Of lollies and eloquent eyebrows

UP CLOSE AND FROM A DISTANCE, THE

University of Auckland’s new Faculty of Engineering, Te Herenga Mātai Pūkaha, aka B405, says, in the immortal words of Rem Koolhaas, “fuck context”. When he said it in S, M, L, XL, Koolhaas was talking about supersized buildings: “Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue. It exists; at most, it coexists. Its subtext is fuck context.”

B405 by Jasmax exists big time – 114m long, 42m wide and 12-storeys high. Its bulk and prominence on the Symonds Street ridgeline dominates the campus with staunch ‘don’t-mess-with-me’ stance. B405 is the new boss in town, the new centre of the University, making the previous centre, the adjacent Edward Scissorhands cutting and thrusting Auckland Business School look positively puny. At a cost of $224 million, this is a building that can afford to swagger.

And swagger it does: pragmatic, fit-for-purpose, an agent for the global neo-liberal university wearing some very strange clothes.