Wide range of free events for Auckland Architecture Week

15/09/2014

Wide range of free events planned for Auckland Architecture Week 2014

From the 23-28 September the New Zealand Institute of Architects (Auckland Branch) is presenting a week-long festival of architecturally themed events and activities, most of them free.

The organisers of Auckland Architecture Week 2014 have put together a programme of events that considers the identity of Auckland, addresses architecture at both public and private scales, and recognises that the most important part of architecture is people.

City-focussed events include an Auckland Conversation featuring Auckland Council design champion Ludo Campbell-Reid, Hobsonville Land Company executive Mark Fraser and NZIA President Pip Cheshire and fellow Cheshire Architects director Nat Cheshire two designers who have been influential in the regeneration of some of the citys most popular areas. Auckland the Rise of a Design-led City (Thursday 25/09, 7:00pm) will focus on how integrating design thinking, the adaptive response to place, context and culture, can be Aucklands competitive edge its point of difference in the world.

Auckland Architecture Week also covers the topic of Aucklands identity. At the group exhibition, Auckland Redefined (opening event Friday 26/09, 7:00pm), five of the citys best architectural photographers, Patrick Reynolds, Mark Smith, Jackie Meiring, Samuel Hartnett and David Straight, present visual responses to a question posed by NZIA President Pip Cheshire: Auckland has used the City of Sails to promote itself in the past. Isnt it time we came ashore and defined Auckland by what it is, not what it is next to? What image of Auckland will evoke the spirit of our new city in a way that the billowing sails on the Waitemata once did?

Another event that considers identity, albeit at a national level, is Last Loveliest Loneliest in Venice (Thursday 29/09, 1:00pm). This year, architect David Mitchell was creative director of New Zealands first national exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Like all other national exhibitions at Venice, New Zealand responded to a provocation by Biennale curator Rem Koolhaas: do modern buildings, regardless of country, all look the same? New Zealands exhibition, Last Loneliest Loveliest, is a proposition about where New Zealand architecture has come from, where it might go, and how the islands in the South Pacific are connected to the wider architectural world.

Heritage protection or lack thereof for modern buildings is a current concern for Auckland. At Modernist Buildings under Threat (Sunday 28/09, 3:00pm) architectural lecturer and author Julia Gatley, conservation architecture specialist Adam Wild and HOME editor Jeremy Hansen will discuss reasons why modernist buildings with good architectural pedigrees, such as Tibor Donners Auckland Administration Building, sit in a heritage-protection blind spot.

Auckland Architecture Week also has an international aspect. This years Metro Glass Public Lecture (Friday 26/09, 6:00pm) will be presented by Mexican architect Enrique Norten, founder of the esteemed practice TEN Architectos. Norten is currently working on a wide-range of projects with significant international profiles, including the Guggenheim museum in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Auckland Architecture Weeks activities also address architecture at a human scale. On Sunday 28/09 (1:00pm), actor and television host Peter Elliott will present The Art of the Architect Live, a discussion with some of the well regarded architects who appeared on the popular television show. How do you choose an architect? What should you expect? What are the high and low points of the design process and, of course, what was making the TV show really like? The discussion will feature award-winning architects Lance Herbst, Malcolm Walker and Tony Koia.

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Wide range of free events for Auckland Architecture Week