Going beyond the brief
AN ASSERTIVE NEW LIBRARY HAS EMERGED IN Johnsonville’s town centre on Wellington’s road north from the western suburbs of Karori, Wadestown and Khandallah. Immediately noticeable for its angularity and tallness on the street edge, its openness and the welcome it signals, it is an unexpected architectural moment, highlighted by its contrast to the otherwise mundane built context.
Johnsonville was named after the first colonial settlers of the area. Beginning as a clearing in the bush on the original Māori path north to Porirua, over time it became an important stop on the journey from Wellington, the terminus of a train line north in 1886, then a farming hub, and a rural service centre, before suburbanisation from the 1930s. It is also a crossroads between the two major northern paths and, for most people, it remains an uneventful place they pass through. It is well connected to the city centre by both train and motorway, yet, it is a place apart, separated geographically from Wellington – car-focussed, with an improvised character centred on a run-down mall opened in 1969. Its strategic location makes it an important part of Wellington’s planned urban intensification along the northern growth corridor but little has signaled this change, except some medium-density housing that follows a slightly mean commercial formula.
