Pews on wheels; Heritage on the move

Two events I’ve been privy to this week, David Sington’s 2007 film “In the Shadow of the Moon,” and the arrival of a quiet and dignified letter in the “eye-of-the-fish” post, have surprisingly eery resonances.  Sington’s film presents both an intimate and public view of the astronauts who have landed on the moon.  Its cosmic scale blasts so many of our earthly concerns into insignificance or smaller.

The epistle, despairing of a seemingly trival matter of re-arranging furniture, at first glance presents its concerns at a microcosmic scale.  Yet its modus operandi is equally complex.  It raises wider issues of sustainability with integrity, the limitations of current heritage regulations, and the potential contradictory aims of preservation when a building’s function is struggling to survive.  

Such issues appear to be a particular concern for churches – which have, for much of New Zealand’s colonial history, been a staple of our historical architectural livestock.  … But a recurring question of the late C20th and early C21st remains: how to revive falling congregation numbers (and the very viability of a parish building) and preserve our ecclesiastical heritage with architectural integrity?  Are these two aspirations necessarily in contradiction?

Karori seems a hotspot for such concerns: namely,

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Rising up in the blogosphere - or Lost in Transmission?

An interesting link to our site today, and a classification I didn’t know we had - it seems that Eye of the Fish has been ranked at 51st in the latest nz political blogosphere rankings on the tumeke! website. Initially I was excited: and then confused, and then: moderately proud. Isn’t that a sort of back-handed compliment like “fourth most popular folk comedy duo“? Of course, if we had the kind of cult following that Bret and Jemaine do, we’d be well stoked. Still, while we’re a fair bit away from position #1 : David Farrar’s rightwing Kiwiblog with 7000 daily visitors (never heard of it myself), or #2 : public address, by Russ Brown et al (3000 daily visitors), we’ve got a more reasoned 100 daily visitors, which is not bad for our more narrow focus on “urban life, design, architecture in Wellington“. We’re probably not getting that many visitors from Auckland, or Azerbijian, or much in between, but hey - we’re not far behind John Keys - his blog is just 8 places ahead of us, at #43, with 160 visitors

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Ngauranga to Airport (Part 2)

Its that time again - time for another round in the turtle-paced tennis match that is the public consultation process. This time the ball is back in our court, taking the form of a new draft plan for the Ngauranga-Airport transport corridor.

The plan is quick to address what is perhaps the most topical of the proposed options: light rail. To summarise, the report concludes that light rail is “exciting” and “potentially a very effective public transport solution,” but that none of the tested options were found to be feasible within the next deacde. However a “detailed scheme assesment” is to be undertaken within 5-10 years.

Instead, the suggested strategy is primarily focused around producing a rapid bus transit system along the much lauded ‘growth spine’ of the N2A corridor. Within 5 years, bus priority measures are planned to be put in place between the railway station and Newtown, which essentially means that dedicated bus lanes will be implemented during peak times, along with some minor improvements such as electronic arrival tracking and traffic signal manipulation for late buses. The plan is also quick to point out that these new busways could easily become the base infrastructure for a future light …

Mill Creek Wind Farm

Wellington is a windy place, we’ll accept that. Except this year, when it has been unusually calm, but we’re not complaining! And New Zealand is a green, clean, and (almost) energy sustainable country. For years we have got by on nothing but hydro-electric and geo-thermal power - we’re the envy of the world, in many ways.

Lately however we’ve ben profligate in our energy use, and have been burning coal, oil, and gas. The mighty Maui oil and gas field has been depleted in an amazingly short 15 years or so - if we had used it carefully we could have had gas for cooking for the next 100 years or more - instead we piped it to shore, and burnt it off in a generator to make steam to drive a turbine to create electricity - a roundabout way that uses up the majority of the energy before it even gets to your home.

Now we’re doing the same with the also large Tui oil field, and we’re not even keeping the gas - we’re flaring that off at a tremendous rate. NZ is now nothing but a profligate energy waster - the only reason we’re still green …

She’s a total blam blam

Wellington’s apartment / property market continues on at (almost) full pace. Perhaps there is no reason for Kiwis to be so pessimistic in their outlook after all - there may be a global credit crunch, but evidently Wellington is doing just fine. OK, so we all have heard that the Auckland apartment market has tanked in a big way, but then again: if you allow hectares of bland unexciting crap to be built, you should expect to reap what you sow. However, Wellington seems to have better architects, better control over what the end result looks like, better planned developments - why, the outlook is positively rosy! And what better way to show your confidence than to demolish your existing building? In the past fortnight two of Wellington’s apartment projects have made a bold start by demolishing the existing building, which is a fairly confident way of saying that the new building is going to go ahead.  Blam! The first of them to fall under the demolition ball is the site for the so-called Soho apartments, a proposed high-rise complex of medium quality flats next to Les Mills in Taranaki St. The marketing of this building has been curious: …