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.