Innholdsfortegnelse for January-February 2023 i Architecture NZ

The 2022 World Architecture Festival (WAF) held in Lisbon, Portugal, in early December saw 19 category winners awarded for Completed Buildings, 12 for Future Projects, 11 for Inside and two for Landscape Design. New Zealand practices came away with three category wins, with: Stevens Lawson’s Chapel of St Peter (05) winning the top award for Completed Buildings: Religion; FJMT Studio, Jasmax and designTRIBE winning the Inside: Public Buildings award for Te Ao Mārama South Atrium (06); and Warren and Mahoney, BKK Architects, Taylor Cullity Lethlean, Greenaway Architects and Greenshoot Consulting’s North East Link in Australia (07) winning Future Project: Infrastructure. Stevens Lawson also received a Completed Buildings: Civic and community Highly Commended award for HomeGround/Auckland City Mission. All category winners were in the running to win the WAF Building of…

Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects and the family of former Government Architect F. Gordon Wilson have established the F. Gordon Wilson Fellowship to help address the issue of public housing in Aotearoa New Zealand. The Fellowship seeks to promote creative design thinking, problem-solving, and new ideas and approaches to this country’s significant unmet housing needs through a self-directed research project. It also aims to cultivate new housing leaders who can contribute to the ongoing transformation of public housing in New Zealand. A design champion for state housing in New Zealand, Wilson led the creation of the innovative State Housing programme, which included thousands of new single, duplex and multi-unit houses, including the Berhampore Flats (built in 1939–1940), Dixon Street State Flats (1941–1944), McLean State Flats (1943–1944) and…

E noho ana ahau ki tōku taumata whakamarumaru o Ngōngōtahā, taka rawa iho ngā wai o Utuhina, e piri nei ki te taha o Pukeroa Oruawhata. Ka huri taku titiro ki Tiheia, e aru kōrikoriko ana ngā wai ō Awahou. E ai rā taku titiro ki nga wai karekare i a Rotorua-nui-a-Kahu. Nō reira, piki mai, kake mai rā! Hōmai te waiora ki a ahau kia tūtakitaki waiora, tūtakitaki nahanaha mai e! Whakaamohia te ao ki uta, whakangāwaritia te ao ki tai! Kei ngā kākahi whakairoiro, kei ngā rake pīngao, huri noa, huri noa, nau mai, haere mai, whakatau mai rā! Whakatau mai rā ki runga i te ki ā ngā mātua tupuna: nō te hōhonutanga ō Te Korokoro ō Te Parata, nō Te Whare Hukahukanui ā Tangaroa, ka puta,…

Thursday 13 October 2022 Freyberg Place, Auckland It was 5:45pm Thursday at Freyberg Place, downtown Auckland. Catchy segments of audio from synchronised drag and K-pop dance performances reverberated up Isthmus’ One Hundred and Eighty-nine Steps. One of many events taking place that evening as part of ‘Late Night Art’, the ‘Urban Art Village’ occupied O’Connell Street with a series of nine installations designed and built by coalitions of adventurous minds from the University of Auckland’s School of Architecture and Planning. The structures exuded a sense of playful discontent: discontent towards tertiary education, consumption practices, working conditions and housing precarity. Nearby, urban art MVP Matt Liggins idled in his ‘Friendship Waka’, a modded Toyota Vanguard in which passengers were taken on stationary tiki tours via a projector screen mounted to the…

Several members of the Canterbury branch of Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects, along with other city-makers, are preparing to publish a book documenting architecture in Ōtautahi Christchurch following the 2010–2011 earthquakes. The 224-page hardcover book comprises eight essays covering the post-quake progression from immediate response through to the subsequent architectural contributions. Authors include Bernadette Muir (foreword), Matthew Webby, Jessica Halliday, Charlotte Hoare, Debbie Tikao, Huia Reriti, Yuqi Kong, Jasper van der Lingen, Daniel Crooks, Colin Corsbie and Fritha Powell. Also included are 80 concise catalogue entries sharing the stories of select buildings and their roles in the rebuild, written by contributors such as Fiona Short, Jane Rooney and Vanessa Carswell. Freerange Press publisher Emma Johnson says the richly illustrated book captures the journey towards a more meaningful…

1982: AS A YOUNG ARCHITECT, I HAD wrestled my way from Turkey to Finland, at the soggy end of a hitchhiker’s version of the Grand Tour, involving low-budget lodgings, sleeping on beaches, thumbing lifts and cheap food. All wonderful. Aalto’s Church of the Three Crosses at Imatra was a high point: a luminous joy, offering more natural illumination inside than the grey, overcast gloom outside. For years, I had dreamt of returning and so the chance for Miriam van Wezel and me to join an Australian Studies Abroad tour led by Stephen and Naomi Crafti was irresistible. In 2020, though, Covid had different ideas. Now, in 2022, the tour lives: fourteen days of intense programme, incorporating more than just Aalto. Design, art, contemporary architecture, interesting company and good food were all…

Whangārei Harbour has been significant since our earliest days, serving as a landing point for migratory waka and a centre for trade during pre-colonial times. As the missionaries and settlers moved south from the Bay of Islands, several families took up residence from the 1830s but fled in 1845 when conflict broke out in the north; many did not return. The town later developed as a port for natural resources extracted from the hinterland – particularly after coal was found nearby – the port located in what is now the Town Basin. The economic importance of coastal shipping routes faded when rail linked the city to the nation in the 1920s. Construction of the Marsden Point Oil Refinery boosted the region in the 1960s and Northport in the 2000s, though…

THE WORLD: WHAT A PLACE! The last column I wrote made a case that the isms of Eurocentric legacy architecture were a bit of a plague for the building practices of indigenous people. Further, that one of the losses accounts for the devaluing of ideas and approaches to collective being that may have resided in local knowledges. Since then, well, I have been thinking about… the architectural satire account: @dank.lloyd.wright. As an intermittent social media user, I was reminded of it when reading Professor of Design Studio in the School of Architecture at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington’s Daniel Brown’s opinion piece: ‘’The issue of unpaid internships in architecture offices’.1 I tend to agree with the views therein. Unpaid labour in any sector is at a disconnect with…

Massey University Press has released HomeGround: The story of a building that changes lives – a 256-page hardcover book documenting “the realisation of a dream by the Auckland City Mission, designed by Stevens Lawson and now brought to fruition to create a haven in the CBD for some of the city’s most vulnerable”. The book features photography by Mark Smith and words by journalist Simon Wilson, and University of Auckland’s School of Architecture and Planning Professor Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu) and Dr Karamia Müller. “HomeGround represents an enduring record of a remarkable building built for a remarkable organisation, created through the aroha and vision of many,” says Wilson. “It documents and records a key moment in Aotearoa New Zealand, when a visionary social services agency, a committed architecture practice,…

You recently merged your Studio Gascoigne with Walker Group Architects. What brought about that move? For more than 30 years, Studio Gascoigne specialised in retail and hospitality spaces and then became heavily involved with airport retail, too. Unfortunately, the first lockdown meant that nearly all of our projects were cancelled or postponed. We were offered an opportunity to merge with Walker Group Architects, a 90-year-old company with an impressive track record of work covering multiple disciplines, including commercial, retail, community, cinema and residential work. This gave us the ability not only to expand our team but, also, to pursue some other design directions; this has been really refreshing. I’ve become co-owner with a combined team of around 20 employees, so we’re now tackling some really large and exciting projects, both…

Thames & Hudson, 2022 “I cannot think of any metaphor which better describes the organic growth of culture and scholarship than that of the coral organism. One lays down one’s own skeleton on the heap of bones left by others, who by doing so have built up a patterned structure. One also does it for the benefit of later comers, who will in turn lay their remains on yours. It is the inclusive effect of this accretion, not the individual contribution, that creates cultural meaning.” Michael King recalling his UK conversation with New Zealand expatriate Eric McCormick.1 I am thumbing through the large-format Thames & Hudson book The New Queensland House, edited by Cameron Bruhn and Katelin Butler. It’s a pleasant pastime, I think, that all architects share: dreaming away…

Guy Marriage EBOSS, 2022 Guy Marriage’s Medium is an important, beguiling and thorough examination of contemporary medium-density housing in New Zealand. It’s important because, as a relatively new, strategically preferred and rapidly accelerating form of urban density, the medium-density residential type is likely to replace the familiar, less-dense versions of the same and supplant the urban norm of the single, stand-alone residential building on its own piece of land so ingrained in our national residential psyche. The book has big ambitions and much to address. As Marriage points out, when it comes to achieving successful urban density, New Zealand’s legislative and planning settings, design knowledge and abilities, development and construction experience and practice, and ownership, leasing and rental structures are all manifestly ill-prepared to achieve comprehensive, carefully considered development of…