“LAST, LONELIEST, LOVELIEST” ETC. ETC. ETC. That was Kipling’s 1890s’ assessment of Auckland but the city has been made well and truly mediocre, now, and this part of Downtown is one of the mundaneist, motley-ist and most mistreated. The harbour was filled in decades ago and the blight of late-20th-century traffic engineering ends up as torrents of cars negotiating knots of awkward intersections, then disgorging into a disparate bunch of very ordinary modernist carparking blocks and office towers. But there is something that, to continue Kipling’s stanza, you could still call exquisite and apart: Neville Price’s West Plaza, 1969–1974, which has now been reborn as 1 Albert Street, with Price as consultant and Ignite Architects as architect and interior designer.
West Plaza was always cool and, unlike most of
