Vertical Living: A Wellington architectural history

Vertical Living: The Architectural Centre and the Remaking of Wellington
By Julia Gatley and Paul Walker
Auckland University Press RRP $59.99

Vertical Living is a number of things but primarily it is a potted history of the development of architecture and urban planning in Wellington.

The city is a strange mixture with parts looking as though they have been well planned, designed and developed while other bits seem to have been haphazard and ill-conceived.

The book's genesis was in the writing about the Wellington-based The Architectural Centre, which was originally formed in 1946 by a group of students and idealists who got together to realise their visions for a modern city.

This was before Wellington had a school of architecture. Over the next 50 years the centre along with the new architectural school would have an impact on the shaping of Wellington's architecture and town planning, influencing the look of the city.

While it is a general architectural history there is a major concentration of the post-war buildings. Along with this it documents the impact of new planning ideas around civic design, which have been crucial in the creation of contemporary Wellington.

The history of significant (and less significant) buildings is given an architectural, political and social context, underscoring the fact that a city’s architecture does not necessarily evolve in a well ordered manner.

The book focuses on some specific issues such as the building of Te Papa, which was beset with negative comments and reviews from the time of the first design concepts. The board was reluctant to let the public even see the design ideas as well as attempt to restrict applications to New Zealand architects.

This was the opportunity for an internationally impressive building, as would have happened with the Ian Athfield/Frank Gehry team. Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim, which opened in the same year as Te Papa, stole the architectural limelight that could have been Wellington's.

The book discusses the importance of some of the government initiatives such as the Dixon Street Flats, the impact of the émigré architects and designers, as well as the more recent ideas about preservation of the architectural heritage.

While the book records some of the impressive buildings such as the ground-breaking Shell headquarters, the first the first modern curtain wall building in New Zealand, there is also the long running sage of the Bank of New Zealand building, which stumbled its way to completion in the 1970s.

The book reminds us that, in modernist ideology, architecture and urban planning went hand-in-hand with visual and craft arts, graphic and industrial design.