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. Read More
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 Hills because he felt he should be in charge of his own mortality) has had this timely poke at the what he perceives to be the design response of the architecture profession. Read More
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 houses to have suffered too much, I felt a need to go and ‘check on the kids’.
The only damage was to an old boatshed in Karaka Bay that we had already designed a replacement for. The stormy surges have saved our client demolition costs by pounding it pretty comprehensively.
I am pleased to report that elsewhere there was no damage to any of our houses. Hopefully it will be at least another 37 years until such an event happens again, although I suspect with the bad mood we have put the planet in, this type of storm will be more frequent.
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 layout, the location of the grease trap and the preparation of the Fire Report. In other words, all those matters requiring Building Consent rather than creative input. However recently, the owner of the newly opened Ivy Bar, in the basement of the James Smith Building, went beyond our usual brief and entrusted us to assist with the décor.
This was a truly exciting experience which added further to our design knowledge and skills. Read More
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 to the underworld. Of course there is such a thing as architectural strip tease, and Professor Toy took my essay seriously.
In real life, there a little bar in Melbourne called The Croft Institute which is located at the end of Croft Alley off a dogleg off Payne’s Place and then off Little Burke St. A couple of years ago, I took Miss M and her friend Josh there.
Such was its unprepossessing, rubbish bin lined, dimly lit and ever narrowing approach, twice they asked me if I knew where I was going.
