School buildings win architecture awards

Jubilee sports centre at St Kentigern School.

From a bilingual school building to a ‘buried’ sports pavilion, striking new education buildings have carried off honours in the 2009 Auckland and Nelson Marlborough Architecture Awards.

The awards programme is organised by the NZ Institute of Architects and supported by Resene.

The 2009 Auckland Architecture Awards included several educational buildings in the public architecture category.

The Te Whanau o Tupuranga bilingual school in Manukau City by Jasmax Limited was praised as a ‘thoughtful expansion’ cleverly integrating new architecture into an existing building fabric.

The school was formerly the Maori bilingual unit of Clover Park Middle School but opened as a year 7-13 school in its own right in 2006.

Jurors praised the way Maori as tangata whenua of the school is reflected through its spatial hierarchy, selection of materials and sophisticated use of traditional colour.

The bulk of the Saint Kentigern School – Jubilee Sports Centre by Architectus, is buried in a steep bank providing a vital link from the main school grounds to a lower sports field. The jury hailed it as “a highly successful response to a challenging site”.

 The independent school in Manukau City, for boys aged 1-8, celebrated its 50th jubilee this year – with Olympian and former pupil Hamish Carter among those celebrating the opening of the centre.

The AUT Lecture Theatre and Conference Centre by RTA Studio was acclaimed for the way “the strong sculptural forms of the theatre define the edge of the campus, serve to emphasise the through-site link to transport nodes and create a square to provide public outdoor space”.

Winners of the 2009 Nelson Marlborough Architecture Awards included the new teaching block for the NMIT School of Tourism, Hospitality and Wellbeing in Nelson, by Jerram Tocker Barron Architects.

The multi-purpose building, which marks the entry to the NMIT’s Nelson campus, was a winner in the public architecture category.

Conceived as part of the master plan for the campus, it was described by the jury as “visually compelling”.

Judging panel convenor Gary Hopkinson said: “It’s a wonderful building, a real class act and great attention has been paid to how it interacts with the street.”

Glass curtain windows, which allow the public to see inside to areas such as the school of hairdressing, were hailed as “admirable in an institutional building”.

Colour details include careful choice of shades to enhance the individual quality of different spaces. Each of the columns in the commercial kitchen is even painted a slightly different hue.

The citation read “Appropriately for a teaching facility, it is a building that makes you think about colour. At night the colourful interior shares its interests and humour with the street.”

As well as visiting all short listed properties, the judges met with the architects and clients. The buildings were judged against a series of key criteria including their contribution to the advancement of architecture as a discipline and enhancement of the human spirit.