Winning corner

The New Zealand Archi­tec­ture Awards were announced today, and while there are few Welling­ton projects on the list, one promi­nent devel­op­ment stands out. Zavos Cor­ner by Par­son­son Archi­tects Ltd, a low-rise apart­ment com­plex on the cor­ner of Pirie and Brougham streets in Mt Vic­to­ria, won the Sir Ian Ath­field Award for Hous­ing.

The judges praised it as “par­tic­u­lar­ly grat­i­fy­ing when this coun­try is in such need of qual­i­ty mul­ti-unit hous­ing. Archi­tect and client are to be con­grat­u­lat­ed for so con­vinc­ing­ly tran­scend­ing the norms of medi­um-den­si­ty hous­ing and set­ting a bench­mark for this type of build­ing.” But it was­n’t an easy path to get there. Mt Vic­to­ria has some very char­ac­ter­ful and attrac­tive streetscapes, and these are quite right­ly pro­tect­ed in the Dis­trict Plan. Inten­si­fi­ca­tion this close to the city is wel­come, but dif­fi­cult to do well while still retain­ing the char­ac­ter­is­tics that make the neigh­bour­hood spe­cial.

When this was first pro­posed, I was in the slight­ly fraught posi­tion of being the Welling­ton City Coun­cil urban design­er who had to assess how well it met the design guides. Those guide­lines are quite pre­scrip­tive, which can be help­ful when deal­ing with clue­less or unscrupu­lous devel­op­ers, but they make it hard when you’re faced with a cre­ative response to an unusu­al site. A sin­gle nar­row site in the mid­dle of a street of iden­ti­cal vil­las would usu­al­ly call for a rea­son­ably strict adher­ence to the forms, mass­ing and mate­r­i­al palette of its neigh­bours, so that the parts can still add up to a coher­ent whole. But an ele­vat­ed cor­ner site that’s on a major route into the city, adja­cent to mod­ernist apart­ments, and just up the road from indus­tri­al and com­mer­cial build­ings, can han­dle a much bold­er approach. Which is exact­ly what Ger­ald Par­son­son deliv­ered.

Of course, no archi­tec­ture, no mat­ter how inven­tive, should ignore its con­text. What this design does is take ref­er­ences from the roof pitch­es, scale, mate­ri­als and pro­por­tions of the wider neigh­bour­hood and recon­fig­ure them in a cre­ative way to cre­ate a dra­mat­ic yet con­sid­ered response to the site. In the way that in music, har­mo­ny is dif­fer­ent from uni­son, it does­n’t echo its built con­text but engages it in a live­ly con­ver­sa­tion.

Of course, this did­n’t go down quite so well with the neigh­bours, who said it would “clash with the weath­er­board Vic­to­ri­ana theme of the neigh­bour­hood” (yes, they actu­al­ly said “Vic­to­ri­ana”). But respect for the nuances of tra­di­tion­al archi­tec­ture may not have been their only con­cern. The NZIA judges men­tioned that “the project is a strong addi­tion to its street, an impres­sive pres­ence in its neigh­bour­hood, and a fine home to a com­mu­ni­ty of appre­cia­tive ten­ants,” and I sus­pect that the final word is part of their prob­lem: “ten­ants”. I heard sev­er­al com­ments in the hear­ings about poten­tial res­i­dents not being “the right type” for Mt Vic­to­ria: non-home-own­ers (even in a clear­ly upmar­ket devel­op­ment) are con­sid­ered to bring the neigh­bour­hood down.

The Res­i­dents’ Asso­ci­a­tion’s naked NIM­BY­ism is even more explic­it about the moti­va­tion behind their objec­tions. Prais­ing most­ly strict inter­pre­ta­tions of char­ac­ter restric­tions, they said “prices have soared as house own­ers have lost the fear that some­thing inap­pro­pri­ate could be built beside their refur­bished clas­sic house. (From the Brougham Street cor­ner you can see 33 hous­es val­ued over $1m)”. Many of us would con­sid­er that such house price ris­es are unsus­tain­able (bor­der­ing on obscene), and that build­ing eight rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive two-bed­room homes just one block from the cen­tral city would be a good thing for afford­abil­i­ty and walk­a­bil­i­ty, but a cer­tain type of res­i­dent is more inter­est­ed in clutch­ing on to their soar­ing cap­i­tal gains.

Not every­thing is per­fect. The clock tow­er may have been a good tec­ton­ic move, bring­ing visu­al strength and cohe­sion to the impor­tant cor­ner, but the actu­al clock has end­ed up under­whelm­ing­ly small. Per­haps the orig­i­nal clock design ran afoul of Coun­cil sig­nage reg­u­la­tions! Some of the oth­er pos­i­tive aspects came about because there were ways around oth­er Dis­trict Plan pro­vi­sions. For instance, the res­i­den­tial park­ing pro­vi­sions (one per unit, plus vis­i­tor park­ing once over a cer­tain size) usu­al­ly makes the ground lev­el of town­house devel­op­ments a poor com­pro­mise between vehi­cles and out­door space. In this case, the topog­ra­phy and bud­get allowed for under­ground park­ing, leav­ing the ground plane free for a shel­tered court­yard. I par­tic­u­lar­ly liked that the land­scape plan includ­ed both native plant­i­ng and species from Greece, acknowl­edg­ing both the nat­ur­al her­itage of Tan­gi Te Keo and the post-war cul­tur­al her­itage of Mt Vic­to­ria.

There were plen­ty of headaches try­ing to get out­door areas to meet the Dis­trict Plan require­ments for space, access and sun­shine, which the archi­tects man­aged to resolve in a prag­mat­ic way. Liv­ing qual­i­ty is impor­tant, but many of these rules, like the park­ing ones, make no dis­tinc­tion between small flats on the edge of the CBD and 5‑bedroom fam­i­ly hous­es on the out­skirts of Chur­ton Park. Welling­ton needs to pro­vide more homes in the right places, and the rules will need more flex­i­bil­i­ty to allow for these cas­es. But in this case I’m glad that Par­son­son’s team per­sist­ed through the tor­tu­ous process: the result is a win not just for them, but for the city.