Focus Live: Fire and Emergency NZ show photos from inside the SkyCity fire
One of New Zealand’s largest public art installations did not survive the 2019 Auckland inferno and a renowned artist has had to remake them all.
Sara Hughes, commissioned by SkyCity Entertainment Group to make an audacious sky forest of colourful panels up to 9m or three levels high, said shehad to re-make the NZ International Convention Centre works due to heat and fire damage.
Sara Hughes' panels being re-installed on the New Zealand International Convention Centre. Photo / Michael Craig
“They are the same design,” Hughes said.
“It’s great for me to see my panels go back up on the building again and a milestone for the rebuild of NZICC.”
The 550 panels with a total area of 2400sq m were on the exterior of the almost-finished building when fire broke out but were initially thought to have survived the blaze.
Fire and emergency workers battled to protect the art.
By early last week, the first four panels were up on the Nelson St side of the centre, at the Wellesley St intersection.
Fletcher Construction has the head contract on the Auckland CBD site and is using a tower crawler crane to lift the panels as it continues with the installation down Nelson St towards TVNZ.
“We’d like to have saved the artwork, but the façade engineers looked very closely and there was internal damage. It looks fine to my eyes, but it would’ve been risky to leave them there. The panels are enormous too, around 2500sq metres in total, so hopefully, something can be done with the old ones. Maybe they can be ground up to make a road?”
“The SkyCity Convention Centre is my biggest project, both in terms of scale and time and now it’s ongoing because the work has to be remade,” she told the Herald’s Elisabeth Easther.
Hughes had been working on a show at Gow Langsford when she heard about the fire, saw a picture of a small plume of rising smoke, so walked to Queen St thinking it would soon be extinguished.
“Then people started sending pictures of a terrible blaze, with flames licking up around the artwork. The building can be remade, as can the artwork, but it was quite crazy when the artwork was all installed. Now, 550 panels, many of them nine metres tall, have to be taken down and remade,” she said last year.
She praised firefighters and told of re-doing the panels.
Under the SkyTower's gaze: panels are going back on the convention centre. Photo / Michael Craig
Fletcher Construction this week referred questions about the panels to SkyCity.
“To see the glass fins once more bring their veil of colour to the building is a significant milestone for the project,” said Callum Mallett, SkyCity chief operating officer for New Zealand.
What it has cost to have such a large expanse of intricate work done twice has not been revealed.
Asked about the panel work, how long it would take to erect them and how many people were working on that, a SkyCity spokesman said he couldn’t answer.
Callum Mallett of SkyCity when the NZICC was less progressed. Photo / Doug Sherring
In 2019, SkyCity said 98 glass fins would go on the western and eastern exterior and more than 500 panels of varying sizes on the southern side.
The panels have 60 colour tones and were inspired by Hughes’ upbringing in rural Northland near the Waipoua kauri forest, the company said then.
“The artwork reflects the experience of walking through the New Zealand bush and looking up through a canopy of trees to see the unique light and colour of the forest,’’ Hughes said previously. “It’s really exciting and moving for me personally to see this work lifted into place and on public display for the first time.’’
The NZICC was designed by Warren and Mahoney in association with Moller Architects and Woods Bagot.
Ex-Mayor Phil Goff watched the fire take hold and wondered how the glass panels below the roof could possibly survive such heat.
“I was watching the fire hoses playing directly onto the glass panels and expecting them with the force of a fire hose to shatter, and they didn’t. I don’t think we lost one of them, which was a small bright spot,” Goff said then.
