Innholdsfortegnelse for March-April 2022 i Architecture NZ

THEY DROVE. THEY PARKED. THEY camped. Initially, life in the tent village beside Wellington’s ‘Beehive’ parliament building seemed spontaneous and carefree. They didn’t seem to mind being soaked by the parliamentary lawn sprinklers or being blasted by Barry Manilow’s greatest hits, courtesy of the Speaker of the House. They had food, toilets and a hairdresser’s tent. Except for the straight line of plastic traffic barriers separating the encampment from the front of the old and newer parliament buildings, there were no boundaries. Unimpeded, they expanded into the surrounding streets. Then, on day 14, the fences went up. Technically, they were concrete barriers: big rectangular blocks of concrete, forklifted into place. But really the police were fencing them in. As Richard Francis-Jones writes in his excellent Truth and Lies in Architecture (see…

The design of a level threshold drainage system is not as simple as it first seems. The E2 building code is very prescriptive in what will be allowed – is your solution code compliant? Let ACO help with choosing the correct product for your application. E2 Building Code • Clause 7.3.2.1 of the E2 building code lists the requirements for an acceptable solution for level threshold drainage: • A channel that is 150mm deep, 200mm wide. • Maximum channel length of 3.7m. • 1:200 minimum fall to outlet. • The grating that sits over the channel must: • Be able to be fully removed for maintenance. • Be supported independently of the door frame. • Have a continuous gap of 12mm. Legs sitting in the channel base will often obstruct…

Artist Fiona Jack’s large-scale artwork featuring the word ‘everything’ has lit up the 110-metre-long, 13-metre-high light wall on Auckland’s Bledisloe Wharf, known as The Lightship. The installation is made up of seven panels and almost 8500 LED lights; it references the acting head of Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland’s first major public work in 1997, Nothing™, in which 33 billboards were displayed around Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland 25 years ago. In Nothing™, Jack was playing with the language and style of advertising and exploring the increasing dominance of billboard space as a form of real estate in Auckland’s central city. The billboards were so convincing that they prompted enquiries on where to buy Nothing™. When Jack was invited to create an artwork for the Ports of…

Architects Warren and Mahoney have been engaged by developer AMP Capital to deliver a national purpose-built facility for Archives New Zealand in Wellington, “to house and protect our memory of government and significant taonga through the provision of specialist repository spaces and conservation facilities”. The building will connect to the National Library by an air bridge, to allow for better collaboration and the creation of a national documentary heritage campus to store irreplaceable taonga, such as the Treaty of Waitangi and the Women’s Suffrage Petition – collections which are valued in excess of $1.7 billion. Since the $290-million Heke Rua project will be located within the Parliamentary Precinct and on the original Pipitea Pā site, it was important that it acknowledged the significance of this site for mana whenua, says…

YOU ARRIVE COMPLETELY ‘UNBORN’, in a state of ignorance. You don’t even know you don’t know but you arrive at university, the School of Architecture, and your next life begins. You slowly learn to become an architect. You grow up, have a few wild moments of self-belief and knowing, surety, clarity of purpose. Then it’s back to the doubt. All the while, the passion for what architecture might be propels you on. Working in a sea of doubt. Architects choose what must be the cruellest profession: one that requires you to make enormously manifest, larger than life, something that starts as a kernel of an idea inside your head. Something permanent, waterproof, functional, beautiful. What isn’t there to worry about? To perform this dazzling act of radical uncertainty requires assembling…

AS A BOY AT A TYPICAL 1970S’ SCHOOL uniform-wearing, single-sex, sports-mad, culturally ignorant high school, in a then typically insular region that was happily demolishing its art deco heritage, I visited a touring exhibition by Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser.1 His work, like the art room haven I was discovering at school, was full of light, colour and energy. Hundertwasser’s work and that art room2 were both retreats from the reality of our dreary built environment and windows into a wider world of what could be. We all dreamed of fabulous possibilities in our youth but, of course, a lot of that is beaten out of us by schools and practice and life in general as we become human resource units in the service of capitalism. But I still have a copy…

LOCATION 188 Oxford Terrace, Christchurch FLOOR AREA 28,000m2 NUMBER OF STOREYS Four TIME SCHEDULE Design, documentation: 21 months Construction: 4 years 3 months ARCHITECT Woods Bagot in association with Warren and Mahoney PROJECT TEAM Woods Bagot: Bruno Mendes, Eric Buhrs, Jordon Saunders, Andy Gentry, James Pearse, Andrew Pietersz, Brian Renehan, Harry Charalambous, Kenneth Chou, Nik Karalis, Michael Andrew, Natalie Aganoff, Richard Galloway, Vien Nguyen, Virgil Lay, Yeung Chen, John Norman, Ruth Hutchison Warren and Mahoney: Peter Marshall, Andrew Barclay, Jason Howden, Iain Nicholls, Bridget Watson, Melissa Risk, Jono Coates, Chris Hutchings, Jeremy Rush, Eoin Hudson, Gareth Jenkins, Daryl Maguire, Sebastien Gapinski, Shannon Joe, Stephanie Hamilton, Ian Hutchinson CLIENT Ōtākaro BUILDER/CONTRACTOR CPB Contractors STRUCTURAL ENGINEER Holmes Consulting CIVIL ENGINEER Eliot Sinclair and Partners HYDAULIC, MECHANICAL AND ELECTRICAL ENGINEER WSP QUANTITY SURVEYOR…

HOUSING IS A COMPLEX ISSUE. It’s hard enough doing one-off houses, and navigating irascible clients, budgets and so forth, but a great deal more complicated when one discusses the critical role housing has in the accounting of the country’s wealth and welfare. Is there any doubt that housing, in all its manifestations, lies at the heart of our success or failure as a country? It does not take long for any discussion about the state of the nation’s well-being to turn to examining the correlation between housing and health, or housing and social equity or any number of other social measures. Very many research papers show that poor-quality housing and housing poorly matched to occupant need have negative impacts arising from issues of health, well-being and financial security. From such impacts,…

Antarctica New Zealand’s Scott Base on Ross Island was first designed for Sir Edmund Hillary’s Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1957 and has been occupied continuously since then, with numerous upgrades and additions. Many of the structures at the base are now considered to be at the ends of their effective lives. In 2017, Antarctica New Zealand commissioned Jasmax, along with UK practice Hugh Broughton Architects – designers of Britain’s Halley VI Antarctic Research Station, the world’s first relocatable research station – to design a sustainable, fit-for-purpose research facility to support New Zealand’s presence in the region for the next 50 years. Jasmax’s involvement in developing the design and delivery strategy came to a close last year, and Leighs Construction, supported by Hugh Broughton Architects and WSP, is now finalising detailed design…

The Sheppard & Rout-designed Ōpuke Thermal Pools and Spa at the base of Mount Hutt opened to the public in December; this is the practice’s first major tourism project since completing the award-winning Dark Sky Project in Takapō in 2019. Water for the two-hectare Methven wellness destination is sourced from the surrounding mountains and heated solely by the sun, in what architect Jasper van der Lingen says is the largest solar thermal system in Aotearoa. “The bank of 480 panels is located on a north-facing embankment on the south side of the site and has the capacity to generate up to one megawatt at midday,” says van der Lingen. “There are plenty of larger solar arrays but solar electric is only about 25 per cent efficient compared to 80 per…

AS ARCHITECTS, WE ARE INHERENTLY curious about what other architects are creating and how they interpret a building, especially to gain a perspective on another response to building in the surroundings in which we predominantly design. This site is located in the Central Otago region. The climate is harsh: hot, dry summers with cold-but-beautiful winters, with the days long in summer and short in winter. The contextual environment is of partially barren, rugged landscapes; textures of rocky outcrops and gravelly soils are interspersed with structured layers of manipulated horticultural and vineyard plantings. The rural farm architecture is one of sheds and barns built of stone and corrugated iron: simple and rudimentary in form but practical in application. A meandering drive leads to the site through a horticultural landscape, over a bridge…

THIRTEEN YEARS AGO, 2DEGREES BURST onto the local telco scene: the new kid on the block, the disruptor, the Robin Hood of mobile phone land. Its name, patently, stands for connection, not only across the cellular network but also with each other – there are, after all, only two degrees of separation between each of us here in Aotearoa, sorry Karinthy.1 While the business has grown solidly and given Spark (previously Telecom) and Vodafone a run for their money, it has always held true to its underdog position, even adopting the mantra ‘Fighting for fair: to make New Zealand a better place to live’ as recently as 2019. Part of that fight, CEO Mark Aue explains, is not just for customers but for staff, too. “I can’t wait for our…

Supported by Dulux® Colours of New Zealand® With its origins in the practice formed by William Mason (1810–1897) in Dunedin in 1862, Mason & Wales is New Zealand’s oldest architectural practice. Mason had worked in England and Australia before moving to Auckland in 1840, where his outputs included the building now known as Old Government House (1855–1956), and then on to Dunedin in 1862, where the discovery of gold signalled potential. He set up partnership briefly with David Ross (1827–1908) and then, more significantly, with William Clayton (1823–1877). Tasmanian-born Clayton had designed numerous buildings there before immigrating to Dunedin in 1863, again attracted by the gold rush. Mason & Clayton’s key buildings included the Colonial Museum in Wellington (1864–1865), Dunedin’s Post Office (1864–1868) and the Otago Provincial Council Buildings (1867).…

Developers Precinct Properties and Mansons TCLM have plans for two new commercial buildings in Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter, which, when completed, will provide space for more than 1000 office workers. Precinct’s project (pictured below) on 5300m2 at Pakenham Street West and Halsey Street has been designed by Warren and Mahoney and is made up of three office buildings at three, eight and nine levels. While architecturally distinct, the buildings are operationally capable of being occupied as one. “The floor plates can be connected between two or three buildings, or inter-connected by air bridges,” says project principal Blair Johnston. “Whichever approach is selected, the floor plate offers the efficiency and flexibility required for agile working strategies.” The single-level Halsey Traders building currently on site is expected to remain where it is. The…

Practice in Profile Supported by Resene the paint the professionals use IT STARTED WITH A CONVERSATION about windows. One of our consultants on the Bader Ventura development suggested that, by using a specific combination of windows and concrete panelling, we might be on the way to achieving Passive House standard. At that point, in early 2020, Kāinga Ora had already been moving towards more sustainable building practices. This included adopting the New Zealand Green Building Council 6 Homestar rating, or better, for all new homes in 2019. Ultimately, we are focused on reducing carbon emissions while delivering better-performing homes that are more cost-effective and efficient to build. This is underpinned by our Building Momentum construction strategy document and, more recently, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s (MBIE) Building for…

THE OPENING OF TE PAE, THE CHRISTCHURCH Convention Centre, on 16 December 2021, auspiciously the 171st anniversary of the arrival of the first Canterbury Association settlers in Lyttelton, marks an important stage in Christchurch’s recovery from the earthquakes of a decade ago. Conceived as one of the anchor projects that formed part of the 2012 Christchurch Central Recovery Plan, or ‘Blueprint’ as it became known, the convention centre was intended to act as a major driver in the city’s recovery. However, the inevitable delays involved in planning and delivering such a large project mean that the promised, post-quake boost to the city’s economy has yet to be realised. In addition, the impact of Covid-19 has compounded these delays and raised questions about the viability of such venues in a warming,…

Objectspace, Auckland 12 November 2021 – 20 February 2022 Toro Whakaara: Responses to our Built Environment, curated by Kim Paton and Zoe Black and exhibited at Objectspace, Tāmaki Makaurau, presents a series of enquiries by five practitioners into the histories and economies of our shared environs. HOOPLA, Isobel Thom, Lindsay Yee, Ngahuia Harrison and Raphaela Rose have together produced a series of new works that celebrate Objectspace’s commitment to the development of heterogeneous creative practices in Aotearoa. Against a homogenisation of arts practice – from globalisation to decentralisation – institutions like Objectspace continue to turn away from the #bigquestions in favour of an interrogation of ‘the local’. We see this in the exhibition’s own evolution; originally billed as an exploration of ‘hostile architecture’, the works and their accompanying texts emerge as…