Awake awake

I AM WRITING AT THE TAIL END of the award season: that time of year when our mates pop up on stage trailing along a client or two, a builder and a collection of the crew from the back room to receive a gong. The award programmes come thick and fast: Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects, the Property Council, the Designers Institute, the Architectural Designers and others out there in Aotearoa. There are those from afar too, importuning us to enter their programmes and post off euros, dollars, fat image files and florid text, all wrapped in high hopes.

I have an ambivalent engagement in these things, wringing my hands at my failure to win awards in programmes I haven’t