Rog on Beauty
Bending Beauties
Ugly low buildings to a degree can merge with their surroundings, but ugly tall ones have nowhere to hide. Some years ago, when I was staying with an architect friend in Glasgow, I was invited to a planning meeting with the developer, his consultants, and the council to discuss a high rise proposal in that […]
In Praise of the Picturesque
Miss M and I have just returned from a trip around Northland. It was in 2002 when I last visited the Far North. The Kerikeri Stone Store and Kemp House in Kerikeri, The Mission House in Waimate and Pompallier House in Russell, were all looking pristine, gorgeous in their settings, and were attracting hordes of […]
Plan to keep breathing
The team from Walker Architecture and Design was in Christchurch last night to hear the Minister of Building and Housing announce the winning project for the Breathe Urban Village. By now you may well know through media coverage that ours was not the winning scheme (at least not in the eyes of those who made […]
THE TEZUKA’S TALK
Another warm, humorous and imaginative Japanese architect popped up in our soup last night. Takaharu Tezuka began a talk at the University by speaking of the importance of family. ‘I dress always in blue, my wife in red, and our daughter in yellow’ he explained. He said architects should be happy in order to make […]
Petcha Kutcha – Food Architecture
This was Roger’s contribution to the Petcha Kutcha event held at the Opera House as part of Wellington on a Plate, 2013. KITCHEN FIRE I am surprised to have been invited to this event, as I cannot actually cook. In my university days this is what happened […]
New Plymouth Redux
In 1975 I designed a large house perched high above New Plymouth for a local businessman. This was a challenge to a young frisky architect, and I gave it my best. My client ran a successful and innovative furniture company, based largely on wood as a material.
Thinking outside the box
Christchurch has been on my mind a lot lately as I progress work on our development of our scheme for the Breathe Urban Village project. Now that the rebuild of Christchurch is shifting up a gear, Joe Bennett (he who challenged an official order to leave his beloved home of 25 years in the Port […]
Checking on the Children
I’ve been blogless for a few weeks – mostly head down working on this. I took a breather just as Wellington’s worst southerly storm weather since Wahine day arrived. The insurers have barely recovered from Christchurch. I’ve designed several houses around the South Coast and while I didn’t really expect architect designed and structurally engineered […]
Raising the Bar
While the majority of our work is residential (in all its manifestations) we’ve also had our share of designing bars, cafes and restaurants. In recent years Lone Star, Chow and Wholly Bagel (Thorndon New World ) have come across our drawing boards. In those jobs we attended mostly to the boring bits such as the […]
Melbourne surprises
When I was at university in the sixties, I wrote an essay about sex in architecture. It wasn’t about bedrooms, it painted a bigger picture. My metaphor was the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’, a biblical story in which the fertility goddess Ishtar removes an article of clothing at each of the seven gates leading […]
