There’s a small town some hour or so north of Wellington, by commercial jet, called Auckland. Small town, big suburbs, not much of a city. Normally they don’t make it onto the Eye of the Fish web cam, but then again, they have 2 harbours whereas we just have one, and that makes my tiny flippers quiver. The news for Auckland today means I feel for…
Fish
1,099 Articles
Maximus
3 Min Read
Do we have too much bureaucracy in NZ, or not enough? Is it too easy to get a building designed and built in our shiny happy little country, or is it really the solid chore and back-breaking task that the Nats would have you believe? While our building standards in NZ may be set at a fairly low point, asking only that we barely scrape past…
Maximus
4 Min Read
Indeed, you’re all too fast to catch me out – it shows we have some pretty sharp eyes here in the capital at picking out window details. OK, it wasn’t that hard a competition, and it is a pretty big building that we’ve all been watching with eagle eyes, and despite what I said before, its not really something that can be ignored. Yes, the building…
Maximus
1 Min Read
This building is just too overpowering for words. So pictures will have to do instead. Can you guess what it is? The cladding is very simple, to the point of being very plain. There’s nothing better than a smooth even grey. A warm soft grey, with a hint of white. Is frit the new phat? Is grey the new black?
Maximus
3 Min Read
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…