Media release March 14, 2006
Auckland s artwork plan and New Plymouth foreshore award winning projects helping shape the face of NZ
Auckland s artwork plan and New Plymouth foreshore Pride of Place Award winning landscape architecture projects were
helping shape the face of New Zealand, a leading expert said today.
The plan to establish major artworks in downtown Auckland and the development of New Plymouth s foreshore and promenade
clinched the supreme trophies at the New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects (NZILA) awards in Wellington last
night.
NZILA president Renee Lambert said today the biennial Pride of Place Awards highlighted the importance of establishing
and honouring a national design direction that ensured the creation of places with a distinctive NZ landscape character.
``The emergence of a strong sense of place is due to a better understanding of ourselves as a nation and, as a
profession, having the confidence and ability to express that understanding.
Contemporary landscape architecture in New Zealand has over the last decades slowly established a voice that is now
clearly recognising our uniqueness in the world.
``We have reinforced the need to undertake collaboration within our projects and integrate other professional knowledge.
We have a better understanding of our social history and how that influences strongly our design responses.
``We have begun to respect local knowledge and its contribution to our work. Above all, we have asserted a pride in our
profession, as exhibited through the awards, that acknowledges our own local constraints and the intimate involvement
we, as landscape architects have within the landscape and all its elements .
The supreme awards are not presented every year because of a high standard set, but one of the judges Simon Smale said
the Auckland artworks plan and Taranaki foreshore projects merited honours this year.
Twenty six winners were announced at the gala awards dinner at Te Papa in Wellington last night.
The supreme landscape architecture winners were Richard Reid, for the Auckland City artwork plan, and the Isthmus Group,
Richard Bain and the New Plymouth District Council for the New Plymouth foreshore project.
Landscape architecture is a difficult profession to describe as it ranges in scale from regional planning down to the
private back yard, with purposes that range from the individual client to community groups and city residents.
The awards demonstrate variety in the New Zealand profession with entries in categories from residential, urban,
industrial and park design to planning documents and cutting edge research papers.
Winning projects this year came from a range of regions including Auckland, Queenstown, Christchurch, Wellington, New
Plymouth, Otago, Wanganui, Porirua, Northland, Blenheim, Cambridge and the Waikato.
The major winners last night will be submitted to the International Federation of Landscape Architects Awards, which
recognises excellence in landscape architecture from IFLA member countries.
ENDS
Award winners:
Isthmus Group in association with Richard Bain Landscape Architect and New Plymouth District Council
New Plymouth Foreshore Stages 3 And 4: Woolcombe Terrace And Puke Ariki Landing
GEORGE MALCOLM SUPREME AWARD and GOLD in Urban Design
The project s primary objective was to connect the CBD with the sea. Its success in achieving that objective has
exceeded all expectations. At all times of the day, and in all weathers, the walkway is alive with promenaders -
walkers, joggers, cyclists, skaters, people walking dogs. New Plymouth now is a city that defines itself very much by
its association with its coast. The walkway features in postcards of New Plymouth, and residents are inordinately proud
of their seaside city.
The concept was always sound, but its remarkable success is due in large part to design excellence in its realization.
The project has established a New Plymouth design vernacular that is now finding its way into the design of adjacent
buildings and spaces. It has literally and figuratively turned a provincial city around, demonstrating the power of good
design to connect people and place.
Richard Reid Architect & Landscape Architect
AucklandCity CBD Public Artwork Development Plan
CHARLIE CHALLENGER SUPREME AWARD and GOLD in Landscape Research
This is a comprehensive and accessible policy document which confronts issues such as biculturalism. It is a timely,
relevant and sophisticated handling of the topic, with careful and rigorous research, and accessible language. This work
is an important contribution to the future of Auckland and its location in the Pacific. The work expands the idea of art
in public space.
Rod Barnett
LumleyTowerPlaza - Auckland
Landscape Design - Commercial/Industrial/Institutional - GOLD
Despite the site s presenting the severe constraints that are associated with roof gardens, the brief was responded to
with an elegant, beautifully-proportioned and -detailed space of massive boulders, cycads and water that is deceptive in
its apparent simplicity. With the arrangement of elements informed by an ordering system based on the Japanese tatami
mat, the garden achieves a seamless indoor-outdoor transition, so that it is experienced from within the building also
as part of the minimalist foyer space. A brilliant balance is struck in achieving just the right amount of patterning in
the detail, using an integrated palette of subtle colours. It is very hard to do a ZenGarden well, particularly to
complement the scale of corporate architecture, but this project achieves it with confidence and style.
Isthmus Group in association with Tina Dyer
Barry Curtis Park Regional Playground
Visionary Landscapes - GOLD
Isthmus Group s plan for Barry Curtis Park takes an obvious theme for an Auckland site volcanism and develops it in a
highly imaginative way to transform a largely featureless site into an intensive landscape offering a multiplicity of
play and educational experiences. Integrated within a framework of wilderness parkland vegetation, a series of volcanic
features is detailed -The Plug, Hot Spot, Net, Flow Cone, Steam Chamber and Tuff Ring, Tremor Stack, Wilderness Dome and
Fracture Cone. Each feature is designed and detailed to cater for its own distinct package of active or passive
recreational and educational experiences, with the overall park complex deriving its unique Auckland identity from the
volcano theme. It is expected that the same design-led approach to detailing of the individual spaces and features that
is evident in the masterplan will see Barry Curtis Park develop in time as an enduring legacy of public open space for
the new millennium.
Urban Team, Ministry for the Environment
Urban Design Protocol Programme 2005
Landscape Planning - GOLD
The Urban Design Protocol is a highly significant initiative. Four publications were included in this entry. They are
all very readable documents, clear and strong on advocacy and memorability of the 7 C s of good urban design. These
documents are very timely providing strong leadership to ensure something does happen and continues to happen, in this
sense, an excellent project.
Morgan Pollard & Associates Queenstown Ltd
KelvinHeightsGarden
Landscape Design - Residential - GOLD
Success with a scheme that is so strongly based in mass-planting obviously requires excellent plant establishment and
growth. Ralph Kruger achieved this firstly through meticulous attention to site preparation, secondly through a sound
knowledge of local plants and conditions, and thirdly through a rigorous early maintenance regime. 18 months after
establishment the house is superbly integrated with its mountain setting, and local admiration for the garden is seeing
its style being replicated in the surrounding neighbourhood.
Isthmus Group
Manukau Square
Landscape Design/Urban Design - GOLD
There is a sureness and lightness of design touch that sets this project apart. The design team s objective of creating
a space that is civic in nature, yet sufficiently informal to invite the casual, everyday use that will occupy it for
most of the time, appears to have been met effortlessly. This project achieves design excellence that lifts it into the
realm of the extra-ordinary by sophistication in design thinking that takes the notion of Aotearoan identity and
vernacular to a new level. Navigation, weaving, rafts, drums, fishing, mats, plants and birds are all represented.
Almost none of the symbolism is overt, however, so that the experience of the space as Aotearoan/South Pacific works
largely at a subliminal level. A finely-matched suite of construction detailing is complemented by a subtle
palette of warm volcanic colours, and a carefully-chosen plant menu that reinforces weaving references with its use of
mass-planted harakeke.
John Clemens
Critique of the Northwest Arch
Landscape Research GOLD
This is a very relevant critique concerning suburban Christchurch sculpture at or near the entry of a subdivision. It is
a work that is lyrically written, original, tactful and direct. This work is a useful contribution to critique in NZ.
Skilled articulation of the principles of critique and a light-hearted and delightful but rigorous work.
Shelley Egoz -
It isn t a village anymore
Landscape Research SILVER
This is an example of research contributing to the understanding of landscape issues. This work contributes to more
informed choices and decisions in the future. It is a very accessible work while maintaining rigour and demonstrates
sensitivity to the cultural, historical, physical and natural context. It is a work which is about community values and
this is integral to its findings.
Chow:Hill - Bridgit Diprose, Dave Little
Manukau City Council 2004 Ellerslie Flower Show Relocatable exhibit "Marble Play"
Landscape Design - Rural/Park/Recreational - SILVER
This tiny park is a delightfully self-contained space that artfully integrates children s play and education within the
context of a very tight and coherent circular marble design. Despite a tight budget, the design works at all levels. As
a land art piece set on a slightly raised mound in the middle of a lawn area it presents an intriguing aesthetic swirls
of massed groundcover and winding timber paths reflect the patterning of one of the traditional types of marble, with
the nicely proportioned vertical elements of interpretation panel mountings, three cabbage trees, and several symbolic
and playful large steel marble spheres completing the third dimension and drawing the eye.
EdawJasmax
VodafonePlaza
Landscape Design/Urban Design - SILVER
The plaza is designed on a formal grid that is slightly offset from the alignment of the enclosing buildings, with an
organic oval volcano form dropped onto the grid acting as a counterpoint to the formality of the space overall, and
creating an inviting people space within the square. The project achieves a smart downtown urban character that
integrates corporate entry statement with creation of inviting human-scale spaces for workers and customers. There is a
nice counterpoint of formal and informal. A limited and well-integrated package of paving and structure details is
skillfully used, all in corporate grey except for several well-placed highlights in Vodafone red . The predominantly
grey hard landscape provides a good foil for a well-chosen palette of native plant species that has superb ttoki
specimens as its key signature.
Boffa Miskell Ltd
St John'sCollegeCemetery Area - Auckland
Landscape Design - Commercial/Industrial/Institutional - SILVER
The best reference for the skill with which this brief has been met is probably to say that it is one of those sites
where it is not immediately obvious that a landscape professional has been involved. Here the new structures of gate
house and niche wall, and the bollards defining the boundary of the burial area, have been designed and constructed with
such absolute consistency with the proportion and detail of those of the historic chapel that they look as though they
have always been there. A great detail of respectful thinking and attention has been accorded to the development of this
site, and it shows in the result.
Isthmus Group
Matakana Farmers Market
Landscape Design - Commercial/Industrial/Institutional - SILVER
A tight corner site in MatakanaVillage with significant contour from road edge to river, and adversely affected by
former industrial use, has been skillfully redeveloped as a farmers market. Competent site design is complemented by a
palette of hard and soft landscape materials, and a construction details package, that pay homage to the site s
industrial history, to the rural character of its location, and to its new use as an outlet for produce from the
surrounding countryside. The whole site has a folksy feel that brings it to vibrant life on Saturday mornings when
locals converge to meet as much as to buy, and increasing numbers of city dwellers make the trip up from Auckland for
the farmers market experience that has quite suddenly become remarkably popular up and down the country. Little over a
year old, the Matakana Farmers Market is already making a major contribution to revitalization of the district and
community.
Wraight & Associates Ltd
SpyValley Wines
Landscape Design - Commercial/Industrial/Institutional - SILVER
A contemporary design approach that acknowledges the site s rural location, and use of a limited palette of hard and
soft landscape materials, have created a simple but striking entry statement to Spy valley Winery s tasting room and
sales area. The project takes an imaginative approach with the pond and drainage lines, uses materials competently in a
highly appropriate landscape response, and has a distinctly contemporary feel and vitality well matched to the growing
status of the local wine industry.
Boffa Miskell Ltd
BushCity - Te Papa
Landscape Design - Commercial/Industrial/Institutional - SILVER
The successful establishment of a bush ecosystem that provides visitors with a remarkably authentic experience of New
Zealand native forest on a 32-metre-wide site of just 4500 square metres is a triumph of meticulous planning and design.
Careful replication of seven different substrates to create a range of habitats, manipulation of levels and vertical
separation to exaggerate scale and density of vegetation, skilled construction of artificial rock outcrops, and
sheltering of establishing vegetation with a large wind mesh canopy in early years, are just some of the measures that
were implemented to ensure that the sceptics were confounded.
Isthmus Group
Sylvia Park
Visionary Landscapes - SILVER
SeartPark is the space located beneath the expressway, and it is clear from the submission that the design for this
space is a more metaphorical expression of volcanic and bush origins. The designers have explored options using a
variety of forms and patterns to articulate the idea of ancient portage paths, streams, volcanic cones and the forest
However some of these themes have been discarded and the final is apparently based on the forest theme with an
underlying volcanic influence. The result has lively vertical expression created by multi-coloured poles of different
sizes (the whimsical forest) located in an abstract pattern throughout. Discarding the movement lines through the site
and introducing the strong static circular patterns (Volcanic cones ) on the ground floor plane reduces the liveliness
and movement of the space.
Boffa Miskell Ltd
Porirua Suburban Character Study
Landscape Planning - SILVER
The brief and process for this study is clear, relevant and timely, it sets out recommendations very clearly and
outlines how they should be implemented. This is a well structured study; rigorous and professional.
DJ Scott Associates
Mangawhai Structure Plan
Landscape Planning - SILVER
This structure plan details a quality approach to an important NZ issue and looks at longer term planning through
catchment management approaches. The plan is beautifully presented and a lot of emphasis has been placed a on the
integrated team approach and identification of the team and how they worked together; this has set a benchmark that
should be adopted by others undertaking these sorts of projects.
Mansergh Graham Landscape Architects Ltd
Tuwharetoa Street Upgrade
Landscape Design/Urban Design - BRONZE
Mansergh Graham s Tuwharetoa Street upgrade for Taupo District Council has transformed a run-down, problem area of town
into a smart urban precinct that expresses strong local character. Sense of place is emphasized in the ground plane by
pumice-coloured pavers, with blue glass chips in the pavers and sinuous blue bands along the pavement paying homage to
the lake that is the town s key asset. Plinths of local stone built around light, cycle stand and shelter bases reveal
the local geology. Cleverly-designed street lighting evokes images of leaping trout at night, and large shelters and
even seating details incorporate arcs and angles that lift the streetscape beyond the merely pedestrian.
Mansergh Graham Landscape Architects Ltd
Cambridge Civic Renewal
Landscape Design/Urban Design - BRONZE
Redevelopment of the space between the neoclassical CambridgeTown Hall and its facing War Memorial was the first stage
of a wider Cambridge Civic Renewal project. Mansergh Graham s redesign establishes a formal plaza in honed concrete,
neoclassically patterned to address the refurbished Town Hall building. The patterning centres the space, which extends
through to encompass the War Memorial. The plaza, the Town Hall and the memorial are all anchored and provide some low
enclosure by formal planting beds. Paths around the hall itself are detailed in similar style to the plaza. The plaza is
now several years old, and is standing up well to intensive use that includes heavy vehicles, including the occasional
tank!
Wraight & Associates Ltd
Whitireia Polytechnic: Library Learning Centre
Landscape Design - Commercial/Industrial/Institutional - BRONZE
The masterplan for Whitireia reverses the previous landscaping approach on the site using plants to screen nondescript
buildings in different styles by re-exposing the buildings and instead developing strong axes and re-establishing a sort
of wetland metaphor on the site. Buildings and associated boardwalk accessways now sit alongside sunken plantings of
massed wetland species that echo site history. A pond, around a new Library Learning Centre collects roof and parking
area runoff before discharging into a sunken wetland of indigenous native planting that treats stormwater before
discharging into the harbour.
LA4 Landscape Architects Ltd
Kohimarama Esplanade Reserve Redevelopment
Landscape Design - Commercial/Industrial/Institutional - BRONZE
A robust functional design approach to addressing protection and use issues along the beachfront is lifted into the
realm of seriously good design by some nice touches in the detail design such as seats that look slightly wind-blown in
response to the prevailing onshore breeze and by an approach strongly informed by sustainable principles such use of
sustainably grown Solomon Islands Vitex hardwood for the fine boardwalk, low-energy LED site lighting, and easy-care
massed planting of hardy native coastal groundcover species.
project scores highly assessed against criteria of responsiveness to site character and challenges, functionality, and
sustainability.
Marion Read
The Construction of Landcape: A case study of the OtagoPeninsula, Aotearoa, New Zealand
Lanscape Research - BRONZE
This thesis is interesting, thorough and provocative. Marion takes the stance of landscape as social construct, to be
understood by application of ethnography and discourse analysis. Having identified points of conflict in the discourses
identified in her selected study area, OtagoPeninsula, she then makes recommendations for the landscape profession,
particularly for landscape assessment and the role of the landscape architect. This is a thesis which should be made
available to all members of the profession and which highlights the benefit of research in the progression of new ideas
within the profession.
Wendy Hoddinott
Passing Time: A Phenomenological approach to heritage design
Landscape Research BRONZE
Excellent research essay taking the difficult topic of heritage design and interpretation of design to create an
inspirational outcome easily read and understood. It recognises contemporary work as well as the views of New Zealand
landscape architects. It poses an experiential design intervention as the research outcome. The site in Akaroa instead
of buying into a native vs exotic approach or community response approach is undertaken as an intervention for the
research.
Shannon Davis
Wings of Peace
Landscape Research - MERIT
This is a well researched, evocative and effectively communicated article about the fire-fighters reserve in
Christchurch. The article considers the significance of what is a memorial and what it is memorialising - globalisation
or peace? The work recognised the designers? purpose and was well illustrated.
Wendy Hoddinott
Critique of the Christchurch Cathedral Collumbarium
Landscape Research - MERIT
A very readable critique explaining why the columbarium was built, the design concepts, materials selection and a
critique of the design is an example of well illustrated, sympathetic and informative writing.
Student Awards
Nathan Young
HOMELAND AND SEA
GOLD.
This project explores the notion of extending the landscape beyond the edge and under the sea. The site is the
Wellington waterfront and the designer explores the physical and natural, historical and cultural past of the edge,
concluding that the edge between the land and the sea is a temporal and ephemeral space, a place of change.
The project process is clearly set out, logically worked through, beautifully illustrated and is original and
innovative.
Chris Punt
TAHUNANUI ECOLOGICAL PARK
GOLD
This foreshore site is in need of a makeover. The design objective is to redevelop it as an integrated park
demonstrating the range of ecological systems that characterises the Nelson Region. The result is a matrix of
environments wedged between the sea and the urban area and dissected by water, connecting paths and a road, and anchored
by a commercial area to attract the visitor. Superb graphics and illustration.
Lynette Wilson
LANDSCAPES OF INCARCERATION.
SILVER
This project appears to be extensively researched and it responds sympathetically to both the cultural and physical
constraints of the site - Wanganui prison. Client needs - prisoners, guards and society - are combined with cues from
the surrounding landscape to reveal a creative and innovative landscape intervention. This could form the basis for
redevelopment of the entire prison landscape. Well
Charlotte Grant
SHIRLEY RENEWAL
SILVER
The designer has a good grasp of the multicultural nature of this lower socio-economic area and the problems inherent in
the neighbourhood. Her solution is wide-ranging, and includes opening the park to the street, focusing neighbourhood
activity in a new community centre in the centre of it, providing facilities which can be readily used by the community
such as outdoor BBQ and hangi areas along with more traditional recreation areas, thus building physical and
metaphorical bridges back into the neighbourhood.
Wendy Hoddinott
PASSING TIME AT TE WAIHORA/LAKE ELLESMERE.
SILVER
This is a project that evokes imagery of both the physical and the cultural past of the place by using the simple device
of a landscape intervention - albeit on a fairly
dramatic scale - to symbolize what might have gone before. Water reclaims the land, but the marks of human influence are
retained. Displays a mastery of design, with beautiful graphics and illustrations.
Mark Teesdale
MAUNGATAUTARI ECOLOGICAL RESERVE
SILVER
This project establishes an entry experience to the ?mainland island? reserve. The entire entry landscape is a metaphor
for ecological history. This design presents an intriguing solution to the problems of creating a new landscape in an
old one, particularly when the old landscape has multiple layers of meaning and a strong cultural past. The masterplan
clearly illustrates the connections between the landscapes and the detailed design for the visitor facility is simple
but effective and accompanied by good illustrations.
ENDS