Barrier’s best bachs
The improvisational shacks of the Great Barrier Island have inspired a new breed of bachs, collecting rainfall for water treating waste for irrigation, harnessing the sun with solar panels, and generally creating a space…
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With glass and steel
David Hovey, the New Zealand-born, award-winning architect who owns Optima Inc. in Arizona says his dream home would be a contemporary home built of steel and glass built near the ocean in New Zealand…
21st century renewal
Wellington’s Waitangi Park – transformed in a collaboration between landscape architects Wraight & Associates and Athfield Architects – combines environmentally-sound urban redevelopment with recreation, and includes water purifying ponds, man-made wetlands and a concrete…
More than shelter
The “Mai Mai” house in Ponsonby (above) and the clubhouse at The Hills golf course in Queenstown (below), both designed by Auckland-based architects Patterson Associates, have been named finalists for October’s World…
Arrondissement-on-the-Edge
NZ-born architect Brendan MacFarlane is playing a major role in the redevelopment of Paris’s 13th arrondissement. The planning project for the French capital’s “nouveau quartier” is known as Paris Rive Gauche, and has…
NZ ceremony honoured in UK
The dedication ceremony for the New Zealand Memorial at London’s Hyde Park has won a major British award. The event won the International Visual Communication Association (IVCA) award for projects that inform and…
Rotorua Takes Root in Nanjing
Rotorua Town is the latest in a series of namesake housing compounds to be built for China’s booming upper class. Located in Nanjing, two hours from Shanghai, Rotorua Town is an upmarket gated…
A decade in design
NZ architect Chris Moller is holding his first major solo exhibition in London, showcasing ten years of innovative practice by his company S333 Architecture + Urbanism. Titled On the Urban Designing of Architecture,…
Titirangi Tate
Architect Chris Tate’s Titirangi dream house featured in the Telegraph‘s property pages this month. Tate’s home sits 13 feet above a gully at its highest point, anchored by 16 poles in the earth. The…
Loft vision
NZ-born architect David Howell’s vision for a disused Manhattan loft space earned a full-page feature in the New York Times. Located near Gramercy Park, the 35-by-20-foot rectangular space with 11-foot high ceilings dates from…
Doyen of deconstructivism
NZ architect Mark Wigley is name-checked in Dwell magazine’s monthly Architectural Movements 101 section. Wigley’s famous Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition, with Philip Johnson, forms the basis of Dwell’s May article devoted to the…
Herne Bay Haven
Wallpaper’s April issue includes a Pacific-inspired Herne Bay home designed Auckland’s Stevens Lawson Architects. “For us, it’s the ultimate modernist abstraction,” says architect Nicholas Stevens of the impressive structure, which features a…
Not Your Average Winery
Americans can finally appreciate the work of artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser on home soil, with the opening of the Quixote Winery in California’s Napa Valley. Owner Carl Doumani commissioned the eccentric Viennese-born artist to design…
New Zealander of the Year
Wellington architect Jonathan Rennie was named New Zealander of the Year at the annual NZ Society Waitangi Day dinner in London. The award recognises an outstanding contribution by a NZ or British national…
A floating world
Titirangi’s Brake House features in architecture magazine Monument’s inaugural guide to Australasia’s seminal residential projects. Designed by Auckland architect Ron Sang, the Japanese-inspired house was built for world-famous NZ photojournalist Brian Brake in 1976….
Heir to a Legend
Antoni Gaudi’s great unfinished masterpiece – the Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona – is finally nearing completion, under the steady hand of NZ architect Mark Burry. Work on the epic scale building effectively…
Aspirational Apprehension
Aucklander Andrew Patterson features in the new Phaidon showcase of the world’s 100 most exceptional emerging architects selected by 10 leading figures in architecture. “We’re a beautiful natural part of the planet and our…
Man-made Marvel
Peregrine Winery in Gibbston Valley, Central Otago, was one of five winners of the world’s biggest and best architectural award – the Architectural Review’s ar+d Emerging Architecture prize – for 2004. The London-based award…
Treasure Out of Ruins
The Art Deco 1910-1939 exhibition at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts describes Napier as “one of the purest Art Deco cities in the world.” An IHT article gives a detailed tour of Napier’s architectural…
From Shack to Chic: The Not-so-humble Bach
Wallpaper* pays homage to the Kiwi bach, in its most highly evolved form. “Baches built today reflect the increased value of the land – they’re less rustic and more expensive to build – but…
Beach houses
“Self-catering in NZ has never been sexier.” The Observer rates four of the North Island’s most luxurious retreats; the Glass House on Waiheke Island (“this is a beach house in the same way that…
Form vs. function
The possible closure of the famed Freidensreich Hundertwasser-designed public toilets at Kawakawa earned a detailed write-up in the Independent. Officially opened in 1999, the stunning facilities were the final project by the acclaimed Austrian…
Beyond the humble bach
The Guardian explores NZ’s high-end bach culture, with profiles of such luxurious rentals as the Glasshouse on Waiheke Island, Oceania II and Villa Toscana Lodge on the Coromandel Peninsula, and the Hawke’s Bay’s Tom’s…
Built edge
Wellington architect Chris Kelly was a guest speaker at the Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ annual conference, ‘Imagining Architecture’ in June. Part of a select group of “some of the world’s most exciting…
Deco-dence in Napier
“I feel as though I’ve popped a 78 on the phonograph and stepped into my grandmother’s photo album. This is the bee’s knees.” Boston Herald comes to Napier for the annual Art Deco Weekend….
Finding beauty in quotodian Wellington architecture
Ex-pat Peter Campbell, LRB art critic, returns home to report on all things architectural: “Painters have not made much of Wellington houses, but in Rita Angus’s picture of Thorndon, the part of the city…
Deconstructing faculty
Respected Dean of Columbia School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Bernard Tschumi’s tenure reviewed on notice of his retirement. His transformative guidance made the faculty a model of architectural education and he will leave…
Thinking iInside the Box
NZer Chris Moller is one wall of expat architecture firm, Amsterdam’s S333 Studio for Architecture and Urbanism. The firm has won several international competitions. A winning entry currently being completed is a housing…
Trans-urbanism: getting Wigley with it
Colombia University Professor of Architecture, NZer Mark Wigley bemoans the divide between theory and practice at a Rotterdam symposium to debate the future of the city. Sharing the hustings with Rem Koolhaas, Edward Soja…
Suburban Nirvana?
After striving from Yamoussoukra to Tunis to turn trouble-spots to hot-spots aspirational living guide Wallpaper magazine strolls down the “1930s model of modern living” – Savage Crescent, Palmerston North. Named after the then Prime Minister,…
Upside down-under architect
Paris-based Brendan MacFarlane and partner Dominique Jakob talk concept with Interview magazine. “At Georges (the applauded restaurant atop the Pompidou Center), we deformed the floor”, says MacFarlane. “Here … [referring to the duo’s concept…
Bach Symphony
Design/style bible Wallpaper scours the globe to compile a directory of the best architects to pick if you’re thinking of home improvements and includes the “sparklingly clear vision” of edge architects Fearon Hay. Inspired…
Eiffel? non. Blobby? oui!
Brendan MacFarlane, Kiwi half of design duo Jakob and MacFarlane continues to dazzle the Parisian architecture scene: “The only work of architecture raising Parisians’ eyebrows was Jakob and MacFarlane’s “blobby” rooftop restaurant, crowning the…
Spence of the sixties
The house of Beehive-architect Sir Basil Spence is described as “the best 1960’s space in Great Britain”.
Holiday high
New Zealander Russell Brice plans to build the world’s highest hotel – at base camp on Everest’s Tibetan flank. The hotel aims to be “a flagship of green construction techniques,” using solar power and…
Stadium award
“The trend has finally swung away from the exaggeration of post-modernism … Buildings are now plain, restrained and professional.” Capturing the mood, Wellington’s WestpacTrust Stadium picked up the international section at the Australian National…
A man of many amenities
Hundertwasser, the Austrian architect who lived out his last years in New Zealand and designed the famous toilets in Kawakawa, also left his mark in the curving lines of Bad Blumau, a spa…
In Chicago Beach did Fletcher a stately pleasure dome build
Fletcher Construction was the managing partner in the construction of the world’s tallest hotel, the hyper-luxury Burj Al Arab Hotel in the United Arab Emirates. The facade, designed like a giant sail represents an…
Domestic round
Kiwi ingenuity presents the solution to your sunlight problems: turn the house around! Don Dunick spent fifteen years designing and building the world’s first fully revolving house.
Ian Athfield: last of the intelligent bohemians
As if the rugby wasn’t enough: renowned Australian playwright Alex Buzo advances our architect fair, calling Athfield a member “of a species now extinct in Australia, the intelligent bohemian.” Getting all postmodern about phonebooks,…
Elemental Design Lets House Take Care of Itself
Professor Brenda Vale and Dr Robert Vale of the Sustainable Design Centre Research Centre at the University of Auckland, use The Times to forward their manifesto for environmentally friendly housing design. Their ‘Autonomous House’…
Kiwi designed green house for the good life 2000
Brenda and Robert Vale, from Auckland University, have designed what has become known as the Autonomous House. Producing its own electricity and suppling its own water, it is the realisation of their design manifesto…
Artist and Architect with a Childlike Love of Embellishment
The straight lines of modern architecture particularly incensed him.
Small town toilet with big flushing power
Kawakawa, New Zealand: flushing the toilet has forever changed in this tiny township as hundreds of tourists flood in – to go to perhaps the most triumphant public loo in all the world. A…
New Zealand architect designs gastronomic gateway to newly re-opened Centre Pomidou
When the Pompidou Centre in Paris was closed for two years for a refit, a competition was held to design the Centre’s restaurant. Beating entries from the elite of European architecture, the prize went…
