Innholdsfortegnelse for May-June 2021 i Architecture NZ

PLEASE NO, NOT ALVAR AALTO. Finnish female director Virpi Suutari’s brilliant examination, Aalto, showing here in May and June at the Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival, lays bare some uneasy home truths about the man lauded as an icon of modernism. Revelations that give pause to rethink his beautiful, organic, curving architecture, his chairs, vases, and even his tea towels. Suutari’s coup was gaining access and permission to use love letters between Aalto and his first wife Aino, whom he married in 1924 and who died in 1949. They give unusual insight into the man behind the hero image, including his “erotic approach to life and work”. He was a philanderer. He drank. In one letter, he writes: “You need to commit a whole lot of sin before we’re even.…

A category one-listed heritage building at 35 Graham Street in Auckland’s Victoria Quarter is looking to become the site of the country’s largest sustainable construction reuse project. The potential project has entered the first stage of its planning process and has now been granted resource consent. If completed according to projections, it will be the first major commercial office development in the CBD designed for a post-Covid working environment. Set on an acre of land above Fanshawe Street, the existing 12,900m2 building was the Auckland City Council Service Centre for more than 20 years. The new Woods Bagot design plans to retain 1.8 million kilograms of reinforced concrete, resulting in projected CO2 savings of the equivalent of planting approximately 52 hectares of trees or of cancelling more than 13,000 flights…

Professor Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu), head of the University of Auckland’s School of Architecture and Planning, is one of 27 new Ngā Ahurei a Te Apārangi Fellows and Ngā Ahurei Honore a Te Apārangi Honorary Fellows to be elected to the Academy of the Royal Society Te Apārangi. Of the current 455 Royal Society Te Apārangi Fellows, Brown is the only one with an architecture and art history background. As a founding researcher of Māori architectural history and design, her research has been used as a framework in the field of Māori architecture within Aotearoa and internationally. Brown says she hopes to bring to the Society her knowledge and experience of building and creative practice research, and indigenous art and architectural history research, to assist in the Society’s mission…

Artists Rachael Rakena and Simon Kaan have been commissioned to create an eight-metretall by 10-metre-wide ngutu as the ceremonial entranceway to Te Pae Christchurch Convention Centre. Named Te Aika, the home people, the white sculpture recognises the mana of local hapū Ngāi Tūāhuriri and has been inspired by the southern maihi, or diagonal bargeboards, on whare on the banks of the Horotueka, Cam River. Matapopore trustee Lynne-Harata Te Aika says the whare’s distinctive cross-beam apex is an architectural feature unique to Ngāi Tahu and was found in many buildings in the South Island. “Ngāi Tūāhuriri is proud that a modern version of the entranceway will be replicated at Te Pae.” Rakena says that the sculpture has been constructed in such a way – with cladding on both sides – that…

THIS ARTICLE ALLOWS ME TO CALIBRATE my relationship to the architecture of Aotearoa New Zealand between 1990 and 2020 via flashbacks and ‘Fast Forwards’. Many architectural epochs don’t last 30 years (futurism 1909–1934, brutalism 1950–1978, metabolism 1959–1968,1 deconstructivism 1982–2008)2 and so this time in absentia is long enough to ‘sea change’. When I departed these shores, New Zealand was completing its sesquicentennial year commemorating 150 years since Te Tiriti’s signing and interest in things Māori was high. The term ‘bicultural’ had entered local architectural discourse, with Russell Withers first to deploy it in his 1986 column on Racism and Architecture.3 The second reference, in 1987, was by Rewi Thompson about his work reflecting the “balance between things Māori and Pākehā”.4 Cultural interactions were becoming more critical in institutional building designers’ work.5…

CHARLES DARWIN KNEW A THING OR TWO about survival. He knew it was not the strongest of the species that survived, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. And the recent Te Ao Mārama rebuild, together with the earlier addition of the South Atrium, are both stories of adaptation: perhaps, too, for the sake of survival. Big gestures such as the suspended tanoa and floating glass roof on top of the neoclassical building speak of change and progression in a brave new world. When Ignite teamed up with artist Carin Wilson of Studio Pasifika to conceive the design for the new Hokohoko Museum Store, Wilson told a story of how in the 1930s, around the time when the museum was built, Māori culture was at its…

DRIVING DOWN THE HILL AND AROUND THE bend in Rochdale Drive in Churton Park, Wellington, you have a view across a suburban valley to a long and low house. Despite its calm, settled-into-the-landscape character, the house is very distinctive. You can’t miss it. People walking past on the footpath are intrigued and stop to comment. It’s a house that advocates for architecture. The understated design quality of the Parsonson Architects-designed Long House is highlighted by the contrast with its context – Churton Park’s snaking suburban subdivision of bulky, barely designed houses of similar age, material and colour. Like most ubiquitous ‘design’ and build suburban developments in Aotearoa New Zealand, it is a sprawling suburb of similar oversized houses on undersized sites, relieved only by cookie-cutter, medium-density terrace housing, and a…

CASTING WORDS INTO THE future to be processed in a four-weeklong editorial programme is a strange business in a world that seems to spin ever faster. It is as if Instagram were mired in treacle, electrons crawling to deliver a photo of tonight’s great dessert some weeks hence, by which time dinner guests, occasion and location will have been long forgotten. One might, in response, have recourse to matters of a somewhat weightier import and longer lifespan but, though I feel passionate about, say, misplaced gerunds and the increasing use of ‘multiple’ in place of ‘many’ in the daily papers, I suspect that linguistic pedantry will not capture the imaginations of readers of this august journal. Nor will it be much of a call to arms in this, an age…

This month, Open Christchurch celebrates some of Ōtautahi’s most exceptional architecture by opening 46 buildings to the public across the weekend of 15–16 May. Run by Te Pūtahi Centre for Architecture and City Making, Open Christchurch will offer access to culturally, historically and architecturally significant buildings as well as some not normally open to the public, such as Sir Miles Warren’s modernist College House and the heritage buildings of Christ’s College. Also featured during the two-day event will be: children’s architecture-themed workshops at the Arts Centre and Tūranga; expert tours of buildings by the architects and engineers behind their designs, including the Stranges & Glendenning Hill building, the St Andrew’s College Centennial Chapel, the Madras Street Townhouses and the Chen Anselmi Units; and guided walks, exhibitions and garden tours. Most of the events are…

Urban regeneration agency Panuku Development Auckland is partnering with Malaysian property developers MRCB (Malaysian Resources Corporation Berhad) to deliver retail, offices and housing above the Aotea Station City Rail Link (CRL) hub on the corner of Wellesley Street and Mayoral Drive. Concept plans by architects Woods Bagot reveal a stepped roof, designed to ensure that sunlight requirements in nearby Aotea Square are met, topped with terraced foliage. The ground level includes a landscaped lane between the site and the neighbouring Bledisloe House and a ‘civic-incubator space’, which can be used flexibly for community needs. Woods Bagot principal Bruno Mendes says Auckland needs more active destinations to evolve into a dynamic metropolis. “The host of programmes in this pedestrian-friendly public realm – with recreation, retail, office and residential spaces – will…

FOR Māori AND PACIFIC PEOPLE, INGOA or names have played a crucial role in social and cultural systems for fixing the world, ever since Rangi (sky) and Papa (land) were disengaged in a primordial struggle by the first ancestors to attain Te Ao Mārama – the lived world and the new name for the South Atrium. Names are thus symbolic of important concepts connecting people and the environment, and assembling together a world view. They reveal a basis for reading anew the architecture of the Auckland Museum with origins in repicturing Greek and Pacific myth-histories that are redolent with blood sacrifice. To untangle this metaphorical architecture is to read lines carved in stones and wood to find the proper context of a cross-cultural bloody architecture, which includes the latest refurbishment…

AIRPORTS REALLY ARE AWFUL, AREN’T THEY? The architecture is often a few flaccid curves here and there while aircraft are carefully concealed: no excitement of flight allowed. Emotional departures are constrained to awkward conversation in a food court until someone looks at the time – gotta go. Then, awkward hugs, the queue through security and the trek through duty-free, followed by that limbo wait at the gate before we are all crammed into a metal can. All the world’s drama is homogenised; airports are supermarkets of the sky, except you have to pay for parking. Arrival is no different: in Aotearoa, some canned kōkako calls and pics of our fake 100 per cent clean and green country, then out into chaos that characterises almost all airports everywhere. What could be…

After 54 years at 108 Greys Avenue, the Auckland Hebrew Congregation and Kadimah School are moving to a more appropriate site at what is now the Saint Kentigern Girls’ School in Remuera. As the site goes up for sale, Sarah Bookman and Seth Schanzer reflect on what it means to lose a building from three perspectives: of having grown up in the space; of community members; and for the architectural community. The property is billed as a “Prime CBD Redevelopment or Add-Value Opportunity” but there is no mention of the quality of its buildings or their original architect (John Goldwater) in the agent’s listing. Completed in 1968, the Kadimah School was updated in 2010 by Richard Goldie and his team at Peddlethorp, who received an Auckland Architecture Award for their…

Congratulations to the many talented designers who worked on each of these spaces: Salmond Reed Architects, Patterson Associates, Fearon Hay Architects, José Gutierrez, Hare Interiors, McKinney + Windeatt Architects, Studio Pacific Architecture, BVN in association with Jasmax, and Warren and Mahoney in association with NH Architecture. We look forward to announcing the 2021 Supreme Award winner on Thursday 24 June. Join us on the night – tickets available from 2 June at interiorawards.co.nz…

Recent master planning for one of the country’s fastest-growing towns, Rolleston (25km south-west of Christchurch), has seen urban planners at Selwyn District Council team up with Cooper Developments, Thom Craig, PRau, Izzard, Armitage Williams Construction and Studio South to conceive an $85-million town centre development to be built over the next five years. The mixed-use development, situated on what is currently Rolleston Reserve, will provide 1200m2 of hospitality and 10,000m2 of retail, health and wellness, and office and co-working spaces, along with public ‘explore and play’ areas. “The opportunity to utilise a collaborative design approach with all stakeholders, to both the macro and micro scale of the master planning at the start of the project, will deliver an appropriate urban and architectural outcome,” says Thom Craig, joint project lead with…

IN THEIR SUBMISSION FOR THIS YEAR’S NZIA Awards, the architects of the transformed South Atrium and adjoining galleries of Tāmaki Paenga Hira, Auckland War Memorial Museum, make much of the golden mean. They talk of the 1929 colonial colossus on the hill of Pukekawa in the Auckland Domain as a great example of neoclassical architecture: a building to be much admired for its proportions. Never mind the somewhat absurd idea of importing an alien Greek Doric temple form, emblematic of the origins of European culture, here to Aotearoa. The proportional framework is, of course, the golden mean: a “geometric discipline of sublime proportion”, underpinning classical architecture and “a naturally occurring fractal, or never-ending geometric pattern, with specific proportions that pleasingly resonate with the human sense of aesthetics”, say the architects.…

It is very appropriate that it was the winner of the John Scott Award for Public Architecture. Scott claimed the shed as a source for New Zealand architecture. ABOUT FIFTY YEARS AGO, IN ONE OF A collection of essays entitled The Māori People in the Nineteen-Sixties, 1 Bruce Biggs (author of the book Let’s Learn Māori2) stated that te reo would become restricted to formal occasions in the future and be used less and less in daily life. In the same publication, (Sir) Hugh Kāwharu had a paper that argued that there was no possibility of having new marae in cities other than those already established by the mana whenua. Both prophecies turned out to be wrong. Te reo has flourished and urban maraes have been built in many places.…

published in partnership with architecturenz The Rules of the NZIA The face of architectural practice in New Zealand is constantly changing. One part of the role of Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects (NZIA) is to ensure its members remain abreast of all new developments. In order to be admitted to NZIA Practice membership, a practice must: 1. Strive to ensure that they are competent to deal effectively with duties undertaken and maintain and extend their competence. This is an important component of the Code of Ethical Conduct for Registered Architects of the New Zealand Registered Architects’ Board (NZRAB), nzrab.org.nz, the body whose requirements must be met in order for anyone to use the title “architect” or “registered architect”. 2. Have architecture as their core business or a…