A focus on ‘doing a few things very well’ has seen Irving Smith Jack Architects Ltd announced as the winner of a prestigious New Zealand Institute of Architects Award for Te Kōputu a Te Whanga a Toi – the Whakatāne Library and Exhibition Centre.
At the awards ceremony on 24 May, Te Kōputu was announced as the winner of the Public Architecture category, and was also one of five projects in contention for the supreme award. Nineteen architectural projects, which ranged in scale from a large indoor sports centre in Wellington to a micro-bach on the Coromandel Peninsula, received awards on the night.
The accolade for Te Kōputu follows success at the Institute’s Waikato/Bay of Plenty region annual awards, where it won both the Sustainable and Public Architecture categories of the competition. Whakatāne Mayor Tony Bonne says he’s delighted with the recognition the awards provide for this important community facility.
“Our vision from the beginning was to develop an exceptional facility that would become the home of arts and culture for the Whakatāne District,” Mr Bonne says. “Our architects have made that vision a reality and helped us turn a vacant and run-down building into a fantastic community hub.”
Speaking on behalf of the national award jurors, Auckland architect Andrew Barclay says: “The conversion of older buildings to new purposes may be a symptom of current economic circumstances, but it also signals a greater awareness of the worth of existing buildings, and of the possibilities they offer to imaginative clients and architects.”
Mr Barclay says imagination was necessarily at a premium in many of the Award-winning buildings, because budgets were often modest. “Some of the projects the Awards jury enjoyed most used very little, very well. On buildings like the Whakatāne Library and Exhibition Centre, the designers used limited resources to great effect.”
Judges commented that the architects had focused on doing a few things very well. “Their pragmatic and sympathetic decisiveness extends to the exhibition stands and displays which they designed. A new canopy gives the building an urban scale, enlivened edges animate the adjacent public area, and an intelligent sequencing of interior spaces provides a generously proportioned and democratic environment.”