The 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…
Maximus
1 Min Read
Cuba 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…
Maximus
7 Min Read
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…
Maximus
2 Min Read
The 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…
Maximus
1 Min Read
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…
Maximus
3 Min Read
The 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…
Maximus
4 Min Read
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…
Maximus
3 Min Read
Over 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…
Maximus
3 Min Read
Following 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…
Maximus
2 Min Read
In 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…