Innholdsfortegnelse for November-December 2023 i Architecture NZ

The Awards celebrate excellence in design and architecture in commercial, residential and community spaces. And the quest to find the country’s top interior projects and designers is about to start. Entries open 23 January 2024. Award categories: Retail; Hospitality; Civic; Healthcare and Wellness, Workplace (up to 1000m2 ); Workplace (over 1000m2 ); Residential Kitchen; Residential, Community Impact, Emerging Design Professional and new category–;Education. Don’t forget our special early-bird discount for entries received by 6 March. And look out for the announcement of our jury coming soon. interiorawards.co.nz…

TE ARATAI IS A COLLEGE WITH A PROUD history. Originally known as Linwood College and founded in Christchurch in 1954, it was the first coeducational secondary school started in New Zealand after the second world war. It embodied a progressive vision in the post-war baby boom times, optimistic for a new future moving beyond the horrors of the previous decade: a place less about the traditions of the past but more about a future where all were respected and could participate in education equally. These founding values have persisted through various ups and downs that schools experience over time. One of the most profound downs was the 2011 Canterbury earthquakes, which struck Linwood College hard, leaving its buildings devastated. The school community led a nomadic life, starting out by sharing…

WELLINGTON, TE WHANGANUI-A-TARA SITE 9 KUMUTOTO BY ATHFIELD ARCHITECTS “This project on Wellington’s waterfront is a standout example of architectural ingenuity and sensitive urban design in response to a difficult site. Careful modulation of form and façade blends seamlessly with the maritime and historical context of its surroundings. The building is on a site initially thought too small to be developed, but innovative engineering solutions allowed the addition of a discreet fifth floor, making the project economically viable. The design also overcame complex site conditions and planning constraints, which had challenged the team, making the result even more successful. The project also excels in material durability, clever internal planning and a well-thought-out interface with public realms, making it a notable addition to Wellington’s evolving waterfront landscape.” Project team JOHN HARDWICK-SMITH,…

Jury Commentary Dave Strachan, Sally Ogle, Ewan Brown and guest international juror Clare Cousins Te Aratai College, a transformative rebuild of the former Linwood College in East Christchurch, is a beacon of community engagement and educational innovation. It answers the needs of a diverse community with a layout that seamlessly links individual learning paths and community spaces. Its layout features two distinct courtyard spaces (each with its own identity), linked by an ‘avenue of learning’, and it caters to students’ individual needs while promoting a sense of belonging. Sustainability is woven into the fabric of the design, featuring energyefficient systems and thoughtful material selection suited to the local environmental conditions. Carefully planned through deep community consultation and with an emphasis on cultural significance, this exceptional project stands as a testimony…

Jury Commentary Dave Strachan, Sally Ogle, Ewan Brown and guest international juror Clare Cousins Sometimes functional and pragmatic buildings can elicit a business-as-usual architectural response. This is anything but. Many of the materials and much of the labour were gifted by the locals, reflecting a generosity of spirit in a small community. Te Pae, as it catches the light following the path of the sun and becomes a brooding presence at night, now stands as a guardian embodying a true spirit of place. –NAMED AWARD CITATION Aotearoa’s wild West Coast has claimed many lives over the years, making a fit-for-purpose lifeguard tower a critical piece of the community’s infrastructure. With a history of their towers succumbing to the extremely harsh marine environment, form and material selection were paramount for the…

WELLINGTON, TE WHANGANUI-A-TARA THIRD STUDIO F. GORDON WILSON FELLOWSHIP How we build our public housing to be more adaptable in the face of climate change is a subject that the extreme weather events of 2023 are urging us to address. So, it’s fitting that making housing for our most vulnerable more resilient is the focus of the very first F. Gordon Wilson Fellowship for Public Housing. Mitra Homolja and Ellie Tuckey, architectural graduates who live in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, have been awarded the inaugural fellowship. The pair, founders of Third Studio and urban design consultants for Hutt City Council, will use the $20,000 grant to investigate circular economy construction technology in the context of making existing public housing more resilient, to complete a survey of mātauranga Māori perspectives on resilience…

TWENTY ONE YEARS AGO, AS A small Nelson company, we saw the opportunity to introduce car stacking into New Zealand. The need for additional car parking, mainly in the country’s CBD areas, was becoming obvious. With an increasing numbers of cars and the high cost of a single car space (not to mention the lack of them), developers and building owners were wanting to increase carpark numbers on small, existing land templates. It is a simple case of compressing and achieving 100–300% more car spaces on the same land area with some easy design changes, such as creating a small pit to pop cars down and increasing the height in garages and basements. It was not easy, however, to introduce the systems into the market. Three years of market research…

TIMBER ARCH SETS RECORD FOR SIZE On its completion in early 2025, Studio Pacific Architecture’s new flagship hangar for Air New Zealand–;Hangar 4 in Auckland–;will be the largest single-span timber arch aircraft hangar in the southern hemisphere. At one and a half times the size of the airline’s largest existing hangar, it will be able to house one wide-bodied aircraft, such as a Boeing 777-300 or 787-9, as well as two narrow-bodied aircraft, such as an A320 or an A321neo, at the same time. The laminated veneer lumber (LVL) and cross-laminated timber (CLT) hybrid timber arch spans 98 metres and has a low total structure mass, making it considerably easier and more efficient to put together on site than a similarly sized steel structure would be. Lead architect Patrick Thompson…

The third Model Citizens event was held this year during the annual Aotearoa Festival of Architecture and Auckland Architecture Week, with 11 teams from local architecture practices and organisations coming together at Kada to compete for the Model Citizens title and trophy. Model Citizens was first held in 2019, when Athfield Architects took home the prize with its spectacular, multifaceted Lego tower, designed for the Auckland waterfront. In 2021, the competition returned and the luminary pendant judged most creative was the work of the talented Architecture+Women·NZ team. The latest iteration of the Architecture NZ and ArchitectureNow-run event saw the teams tasked with designing a landmark structure on the city’s soon-to-be reclaimed waterfront, in response to Mayor Wayne Brown’s ‘dream’ for a Bjarke Ingels Group’s (BIG) Aarhus Havnebadet-inspired open-air swimming pool…

THE GREAT GLENORCHY ALPINE BASE CAMP is a thorough-going realisation of a distinctive commercial model: bespoke architecture in the service of bespoke adventure. In both a design and a business sense, the enterprise pitches its tent (excuse me) in highly resonant territory. Hollywood–;and the cinematic quality of the project encourages movie-making analogies–;would recognise it as a high-concept proposition. You could say, given that mining metaphors in this part of Otago are as irresistible as the lure of gold once was, that The Great Glenorchy Alpine Base Camp exploits a rich seam of settler typologies and memes. It’s quite a title: ‘The Great Glenorchy Alpine Base Camp’. Aside from its assertion of superlative status, the name acknowledges the setting of a village remotely sited at the confluence of the Dart River–Te…

This year’s New Zealand Architecture Awards jury was led by 2020 Gold Medal award-winning architect Dave Strachan of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland-based practice Strachan Group Architects. Strachan was joined by Sally Ogle of Patchwork Architecture and Ewan Brown of Tennent Brown Architects, both of Wellington Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and guest international juror and past President of the Australian Institute of Architects Clare Cousins, from Melbourne, Australia. The jury visited 61 short-listed projects across 13 categories during late August and early September. Congratulations to this year’s award-winners, who are profiled over the following 45 pages.…

BAY OF PLENTY, ŌMĀIO TE KURA O TE WHĀNAU A APANUI BY DCA ARCHITECTS OF TRANSFORMATION AND MOAA ARCHITECTS IN ASSOCIATION “The success of any kura is critical to empowering our future generations. Those who are lucky enough to work and study here will connect with their whakapapa and be enriched by the experience. This project is an exemplar of how to meet adversity head on and with tenacity, consultation and understanding from the 13 hapū involved; it has resulted in a rich environment for a very proud iwi. Three gable roof forms with generous verandahs have their ley lines oriented to places of significance and tell the story of the three schools, previously stretched over many kilometres of coastline, that have combined to become one. The careful relocation of…

Jury Commentary Dave Strachan, Sally Ogle, Ewan Brown and guest international juror Clare Cousins This is a beautiful house, carefully sited amongst established pōhutukawa and approachable from all sides: a house in the round. There is a striking contrast between the openness and operability of the living zones of the house, and the warmth and enclosure of the bedroom wing, which is enhanced by the spatial choices and material selections in each area. Although this is a large house in totality, the relatively modest scale of the rooms and courtyard spaces ensures a feeling of domesticity and easy inhabitation. This is a house where every aspect, at every scale, is considered in minute detail, including the curved belly ceiling in the living spaces, the rich timbered interior of the bedroom…

AUCKLAND, TĀMAKI MAKAURAU KEENE FAMILY HOME BY BULL O'SULLIVAN ARCHITECTURE “A relatively unchanged street façade opens up (and up and up) to an extensive addition behind this project, skilfully managing the planning of a large house on a 40° slope, and in close proximity to neighbours on both sides. The alteration achieves expansive views from each level and a surprising amount of outdoor amenity, including sheltered courtyards and a pool at the apex of the site. The palette of materials inside and out includes native timbers, woollen carpets and cork, which are sympathetic to the original house but distinct from the white façade of the exterior and the neighbouring dwellings. This project is extremely responsive to the brief from the family–;a physical copy of which is framed on a wall…

Te Auaha Gallery, Wellington 7–20 July 2023 I visited architect Simon Twose’s oneroomed installation Old House twice. The first was opening night, when Te Auaha’s gallery was thick with bodies, human and non. Whilst humans clutched their wine glasses, shifting about the space with interest, Twose’s assembly of ‘sketch creatures’ stood tripodally still, holding ground, as if waiting to burst into activity once we all went away. Like analogue cyborgs, the ‘creatures’ were less singular bodies and more assemblages of incompleteness, cohered around material affinities in an emergent interface between Twose, his dilapidated family cottage and the energetic Kaikōura coast. Cast beneath the ‘feet’ of the sketch creatures, discontinuous video sequences cut together house sketches and macro photography while a speaker in one corner of the gallery emitted an unearthly…

WE HAVE A COMMISSION, a new commission: a cause for some small celebration in these times of uncertainty. It is a very small commission that may lead to something larger but, at the moment, our clients have limited expectations of us–;just some illustrations of a possible building. It is hoped the images will help galvanise the client group, focusing their discussions and gaining agreement about the specifics of a brief. It is hoped that we might make some drawings that could be used for fund-raising, too. This is not unusual; the power of a drawing to make manifest a group’s hopes and dreams can be a potent rallying point, and something we are occasionally asked to do. It’s not as if there is a reservoir of forms and shapes lying in…

23 June 1940–;28 September 2023 Marshall grew up surrounded by the maps and photographs of his cartographer and historical curator father in Napier. School holiday jobs at the local architect’s office introduced him to John Scott and reinforced his enthusiasm for studying architecture. He came to the Auckland School of Architecture in 1959, took time out to work with Bill Wilson and Ivan Juriss–;the remnants of Group Architects–;John Scott and Lillian Chrystal, then returned to the school to finish in 1966. Marshall started a practice in 1967 with Terry Hitchcock and they were later joined by Peter Sargisson. In the mid-1970s, he travelled to England and taught timber construction for three years. Upon his return to New Zealand in the late 1970s, the practice undertook a number of ski resort…

Visiting Dunedin last month, a friend asked whether or not I knew the somewhat nondescript Maritime Building on Crawford Street–;the one with the easily missed Māori relief panels on its façade. I was able to reply that, decades earlier, Michael Findlay had pointed it out and, what’s more, he had suggested some possible design sources. During a relatively short visit, this was just one of many conversations where Michael’s name came up. Four years after his death, repeated mention of his work and observations emphasised what a loss this has been, and how his shared understandings continue to contribute to the cultural life of the south. In 1989, Michael and his family–;garden expert Alice with children Matthew and Bryony–;moved to Dunedin where he had taken a position of Collections Curator…

THIS IS ONE OF THE NEW BREED OF MEDIUM-to-high-density social housing but you wouldn’t know it. In an age of spectacular World Architecture Award-winning adjective-overloaded architecture, you could walk right past this building–;and I think that’s a good thing. I learned the hard way that most social housing tenants don’t actually want something super-architectural; they just want what everyone else has. I worked on Manning Mitchell’s state houses at Wiri, South Auckland, in the late 1980s and was responsible for some dazzling colour schemes you could see from the southern motorway. They were repainted beige a few years later. Rewi Thompson did some housing nearby that had more architectural attention but fared less well in tenant popularity–;it was eventually demolished. When doing final inspections of the Manning Mitchell houses, I…

Jury Commentary Dave Strachan, Sally Ogle, Ewan Brown and guest international juror Clare Cousins Many global tourist destinations are suffering from being overrun by huge visitor numbers. The slow tourism of The Great Glenorchy Alpine Base Camp suggests a softer touch. The experiences here for tourists are not offering hospitality with a high demand in terms of energy and resource use. The low-impact buildings and site services offer delightfully simple sleeping huts rather than a high-end hotel: something which suggests visitors who book an experience here are much more in tune with the spirit of the place. –NAMED AWARD CITATION Architecture that sits on the doorstep of a UNESCO World Heritage Site has to deliver an appropriate response to context. Fourteen simple, gable-roofed sleeping huts and adjacent communal spaces are…

AUCKLAND, TĀMAKI MAKAURAU THE HAYMAN KRONFELD BUILDING BY PEDDLE THORP “The Hayman Kronfeld Building, located in Auckland’s Britomart Precinct, is an innovative example of adaptive re-use, merging two Grade A heritage-listed buildings into one modern, compliant office space. The project skilfully negotiates structural challenges, like floor height disparities, through the inventive use of a lift core, and also showcases skilful fire risk and acoustics management. Alongside modern elements, the project incorporates significant heritage restoration components, including the thoughtful use of salvaged bricks and period-appropriate materials. The building interior is enhanced through thoughtful internal and external lighting strategies and sets a strong precedent for urban design, extending its impact well beyond its footprint.” Project team RICHARD GOLDIE, NICOLAU DOMINGUES, JOHN WARDLE, BRAD BALLE, CALEM BEAZLEY, EMANUELE LISCI, HANAN HAMOUDI, JOHN DIXON,…

NELSON, WHAKATŪ FEATHER HOUSE BY IRVING SMITH ARCHITECTS “This house is evidence of the clear understanding, trust and collaboration between architect and client, and a testament to the results that can come from continued prototyping and testing throughout design and construction phases. Strong diagonal circulation zigzagging through the house creates a series of flexible living spaces both inside and out. The deconstructed bathroom further enhances the flexibility of the planning, allowing this house to accommodate two people, or an extended family, comfortably. The house is well settled into its site, with the in-situ concrete walls defining further ‘rooms’ and circulation between the building and the hill. Details are sophisticated and beautifully crafted throughout, with bespoke designs making the most of the fact that the owner was also the builder and…

AUCKLAND, TĀMAKI MAKAURAU NGĀ HAU MĀNGERE–;OLD MĀNGERE BRIDGE REPLACEMENT BY BOSSLEY ARCHITECTS “Ngā Hau Māngere is a successful marriage of community-engaged design and engineering. Replacing a century-old crossing, the new structure serves as a social hub that promotes active transport and community gatherings. Developed in partnership with mana whenua and guided by public feedback, the bridge bends mid-span to change the traveller’s midjourney view of their destination, offers views of the maunga (mountains) at either end, and provides generous space for pedestrians, cyclists and fishers, with inbuilt seating and rod-holders. It has quickly become a local aesthetic treasure, with an inclined steel arch creating a visual link between the upper and lower harbours, and a colour gradient referencing fish scales that change as the traveller moves across the span.” Architect…

Makers Cabinet was founded in 2017 by designers Odin Ardagh, Benjamin Weininger and Noah Bier. It began with a simple idea, re-imagining the way we sharpen pencils. Since then, they have created a range of original and exciting heirloom-quality tools, elevating the drawing and writing experience to an art form. The Mighty Pen Gift Box with Yousef Sabry, valued at $566 The gift set includes: Høvel, Høvel Base, Høvel Sheath, Ferrule, Ferrule Sheath, HB Pencils, 2B Pencils, Lazlo, Lazlo Sheath, Drop Stand, 12 x Limited Edition Makers Cabinet Blackwing Pencils, 6 x Limited Edition Makers Cabinet Blackwing Erasers. We have two Lazlo Pens for the runners-up, valued at $163 each Lazlo is a pen meticulously designed to value the art of writing with unparalleled satisfaction in your hand. Featuring a…