Maximus

549 Articles

A Wellingtonian, interested in architecture and design. But enough about me, what about you?

Maximus
2 Min Read

It’s time like these, in the dead of winter, that I wish I was back in England. No – not for the weather – by all accounts we are having better weather in NZ today than Britain had over the weekend, but because of the shear sense of fun. Or should that be sheer? One is a pair of clippers, the other is a see through…

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Maximus
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Don’t go back. You can never go back. The past is indeed a distant country. The Fish is away at present, and may be some time. Revisiting old haunts. But things are never the same. Going back to the House of the Fish, where us little tiddlers took our first few tentative steps. When we left our house, our ancestral home, our turangawaewae, if you will:…

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Maximus
1 Min Read

wiggly wiggly wiggly wiggly wiggly. Five wigglys – that’s how wiggly this is. Tory Street, 2012: the year this city got its wiggle on. I can’t overstate how much fun this building is – a plan, ugly, bog-standard black box of a building with the world’s worst pudding basin hairdo before (Mansard Roof, pug nose: traincrash ugly), this little Tory St palace has been transformed into…

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Maximus
4 Min Read

There is a lot of info to download in the latest swag of reports from Aecom, the folk doing the Passenger Transport Spine Study. Most of Wellington won’t read it – certainly the writers to Stuff haven’t read it, as they blithly mouth off without a clue. I’ll tell you what – I’ll give it a go to read it, and then I’m going to post…

Maximus
2 Min Read

Actually: Not Monorail, that should say : Bus. Just when i thought it was safe to dip my fishy fingers back into the water of the war on the waterfront, a new challenge comes along. Yes: its the proposed Transport Spine interim review, and it is proposing 8 options for consideration. You may have read about it here in the DomPost “Subway Proposed“, or here “8…

Maximus
1 Min Read

Breaking News – Waterfront Watch has succeeded in the Environment Court, putting WCC and WWL well and truly back in their bottle, with the turning down of Variation 11. Congratulations to Pauline Swann and her indefatigable spirit. Other news media like Stuff and Scoop haven’t posted this story yet, so I can’t confirm, but it sounds like the sensible route of all buildings on the waterfront…

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Maximus
1 Min Read

Well at last there is something urbanly relevant to talk about in Wellington. No, no, not the One Direction concert, which saw squealing levels at a rate high enough to make all the dogs in town howl in unison (just what is it with those squealy girls? Do they wear ear plugs for their own protection?). Nor the (laughable) fact that the NZ Property Council has…

Maximus
4 Min Read

These is really only one story worth talking about in New Zealand right now, and that’s the big old stone churches in our southern sister city. Most of them have already been demolished, it seems, and of the few remaining there is great debate about what is happening and what should happen, and who should have the right to do what they want to. Me, personally?…

Maximus
2 Min Read

Two articles about women architects today – on the one hand there is the story of architect Karen Krogh, who has tasted the life of the developer and does not like it, and on the other flipper there is a story of an architect who practically lives in the ocean, wrapped in rubber, breathing verrrrrrry slowly. Hmm, that sounds fishy – very Fishy. I wonder if…

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Maximus
2 Min Read

Hooray. For the first time for absolutely ages, something innovative is happening in Taranaki St. Yes, right down the bottom of ‘Naki, opposite Zibbibo, and smack bang in front of the former sleazy strip club on top of Brandon Motors, a “Pod” has arisen on four shaky legs, and stands over us. When it was going up a couple of weeks ago, it was covered discretely…