The 2024 New Zealand Institute of Architects Architecture Awards were announced in late November. Here, we explore the winners in the housing categories — a quartet of diverse and fresh approaches to varying concepts of ‘house’ — and look at the recipient of the Sir Ian Athfield Award for Housing.
Wanaka S.K.I. House
Roberts Gray Architects
The private house has become a contentious category in architecture as we grapple with issues of sustainability, density, and housing security. In response, Roberts Gray has approached this building type with propositions that extend architectural thinking. There is evident speculation about how stubborn vernaculars might be challenged and a suggestion of fresh approaches to materiality, massing, privacy, and transparency and balance of built form to landscape.
This meticulously detailed and experientially beautiful house reveals impressive technical ability and a finely wrought aesthetic judgement. Importantly, it also demonstrates architectural thinking in this young practice that could lead to a better urbanism.
Images: Sam Hartnett
Ravenscar House
Patterson Associates
A project rising from destruction, Ravenscar is the generous gifting by Jim and Susan Wakefield of their art and artefact collection to the people of Ōtautahi Christchurch. Following the loss of their home to the earthquakes, the couple decided not to rebuild on the site, but to commission a new house/museum in the central city. Granite from their former home, stone donated from the neighbouring Arts Centre, and rubble from other cherished buildings have been incorporated into the precast panels of this building.
Ravenscar is a beautifully detailed assembly of four pavilions around a central impluvium. As a piece of architecture, it bridges many readings — is it a house or is it a landscape? With a sense of intrigue in its fortified containment, internal worlds, and glazed links open to the surrounding garden, Ravenscar is a new take on the lineage of English influences in the city’s cultural precinct.
Images: Sam Hartnett
Gonville Pool House
Patchwork Architecture
A different take on the adaptive reuse of a public building, a new whare is integrated into the well-loved and architecturally cheerful Gonville Pool. This approach maintains the original characterful street presence, while providing a well-planned, considerately sited new house that artfully uses the defunct pool to bring a productive garden into the centre of the programme. An artist’s residency retrofit into the changing rooms adds to the local community’s artistic stripe. The former public pool’s infrastructure is visibly integrated into the landscaping of this fun and lively project.
Images: Simon Wilson
Ridge House
Keshaw McArthur
Restrained and elegant, this clever response makes the best of a tight inner-city site.The gradual stepping of levels to maximise the entire site as living areas, the gradual reveal of views to Maungawhau (Mount Eden), and the episodic openings to the sides give this very controlled linear addition the feeling of breathing in and out. The sculptural use of roof lights and a crisp material palette create a calm oasis for family life.
Images: David Straight
Sir Ian Athfield Award for Housing
Hills Residences
Edwards White Architects
Ath was a thinker, maker, agitator, and larger-than-life figure whose legacy remains not just in his eponymous practice but throughout Aotearoa New Zealand, the Pacific, Australia, and beyond.
Hills Residences is an example of pushing boundaries here and beyond our borders — a famously Athfieldian quality. This project demonstrates how buildings otherwise slated for demolition can be successfully reused. It shows that multi-residential projects can cater for diverse users and tastes, and succeed as a piece of city-making through densification, connecting, stitching, and imagining beyond the site. Perhaps most importantly, it is part of a wider project by the architects to energise Kirikiriroa Hamilton through connection to its river.
Images: Simon Wilson
