“The importance of upfront investment in the public domain, whether by a public authority or private developer.”
### idealog.co.nz Fri, 9 Nov 2011 @ 9:24am
Auckland tops at brand new Urban Design Awards
By Design Daily team
Wynyard Quarter’s Jellicoe Precinct and the Auckland City Centre Masterplan have taken the top awards in the first-ever New Zealand Urban Design Awards, a new biennial programme that acknowledges the importance of high quality urban environments.
Jellicoe Precinct, Wynyard Quarter – Winner, Built Projects category
Wellington waterfront – Highly Commended, Built Projects category
[Images via Idealog]
Jury convenor, former New South Wales government architect Peter Mould, said they looked for projects “which established or reinforced urban initiatives and executed them with demonstrable design excellence”. “Urban design is concerned not so much with individual buildings, but with the building of a city. It’s about place making, and it’s also about the public realm.”
Mould said that if a trend emerged from the first Urban Design Awards, “it was the importance of upfront investment in the public domain, whether by a public authority or private developer. Such investment sets the agenda for excellence in the future”.
Waterfront Auckland’s Jellicoe Precinct, stage one of the development of Wynyard Quarter, was an exemplary case of agenda-setting urban design for which consultants Architectus and Taylor Cullity Leathlean and Wraight + Associates deserved congratulation as winner of the Built Projects category.
The New Zealand Urban Design Awards are supported by the New Zealand Institute of Architects, the Urban Design Forum, the New Zealand Planning Institute, the New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects and the Property Council of New Zealand.
Joining Mould on the jury were planning consultant David Mead, landscape architect Sally Peake, deputy head of the University of Auckland’s School of Architecture and Planning, Lee Beattie, and property developer Patrick Fontein.
Read more + Images
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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr
What if? Dunedin... 
█ Three Top Architects: Architectus, Athfield Architects and Studio Pacific Architecture
### radionz.co.nz Updated at 9:50 am on 4 July 2014
RNZ News
Auckland to build 600 new homes
A development including up to 600 homes and apartments is to be built near Auckland’s downtown waterfront. Council-owned agency Waterfront Auckland said the homes will be in Wynyard Quarter, which is redeveloped former commercial and industrial land near the harbour’s edge. A mix of apartments, townhouses and duplexes will be built over eight to 10 years with sales beginning at the end of this year. The developers, Willis Bond and Co, have won the right to build the homes, which will have to meet a Homestar rating of seven, including solar power and solar water heating. Link
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4.7.14 Waterfront Auckland media release
Wynyard Quarter – A different place to live
Waterfront Auckland, together with Willis Bond is pleased to announce a partnership which will see 500 – 600 new apartments, townhouses and duplexes built in the central area of Wynyard Quarter. This development will cater for the growth of Auckland in a way never seen before. Smart, energy efficient buildings designed by some of New Zealand’s best architects will sit side by side with innovative businesses in a beautiful public realm. Link
4.7.14 Stuff Wynyard developer chosen
It would be an eight to 10-year project involving 17 buildings across five sites, and 500 to 600 apartments, townhouses and duplexes. Three top architects – Architectus, Athfield Architects and Studio Pacific Architecture – will design the homes, which will be built by LT McGuinness and Haydn & Rollett. Link
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Related Post:
27.5.14 NZIA Gold Medal: Patrick Clifford
Meanwhile at the other end of the country, architect Bob Simpson grapples with potential change for inner city Invercargill – I have some sympathy with his arguments.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/southland-times/opinion/10205753/Inner-city-challenges-ahead
So, it’s back to the future. Since the second world war, NZ’s cities have progressively ‘gutted’ their innards. Now the idea of rejuvenating inner city living is seen as the answer. But is it? Dunedin as an example had a very viable inner city residential population, I remember school friends living in Bombay St and St Andrew St as well as Filleul, George, Castle, Logan Park area, in small cottages, terrace houses and in some instances substantial gentlemen’s residences. All gone in the suburbanisation which took place in the fifties through the seventies. In their place we have the University/Polytechnic, factories, warehouses and box retailers. This exacerbated by the general exodus and demise of much of the old established enterprises. To me the idea of returning to the mix of yesteryear is no more than a dream. First, there is no pressure to do so. If folk were to move back into the city, who would they sell their existing suburban houses to? Before there could be any realistic thought of that, there would be the need for population growth, and substantially so at that. But Dunedin is in a demographic retrenchment and has been for most of the last hundred years with the last fifty being quite dramatic. It does not even hold its natural increase. That is a factor affecting much of the provincial South Island. There are the exceptions, Central Otago being an example. Much of the DCC’s so-called planning ignores these basic facts. Instead of accepting the situation and planning accordingly, they prefer to think believing a desire is enough to make it happen. All that will do is create expectations and half-baked unfulfilled dreams at great expense. Unless there is a turn around in population growth and serious reasons for people to migrate to Dunedin it won’t happen. Increasing the costs of being here due to increasing debt burdens and frustrating the existing populace won’t do it either.
Damn the awful Dunedin City Spatial Plan… and the even more lethal 2GP, which (if giving effect to spatial plan objectives) will only serve to give to the haves and take from the have-nots where residential property (within the commodious confines set by the Town Belt) is concerned. Since when did the desk-proppers at DCC understand market place economics when they drew their ‘red lines’ across “our city that we own” – which is not the same as red carpet.