No affordable housing?
On Thursday, Wellington held the Inaugural Housing Policy Forum. Admirably timed to help debate housing policies before the election, the Forum set out to examine New Zealand’s peculiar obsession with owning your own home: especially your own, detached, quarter acre, 4 walls and picket-fence type home.
The range of speakers included the right wing: Don Brash, Phil Heatley, Owen McShane, and Hugh Pavletich - and their answers are a predictable right wing response: tax cuts, develop greenfield sites, reform the Resource Management Act. All these measures will - if you are a believer in right wing National Party / Act policies - allow housing to become more affordable. Key repeated issues such as the high increase of the land price component of houses, and the increasing disparity between wage inflation and house price inflation over recent years (the figures cited indicated a shift from houses costing 320% of wages (1991) to 400% in 2003, and 600% in 2007). That all ties in well with the announcements earlier in the week from Labour’s Shane Jones, that simplifying the Building Consent process will bring the cost of housing down. Umm, yeah right, Shane. Not really an answer to the housing problem.
Hugh Pavletich, of …
Fwd: An open letter to the NZIA
While vaguely in the political arena, I thought I would take a moment to help propogate a recently written address to the New Zealand Institute of Architects. The address follows on from the (relatively) recent Pacific Students of Architecture Congress, and details some of the problems surrounding the disciple of architecture that were explored by the conference.
My knowledge on NZIA matters is fairly limited, so im going to refrain from commentary. But please, feel free to add your say - this is certainly an important issue.
This post just received Resource Consent
Shane Jones - Minister of Building and Construction - is looking to change portions of the Resource Management Act, aiming to reduce the costs associated with building homes. Affecting both a range of project scales, the proposals represent a relaxation of the Act’s strict dictates.
On the smaller scale it looks like DIY-ers will face less restrictions when performing minor alterations to their own property. That is, as long as there is no significant danger involved.
It also seems that something of a bundled plan will be available for new residential projects, possibly trimming up to $3000 from the costs of garnering consent. While this is really a pittance for individual projects, the ramifications for large scale developers under this House-Super-Combo is that developers can potentially merge groups of identical housing plans into a single application - largely bypassing individual certification. However, this is limited only to “established group housing building companies,” and so will presumably only be employed in large scale projects.
It’s difficult to read into this. Will it only be used in huge developments, where plans are copy-pasted en-masse across a single site? Or in contrast, will it also be able to be used in to apply similar …
Metropol-itan ?
Hot on the heels of the Barrio development comes another development of inner-city apartments (first blogged on WellUrban). This one is designed by Archaus - the most prolific architects in Wellington. The site has had a couple of schemes proposed for it previously: one by Abri Architects of Auckland which was shot down in flames pretty quickly, and the other, curvy one that never really saw the light of day except for a feature in the Wellurban blog. This one may be around a little longer.
The site, is a highly sought after corner close to Cuba St, right on the edge of Ghuznee St and Leeds St. Looking at architects drawings it seems to be about 14 stories tall. So tall in fact, that in most of the shots the top of the building is cropped out, not quite lost in the clouds, but certainly too tall to show in a landscape format. Or is that just so that the public don’t get to find out exactly how many floors the building is?
At present, the site is mostly empty - an empty Shackel Motors yard that used to house …
The Hilton vanishes?
The potential Hilton hotel has had the appeals against its consent upheld, signalling what is likely to be the end of the controversial waterfront proposal. Having started the applications process back in later 2005, the news seems like it will be a decisive blow to the project; although an appeal is possible, it must go through the High Court.
The presiding judge cited all the usual issues with the project, such as public space, lines of sight and heritage concerns among others. Plenty has been written about the project previously, and its associated drawbacks and benefits. Despite the changes that were made to throughout the application process, it seems that this decision was ultimately a judgement of not-quite-good-enough . Although the design is of a decent quality, and the hotel would bring many economic benefits, my hope is that the decision was made with the intent of preserving the site for an even higher quality project, rather than following a general distaste for commercial waterfront developments.
Looking to the future, the rejection of this plan does again open up the potential of the site. Occupying a prime position amongst the new developments, …
Barrio and Bellagio
Just as the press is all about the coming end of the property market, and the apartment market crash in Auckland, another development appears on the horizon.
Barrio is the latest high rise apartment building designed by architect Campbell Pope, interestingly just next to his previous work: the Bellagio. While Bellagio seemed a random choice for a name, implying an Italian background, Barrio seems outright wrong - normally meaning a poor neighbourhood in a Spanish speaking country. Not quite a favela, or a slum; but not far from it. Perhaps not what you want rich property investors to be thinking - presumably the developers are assuming that kiwi investors won’t be fluent in Spanish. One word to you then: Pajero.
Barrio is designed on the same rationale as many of the Archaus projects, whereby you buy two small apartments linked together as one package, and can then rent out one and live in the other. Inevitably, one is a dubiously small studio apartment, while the other is a ‘one bedroom’ flat, often little larger. Its depressing, to me at least, because while it caters well for the ‘get rich
…
Derek and Jen
Watching TV on Saturday night, I spotted two things that are doing marvellous PR for Architects in New Zealand. Forget about the inept and unregistered on Mitre 10 Dream home – producing the sort of tat we’re all trying to avoid – over on Grand Designs Abroad, the host Kevin McCloud is possibly the best advert for having an architect in NZ, even if it is a British programme - this week set in Spain…
This week Derek and Jen, enthusiastic but interfering South Africans, were their own worst clients, literally chopping and changing the architects’ plans (“we just using them as wallpaper na”) until their housing conception truly looked like a dogs breakfast.
McCloud is right on the money when he whispers to the camera that they should butt out and leave the architecture to the professionals; they had meddled and meddled until they had cocked the whole thing up. It not only looked awful, but featuring stairs you crack your head on, to get up to a mezzanine that you can’t see out of the windows from, and a big plexiglass atrium roof to let the sun into the centre of the house and trap the heat. This …
Courtenay 2.0
Is it just me, or has the media coverage of the proposed Courtenay Place changes focused a little too much on the issues related to the curbing of an “out-of-control” party zone, much to the detriment of several other important issues. For example, in the Dominion Post it was noted that:
“Out-of-control drinking … has prompted a radical review, which could result in which could result in closed-circuit television cameras scanning the streets, a 24/7 alcohol ban and peak-hour traffic blocked.”
The polemic of Courtenay as a dangerous embarrassment may or may not be entirely valid, and I understand the usefullness of alcohol bans and CCTVs, but of what relevance are the drinking problems to restrictions on peak-hour traffic? 8am and 6pm are hardly the epicenters of anti-social drunkenness. I feel these changes should stand on their own merits; if implemented, this change - and several others in the same vein - would have a dramatic effects on how the area operates.
Another interesting suggestion is to increase the amount of outdoor space available to bars and resteraunts by removing car parks and extending the footpath - particularly on the Courtney ends of Blair and Allen. Although, it seems that blurring the …
The Strange Death of Architectural Criticism
It’s a lonely life being an architectural critic in New Zealand. An art form that’s not so much dying as nearly not born at all, there are precious few who will stick their head above the parapet to comment on the equally few works of architecture we have that appear in the pages of the press. And it is a situation that is going to get worse. Newspaper rolls are falling quite rapidly, with Wellington once having had two newspapers; well respected voices that have since combined into one, although the end result is worse than either was previously, now seemingly more interested in running double page ads for the Warehouse, or sensationalizing trivia than for any intelligent commentary. The New Zealand Herald - Auckland’s rag - is no better, and arguably a whole lot worse. Intelligent, well-reasoned commentary is not so much marginalised as confined to a ghetto.
The ghetto in question is of course a magazine, that blossoming, burgeoning art form of high gloss paper and full colour, double spread pictures that captures a fragment of this country’s architectural output. A few years ago it was picked that magazines would die out, costs were high and their specialist …