Icon get no satisfaction

It has been announced by the Wellington City Council, that following on from the demise of the proposal for a Hilton Hotel, there will be an ideas competition for the end of the Outer T on Queens Wharf: currently home to an old tin shed, as I’m sure you all know. The Hilton-to-be, as you will recall, was vanquished by the continued badgering of the combined forces of Waterfront Watch and the Civic Trust (go Grey Power!), and no one much seems to have mourned its passing (blogged by Philip back in March). The Hilton’s Auckland architects have left town with their tails between their legs, probably destined never to want to return. While details for the competition for the replacement building have not been clarified yet, there’s one thing for sure: there’s going to be a call for it to be Iconic.

Do you reckon it might just be time to put an end to the use of the word Iconic ?  Once upon a time Icon was just a word meaning those painted portraits of Orthodox saints, then it became a symbol for a Mac

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Get your skates on

Wellington has long had an ambivalent attitude to alternative means of transport unloved in other cities - we still have trolley buses (long absent from Auckland or Christchurch), we have a cable car (NZ’s and one of the world’s few commuter vertical transporters), and the cops here seem to turn a blind eye to youths driving scooters, sidewinders or skateboards.

In most major cities of the world the sight of a dreadlocked MP riding down the road on a skateboard on the way to Parliament would have been a major story, but here Nandoor Tanczos made only a brief mention in the paper some years ago (an MP no more, that makes us all just that little bit duller).  Perhaps in Delhi the sight of holy cattle wandering the streets adds a frisson of excitement that cannot be matched here, except perhaps by the equal dodgem-ride feeling of steering around a Victoria uni student surfing merrily down the middle lane of Taranaki St, while buses and cars sail seemingly unconcerned past on either side. Skateboards seem to occupy a special place in the eyes of the law that even cyclists cannot reach -

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Civic Trust Award Winners

In the line of an old Abba song, The Winner takes it All, and so it was in the 2008 Wellington Civic Trust awards last night. A friendly Fish-monger sends in this report from the ceremony in Te Papa:

The evening started off promptly, no time for drinkies (or Studio Pacific - who missed out on the news they had won the first prize of the evening by a good 5 minutes!), before leaping straight into the Awards ceremonies. First up was the award for best building in Wellington (constructed in the last 3 years). Nominated by members of the public, and adjudicated upon by a learned cocktail of Dudding, Beard and Toomath, the nominations included Archaus’ very tasty Cuba St headquarters for Kate Sylvester, the glazed recycled cinema of DoC House, the fine timber-feathered form for Meridian on the waterfront, and a few others. Meridian swept away with that award, and deservedly so for a excellent addition to Wellington’s waterfront architecture.

Other awards were: Best Heritage project (judged by David Pucher, Barbara Fill and Con Flinkenberg) - nominees were the holy restoration of the Chapel of St Barnabas, the new life

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Do it once, do it right

It has been said that if you want a job done right, then do it yourself. The government seems to have taken this to heart at present, by announcing that a competition for an affordable home has been launched: one possible sub-text being that as they have no way of making housing affordable, perhaps you’d like to design yourself one. Its not to be sneezed at though - there’s an $8,000 first prize, and a guarantee that the winning entry WILL be built. Open to students, professionals, and all comers, the affordable home is to be bought in at under $1400 / m2 and a max area of 120 m2. If you can meet those restrictions, then an all up construction cost of $168,000 for the house would indeed put it in the affordable category, assuming that the land was free of course. Details all available on the DBH website here, including, presumably, where to get this supply of free land.

Judges, somewhat to my surprise, include the aged and venerated Gordon Moller (a former NZIA President, the Chair of the panel, and designer of a Skytower or two), Prof Gordon Holden (Victoria University architecture Dean), as well as Graham

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The right to write

After a lengthy (some might say excruciating) out-pouring about her experience of the ridiculous difficulties of building (home renovations and building consents), Joanne Black has recently decide to public pronounce on two more fascinating aspects of the architectural world.  Firstly, that the building process is too easy for other people (yes the old “Not-in-my-backyard-especially-when-it’s-Thorndon” syndrome), and secondly, the right for architects to describe their projects using language in a way which is at odds with her own journalistic purity.

 
The launch of this discussion began a couple of week’s ago in Black’s regular Listener column (6-12 September 2008).  It began: “Architects sometimes spout tiresomely pretentious verbiage” (p. 94).  She has continued in a following column naming the criminal architectural-writers as Studio Pacific Architects, and confessing that she has “now developed a horrified fascination for architects’ descriptions of their own work” (13-19 September 2008, p. 94).  A similar vein was rendered again on yesterday’s National Radio afternoon’s programme “The Panel” with Amanda Millar and Jim Mora.   

What fascinates me is that a member of the journalistic profession - one dedicated to a very limited view of language as reportage and a low reading age (apparently newspaper are written for a reading

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Two Pensions?

In the heart of Wellington’s old Chinatown, namely the narrow low-scale neighbourhood of Haining St, there is one of the few trees that are growing in Te Aro, nestling happily in the lee of an also fairly non-descript warehouse building. Until fairly recently the site was the home of a film unit, a student flat, and parking for assorted businesses, until it was sold and resold and eventually ended up in the hands of the property spruikers known as Rich Mastery: organizers of ‘property seminars’ - otherwise known as a way to “get rich quick”. Unfortunately for the majority that sign up, it’s mainly the leaders of this property-mania cult that stand to get rich.

In this case, Steve Goodey of Venture Property Group has assumed the mantle of developer, rechristened the existing building “RichMastery House” for the seminars - which must sound pretty grand until you visit the site and find it is just a retrofitted warehouse. Never mind that it sits amidst a predominantly two storey high neighbourhood, this proposal is for a 10 storey building - and I suspect there is no doubt that they would have

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St George and St Mary

Another week, another apartment development. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad: sometimes it seems they’re just sent to test the market. There are two more recent apartment buildings being promoted at present: one publicly notified, the other trying to sneak in under the radar. Let’s look at the notified proposal first – as comments are due to the Council by 4 September.

This notified consent application is a real test of the developers nerve, and of the Council’s will power. What do you do with a site nestling near the base of the tallest building in the capital? Surely just about anything you do will look relatively small next to the Majestic Tower, so why not try to push your options to the max? The site is next to the St George Hotel on the corner of Willis and Boulcott: at present there’s just a small asphalt carpark area, flanked by the side elevations of the St George Hotel, with an interesting (if unsightly) display of downpipes. A site surely singing out to be redeveloped, if not simply just to help cover up the nasty boxy elevations of the student accommodation behind.

Only trouble is, of course, is that it’s in a

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