If Minister Bishop gets his way, what will happen to lovely little designs like these changing sheds for "Brownie's Pool", at Karanga Plaza in the Wynyard Quarter? Designed by Pac Studio. Photo / Samuel Hartnett
If Minister Bishop gets his way, what will happen to lovely little designs like these changing sheds for "Brownie's Pool", at Karanga Plaza in the Wynyard Quarter? Designed by Pac Studio. Photo / Samuel Hartnett
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop wants councils to focus on “efficiency and effectiveness” in their buildings and public spaces, not design or environmental ratings.
Auckland has many award-winning public buildings and public spaces.
Design has many functions its advocates say help with efficiency and effectiveness, among other things.
Oh dear. The barbarians really are at the gate. This month, in his capacity as Minister of RMA Reform, Chris Bishop delivered what he called a “message” to councils. He was very stern.
“Not everything you do has to be an architectural masterpiece,” he told the localgovernment conference in Christchurch. “Not everything has to win awards for being the most sustainable or the most innovative or the most beautiful.
“Ratepayers don’t care what Greenstar rating your new council facilities have or whether some international architectural body thinks your latest build is pretty or not. The only awards your projects should be winning are for cost efficiency and effectiveness.”
In other words, forget about good design. What, even for kids?
Hayman Park playtower, designed by Athfield Architects.
The Hayman Park “playtower” in Manukau stands 12m tall. It has a helix slide, climbing wall, rope bridges and many other climbing features. It’s a castle, fort and treehouse full of colourful and tactile play elements for kids of all ages.
The whole thing is designed to push the balance of adventure and safety to very bold new heights, pun intended. Adults can watch from ground level, or get into the thing themselves, if necessary, via a winding central staircase.
I don’t know how Bishop would measure efficiency and effectiveness for playground equipment, but I know educators could talk to him for hours about the benefits of that playtower. Good design is lots of things and one of them is this: it helps us, as humans, to grow.
Who wouldn’t want something like that for the kids in their neighbourhood?
Last year, Athfield Architects won an award for that playtower. I’m here to cheer them on, and the local board and council staff who made it happen. (See below for a full list of the architects who gave us the buildings and other structures in this story.)
There’s a lot to unpack in Bishop’s “message”, but let’s just say his view that design is the enemy of efficiency and effectiveness betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of why things are designed and how good design is measured.
The first job of design is function. Bishop may think architects spend their time thinking up “pretty” buildings, but the core job of any designer is to work out how to make the thing work well.
Does this building have the right rooms, windows and doors in the right places, to enable people to enjoy living and/or working productively in it? Is it energy efficient?
And in this public space, how will people get sun, shade, views, feel safe, be comfortable, put on events, be able to move through it? Is it also a showcase for history and culture, like Te Wānanga, the new park overhanging the waterfront?
Te Wānanga, the waterfront park next to the Ferry Building in downtown Auckland, designed by Isthmus Group. Photo / David St George
What it looks like doesn’t come first. It gets decided on top of these thing, not instead of them. Aesthetics are still important, but if a place doesn’t please the people who have to engage with it, for all the above reasons, what suffers? Efficiency and effectiveness.
I know these things because I’ve been a lay judge in architectural awards. The professionals I traipsed around with weren’t remotely interested in awarding prizes to anything just because, in Bishop’s words, it “looks pretty”. It had to work.
Design doesn’t guarantee good outcomes. But it involves a process where it’s easier to generate them. If design is not a factor, that gets shut down.
The new CRL railway stations have been designed with all this in mind, just as Britomart station was 25 years ago. Places that get you where you want to go as efficiently and safely as possible. And which look great. All of which encourages people to use them.
Britomart station, now called Waitematā, with its elegant entrance through the old Post Office building. Photo / Auckland Transport
The same is true for some of the new bus and train interchange stations, especially Puhinui, and the big new bus station at Manukau.
You can see the opposite thinking at work at the Intercity bus station tucked into the SkyCity building on Hobson St. It’s ugly beyond belief, dark, dingy and uncomfortable for waiting passengers and carries a clear message: we couldn’t care less about you.
In fact, SkyCity is Auckland’s outstanding example of how bad things can get when architecture forgets what a building might feel like up close. Personally, I love the tower. But at street level the casino building is a nightmare: blank walls that go for miles around three of the four sides. Designed in a time when no one thought pedestrians might come near.
Another value of good design is that it makes things popular. The best example is libraries, where increased use always, all over the world, follows good new design.
Auckland enjoys several examples, including Devonport and Birkenhead.
Devonport Library, designed by Athfield Architects. Photo / Jason Mann Photography
Auckland Central Library is one of many places where they discovered that cost doesn’t have to be a determining factor of quality. A few years ago they had a budget to replace the carpet but the designers proposed a wider-ranging makeover.
For the same price, and with little more than colour, some drawing on the walls and rearrangement of the fixtures – that is, paint and creativity – they gave the whole place a tone-up.
Good design also integrates disparate and larger purposes in a project. The obvious example is the Greenstar label Bishop disparages. Greenstar provides buildings with a certified measure of energy efficiency for construction and whole-of-life use.
Not only is it the very way Bishop’s “efficiency” gets assessed, it serves the larger purpose of helping reduce climate emissions. Finding cost-efficient ways to do this should guide Government thinking about the built environment, not provide a chance to sneer at its supposed irrelevance.
Other disparate goals that good design can help achieve include: future needs, and the needs of children, the elderly, disabled people and other marginalised groups. When there’s a low-design, just-replace-what-was-there approach, these goals are more likely to be forgotten
The Warren and Mahoney-designed building housing the Manukau Institute of Technology and the Manukau Railway Station. Photo / Supplied
The Manukau Institute of Technology is built right over the train station. It’s a good design solution to an important question: how do we make transport easy for students?
And throughout the city, design is used to celebrate cultural diversity and express cultural respect.
One example: on the long, meandering shared path through the parks beside Te Auaunga/Oakley Creek in Mt Roskill, there’s a “multicultural fāle and outdoor classroom”.
It’s a “folly”, in the European tradition of garden edifices too grand for their surroundings, but this one has been appropriated to create a colourful, playful and very sturdy expression of contemporary Polynesian culture. Are people no longer to be allowed such things?
Auckland Council has a busy public art programme, with perhaps the most sophisticated work being Waimahara: it’s an extraordinary sculpture, sound and light show sited in the underpass at the bottom of Myers Park.
A formerly dangerous place is now a delight, thanks to design.
Tuna, or eel, in a basket motif: part of Graham Tipene's Waimahara installation in the underpass at the bottom of Myers Park. Photo / Auckland Council
Design brings people together. When a new lifeguard tower was proposed for North Piha, the locals donated much of the materials and labour. It’s uniquely theirs, and also there for all of us to enjoy.
And it points to another thing about good design: it can be very funny.
Te Pae, the lifeguard tower at North Piha, designed by Crosson Architects.
Design helps us integrate the old and the new, and it often does this with a larger purpose.
We have some world-class examples. One is the Auckland Art Gallery, where the sweeping, swamp kauri roof is juxtaposed with the 1887 building that originally housed the library and municipal offices.
Another is the Auckland War Memorial Museum, where an enormous wooden structure hangs like a kava bowl or seed pod from the Pacific in Te Ao Mārama, the south entrance of the 1929 building.
The kava bowl or seed pod hanging in Te Ao Mārama, the south atrium of the Auckland Museum. Photo / Supplied
The larger purpose of this? These designed things offer us a thrilling sense of who we are and who we might be.
Other public buildings, including Te Uru, the gallery next to Lopdell House in Titirangi, do the same.
Design stimulates us, asks intriguing questions and can deepen our connections, to each other and to the world around us. On the Hobsonville coastal walkway there are several “habitat markers”: wooden posts with carved holes and hollows for birds and insects, and for children to explore.
"Habitat marker" on the Hobsonville Coastal Walkway, designed by Phillip Meier for Isthmus Group.
The Westhaven boardwalk is perched deliciously over the water. We don’t need it – after all, there’s a footpath by the road – but try asking the crowds of people who use it all the time if they think it’s anything other than wonderful.
The boardwalk shared path at Westhaven Marina. Photo / Alex Robertson
Auckland architects and designers are especially good at bridges. The latest is in Panmure, where a new walking and cycling bridge across the basin echoes the old one it replaced and tells stories about the eight-tailed taniwha that used to live in the water. It also has a light show controlled by weather patterns.
Te Kōpua o Hiku, the new walking and cycling bridge across the Panmure Basin. Photo / Auckland Council
There are more beautiful bridges over the motorways near Mt Roskill, Onehunga, Albany and Māngere Bridge, over Tamaki Drive by the Parnell Baths, over the Oakley and Puhinui creeks, and in many other places. Mostly, those bridges connect to beautifully planted parks and walkways. All of them make this city a better place.
Design takes the lead so others might follow. In Takapuna, there was a long conflict about how to revive the town centre. Hurstmere Green provided proof of concept: you can make nice things and people will flock to enjoy them.
And if you look down the hill to the left in this photo, Rangitoto lies waiting. Hurstmere Green, by Sills van Bohemen. Photo /Simon Devitt
Design fosters civic pride, on top of the sheer pleasure of living here. This is the value of the “pink pathway”, the shared path also known as Te Ara i Whiti/the Lightpath.
And of the walkway on Maungawhau/Mt Eden. How good is it now, to take visitors up the maunga to see the volcanic cone and the view, and tread the elegantly unassuming walkway, knowing that by keeping visitors on the path it helps prevent erosion?
View from Maungawhau/Mt Eden, with the new walkway. Photo / Alex Burton
Maungawhau is for everyone. Design is for everyone. The cultural and community centre in Glen Innes known as Te Oro is a triumph of urban regeneration, a great commitment to the idea that everyone has the right to participate and to enjoy. Design builds communities.
Te Oro, the cultural and community centre in Glen Innes, designed by Archimedia.
And, minister, design enables commercial goals to be met.
This is the really disappointing thing about Bishop’s “message”. Even by his own values of cost efficiency and effectiveness, good design will get us there faster, better and richer, in our wallets as well as in our hearts.
The design makeover of Karangahape Rd was instrumental in reviving that precinct, and the same is happening now on Queen St. And Te Komititanga, the square at the bottom of town, works exactly like a bustling European town square, bringing people together day and night, except it has a decidedly local feel. What a triumph that’s turned out to be.
Te Komititanga, the public square at the bottom of Queen St. Image / Auckland Council
If Bishop is serious about his goal of density around transit stations, we will need a lot of good urban design. Otherwise, those areas will remain dull and unattractive and people won’t want to live or work there.
Doesn’t he want to keep young people from fleeing to Australia? Doesn’t he want us to attract talent to live, work and play here?
Our forebears understood all this. They planted trees, laid out parks and bequeathed us some superb neo-classical architecture, including the town hall and the museum, along with elegant Georgian banks and insurance buildings. Art Deco inspired many lovely little utility buildings and some big ones, notably Smith & Caughey. When modernism arrived, the Auckland Council’s own architects, led by Tibor Donner, redesigned the Parnell Baths.
Yet another Auckland gem: the Parnell Baths. Photo / Alex Burton
And design, through heritage architecture, has allowed us to continue enjoying the best of the old. Check out the restored Wintergarden in the Domain.
What’s the wellspring for Bishop’s thinking? That people should buy their own nice things, but if they can’t afford to, they should be punished?
Auckland Council doesn’t get everything right. Of course not. But over many years, the city has benefitted from having council staff and elected officials who carry a torch for good design. Thank you all.
And thank you to the architects, landscapers, urban designers, artists, technical wizards, planners and advocates who believe in the city and do the mahi to make it better. The results of their work can be seen all over greater Auckland, not just downtown, despite what some people like to think. I’ve only scratched the surface.
Like Chris Bishop, most of the people who use design to make good things are dedicated to efficiency, effectiveness and price rigour. Like him, they want the city to grow and prosper. But their commitment to good design doesn’t compromise that. Because unlike Bishop, they know that design is the best tool we have for achieving those goals.
Why is the minister being such a misery-guts about it? Design can make you happy, minister. Doesn’t this photo make you smile?
Changing sheds for "Brownie's Pool", Karanga Plaza in the Wynyard Quarter, designed by Pac Studio. Photo / Samuel Hartnett
Every building and public space in this story has won an award. Many have won several. This year, these changing sheds at Karanga Plaza, in the Wynyard Quarter, joined the prizewinners list. They were designed and built to service the seawater baths our mayor likes to call Brownie’s Pool.
Honestly, what’s not to love? It’s an essential public amenity, small and perfectly formed.
The architects and their work
Hayman Park playtower: Athfield Architects
Te Wānanga: Isthmus Group
CRL stations: Jasmax, Grimshaw and ALT Group
Britomart railway station: Mario Madayag and Jasmax
Puhinui interchange: Jasmax
Manukau bus station: Warren & Mahoney
Devonport Library: Athfield Architects
Birkenhead Library: Archoffice
Auckland Central Library: Athfield Architects
Manukau Institute of Technology/Manukau railway station: Warren & Mahoney
Te Auaunga fale: Sopolemalama Filipe Tohi
Waimahara: Graham Tipene with IION
Te Pae: Crosson Architects
Auckland Art Gallery: Archimedia and Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp (FJMT)
Te Ao Mārama: Noel Lane; Jasmax and FJMT, designTRIBE and Salmond Reed Architects
Te Uru: Mitchell & Stout
Hobsonville habitat markers: Isthmus and Phillip Meier
Westhaven boardwalk: LandLAB, Architectus and ASPECT Studios
