The house and the city - Architecture Archive

BLOCK
09 2013
LECTURE TWO
AUCKLAND:
THE HOUSE AND THE CITY
BY DAVID MITCHELL
Introduction
In 2011 Block organised the inaugural Block Lecture, an event aimed
at offering a personal reflection on our art; not a presentation of an
oeuvre, but an informed commentary on the state of architecture in
this far flung land. We were delighted on that occasion when John
Walsh accepted the invitation to address those who gathered for
dinner in Fearon Hay’s Northern Club Wintergarden. Despite a
stormy night, the evening was a great success and we determined to
repeat the event.
The demands of practice and publication delayed the second
evening until August this year when David Mitchell accepted our
invitation to deliver the 2013 Block Lecture. There are few architects
practicing in New Zealand who have not been profoundly affected
in some way by David, either through his teaching, his writing, his
television and film appearances, or as visitors and users of the
unfailingly provocative buildings his various partnerships have
produced.
David’s 2005 NZIA Gold Medal citation refers to his impact on a
generation of architects who were students at ‘the school’ in the
1970s. As one of those I have enjoyed his artful commentary in
which a robust critique is often masked by humour and irony.
Though the ‘brick studio’, which he led with Mike Austin and Kerry
Morrow, focused strongly on design, David’s concern for the built
form imparted a strong regard for the ways of making things, and a
respect for the way in which a pragmatic construction requirement
might engender a line of enquiry.
The fusion of adventurous design and innovative, crafted building
has given rise to a number of outstanding buildings - always
accommodating of the human condition with grace, warmth, wit,
romance, and not a little surprise. Notable of these are the University
of Auckland School of Music done with Jack Manning and the string
of outstanding projects produced in partnership with Julie Stout: the
Mitchell Stout houses, Auckland Girls’ Grammar Teaching Block,
Unitec’s Landscape and Plant Sciences Building and the Waiheke,
Farmer and Gibbs houses.
It is astounding that these projects have been produced concurrently
with a number of major ocean-going explorations covering much of
the Pacific and Indian maritime cultures. Each of the voyages has
given rise to sketches, journals and acute observations of life lived in
ways markedly different from that in New Zealand. We are much the
richer for those observations and the architecture that they inform.
We are the richer too for David’s unique ability to use simple words
to describe the often complex ideas within architecture, a skill that he
used to great effect in delivering the 2013 Block Lecture and which
we have pleasure in presenting here.
Pip Cheshire
Block Editors:
Pip Cheshire, Andrew Barrie, Nat Cheshire, Sean Flanagan, and Ian Scott.
Auckland:
The House and the City
David Mitchell, 1st August 2013
The Modern and the Post-Modern
Allow me a moment in the 1980s. Post-modernism is triumphant, and
well-trained Modernists like me are vacillating. A few florid gestures
on the University Music School leave me still cheeky but a little
uncomfortable. We risk an axial symmetrical plan and façade at Epsom
Girls’ Grammar Library, which Bill McKay embellishes ardently. Our great
Brutalist Miles Warren, always certain, is now building massive keystone
arches, and colonnaded pediments in precast concrete, embracing
Neoclassicism as if he’d come home to it.
Jack Manning, once architect of the AMP curtain wall is no NeoClassicist.
He is working on the first contest for Britomart – with 60 exoticallywrought storeys in mind. A few years earlier, Miles’s elegant Union
House jumped the scale of the little Moderne Maritime House. Here,
Manning’s whopper jumps Union House. Younger architects in the office
did junior versions, and this is Bill McKay’s. Note the prescient roof
gardens and the real roof – surely a rainwater collection system. Like
Rem Koolhaas (think CCTV), Manning is clearly sceptical of contextualist
argument. He doesn’t mind jumps in scale one bit.
Modernism was said to have died, just before I wrote The Elegant Shed
in 1984. NeoClassical post-Modernism flared briefly, before the critics
yawned, and the architects blushed, and then shuffled away from it like
guests leaving a rained-out barbecue. They left their decorations for
future heritage campaigners to love and preserve.
Modernism still gets a
bad press these days.
The Modern is deplored
for its objectifying of
architecture and for its
systematising, sanitising
influence on city planning.
Corb’s city visions were
surely his worst. Now that
‘sustainability’ has become
an unquestionable driver
in every aspect of life, the
sustainable community
housed in sustainable
buildings seems to be the
only worthy goal. Worthy,
and usually dull. (For
more on this, try to digest
Peter Buchanan’s series of
articles, ‘The Big Rethink’
in recent copies of The
Architectural Review.)
Jack Manning’s 60-storey scheme for Britomart
The Computer and Persistence of the Modern
Despite all the raging against Modernism, it seems to me that an
essentially Modern manner continues like a musical obligato, worldwide,
but especially in New Zealand. The international press may be filled with
sloping buildings, free forms, and buildings sporting repeated structural
transformations – suggesting the use of certain computer programmes
rather than certain architects. But against this, the work of many
architects still looks like late 20th Century Modernism to me.
One day in Melbourne I watched builders putting Federation Square
together. It was an unsheathed mass of struts at that stage. I marvelled at
the terrifying complexity – the daring of it. A couple stopped beside me.
‘An architect’s bloody nightmare!’ said the bloke, in a well-known accent
‘Well…’ he said, ‘I just come from a little town in New Zealand. We’ve
only got one traffic light’. I threw him an arch Australian smile, and dared
not speak.
But I wondered, has the orthogonal vanished with the T-square and
the saw? And I still wonder. Or was this the first wild hollering of the
electronic age of architecture? Would it quieten down, losing its heraldic
pose, just as the grandfather clock had become the watch, the radio
cabinet had become the tuner, the picture palace had become the
cinema.
Fifteen years on, and it seems to me remarkable that even now, the only
New Zealand building that looks as if a computer was used in designing
it is the terminal called the Rock at Wellington Airport. Have we missed
the boat, or are we still trying to catch it? Are we really people with only
one traffic light?
California and Auckland Modern as Models for the Common Stock
The California Modern Show now at Auckland Art Gallery brings back
the optimistic, unified spirit of mid-20th Century architecture in the New
World.
‘The Rock’ at Wellington Airport by Studio Pacific Architecture
The spirit of California differed a little from our more sensible national
style, but the pottery, fabric and buildings in the show and the ethic
and aesthetic that guided them had strong New Zealand parallels. We
were designing houses that were very similar to Arts and Architecture
magazine’s Case Study houses in their goals, but made of timber,
not steel. The Californians were lotus eaters from Reyner Banham’s
‘Second Machine Age’, while we were hobbits with hammers, bringing
the Arts and Crafts movement up to date. Like the Californians, we
thought of our houses as models that would spread through the
wider community, giving a transfusion to the common building stock.
Experience has tempered this expectation.
Limitations to Low-Cost Domestic Architecture
The low-cost suburb is not the theatre in which radical architectural
performance is found. High-end architect-designed houses may set
the style which with which countless draughtsman try to grace-stroke
their humbler offerings, but designing single houses hardly touches
national housing needs, though it is probably the commonest work in
NZ architecture offices.
In the 1980s, our office worked for mass house builders – the Housing
Corporation, Fletcher Residential, Beazley Homes and Keith Hay
Homes. I once checked Beazley’s sales figures and realised that the
few hundred repeated houses we had designed for big house builders
eclipsed everything else we had ever done. Yet today, I could not lead
you to a single one of those cheap, decent houses. They dissolved
into the suburban melange. And why did we stop designing them?
Because it was boring. Architects are better at jigsaw puzzles than
most people, but they get sick of doing them.
They hanker for the new, or at least for the latest fashion. To them a
house may be a home but it is at least a mechanism, or a metaphor,
or a proposition. That is why they cannot be trusted to lead today’s
‘affordable housing’ campaign.
Hobbits with hammers: NZ’s adaptation of International Modernism
State Housing at Rata Vine by Manning Mitchell
We once thought our brightly coloured detached State houses at
Rata Vine would fit happily into the suburb. We had names for them
– like the Tuscan, and the Sure-to Rise. At the first repaint they were
all painted cream. Rata Vine became gangland, well known for drink,
drugs and domestic violence. Did we contribute somehow? We had to
ask ourselves. Up the road at Laurelia Place, Rewi Thompson’s team
designed more radical bach-like corrugated-iron clad pole houses, ‘like
a wharf over the wilderness’ as Rewi described the conceptual drawings
at the time. These days Rata Vine is called ‘the Bronx’ and the houses
are looking pretty tired. Rewi’s ‘wilderness’ turned out to have more wild
animals in it than Housing NZ could cope with, and last year they pulled
down 25 units. The Sure-to-rise has slumped.
Peter Middleton proposed a very humble role for mass architecture: “the
preservation of self-respect”. I can only add one observation to that:
the person at the bottom end of the housing market wants a house just
like the one that someone slightly richer lives in. No experiments are
permissible down there.
Affordable Housing
‘Affordable housing’ used to mean bottom-end. It’s moved to the middle.
The recent NZIA CPD seminars on ‘affordable housing’ exposed the
financial problems of building for the middle class. We saw no buildings
for the poor, and it has to be said that what we did see in power points
was not new. As Chris Kelly readily pointed out, there are books full of
medium density middle-class housing models. And many have been
built over the last 50 years, including in New Zealand.
However, Housing New Zealand, stripped as it is, remains the only
provider for the truly poor.
If there is any hope of dignity for architects here, it is in the upward
mobility of desire. Change starts at the top and becomes a goal of the
next group down. Apartments started on Remuera and Jervois Roads
and St. Stephens Avenue, and the first townhouses were in Remuera and
Parnell.
Compson Bach by Herbst Architects
Headland House by Stevens Lawson Architects
The Elegant Shed Continues
Come back to Paradise: Like the architects in the California Modern
show, mid-Century Auckland architects were enamoured of direct
structural expression, and explicit construction detailing, and this
tradition continues among many. The title The Elegant Shed was
stretched to describe New Zealand architecture, when the architecture
it fitted was really Auckland’s. That bloodline has continued – through
houses by us, Patrick Clifford, Pete Bossley, Ken Crosson, Lance and
Nicola Herbst, Briar Green, Rick Pearson (Rotoroa Island museum),
and quite a few others. Dave Strachan, with Unitec students, designing
and building a house a year, is in this lineage. Group Architects would
be rightly proud of him. But there are excellent architects, like Stevens
Lawson, and Fearon Hay who care much more about the texture and
finish of surfaces, than about explicit construction systems. We notice
each other’s work, but influence is complex. Here is a well-known Fearon
Hay Bay of Islands house, here a long-remembered view from a bus
in Paraguay, a Mitchell and Stout house on Waiheke, a recent Stevens
Lawson house on Waiheke. When is the outside in, and the inside
out? We Aucklanders keep asking. Architecture finds its sources in
architecture.
Recently, Jeremy Hansen, John Walsh and Patrick Reynolds have
published most of the best houses they could find, with many interviews
and much shrewd comment. When I was young I would have sieved the
lot, and worked up a theory about it. Now it doesn’t seem possible. The
range is too wide, and architects are less certain about what they are
doing. Sure, there is the moral certitude of the eco-warrior – but where is
the poetic expression?
House architecture remains the preserve of the privileged classes, who
are confident and wealthy enough to give architects room to run. And
so it will continue, I’m sure. We’ll wrestle with multi-car garages, benchtops, bathroomware and barbecues, all for the right to manipulate mass
and space – the ancient ritual that is at the heart of our great art. Yes, it’s
true that many of our houses are very well done. But we’re not going to
change the world one house at a time.
The Heritage Campaign
Meantime, heritage campaigners are trying to squeeze new architecture
right out of the inner suburbs, and even the new single house is seen
as an interloper. Campaigners have objected in the NZ Herald to a
number of architecturally distinguished new houses recently built in
inner Auckland suburbs because they didn’t ‘fit in with the architecture
of the area”. They have picked up the language of the urban design
police, with phrases like “out of scale” (too big) and “out of context”
(doesn’t look like the neighbours). The very sameness of a street full of
bungalows or villas is apparently a virtue. So Mt Eden should be villaville
for ever, and Mt Albert should be perpetually bungaloidal. Ironically,
the most valued suburbs in the city- Epsom, Remuera, and the eastern
seaside suburbs have the greatest architectural variety. It is trees which
unify Epsom and Remuera.
Here now is St Mary’s Bay – a haven of heritage buildings. Mark the
manners: the street frontage is a stumble of old house fronts, with a maw
of garage doors beneath. Never mind the excavated front yards and
undercrofts; never mind the disembowelled interiors, with modern-style
open kitchen-dining living areas linked to new decks through folding
doors; never mind the dormers and roof rooms so ill-fitting they could
only be new. This melange of assaults and additions passes for heritage
St Mary’s Bay street frontage
protection, and its owners will do all they can to preserve its domination
by stamping out non-conforming neighbours. Contemporary architecture
is inadmissible unless it looks something like this.
In St Heliers, heritage campaigners objected to this building by Cook
Sargisson Pirie replacing a dingy little group of Art Deco houses. Down
the road, Ian Moore took a drubbing for this building (currently a World
Architecture festival finalist, would you believe?). A good deal of the
‘village’, as St Heliers is affectionately known, is made of overstuffed seafront tack, and bottom-of-the-barrel rent-pullers with parking.
The Auckland Unitary Plan
Quite suddenly, the Auckland Unitary Plan seemed to open a new door.
It attacked the suburb by shrinking lot sizes, and increasing densities.
Even I wonder if suburban quality can survive with detached houses
on 300 sq. metre lots. Householders at large were terrified, protective
of their plots and fearful of being ‘built out’. Helped by a mass of
misinformation in press reports, visions of high-rise (3 storeys, and
sometimes more) were displayed by objectors at public meetings for
locals to rail against. None of these pictures looked like the streets of
cities like Copenhagen, which had inspired the planners. Instead, there
was constant reference to the architecture of East Germany and the
Communist bloc. Status quo nimbyism dominated, whenever increased
densities or increased height were discussed. There could be no highrise in Belmont
Turua Street Development by Cook Sargisson Pirie
387 Tamaki Drive by Ian Moore Architects
The first Unitary Plan was a crude document, with a great deal of
important detail missing. Nevertheless, public reaction suggests that the
suburb is a tough ground for any revolution, and that it may well be wise
to leave it largely alone. That would shift attention to areas which are
urban, semi-urban or decayed.
To me, and probably to many here, the prospect of a denser city is
exciting. With density comes intensity.
With the suburb largely out of bounds, I think we have to turn to the
main roads, the commercial streets and the central city as sites for
transformation.
The City
Outside the Queen St valley, Symonds St, and Newmarket there has
been almost no change in the scale of commercial buildings in Auckland
in 90 years. The heritage reputation of Ponsonby Rd rests on some old
houses and a few two-storey blocks of shops which have been largely
rehashed on the ground floors. There’s not much to save.
It’s a cow-town main street, longing to be built up. RTA Studio’s new
shops just off the main road are a delight, and their new roof to the
coffee courtyard has splendidly up-scaled the street wall. But imagine
six or eight-storey buildings here, and the street gains presence. It also
gains a pedestrian population.
In Parnell Rd, only a shrewd eye can distinguish old buildings from the
multitude of pseudo-Colonial additions Les Harvey made in the 1970s.
More important were the alluring public spaces between Harvey’s
houses. They were new to us at the time.
Axis Building (formerly Nestle) and
Geyser by Patterson Associates
The Nestle building, not far away, was a closed world until Andrew
Patterson renovated it, making its courtyard inviting and public. It
became a model for other courtyard buildings like D72 and Site 3.
Patterson Associates’ buildings engage with the passing public by
presenting enigmatic images which veil the private lives behind. This
used to be very unusual in Auckland architecture, which constantly
raised its cap to the view, opened its wings to the sun and showed its
interior at the same time.
Geyser is a virtuoso piece of trick cycling. It’s a multi-Greenstar winner
on a multi- storey carpark- such are the ironies of modern compliance.
It’s icy, with a discomforting defensive/aggressive pose, and a
captivating surface. This is a cluster of buildings with routes between,
which are barely perceptible from Parnell Rd. Since the exterior glass is
intensely and suavely fritted, views from within and without are extremely
limited, and moving between the walls reminded me of walking the alleys
of Al Mukallah – a Muslim town in Yemen, catching rare glimpses of dark
figures through high latticed hatches in white walls.
In fact much contemporary veiling parallels Islamic work – BVN’s sunbreaker on the new ASB headquarters, Richard Naish’s perforated
screens in several buildings, and the woven wire and perforated metal
screens of many contemporary buildings. Compare them with the nonfigurative art of Islamic tile patterns, the perforated stone screens of the
Alhambra, the fretted shutters on Arabic houses (so women and children
avoid the male gaze). Architecture finds its sources in architecture –
anyone’s architecture, in my book.
As for ‘Cumulus’, and ‘Geyser’, the ‘Rock’ and the ‘Cloud’- these are
emblematic labels for the visually illiterate, but I can’t believe they are
metaphorical drivers of architecture. I park them in the PR file.
Karangahape Rd has barely changed, but RTA’s Ironbank shows where
it might go. The street facade clearly tries to play with its neighbours, in
the manner urban designers favour. I’d rather have seen the rusty boxes
tumble into the street, and of course I’d love the building to be twice as
high. But I admire the deep reach of the plan back to Cross St. With
more of this, Cross St could come back from the grave.
Connections
The exquisite precedent of St Keven’s Arcade reminds us that it’s not
just buildings, but connections that we need. Here is a newly worked
connector by Jasmax through the buildings of AUT. And another to Albert
Park via the Art Gallery forecourt. We are invited by our profession to
make the public theatre of our day. It is our most important role, and we
have at last turned to it.
The Imperial project of Fearon Hay extends Auckland Council’s excellent
shared streets programmes through a city block from Fort Lane to
Queen St with a rich piece of old-and-new. The ramp is madly alluring,
and the four rooflights cut through the floors over it are Piranesian. There
is light in the dungeon, and in the distance Queen St beckons. The
highest praise is to say it has become part of my route from our High St
office to the ferry building.
City Mission by Stevens Lawson Architects
This Stevens Lawson scheme for the City Mission combines assisted
housing for the truly poor, including the homeless, with the Mission’s
own facilities, and community social and retail functions, and facilities
for neighbouring St Matthews church. What is exceptional here is firstly
the public courtyard space between the church and the new buildings,
where there is now a carpark. It’s the right size, it’s sunny, it sets up the
church, it’s a little protective. This is an area of the city where almost all
public space is roads and the City development contributions of many
nearby apartment buildings have produced no pedestrian open space.
Secondly, the Mission buildings are ingratiating, but do not patronise
their occupants. In function and style they could as well be in Parnell
as Hobson St. It’s been stalled for some years. I very much hope it gets
built.
The heroic Britomart that Jack Manning envisaged was not to be. The
development to date is most notable for the renovations of surrounding
buildings – much of it by Cheshire Architects, and for the temporary
structures forming a street through the centre – which they also
designed. The last consistent relic of our once-European city is this
fine wall on the north side of Customs St. When the latest version of
Britomart was planned no buildings were to rise in the background
above these, though I can’t fathom why not.
Similarly, the Viaduct building heights were pegged at six storeys. If the
office blocks on Fanshawe St had been higher, and glassier, with wider
views between them, and glazed ground floors, we could have looked
into the Viaduct basin from the other side of Fanshawe St.
Every visit by Jan Gehl reinforces our present conventional wisdom,
as he tells us again that the continuous 4-7 storey street wall is what
the great cities got (before the lift was invented), that we should ride
bikes and walk and try to be like Copenhagen. I go with the bikes and
walkers, and I’m glad Christchurch is trying to be like Copenhagen. As
for Auckland, to hell with it. I’m happy with high-rise. I love a lift like I love
Auckland’s high-rise waterfront
an underground railway. I want to look out. I want contrast, more than
context. Sure, street level has to be active below the veranda (another
mantra of the urban design crowd) but let’s have some fun upstairs.
The new Unitary Plan sets maximum metropolitan height limits at 18
storeys. The Vero building is twice that high already. What’s wrong with
70 storeys? With Auckland’s topography and views it’s the gaps between
the buildings that count more than their height. And it’s action on the
ground floors, and population above that make a rich pedestrian world.
At Britomart, the East building, designed by Richard Johnstone,
is massive and the huge floor plates and limited height must have
been tough to handle. The massif has been divided by a ‘walking
street’ vertically, and into sandwiches of different styles and materials
horizontally. I understand this latter as a visual trick for countering size
and nodding to lower buildings across the street, but I have to ask is that
the architectural sum of it? Lacking the population of a typical Asian mall,
the ground floor street is too wide and the shops are a bit gaunt.
By contrast, the friendly black and perforated (and brick veneer!) shops
by Cheshire Architects in the central Britomart area are fun to walk by
and use. So are the nearby bars in refurbed old buildings. This works,
just as Harvey’s Parnell Village worked. It’s fussy and cluttered with
architectural knick-knacks and furniture. One hopes, with no great
confidence, that the seven and nine storey blocks intended one day to
replace the temporary shops, can avoid the detached air so common in
big new buildings. Will the walking street fill up with people?
Westward, we have the ‘Cloud’ and the ‘Events Centre’, neither of which
we seem to know quite what to do with, judging by how rarely they are
occupied. Shed 10 will give us another ‘centre’ when cruise ships aren’t
here, and a desperate lack of population will be even more obvious.
The main function of the Cloud seems to be to carry a wandering band
of light up and down its edge to entertain ferry passengers like me on
Winter nights. Entertainment is a fine thing – the coloured plastic wall
of Bossley Architects’ nearby Maritime Museum addition is also lovely
The Pavilions by Cheshire Architects. East Building by Richard Johnstone in background.
at night. But the big question over the Cloud is what’s it for? It leads to
a larger question – if ‘the red fence comes down” as Heart of the City
would like, and more wharfs are opened to the public, what are we going
to do with them? It’s commercial shipping that gives them life. Public
open space is not judged by how many hectares there are of it.
Many Aucklanders long for inspiring public architecture, but so far
they haven’t been prepared to pay for it. Meantime, we architects have
so devalued ourselves and one another that we compete for work on
the basis of fees. We submit to the judgement of project-managed
committees, where architectural quality is a subject likely to rate below
all other factors. Worse still, we enter competitions so poorly funded
that gratuities paid have no relation to work done. (The Viaduct Bridge
and Queens Wharf competitions loom in the memory.) Since we value
ourselves cheaply, so does the public at large. Two weeks ago my local
paper, the Devonport Flagstaff published this intelligent project by Sills
van Bohemen and Jasmax for Devonport Wharf. It’s the latest winner
– one of the designs of a few invited architects, who according to the
Flagstaff received $3000 each for their original ideas for one of the city’s
greatest sites. The Flagstaff had to use the Official Information Act to get
access to information and the pictures of the schemes it published. I
hope against the odds that it goes ahead.
Even worse than unpaid competitions is a process in which projects
for which concept designs have already been done by one architect
are re-tendered to the rest of us. Local authorities call this ‘transparent
process’. It is the final sacrifice of art to commerce. Collegiality and
confidence rather than secrecy and competition will serve architecture
best. Self-respect is the least we can expect of ourselves.
So what’s to like? Walking the nearly-restored Quay St axis down to
the new Silo Park, the lure of the Tank Farm future, and a good deal of
well-executed landscape architecture, mostly well away from the water’s
edge. One vital ingredient is missing in general – trees, especially big
deciduous trees, like the planes of Ponsonby. Even grass. The shade
of trees is essential in public spaces, especially in summer. Regrettably,
titoki and nikau may be good for nationalist conscience, but they don’t
make much of a street.
Te Wero Island carpark
Viaduct Basin apartments
North Wharf
Nothing shades the public space in front of any apartments in the
Viaduct Basin. Trees would interrupt the private views of apartment
owners. Waitemata Plaza? Effectively, it has never been used.
Residents resist use – they don’t want noise. There are no trees from
Princes Wharf to the end of North Wharf, save a few shrubs in tubs.
If a line of big lamp standards could be planted down the inner edge
of North Wharf – as it has, why not a line of trees. What is simply
outrageous is the use of Te Wero Island and the peninsula leading to
it for carparking. Perimeter service access to boats should be allowed,
but the finest site in the area needs real trees. If it had grass too we
might even see an occasional family down there.
Auckland pedestrians are continually dominated by cars. The skyway
scheme for the harbour bridge is a first step in overturning this. Let’s
have it. It’s almost impossible for walkers to cross from the western city
to the waterfront. Fanshawe St should be underground at Victoria Park.
Bridges should link the old foreshore cliff by the Auckland Council
building over Fanshawe St to the Viaduct, right here, and from the
bottom of Nelson St to the Viaduct.
Scheme for a pedestrian route over Grafton Gully
The most barbaric pedestrian route is from the University to the Domain
down over the tangle of roads in Grafton Gully. There is no pedestrian
way here, and I think only a big move can save it. The motorway is an
artefact of metropolitan scale, not to be meddled with timidly. Here is
Auckland University student – Michael Cox’s brave attack – high level
pedestrian routes linking towers of habitable space between the roads.
It’s visionary, and metropolitan, and optimistic.
I think we can largely leave the Auckland suburbs to look after their
closeted burghers, so long as we power up the commercial centres and
downtown. The model is metropolis, and New York is its apotheosis.
Making the elegant shed has been a fine indulgence, but making the
elegant city is now our great task. We had one once, and we’re heading
there again. I do hope Nature doesn’t get there first. David Mitchell
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