Practice in Profile Supported by
RECEIVING THE GOLD MEDAL HAS prompted us to reflect on our body of work over the last 20 years and to distil the underlying themes and imperatives that connect the individual works. We believe that the overarching driver in our work has been a search for a spirit of place or ‘Genius Loci’, a term defined within the context of architecture by the theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz.
Norberg-Schulz elaborates: “Identity means, primarily, that one defines and develops one’s own local characteristics, while freedom means, among other things, equality of opportunity to play one’s part in a greater context.”
In the face of the unrelenting forces of globalisation, we are interested in creating an identifiable position for New Zealand architecture within a global context. More than this, we are searching for regional differences to inform and generate further distinctions. In other words, we are trying to build architecture that embodies a sense of place specific to New Zealand as a country but, also, to particular locations within New Zealand.
This is not a new idea. Kenneth Frampton’s concept of Critical Regionalism, as resistance to universal modernism, covered this ground in the 1970s but it feels as relevant now as it did then. There is a groundswell of inventive architecture appearing around the world and New Zealand that is infused with a specific sense of place and local cultural history. It is important to
