Innholdsfortegnelse for March-April 2021 i Architecture NZ

“FROM THE INFORMATION WE HAD, AND the advice we got, trying to take into account all of the precedents we were setting, I think we did the best we could.” On the 10th anniversary of the devastating Ōtautahi Christchurch earthquake of 22 February 2011, former National Prime Minister Sir John Key’s assessment in the New Zealand Herald of his government’s handling of the city rebuild is dispiriting, to say the least. So much for a market-led recovery. Clearly Key didn’t watch film-maker Gerard Smyth’s outstanding documentary When a City Rises, screened on TVNZ to coincide with the anniversary. It is a poignant celebration of what people power and community can achieve in the face of adversity but also a searing indictment on the job Key’s government did. As the documentary…

Jasmax senior associate, and founding member of the practice’s Waka Māia, Elisapeta Heta (Ngātiwai ki Whangaruru me Waikato Tainui) has collaborated with veteran photographer John Miller (Ngāpuhi) to bring us Pouwātū: Active Presence, currently exhibiting at Objectspace as part of Auckland Arts Festival. Miller, perhaps best known for his documentation of radical protest, has recorded Māori people, culture and communities throughout his 40-plus-year career. The subjects of his candid images range from people during everyday occurrences to significant moments – at Rātana Pā, Māori Women’s Welfare League hui, and Ngā Puna Waihanga Māori Artists and Writers gatherings, the Polynesian Panthers and Ngā Tamatoa, and many more. “Pouwātū is a celebration of transformative events in Aotearoa’s history, with an overarching theme of sovereignty at its core,” explains Heta. “It was first…

When I heard that Maurice Smith had died at his home on Cleaves Hill Road, Harvard, at the age of 94, I was filled with a deep sadness for this remarkable architect and his rich life in the USA, teaching generations of young architects while hardly known in his birth country of New Zealand. As a young college student in the summer of 1955, I passed out programmes at his remarkable geodesic dome at the Auckland Birthday Carnival at Western Springs. I listened as Maurice and a group of architects talked about how this was the forerunner of the way we would live in the 21st century and beyond. I never thought that, just over a decade later, I would be the owner of the house that he and his…

ON MY FIRST VISIT TO THE SPRAWLING SCION campus at Whakarewarewa, Rotorua, in 2012, for a New Zealand Herald feature about biofuels from wood, I arrived at a nondescript entrance via a driveway off Sala Street. Surrounded by forest, it felt like a step back in time to a very 1970s’ architecture – rows of sheds housing labs and offices, gliding on and on in a labyrinth of corridors. Naturally, for a Crown Research Institute focused on the science of forestry and all things wood, everything was made of timber: laminated beams, wooden floors, wooden panelling, spiral timber staircase – even wooden name tags on the office doors. Today, as I approach Scion’s new, showy front door at what is now known as the Te Papa Tipu Innovation Park, the…

STRAIGHTLINEBOOK.NZ, 2020 A record of houses lived in and loved by their inhabitants, 50 years on, is like water to the soul of the thirsty architect. I Never Met a Straight Line I Didn’t Like is a photographic portrayal of 12 houses designed and built in Christchurch during the 1960s and early 1970s, presenting the brilliance and quirk of architects during this time. Straight lines do not imply a lack of personality and authors Gaudin and Arnold have selected the best remaining examples of the ‘Christchurch Style’ to prove this; in doing so, they also demonstrate good design prevailing with time. The rather hefty book is dominated by works by Warren and Mahoney – and rightfully so – given that Miles Warren and Maurice Mahoney were at the heart of…

Drawing its inspiration from Wellington’s famed weather patterns (perhaps, most notably, the wind) and the city’s hilly topography and maritime setting, Studio Pacific Architecture’s Tākina Convention and Exhibition Centre will provide a unique sculptural form on Wellington’s waterfront when it opens in mid-2023. Work began on the 18,000m2 building, which will feature 10,000m2 of dedicated convention space across its top two floors and a 1650m2 ground-floor exhibition gallery to accommodate touring exhibitions, in September 2019. The primary structure is expected to be completed midway through this year, with the facade installation scheduled to begin early in the second quarter. Project Director Stephen McDougall says Tākina will be clad primarily in a shimmering bronze glass; this references Ūpoko-o-te-Ika-a-Māui (Māui’s head of the fish) and will change in transparency throughout the day…

One of the country’s most significant private art collections, the Ravenscar Collection, is soon to be rehoused in an imposing museum on Christchurch’s Rolleston Avenue, designed by Patterson Associates Architects. The $15-million development, funded by the Ravenscar Trust, replaces the original Ravenscar House at Scarborough, the former home of trust benefactors Jim and Dr Susan Wakefield, which was red-zoned after the Canterbury earthquakes. Project Director Andrew Mitchell says earthquake rubble was used in the aggregate to make the pre-cast concrete panels for the 520m2 house, including granite from the Scarborough property, red brick from another house owned by the Wakefields, which was demolished post-earthquakes, and volcanic stone remnants gifted by The Arts Centre of Christchurch. “Susan loved the idea of a red building, referencing the brick-red volcanic rock of Banks…

The 2020 Brick Bay Folly winner walks a line between digital promise and its realised form. It is not the first piece to traverse this route; indeed, it is almost implicit in the competition’s format, appealing as it does to students and recent graduates. So pervasive is the generation of form through digital manipulation that it has become the default lingua franca. And why not? The ability to generate form, to manipulate it through generative parameters and spin a projection around on the screen, or travel within it using a headset, is intoxicating and a sometimes-welcome escape from what early diginauts called ‘the big room’. Getting the thing built, though, remains a challenge. The gap between the projected and the probable is still struggling to be bridged, even as new…

LYTTELTON IS FULL OF CHARACTER AND characters. It is the kind of place where a dining table carries the stories, welcoming and mirth of all the comings and goings. There is whānau, of course, but also room for more, be they neighbours, visitors or a friend arriving fresh from digger-driving to borrow an iron. In fact, we saw a second man out walking an iron as we traversed Lyttelton’s network of sometimes zigzagging, sometimes straight-up little streets. There is quirk happening; it comes with the artists, the port, the grit and the creases. And it is here, amongst community, that architect Michael O’Sullivan and the team at Bull O’Sullivan Architecture have added another beautifully ‘at-home’ home. I say added rather than ‘reworked’, as could describe an alteration, or ‘built’, as…

LOCATION Te Papa Tipu Innovation Park, Tītokorangi Drive (formerly Long Mile Road), Rotorua FLOOR SIZE 1866m2 ARCHITECT RTA Studio and Irving Smith Architects PROJECT TEAM RTA Studio: Richard Naish, Ben Dallimore, Adam Dwen, Natalie Stebben, Thomas Keeler; Irving Smith Architects: Jeremy Smith, Andrew Irving, Blair Sigley, Gaby Van Der Boom CONSTRUCTION/BUILDER Watts & Hughes STRUCTURAL ENGINEER Dunning Thornton HYDRAULIC AND MECHANICAL ENGINEER eCubed Building Workshop ELECTRICAL AND LIGHTING ENGINEER Professional Consulting Services GEOTECHNICAL CONSULTANT Tonkin + Taylor QUANTITY SURVEYOR Kingstons SURVEYOR Cheal ACOUSTICS Marshall Day Acoustics PROJECT MANAGER RDT Pacific FIRE CONSULTANT Crossfire FLOORING Advance Tecsom Linear carpet, Batten & Cradle AccoustiFlor, Comcork, Jacobsen, TimberLab glulam and LVL, XLam EXTERNAL WALLS TimberLab LVL diagrid structure, Pacific Build Supply Swisspearl cladding INTERNAL WALLS XLam CLT walls, TimberLab LVL diagrid structure WINDOWS…

IT’S TEMPTING TO DRAW COMPARISONS between the quirky, colourful heart of Wellington that is Cuba Street and its Caribbean island namesake, especially when it is graced by local institutions such as Floriditas, the Havana Bar and Fidel’s. But the street is, in fact, named after an early New Zealand Company settler ship, the Cuba, which sailed into Wellington’s harbour on 3 January 1840. Originally home to brickyards, a local produce market and a bell hanger, Cuba Street also became home to the People’s Palace in 1907, when the Salvation Army replaced its Paulina Rescue Hostel for women, built in 1894, with a temperance hotel on the same site. The large Edwardian establishment was to become one of more than 40 buildings of historic significance a century later, when Cuba Street…

Utu is one of my favourite Māori words because of its multiplicity of meanings. Probably the most common meaning we know is revenge and, yes, this is one way of defining utu. But the meaning taken for this project is balance or equilibrium. This thesis is intended as research and a provocation to designers in Aotearoa to think critically about indigenous design. I’m incredibly proud to be Māori – a half-caste one, a speckled kāmara. We all understand in Aotearoa how to navigate boundaries between cultures. These were the feelings I also felt growing up and since coming to architecture school. Te ao Māori, te ao Pākehā. Te ao Māori and architecture. It took a few years for me to attempt my own Māori-inspired project; I observed other students attempting…

AN AWFULLY LONG TIME AGO, I came across a very large tent peg impaled in the pavement just off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. A rope stretched from the top of the peg to a very elegant mansion and a sign above the door identified the building as the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum and announced a show inside that looked promising. I was an architectural neophyte and, while I vaguely knew the names Hans Hollein, Oswald Ungers, Ettore Sottsass, Arata Isozaki and Richard Meier, it was Buckminster Fuller’s name that had me bounding up the steps. It was his name that had fanned the embers of my earlier interest in studying architecture. It was, too, his geodesic constructions that stretched my understanding of the possibilities of building, beyond those of Christchurch’s…

Mark your calendars and get your submissions ready because entries are now open for the Interior Awards 2021. This year marks a decade of celebrating New Zealand’s most innovative interiors and the programme is back with all your favourite categories, plus a few tweaks – including naming New Zealand’s Designer of the Decade, as voted by the industry and a special public vote. A super-jury, made up of past and present Interior Awards jurors and Supreme Award winners, will select its top three designers – those who have had the greatest impact on interior design and the industry since 2010 – and a fourth name, chosen by public vote, will be added to the short list. Judging will take place in mid-May, alongside the Interior Awards judging. This year’s Interior…

The Govett-Brewster is familiar to many as the home of Aotearoa-born film-maker and kinetic sculptor Len Lye (1901–1980). Last year, the gallery celebrated 40 years of Len Lye and five years since the opening of its Len Lye Centre extension. The gallery’s relationship with Lye goes back to its first decade, when New Plymouth welcomed the New York-based artist back to Aotearoa in 1977 with the exhibition Len Lye: Kinetic Works. While Lye was a fierce critic of museum attitudes towards kinetic sculpture, his working relationship with the Govett-Brewster was positive and the gallery provided a desirable location for The Len Lye Foundation to deposit its collection after its formation and the artist’s death in 1980. Following decades of annual exhibitions of Lye’s work, the Len Lye Centre (designed by…

You co-host 76 Small Rooms with Jeremy Hansen, Mat Brown and Richard Archbold. How did that come about and what does it entail? It started with a casual question from a mutual friend on Twitter: “Know any good local architecture podcasts?” “Hmmm…” “Maybe you should do one.” Within a week, we were standing on architect Richard Naish’s front steps with a borrowed recorder and the overarching idea that we wanted to talk to him about his award-winning house in a non-architect-y way. It’s still the driving idea behind our conversations: to talk about architecture-related issues, mostly local, in a way that’s accessible to anyone. Although, I’m sure we’ve gone off-piste on more than a few occasions. You recently won a Resene Total Colour Maestro Award for your Twin Peaks villa…

LOCATION Lyttelton, Christchurch FLOOR AREA 250m2 SITE AREA 839m2 ARCHITECT Bull O’Sullivan Architecture PROJECT TEAM Michael O’Sulllivan, Baz Cheng BUILDER/CONTRACTOR Browntown Builders and homeowner STRUCTURAL ENGINEER Engco INTERIORS Bull O’Sullivan Architecture ROOFING/EXTERNAL WALLS Dimond Zincalume Corrugate HEATING Pyroclassic Fires FLOORING Carpet/cork over PlyFloor WINDOW FLASHINGS Thermakraft INSULATION Pink Batts BRACING Ecoply…

BOTH MY GRANDFATHERS HAD SALT WATER in their veins, traversing the Pacific. Maybe that’s where my love of our ocean and my interest in the vessels and architecture of the region come from. So, the first time I went to this church, it wasn’t a Gothic arch or hands clasped in prayer I saw, it was the bow of a boat or prow of a vaka (canoe is such an inadequate translation). Maybe this was because I’d just seen Christchurch Art Gallery’s fabulous exhibition Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania, full of the inspiring art of young Pacific people. Robin White and Ruha Fifita’s tapa collaboration, We are the Small Axe, takes the same pointed arch form, representing both window and vaka, escorted by eel and flying fish, and loads it…

LOCATION 213 Cuba Street, Wellington STUDIO Material Creative (interior architecture/design) with Foster + Melville Architects (building consent and exterior) PROJECT TEAM Material Creative: Toni Brandso, Liv Patience, Olivia McNeil, Jaime Aspinall, Anna Douglas, Olivia Macfarlane Foster + Melville Architects: Angela Foster CONSTRUCTION/BUILDER Gartshore Group (common spaces), RBS Group (bedrooms and corridors) HYDRAULIC AND MECHANICAL ENGINEER 2PIR ELECTRICAL ENGINEER Switch INTERIORS Material Creative PROJECT MANAGER Foster + Melville Architects GRAPHIC DESIGN AND WAYFINDING Fuman WALLS AND WALL PANELLING Ambitec, Gartshore, Warwick Fabrics FLOORING Interface, Winkleman RUGS Designer Rugs, Nodi LIGHTING ECC, Eunice Taylor, Harto, Houtique, Luke Jacomb, PaulinePlusLuis, Soktas, ZeroUNO FURNITURE ECC, Contempa, Dalma, Harrows, Houtique, Hub Furniture, James Dunlop, Maxwell Rodgers, Mokum, The Arc Dept, UFL…