THIS IS ONE OF THE NEW BREED OF MEDIUM-to-high-density social housing but you wouldn’t know it. In an age of spectacular World Architecture Award-winning adjective-overloaded architecture, you could walk right past this building–;and I think that’s a good thing. I learned the hard way that most social housing tenants don’t actually want something super-architectural; they just want what everyone else has.
I worked on Manning Mitchell’s state houses at Wiri, South Auckland, in the late 1980s and was responsible for some dazzling colour schemes you could see from the southern motorway. They were repainted beige a few years later. Rewi Thompson did some housing nearby that had more architectural attention but fared less well in tenant popularity–;it was eventually demolished. When doing final inspections of the Manning Mitchell houses, I received…
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Architecture NZ (Digital) - 1 Issue, November-December 2023