buildings news
Birdcage slide
The old Birdcage hotel in Auckland is sliding very slowly up the hill to temporarily make room for a new tunnel (which will help that city’s enormous traffic jams for a wee while). The move is pretty slow, as this time lapse shows, as the old brick hotel was not very strong in the first place. The last thing it needed was to be put on skates.
01.09.10 in buildings weird-wonderful
Wanganui Design
Nicole Stock of Urbis magazine takes us on a Pecha Kucha tour of some spaces in Wanganui, a city on New Zealand’s West Coast that sems to be punching above its weight on the design front. Click the pic on the web page to see the quicktime slideshow.
29.08.09 in buildings
Terminal Development
Christchurch International Airport is to be rebuilt big, to accommodate all the extra flights we seem to need to take these days, and all the extra shops we need to walk past. Sadly Warren and Mahoney’s big new building buries Paul Pascoe’s gold medal winning 1956 design. Is that a faint echo of it in the diamond plan? Maybe not.
17.01.09 in buildings
Architect / protaganist:
Wellington airport
Studio of Pacific Architecture and Warren and Mahoney have designed the new extensions to Wellington’s boxy old airport. Architect elder, Russell Walden, isn’t pleased with the new look, variously described as rock-like, pumpkin-like, and Flintstones-like.
The vox pop is predictably anti. My snobby favourites on the first of 17 pages are, “Avant Guard naivety” and “it looks hence”.
21.02.08 in buildings