I went past the old Thorndon Tavern last week, which is starting to be transformed into the new Thai embassy. To my delight, the old accretions of the former pub had been stripped away, and the bare concrete skeleton exposed. While the concrete frame of the building is amazing – only 4 massive columns, with 4 massive beams, brilliantly designed by Colin Gunter at NZ Breweries, and each floor an exposed grid of concrete waffle slab that spans from side to side and cantilevers daringly out – the bit that captivated me was the stair. The bulldozers had been in…
read the full entryThorndon’s quite the place to be you know. Apart from being riven in two by a motorway, squashed sideways into the base of a heavy tree-clad hill, beset with a massive supermarket carpark at its heart, and lived in by some of the plutiest snobs that Wellington has seen, it’s all actually quite nice. Some of Wellington’s best writers lived there, and some of the worst ones still do.
But there is an eyesore that is troubling the residents, above and beyond such other eyesores such as the American Embassy, the abortion of a supermarket carpark, the ugly lumpy…
read the full entryFrom 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…
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