Auckland Architecture Awards, New Zealand Building Prize, Images, Architects

Auckland Architecture Awards 2010, New Zealand

NZIA Winners – Citations Part 2

19 Oct 2010

Auckland Architecture Awards 2010 – Judges Citations : Part 2

Auckland Architecture Awards Winners: Public Architecture

Auckland Girls Grammar School – Art and Mathematics Classroom Block
Architecture Brewer Davidson Limited

The well-managed new classroom block at Auckland Girls Grammar School continues a deft shaping of the site into terraces and courtyards, using classrooms as screens between the outdoor spaces. The formal learning spaces bring in the world outside, while the walls of the circulation stairs and corridor give the flow of students a screen production effect. The architecture tips off the ground with extended cantilevers, offering unexpected lightness and structural play.

Birkenhead Library & Civic Centre
Archoffice

The new Birkenhead Library has successfully reinvigorated community library use by offering a warm expansive space that neither intimidates its users nor trivialises its function. Referring to the previous kauri grove on the site, giant vertical timber battens ripple across the building. The bulk of the building sits low on the site and yet allows for long views into Auckland.

Diocesan Aquatic Centre
Upton Architects Ltd and McIldowie Partners in association

The pleasures of an expanse of reflective warm water are fully exploited in this building. The main pool is visible through a wall of glass connecting the centre’s functions to the landscaped school grounds. A non-committal elevation maintains a separation with the street. The success of the project owes much to the luxury of the internal space and the well-designed facilities for both viewing and learning to swim. The environmental aspects of the project have been carefully controlled.

Newmarket Railway Station Redevelopment
Opus Architecture and Herriot + Melhuish: Architecture in association

The tight horizontal constraints of the site have led to an elegant vertical slip of a station offering rear window views of the surrounding neighbourhood. The vertical circulation of people and air is deftly managed. The map of the past conditions of the site reinforces a slight sense of nostalgia for the English train station.

Voyager New Zealand Maritime Museum
Pete Bossley Architects Ltd

The Voyager New Zealand Maritime Museum is an elusive building. Edging the wharf with a screen of blue/grey and milky white, it offers a bar-coded image of the sea. The interior, muffled due to conservation requirements, contains a decapitated America’s Cup yacht floating in the gloomy light.

Auckland Architecture Awards Winners: Residential Architecture – Houses

City House
Architex New Zealand Ltd

Absolute control of detail and organization makes this house a fine exhibition of the architect’s art. The discrete, blank façade hides a series of lightly connected, opening pavilions set around a carefully proportioned courtyard. The reinforcement of the exterior walls with planting allows for an unusual degree of internal openness. This one-person urban house is both highly articulated and private.

Glendowie House
Pete Bossley Architects Ltd

In a time of grand houses making big claims about their sustainability, this house strikes a balance. It allows for some of the excess that embellishes everyday life, but also has a modesty of space that, with a cleverly crafted plan and section, expands the potential for domestic life. The house becomes a decorative screen and opens to a view of Motukorea Island beyond.

Island Retreat
Fearon Hay Architects Ltd

This extreme house is based around the idea of a camping compound. It is made up of separate, tent-like, boxes with fabric roofs held down with tension wires. Sited in a small hollow on a ridge, the units organise the elements (both natural and constructed) around an outdoor living space. The successful living unit of the house is open to the exterior and participates in both the campsite and the wider world. The house is interesting and carefully crafted.

Karaka Bay House
Stevens Lawson Architects Ltd

Karaka Bay House

There is more to this house than the initial approach suggests. The intimidating first view of heavily textured, precast concrete boxes disappears once the front door is opened. Inside, the house is split by a double height, central corridor that offers an unexpected view to the sea beyond. Carefully composed timber panelling provides a welcome warmth and contrasts with the concrete construction throughout. Rooms are nicely proportioned to create intimate spaces; the beautifully crafted circular staircase is a hidden gem. Although monumental in construction, the house feels light due to the skilful arrangement of openings.

Local Rock House
Patterson Associates Limited

Local Rock House is theatrical, sensuous and beautifully proportioned. The rotating fins on the upper level open the house out to the sea and shore; when unoccupied, it closes like a rock face. The house terraces a landscape using multi-coloured local rock, which gives it a warmth and very material presence. The plan of the house refers to the single space of the bach, in which cooking, dining and living occur in a line. But it does so ironically – the room that holds these functions is extraordinary and holds the potential for other arrangements.

Takapuna House
Godward Guthrie Architecture Limited

‘Less is more’ sums up this extensive alteration of an architecturally designed 1980s house on a busy beach. The removal of ‘80s style excesses has exposed a well-proportioned courtyard house with modern bones. Skilful reconfiguring of key walls and the staircase has opened the home up to the light, creating new circulation and visual links. Although the aesthetic has been modernised with all new door and window joinery, quality internal materials and fittings, the house has developed a classic seaside feel that is relaxing and not too precious.

Waiheke House
Sumich Chaplin Architects

This extremely well-mannered house signals the shift away from the bach on Waiheke Island and yet retains a trace of the former architecture of the area. An outdoor room and the absence of a formal entry hall allows a slight informality to register. The geometry of the house is controlled and marshalled with great skill. Terracing makes excellent use of the sloping site to effect separation between functions.

Waiheke Island House
Mitchell & Stout Architects Ltd

This house shifts between landscape, art and architecture. As a timber form sitting in a field surrounded by Manuka, it is strange and compelling. Set up symmetrically, its distorted forms verge on the grotesque and echo the surrounding wind-shaped vegetation. The high point of the interior is the music room which has a beautiful curving wall across which a fine gradient of light falls.