Its taken a while for the groundswell of opinion to slowly rise up from the mire, but the Warren and Mahoney scheme for the reworking of the National Library is getting some flack recently. Does it deserve it? Isn’t the purpose of art and architecture to challenge? We’ve blogged about the proposed works at the National Library once before, and we had quite a few comments back, although once again: the architects in town all keep quiet. No-one in the profession dares to comment on other architects work, so it seems. Mind you, on certain occasions it seems like they…
read the full entryThe failed restaurant Pod, a Herriot + Melhuish designed restaurant which had been resident in a steel, zinc and glass box on the corner of Victoria St, has been butchered as an example of clean modern architecture, and has risen instead as a tack-ridden example of neo-celtic, mock-old, mock-new, mock serious, mock-everything irish theme bar called the Green Man.
They’ve certainly got their bases covered. The Masked Barfly has written of it in the Wellingtonista as “combined into a slick and consciously contrived “wackiness” with the sheen of an nascent franchise ready to spread from Queenstown to…
Breaking news tonight of a story close to our hearts here at the Eye of the Fish. I’m really pleased that at last someone has decided to start calling the two main Islands more inventive names than North and South. I’m far more excited to live on Te Ika a Maui than on the dull and predictable North Island, and with the South Island being named Te Wai Pounamu, at last we can have some sense of pride in where we live. Although it seems I may be out on a different limb here from boring old mainstream NZ.
Mind…
read the full entryThe Commissioners have been busy of late. When the going gets tough, in a small city like this, there’s only one thing to do: call in the Commissioner. The big news for Wellington is of course that Indoor Sports Centre is ready to rumble.
Yes, the independent Commissioner, John Anderson, has prepared his final report and is ready to report back to Wellington on the result today or tomorrow He’s reported back – see update below. We’d love to be able to scoop you (wait, we already have) the result of whether the Commissioner says “Yay”,…
This posting takes as it’s start the musings of a regular reader / commenter, “Starkive”, with a musing on the possibility of covering / incorporating the proposed overpass across the Basin Reserve with…
…no, not ants, but with something:
As it happens I am a cricket tragic and – to the extent that being an Auckland supporter will allow – a Basin lover. I have often slumped on the grassy bank and plotted how much better the ground could be while still remaining the Basin. Most of those plots involve the northern end of the ground where a…
read the full entryOver the last few months we’ve been watching with interest as the new ‘Soho’ apartment building is being erected in Taranaki St. Unlike other apartment projects that seem to have been mired in the mud for some time (Watermark being one, and most of Merge Developments outputs being another few), this Taranaki St project is going full steam ahead. As I dislike their use of the name Soho (I’ve said before – it’s all just so wrong), I’m going to re-christen them the Sodo apartments, due to their attitude to the rest of the neighbourhood as well as to their…
read the full entryFollowing on from the last post we made, an April Fool’s gag that seems to have genuinely fooled some of our less discriminating readers, it’s with no great surprise that we hear of the demise / further delay of “Memorial Park”. It was the other potential target for our 1 April prank – where we were set to announce that the Park was to go ahead – but even we didn’t think that anyone was likely to be seriously taken in by that story. As the weeds grow thick and fast on the former building verge, and the hurricane wire…
read the full entryIn a move that has completely flummoxed us fishy writers, Mayor Kerry Prendergast, we’re pleased to scoop (in that newsworthy way), will soon announce that the new Inner City Sports Facility will indeed be shifted back to the central city site next to the Stadium.
Groans have been heard from school children in Kilbirnie – but hey, that’s life in a big city where the political move can swing faster than any tide. The latest “independent” review of the Cobham Drive proposal is due out from the even-more-independent-reviewer-than-the-last-one at mid-day today, and we’ll be huddled around our…
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