Nominations have now closed for the Nooks and Crannies competition! Thanks to everyone who contributed – certainly got us thinking more about our city’s celebrated and shamed spots.

Image a completely random montage of nominations.

From here, we’ll create a shortlist of 4 best and 4 worst and put them to a public vote. Watch this space!!

— Closing date for nominations now 28th September. Keep them coming in the comments! —

The Architectural Centre is pleased to announce its next ‘best and worst’ competition – Wellington’s Best and Worst Urban Nooks and Crannies.

Back in ’07, Arch Centre ran a similar competition, pulling specific buildings into the spotlight. The Dominion Post published the lists, and ensuing public debate was lively and altogether healthy! WellUrban have a good record of some of the discussion of the worst list, and also the best list. This year, we thought we’d focus on Wellington’s urban environment and hunt for notable ‘nooks and crannies’ around the city, be they comfortable, joyful, forgotten and/or hideous.

Nominations now close Friday 28th September and we intend to put the list to a public vote at a lecture event as there must be winners and losers, after all. Here are a few examples, to get the ball rolling…

Albiet temporary, this is a great public space from the father of nooks and crannies. Defiantly enjoyed by young visitors.

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A most intriguing and bizarre diatribe has appeared in the English newspaper The Guardian, normally a paper known for its careful and thoughtful dissection of architectural themes and discussions. Yesterday, however, it printed a page or two out of a book by Jonathan Meades, now available to buy: “Museum without Walls”. I’m not that keen to buy the book, down to the simple reason of sentence length alone – the man seemingly knows nothing of the common rules of punctuation, with one of his sentences in the article clocking in at a staggering 219 words. I’ll include it here, so you can write in and tell me what he is on about:

“A writer, at least this writer – and I am hardly alone – sees entropic beauty, roads to nowhere whose gravel aggregate is that of ad hoc second world war fighter runways, decrepit Victorian oriental pumping stations, rats, supermarket trolleys in toxic canals, rotting foxes, used condoms, pitta bread with green mould, polythene bags caught on branches and billowing like windsocks, greasy carpet tiles, countless gauges of wire, flaking private/keep-out signs that have been ignored since the day they were erected, goose grass, shacks built out of doors and car panels, skeins of torn tights in milky puddles, burnt-out cars, burnt-out houses, abandoned chemical drums, abandoned cooking oil drums, abandoned washing machine drums, squashed feathers, tidal mud, an embanked former railway line, a shoe, vestigial lanes lined with may bushes, a hawser, soggy burlap sacks, ground elder, a wheelless buggy, perished underlay, buddleia, a pavement blocked by a container, cracked plastic pipes, a ceramic rheostat, a car battery warehouse constellated with CCTV cameras, a couple of scraggy horses on a patch of mud, the Germolene-pink premises of a salmon smoker, bricked-up windows, travellers’ caravans and washing lines, a ravine filled with worn car tyres, jackdaws, herons, jays, a petrol pump pitted and crisp as an overcooked biscuit, a bridge made of railway sleepers across duckweed, an oasis of scrupulously tended allotments.”

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