Twenty practices from across the Auckland region scooped awards for projects ranging from small home additions to large infrastructure works; with Britomart, Hobsonville Point and Titirangi standing out as the key areas. Education and new residential projects also featured prominently.

The awards were announced at the MOTAT Aviation Hall on 28 May.

Awards convenor Tony van Raat, the head of Unitec’s Department of Architecture, said 159 projects were submitted into the awards programme this year, 56 of which were shortlisted for a visit by a jury also comprising architects Peter Davidson and Murali Bhasker and lay juror Nicola Legat.

“The standard of entries this year was very high,” van Raat said. “There were many projects of outstanding merit which revealed the skill, care and insights of their architects. New Zealand society continues to be well served by the profession, and in the Auckland region we were pleased to see that high standards are now common practice.”

Full list of winners and jury citations below:

COMMERCIAL ARCHITECTURE AWARDS:

Allendale Annexe by Salmond Reed Architects

The challenges could hardly have been more major: build alongside and link to a Category One historic building and its ancient stables on a narrow site with major traffic issues while also making a statement that the client – the ASB Community Trust – is future-facing and contributing to the Ponsonby Road streetscape. This beautifully built two-storey building rises to the challenge. It displays a modesty and restraint appropriate to its occupant and a great respect for its Victorian neighbour. 

The Pavilions by Cheshire Architects

Built to be temporary, this cluster of buildings, gripped by a soaring, lightweight, triple-gabled roof, with the steep gable of Ortolana restaurant rising at its centre, does not lack for charm despite its shortterm destiny. Skilled laneway and courtyard insertions continue the urban language and gritty fabric of this historic merchant precinct, and the exuberant landscaping softens the aspect to charming effect. Aucklanders have come to love spending time in this gentle quarter. They will miss it when it has gone.

EDUCATION AWARDS:

Avondale College by Jasmax

The completion of a three-stage, four-year project at this large state high school has given its community buildings that it can be inspired by and proud of. Deploying the language of an urban street, the arrangement of confident buildings and courtyards, which are given texture and interest via textured concrete formwork and coloured plywood paneling, must surely energise and affirm its pupils each day. The environment within which they easily move is assured and sophisticated, the well-appointed teacher work rooms must be a delight to their users, and the retention of a wing of the school’s historic early buildings is to be applauded.

Hobsonville Point Primary School by ASC Architects 

Built to accommodate both future capacity and the requirements of the Ministry of Education’s ‘Modern Learning Environments’ pathway, this new school is eminently suited to be a school of and for the future. Significantly, it also serves as an anchor building that lends identity and a sense of place to the growing urban-village hub of Hobsonville. The school’s crisp clean lines, ‘interior street’, flexible spaces and high-quality build are all fit for robust usage, and as the community matures this building will continue to serve as a place of public amenity.

MIT Manukau and Transport Interchange Warren and Mahoney

This handsome building of substance and gravitas is surely capable of delivering two transformations: first, to the educational aspirations of its surrounding low-income community, and second, to the urban fabric of the Manukau city-centre. The bold structure employs quality materials and furnishings to create a first-rate tertiary learning environment. Its lofty six-storey atrium creates an exciting, inspiring environment for all visitors, be they straight off the eastern-line trains that pull in below or those destined for a business studies course and a bright future.

The University of Auckland Building 303 by Architectus

The students of the 1970s who toiled in this dour Brutalist block would surely embrace its recent humanising interventions with envy. From the welcoming blast of coloured glass at the new Princes Streetfacing entrance to the way in which the building has been reunited with Albert Park’s treetops and the view east of the campus, this intelligent reconfiguration, repurposing and remediation has created warm public transition spaces, restful breakout areas and office environments that leave the old prison-style corridors of the past in the, well, past. The red bridge on level four is a stroke of wit and brilliance.

Resene Colour Award:
No more walls of stentorian concrete for today’s maths, physics and chemistry students. The blaze of colour at the Princes Street entrance is confident and energising, and upstairs, on the fourth-level bridge connecting building 303 to its neighbour, the snazzy red bridge is a smile-generating pedestrian delight.

ENDURING ARCHITECTURE AWARDS:

Flint House (1969) by Roger Walker Design

This perfectly maintained house from a classic period of New Zealand architecture is a reminder of how fresh, playful and essentially novel Roger Walker’s work was — and still is. In a series of individuallyarticulated volumes set in a grove of kauri trees, this family home retains all the intricacies of planning, shifts in level, intimacies of scale and generous connection to the exterior world through a plethora of skylights and windows that sets it in contrast to so many of its contemporaries and successors.

Gibbs House (1985) by Mitchell & Stout Architects

As elegant yet playful today as it was when first built in the mid-1980s, this post-modern pavilion is luxurious without being lavish, daring without being showy, polished without being cold. Almost 30 years on, the corrugated stainless steel ceiling, the daringly unfenced pool, the pops of colour and the massive Corbusier-red steel beam that flings itself out to the north-west remain bold, confident and full of energy. The play of light and the handsome spaces for sociability imagined by its creators retain their capacity to inspire and delight.

HERITAGE AWARD:

Lopdell House by Mitchell & Stout Architects

The various accretions which over the years have degraded the building’s presence have been stripped back and a sensitive colour scheme and some opening up of the pavement faces of the building have made it both more comfortably integrated with its neighbours and more accessible. The completed project, sharp, refreshed and skillfully adjusted to new uses, is now ready to act as a focus of the Titirangi community for another generation.

HOSPITALITY AND RETAIL AWARDS:

The Federal Delicatessen by Nott Architects

New York? Montreal? You could be there in this loving tribute to a typical Jewish deli that has lifted itself well beyond pastiche and feels like the real Reuben. The constraints of the long narrow space are well handled, and the atmosphere created by quality materials, terrific furniture, a well-ordered open kitchen and loads of cleverly curated deli paraphernalia makes The Fed a warm and welcoming addition to the fabric of the city.

James by Rowe Baetens Architecture and Noel Lane Architects in association

Less is indeed more in this energising response to an old site with its doubleheight volume and concrete-formwork walls. A gesture as simple as hanging swathes of hot-pink sheer curtaining which can be arranged to configure a series of intimate ‘rooms’ or to frame the entire space, is exactly the right, inspired decision. Coming from the near pitchblack bar area, the room is an explosion of eye popping, fun colour and a great environment for a party.

Masu, Sky City Grand Hotel by Moller Architects

Dinner is made exciting and theatrical in this capacious, high-end Japanese restaurant. With its various cooking and dining zones, luxury materials and exquisite detailing, the restaurant delivers both theatre and a big-city dynamism that makes it a pleasure to dine in, and is also a great showcase for the superb food of an ambitious and visionary chef.

Orleans by Cheshire Architects

Here the rule is: more is more. The aspiration was to take patrons into some Frenchmen Street dive, and the architects nailed it. The attention to detail, the accretion of bric-a-brac, and the appropriately and artfully exercised roughand- ready construction used here would send a location scout for the TV series Treme into a downright fever. 

Ostro, Seafarers Building by Fearon Hay Architects

The ugly-duckling Seafarers Building has been progressively morphed into a series of striking spaces, and the creation of the sprawling cosmopolitan Ostro was both the first cab off the rank and a signal of intent. Not only has it given Aucklanders a place to engage with the harbourfront – an all-too-rare pleasure – but the striking terrace on the opposite face of the building is also alluring to those at street level in Takutai Square. Ostro makes a real contribution to its immediate urban fabric.

HOUSING AWARDS:

048per_VillaOP by Townsend Architects and WHAT_architecture in association

There was surely consternation in the
heritage-zoned neighbourhood when plans for this bold house began to circulate. But how intelligently and ultimately diplomatically it has inserted itself into a street of tiny cottages on very small lots. The language of the villa is extant but deftly mutated. The faceted, weatherboard-clad front is an absence rather than an assault in its recessive black. Inside, angles and joints have been achieved through an engineer’s daring — and no doubt a builder’s agony — and they are impeccably executed.

Resene Colour Award:
In a house notable for its restrained control of materials and colour, the guest bathroom is an explosion of intense blue, from floor to ceiling, which gives the user the sense of plunging into a tropical pool.

Boatsheds by Strachan Group Architects and Rachael Rush in association

Inserted onto a small and very difficult corner site, this elegant, light-filled assemblage of three boat-shed like structures is a superb response to the lives of a busy boating and sporting family. Robust yet elegant, full of surprises, and making inspired use of wood, glass and steel, the house is beautifully built throughout. This is a superb, relaxed, confident family home with real personality, and it makes a vivid streetscape contribution to its neighbourhood.

Castle Rock House by Herbst Architects

This project has a directness and simplicity that engages its occupants with both the essential and the existential nature of the beach house. Beautifully considered and expertly crafted, this is an intentionally challenging house — showers are not fully weather-sealed, surfaces are intended to suffer the natural consequences of ageing, and materials are blunt and uncompromising: the architects know that meeting some challenges is a wholly beneficial exercise. Yet within this almost rustic language is a captivating level of delight; the building has all the qualities which distinguish a holiday house from a suburban home and create a distinctive sense of place. 

The Crossing by Crosson Clarke Carnachan Architects

This small hilltop house operates with greatest effect because of its restraint and simplicity. Effectively a tent, consisting of a tight metal skin wrapped over a folded volume, the building occupies its prominent site unmediated by gardens or any form of self-conscious landscaping. Interior spaces reflect the geometries of the external skin and the language of folded metallic planes is skillfully expressed in interior elements and fittings. This is a great little house, clearly a delight to its owner and no less of a pleasure to visitors.

Easterbrook House by Dorrington Atcheson Architects

Modest in its aspirations, dimensions and budget, this small house for a family of four, nestled in a Titirangi bush glade, is a delight. Every aspect of the house works hard to offer storage, purpose, comfort, sun and surprise. From the window seats in the children’s bedroom and the diminutive bathroom that still holds room for a clawfoot bath, to the immaculate cabinetry and the artful pings of colour, it is a carefully controlled and considered exercise which has yielded an airy, playful, entirely relaxed and quite joyful outcome.

Fold House by Bossley Architects

This extensive and beautifully finished holiday house not only delivers on the explicit and implicit requirements of its brief but gracefully and without contrivance transcends them. Conceptualised as an encampment and formed by a collection of freely associated but very carefully placed elements, these large buildings sit easily on the ground, exhibiting in their loosely articulated rooflines and casually formed spaces a sense of relaxed living and generous entertainment that perfectly expresses the idea of holidays on the beach.

Resene Colour Award:
The soft, subdued colour palette of this coastal house gets a wild injection of vibrancy in each of the bathrooms, where there’s a vivid wall of coloured tiles, each chosen by the young occupants of the bedrooms adjacent.

Hekerua Bay Residence by Archimedia Group

Built to a superb standard on a Waiheke cliff edge, this suave house takes its owner’s Mediterranean background as the springboard for a programme that summons lazy days under a blazing sun. Travertine, in situ insulated concrete and superbly crafted wooden cabinetry are almost the entirety of the material palette. Internally, the underbelly of the curved concrete forms invites caress, like the hulls of a boat up on the hard; externally, the building’s series of shell-like structures reference the gun emplacements of the Gulf.

In Situ House by Stevens Lawson Architects

A remarkable house by any measure, this massive residence is the fruit of a bold vision by both practice and client and an approach to building and engineering that pushed at all technical boundaries previously established in this country’s residential projects. The interiors are an exercise in high control and restraint, restricting itself to the repeated use of concrete also poured into intricate Victorian moulds, wood paneling with the same patterning, bronze, stone and handmade tiles in the beautiful bathrooms. The house is a rare accomplishment.

Lake Pupuke House by Mitchell & Stout Architects

Approached through a restricted and somewhat unpromising entry sequence, this house expands from the front door into a series of most agreeable domestic spaces. A free plan connects a series of carefully modeled rooms to the view and the sun. Courtyards, decks and roof gardens connect the rooms to the outside and are all proportioned at the scale of the rooms that they serve. The informal quality and the unexpectedness of some room shapes and window placements engage the viewer and must provide the occupants of this unpretentious house with an ideal framework for the pleasures of domestic life.

Muriwai House by Godward Guthrie Architecture

This confident hilltop building uses a hunkered-down, shelter-from-the storm language that is entirely appropriate to its exposed cliff-edge site high above Muriwai beach. It is careful to capture and frame the spectacular views but its confident use of in situ poured concrete and wood also reassures occupants that the house can ride out the wildest storms the Tasman can throw at it. Inside, the house’s volumes are airy, elegant and restrained in their considered use of materials, lending the building a sense of calm, solidity and poise.

Ostend Family Home by Bull O’Sullivan Architecture

You can’t help but be delighted by a house that invites you to lean back comfortably against raked hallway walls. The language of this house is modest, hand-wrought, direct and quirky. From its small cabin-like bedrooms and long, lean, sun-facing plan to its relaxed living and kitchen space and spectacular bath, this house is the work of an architect who has exactly and perfectly fashioned it for his clients and their young family. He has given them something they may have hoped for but did not necessarily expect to achieve: a joyful place to inhabit.

Rawhiti Bach by Studio of Pacific Architecture

This project consists of neighbouring buildings on
the site of an earlier house. Unexpectedly, the two structures employ quite different languages to express their purposes. The house is a two-storey volume reflective in some ways of its predecessor; generous and open, it acknowledges a number of traditional models for beach housing. The sleep-out, by contrast, is a remarkably brave, hard-edged concrete structure clearly engaged with the future rather than the past. A tough-minded building, it is designed and detailed with considerable skill to provide the occupants with an emphatic and satisfying series of architectural propositions.

Red House by Crosson Clarke Carnachan Architects

This house sends a stern rebuke to any suggestion that architecture makes little difference to the way we might live. The house immediately declares the courage of its convictions: the cherry red glowing out of the mature bush setting is both bold statement and also entirely appropriate – what goes better with the green of our bush than pohutukawa red? Inside, the house’s few simple materials are elevated by great design and fine craftsmanship. The house is idiosyncratic, playful, a counterfoil to its bush setting but also deeply respectful of it, and a joy to its artistic and risk-taking owners.

Resene Colour Award:
Glowing like a ruby in a bush glade, the red of this corrugated iron house is vibrant, intense, brave, cheerful and pitch perfect.

Rock House by Stevens Lawson Architects

Built with confidence and dexterity on an enormously challenging site dominated by a massive basaltic outcrop, this ingenious house makes a virtue of its rocky relationship by putting the massive slab at the building’s core. The three floors of serene rooms are remarkable for their subtle finishing and dramatic angles and the play of light within them. The building sits lightly on its site, enfolded by its metal skin and anchored to the rock on a manner that is at once alpine-hut-like and enduringly robust.

Sayes Stock House by Henri Sayes Architect

Built on an extremely modest budget, this charming small house sets a benchmark for what can be achieved with resolve, resourcefulness and the disciplined delivery of grace notes where they will most count. From the deep window seat to the pin-board sliding pantry doors, the response to a tight budget has been to execute delights wherever possible while exercising restraint and control.

Te Kohanga House by Wendy Shacklock Architects and Paul Clarke of Crosson Clarke Carnachan in association

Built on a remarkable but also challenging site, and moving coastal design on from the pavilion, this elegant house subjugates itself to its strategic location by clinging long and low to the cliff edge. A considerate neighbour in its island community, its form is also a considered response to its marine environment; after all, for every Mediterranean day there are others dominated by a maddening wind. Outside, there’s a striking, rugged materiality. Inside, the house is handsome, expansive and confident, its serene tone achieved by the controlled use of a limited range of materials.

HOUSING – ALTERATIONS AND ADDITIONS AWARDS:

Burn House Addition by Godward Guthrie Architecture

A significant late-1960s house by emigré architect Franz Iseke sits within a stone’s throw of a cluster of several small modernist gems in a Meadowbank gully. The latest stage of this sensitive renovation has both restored the house’s original programme from a previous mangling and given some much-needed extra space to the current owners. Echoing the existing language of the house, the new secondstorey addition is both respectful and confidently expressive in its own right.

Clevedon Estate by Herbst Architects

The filigree-timber-skin language so often deployed by this practice here sits in contrast to and in dynamic tension with the sturdy, South-Australian-Outback language of the large house already on the site. Of the two pavilion-like buildings, the pool house is a delight. Built for sociability, its proportions are elegant, and despite its tough materials it feels supremely refined. The second pavilion, which serves as both garaging and office, is enlivened by a central courtyard in which grows a solitary tree, reaching to the sky through a cut in the roof.

Marine Parade by Dorrington Atcheson Architects

Intriguing from the street with its spare, brooding style, inside this house reveals a host of pleasures and surprises that take their cue from its original quality build in the 1970s. A faithful attention to period detail does not overshadow the success of the repurpose of the house for modern living. A reconfiguration of some of the interior programme, two substantial additions, and a bold exterior ‘wrap’ have created a house of distinction, substance and elegance.

Peary Road Addition by Cook Sargisson & Pirie Architects

Masterful hands have controlled the programme for this box at the back of a modest ‘moderne’ style house. Confident, playful and hard-working, this new volume is set up perfectly for casual family living while also achieving a certain elegance and offering a host of surprises. There surely was no more fitting partnership for the red brick of the original house than boards with wide battens, and the cherry red is the perfect touch.

Resene Colour Award:
Plywood and battens are here stained a perfect cherry red, a tone that works remarkably well with the red brick of the old house to which this addition is attached.

Pt Chevalier Bungalow by Megan Edwards Architects

This small and very modest bungalow has been transformed by a skillful renovation that has deployed simple but elegantly utilised and controlled materials to create new rooms that perfectly suit a growing family and busy parents. The result is elegant, warm, poised and enormously appealing. The bungalow is notoriously difficult to successfully re-model, but this house is surely an exemplar of how success should look.

Sod the Villa by Malcolm Walker Architects

Tell the villa to sod off? Malcolm Walker has in fact done no such thing in this inspired and inspiring alteration to a rundown Grey Lynn house. Rather, he has breathed life into the old belle, highlighted her beauties and revved up the programme with whimsy, craftsmanship and the deft manipulation of volumes into a series of small but highly pleasing spaces. An almost fanatical attention to details coheres into a renovation of supreme confidence and capability.

Westmere Alteration by Crosson Clarke Carnachan Architects

The box attached to the bungalow, villa, or, as in this case, well-kept little ‘statie’ has become a slightly worn trope. Here it is approached afresh, and elevated most successfully through the use of quality materials, a great build and a light touch achieved with skill and intelligence. The transition between the two forms is deftly handled and the sense of space and light offered by the full-height sliding doors makes this home a delight to be in.

HOUSING – MULTI-UNIT AWARD:

Carlaw Park Student Village by Warren and Mahoney 

 A great deal has been got right in this highdensity student accommodation campus. More than 400 students are offered high quality and surprisingly spacious housing in a development that is notable for its human scale, well considered programme and intelligent response to its site. It is a model for low-cost, high density accommodation that merits attention. 

Squadron Lane Terraces by Stevens Lawson Architects

Any fears that the development at Hobsonville Point will end up looking either like streets from The Truman Show or an inchoate collection of medium-density ambitions are set to rest in this wellcontrolled and indeed elegant block of 38 terrace houses. The developer for whom they were designed must surely be pleased by the poise, resolve and confidence that has been achieved by a consistent use of materials, form and colour. The terrace need not be bland or unimaginative — this development shows how. 

PUBLIC ARCHITECTURE AWARDS:

Panmure Interchange by Opus Architecture

This well-crafted building, with its skilled use of stainless steel, timber and granite and its intriguing ‘compass’ ceiling indicating places in the landscape that are important to isthmus iwi, offers much more than a sheltered place for public transport users. Adopting a bold, confident stance at the junction where new roads, a train line and new bus nodes meet, signals both that modern-era public transport has arrived in Panmure and that, under the great mountain, there is much potential to be unlocked in the area.

Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery by Mitchell & Stout Architects

The transformational power of modern architecture can hardly be better illustrated than in this dramatic addition to Titirangi village. Standing boldly apart from its surroundings, yet sympathetic to its place, the gallery provides the village with a new conception of itself. The architects have understood the virtues of the site, and acknowledged the street with a powerful façade and a well-formed entry that leads the visitor through an engaging series of galleries linked by dramatic vertical spaces. Its social effect is this building’s greatest achievement; it is rare for any new project to be so immediately valued and appreciated by its community. 

SMALL PROJECT ARCHITECTURE AWARDS:

Longroom Canopy by RTA Studio

Sometimes it is possible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, in this case an undistinguished commercial building in the heart of Ponsonby Road’s densest restaurant and retail zone. The solution was to fabricate an elegant, lace-like screen that reintegrates the building with the street frontage, creating an almost Medina-like veil. Behind the screen the courtyard space has achieved refinement and enclosure.

Te Kaitaka: ‘The Cloak’ by Fearon Hay Architects 

This whimsical little building will surely become one of the most-loved structures in the growing airport village. Hunkered down into its corner site like some shaggy Highland cattle-beast, its tufty tussock roof grows out of linked brass chain mesh, woven and edged (hence the name) like a Māori cloak. Inside, the attention to detail is impressive: beautifully detailed materials combine to create an atmosphere of beguiling simplicity, the perfect canvas for the many uses to which this building will be put.