Shaping our collective Pacific future
TRYING TO DESCRIBE 30 YEARS OF STUDIO Pacific Architecture with, say, two sentences per year is rather like describing a large cloth by talking about a couple of its strands. It is with some of the same naivete, hope and ambition with which we started off the practice that this partial view of Studio Pacific’s history is put together. There have been amazing times and fortunate opportunities; without glossing over a few struggles in between, I (and we) can see now that we have achieved more than we ever dared hope we would at the beginning of the practice.
To me, the point was to use our collective creativity to make Aotearoa New Zealand a better place or, at least, the pockets of place we could influence. Two central queries always seem to come about when talking about practice history: how did we get from 1992 to here, in the practical sense of running an office, and what has imbued our design work with its character in that time?
In answering, it is difficult to speak on behalf of everyone involved in the enterprise – there are so many people to whom we should be thankful, not least some very able and understanding clients and some very longstanding and dedicated staff. And I hesitate to use “we” to talk about what has been achieved, as it’s only one point of view and there are others with much to say that will be left unsaid here. So, this is a personal view, not the comprehensive history of record which remains to be written.
Our bare origin story is that the three originals, Nick Barratt-Boyes, Stephen McDougall and I, put together the idea of Studio Pacific in various haunts in London. We scribbled up sheets of paper to determine the name and thought about what we might like to do and how we might go about it, although actual projects were in very short supply at the time. We
