Blank faces a blot on skyline

By TIM WATKIN

Douglas Lloyd-Jenkins is sipping a weak latte in a Pt Chevalier cafe, but in his mind he's driving south past Northcote on the Northern Motorway, heading towards the bridge.

"You get that first view of the city looking across the harbour and, yes, what a wonderful skyline," the design lecturer and arts commentator says. "But the closer you look the worse it's getting."

It's a revealing game of the imagination. Try driving in on a few other of the gateway entrances to Auckland's CBD. Say, off the Southern Motorway.

"One of the zones that really bugs me is the top of Hobson St. There's a whole series of apartments that look like Hong Kong," he says, rubbing his forehead in frustration.

"It strikes me that could have been used to re-invent part of the city, but has been used to make it worse.

"If you drive from Parnell along Quay St, look up on the hill or up Anzac Ave, that's changed dramatically and for the worse, with a lot of poor-quality, blank-faced apartment buildings that aren't doing anything for the sculptural shape of the city."

Coming in from Ponsonby and Grafton is the same.

Lloyd-Jenkins stares gloomily into his coffee. "You start looking at them and you think, what is all this cheap stuff? There's some incredible architecture going on around the world and we're missing it."

Auckland is in the midst of an apartment boom that is, in a rush of concrete slabs, changing the face of the city, as people are drawn to inner-city living.

"Sprawling suburbs are yesterday's solution to growth," councillor Juliet Yates, chair of Auckland City Council's city development committee, wrote in the Herald in September. "Today we have to design our cities to accommodate more people."

That means apartments, and developers are rushing to meet the demand. But few would say this blight of new apartments is making Auckland more attractive.

"Based on what we've already seen, that opportunity still awaits us," leading architect Patrick Clifford says drily.

"Predictable" is the best that Professor John Hunt, of Auckland University's architecture department, can offer. "We've seen a series of developments that pay minimal regard to what's going on around them."

"Appalling," says architect and Urban Auckland spokesman Don McRae, rather more directly.

In a professional arena where criticism is often muted by the "it's all subjective" argument, such unanimity is significant.

Yet as desperately as this city needs a debate on aesthetics, it's hard to get people to criticise specific buildings, even though, as developer Nigel McKenna says, "on really good buildings you get general agreement, and it's easy to agree on what's really bad".

The architectural community is small and unwilling to risk offence or loss of work, the council has long been hands-off, and the public too often ill-informed and indifferent.

Still, it's not hard to spot the worst offenders: City Gardens atop a car park on Albert Street. Ugly. The Metro City and Mt Terrace apartments on Wellesley and Mount Sts respectively. Ugly and ugly. Also the Hopetoun urban zone and C-Vu apartments approaching the Hopetoun Bridge and Lord Nelson and Hobson Gardens in Hobson St.

Then there's the terraced housing debacles, such as Normanby Mews and Greenwich Park or 32 Edwin St and 8 Rendall Place. All ugly.

As Lloyd-Jenkins says, when it comes to these boxes, it isn't a question of taste. They're just bad. A look at a few architectural fundamentals will tell you why.

Clinton Bird, associate professor in architecture at Auckland University, is standing on a pavement outside Fox Terraces in Parnell, his arms cutting lines in the air. The building is the blackboard he's chosen to illustrate how to get the basics right. First, a building must have a scale and style that fits its site. Second, it must have a base, a middle and a top. The base must relate to the street, with doors, windows, decoration, plantings and so on, which is why the best often have retail on the ground floor, or perhaps attractive doorways raised a little above the street for privacy's sake.

The worst have "a dead edge" - a garage entrance, ventilation fans or a solid, blank wall. The middle needs a variety of features and angles - articulation, architects call it. Balconies, either out from the wall or under cover, offer the most design opportunities, but other features such as planter boxes, louvres, arches and so on can be added.

Bird points to the roof. "You've got to get some sort of variation where the building meets the sky. This doesn't look like it's been chopped off. Then there's the extended cornice, it acknowledges the corner."

Across town, at the site of lesson number two, his black, polished shoes bound through the dirt and woodchips of Beaumont Quarter. On everyone's top five list, Bird reckons it's as good as you get in Auckland. Several architects were used for the 2.4ha site, "so you've got variety", he says.

The terraced houses reference the old brickworks - incorporated into the development - and front doors face other front doors, rather than back walls as in tattier terraced house developments. Pedestrian streets have been created, with grass, stairways and courtyards, not just garage-door alleyways filled with wheelie bins. The buildings have decent-sized bedrooms, plenty of light, ventilation and shelter from the fickle Auckland weather.

Ask around architects, and such basic principles will be repeated time and again. As Hunt says, a good look simply comes down to "fiddling with a wall in an intelligent way".

So why is it so many Auckland apartments can't even claim to do that?

Blame can be levelled at developers, architects, politicians and the public alike.

Auckland has long been a developer's town and maximum bedrooms, minimum cost is the prevailing ethos behind the worst developments.

"The developers are building them as cheaply as they can," says McRae. "They try to do that by reducing materials, reducing space and reducing shape."

Stephen McDougall, concept architect of the top-end Lighter Quay apartments, says "at the moment most developers' aspirations are low end, so they're getting what they ask for, which is not much".

Everyone spoken to for this story noted that many of the best architects, who might insist on higher standards, aren't getting the work.

"There are some very clever architects out there who I'm sure can make lovely and interesting little apartments, they've just got to be given the opportunity. But at the moment excessive profit isn't letting them," says Lloyd-Jenkins.

McKenna, whose Melview Developments is behind Beaumont Quarter and Lighter Quay, agrees. But developers here are up against Auckland's high land and labour costs, he explains. Viaduct apartments will sell for about $7000 to $8000 a sq m, compared to $20,000 to $30,000 a sq m on Sydney's waterfront, "and while land costs are slightly higher in Sydney, the cost of construction is very similar".

Yet it's not as if decent developers can't make a buck, says Lloyd-Jenkins.

"People say if you make it difficult for developers development won't happen. Well, I don't think that's the case. Demand for land is such that it will still be profitable."

Apartment buyers must take a share of the blame, too.

"It's only because people care so little about architecture that they accept these buildings."

The conclusion the academics, architects and even developers have come to, however, is that aesthetic salvation can, ultimately, only come from one source.

Explains Lloyd-Jenkins: "If you've got a developer who wants to build 145 cheap apartments, they'll find an architect who will do it, so neither of those are going to stop that. We can hope the public will say 'we're not going to buy them', but with Auckland's population growing so fast they are going to be bought. The council's really the thing."

Can the council really tell private land-owners what to do? "Every other city in the world does, so why can't we?"

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the city council has been caught short by the boom.

"Because of the rush of it, a lot has happened before they had a plan in place, so they've been a bit slow to act," says Ross Pickett, CEO of property advisers DTZ.

For example, the council has belatedly announced it plans to decline building consent for bedrooms smaller than 30sq m or with inadequate light. But the city already has many such chicken coops, largely investor-owned and rented by Asian students. As the overseas student market flattens and demand for quality grows, those investors and the city will face major troubles.

"In 15 years' time - or 10 years or five years - there's going to be this mush of poorly built stuff ", McDougall says, "and if you think we've got a problem with leaky buildings now, just you wait."

"No one," Pickett says, "will live in those boxes".

Yates, in her Herald piece, conceded that "shocking examples" of apartments had been permitted but "significant changes" had been introduced to stop repeat offences. At the forefront are urban design and appearance control guidelines and an urban design panel headed by Hunt.

The guidelines cover precincts in the CBD, such as High St, the Viaduct, K Rd and the Queen St Valley. Notified back in the 1997 district plan, the guidelines suggest design ideas architects should follow.

The High St guide, for example, makes recommendations that are both site-specific - facades 15m to 25m high with "a generally dominant vertical emphasis" - and universal - developments that address the corner and are sympathetic to the heritage buildings around them.

The hope is that those precincts might be just the start.

"The council will start looking shortly at the whole CBD and whether it should have design and appearance controls relating to all buildings or just specific types of activities," says Mark Vinall, Auckland City's manager of central area planning.

Our urban design panel models versions in cities from Sydney to Santa Monica, California. The panel typically sees any projects at a pre-consent application stage and offers architectural advice. Hunt says he wants to "raise the bar" without acting as "taste police".

But are the council's changes significant enough?

Unlike Vancouver, Santa Monica and Sydney, the guidelines and panel in Auckland are essentially optional. Although "every proposal needs to be assessed against the [design] criteria", those criteria are not mandatory and the committee can ignore them. What's more, the issues reach beyond the CBD.

Morningside and Mt Eden's city-side have been pummelled with bad apartments and terraced houses, and still have no guidelines or controls. Panmure, Newmarket and Avondale are next on the list yet are similarly exposed.

The guidelines also struggle up against the Resource Management Act. Appearance controls were this year applied to Quay Park, but didn't stop the first two Scene apartment blocks, which create a wall along the waterfront.

Under the RMA, developers can submit sub-division proposals piecemeal, says Vinall.

"Developers put forward a proposal for the Foodtown and the council didn't have the ability to see what the remainder of the development [the Scene apartments] would look like."

Guidelines or no, because the apartments conformed to RMA height and bulk restrictions, the council had little power to enforce aesthetic considerations, such as view shafts.

"The RMA doesn't allow the city to masterplan the whole block. It's a thing the council finds very difficult to do," Vinall says.

Lloyd-Jenkins says it is vital that regulations - via bylaws or national laws - be introduced to allow master-planning. The council has to take responsibility for sculpting the inner city as a whole, he says.

He stirs the dregs of his coffee. He sees his city as a single sculpture that's being mistreated. A rare born-and-bred Aucklander, he's got a theory why it's happening.

"Something like 25 per cent of Aucklanders were born in the city. So most people living here don't have any consciousness of what's been lost or changed."

We're a city that goes away for long weekends or cares more about our hometown than the one we live in now.

"Until people start owning the city it's not going to get any better," he says. "Until people think 'I can spend a really good long weekend at home in the inner city', Auckland's architecture problems won't be solved."

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