Wellington has the highest proportion of Council-provided housing in the country, and a large chunk of that housing is situated on Arlington St. You’re probably all familiar with Arlington as it is on one of the main routes through the city – but a lot of it is looking fairly run down right now. Some of it has already been replaced, with the soon to open,…
A quick post for a Friday – a new wall in town. Quiz question starter for ten points: Where’s this? Chocolate fish to the first correct respondent!
Morandi bridge a week on: the key thing, I believe, is a lack of structural redundancy. For the bridge to collapse as it did, something needed to give way – and it was unlikely to be a member in compression, so that rules the struts out. We know the tower remained standing after the roadway had gone, and then first one side of the giant pylon…
Amidst the tragedy of the collapsed autostrada in Genoa, and despite the death and destruction beset upon that city, there are still some interesting things to observe from this horror story. I hope it is not too distasteful to write about this while they are still pulling bodies out of the wreckage, but really: does anyone else think it is strange that there is so little…
There are several topics we’re keen to explore in the news right now, including that motorway bridge in Genoa, historic buildings in Whanganui, and more on the subject of buses etc in Wellington, but right now there is one pressing subject: what should Greytown do? They’ve had a proposal for a four storey apartment block to replace this ugly old warehouse on the main street. Should…
Following on from Sea Monkey’s photos last week of a giant crane amidst a sea of abandoned prefab house parts at the Countdown supermarket near the Tawa off ramp, the Eye of the Fish has been looking a little closer. We went out to site and found to our consternation that the number of houses on site appeared to be getting less each day – where…
Our fears of the Matrix homes abandoned at Tawa for an extended period of time do not seem to have become true, for a sharp-eyed regular (the one and only mysterious Sea Monkey) sent in these two pics, of a giant mobile crane moving houses around at Tawa yesterday in the balmy weather. It’s the big Daddy of all the Titan cranes so it means that…
It is becoming increasingly clear that the new Wellington bus network is a bit of a disaster. Initially thought to be just teething problems on the introduction week, it is now fairly obvious that the Regional Council have made a massive cock-up of the transport re-plan. Which is a pity, as they have spent the last several years planning and preparing for it. Some of the…
I really could not care less about the name change proposal from Victoria University, Wellington. Corporate rebranding are foolish things, undertaken by PR firms who may not really have a full understanding of the issues. Telecom changing it’s name to Spark seemed puerile and pathetic at the time, with it only just starting to be accepted several years later. But the proposal from Vic seems odd…
This is not good. Last week it was Matrix – this week it is Ebert. Before that we had the harrowing of Hawkins, and earlier on we had Fletcher’s famous faceplant. It’s not a nice thing to watch – a construction sector taking a bath. Too early to tell, of course, but is this a trend that is going to continue to get worse? Actually, I…