Ideas to Remember
It strikes me that the terms of reference for the CERA earthquake memorial project almost entirely miss the point.http://cera.govt.nz/news/2014/site-confirmed-for-canterbury-earthquake-memorial-12-july-2014 Why are we limiting proposals to the location selected? The riverside site represents a number of quite profound social and architectural deficiencies and lost opportunities for any disaster memorial of international stature. The worst is that […]
Architects on the Christchurch Rebuild
As an urgent public service response to Christchurch’s recent devastating earthquakes, a good number of Christchurch’s Architects who feel passionately about the city, including some of its most respected and experienced practitioners, have for some months been volunteering their time to consider and work on strategies and ideas for the reconstruction of the central city. […]
Christchurch ’48 Hours’ Competition
Christchurch Architects were put to the challenge recently, with a design competition to address the earthquake ravaged city centre. Starting at midday on 1st July 2011 and finishing an exhausting but exhilarating 48 hours later, 15 teams comprising over a hundred Architects, architectural designers, landscape architects, urban designers, engineers and students gathered together at Lincoln […]
Auckland Waterfront Competition
Just found some work we did in a joint submission with some landscapers for the Queen’s Wharf architectural competition back in 2009, intended to provide event space for the upcoming Rugby World Cup. Our scheme disappeared without a trace of course (the first clue that something was going badly wrong!) and as it turned out […]
Stimulating Environments May Save Lives
(source: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100708/full/news.2010.342.html)Alla Katsnelson Stress has acquired a bad image as a contributor to disease, but a little stress may be no bad thing. Mice raised in a complex environment providing social interactions, opportunities to learn and increased physical activity are less likely to get cancer, and better at fighting it when they do, a new […]
“Sustainability” – what exactly does this mean?
Most of us take “sustainability” to be a pretty compelling and important objective, and this is an often requested feature in building design, but beyond all the marketing hype and virtue signaling, what does this term really mean?, and what exactly is required to achieve it? Sadly, “sustainability” is rather an abused and emotionally loaded […]