Editorial by Simon Sellars:
At the New Zealand Institute of Architects’ national conference in February (AR 125), rebuilding Christchurch was a hot topic. Post-quake, the city is changing beyond recognition with buildings (heritage and otherwise) being pulled down at an alarming rate. The Christchurch City Council promises a bigger, brighter city of the future with more liveable and greener spaces, better infrastructure and more civic interaction. But where are architects within this process?
According to the temper of the conference, they are nowhere to be found, ignored during consultations for rebuilding the city. Fears that Christchurch will morph into Tilt-Slab City appear stronger than ever, and such ‘repositioning’ of architecture’s worth is not confined to New Zealand, either.
This issue of AR tries to redress that balance, elevating the idea that good architecture is fundamentally about urban scale and should be implemented from the bottom up. If a city’s infrastructure is concerned with the basic organisational structures needed for it to function, then surely liveability must be inbuilt, and architects’ considerable skill in negotiating the cultural and social aspects of citymaking taken as a given.
Our project reviews reinforce this. Three look at architectural responses to natural disasters in Tokyo (p88), Christchurch (p94) and Brisbane (p100), while three more consider how architecture can enhance public space in Singapore (p68), Barwon Heads (p76) and Seoul (p82). All six projects are resolutely ‘infrastructural’, and suggest a way for architecture to extricate itself from the apparent crisis of relevance we’re often told it is in.
Our features and columns follow suit, ranging from theoretical responses to the marriage of architecture and infrastructure (pp42, 62), to reimaginings (pp46-53), to hard-nosed realism (pp54-61).
Finally, farewell to Mat Ward, who has finished up as Associate Publisher of AR. We’ll miss Mat’s experience inhouse but he’ll still be onboard as an occasional freelance contributor, starting with this issue.
In this issue:
- On the cover: West End Ferry Terminal, in Brisbane, by Cox Rayner
Project reviews:
- ‘Aquatic Therapy’: Singapore’s Bishan Park, by Atelier Dreiseitl (review: Patrick Bingham-Hall)
- ‘Bridging the Past’: William Buckley Bridge in Barwon Heads, by Peter Elliott Architecture and Urban Design (review: Maitiu Ward)
- ‘Rhythmic Flow’: Seoul’s Herma Parking Building, by JOHO Architecture (review: Jinyoung Lee)
- ‘On the Grid’: EEI Building in Tokyo, by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto Laboratory (review: Christopher Kaltenbach)
- ‘The New Normal’: Re:START Mall in Christchurch, by The Buchan Group (review: Lara Strongman)
- ‘Facing the Future’: Brisbane’s West End Ferry Terminal, by Cox Rayner (review: David Neustein)
Features:
- ‘The Wired City’, by PD Smith (extract)
- ‘Infrastructure, Excess and Difference’, by Anna Tweeddale
- ‘Exotic Pylon’, by Charles Holland
- ‘Under Overpasses’, by Naomi Stead
- ‘Roadtrip: Trouble in Paradise’, by David Neustein
- ‘Rajarhat, the Urban Dystopia’
Interviews:
- Dilip da Cunha & Anuradha Mathur: Design Activism, by Maitiu Ward
Plus Jennie Officer’s profile on architect Kelly Rattigan in One to Watch, BKK & Jackson Teece on Design Wall, and Russell Fortmeyer looks the repositioning of architecture around infrastructure.
Contributors: