A bus tour of Modernist buildings in Wellington (Sunday 14 March). On Sunday Architect Bill Toomath will also be aboard, and will speak briefly about his design for the Wellington Teacher’s College in Karori.
Julia Gatley is the bus tour guide and also the curator of Long Live the Modern, showing at TheNewDowse from 31 January to 4 April 2010.
Visit www.newdowse.org.nz for further details.

A bus tour of Modernist buildings in the Hutt Valley (Saturday 13 March) with Julia Gatley (curator of the Long Live the Modern show at the New Dowse).
Visit www.newdowse.org.nz for further details.

Thursday 25 February 2010, 12.30pm
Adam Auditorium, City Gallery

An illustrated lecture on the WCC social housing blocks in Wellington currently undergoing a major upgrade. These 13 blocks were part of a larger urban renewal project beginning in the 1960s, in which the
Architectural Centre and many of Bill Toomath’s contemporaries were significantly involved. Art historian Ann McEwan has been engaged in the heritage assessment of these buildings, and will provide a 40minute pictorial talk on their historical background, the details of the current project, and the way present-day social housing agenda still resonates with Toomath and his contemporaries’ social and moral agenda for architecture.

This event is NZIA accredited, 10 points

Opened this week with princely aplomb, the symbol of New Zealand’s self-sufficient justice system, ironically begins its life with Royal approval. Read the rest of this entry »

You may recall (you should!) the launch of the Long Live the Modern book held by Arch Centre last year.

At long last, after Auckland, Napier, and Christchurch, Wellington (well, Lower Hutt actually) gets to host the touring exhibition. Its at the new Dowse in the Hutt, from 30 January Read the rest of this entry »

Opening 28 January at the City Gallery will be an exhibition on the long and distinguished career of Wellington architect S William Toomath. The exhibition, Liberating Everyday Life, will provide an overview of Bill Toomath’s work over the many years he has been around.

An early member of the Architectural Centre, still an active member, and still firing on all cylinders now, Bill will be speaking on Thursday night (28 January, 5.15 pm on) at the City Gallery in a discussion labelled “Morals of the Modern: Changing Values of Modern Architecture since Bill Toomath was a Boy”. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a bit of an old chesnut but here we go again – lock ’em up and throw away the keys.  This week it seems that Act and National are convinced that humanity can’t do what architecture is so good at – incarceration.  Their addition to the Sentencing and Parole Reform Bill, if enacted, will mean “no prospect of ever being freed for those convicted of murder or manslaughter.” Such thinking makes architecture the ultimate punishment. Read the rest of this entry »