It has been announced by the Wellington City Council, that following on from the demise of the proposal for a Hilton Hotel, there will be an ideas competition for the end of the Outer T on Queens Wharf: currently home to an old tin shed, as I’m sure you all know. The Hilton-to-be, as you will recall, was vanquished by the continued badgering of the combined…
Fish
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Maximus
1 Min Read
Wellington has long had an ambivalent attitude to alternative means of transport unloved in other cities – we still have trolley buses (long absent from Auckland or Christchurch), we have a cable car (NZ’s and one of the world’s few commuter vertical transporters), and the cops here seem to turn a blind eye to youths driving scooters, sidewinders or skateboards. In most major cities of the…
Maximus
3 Min Read
In the line of an old Abba song, The Winner takes it All, and so it was in the 2008 Wellington Civic Trust awards last night. A friendly Fish-monger sends in this report from the ceremony in Te Papa: The evening started off promptly, no time for drinkies (or Studio Pacific – who missed out on the news they had won the first prize of the…
Maximus
1 Min Read
It has been said that if you want a job done right, then do it yourself. The government seems to have taken this to heart at present, by announcing that a competition for an affordable home has been launched: one possible sub-text being that as they have no way of making housing affordable, perhaps you’d like to design yourself one. Its not to be sneezed at…
Maximus
3 Min Read
After a lengthy (some might say excruciating) out-pouring about her experience of the ridiculous difficulties of building (home renovations and building consents), Joanne Black has recently decide to public pronounce on two more fascinating aspects of the architectural world. Firstly, that the building process is too easy for other people (yes the old “Not-in-my-backyard-especially-when-it’s-Thorndon” syndrome), and secondly, the right for architects to describe their projects using…
Maximus
3 Min Read
In the heart of Wellington’s old Chinatown, namely the narrow low-scale neighbourhood of Haining St, there is one of the few trees that are growing in Te Aro, nestling happily in the lee of an also fairly non-descript warehouse building. Until fairly recently the site was the home of a film unit, a student flat, and parking for assorted businesses, until it was sold and resold…
Maximus
3 Min Read
Another week, another apartment development. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad: sometimes it seems they’re just sent to test the market. There are two more recent apartment buildings being promoted at present: one publicly notified, the other trying to sneak in under the radar. Let’s look at the notified proposal first – as comments are due to the Council by 4 September. This notified consent application…
Maximus
2 Min Read
Just a short note to alert residents of the Inner City to a meeting for a possible formation of an inner-city Residents Association. It’s on Monday 1st September, at 5.30pm at the Southern Cross Bar in Abel Smith St. Initially an initiative of Grant Robertson, the Labour candidate for Wellington Central, and echoing a similar initiative from Mark Blumsky, a National MP and former mayor,…
Maximus
2 Min Read
Passing along the waterfront last night, on a wettish, cold, windy Wednesday evening, I was bemused to find Shed 5 packed to the gills with large men in suits – but then I remembered – of course – the Property Council of New Zealand is in town for their annual conference. The theme for this year is Building Succesful Cities, and so its interesting to see…
Philip
1 Min Read
Yesterday we had a rather interesting talk from Sam Kebbel of Kebbell Daish Architects, discussing Joanna Langford’s The Beautiful and the Damned – a piece currently installed in the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery. The artwork creates an ethereal urban skyline, pieced together from the glowing windows of unbalanced buildings, with a sharp scale shift provided by the odd street lamp. This is all constructed from the soft…