Resource Management Act: Discuss

So National has pledged to reform the RMA within its first 100 days of office, should it get elected. Some people are getting very excited about that. ACT seems to think this may mean less restrictions on suburban land for housing, and let ‘good’ projects start and finish earlier. National seems to think that key ‘infrastructure’ projects will get a green light with less soul-searching. Labour seems to think that the RMA is just fine as it is, and has no need to change. 

If you were elected tomorrow, what would you change in the RMA in your first 100 days in office?  

Banalitecture

I’ve just spotted this blank wall being constructed beside the main route into the city from the airport. Facing north, providing a beautiful backdrop for shadow play of pohutukawa, as well as a future venue for no doubt countless mindless scribblings, is a blank wall. Courtesy of the ArcHaus architectural team.

Is this really what we want to be seen from the main road? Is a blank wall the best we can do for a frontage onto the beautiful waters of Evans Bay? Or should we be striving for better for our city? Is there going to be some great and beautiful structure on top, or have we already had the masterstroke on this work of architecture already?  

Wellington Construction corpses

The DomPost reported recently that Wellington Construction Ltd has bit the dust, owing various creditors money as it dissolved into a pile of construction rubble. We’re saddened by that, but its not completely unexpected: you run with wolves, you might just get bitten: although in this case its not really clear who is doing the biting. The saviour of Wellington football club Phoenix, our favourite spiky-haired developer Terry Serepisos has been hit by collateral damage - WCL were building Terry’s Century City development, leaving it in a state of limbo. Perhaps it may even have a a roll-on effect on the next Serepisos project in Dixon St. So, is this the start of the end of Wellington’s construction boom, or is it completely unrelated? 

Maybe we just leave you to make your own mind up. Terry Pinfold, the head of WCL, was an experienced contractor: 

“Pinfold made his name as commercial manager for Mainzeal in the 1990s when he was associated with projects such as moving the Museum Hotel, refurbishing the St James Theatre and building the Moa Point sewage treatment plant. In 1998 he set up the Wellington office of Auckland-based Hartner Construction. When Hartner went into liquidation in 2001,

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Jolly Green Giants

In a break away from discussing the whys and wherefores of a proposed small road to the north of Wellington, lets return for a moment to the heart of the city to present and discuss a building proposal by The Wellington Company. 

The building, designed by local architects Architecture +, is proposed as the new home for Telecom in Wellington, as reported by NBR and the DomPost earlier this week, although in typical non-helpful fashion, neither acknowledged who the architect was.

Also being marketed recently are glassy new proposals situated between Lambton Quay and Kate Sheppard Place, just next to the bus-station,  which are an update on a previous scheme, by the same architects, as originally reported almost a year ago by WellUrban. Some hillside dwellers aren’t going to be getting much sleep if all these projects come off… 

Telecom have been on the hunt for some time for a new base in the capital, to concentrate their staff - at present distributed in several buildings around Wellington, including on Jervois Quay and also in Tory St. Those avid property watchers amongst us will have noticed that Ian Cassells, head of the Wellington Company, bought the

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Boondoggle Gully

Following on from our recent post dissing the likelihood of the “Transmission Gully” project ever getting off the ground, Transit made a big splash with a 4 page advert in the local rag (sorry DomPost, but your quality has been on a solid downwards trajectory lately and you no longer deserve the epithet of national newspaper), setting out improvements: a “new route” (which seems to be “using the gully floor” instead of “half way up the bottom of a steep slope”), a reduction in the number of intersections, and a confirmation that it would be 4 lanes (ie 2 lanes each way). Somehow from that there is a saving of over $235 million, certainly nothing to be sneezed at. Why, that would get you one and a half new light rail systems (a relative snip at $140 million) in central Wellington, right there! And there’s the rub: Mayor Kerry is quoted on the front page as saying that Transmission Gully was still in Never-Never Land, and that unless central government stumps up with another $600 million, it isn’t going to go ahead. It’s worth noting that the definition of boondoggle not only includes: work or activity that …

Dude, where’s my gas station?

There’s something curious going on in Wellington at present, with a reduction in the number of gas stations going on. Perhaps it is not something to be too upset about, and maybe it is just the start of a well deserved end to an urban design form of none too exciting character, but there seems to be a distinct inclination to demolish old gas stations, and not commission new ones. Is this the start of a new urban phenomenom? Being an urban soul who doesn’t venture far into the horrors of the suburbs, I understand from far flung friends in fairer fields that gas stations line the routes home to suburbs like uh, north, and south. Who knows, perhaps even east and west have them too.But in the city, like corner dairies in the foothills of the Hutt Valley, gas stations are shutting up their central city doors and not coming back. Oh sure, its no big deal perhaps, and there are still 2 or 3 central city sites belonging to BP and Shell which obviously chew up a fair bit of the petrol being pumped out to Wellington’s commuters, but it seems that most of the sites are relocating …

Wagamama joins Mojo at Kumutoto

In what appears to be one of Wellington’s more anticipated restaurant openings for years, a branch of the international noodle bar Wagamama has opened in the Meridian building, and already queues are forming out the door: indeed, breaking all Australasian records for turnover in a first week, despite it being the middle of a very bleak winter. It evidently has been a phenomenal success.   This is the first (and probably will be the only) branch of Wagamama to open in Wellington - there are already two or three in Auckland, although the chain itself started in London a couple of decades ago and has been spreading steadily across the world, exhalting its values of positive eating and positive living. The mantra of good design has always been strong at Wagamama, courtesy of Alan Yau, who got David Chipperfield to design his first, Bloomsbury branch of Waga’s in the early 90s, and followed that up with John Pawson to design the branch in Wardour St in Soho (London).  Here, the fitout, by Christchurch based designers Element 17, also follows the Wagamama guidelines - the space is tall, and largely unadorned, with the solid oak refractory style tables  so …

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 …