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.

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 »

The Architectural Centre, having just put in a submission on the future of Wellington in the year 2040, where we had the pleasure of looking at the city as a whole, are of the opinion that in 30 years time the city will be very different from what we have now. Traffic needs of the city, currently throttling it to death in various places, need to be reassessed - and with a free mind.

Things like the Basin Reserve for instance, may not need to be continuously ringed with roads for traffic. Indeed, we are most concerned that the Basin Reserve is currently reserved mainly for use as a giant traffic roundabout - there are better uses for a Basin than that, and there are certainly better roundabouts. But what if the traffic was to go elsewere? While the traffic planners at Opus and the NZTA are crying “OverPass”, what if the traffic was to go in a tunnel?

Like just about any idea in the world, someone else has thought of it all before. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, brought to you by Home NZ and us - following fast on the footsteps of Sharon Jansen - is Roger Walker, architect, Ferrari owner, and tv showman, coming to a Cafe L’Affare near you. Read the rest of this entry »

Not just any old New Zealand house, this is about THE New Zealand House.

Hitting the news this week, and probably the gutter / talk back radio as well:

Taxpayers face a $150 million bill to renovate New Zealand House in London - $23m more than the building’s book value.

The newspaper seems Read the rest of this entry »

So where have the loquacious architects gone? Have architects become, like the tradition of French painters, dumb… ‘bete’ also suggesting ‘beast’, an animal without speech. It is true isn’t it? If you think of the Athfields and Walkers, not to mention the Fowlers and Waldens, architects used to be rampant orators, at times difficult to shut-up. But now liabilities seem to overwhelm opinions, and the debates of architecture are limited to polite gripes about who won what at the NZIA Awards, and less polite snipes on the amount of time things take to get through council.

In a recent Listener, Ranganui Walker declared that if you weren’t thinking politically, you may as well be dead intellectually. ‘Politics’ can be a broad term. On the one hand, there is a ‘politic’ in how loudly you complain about the NZIA Awards. But on the other, there is a ‘politic’ which engages society in the setting of values and standards. Deidre Brown’s recent talk to launch ‘Maori Architecture: from fale to whare and beyond’, discussed the immanent Treaty of Waitangi Claim Wai 262, which sets out to repair damage caused by the Crown’s failure to protect mātauranga Māori (Māori traditional knowledge). This covers ‘flora and fauna’ ie. genetic material which might be lost to ‘bio-prospecting’, but also Maori intellectual property.

Apart from my personal belief that mechanisms like Toi Iho branding are destined to be conservative and produce an historicised definition of Maori art/design/architecture, the protection of Maori intellectual property is important - Robbie Williams’s tattoo leaps to mind for a start. But Brown’s point, more interestingly for architecture, suggested the extent to which Maori building/construction knowledge has been eroded by building codes. These codes fail to acknowledge in fact they exclude the option of using customary techniques and materials. Te Puea’s project for Maori housing of the 1930’s is an example of lost a opportunity.

But this loss is not just in Maori tikanga. How many other forms of identifiably ‘kiwi’ architecture make reference to vernacular architectural traditions (perhaps a bit shoddy, but tradition none the less!!)? How many students are inspired to study architecture because of a family history of DIY? How much of an architecture student’s understanding of construction and materials comes from completing some of their own DIY?

…. and why don’t there seem to be any architects being vocal about this sort of loss?