Many of you will know that most of the Karori Teach­ers’ Col­lege cam­pus, designed by the late Bill Toomath, is threat­ened with demo­li­tion by its new own­ers, Ryman Health­care. I don’t know enough about the pre­vi­ous VUW/WCC own­er­ship shenani­gans to com­ment on that side, and the prac­ti­cal­i­ty of main­tain­ing its role as a com­mu­ni­ty asset are best left to that com­mu­ni­ty, but I will mourn the loss of a fine and sig­nif­i­cant part of Welling­ton’s archi­tec­tur­al her­itage. While it’s still here, I decid­ed to make a sort of “ambi­ent doc­u­men­tary” record­ing its won­der­ful inter­play of form, tex­ture, land­scape and light.

I know that not every­one appre­ci­ates Bru­tal­ist archi­tec­ture, and in some con­texts it can indeed be as grim as its pop­u­lar rep­u­ta­tion sug­gests. How­ev­er, the way that Toomath inte­grates build­ing and land­scape is some­times sub­lime, and the jux­ta­po­si­tion of bold­ly tex­tured con­crete and dense green­ery is sur­pris­ing­ly nat­ur­al: the U‑shaped stair­wells emerge from the under­growth like lime­stone boul­ders or the rem­nants of ancient tem­ples. In con­trast, the upper court­yard is light-filled and gen­tly scaled, com­bin­ing ele­ments of medi­ae­val clois­ters with Japan­ese influ­ences and rig­or­ous plan­ning to pro­duce a refresh­ing­ly humane strand of Mod­ernism. Not just con­crete, but glass and wood, are deployed as a sur­pris­ing­ly broad tex­tur­al palette, almost sen­su­al in places, with a Guy Ngan sculp­ture as a fit­ting cen­tre­piece.

You can find more about its his­to­ry and her­itage on the Archi­tec­tur­al Centre’s web­site and in this arti­cle by Ben Schrad­er.