5 days ago
An unseemly hatred for one building
Comment: Heritage buildings can be controversial. The targeting of New Zealand's heritage-listed Gordon Wilson Flats with special government legislation clearly demonstrates this. In what must be a first for New Zealand, the Government will pass this Act to overrule the agreed definition of heritage and its associated decision-making processes – just for one building.
Such decisions are normally made by local councils. Heritage listing (or de-listing) a building requires evaluation of heritage significance, while consent to demolish a listed building also assesses other factors. In contrast, using a government bill departs from the convention that heritage legislation provides consistent rules against which specific cases are tested.
But no one is challenging this. Instead, it seems that hatred for the building is overriding values that people would normally cherish.
Gordon Wilson Flats are located on a hillside overlooking the capital city. This 10-storey, 64m-wide building is heritage architecture that is hard to miss.
It is the only remaining post-war, high-rise, state-housing block in New Zealand and is arguably the country's first brutalist building. Its design is indebted to the historic relationship between the Ministry of Works and the London County Council. Its maisonette plan adapts the 1959 Alton West plan, which was influenced by Le Corbusier's 1952 Unité d'Habitation.
The flats were heralded in 1958 by British architectural historian Nicholas Pevsner in the Architectural Review as 'exciting in appearance'. Its use in seismic design research gained the attention of Japanese building engineers, because it was an internationally rare instance of a 10-storey post-war building with seismic data. It memorialises government architect Gordon Wilson (1900-59), who died as the building was completed.
In May 2012, the tenants were given seven days to leave their homes following a report finding that panels on the façade might fall off in an earthquake or strong wind. Rather than repair these, Housing New Zealand sold the flats to nearby Victoria University, which planned to demolish them to create a university gateway. Attempts to remove the building's heritage protection have failed. Its heritage status was instead reconfirmed in the Environment Court in 2017 and further strengthened with Heritage New Zealand category I status in 2021. The university still wants to replace the flats but now with new student housing.
The legislation to enable the building's demolition is the Resource Management (Consenting and Other System Changes) Amendment Bill. Chris Bishop, the minister responsible, has justified this special treatment because:
'The building is owned by a public institution – Victoria University – and because that owner, the council and the community all want it gone.'
However, the public ownership of the building brings with it more, not fewer, heritage obligations. Government policy requires that state sector organisations, including universities, take 'a leadership role in being good stewards of the heritage places in its care'. The conflict with this policy, the bypassing of council processes, and the role of the Green Party in this unprecedented move have raised no public reaction.
It was in the Environment Select Committee report on the bill that the Green Party advocated that the bill:
'Should go further to enable more effective and democratic management of perpetually derelict heritage protected structures, such as the hazardous Gordon Wilson Apartments in Wellington Central.'
Green parties fashion themselves as protectors of the environment and climate-change activists. The Green Party of Aotearoa is no different. But nowhere did its response to the bill recognise The Gordon Wilson Flat's high embodied energy.
Embodied energy is the energy needed to make something. For buildings, this includes energy to make concrete and steel and to transport materials to the site and remove excavated soil from it. Being enormous, the flats' embodied energy will not be environmentally insignificant and is important not to discard. As Professor Rebecca Lunn, a co-author of the Royal Academy of Engineering's Decarbonising construction report, has said: 'Our biggest failure is that we build buildings, then we knock them down and throw them away. We must stop doing this.'
The flats were also built as a model of high-density inner-city housing, close to employment and transportation routes – the sort of buildings we need in the face of climate change. Its heritage is thus important, not only as social housing, but because of its historic role in contributing to our current understanding of how to build a sustainable city.
This proposed sidelining of established heritage processes is extraordinary and it acknowledges that normal planning methods cannot avoid the magnitude of the apartments' heritage significance. But the lack of discomfort with the Government's planned use of special legislation also shows how feelings towards a building can override and contradict fundamental values, including the very idea of heritage.
As Janet, a reader of Wellington Scoop, put it: 'I like heritage buildings but not those flats.'
