From our watery vantage point out in the harbour, we Fish survey the shore with interest. The other day (when the sun was out: remember what the sun looks like?) we spied something that we thought was odd. This first building is for some nameless private company, with a big blobby amoeba like logo splashed on the end facade. I think that once upon a time it was designed by Craig Craig Moller? Built in the early 80s as far as I remember, it is an interesting design: the first grapplings of Gordon Moller perhaps in going from a simple…
read the full entryIt’s all go down on the waterfront this week: the news keeps flying thick and fast, and we just can’t keep up with the flow! But we’ll try: here’s a catch-up.
First there was the news that the Wharves were falling down – with DomPost giving that story more face time than the war against the Tamils – and a doleful looking Mr Pike lost in a field of rotting wharf timbers. It’s nice to have someone with a Fishy name like Pike in charge of the waterfront: it sounds like he’s in tune with the water and us Fishes. Apparently…
read the full entryWe here at the Fish have been following the fate of Auckland’s motorway obsession with interest. It seems that NZTA (the former Transit) and their Infrastructure Minister Stephen Joyce, are more than a little bit cautious when it comes to building things in tunnels. As many of our commenters here have noted, projected costs of $540 million per kilometre of tunnels are more than a little bit ridiculous. If you’re paying $540 million / km – you’re just not doing it right !
And so, while you were all out larging it on a Friday night, the Maximus massive were researching…
read the full entryThere’s a small town some hour or so north of Wellington, by commercial jet, called Auckland. Small town, big suburbs, not much of a city. Normally they don’t make it onto the Eye of the Fish web cam, but then again, they have 2 harbours whereas we just have one, and that makes my tiny flippers quiver. The news for Auckland today means I feel for them, in a fishy kind of way.
Not because they have John Banks as a mayor – they were silly enough to vote for him – twice – so they deserve whatever they get.
Not…
read the full entryDo we have too much bureaucracy in NZ, or not enough? Is it too easy to get a building designed and built in our shiny happy little country, or is it really the solid chore and back-breaking task that the Nats would have you believe? While our building standards in NZ may be set at a fairly low point, asking only that we barely scrape past the minimum, at least we have a reasonably responsible to matters where there is an actual risk of loss of life. And we have that RMA thing to safeguard our birds and bees and…
read the full entryIndeed, you’re all too fast to catch me out – it shows we have some pretty sharp eyes here in the capital at picking out window details. OK, it wasn’t that hard a competition, and it is a pretty big building that we’ve all been watching with eagle eyes, and despite what I said before, its not really something that can be ignored.
Yes, the building is the Mark Dunajtschik development at number 1 Featherston Street, with the main tenant going to be the Taxman. It’s big, but nowhere near as big as the Pentagon (Mobsta, tell your source they’re sadly…
read the full entryThis building is just too overpowering for words. So pictures will have to do instead. Can you guess what it is?
The cladding is very simple, to the point of being very plain. There’s nothing better than a smooth even grey. A warm soft grey, with a hint of white.
Is frit the new phat? Is grey the new black?
read the full entryThe scaffold has come down and the last of the glass balustrading was going on Saturday morning – and its great to see at last what Piermont really looks like.
This is an apartment building that has been carefully designed for this particular corner: maximising the views out to the Waitangi Park, carefully trying to avoid seeing too much of the black hulk of the Museum Hotel, and staunchly turning its back to Portal, the other Architecture + development for CAS just up the road.
It’s always hard to comment about a building if you haven’t been inside, but until…
read the full entryCuba Street is nothing if not the Busking home of Wellington, and at any given time there are normally at least a couple of buskers, thrashing out chords and trying out their talents on our eardrums.
There is as always the Bard of Cuba St as he styles himself, with excellent finger-handling as he picks out the strings on his worn out fretwork, and gingery beard wavering below his toothy gapped grin on some maudlin lyrics. He always plays “I don’t like Mondays” to start us off on our way to work early in the week: there’s nothing like an appropriately…
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