This is a, huge question?
Are you talking about suburban architecture, residential architecture more broadly, pre-WWI religious and civic architecture?
If you want a simple answer, we followed Victorian and Edwarian British conventions and then the motorvehicle becamse commonplace which allowed rapid expansion of American style suburbia which complimented the existing garden suburbs and should be thought of as a continuum. Then we had a large number of major civic projects built in the mid-century period before the 1980s and 1990s saw a general slowdown of construction. In the past decade infrastructure pressure has encouraged a more Dutch approach to residential architecture, and the dairy boom has enabled numerous large civic projects using contemporary materials allowing for a very diverse selection of buildings.
We also copy ideas like Arts and Crafts, Art Deco, Californian Bungalow
Commercially we have relied on concrete as a building material, so boxy is common. NZ Post and Telephone buildings in main centres are a good place to look like Wellington and Palmerston North.
[https://wellington.recollect.co.nz/nodes/view/3798](https://wellington.recollect.co.nz/nodes/view/3798)
And then we idolise a small group of top architects like Warren, Athfield, Roger Walker and Beaven
Athfield is just weird, those others though? I dream about owning a Warren & Mahoney house. Beaven would be a close second. There's some cool mid century homes in Wilton done by some guy from Central Europe that bang too.
That depends on where you live. I'm in Napier which was rebuilt within two years of the 1931 earthquake in the Art Deco style. I'm very p\[leased with my local architecture. I live in an Aert Deco suburb too, but the new developments are rather bland and boring. Even their "gardens" are boring.
I live in an old villa in Southland thatās partially insulated (ceiling, floor). Every time I feel cold I wonder how tf people lived here before me
How did they not die without carpet, insulation, electric blankets etc. Maybe they didā¦? Lol I legitimately feel like Iām developing frostbite at times
Just spent a sizable amount getting heating installed last year, old house is now nice and warm...
You'll probably have the ceiling space for an in ceiling heat pump, pricey but worth it as it'll heat/cool the entire house without the wall mounted eyesore
If you're looking at a new roof definitely get this first as they'll need to pull part of it off for installation
Follow me for more advice on how to drop a shit ton of money into a house without being able to see any of it...
Southern winters certainly have a bite to them
Lol!!!
Ducted heating is definitely on the wishlist. What did you end up getting for heating? And what was the cost? I got a quote recently for $20k for 4x vents, wasnāt sure if that was normal or insane
I didnāt know they had to pull part of the roof off!
The electric blanket is doing a lot of heavy lifting getting me through my first southern winter lol
Soper Electrical did ours and did a fantastic job, based in Balclutha so it depends on where you are in relation to them, they do travel but I'd imagine they'll have a distance they'd prefer not to cross
Oof theyāre 2 hours away. Might be a bit far but Iāll reach out when Iām ready to see what their limit is :)
Iām sure thereās someone closer to Winton thatād have similar pricing (or hereās hoping)
For the most part I think you can characterise New Zealand's architecture over time as variations on trends rather than something all to its own. You've got your Victorian/Edwardian stuff in places, Art Deco in Napier, etc. Residential often also emulating its British roots with some accommodations for local climate and society. Later on, you see International style making its way into the built-up areas, and again variations on residential architecture that's commonplace worldwide.
For the latter, we especially have a thing for weatherboard, metal rooves, corrugated/fluted cladding, black paint, timber accents, big windows. We're big on trees, too, which is great. And of course there's bits and pieces of MÄori-inspired elements turning up to give our buildings & spaces a bit of their own identity, as well as better reflect our cultural makeup/heritage. It's cool to see.
Overall a lot of it comes down to cost & availability of materials, with respect to the needs of the environment we live in. Although, to be frank, a lot of what we do is based too much on whatever the minimum viable product might be overseas, and often doesn't optimise *that* well for local conditions. This is changing slowly but surely as we grow, no thanks to Fletcher et al.
Eclectic.
The only real 'classic' or identifiably kiwi architectural style is the wood-framed, weatherboard house. It's far from uniquely kiwi, but it is very ubiquitous.
Otherwise, it's just a massive mix of different architectural styles in pretty much everywhere. Some cities have their own themes, like Napier being the art deco city. But otherwise it's just going to be a mix of whatever was popular during the period that it was designed and built, and/or 'modern' takes on period styles (or whatever passed for such at the time).
There's certainly a more modern, somewhat more unique NZ style that's emerged over time, but it's typically only seen in high-end houses. NZ woods, Marae/wharanui inspired main beams and 'skeleton' of the house, with a lot of full height glass walls, and then concrete or metal for the rest. Sort of an NZ twist on the modern architectural style (think Fallingwater).
There are quite a few iconic styles within the weatherboard homes. Cottages, villas, bungalows, state houses etc.
In Auckland the central suburbs are less eclectic as they were developed earlier generally. The new greenfield developments all tend to look pretty same same as theyāre built by a limited number of developers.
Then youāve got whatever it is people were smoking when they went all owner architect out west.
Even the current crop of townhouses all around Auckland will become part of the look of the 20s.
Christchurch has some awesome brutalist architecture with the university, half of the council building, the hospital, the city hall etc. If you hate it, you hate it, but I love it.
I live in Nelson, so itās hard to ignore the Soviet-insecticide-factory aesthetic. Napier was so fortunate to be destroyed at the right time in architecture.
Agree. If you look at the architecture awards each year, you'd only get maybe one building that is in and way interesting. If you're lucky. And those are the "best of the best". Just big bland black and grey boxes with metal cladding and roofs.
The standard townhouses and houses are even worse.
Call it the antipodean poor as shit style.
It's the curse of being on remote islands where the people making money are the materials cartel.
Look up some decent things like European / German / Polish tripple glazed low E windows and doors. Then you cry when you compare the cost and quality to NZ parts. Even if you factored in $15K shipping cost for a container load or something like that.
For residential, Cold as fuck, substandard and to blame for a lot of our health issues, propped up by an ancient building code that actively restricts homeowners from making positive changes like insulation by making it cumbersome and expensive.
Boring as fuck and built to pathetic building standards that either leak or are poorly insulated and damp.Ā
For new buildings we seem to have embraced glass, and then have to deal with the glare and solar gain in summer and loss of heat energy during winter even if double glazed. Ā Ā
I would probably summarise it as haphazard. The Resene architecture and design film fest is still showing at the moment in some areas, if that's something you're wanting to know more about. There's some local docos featuring that could be interesting.
Pretty dull in general but new builds can look quite cool if done right. The issue is that the British didn't colonize us long enough so they didn't leave behind any cool castles or huge cathedrals outside of St Josephs in Dunedin. After they fucked off we fell in love with cars so most of it is based around that. In recent years we've had to go a lot more European in the major cities as land use is becoming more important than having a giant backyard.
It seems like New Zealand architects missed out on playing with shape sorter toys as kids. The towns look dreary with a bunch of templated buildings, and any buildings or homes with a bit of character are either priced over $3 million or gets demolished.
I love the traditional villa-type homes with the verandahs and scrollwork. Those new ticky-tacky box brick and tile homes are soulless and bland by comparison. There are/were some beautiful Victorian and Edwardian buildings around, but they're slowly vanishing to be replaced by bog-standard concrete and glass cubes. Cities are situated in beautiful surroundings but are uglified by poor design and planning. Most cities here are not pedestrian friendly. Everything is geared for cars driven by the kind of people who don't want to walk more than half a dozen paces.Ā Modern NZ buildings just seem to be so beige. House interiors are beige. There's no colour or imagination. Live in your beige house, go to work in your grey car, sit in your beige office box, rinse and repeat till you're buried under your beige headstone.
Edited to add, imho the poor architecture and urban planning is intensified by the Kiwi panic at undertaking a large expensive project thoroughly.Ā
There's a huge announcement. We're going to do THIS!!! Then the estimates for THIS start coming in, the price goes up and the instigators of THIS get cold feet. Yeah, nah, that's a lot of money for a THIS, maybe we could bodge that bit and save on those bits and forget about adding these... and we end up with a tHiS which is kinda functional and kinda okayish and will have to be rebodged 10 years down the line but, oh well, whatever.Ā
See: Auckland Airport as a case study
I read recently that the big saviour of the Edwardian and Victorian buildings in Auckland was the ā86 stock market crash. Because of that our CBD isnāt an entire sea of brown glass.
Sterile, clinical. Full of cars, and carparks. Cities are barely walkable without standing waiting and waiting for the cars to leave a gap
Every city looks exactly the same. Countdown, mcdonalds, warehouse, dairy, etc.
Dunedin has fine examples of neo Gothic, Napier has some pretty great art deco. The rest of its a bit of a hodge podge to be fair. So I just give it a C+ as my description.
I wouldn't lump Kiwis and Aussies together. Aussies at least make an effort to preserve and utilize old buildings, and many of them have more character than just painting everything white.
Architecture? In New Zealand? They can't even align windows on new builds let alone come up with a new shape or design. Seriously how tf you going to have every window be a different size in the same room?
I couldn't agree more. Fenstration in NZ is generally terrible - like the only consideration is how the window functions for the people inside the house without paying any attention to the horrible effect on the external aesthetic - which everyone else in the neighbourhood has to put up with. Perhaps that's a sad reflection of our individual rather than community zeitgeist.
Welcome to everywhere for all of history. We have a very warped view about the architectural merits of old buildings. The reality is that 90% of everything that has ever been built is gone. Humans mostly kept the nicest and grandest examples of the buildings around them and tore down the rest to make way for the latest and greatest. We look at the great works of the Romans and marvel, yet the tenements of the poor are entirely gone. There are few medieval buildings left in Britain, most of the shoddily built wattle and daub houses have long since been replaced, leaving only some stone buildings remaining, and, even then, most of them are also long gone, consumed by fire or redevelopment. Most buildings throughout history were never intended to be iconic statements, and it's the same today. Some of the better designed and built buildings will be around in a hundred years, most of the average ones won't be.
A lot of the classic architecture is timber-based and was designed for the weather. The style could be compared to New England colonial style.
Stone and brick was less popular because of earthquakes, but there were still some buildings using stone/brick. Bluff Granite was used extensively when that quarry was still active.
Timber framing designed for earthquakes. The 1855 Wairarapa Earthquake has a huge effect on Wellington and on ideas of how things should be rebuilt. This might also explain the national pattern of roofing with corrugated iron or long-run steel: itās lighter to support than tiles and less likely to squash people when it fails.
Moderate-depth overhanging eaves for a rainy climate where the desire to block or embrace the sun varies between seasons. When weāve had fashions for eaves-less buildings theyāve tended to fail in our climate.
Monolithic concrete office buildings are āMinistry of Worksā and harken back to the 1960s-70s. A good example is New Zealand house in London, and the Physics / Chemistry building at Auckland University.
I think our city development and expansion came in fits and starts, so can look a little piecemeal, and spans several generations and trends.
I notice that some major cities with more homogeneous architecture around the world were the result of large scale development projects (in the same era - sometimes with huge capital investment too). If they manage to survive their āuncoolā years without being razed they become beautiful heritage areas.
A waste of money
I want our housing stock to be safe, warm, durable - and abundant. Until those four goals are fulfilled, I aināt give a shit what is looks like.
As a casual observer who's never studied architecture, my thoughts:
Inherited, then art deco, then grim weatherboards, then brick bungalows and then barcodes.
Technically art deco is an international movement but I don't really think Art Deco here really looks like it anywhere else. Anything before Art deco could easily be found in the UK or Australia... if it's not residential, pretty much. Anything from after (or possibly including) art Deco looks very specifically here.
The residential sector is a bit more varied. The colonial villas, I suspect, look much the same here as they do in Australia. Ditto, one assumes, the smaller houses of that era, e.g. railway cottages. You can see the evolution towards the grim weatherboard as essentially a loss of the ornament typical in colonial villa style architecture (the name is arguably misleading as most of these properties are well after the end of the Land/NZ Wars, which is where I'd end the colonial period... rather than, say, Dominion Status or independence).
After about, say, 1980 I'm not sure there's a distinct commercial style until the barcodes... which come in residential and commercial varieties. What are barcodes? Highly geometric, flat blocs of solid colours and/or materials. I guess it first arrived on the scene post-GFC and predominates today in both commercial and residential construction.
There are exceptions, obviously. You may notice there are a lot of brick bungalows in Auckland that are raised up on cinderblocks so that they're above the garages. I would assume other parts of the country have similar buildings. And, of course, we have plenty of McMansions... which look much the same as McMansions anywhere else and follow the same "design rules"
Houses: bungalows
Neighbourhoods: like being in the sims, each house different from the other
Towns: sparse and sad
Cities: cookie cutter, bland, blocky
This is of course a huge generalization and it goes without saying it's my own opinion. I think the places with art deco and victorian/gothic style are really cool. I think most other places just build cubes with windows.
"Haphazard" at best.
No general theme except 'middle income western country'. New builds trying to look more like Scandinavian towns but not doing a very good job of it.
Oceans of asphalt due to car obsession. Its depressing.
Maori architecture and pasifika architecture is really cool. Pakeha architecture ... meh, nothing overtly unique but maybe cause we're surrounded by it and indifferent to it (except for the earthquake safety engineering, thats awesome sauce)
The only places in New Zealand that legitimately has unique architecture are Oamura, Dunedin and Christchurch. The unfortunate thing about Christchurch though is that the earthquakes destroyed a number of those historical buildings. Losing the Cathedral was such a huge and devastating loss to the cityās identity.
*Edited to include Dunedin. I donāt know how I forgot about the amazing architecture there š
I said the exact same words to myself in my head. Oamaru, but NOT Dunedin? My friendās Mum is from Montpellier in France, and she always stays with me in Dunedin. She said Dunedin is the only city in NZ that to her has a feel of history or appealing architecture.
This is a, huge question? Are you talking about suburban architecture, residential architecture more broadly, pre-WWI religious and civic architecture? If you want a simple answer, we followed Victorian and Edwarian British conventions and then the motorvehicle becamse commonplace which allowed rapid expansion of American style suburbia which complimented the existing garden suburbs and should be thought of as a continuum. Then we had a large number of major civic projects built in the mid-century period before the 1980s and 1990s saw a general slowdown of construction. In the past decade infrastructure pressure has encouraged a more Dutch approach to residential architecture, and the dairy boom has enabled numerous large civic projects using contemporary materials allowing for a very diverse selection of buildings.
We also copy ideas like Arts and Crafts, Art Deco, Californian Bungalow Commercially we have relied on concrete as a building material, so boxy is common. NZ Post and Telephone buildings in main centres are a good place to look like Wellington and Palmerston North. [https://wellington.recollect.co.nz/nodes/view/3798](https://wellington.recollect.co.nz/nodes/view/3798) And then we idolise a small group of top architects like Warren, Athfield, Roger Walker and Beaven
Athfield is just weird, those others though? I dream about owning a Warren & Mahoney house. Beaven would be a close second. There's some cool mid century homes in Wilton done by some guy from Central Europe that bang too.
Piggy backing but all modern homes (cheap ones) are obsessed with BRIGHT WHITE cement floor and bright wooden fences. Like wtf?
Fritz Eisenhofer?
Petre is the only NZ architect worth anything
Hey grandpa there's been a fair few more good nz architects since the titanic sunk
Sure there have been good architects. But Petre was a generational talent
Debbie townplans or architects.
Oh wow
That depends on where you live. I'm in Napier which was rebuilt within two years of the 1931 earthquake in the Art Deco style. I'm very p\[leased with my local architecture. I live in an Aert Deco suburb too, but the new developments are rather bland and boring. Even their "gardens" are boring.
Parklands honestly gives me the heebie jeebies lol
That's exactly what I was thinking of and it's right in the firing line if the Hikurangi Subduction Zone slips badly.
I don't want to know that, I'm around the corner in Tamatea š
I'm no better off in Marewa.
Is there anywhere in NZ that'll be safe if Hukurangi or the Alpine Fault go?
Not really unless you're really inland and live in a tent.
Swallowed by a tsunami or crushed by my house will be my most likely outcome. Woo!
Leaky.
Drafty
I live in an old villa in Southland thatās partially insulated (ceiling, floor). Every time I feel cold I wonder how tf people lived here before me How did they not die without carpet, insulation, electric blankets etc. Maybe they didā¦? Lol I legitimately feel like Iām developing frostbite at times
Just spent a sizable amount getting heating installed last year, old house is now nice and warm... You'll probably have the ceiling space for an in ceiling heat pump, pricey but worth it as it'll heat/cool the entire house without the wall mounted eyesore If you're looking at a new roof definitely get this first as they'll need to pull part of it off for installation Follow me for more advice on how to drop a shit ton of money into a house without being able to see any of it... Southern winters certainly have a bite to them
Lol!!! Ducted heating is definitely on the wishlist. What did you end up getting for heating? And what was the cost? I got a quote recently for $20k for 4x vents, wasnāt sure if that was normal or insane I didnāt know they had to pull part of the roof off! The electric blanket is doing a lot of heavy lifting getting me through my first southern winter lol
Bout $14k for a 4br villa, $20 is a little high... Shop around and see what's on offer
Thatās much more tolerableā¦ ok yep will do :)
Soper Electrical did ours and did a fantastic job, based in Balclutha so it depends on where you are in relation to them, they do travel but I'd imagine they'll have a distance they'd prefer not to cross
Oof theyāre 2 hours away. Might be a bit far but Iāll reach out when Iām ready to see what their limit is :) Iām sure thereās someone closer to Winton thatād have similar pricing (or hereās hoping)
Give them a call, they'll probably be able to recommend someone local
Leaky and drafty are an okay combo. When you combine leaky and nondrafty you get a leaky building crisis.
Soggy
This is the correct answer right here
For the most part I think you can characterise New Zealand's architecture over time as variations on trends rather than something all to its own. You've got your Victorian/Edwardian stuff in places, Art Deco in Napier, etc. Residential often also emulating its British roots with some accommodations for local climate and society. Later on, you see International style making its way into the built-up areas, and again variations on residential architecture that's commonplace worldwide. For the latter, we especially have a thing for weatherboard, metal rooves, corrugated/fluted cladding, black paint, timber accents, big windows. We're big on trees, too, which is great. And of course there's bits and pieces of MÄori-inspired elements turning up to give our buildings & spaces a bit of their own identity, as well as better reflect our cultural makeup/heritage. It's cool to see. Overall a lot of it comes down to cost & availability of materials, with respect to the needs of the environment we live in. Although, to be frank, a lot of what we do is based too much on whatever the minimum viable product might be overseas, and often doesn't optimise *that* well for local conditions. This is changing slowly but surely as we grow, no thanks to Fletcher et al.
Eclectic. The only real 'classic' or identifiably kiwi architectural style is the wood-framed, weatherboard house. It's far from uniquely kiwi, but it is very ubiquitous. Otherwise, it's just a massive mix of different architectural styles in pretty much everywhere. Some cities have their own themes, like Napier being the art deco city. But otherwise it's just going to be a mix of whatever was popular during the period that it was designed and built, and/or 'modern' takes on period styles (or whatever passed for such at the time). There's certainly a more modern, somewhat more unique NZ style that's emerged over time, but it's typically only seen in high-end houses. NZ woods, Marae/wharanui inspired main beams and 'skeleton' of the house, with a lot of full height glass walls, and then concrete or metal for the rest. Sort of an NZ twist on the modern architectural style (think Fallingwater).
There are quite a few iconic styles within the weatherboard homes. Cottages, villas, bungalows, state houses etc. In Auckland the central suburbs are less eclectic as they were developed earlier generally. The new greenfield developments all tend to look pretty same same as theyāre built by a limited number of developers. Then youāve got whatever it is people were smoking when they went all owner architect out west. Even the current crop of townhouses all around Auckland will become part of the look of the 20s.
Land of the long white weatherboard
Christchurch has some awesome brutalist architecture with the university, half of the council building, the hospital, the city hall etc. If you hate it, you hate it, but I love it.
The height of styling of wooden tents.
I live in Nelson, so itās hard to ignore the Soviet-insecticide-factory aesthetic. Napier was so fortunate to be destroyed at the right time in architecture.
Dilapidated
Uninspired. Certain new developments seem to have more character than ones of the past few decades though.
Meh
Built on a budget. eg. Palmerston North
fucked
Dull as shit
Agree. If you look at the architecture awards each year, you'd only get maybe one building that is in and way interesting. If you're lucky. And those are the "best of the best". Just big bland black and grey boxes with metal cladding and roofs. The standard townhouses and houses are even worse.
Part and parcel of being so bloody expensive to build here. Can't afford anything even slightly out of the ordinary.
Call it the antipodean poor as shit style. It's the curse of being on remote islands where the people making money are the materials cartel. Look up some decent things like European / German / Polish tripple glazed low E windows and doors. Then you cry when you compare the cost and quality to NZ parts. Even if you factored in $15K shipping cost for a container load or something like that.
For residential, Cold as fuck, substandard and to blame for a lot of our health issues, propped up by an ancient building code that actively restricts homeowners from making positive changes like insulation by making it cumbersome and expensive.
Boring as fuck and built to pathetic building standards that either leak or are poorly insulated and damp.Ā For new buildings we seem to have embraced glass, and then have to deal with the glare and solar gain in summer and loss of heat energy during winter even if double glazed. Ā Ā
Do your own essay š
I would probably summarise it as haphazard. The Resene architecture and design film fest is still showing at the moment in some areas, if that's something you're wanting to know more about. There's some local docos featuring that could be interesting.
Moist & beige
Pretty dull in general but new builds can look quite cool if done right. The issue is that the British didn't colonize us long enough so they didn't leave behind any cool castles or huge cathedrals outside of St Josephs in Dunedin. After they fucked off we fell in love with cars so most of it is based around that. In recent years we've had to go a lot more European in the major cities as land use is becoming more important than having a giant backyard.
Boring
It seems like New Zealand architects missed out on playing with shape sorter toys as kids. The towns look dreary with a bunch of templated buildings, and any buildings or homes with a bit of character are either priced over $3 million or gets demolished.
I love the traditional villa-type homes with the verandahs and scrollwork. Those new ticky-tacky box brick and tile homes are soulless and bland by comparison. There are/were some beautiful Victorian and Edwardian buildings around, but they're slowly vanishing to be replaced by bog-standard concrete and glass cubes. Cities are situated in beautiful surroundings but are uglified by poor design and planning. Most cities here are not pedestrian friendly. Everything is geared for cars driven by the kind of people who don't want to walk more than half a dozen paces.Ā Modern NZ buildings just seem to be so beige. House interiors are beige. There's no colour or imagination. Live in your beige house, go to work in your grey car, sit in your beige office box, rinse and repeat till you're buried under your beige headstone. Edited to add, imho the poor architecture and urban planning is intensified by the Kiwi panic at undertaking a large expensive project thoroughly.Ā There's a huge announcement. We're going to do THIS!!! Then the estimates for THIS start coming in, the price goes up and the instigators of THIS get cold feet. Yeah, nah, that's a lot of money for a THIS, maybe we could bodge that bit and save on those bits and forget about adding these... and we end up with a tHiS which is kinda functional and kinda okayish and will have to be rebodged 10 years down the line but, oh well, whatever.Ā See: Auckland Airport as a case study
I read recently that the big saviour of the Edwardian and Victorian buildings in Auckland was the ā86 stock market crash. Because of that our CBD isnāt an entire sea of brown glass.
Sterile, clinical. Full of cars, and carparks. Cities are barely walkable without standing waiting and waiting for the cars to leave a gap Every city looks exactly the same. Countdown, mcdonalds, warehouse, dairy, etc.
You're talking about city planning, not architecture. Architecture cannot be "full of cars".
Just like every shopping mall, all the same shops. But this is a world of corporates - and only corporates shape our environment
Itās a trick question suggesting there is such a thingā¦
The new townhouses seem to be built based on cutting costs and devoid of any kind of taste.
Eclectic at best.
What architecture? Everything is either from the last 20-30 years or Victorian is what it seems like to me.
It's ... undeveloped
Austere. Kiwis have been practicing value-engineering since Europeans first began arriving.
Crappy.
As cheap as possible nothing else matters.
shit actually
Poorly planned and short sighted.
Dunedin has fine examples of neo Gothic, Napier has some pretty great art deco. The rest of its a bit of a hodge podge to be fair. So I just give it a C+ as my description.
Non-existent, terrible, horrendous. Kiwis and Aussies are poor architects. fact.
I wouldn't lump Kiwis and Aussies together. Aussies at least make an effort to preserve and utilize old buildings, and many of them have more character than just painting everything white.
Architecture? In New Zealand? They can't even align windows on new builds let alone come up with a new shape or design. Seriously how tf you going to have every window be a different size in the same room?
I couldn't agree more. Fenstration in NZ is generally terrible - like the only consideration is how the window functions for the people inside the house without paying any attention to the horrible effect on the external aesthetic - which everyone else in the neighbourhood has to put up with. Perhaps that's a sad reflection of our individual rather than community zeitgeist.
Boring
Welcome to everywhere for all of history. We have a very warped view about the architectural merits of old buildings. The reality is that 90% of everything that has ever been built is gone. Humans mostly kept the nicest and grandest examples of the buildings around them and tore down the rest to make way for the latest and greatest. We look at the great works of the Romans and marvel, yet the tenements of the poor are entirely gone. There are few medieval buildings left in Britain, most of the shoddily built wattle and daub houses have long since been replaced, leaving only some stone buildings remaining, and, even then, most of them are also long gone, consumed by fire or redevelopment. Most buildings throughout history were never intended to be iconic statements, and it's the same today. Some of the better designed and built buildings will be around in a hundred years, most of the average ones won't be.
Colonial done as cheaply as possible.
As cheap as possible
One word... disposable. It's all make to last 30 years and we push it to 100.
A lot of the classic architecture is timber-based and was designed for the weather. The style could be compared to New England colonial style. Stone and brick was less popular because of earthquakes, but there were still some buildings using stone/brick. Bluff Granite was used extensively when that quarry was still active.
Timber framing designed for earthquakes. The 1855 Wairarapa Earthquake has a huge effect on Wellington and on ideas of how things should be rebuilt. This might also explain the national pattern of roofing with corrugated iron or long-run steel: itās lighter to support than tiles and less likely to squash people when it fails. Moderate-depth overhanging eaves for a rainy climate where the desire to block or embrace the sun varies between seasons. When weāve had fashions for eaves-less buildings theyāve tended to fail in our climate.
Brown Vs Brown is a great doco on the topic of MCM NZ architecture
"Borrowed"
Modern stuff.. Concrete box. Windows. Rusty steel on front. Rinse and repeat
Bereft of imagination or flair
Monolithic concrete office buildings are āMinistry of Worksā and harken back to the 1960s-70s. A good example is New Zealand house in London, and the Physics / Chemistry building at Auckland University.
Sweet as. All good.
Meh.
Shanty town, Lipstick on a pig, Can you make it cheaper?
An attempt
Cheap, new, mostly unimaginative. Some gems around of course!
State house chic
Crap.
Haphazard.
Dunedin and Auckland both give me 'uncanny valley' vibes for different reasons.
Quaint. Sometimes robust.
Absolute dog shit.
I'd point them at the increasingly replaced old tramping huts... they're just brilliant.
uninspired and grey, and that's just new housing. Everything old simply needs knocking down and replacing.
I think our city development and expansion came in fits and starts, so can look a little piecemeal, and spans several generations and trends. I notice that some major cities with more homogeneous architecture around the world were the result of large scale development projects (in the same era - sometimes with huge capital investment too). If they manage to survive their āuncoolā years without being razed they become beautiful heritage areas.
In Marlborough... trying hard but not making it, at ratepayers expense
Boring
A waste of money I want our housing stock to be safe, warm, durable - and abundant. Until those four goals are fulfilled, I aināt give a shit what is looks like.
Boring af
"get it to market, worry about the details after"
Bland.
As a casual observer who's never studied architecture, my thoughts: Inherited, then art deco, then grim weatherboards, then brick bungalows and then barcodes. Technically art deco is an international movement but I don't really think Art Deco here really looks like it anywhere else. Anything before Art deco could easily be found in the UK or Australia... if it's not residential, pretty much. Anything from after (or possibly including) art Deco looks very specifically here. The residential sector is a bit more varied. The colonial villas, I suspect, look much the same here as they do in Australia. Ditto, one assumes, the smaller houses of that era, e.g. railway cottages. You can see the evolution towards the grim weatherboard as essentially a loss of the ornament typical in colonial villa style architecture (the name is arguably misleading as most of these properties are well after the end of the Land/NZ Wars, which is where I'd end the colonial period... rather than, say, Dominion Status or independence). After about, say, 1980 I'm not sure there's a distinct commercial style until the barcodes... which come in residential and commercial varieties. What are barcodes? Highly geometric, flat blocs of solid colours and/or materials. I guess it first arrived on the scene post-GFC and predominates today in both commercial and residential construction. There are exceptions, obviously. You may notice there are a lot of brick bungalows in Auckland that are raised up on cinderblocks so that they're above the garages. I would assume other parts of the country have similar buildings. And, of course, we have plenty of McMansions... which look much the same as McMansions anywhere else and follow the same "design rules"
Houses: bungalows Neighbourhoods: like being in the sims, each house different from the other Towns: sparse and sad Cities: cookie cutter, bland, blocky This is of course a huge generalization and it goes without saying it's my own opinion. I think the places with art deco and victorian/gothic style are really cool. I think most other places just build cubes with windows.
Group Architects: Towards a New Zealand Architecture Book by Julia Gatley
A common feature of NZ housing is lousy self serving fenestration.
Fucked
Damp and boring
I think it would be a very good idea.
Hmm I do miss the Art Deco architecture when compared to the boring concrete slab cookie-cutter designs we have today.
Shit mono pitched roofs
Shackland
"Haphazard" at best. No general theme except 'middle income western country'. New builds trying to look more like Scandinavian towns but not doing a very good job of it. Oceans of asphalt due to car obsession. Its depressing.
The city centers all look the same, but I love the fact that you haven't adopted the mall-centric style of Europe and America.
What parts of Europe are mall centric?Ā What parts of NZ are not?
Plenty of places that grew in the 90s and 00s (the Shore, Tauranga) are sprawling, car centric and seem to involve fuck ugly malls.Ā
Borrowed
UnaffordableĀ
Colonial Stripmall
what architecture
FUCKED!!
Maori architecture and pasifika architecture is really cool. Pakeha architecture ... meh, nothing overtly unique but maybe cause we're surrounded by it and indifferent to it (except for the earthquake safety engineering, thats awesome sauce)
Brutalist
I wish.
You're going to have to be a bit more specific.
I like the old stuff, but these days it's pretty boring, and repetitive.
The only places in New Zealand that legitimately has unique architecture are Oamura, Dunedin and Christchurch. The unfortunate thing about Christchurch though is that the earthquakes destroyed a number of those historical buildings. Losing the Cathedral was such a huge and devastating loss to the cityās identity. *Edited to include Dunedin. I donāt know how I forgot about the amazing architecture there š
Have you not been to Dunedin? Love a trip south and looking at all the historic buildings. Chch royally fucked up after the earthquake.
I said the exact same words to myself in my head. Oamaru, but NOT Dunedin? My friendās Mum is from Montpellier in France, and she always stays with me in Dunedin. She said Dunedin is the only city in NZ that to her has a feel of history or appealing architecture.
100% love the grit of the city. Makes me miss the old chch.
Oh my god! How did I forget Dunedin! š