On an island in the Bay of Islands, four separate buildings discretely occupy an east-facing bay. The houses are light pavilions which promote the concept of ‘roof’ as the predominant element of shelter. The monopitch roofs float above and beyond the spaces, supported on exo-skeletal structures beautifully detailed in wood. Exterior walls are taut joinery frames, offering minimal interruption between inside and out. The boat shed is totally underground, to reduce visual built form in the bay, with the guesthouse above.
Eyrie comprises two houses near Kaiwaka. Each is barely larger than four sheets of plywood. They are made from wood, are off-grid and autonomous, their outsides burnt black. This project is part polemic, part escape. Holiday homes have become this country’s decadence. Our sub-prime estuarine site permitted a 1500m² palace. It forbade two 29m² cabins. At night we talked excitedly about Malevich’s Suprematism; in the morning we got up and wrote legal submissions on visual density and the attrition of driveways. We wanted a different vision for New Zealand’s coastal future. In these houses a history of prismatic abstraction is conflated with a poetic of small boats bobbing in a sea of grass. There are no doors. One climbs up boulders and in through a window instead. We hoped that in subverting the shorthand language of building these little constructions might feel like something other than – and more than – houses.
From a context of accrued simple shed-esk dwellings in an isolated and south facing New Zealand coastal surf community, a strategy of sequencing building ‘sets’ (aka surf) was generated to scale new form to its surrounds. New ‘shed’ sets are then offset to allow seasonal living, circulation, and privacy options and for variations in wind and sun exposure.
The new Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth, Taranaki, New Zealand, designed by
Patterson Architects Associates, opens as a combined art museum with the Govett-Brewster
Art Gallery on 25 July, 2015.
The LongbushEcosanctuary Welcome Shelter is an innovative environmental education space designed, constructed and operated by a group of passionate volunteers, with the support of local businesses and charitable organisations.
Kahurangi School is the latest new school in the Wellington region. Kahurangi School, meaning “prized” or “precious” opened in September 2013, merging two existing schools, Strathmore Community School and Miramar South School. The design creates a new beginning, with buildings that provide a strong sense of its identity, reflecting the rich cultural diversity of its community and with Pasifika/Maori in particular.
HEADLINE: From a previously unseen building to a fun, colourful and vibrant part of the community.
S&T has worked with the staff and key stakeholders at Kereru Park Campus in South Auckland to give their school a fresh presence from the street with a new administration and library building. The previous buildings were hidden; almost unseen from the road and plagued by weather tightness issues.
This small single level energy efficient house is located near the end of the Kawarau Gorge, in Central Otago, in wine country.
Orgainised in a linear fashion the three bedrooms are accessed from the rear of the open kitchen and living area. Each bedroom has private views of the quiet countryside.
The brief was for a new house on a challenging, steep site in a bush clad creek gully. One of the design challenges was to insert a bold intervention into a sensitive bush reserve whilst still maintaining a sense of modesty and poetic.
The house was designed for a couple in their mid-sixties who had always wanted a house surrounded by nature though not far removed from city life – a place or respite from the speed of city life.
Article source: Monk Mackenzie with Glamuzina Patterson
Due to expanding giraffe numbers the Auckland Zoo needed a new a giraffe breeding shelter; essentially a functional oversized shed with two dens and a keeper area.
The design team responded to the brief by proposing a shelter that assumed an understated external appearance, whose mass was playfully broken down with intersecting roof forms that articulated the junction between the two dens whilst accentuating the collision of human and giraffe scales.
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