Architecture and Planning

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Tommy Honey is a director, designer, educational manager, architectural critic, cultural commentator and reluctant architect. He received his Bachelor of Architecture from The University of Auckland in 1986. He is currently Dean of Whitecliffe College of Arts & Design and the resident urbanist on Radio New Zealand’s Nine-to-Noon programme. Honey spoke about how the nation’s obsession with number 8 wire as the symbol of our ‘ingenuity’ is a lowest common denominator approach to design, making us the cultural cellar dweller of the Western world. (Download MP3, 32 MB, 33'22") License:

Biddy Livesey has a Masters of Science in Urban Management and Development and works as a policy analyst at Auckland Council. But she is better known as one half of performance art duo Raised By Wolves, with Amy Howden-Chapman. She uses texts, images and movement to explore social and economic patterns in urban space. Livesey’s interests include land ownership and development, markets and speculation, and urban dynamics. Her research on urban growth strategies and housing development on communally-owned Māori land has been published by the New Zealand Centre for Sustainable Cities. (Download MP3, 43.2 MB, 45'0") License:

Philip Clarke is the director of Objectspace, a small Auckland public gallery dedicated to the fields of craft and design, that opened in 2004. Objectspace is dedicated to provoking new assessments about works and practices in these fields though its exhibition and publication programmes. Philip has worked in the cultural sector for 30 years, and prior to Objectspace, worked at Creative New Zealand, ARTWORK and the Crafts Council of New Zealand. (Download MP3, 32 MB, 33'18") License:

Since 2003 architect Susanne Hofmann has led the Baupiloten, a joint venture between her architectural firm and the Technical University of Berlin. The Baupiloten operates as a studio in which projects from her office are worked on collaboratively by architects, engineers and students. (Download MP4, 135 MB, 49' 47";) License:

Chris Barton is a feature writer for the New Zealand Herald and also trained as an architect at the University of Auckland School of Architecture. His talk outlined an investigation into the new Auckland Art Gallery revealing a deceptive structure, a bitter court battle, funding shortfalls and heritage concerns. (Download MP3, 39.2 MB, 40'47") License:

Kim Sinclair graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture (Honours) from The University of Auckland and after a period designing and building a couple of very interesting houses, worked in New Zealand’s re-emergent film industry of the 1980s. He is now a designer working with Stephen Spielberg, Peter Jackson and James Cameron on films like Tintin and Avatar. (Download MP3, 204 MB, 1 hour 08';) License:

Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has secured a place among the global architecture elite. His key early projects were a series of innovative houses, many employing unusual structural solutions such as the use of furniture as load-bearing structure, but he came to international prominence with his “paper tube” projects in which cardboard tubes are used as the primary structural system. (Download MP3, 65.4MB, 1 hour 8'7") License:

Phase change materials (PCMs), which melt and solidify at a specified temperature range, can be employed effectively to store energy as a latent heat of melting. They can be used to increase thermal mass of buildings by mixing them with building materials such as gypsum or concrete. In this presentation Mohammed M. Farid, Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Auckland, presents results obtained from extensive simulations and experimental measurements conducted during the last 6 years, using office size timber constructions with gypsum board impregnated with a PCM. (Download MP3, 49.8MB, 51'53") License:

Prefabrication offers many advantages including improved speed of construction, higher quality workmanship and reduced wastage of materials. Gary Caulfield, an innovative thinker with more than 20 years experience in the construction sector, presents two case studies that illustrate the prefabrication process and team involvement from early design stages through to completion. (Download MP3, 45.9MB, 47'50") License:

Min Hall has been practising architecture in the Nelson region for three decades. Her work has received a number of awards, and has appeared in national magazines. Earth, strawbale and other ‘alternative’ or ‘natural’ building materials are predominantly the domain of owner-builders and ‘do-it-yourselfers’; few architects include them in their palette. As a result, there is little information about their performance and potential. By investigating their history, their properties, current practice, and new developments, the role that these materials can have in providing a self sufficient and energy lean housing stock can be better understood. (Download MP3, 50.6MB, 55'15") License:

Auckland's 1.3 million residents are projected to grow to 1.8 million people by 2026 and, with a young and ethnically diverse population structure, the city has the highest proportion of the New Zealand population living in crowded conditions. In this presentation, Professor Jenny Dixon discusses the challenges of housing affordability, a decreasing home ownership rate, the growth of the intermediate housing market and increasing pressures in the private rental market, as well as diminishing quality of life for families living in sub-standard housing. (Download MP3, 11.9MB, 12'58") License:

Kobus Mentz is a director of Urbanism Plus in Auckland. Regarded as one of Australasia’s leading sustainability-based urban designers, he has contributed significantly to advancing urban development practices in the region through his projects, publications, professional training, regeneration strategies and some of the first spatially-based sub-regional plans. (Download MP3, 204 MB, 1 hour 15'40") License:

Rachel de Lambert is a landscape architect and urban designer, and is Director of Design at environmental planning and design consultancy, Boffa Miskell. With degrees in Landscape Architecture and Horticultural Science from Lincoln College, Rachel has a wide range of project experience including landscape design projects, urban design, environmental planning and landscape assessment. (Download MP3, 136 MB, 55'07") License:

Ian Athfield has been described as “a huge personality in New Zealand architecture.” Established in 1968, Athfield Architects began producing experimental and often provocative residential projects, including landmark projects in the history of New Zealand housing such as the Buck and Custance Houses, and the ongoing project for Ath’s own house and studio overlooking Wellington Harbor. (Download MP3, 131.9 MB, 52'06") License:

Cameron Sinclair trained as an architect at the University of Westminster and at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. In 1999 Sinclair and Kate Stohr founded Architecture for Humanity as a charitable organisation that seeks architectural solutions for humanitarian crises and provides design services to communities in need. Over the past decade the organisation has worked in 26 countries on projects ranging from school, health clinics, affordable housing and long term sustainable reconstruction. (Download MP4, 145MB, 1 hour 09'31") License:

Auckland Central Candidates Jacinda Ardern, Denise Roche and Nikki Kaye debated the future of Auckland’s built form and set out how their parties would improve the quality of Auckland’s built environment. (Download MP3, 62.6 MB, 1 hour 8'24") License:

Mal Williams, Gerry Gillespie, Max Purnell. Zero Waste champions have been connecting the sustainability agenda with wasted resources for decades. But lots of people are still missing the links between resource conservation and climate change. Our recycling and resource recovery systems deliver fewer benefits than we imagine because we are trying to use technical solutions to solve social problems. (Download MP3, 60.6MB, 1 hour 6'14") License:

Jeffrey Inaba is the founder of INABA, a consultancy firm based in Los Angeles. INABA specialises in transforming cultural research into urban design and architecture. The firm’s design approach stems from an extensive background in analysis and planning. Jeffrey Inaba is also the Director of C-Lab, a think tank at Columbia University‘s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, which studies urbanism and architecture and makes policy recommendations.

A commitment to insight, creative thinking and careful execution underscores the firm’s approach to architecture projects. Recent work includes urban design and housing projects in Europe, Asia, and the US, and commissions for the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum, Walker Art Center, Storefront for Art and Architecture, X-Initiative, and Enel Contemporanea. (Download MP3, 72.6 MB, 1 hour 19'18") License:

Patrick Reynold’s photography does not simply record architecture; it extends it. His work is a parallel and independent production that fuels and critiques contemporary architecture. His images appear in local and international journals and in a number of recent books on New Zealand architecture. (Download MP3, 62.0 MB, 1 hour 7'46") License:

Go Hasegawa, a young architect based in Tokyo, is establishing himself as an exciting new member of one of the great ‘schools’ in Japanese architecture. He completed a Masters degree at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT) under the tutelage of Atelier Bow-Wow partner, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto. He now lectures at TIT, where he forms part of the lineage of some of Japan’s most important designers, educators and thinkers about residential architecture; a lineage that can be traced from Hasegawa through Tsukamoto to the influential 1980s architect Kazunari Sakamoto and 1970s radical Kazuo Shinohara and back to modernist innovator Kiyoshi Seike. In this lecture, he discusses the possibility of the extension of body sense through architectural language demonstrated with various built projects.

Download this video (131.15MB MOV).

Filipe Tohi was born in Tonga and immigrated to New Zealand in 1978 with the goal of becoming an artist. In the early 1980s he taught in the Taranaki, leaving to become a full time artist in 1990. His practice follows two streams. One is based in the traditional Tongan practice of lalava or sennit lashing. These lashings were both functional and decorative, and before the arrival of metal were used in a variety of settings, including houses, tools, and canoes. Filipe‘s lalava were included at the Fale Pasifika at The University of Auckland. The second aspect of his practice is more contemporary and includes work in a wide variety of media: painting on canvas, carving in wood and stone, and designing abstract sculptural patterns in metal and other media. These patterns are based on lalava, and their application in other media moves traditional forms to a contemporary setting. (Download MP3, 43.7 MB, 47' 40") License:

In March 2011 Auckland mayor Len Brown led what New Zealand Herald columnist Fran O'Sullivan called "the great and the good" in a day-long workshop addressing the Auckland Spatial Plan. Dr Stephen Knight-Lenihan, a lecturer at the School of Architecture and Planning at The University of Auckland comments on the lack of discussion around global conditions that will effect Auckland's future, and suggests that a regional South Pacific approach to issues of sustainability and the future of New Zealand could be a worthwhile addition to this important conversation. (Download MP3, 11.8 MB, 12' 52") License: