Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2024 i Architecture NZ

At the 2023 World Architecture Festival (WAF) in Singapore, Patterson Associates’ Ravenscar House (01) in Christchurch took out the top award for Completed Buildings, Culture, and RTA Studio’s soon-to-be-built Fisher & Paykel Global Headquarters in Auckland (02) was highly commended in the Futureglass Prize, having earlier received a WAFX award. The World Building of the Year award went to the Huizhen High School by Approach Design Studio/Zhejiang University of Technology Engineering Design Group in China (03–05). The architects describe the boarding school campus as a ‘floating forest’, with classrooms hung in each corner of the forest and joined by meandering paths. Scattered tree houses provide students with ‘temporary escapes’ and a ramp leads up to a gently sloped roof. This roof doubles as an open-air lecture hall and a rooftop…

MEET THE JURY This year’s Interior Awards jury brings together a group of talented designers and architects whose wide range of experience covers projects both in Aotearoa and further afield. Ana Heremaia (Ngāpuhi) is an interior architect and co-founder of multi-disciplinary, not-for-profit design studio ĀKAU. After working overseas for a number of years, Ana returned home to explore the ways in which design can be used to create impact in small communities in Te Taitokerau. She is passionate about engaging tamariki and whānau in the design process and finding innovative ways to create tangible outcomes in communities where funding for design projects is limited. With a background in both fine arts and industrial design, Dorian Minty is a principal at Studio Pacific Architecture, which he joined in 2002 after working…

Jonathan Qian Jiang’s Scroll Park Drawing Through Three Ages has been selected for the Architecture+Women.NZ Tātuhi Drawing Architecture: Sarah Treadwell Archive for 2024. The 780x320mm work is from Jiang’s thesis ‘Matterless Matter. An architecture built for children and their ghost friends’. The annual selection for the drawing prize is made by Sarah Treadwell along with her co-selectors Marian Macken, Ashleigh Smith, Simon Twose, Sharon Jansen, Karamia Müller and Lynda Simmons. The 2024 addition to the online archive contributes to the slowly building body of drawings, which is a record of selected approaches to drawing and architecture, each entry particular to its time. The selectors commented that the spatial syntax of the document itself is deeply considered, where the idea of a (traditional Chinese) scroll book is investigated through a three-dimensional…

THIS PROJECT SITS AT THE VERY HEART OF what was the original settlement of Wellington. It really was the maddest place to build a city. A beachfront site with a rocky headland at Kai-upoko, early settlers had to scramble up across the rocks at stormy high tides to get from Willis Street to Lambton Quay. Plimmer’s Ark (an old ship used as a shop) sat across the street and bits of the hull sit there still in an old basement. There have been buildings here at Clay Point (aka Windy Point) ever since pākehā arrived. The clay of the point was made into bricks, building sites were created and early timber shacks on the site for grocers, butchers, milliners, fruit shops, mercery and haberdashers were replaced some years later by…

I CAME ACROSS AN ARTICLE IN the midnight hour: that time of the night when sleep seems far away and the monsters of uncertainty, doubt and insecurity circle the bed. This is the time between the first and second sleeps, when those of an earlier age might rise after having bedded down at dusk and achieved their eight hours, to pen metaphysical poetry by the light of sputtering candles, until overcome with drowsiness again. I am not given to poesy and rather than rise and light a candle, I find myself fending off the midnight belligerents by checking in on the fourth estate’s publications from around the globe. The big city dailies have a well-indexed litany of local and global horror stories that either send one into a foetal curl beneath…

Last year saw the introduction of the new Community Impact award to the annual Interior Awards programme, to help discover design with a greater purpose and for the common good. Projects entered celebrate the collaboration and often pro bono work that designers and architects bring to the creation of spaces for communities and not-for-profit organisations. The inaugural winner in 2023 was ĀKAU’s Te Puna Reo o Manga Tangaroa, which saw the coming together of a community to fund, design and build Aotearoa’s first full-immersion te reo Māori early childhood learning centre. The jury said “this project transcends the line between design and community, process and product into an ‘act of care’ and it will, hopefully, stir a generation of like-minded small communities to aspire to deliver their own centres for…

APARTMENT BUILDINGS CAN BE TRICKY to review. More often than not, they reflect a pre-determined planning and development logic and are simply skinned from a selection of compliant cladding types. This shouldn’t be the case. Apartment buildings can provide great source material in the search for denser models of living, while interrogating the profoundly different ways they are presented through architectural and real-estate media. On one hand, architectural details command the whole frame while, through other channels, the architecture is barely there at all – apartment living presented to prospective purchasers as little more than a frame for the view. Beyond the myriad ways that apartment buildings are presented to their various audiences is a search for a core idea that could be taken up by others and proliferate. Aldo Rossi…

THE PRIZES FROM MAKERS CABINET 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…

Façade solutions provider Thermosash celebrated the opening of its new 17,000m2 facility in Auckland’s Henderson, along with five decades of business, at the end of November. In welcoming the 300-plus guests to the Central Park Drive site, CEO David Hayes said it was a great opportunity to show the company’s clients, architects and main contractors the range of project and façade solutions with which Thermosash had been involved since his father, Laurie Hayes, launched the business in 1973. Amongst the company’s better-known early projects were the University of Auckland’s School of Architecture (1982), the BNZ Tower in Auckland (1986) and the National Bank Twin Towers, also in Auckland (1987). Notable projects post-1987 have been the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa, Wellington (1996), the Auckland Museum Events Centre (2006) and…

When Kai-Uwe Bergmann was a young designer travelling the world, it was the work of Antoni Gaudi that took his breath away. “With the cathedral and the park and his buildings, it was of another world, so plastic and so fluid and like nothing I had seen before… for me, it was an epiphany.” Taking that inspiration, Bergmann is now a New York-based partner with the global architecture practice Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), leading work in more than 40 countries. Straight off the bat, his energy and excitement are palpable as he explains a project called The Spiral, an office tower in Manhattan that is nearing completion. “It has an outdoor terrace on every floor and the terraces spiral up, so it’s called The Spiral. Post-Covid, we can imagine the…

IN THE HEART OF WELLINGTON, OUR team at Tennent Brown is helping a new kind of building rise up through the Kelburn campus of Te Herenga Waka Victoria University. The Living Pā is a new three-storey, 3000m2 building at Te Herenga Waka Marae. As it grows alongside a dense built environment of conventional concrete, steel and masonry structures, it’s a testament to a courageous client’s determination to make a building that will inspire and advocate for a sustainable future for architecture in Aotearoa. The Living Pā is being built to the principles of the Living Building Challenge, a revolutionary set of sustainable construction guidelines pushing architects to find the new ways of building we need if the world is to have any hope of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. The…

TAKING AN ACUTELY UNIQUE MĀORI world view, we pay reverence to the prestige of Wai Ariki, to the whenua upon which it stands and to the iwi of Ngāti Whakaue (nō mua, nō muri, nō nāianei), who helped conceptualise and build, and now occupy, this significant Ngāti Whakaue whare as uri whakaheke. E kō, kōia e tū mai nei! E kō, kōia e ara ake nei! Ka ū ki Matānuku! Ka ū ki Matārangi! Ka ū ki ngā maunga whakahī o Kupe! Ko Pūhanga Tohorā ka whai ki Te Ramaroa! Ko Te Ramaroa ka heke ki Whiria! Ko te paiaka o te riri, ko te kawa o Rāhiri! Whiria, ka huri ki Panguru ki Papata, te rākau e tū papata ki Te Tai Hauāuru! Panguru, Papata ko Maunga Taniwha Whakarongorua!…

IT’S INTERESTING THAT, AS AN INDUSTRY, we’re so caught up in the whole ‘shed’ vernacular. After all, we’re not the only country to lay claim to sheds. But working within this typology seems to appeal to our sense of modesty and humility, and perhaps there’s some comfort in the familiar. The latest offering to join the Martinborough vineyard scene is most definitely an elegant, and somewhat elevated, shed. Here, Christchurch-based architect Charlie Nott has designed a woolshed, set amongst a scattering of casually dispersed rural buildings. It is a shed of such heft, it could rival a celebrated 1883 counterpart on the Maraekakaho Station, some 250km north in Hawke’s Bay. Nott’s imposing timber and metal-clad structure is arrived at by way of a circuitous driveway, passing first a barrel-roofed shed…

Niklas Maak Hatje Cantz 2022 The ‘commons’ is any finite, valuable resource (such as water, a fishery or a national park) that is collectively enjoyed by a number of people with unfettered access. The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is that, without shared social structures, cultural practices like kaitiakitanga (guardianship), mutual restraint by consensus or formal rules, people will tend to overuse it, deplete it and end up destroying the value of the resource altogether.1 Niklas Maak, the author of Server Manifesto, writes “data is the single greatest collective treasure of a digital society, the basic material for business and politics”. Data has become the ‘commons’ of our digital age. The tragedy is that the immense positive potential of data to serve society has been manipulated by algorithm and syphoned off…