This was a brief note I wrote earlier this year for Architecture NZ about the Soho development in Ponsonby (it bears little resemblance to the text that was published in my name). Predictably, and not in any way sadly, the development has ground to a halt.

Currently a spectacular and expensive pit, Soho Square (aka Chancery 2: Electric Boogaloo) is slated to become an eclectic enclave at the south end of Ponsonby Rd.  Construction of this mixed development of apartments, offices, and retail has been slowed to a halt by the suddenly unfavourable market conditions, although the developers insist that work will recommence any day now.

Much is made of 25% of the development being allocated to public spaces. The project adopts the credible strategy of establishing a pedestrian network through the site, but this network turns out to be a set of fairly modest shopping alleys leading to a central court. Essentially, the public space is one of the new generation of malls you have when you’re not having a mall. Predictably, the project is claimed as a blend of tradition and modernity; a marketing strategy to maximise saleability. From the renderings and marketing images, Soho appears to make some fairly cursory and superficial gestures towards the local architectural stock, but this seems to be aimed mostly at breaking down the visual bulk of a hefty development. Say what you like about Christopher Alexander and Leon Krier, but they bring a rigour to their nostalgic urbanism which is missing here.

A few random pictures from Friday night’s Architecture Week exhibition Trans-Form-ers, a joint venture between the University of Auckland School of Architecture and Planning, the Unitec School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and AUT’s Department of Spatial Design. The whole thing was crazy: a convoy of cars, trailers, utes, vans, and trucks departed from Unitec and jammed up traffic all the way into the old ARC workshops near Victoria Park. When they got inside, complete chaos ensued as everyone unloaded their vehicles, tried to deploy their contraptions and get them working properly. Things were folding out, stretching, making a racket, being bolting together, lighting up, inflating, getting wired and tuned up. Madness.

I didn’t write down who did the ones pictured, or even what school they were from, so sorry about that.

Read this hilariously ignorant editorial from the Herald. The writer, who appears to have absolutely no grasp of the issues involved in contemporary city development, complains that ‘Green thinking’ has been too prominent at the Auckland Regional Council, and that the ARC’s transport plan is unrealistic.

The ARC’s plan aims to “support and contribute to a compact and contained urban form consisting of centres, corridors and rural settlements” – which the Herald’s writer calls a ‘fundamental mistake’. Auckland’s “environment and terrain invite sprawl” apparently.  The writer also laments the Council’s prioritising of rail projects over new roads. It is the writer’s hope that once the Super City is established, the council will be too busy to worry about this environmental nonsense, and let it fall through the cracks, so the city can get on with making more roads and biggering and biggering.

Sustainability and good environmental management are not just about climate change and peak oil, as the writer seems to think (having apparently mastered only a couple of keywords from decades of environmental science, planning, and design). They are about very concrete issues that directly affect the lives of people in the city: the quality of the water at the beach, noise and air pollution, access to community resources, the cost of getting around, the physical health of the city’s occupants, the time spent commuting… Environmental concerns don’t ‘compete’ with economic and social equity concerns, as the writer says; environmental concerns are economic and social concerns. The economics of externalities is outdated.

The writer claims that “Auckland’s roads are of national interest in a way that its public transport is not”, unaware that proper public transport is an essential part of allowing the roads to function properly. All the world’s major cities invest substantially in public transport. It is an embarrassment that someone arriving at the Auckland International Airport can’t catch a train into town.

The Herald’s editor also plays the seedy trick of implying that policies you don’t like must reflect a problem of governance: that only bumbling politicans acting out of bad faith could support policies like this, and that there must be a systemic problem.

The ARC is not being held hostage by garden gnomes. It is doing it’s job: thinking over the long term, and managing the city environment. What did the editor think the ARC was supposed to be doing?

[ crossposted to aaa.org.nz ]

Just look at it. It’s the hulking proto-slum looming over Broadway. Go stare at it in sickened wonder some time. It’s a thoughtless, ugly cardboard model with gigantism. It offers absolutely zero to the public realm, and I don’t imagine the private spaces are in any way pleasant either. It’s greedy and selfish. It’s made of the absolute cheapest possible materials. You think it looks bad now? Wait a few years. The programme is appropriate; the scale of the development is appropriate. But it’s Bad Architecture.

Thanks ACC, for giving this a pass. Thanks developers, for pricing human space so cheaply. Thanks architect, for nothing.

[ crossposted to aaa.org.nz ]

Density is one of the most pressing issues for architecture in New Zealand’s cities. Auckland is renowned, or perhaps infamous, for its low density. Compared to cities of similar population:

Auckland (1.3 million inhabitants), 1 209 per square kilometer

Turin (0.9 million inhabitants), 6 994 per square kilometer

Fukuoka (1.4 million inhabitants), 4 061 per square kilometer

For reference:

Mumbai (13.6 million inhabitants), 21 880 per square kilometer

Density is necessary. Density will occur. Densification is not something we are free to weigh up, accept or reject. Population growth and urban drift will produce higher density. More people must live in a smaller area. It is of course possible to refuse to acknowledge this, but if New Zealand were to continue to develop without increasing density in its cities, it would be unique in the world, and it would rapidly consume what most New Zealanders would agree it it’s most precious resource: its land, air, waters, flora, and fauna.

New Zealanders, it is often asserted, require space and openness, and are therefore unlikely, or some might say, unable to live in a dense city. But openness is not opposed to density. On the contrary, it is density that permits openness. Density preserves or sustains openness. Is it possible to imagine a less open condition than that represented by the suburbs of Botany Downs, parcelled up by fences and split by six-lane roads?

Many people feel that density comes down to importing foreign models. The primary architectural type in NZ is the detached house, while in other architectural traditions, collective housing is a well-developed type. It is also true that there are some very poor instances of densification in Auckland. Density has been hijacked by developers for whom it is simply a way to maximise profit. The virtues and benefits of density are undermined by this. The message cannot be “well folks, density is real, so here’s your shoebox, suck it up soldier”. There are very real architectural problems to be solved in order for density to work. Where can I dry my clothes, have a bbq, play cricket, work on the Holden? Architects don’t design objects, they design lives: movements, sensory experiences, social relationships, backgrounds, paths, cases, patterns of activity. People need to convinced of the benefits of density, and assured that life can actually continue in, or be enhanced by, a denser setting.

Perhaps one of the problems is that we lack appealing models for density. Block diagrams comparing density can only take us so far, and could be accused of engendering the very sterility they claim to expose. Instead of telling people off for wasteful living, architects need to be proactive in demonstrating the positive attributes of densification. We cannot herd people into a denser city. We need to produce a desire for density.

[ cross-posted to aaa.org.nz ]