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Newsroom
11-07-2025
- General
- Newsroom
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.'
Newsroom
26-05-2025
- General
- Newsroom
The beauty of brutalism
Comment: News that Dunedin City Council supports the retention of the University of Otago's Archway theatres has been met with polarised reactions. Critics have variously compared the theatres to a toilet block and a maximum-security prison. The university itself wants the option to demolish the building. It's clear the building's suit of unpainted, pre-cast, corduroyed concrete isn't appreciated by all. But I think demolishing the Archway theatres (built 1972-73) would be a mistake. For those unfamiliar with the building, it is a smart design, an exquisite example of brutalism, and its concrete embodies a lot of energy that – in these days of environmental consciousness – shouldn't go to waste. I've taught in the building. I've been confronted by its massive concrete form. I've also walked through it with its architect, Ted McCoy (1925-2018), which only increased my deep appreciation of it. The Archway theatres replaced the tennis courts that once fronted the university's Home Science Building (designed by Edmund Anscombe in 1920). Its name is rather perfunctory – identifying its location proximate to the Archway building. Such straightforwardness is an important part of the building's charm – and a vital part of brutalist architecture. The cross-shaped plan of Archway Theatres. Photo: McCoy Wixon Architects When the Archway theatres building was constructed, the intention was to demolish the Home Science Building. This would have given the Archway theatres a generous forecourt to the river Leith and a clear view of the planned Hocken (now Richardson) Building (1967-79). But it was not to be. Instead, the impossibly tight site meant that McCoy astutely positioned the four lecture theatres to create a cross-shaped plan, rotated 45 degrees to the former tennis courts. The raked under-croft of each lecture theatre flaunts a discourteous rear end to nearly every passerby. Brutalism often gets a hard time. It is probably the most misunderstood architecture. Partly this is because the 'brut' in brutalism derives from the French term for raw concrete – 'béton brut'; partly because its ethos of honesty in construction often comes across as tough, hard, and unyielding, rather than simply frank. Brute force rather than the intended socially conscious truth. Brutalism began with the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles (1952). Well-known local examples include Jim Beard's Hannah Playhouse (1971-73) in Wellington's Courtenay Place, and Bill Toomath's now largely demolished Wellington Teachers College (1966-77). That lost complex, and the buildings of Warren and Mahoney that were demolished after the Canterbury earthquakes, mean high-quality brutalist buildings have become rare in New Zealand. In universities across the world, similar designs were built. This was the new architecture of progressiveness appropriate for places of research and learning. Brunel University Lecture Centre (Richard Sheppard, Robson & Partners, 1965-66) – given cult status in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) – is one example. Closer to home is Chris Brook-White's strident F Block (1969-72) at the Central Institute of Technology. The legibility of each Archway theatre is further reinforced by blue, super-graphic numerals embossed into exterior walls, denoting the pragmatically named Lecture Theatres 1, 2, 3 and 4. At each angle where two theatres meet, an entrance courtyard is formed. Sunken gardens are created to the east of the site, mitigating the vertical impact of the sloping ground. Inside, a corridor links the theatres and circumnavigates the central service core. Along its inner wall, an abstract mural depicts the river Leith and its banks that meander through the university. At one point, a fish leaps up high. At other moments, campus features become geometrically refined into rectangles and curved deviations. This mural establishes a theme of movement that is also painted on the projection boxes protruding from each theatre back wall. Arrowheads converge. Pathways bend around fixed points. They represent what McCoy saw as the constant lifeblood of the university. Everyone moving, going forwards, sidewards, discovering new directions. For brutalists, the building's exterior of rear-facing lecture theatres, projecting boxes and spiral stairways demonstrated a direct and proper connection between a building's form and function that enabled people to immediately comprehend architecture and was honest about it. The volume of the building's concrete might also challenge some – but this volume also means that demolition will waste the high levels of embodied energy used to construct it. Cement production – one factor of the energy needed in concrete buildings – accounts for 8 percent of the world's carbon emissions, leading some UK engineers to oppose building demolition because it is unsustainable to replace. We have few New Zealand buildings that thoroughly demonstrate international brutalism. McCoy's building carefully does this. But it also makes strong connections to its physical site and to ideas about what a university is. It depicts the University of Otago in its core. This makes the Archway theatres a rare building at Otago University and a particularly special one in New Zealand.
Bloomberg
08-02-2025
- General
- Bloomberg
The Forgotten French Architect Who Rebuilt Marseille
For lovers of modernist architecture, there's invariably one name that connects the style to the city of Marseille: Le Corbusier. The Swiss architect's 1947 Unité d'Habitation housing project has made the French city a pilgrimage site for modernism aficionados — reasonably enough, given its huge influence on similar projects globally. The modernism of Marseille, France's second largest city and third largest metro area, doesn't begin and end with Corbusier, however. The city is also home to a radically different, contextually sensitive version of modernist architecture, one created by an overshadowed figure whose work is far removed from Corbusier's professed desire to ' kill the street.' That figure, little known outside France, is Fernand Pouillon — an architect, painter, communist, novelist and convicted fraudster.
