Watching TV on Saturday night, I spotted two things that are doing marvellous PR for Architects in New Zealand. Forget about the inept and unregistered on Mitre 10 Dream home – producing the sort of tat we’re all trying to avoid – over on Grand Designs Abroad, the host Kevin McCloud is possibly the best advert for having an architect in NZ, even if it is…
It’s a lonely life being an architectural critic in New Zealand. An art form that’s not so much dying as nearly not born at all, there are precious few who will stick their head above the parapet to comment on the equally few works of architecture we have that appear in the pages of the press. And it is a situation that is going to get…
Architecture + (plus what, one may ask, to complete the equation), have been one of the busiest architects in the city of late, barring Athfields and Archaus of course. They have recently unveiled the Republic 2 apartments, close on the tail of the Republic (1), which itself followed quickly behind the Monument, which followed the Piermont, and that followed the Portal. Someone’s been spending long hours…
In my last post, I expressed concerns with the light-rail proposal as detailed in the Ngauranga-to-Airport (N2A) strategic study. Implicit in my statement at the end of the post that “I have a hard time getting behind this light rail proposal at this point in time” is the fact that a different time or a different proposal could indeed change my mind. As for better proposals…
Athfield Architects have scooped the waterfront prize-pool, with a clean sweep win of all the sites covered in the Kumutoto North competition. Well done indeed to Ath and his merry band of cliffside dwellers. Wellington Waterfront also deservers kudos for having running a competition in the first place, and for sneaking out the press release a mere 5 months after the competition was held. We’re not…
At the far end of the waterfront promenade from the recently opened oHtel, lies the newest addition to the waterfront: the BNZ ‘groundscraper’. It’s a big building that must treat its bulk carefully, but fortunately what is emerging from the scaffolding seems much more interesting than what the first renders gave it credit for. The architects have clearly delved deep into their bag of tricks to…
Tory Street, named after a settler ship bringing population to Poneke, has for many years been a skinny urban backwater. The road is too narrow to work as a fast route for four-wheeled commuters, but this results in a nice walkable street, certainly less windy than Taranaki. It is populated by small, quirky businesses set in small, quirky buildings: the Mall drycleaners, the Hawthorn Lounge, the Tory Urban Retreat and Moore Wilson‘s. Big businesses and big buildings are largely unknown, the exception being Telecom’s stumpy tower blocks near Courtenay Place.
However change is in the air – as well as a perplexing plethora of fly away roofs.
The Wellington urban class really wants light rail. And why wouldn’t they? Light rail is sexy transit…cruise smoothly, comfortably, and quickly to the local tiki bar; no more lurching starts and stops, no more endless waits behind four other buses boarding at the stop on Willis Street, no more fighting with cars for road space. And so there seems to be a grumbling undercurrent regarding the…
Wellington’s buildings continue to surprise and delight me, relative newcomer as I am to this small, perfectly-formed city. It’s not a place that you could say has great traditions of anything in particular – it has demolished most, but not all of its Victorian heritage, has a fine collection of post-modern eighties buildings that have firmly gone out of style, with the remaining collection being eclectic…