An unseemly hatred for one building
Such decisions are normally made by local councils. Heritage listing (or de-listing) a building requires evaluation of heritage significance, while consent to demolish a listed building also assesses other factors. In contrast, using a government bill departs from the convention that heritage legislation provides consistent rules against which specific cases are tested.
But no one is challenging this. Instead, it seems that hatred for the building is overriding values that people would normally cherish.
Gordon Wilson Flats are located on a hillside overlooking the capital city. This 10-storey, 64m-wide building is heritage architecture that is hard to miss.
It is the only remaining post-war, high-rise, state-housing block in New Zealand and is arguably the country's first brutalist building. Its design is indebted to the historic relationship between the Ministry of Works and the London County Council. Its maisonette plan adapts the 1959 Alton West plan, which was influenced by Le Corbusier's 1952 Unité d'Habitation.
The flats were heralded in 1958 by British architectural historian Nicholas Pevsner in the Architectural Review as 'exciting in appearance'. Its use in seismic design research gained the attention of Japanese building engineers, because it was an internationally rare instance of a 10-storey post-war building with seismic data. It memorialises government architect Gordon Wilson (1900-59), who died as the building was completed.
In May 2012, the tenants were given seven days to leave their homes following a report finding that panels on the façade might fall off in an earthquake or strong wind. Rather than repair these, Housing New Zealand sold the flats to nearby Victoria University, which planned to demolish them to create a university gateway. Attempts to remove the building's heritage protection have failed. Its heritage status was instead reconfirmed in the Environment Court in 2017 and further strengthened with Heritage New Zealand category I status in 2021. The university still wants to replace the flats but now with new student housing.
The legislation to enable the building's demolition is the Resource Management (Consenting and Other System Changes) Amendment Bill. Chris Bishop, the minister responsible, has justified this special treatment because:
'The building is owned by a public institution – Victoria University – and because that owner, the council and the community all want it gone.'
However, the public ownership of the building brings with it more, not fewer, heritage obligations. Government policy requires that state sector organisations, including universities, take 'a leadership role in being good stewards of the heritage places in its care'. The conflict with this policy, the bypassing of council processes, and the role of the Green Party in this unprecedented move have raised no public reaction.
It was in the Environment Select Committee report on the bill that the Green Party advocated that the bill:
'Should go further to enable more effective and democratic management of perpetually derelict heritage protected structures, such as the hazardous Gordon Wilson Apartments in Wellington Central.'
Green parties fashion themselves as protectors of the environment and climate-change activists. The Green Party of Aotearoa is no different. But nowhere did its response to the bill recognise The Gordon Wilson Flat's high embodied energy.
Embodied energy is the energy needed to make something. For buildings, this includes energy to make concrete and steel and to transport materials to the site and remove excavated soil from it. Being enormous, the flats' embodied energy will not be environmentally insignificant and is important not to discard. As Professor Rebecca Lunn, a co-author of the Royal Academy of Engineering's Decarbonising construction report, has said: 'Our biggest failure is that we build buildings, then we knock them down and throw them away. We must stop doing this.'
The flats were also built as a model of high-density inner-city housing, close to employment and transportation routes – the sort of buildings we need in the face of climate change. Its heritage is thus important, not only as social housing, but because of its historic role in contributing to our current understanding of how to build a sustainable city.
This proposed sidelining of established heritage processes is extraordinary and it acknowledges that normal planning methods cannot avoid the magnitude of the apartments' heritage significance. But the lack of discomfort with the Government's planned use of special legislation also shows how feelings towards a building can override and contradict fundamental values, including the very idea of heritage.
As Janet, a reader of Wellington Scoop, put it: 'I like heritage buildings but not those flats.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Otago Daily Times
14 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
Nuclear test participants' stories spotlighted
A photography exhibition documenting the stories of sailors who took part in British nuclear tests in the 1950s held its opening night at Central Stories Museum and Art Gallery in Alexandra on Friday. "Operation Grapple — We Were There", by photographer Denise Baynham, tells the stories of the men aboard the ships HMNZS Pukaki and HMNZS Rotoiti who took part in the tests and their lives afterwards. Both ships were deployed to support the nine nuclear detonations around Kiribati during 1957 and 1958. The crews of the ships would witness the blast and collect weather data from as close as 37km from the blast site. One of the speakers at the opening was Alexandra woman Sue Douglas, who told the story of her brother, Peter Wright, an officer in the Royal New Zealand Navy who participated in Operation Grapple. "He was dressed in a special suit and was told to turn his back to the bomb that hangs over his eyes. He could see his bones light up through the skin in the blast." After 10 years of miscarriages, Mr Wright and his wife were gifted with two girls, she said. Mr Wright would go on to have a successful career in the navy where he rose to the rank of commander and commanded the HMNZS Taranaki. In the late 1960s, Mr Wright was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and his health began to deteriorate. "[Peter] shrank from a handsome 6-foot man with his bones like hokey pokey in terrible pain." Mr Wright would die in 1982, four years after his father. His wife Jan would die by suicide in 1984. "Life was just too much without him, the girls were perilous and still in high school." One of the daughters would go on to become a lawyer and worked with another Grapple veteran to fight for recognition from the government. "The government were hoping they would all die before they made that decision. Read the truth of their stories of the few who are still alive. "I'm honoured to open this exhibition," Mrs Douglas said. Central Stories manager Paula Stephenson said Mr Wright's portrait and his story would be put up on display alongside the portraits of the exhibit. The first-of-its-kind exhibit was powerful and about a subject unknown to most New Zealanders, Ms Stephenson said. "It's important to ensure that people do know about it." The photographer decided to create the exhibit in an effort to raise awareness of the effects the Grapple tests had on the men and their families, who had been fighting for an apology and compensation from the government for decades, Ms Stephenson said. The exhibition will run until August 31.
NZ Herald
3 days ago
- NZ Herald
Croatian Joseph Mikulec got the autographs of kings, presidents and others as he walked more than 320,870km
He became a global sensation, followed by news reporters, featured in newsreels and welcomed by dignitaries. He visited at least 33 countries, travelling more than 200,000 miles (320,870km) - all on foot, with the book in tow: in a bag, on his shoulder, and eventually in its own custom-made stroller. 'Clad in a costume which looked like a combination of Alpine climber, football and bicycle garment, bearing on his back a stout knapsack, and in his sun-browned hand a heavy cudgel, he attracted attention wherever he went,' the Washington Post reported during one of his trips to DC in 1908. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George in the autograph book assembled by Mikulec. Photo / Kaitlyn Dolan, the Washington Post Mikulec died in 1933, his story and his book largely forgotten over the past 100 years, until two things happened: Šimunić, the 34-year-old Mayor of Oroslavje who travelled the world before returning to his hometown, heard about Mikulec from a local teacher two years ago. He was riveted by the story, the élan and hubris of someone from his sleepy, 14th-century village. Unbeknownst to Šimunić, across the Atlantic, a rare manuscript dealer named Nathan Raab was puzzling over the remarkable leather book held together with a thick leather horse strap, which a man had lugged into his Philadelphia office in 2021. The man was a descendant of the ACME grocery magnate who bought it from Mikulec in 1925. Raab was unsure what exactly it was, but guessed it had a tremendous backstory. Cracking open the well-worn spine revealed a time capsule. 'I take pleasure in giving this letter to Joseph F. Mikulec as evidence he called at the White House on this day,' says the February 1, 1915, entry by President Woodrow Wilson, one of six United States presidents who signed Mikulec's book. Six US presidents signed the book assembled by Joseph Mikulec of Oroslavje, Croatia. Photo / Kaitlyn Dolan, the Washington Post Mussolini, Ford, Tesla, Edison, King Edward VIII and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George were among 60,000 others who stopped whatever important business they were doing to sign the autograph book. It became Mikulec's life mission. As he became increasingly famous, world leaders, artists and luminaries from Egypt to New Zealand (in 1911) were thrilled to sign what was becoming a global 'Who's Who'. Some wrote full letters and included stamps, seals and photos. It was a time when metal detectors, gates and scanners didn't separate the public from the prominent. Usually, all it took was Mikulec's charisma to get past one grumpy guard. 'I walked up to 10 Downing Street, London, the other day,' Mikulec told the Evening Star in December 1919. He wanted to see Prime Minister David Lloyd George, but he was out and Mikulec left his book for him to sign. 'When I came back the autographs of most of the cabinet were in my book, and there were two photographers waiting to snap me on the way out,' he said. Mikulec gave lectures, bringing the world to the people who shared his wanderlust. He funded his adventures by charging admission to some of his story hours and selling postcards of himself to his legions of fans. Mikulec once said a Croatian publishing company was going to pay him US$10,000 if he could walk around the world in five years and give them exclusive rights to his story. But there's no evidence that materialised. Viktor Šimunić, left, the Mayor of Oroslavje, Croatia, and Roberto Kuleš, the president of its city council, bring the book to The Washington Post. Photo / Petula Dvorak, the Washington Post The truth was, he was his own remarkable hype man, alerting newspapers from New York to California whenever he was back in town with his massive book and quirky travelling clothes. 'I would say he was like an archetype of today's influencer or travel blogger,' said Roberto Kuleš, president of Oroslavje's city council and a member of the five-man delegation that travelled to the US East Coast last week to buy the book from Raab as part of a grand plan. Mikulec travelled for so many years that his provenance changed with political history. He was identified as an Austrian, a Croat and a 'Jugoslavian' as he circled the globe three times. He became a US citizen after living in Philadelphia for a few years when World War I disrupted his global travels. Mikulec was born in 1878 to a poor farmer who lived near Oroslavje, a small town on the outskirts of Zagreb. He was expected to work in the fields. But he declared his wanderlust in his youth. 'In 1901, when he said, 'I want to travel the world,' he was like a lunatic,' said Šimunić, who saw some of himself in Mikulec. The townsfolk told the dreamer: 'You must get married. You must have children. You must stay home. You must work and be ordinary,' Šimunić said. Mikulec managed to leave his family farm in 1901 to work in Italy and Malta. When his father died in 1905, the 27-year-old hopped on a steamboat to South Africa to begin a trip that would last nearly three decades. From there, he went to South America, where he camped in rainforests and survived on wild fruit, roots and nuts. He was an outspoken vegetarian. After his first visit to Washington, Mikulec crossed the US, lecturing at fire departments and town halls to anyone who wanted to hear about his adventures. His lectures included 'the tale of the snake that stabbed him near Matildas, of the Indian woman who pummelled him in Argentine, of Roosevelt and Wilson as they talked to him, of the bones of the whale on the Brazilian coast so enormous he could barely lift one rib, of Moros whose chests were so roughened by climbing shaggy trees that they looked like crocodiles,' the Detroit Free Press wrote in June 1919. He was the Edwardian era's Travel Channel, National Geographic, and travel TikTok. 'Mikulec appeared there in his tramping clothes, a red bandana around his neck and a big black thing under one arm,' a Washington journalist in Paris for the Evening Star reported when he spotted Mikulec in December 1921. The city was on edge after a bomb exploded in the US Embassy there months earlier. Another glimpse of the book. Photo / Kaitlyn Dolan, the Washington Post Officials at the embassy bolted at the sight of the man with a massive object wrapped in a black, waterproof covering under one arm, and 'two French gendarmes appeared and led Mikulec away', the Star reported. The massive object was the book. There were actually three books in total - the other two much smaller. One that had been with Mikulec's distant family is on display in the Croatian History Museum in Zagreb, which acquired it in 2023. Croatian historians had been buzzing at the news that the biggest book, the one presumed gone, surfaced in Philadelphia. As Šimunić learned more about Mikulec's story, he was inspired by the global impact a farmer from a small village had made. He commissioned a statue of Mikulec with the book on his shoulder. And he longed to buy the biggest book, the famous one in Philadelphia. He called Raab and asked for a digital copy of the pages. 'I told him, you don't know me, I'm a little mayor from a little city,' he said. 'But we have good intentions.' Šimunić handily won his most recent election this summer, fuelled by the dream that he would bring the book back to Croatia and elevate the story of his hometown hero. The US$225,000 to buy the book came out of the city budget. And not everyone there was happy about it, he said. It was electrifying to finally see the book last week in Philadelphia, Šimunić said. Raab said he, too, was moved by the moment. 'It's touching for us to know that it's going back home,' he said in his company's podcast episode about the book. 'Where it belongs.' Šimunić laid out his vision: 'So, first step is the statue. Second step, we must buy the book. And after we buy the book, we can build the museum. That's the real goal,' he said. The museum would become a pilgrimage for travellers like Mikulec and an Instagram magnet for travellers like the young mayor, who set out to see as much of the world as he could before returning to his small town to run it. 'More than 200 mayors signed the book all around the world,' he said. 'And my idea is, why not to contact today's mayors? And ask them to visit?' The Mikulec museum will have a replica of the book, but with the pages all blank, to be filled by the people who travel to Oroslavje. 'Mikulec went to see the world,' Šimunić said. 'And now the world can come to Oroslavje to see his story.'
NZ Herald
4 days ago
- NZ Herald
Families received wrong remains of Air India crash victims
Relatives carry the coffin of a victim of the Air India flight crash during a funeral ceremony in Ahmedabad. Photo / Basit Zargar, AFP Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech. Already a subscriber? Sign in here Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen. Relatives carry the coffin of a victim of the Air India flight crash during a funeral ceremony in Ahmedabad. Photo / Basit Zargar, AFP Relatives of a British victim killed in last month's Air India crash received a casket that contained mixed remains, a lawyer representing several families and UK media has said. The family of a separate victim received the remains of another person, according to James Healy-Pratt, who is representing 20 British families who lost loved ones in the disaster. A total of 241 people on board the London-bound Boeing 787 Dreamliner died when the plane crashed shortly after take-off from Ahmedabad in western India on June 12. Some 169 Indian passengers and 52 British nationals were killed, making it one of the deadliest plane crashes in terms of the number of British fatalities. Several people on the ground also died while only one passenger, British citizen Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, survived the crash.
