Innholdsfortegnelse for January-February 2021 i Architecture NZ

GREAT TO SEE THAT TE KĀHUI Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects has, at last, taken a stand on the climate crisis. And, despite Greta Thunberg calling New Zealand out for a lack of action, it’s encouraging, too, that our government has declared a climate emergency. Better late than never, especially when reading some of the submissions to the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment’s Building for Climate Change (BfCC) programme. Getting any speedy, effective alterations to our building codes and practices to combat this crisis looks nigh on impossible. Perhaps Snøhetta co-founder Kjetil Trædal Thorsen’s dire predictions are right – that our industry will not be able to change rapidly enough to play its vital part in reversing the impact of global warming. Then there’s the feud among signatories…

Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum opened the doors to its transformed Te Ao Mārama South Atrium on 3 December, after an extensive 18-month refurbishment. The new space, designed by Jasmax, with FJMT and designTRIBE, integrates local mana whenua and Pasifika concepts, creating a generous bicultural precinct embodying the principles of manaakitanga. “This project is about deepening the relationship between the building and its place in Tāmaki Makaurau, uplifting the cultural dignity of Te Ao Mārama and delivering bicultural spaces for the people of Auckland,” says Marianne Riley, associate principal, Kaiāwhina, Jasmax. On arrival, Ngāti Whātua ōrākei artist Graham Tipene’s Te Tatau Kaitiaki (The Guardians Gateway) forms a threshold both to welcome manuhiri and to provide a point from which visitors can be formally welcomed into Te Ao Mārama.…

IN LATE 1994, AN UGLY NEW PROBLEM surfaced in New Zealand buildings – far too many were found to be quickly rotting. Within a few years, the problem mushroomed into a massive, full-fledged disaster generating an entirely new industry known as weathertightness remediation. As the new industry evolved, a new perspective – extreme risk aversion – appeared. Not only were many thousands of buildings rotting but the fix was becoming ruinously expensive. Risk aversion enabled the capture of the industry by what can be summarised as the full re-clad/re-roof solution. Only a small minority advocated for effective and less-expensive, targeted repairs. To the majority, as building surveyor Mark Hazlehurst put it, targeted repairs were “… about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit”.1 More than a quarter of a century…

THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A GOOD ART GALLERY: just so much to see, learn and take home. Somehow, you never see everything, which then keeps you heading back for more. So, why not remove the circling and figuratively become lost in your own gallery? Why not wander around being inspired under starlight or with your morning cornflakes? Why not make house by making gallery? Athfield Architects has done just this in suburban Christchurch for two avid collectors and curators: Anthony Wright and Selene Manning. Amongst other things, they direct the Canterbury Museum and run a classic car restoration company, respectively. Athfields calls the building the Wrightmann House but it deserves having a ‘gallery’ prefix added. For, while the neighbours tackle their long narrow sites with house walls, or townhouse walls…

I AM WRITING AT THE TAIL END of the award season: that time of year when our mates pop up on stage trailing along a client or two, a builder and a collection of the crew from the back room to receive a gong. The award programmes come thick and fast: Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects, the Property Council, the Designers Institute, the Architectural Designers and others out there in Aotearoa. There are those from afar too, importuning us to enter their programmes and post off euros, dollars, fat image files and florid text, all wrapped in high hopes. I have an ambivalent engagement in these things, wringing my hands at my failure to win awards in programmes I haven’t entered and feeling deeply inadequate when I…

Warren and Mahoney, in association with Snohetta and Salmond Reed, has released the concept design for the reinstated Christ Church Cathedral and its supporting buildings, which will make up Christchurch’s Cathedral Quarter. Warren and Mahoney project principal Peter Marshall says the Cathedral remains the hero of the vision, supported by contemporary buildings that both contrast and complement it in terms of aesthetics and function. “To the north of the Cathedral will be the new Cathedral Visitors’ Centre; on the ground level, there will be a cafe, with terraced steps leading down to a lowered, landscaped courtyard and museum and retail. To the south, will be the Cathedral Centre, providing much-needed gathering spaces, offices and amenities,” says Marshall. “Both are designed to incorporate glass and timber textures to promote light and…

At the height of the last recession, jobs were few and far between. While my peers were flocking to the mining-driven boom in Australia, I packed my bags and headed south to Ōtautahi, Christchurch. This was January 2010. Little did I know that the somewhat-sleepy garden city set out in 1850 was about to undergo a seismic shift, in more ways than one. The initial September 2010 earthquake felt catastrophic at the time but, looking back, its effect on the structure of the city was limited. Housing was extensively damaged and a significant number of predominantly brick buildings was lost, leaving many ‘missing teeth’ throughout the city. There was not, however, the opportunity to question the basic structure of the city. It was the February 2011 earthquake and aftershocks that…

WE MEET IN THE LANEWAY OUTSIDE The Hotel Britomart in downtown Auckland. Cheshire Architects principal Dajiang Tai begins the talk in interface gestures: “So it is up and down, best operators, left and right”. He’s talking about the hotel’s amplification of the existing ‘Britomart language’ – the geometry and spatial choice the precinct offers. Basement, ground floor, first floor, rooftop: swipe every which way for “energetic” restaurants and bars and designer brand retail. The Britomart language began more than a decade ago with Roukai Lane. Cheshire Architects and developer Cooper and Company, showed that it was possible to make the outward-facing Customs Street and Quay Street perimeter buildings of Britomart face inwards to what was, back then, essentially a mass of car parks. Today, Britomart is a hive of activity,…

Urban Art Village O’CONNELL STREET, AUCKLAND TUESDAY, 13 OCTOBER 2020 The theme of connection was the thread throughout the 2020 Urban Art Village. Following Auckland’s two Covid-19 lockdowns, the exhibitors felt it was important to recognise interaction with the public and especially those working back in the CBD. Funded and supported by Heart of the City as part of Auckland Art Week, Urban Art Village comprised four interactive installations from University of Auckland architecture students and one giveawayformat game show. O’Connell Street was closed and pedestrianised for the event. This was the fourth iteration for Matt Liggins, teacher at the Auckland architecture school, who began the Urban Art Village in 2018 under Deborah White’s initiative. Liggins’ four-hour game show was a hybrid of It’s in the Bag, Trivial Pursuit and…

On a blustery afternoon in early September, a white van backed into the dock-way at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. The van had travelled from Haumoana in Hawke’s Bay. At the wheel was Jacob Scott, eldest son of architect John Scott, accompanied by his brother Adam. In the van were 67 A1 AGFA photographic paper boxes: 50 red, 12 green and five yellow. In the boxes lay upwards of 7000 original drawings by John Scott and his staff, covering all his projects (more than 200) over the years of his architectural practice. Each box was marked with the names of the projects it housed. It was during Queen’s Birthday weekend in 2018 that I first saw the archive and inspected the contents of one of the boxes, along with…

FOLLOWING ON FROM THEIR EXPERIMENTAL and self-built ‘Dog Box’ in 2013, Ben Mitchell-Anyon and Sally Ogle of Patchwork Architecture have made a virtue of responding to the rigours of marginal hillside sites in Wellington and the challenge of building affordably. The names of their projects have continued to be as arresting and pithy as their architecture. In schemes such as ‘Stealth Bomber’, ‘Pyramid Scheme’ and ‘Hot Box’, their practice has continued to emphasise economy – spatially, structurally, financially and environmentally – with a little wit thrown in for good measure. In looking for a house to review that would stir me from the grooves of my own architectural practice, their ‘10x10’ project grabbed my attention: a miniature skyscraper tucked into a Wellington hill, freshly detailed and without a wasted gesture.…

A DISCREET BLACK CANOPY OVERHEAD signals the city-side entrance to The Hotel Britomart on Customs Street East, flanked either side by oversized planters encroaching on a busy downtown pavement. A first glance through the heritage facade opening gives little away – a bustling bread shop serving fresh pastries and loaves and a scattering of small, well-occupied tables in a covered laneway. But we look a little deeper and, in the distance, a row of tall, black-steel-framed doors is opened wide, revealing what looks like a sophisticated, softly lit living room. The hotel may seem hard to find at first, but the magic is in the journey. We follow the city’s bluestone paving through the laneway and around a dog-leg and it crosses the threshold into the hotel lobby, albeit now…

Drawing Room TOI MOROKI – CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART (COCA) CHRISTCHURCH 28 NOVEMBER 2020 – 20 FEBRUARY 2021 On the upper floor of CoCA, a propositional architectural drawing floats through three spaces of the gallery. In the largest space, there is an enormous mechanical arm, tethered to the wall by its elbow. It moves in slow and deliberate arcs across the room, sweeping back and forth over the floor as if carefully searching for a lost contact lens. It knows it lost it somewhere along this line but it’s so dark… It hums a mechanical tune as it searches. In the second, smaller space, the drawing becomes virtual. A VR environment shows the mechanical arm in accurate virtual fidelity, searching away. The arm suddenly begins to play up. It replicates…