Building rumours 17: towers of the imagination

File under: architecture, urbanism, Wellington

Regular readers will know that we haven't exactly been kind to ArcHaus around here, but here's a surprising find: a project on their website that exhibits more than a little grace, drama, complexity and invention.

I get the feeling, though, that this project will go no further. Unlike their other featured projects, this is just labelled "Inner City Residential Concept", and bears all the hallmarks of a "what if" scenario rather than a serious development proposal. It is described thus:

This concept design was a reaction to a tight Wellington inner city corner site. Using the space and the movement inherent in the site the concept was produced of a building that unrolls as the views progress. The curving form was designed to respond to the surrounding more sensitive environment by never turning a blank wall to its surroundings, the delicate curves allowing the building to unfold, even on the site boundaries. The height of the building was based upon use of the discretionary limits to allow the massing which would reflect a building that evolves from the rear towards the front of the site.

Does anyone know whether this might indeed be going ahead, and if so, where it would be? I've tried to work out from the context where this might be, and thought first of all of the old Il Casino site, but it doesn't quite fit.

I'm not completely won over by this design: the shimmering whiteness may just be the product of a simplified rendering, but it all looks a bit more Gold Coast than Wellington. While the separate treatment of tower and base is a good approach to combining sculptural gestures with the more down-to-earth requirements of street-edge urbanism, the latter seems undeveloped and the juxtaposition is a little too arbitrary. I'd also like to know more about "the surrounding more sensitive environment" before deciding how appropriate its 18-storey scale might be.

But otherwise: wow! This an energetic and even gleeful design, showing modulations in all three dimensions and positively revelling in its verticality. One can almost imagine the downtrodden architects at ArcHaus, traumatised after having to grind out yet another envelope-filling, minimum-spec lump, letting all their creative impulses burst free from the oppression of cynical volume-maximising instructions from developers, and remembering that their CAD software does have a curve function after all. The result is exhilarating, and perhaps even a little overwrought, though some subtle variations in materials could temper the spatial exuberance with some elegance and finesse and produce something really special.

With my earlier provisos in mind, this could be a rare example of "discretionary limits" freeing up the architectural imagination rather than being used purely as a loophole to get more dosh out of the site. It's just a pity that this, of all the ArcHaus projects currently proposed, seems the least likely to go ahead.

Building rumours 15: Forest and Turd

File under: architecture, urbanism, Wellington

Thanks to DeepRed for pointing this out: the so-called "Te Aro Towers" on the former Forest & Bird site on the corner of Taranaki and Wigan streets.

Oh god. I'd been forewarned of its awfulness, but with higher-res images now available it looks worse than I expected. It really doesn't make it easy to promote high density urban living when unimaginative crap like this is what the market provides. I'm all for greater density, and not averse to the odd tall apartment tower, but this is a bad building in the wrong place.

The use of retail on the ground floor is good, and there are some half-hearted attempts to vary the façade in the bottom six storeys. If they' stopped there, the results might have been half-decent, and even though the architecture is banal its urbanist virtues might have made up for it. But they've continued by repeating exactly the same floor all the way to thirteen storeys, resulting in two "towers" that neither fit in graciously nor soar gracefully, but loom balefully over what could and should be one of Wellington's most important streets.

The question that has to be asked is: how the hell did they get away with thirteen storeys in this part of Te Aro? The height limit here is supposed to be 27m, and while it was always naive to believe that this would equate to six storeys as the guidelines suggested (a floor-to-ceiling height of 4.5m is very generous), anything over 10 storeys would surely have to breach the plan. Either these apartments will have a 2m stud, and they're aiming at the hitherto-unexploited Oompa-Loompa market, or the developers have the council well under control.

There are supposed to be dispensations for buildings of exceptional design quality, but this doesn't even aspire to mediocrity. The world's greatest architects would struggle to produce something beautiful given that basic mass, but it looks like our old friends at ArcHaus haven't even tried. The real estate site and home page for the development laughably claim that "this building brings a significant design and style element to the Te Aro district", but I can't believe that they even believe that themselves.

Even ten storeys, while legal, would not be what I would think is ideal for Te Aro. Not only is six or seven storeys more like the norm for human-scaled mixed-use and residential urban areas around the world, it's much easier to achieve spatial interest and variety at that scale. For instance, even by taking the fairly poor design of the lower storeys of this development as a starting point, notice how much more humane and detailed it would look if it stopped at seven storeys:

That provides much less residential density, but there are still many hectares of Te Aro that are wasted on car parking, bulk retail and car sales yards. How much better it would be to develop all that poorly-used land to a similar height, while still allowing the odd tall and slender tower near the middle of large blocks or closer to the "high city". It is possible to significantly increase the residential population of Te Aro while retaining the elements that make it special, and without ugly, cynical developments like this.

Of course, I'm thinking like an urbanist rather than like a property developer. But isn't that exactly what the council should be doing?

Fowler & Jones

File under: architecture, sustainability, Wellington

A couple of architecture-related snippets:

I may have found some of his pronouncements perplexing, but Sir Michael Fowler's recent interview on Radio NZ National is worth a listen. He reminisces on his time as mayor, and as an architect, and gives a defence of the 80s "demolition derby". I partly agree with him on that: while we lost some beautiful buildings, I just couldn't imagine Lambton Quay without our little skyscrapers. But mentioning ArcHaus in the same breath as Athfield & Walker?!?

So, Bob Jones thinks that green buildings are "a fad" and "fashionable inanity", because NZ doesn't have power or water shortages? Given that he has long since descended into self-parody, I can't work out why the papers think his self-consciously curmudgeonly outbursts are worth wasting ink and bandwidth on. With any luck, it's stereotypical, short-sighted, money-grabbing "property tycoons" like him that are the fad that will be forgotten in a decade's time. On the other hand, maybe not.

Self-linkage

File under: urbanism, politics, Wellington

I've been a bit quiet here, but a bit busy elsewhere around the blogosphere. Every now and then on Texture I get the chance to write about something other than cocktails, art, theatre and breakfast, and cover the sort of issues that I normally do here on WellUrban. The most recent example is this article about what makes good urban space, inspired by the upcoming IntensCITY week.

I've tried to make up for my slackness on the Wellingtonista (apart from participating in Wellingtonista drinking social activities, of course) by writing a quick introduction to this year's mayoral campaign. Someone's campaign seems to have got off on completely the wrong foot with one Wellingtonista "Gramma Nazi", though.

I should update my original article about the imaginary ArcHaus tower, but for the moment I've just left a quick note on SkyscraperCity to say that I've heard where this was intended to go: the car yard on the corner of Ghuznee and Leeds St. That's the sort of place where I'd imagine 5-6 storeys to be highly appropriate, but 18?!

Building rumours 19: Featherston Tower

File under: architecture, urbanism, Wellington

With so many new buildings planned or rumoured at the moment, it's hard to know where to start. I'll round up some of the apartment developments soon, but for the moment here's something to show that, despite predictions from the anti-Harbour Quays lobby, there's still plenty of interest in building office towers in the core CBD.

A sign has popped up on the corner of Featherston and Waring Taylor streets advertising "Featherston Tower". This is an unusual development, since while most of it will be built on the site of what's now a low-rise building at 128 Featherston St, a lot of it will be constructed on top of the 11-storey Laptop Company Building next door.

Interestingly, this is not the first we've seen of this project. DeepRed over at SkyscraperCity posted a link to the engineers' website, and that has some rather different renders:

Apart from the apparent façade differences, which may just be because the engineers are concentrating on the structural details, the main difference is that the southern section is significantly taller and appears to have an angled roof. Given the timing, I'd expect that the top render is what will actually be built, and I think it's quite an improvement.

Rather than a single, rather heavy slab, the building now reads as a slender tower adjacent to a floating glassy volume. The vertical fins on the tower section seem to extend slightly above the building itself, increasing the sense of slenderness and, if the detailing is handled well, giving a sense of the top of the building dissolving into the sky. While there's something to be said for the argument that a building's top and bottom should be marked architecturally, too often the tops of office towers have been capped with pseudo-domestic pitched roofs or quasi-Classical frippery: this seems like a more appropriate way to treat the top of a skyscraper without descending into pastiche.

It will be a shame to lose the existing brick building, partly because of the warmth of its materials and restrained Deco-ish details, but mostly because it's been a rare example of a cheap old building in the CBD that's allowed small and interesting businesses to get a start. Still, the signs are good that this will be a decent enough replacement, if not a brilliant piece of architecture. The earlier design was by ArcHaus: does anyone know whether the new version is the work of a different firm, or just an evolution of the design?

Shooting fish at the bottom of the barrel

File under: architecture, urbanism, Wellington

The Architectural Centre has had a go at identifying Wellington's worst buildings, and the results are featured on pages A8 and A9 of yesterday's Dominion Post. While I might quibble about the precise rankings, I agree that they're all pretty hideous and deserve to be singled out for criticism. Here's the list:

1 Chaffers New World (279 Wakefield St), Foodstuffs internal designers
2 TSB Arena (Queens Wharf), Craig Craig Moller
3 Courtenay Apartments (120 Courtenay Pl), Calcott Design Ltd
4= Marickian Apartments (135 Taranaki St), Bruce Welsh Architects
4= City Lodge Apartments (cnr Knigges Ave & Vivian St), Peddle Thorp & Montgomery
6 Galleria on Tory (77-87 Tory St), Archaus
7 Renaissance Apartments (above Burger King, 79 Manners St), architects refused responsibility
8 Big box development (generic, but the Airport Retail Park was singled out)
9= Defence House (2 Aitken St), Craig Craig Moller
9= Environment House (23 Kate Sheppard Pl), Campbell Pope
11 Circa Theatre (1 Taranaki St), Ampersand Architects

The paper asked the architects to respond, and two themes emerged:

It's not our fault. Bruce Welsh replied "It's a bit rich for people to criticise a building without knowing the constraints of a brief". Perhaps the way it was presented in the Dom was a bit unfair, since identifying and inviting a response from the architect, but not the client or the planners of the time, implies that the architect had sole responsibility for the design and hence can take all the blame. But the article was about "Wellington's Worst Buildings", not "worst architects", and it's the result that's being judged, not the skill or otherwise of the architect. If a brief makes it impossible to design a decent building, then the brief is at fault, and people are quite within their rights to criticise the result.

There is some justification for passing on the blame in the case of heritage additions, where the council heritage rules of the time seem to have forced some hideous travesties of neoclassical architecture where something simpler would have been much more honest. On the other hand, just saying that the consent application was approved by the council (as Foodstuffs responded) isn't quite good enough: essentially they're saying "we got away with it". Architects and developers should be actively looking for ways to produce good buildings, not just relying on planners to fight the worst aspects of their proposals.

It's okay on the inside. This is the most worrying argument, since it implies absolutely no grasp of the idea that a building should be responsible to its neighbours and the city as a whole. Revealingly, Richard Kay said of City Lodge: "We designed the building from the inside out", and it shows. In these designers' eyes, the apartments have "lots of light, good kitchens, rooms and amenities", and that's all that counts. The fact that the building is a ridiculous, poorly detailed, overbearing lump that detracts from the quality of the street doesn't seem to matter. I'd expect such attitudes from the most cynical developers, but not from architects, who should at least have some professional pride if not an actual social conscience.

While it's important to point the finger at buildings that detract from the environment, it's all a bit depressing to dwell on the negatives. I look forward to seeing a list of Wellington's best buildings.

Building rumours 13: apartments everywhere

File under: architecture, urbanism, Wellington

I had to make a correction to my previous Building Rumours post, because it seems I had my wires crossed, and Serepisos is apparently planning his tower for Lambton Quay rather than Willis St. I'm still not sure about this, as the suggested site (somewhere near Cable Car Lane) is already pretty full of tall buildings, and it seems hard to work out where another might be squeezed in. That 76 Willis St site is still the subject of a planned development though, and while it's being advertised for sale at the moment, there's talk that the original developer's plans are still being progressed through the consent process. There's a mysterious website that promises to reveal all shortly, and I wonder whether it's any coincidence that the site is designed by a company that also lists ArcHaus as a client.

Meanwhile, there's plenty of more reliable apartment development news to pass on. The most publicised is the Monument development on the corner of Wakefield and Tory streets, which complement the Piermont apartments announced back in January. The combined development has fairly blocky proportions, but I quite like it nonetheless. The Monument building doesn't have quite as much spatial variety as the Piermont, but the contrast with its neighbour, the corner treatment, and the way that the double-height apartments rise in "stacks" slightly separate from the rest of the building, all combine to break down the mass just slightly. The random patterning in the glass is a fairly arbitrary way of adding some decoration to simple façades, but it all gives the impression of a quality development and a decent contribution to the streetscape. Well, at least it's better than the Warehouse.

Which is more than I'd say for Richmastery's latest assault on Taranaki St: two 13-storey blocks shoehorned onto the corner of Taranaki and Wigan streets. There are some token attempts to break up the monotony of the surfaces, but while it's hard to tell from these poor-quality images, somehow I just don't get the feeling that it will get the benefit of exquisite detailing and fine materials. At least their previous attempt across the road seems to have been knocked back to some extent by the planners: the latest word is that the new version of the Q on Taranaki development will be lower and not result in the demolition of the old Murdoch factory. It remains to be seen whether it's actually going to be a decent building, but it's good to hear that the rules are having some effect.

Further down Taranaki, there's an even taller pair of towers on the way at number 72. But these ones seem to benefit from the extra height, with the southern tower in particular looking nicely slender from this angle. I'm not sure about the angled roof planes, and it's hard to tell whether the detailing and materials will be any good, but it might not be too bad. Sixteen stories seems awfully high for Te Aro, but this is actually in the transition zone between the high- and low-city zones, and there are a few buildings in the vicinity of comparable height (though funnily enough, not shown in this sketch). It should certainly be more appropriate here than further up Taranaki St, and replacing a fairly nondescript office block is better than knocking down a pleasant little Art Deco building with a well-known mural.

I'm encouraged by the increase in density that this represents (and as at 2006, Te Aro was still less dense than Mt Victoria in terms of residential population), but less so by the quality of architecture. It ranges from fairly decent through mediocre to downright nasty. What will it take to get something truly stunning and innovative like this? Come on Mr Serepisos, if you really want to be remembered positively by Wellingtonians, take the punt on something magnificent.

Nightmare on Taranaki St

File under: architecture, urbanism, Wellington

For those of you who wonder how something as ghastly as Q on Taranaki could be okayed by the planners, the answer is: it hasn't. I have it on good authority that the proposal is still at the "pre-application" phase, and that the council's urban designers have told the developers that their design is utterly wrong for the site, and that not only should they rethink their plans but they should try to retain the Murdoch building. Furthermore, the current owner of the land has yet to sell.

I don't think this is the last we've heard of this proposal, but there's some hope that the system can work for the benefit of Wellington's urban fabric. It does seem odd that ArcHaus would promote this design on their website at such an early and speculative stage: surely they're not proud of this design?

Further down the road, though, is another ugly building project that is definitely too late to stop. The steel frame for the Bellagio apartments next to Molly Malone's has almost reached its full 12-storey height. Hold on, wasn't it supposed to be nine storeys? Yes it was, but no longer: the excavations unearthed the remains of Te Aro pa, and the owners were presumably allowed some extra height to compensate for not being able to have underground carparks. It's only now that we've got to see the new version, and here's a rough comparison between the old render on the left, and a new one (taken from a billboard on the street) on the right.

As you can see, it was never going to be exactly pretty. But at least in its shorter incarnation it was less imposing, and something about the detailing seemed to break up its bulk a bit more. It now seems more monolithic, and reminds me of Rutherford House by the railway station, which despite the best efforts of its refurbishers has just served to prove that you can't make a hippo attractive by slathering on some orange lipstick.

But the worst thing about it is that, like the twin lumps of Q, it's clearly not a work of architecture: it's a maximum allowable volume diagram with some balconies slapped on. Twelve stories needn't have been entirely out of context here, if only the building could have exhibited the merest whisker of grace, elegance or imagination. As it is, it looks like one of the Ministry of Works' worst sixties efforts in Thorndon. Wellington doesn't have many physical traces of pre-European occupation, so retaining the pa remnants was essential, but surely there was a better way than this. It smacks of archaeological blackmail: "Give us some extra storeys, or the whare gets it".