The Christchurch Botanic Gardens lie within a 21ha loop of the Avon River and is the cities most visited public space. The newly developed centre is regarded as one of the most significant new build projects since the 2011 Christchurch Earthquake and extends the garden’s ability to undertake research, conservation and run educational activities as well as demonstrate the beauty, variety and complexity of the plant world.
Designed for a sensitive ridge in rolling countryside, this house was depressed three metres into the existing ridgeline to minimise impact on the sea views from the neighbouring sites.
The new Residence is located at the southern border of the development of Seagrove Conservation Estate in the Wellington suburb of Newlands, perched over a cliff above State Highway 2 towards Petone and less than couple of hundred meters from the Wellington harbour.
The site has 2 special features, a crescent shaped beach that it overlooks and a craggy mountain peak that overlooks it. The water view is south and the mountain view is north.
In 2012, Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology held a design competition by invitation for their new Health Sciences Building. MOAA Architects in association with DCA received first prize. Following award of the project, extensive stakeholder consultation began in order to redefine what was a very traditional brief for teaching of specialist nursing education.
St John’s Church replaced the original church building dating from 1910.
The new church is a single space, square in plan, and rotated 9 degrees off axis. The interior is defined by a glulam pine structure. Divided into 5 equal bays, the space between each structural grid consists of either glass or larch battens.
Big Box retail is increasingly placed away from New Zealand’s small town centres, taking the life and community vitality of the centre with it. The town of Richmond called big box retail back into the main street, questioning how to maintain streetscape and commercial viability to both large and small tenancies. Big Box can entail up to 100m lengths of uninterrupted walls to the street, a scale and typology seemingly incongruous with a greengrocer or a provincial NZ townscape.
A house after the Christchurch quakes. One creative home comes down, another goes up, the new silhouetting the old, reminding, resettling, providing lineage.
Where the former villa sat square and inward, the new layers out across the southern view, shaping to the silhouette for light, and framing a greater appreciation of the everyday.
The ancient architype of The Castle as an Outpost or Fort is rarely articulated in the modern world. This New Zealand farmhouse project explores this typology by being both commanding and defensive in one form.
A young family bought a fantastic sunny section in Gibbston Valley and wanted a Passive House. This house was designed utilising all Passive House principles. It achieves a high level of energy efficiency due to its compact form in which the main rooms are orientated to follow the suns path. Air-tightness, balanced heat exchange, high levels of insulation, and thermally broken windows, all help to mean that this house did not require any heating until well into June, when the fire was first lit.
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