Wellington's ASB Sports Centre wins New Zealand Architecture Award

Recognised by the Awards jury for providing "an elegant and imaginative solution to the challenges of a tough building type and a bracing Wellington site", the ASB Sports Centre has received a New Zealand Architecture Award.

The design, by Tennent+Brown Architects & SKM Architects in association, was one of 19 architectural projects acknowledged in this year's New Zealand Architecture Awards.

Projects promoting sustainable values and enhancing the civic realm also featured in the New Zealand Architecture Awards. Patterson Architects' 6-Green Star Geyser building in Parnell, Auckland, received Awards in both the commercial and sustainable categories, and Athfield Architects' Te Hononga-Christchurch Civic Building, a striking, 6-Green Star re-working of a sound but formerly undistinguished building, was also twice-awarded, in the public architecture and sustainable categories.

In Wellington, the dramatic, angled glass façade of Telecom Central, designed by architecture+, serves to give a strong urban presence to a building that unifies two existing structures and an old carpark into a 35,000 metre2 office tower.

Sustainability, in both the environmental and social sense of the term, was the impulse behind the establishment of Re:START, the morale-boosting container retail precinct in central Christchurch designed by The Buchan Group, and also informed the design, by Architectus, of the Karanga Plaza and Kiosk in Auckland's Wynyard Quarter.

Architectus won a second award for the practice's design of St Cuthbert's College Performing Arts Centre in Auckland, a building praised by the Awards jury for attending to both its functional requirements and its relationship with its residential neighbours.

One of the goals of the New Zealand Architecture Awards programme is to acknowledge buildings that have stood up well to the test of time. This year the jury gave an Enduring Architecture Award to the School of Music at the University of Auckland, which was designed in the early 1980s by Hill Manning Mitchell.

The New Zealand Architecture Awards is a programme of the New Zealand Institute of Architects, supported by Resene.

Images show the ASB Sports Centre.

26th August 2011 - FUTSAL ON SHOW AS WELLINGTON’S INDOOR STADIUM OPENS