Table of contents for INTERIOR_18_201512 in Interior

If anything, this has been a year of great conversations and, as the end of the year excuses a certain amount of reminiscence, here are a few of the chats that have fuelled the last four magazines and made our job so enjoyable. ¶ There was that night in Dunedin’s Doon Bar talking about the influence – or lack – of the built environment on the city’s legendary music scene. It is hard to separate certain types of music from the cities in which they were born: Detroit’s techno, soul and its African American urban roots, the Vienna sound, etc. There’ve been moves to define a “hip hop architecture”; perhaps it is not so far-fetched to seek its Flying Nun equivalent. ¶ There was many a discussion of the importance…

“I was acutely aware that, being in London, I was amongst some of the best architecture firms in the world and that I wouldn’t be living there forever. I wanted to gain experience at a scale, budget and typology applicable in New Zealand.” Daniel Lewis FM: First of all, congratulations on your win. Where were you when you found out Burntwood had been selected for the Stirling Prize? DL: I was lucky enough to be in London at the ceremony – after I heard the first sound of ‘B’ for Burntwood, everything was a-buzz for at least a few minutes – certainly lots of whooping and hugs! FM: What was your role in the project? DL: I was the project architect, working with director Paul Monaghan and associate director Ben Gibson,…

A LARGER FLOOR AREA MEANT SPACEWORKS was able to incorporate a café into the design of the Queen Street store, which is Spark’s only street-side store. “Developing the coffee offer was a secondary brief in the design process. The café needed to have its own identity but to merge, to a degree, with the rest of the store. We have taken the steel framing elements from the joinery used in the store as a framework to create the café zone. Darker, moodier timbers and blacks are used to work in with the Flight Coffee brand,” says designer Christy Ormand. The concrete and timber ceiling in the Queen Street store differs from ceilings in Spark stores in the malls, which all have plasterboard. After removing the low grid and tile ceiling,…

What I am eating At work – Being based in Ponsonby, there is too much choice. Most recently, Ponsonby Central is a great spot and I’m loving the Miss Moonshine’s set-up. At home – My Food Bag all the way: great food, easy menus and cooking with the kids is fun. At play – Baduzzi at North Wharf is a bustling, busy environment with great Italian food. Photography I’m enjoying My brother Luke Hayes is a great architectural photographer and I refer to his blog (lukehayes.com) for the latest and greatest shots. His views of Zaha Hadid’s recently completed building at St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford and Messner Mountain Museum in Italy are fantastic. What I am reading on the web I have a regular set of…

HELEN FRANCES Writer HELEN IS A LONG-TIME CONTRIBUTOR TO INTERIOR AND IN THIS ISSUE, SHE EXAMINES THE NEW ZEALAND POST HOUSE PROJECT, P.50 WHERE ARE YOU RIGHT NOW, AND WHAT DO YOU HAVE PLANNED FOR THE DAY? I work from my home in Whanganui. Today’s plan: work (writing careers information), walk along the river and coffee with a friend. WHAT WAS THE STANDOUT FEATURE FOR YOU IN THE NEW ZEALAND POST FIT-OUT? The overall amalgam of elements – the balance of the industrial look with natural timber and bright splashes of colour; the variety of spaces and comfortable furnishings (moving around and communication is encouraged) – also the great views of the harbour and plenty of daylight. TELL US ABOUT YOUR OWN WORKSPACE… WHAT’S THE STANDOUT FEATURE THERE? My workspace…

Interior (IR): Tell us a bit about your background. How did you get started in design? Joanna Merwood-Salisbury (JMS): I always wanted to be an architect. My grandfather was a contractor and my dad worked in the concrete industry. I was on building sites throughout my childhood, and I followed that by studying at Victoria University and graduating in 1992 just as the recession hit. So I thought, “I’ll go overseas, do some graduate study and then I’ll come back and be an architect.” I was sucked into the world of academia and never left. I did my graduate degree at McGill in Montreal and my PhD at Princeton so I’ve been following the path of an architectural historian ever since. IR: Has your academic work always been based on…

NEW ZEALAND ARCHITECTURE AWARDS The highly anticipated New Zealand Architecture Awards dinner took place on 30 October 2015 at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. The celebration recognised the year􀀈s most significant contributions (and contributors) to the local built environment and honoured enduring buildings. Here is a selection of the commended commercial projects. INTERIOR AWARDS 2016 JURY The race to find the country’s best interior spaces is soon to commence. These are the industry professionals in charge of selecting them. ( from left to right) Harry Rowntree is a principal at Unispace, where he specialises in workplace design and strategy for complex commercial clients. His experience includes residential architecture as well as a decade of working in Tokyo alongside several renowned local architects. During his previous role at Jasmax, Harry was…

I RECENTLY heard the story of a mother telling her young daughter that mobile phones had not been around when she was a child. The daughter replied incredulously: how did you google? Indeed, mobile phones are no longer just for calling people, and telecommunication companies are no longer dealing simply with calling plans and dollar-perminute deals. Telecom realised this and saw the need for a change from its more staid, traditional, corporate image to a youthful brand that comprehends the latest technology – hence the launch of Spark. Spaceworks was contracted to bring the new brand’s image into its stores. Christy Ormand, Head of Retail Design at Spaceworks, said the first step was to look at where the company was as Telecom and where it wanted to be as Spark.…

PRECINCT-MAKING is a task often fraught with peril. Will there be enough critical mass to buy into the new space, will the built environment be daring enough to elicit curiosity yet welcoming enough to build a community? There are many examples of such villages ending up like ghost towns, devoid of enough soul to entice even the most adventurous urbanite in for a tentative latte. Recently, however, there have been a few experiments in precinct-making that have proven to be, at least for the time being, very successful in revitalising bastions of cities worldwide (Auckland, London, Medellin… ). Canberra’s NewActon precinct – latest winner of the Australian Institute of Architects’ award for urban design – is one such enclave. For the past nine years, the central, 2.5-hectare portion of the…

FOR THE BEST PART OF 10 YEARS, I’VE BEEN running a couple of teams. One, of course, is a traditional design team but another team has been looking at placing key questions about the workplace in front of clients. Questions like: What does your organisation look like in three years’ time? What’s driving your organisation? What are the future direction, strategies and priorities you are coming up against? We referred to that as a workplace strategy team, and it came about because some of the challenges clients were asking us to look at and help them solve were not architectural in nature. If I look at the members of the education team within Jasmax, which is focused fundamentally on pre-tertiary, they are probably now some of the standout leaders in…

BOOK Post-petroleum Design BY GEORGE ELVIN George Elvin opens Post-petroleum Design with a brief summary of the industrialised world’s history with petroleum and petroleum-based products. It’s nothing we haven’t heard before but it bears repeating that, in terms of co-dependence, addiction and enabling, this is one seriously toxic, long-term relationship. There’s hope, though. Vernacular craft traditions, industrial-scale production, even the latest advances in nanotechnology, all hold the potential to lead us beyond our dependence on non-renewable resources; this is the underlying message of Post-petroleum Design. Elvin offers large– and small–scale examples of products, strategies and innovative technology that a growing global community of designers and thinkers is using to move to a more conscious methodology of design and living. It’s no surprise that packaging, plastics and disposables are squarely in…