improvisation’, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972. 4 Balsavar, Durganand. “I realise that life is…