Innholdsfortegnelse for March-April 2023 i Architecture NZ

ON 14 FEBRUARY, PRIME MINISTER Chris Hipkins labelled Cyclone Gabrielle, in its severity and breadth of damage, the most significant weather event New Zealand has seen this century. The flooding – whole towns and vast swathes of farmland – defies belief, unlike anything we’ve seen here before. Gabrielle came hard on the heels of massive flooding in Auckland, which the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research described as a one-in-200-year event, delivering, via an atmospheric river, an entire summer’s worth of rain within one day. Many in West Auckland had only just repaired their flood-damaged homes after a one-in-100-year event in August 2021. It’s a recurring story. Rain and more rain. Storm after storm. Prior to Gabrielle, the Tairāwhiti Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay areas were already sodden and unstable from…

WAIKATO THEATRE CONNECTS TO RIVER Work has begun on Kirikiriroa Hamilton’s new performing arts centre, designed by Jasmax in collaboration with British theatre design consultants Charcoalblue’s Melbourne studio. The project on Victoria Street South replaces the 50-year-old Founders Theatre, which has been closed since 2016 because of seismic issues with the flying system. Connecting to the eastern side of the existing heritage Hamilton Hotel (which has occupied the Victoria Street site since 1864), the new structure will both address the river and reinvigorate the street frontage. It includes restoration of the hotel to incorporate a new art gallery at level one in the former Chartwell Trust space, as well as hospitality on Victoria Street and a riverside café. The Waikato Regional Theatre Property Trust says the $80-million precinct will house…

Various preparatory milestones must eventuate for participation in any worthwhile international architectural awards programme: an admirable commission, smooth consultation and construction processes, viable completion dates and heroic photography. All of this predetermines only the possibility of being short-listed. Following two years of Covid-enforced, online-only participation, the architecture celebrated in Lisbon at the 2022 World Architecture Festival (WAF) seemed intent on finding relationships with people to reflect the festival’s theme: ‘Together’. This was an opposing reference to the impact of isolation, and the dislocation and loneliness the architectural community (amongst others) faced during the Covid pandemic. Since its inaugural beginnings in 2008, WAF is now recognised as one of the world’s best architectural conferences and awards programmes. It is hosted in different countries and each festival tends to carry a life…

THERE ARE PLACES THAT SEEM DREAM-LIKE, haunted by memories and fantastical stories: places with an atmosphere that comes from somewhere mysterious. For those of us brought up in Canterbury, this place is the high country, the mountains that loom distant on the horizon beyond the flat monotony of the plains. Up there is where mysteries live. In the Craigieburn Range, on the way up to Arthur’s Pass, a moa was sighted in the bush in 1993; the claim was accompanied by the mandatory grainy photo, making nationwide news for weeks on end. Also, in the Craigieburn Range is the jumble of strange, sculptural limestone blocks scattered across the hills, Kura Tawhiti, Castle Hill. A 19th-century visitor, Reverend Charles Oakes, described them as “… like the buildings of a Cyclopean city”,…

IN THE EMPTY AIRWAVES OF the early 1960s, my album of Dick Dale’s guitar was a rare treat. It’s insistent reverb-laden Stratocaster all but smelt of the rush and power of surfing. It fuelled the busting-out of a marginal activity practised by a relatively few bleached-blonde beach bums and cemented California as the epicentre of a beach-focused cultural phenomenon, and burgeoning new industry. Much later, I read an interview with Dale describing his retreat into the Mojave Desert and reluctance to come below 1500 feet above sea level for fear the San Andreas fault-line would shift, precipitating an earthquake in which he might be caught. I was musing about the role of the high desert as a place of refuge and retreat, much as the possibility of ‘going bush’ for many…

The Department of Conservation’s (DOC) Dolomite Point Redevelopment Project at Punakaiki on the South Island’s West Coast is scheduled to open in late October. Christchurch-based practice Sheppard & Rout has collaborated with DOC and Ngāti Waewae mana whenua on the design, which references Māori and modern-day journeys, the region’s rich mineral resources, and the shelter and food the area provides. The main building, the Experience Centre, is formed of a series of curves that avoid significant nīkau groves and provides an opening to the north that looks down into a doline (limestone sinkhole). Sustainably sourced, FSC-certified timber has been used throughout and a green roof will help merge the building into the natural environment while providing a habitat and ecosystem for the natural flora and fauna of the area. The…

CHRISTCHURCH SET TO ‘REOPEN’ Ōtautahi’s annual festival of architecture, Open Christchurch, returns on Saturday 6 and Sunday 7 May 2023 for another celebration of the city’s best buildings. Over the course of the weekend, visitors and residents will have the chance to explore close to 50 buildings, ranging in style, use and age, for free. (A handful of private residence tours will incur a small booking fee.) This year’s festival takes a closer look at the work of Sir Miles Warren and Maurice Mahoney, showcasing some of their major projects and domestic designs. Other points of focus for this edition include education buildings spanning 162 years and coastal architecture. Te Pūtahi Centre for Architecture and City Making, the organisation behind Open Christchurch, extends an invitation to people from throughout the…

Your studio has worked on several Metlifecare projects. How do you ensure that each one has a distinct, unique identity? Our concepts and designs are always very site specific, as well as connecting back to the demographic of the village residents. Alongside Gulf Rise, we’re currently fitting out Fairway Gardens next to the Pakuranga Golf Course, where we’ve created a clubhouse feeling in reference to the history of the site and the surrounding open green spaces. We’ve also designed interiors for Pōhutukawa Landing in Beachlands, which are based around the bountiful planting at the site and a ‘from garden to table’ ethos, acknowledging the area’s agricultural history. What sets Gulf Rise at Red Beach apart from the other flagship villages? Residents are moving to Red Beach on the Hibiscus Coast…

EAT YOUR HEARTS OUT, STEVENS LAWSON, Fearon Hay and RTA Studio – your awards’ hit rates are impressive but Dunedin architect Gary Todd’s is well-nigh perfect. In 2022, almost 50 years after he started out in architecture as a teenaged ‘print boy’, Todd entered the Institute of Architects awards programme seriously for the first time. His firm’s project, Ebb-Dunedin in downtown Ōtepoti, not only won a New Zealand Award but gained top-tier recognition in the form of the Sir Miles Warren Award for Commercial Architecture. That’s quite a feat of architectural summiting and it would be understandable if Todd regarded Ebb’s elevation as the apotheosis of his career. Not so. He prefers to see the Sir Miles Award not as the culmination of a journey but as confirmation he’s on…

2 January 1944 – 3 January 2023 Jeremy Salmond passed away peacefully in Auckland on the third of January 2023, a day after his 79th birthday. Jeremy was a friend and mentor of, and collaborator with, many architects around Aotearoa. He was, to many, the most respected conservation architect in the country, having literally written the book on old New Zealand houses. He was the founding director of Salmond Reed Architects and, in 2007, was awarded the Queen’s Service Order (QSO) for his contribution to the preservation of New Zealand’s heritage of significant buildings. In 2018, Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects recognised his towering contribution to our built environment with the NZIA Gold Medal – an award for which he was grateful but, simultaneously, incredulous to receive.…

KA TŪ AU KI TE TIHI O TŌKU MAUNGA O Parihaka ki te mihi ki te whitinga o te rā. E tū ana au ki ngā tapuwae o ōku tūpuna i noho ai ki konei. Tirohia ki Manaia, ki tētahi o ngā pakiaka o Ngāpuhi, mihi ki te tūpuna ka tū tonu hei kōhatu, anei te toto e heke mai nei, mai i tēra maunga ki au. Titiro ki Pukenui, ki te uru, mihi ki te taha o Te Parawhau, ki ērā tāngata ki te tonga o te rā. For Māori, the connections to Te Kooti Whenua Māori are complex and intensely personal. These experiences can be fractious and multilayered. Te Kooti can be a setting for rangahau, for wānanga ā-whānau – perhaps the beginning point of a thread to…

Albert L. Refiti, with exhibition design by Hannah Manning-Scott Objectspace, Auckland 3 December 2022 – 26 February 2023 Mike Austin, known for his humility, would shrink from the title ‘Godfather of Pacific Architecture’, even if I use it in moderate jest. But there is truth in the ruse. Parsing the canon of Pacific architecture means, inevitably, encountering the work of Mike Austin. This is impressive; the region is defined by the watery body that flows over one third of the planet. Austin is a practising architect and leading scholar in the field, and his photographs evidence a lifelong architectural photography practice. The displayed images have been selected from his personal archive, which documents his time travelling through Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Sāmoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Hawai’i and…

25 – 27 November 2022 Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland It isn’t easy to get a bunch of architects and planners together for a weekend of collegial happiness, but SAHANZ (Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand) and the Australian UHPH (Urban History/Planning History) Group made it happen with their conference, Ngā Pūtahitanga/Crossings, held in November 2022. The conference brought together more than 100 people from a range of built environment disciplines to explore the intersecting lineages of planning and architecture, urban design, heritage conservation and landscape. It was hosted by the School of Architecture and Planning at Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland, and the convenors, Julia Gatley and Elizabeth Aitken Rose, wove a programme that critically delved into issues of class, ethnicity, gender, migration and inequality…