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September 25th, 2016

25/9/2016

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Rebuild architect, Greg Young

Architect Greg Young of Young Architects has been tasked with leading the Dorset Street Flats rebuild project. Greg is uniquely placed, in having worked for both the flats original architects (Warren & Mahoney) and engineers (Holmes Consulting), before forming his own company in 2003.

Here, Greg answers some questions about taking on such an important project.


What has been your experience of living and working in Christchurch post-earthquake?


Living and working in Christchurch is very challenging; it is an absolute roller coaster ride of being surrounded by the despair of broken buildings, lives, and infrastructure, intermingled with the rebirth of the city and new opportunities.

Dorset Street Flats are “A” category listed by Heritage New Zealand, they are protected in the City Plan, they make the top ten modernist buildings on the DOCOMOMO NZ register. What qualifies you to be taking on repairing such a respected and highly-regarded building?

I have the relatively unique background as an architect with structural engineering experience. I have worked for both the original engineers, and the original architects. The Dorset Street Flats are a building that expresses the structure as part of the architecture, and vice versa - to work them, in my opinion, you need to understand both, to appreciate the synergy.

What was your awareness of the Dorset Street Flats prior to becoming involved in this project?

Every architect in Christchurch is very aware of the influence of The Dorset Street Flats on the architectural fabric of our city, and in the evolution of a style of architecture so dominant and influential on the built environment in Christchurch. I am no different, and they have had strong influences on my own work.

This is a complex job. How would you break down the phases of what needs to be done.

The way to deal with complex jobs is often to look at the big picture. This is particularly important in this case. In order to understand what has happened to the building, you need to understand what it has undergone, and also what could have happened. Looking at earthquake damage on a room by room basis will not give you an understanding of the damage to the building, but only to the damage on visible items. Once you understand the big picture, you can look at parts of the picture.

How does the work plan look right now?

Firstly, we’re currently working through capturing exactly how they were built, and documenting that. This also highlights to us areas that will require special attention in the detailed documentation and specification phase - for example, there are curved concrete blocks that have been used in the landscaping that we can't replace.
Secondly, while we're documenting the "as built", we're also meeting with construction experts, and repair experts, evaluating different proposals for the repairs on how they will affect the existing structure, how they will affect the aesthetics, what risk is involved, and what changes maybe needed. This includes checking examples of techniques on previously completed projects.
And thirdly, once we're comfortable with the construction techniques and materials proposed, we'll discuss with heritage consultants, the Christchurch City Council heritage team, Heritage New Zealand, Sir Miles Warren, and all of the owners, before completing the construction documentation, ready for building consent and tender.


We'll post the second half next week, or you can read the whole interview on the website link below.

​
http://www.dorsetstreetflats.com/rebuild-553711.html
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September 22nd, 2016

22/9/2016

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Christchurch City Council to create $7.2m Victoria St action plan

A $7.2 million Victoria St revamp will go ahead despite opposition from some retailers and a Christchurch City councillor. The council approved the creation of a plan to develop Victoria Street into a shared area for pedestrians, cars, buses, and bicycles. 

Cr Yani Johanson opposed the motion, saying the proposal was dangerous and too expensive. He was particularly worried about bicycles sharing road space with buses. A group of local retailers last week submitted against the project's plans to reduce parking spaces. Johanson said the plan would also slow traffic in the central city, mainly because of changes to the intersections at Bealey Avenue and Montreal St. "We actually need to have a much more holistic approach to what we do with traffic coming in from the north." He also opposed the cost of the plan, and an additional $1m to be spent in the 2018-19 financial year on intersection improvement. "I don't support $8m going into Victoria St." The money should be spent fixing roads in the suburbs rather than "gold plating" the central city, Johanson said.


Cr David East voted for the resolution, but said he had some reservations. "I do have an ongoing concern about the propensity to throw out bike lanes and our bus lanes together, and we don't seem to be thinking outside the square and trying to separate our cyclists form traffic. East suggested the cycleway could be moved into a shared space with pedestrians on the footpath. Cr Pauline Cotter, who was involved in the proposal as a member of the council's environment committee, said the community was happy with the process and "generally happy" with the outcome. "I think we've reached a good compromise and we're achieving the outcome we want.”

The council's plan is to make Victoria St a 30kmh zone, and reduce the amount of through traffic. It will also remove 20 per cent of the roadside parking spaces. The project, which will begin next March, includes the length of Victoria St between Kilmore St and Bealey Ave. The council expects work to be finished by October 2017. It excludes two major intersections: Victoria, Montreal, and Salisbury streets, and Victoria, Durham, and Kilmore streets. The council will undertake consultation on development of these intersections as a separate project early next year.


The Press, 22 September 2016.

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September 11th, 2016

11/9/2016

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Miles Warren travelled to Denmark and saw the work of the architect Finn Juhl, whose 1941-42 house at Ordrup has been widely illustrated in periodicals of the day. This house and other small-scale houses, provided the New Zealand architect with a model for the early Christchurch houses he built after coming back to New Zealand “brimful of ideas and determined to force them on an unsuspecting public”. He quickly realised that Group-style timber housing was unsuitable in the cooler Canterbury climate and so began to design flats and houses which had walls of white-painted concrete block. The first such building was the sequence of eight Dorset Street Flats (1956-57), which the architect has described as “simply a box of concrete block walls - with two full-height openings to the north and slots to the rear, and other solid boxes for the bathroom and wardrobe”. The block walls stop at door height and support fair-faced concrete beams; door and window detailing shows the depth of the concrete block; roofs are low pitched, timber framed and covered with corrugated iron, their eaves and verges set back to reveal the thickness of the walls.

The Christchurch City Council engineers, unfamiliar with concrete block load-bearing walls, insisted on a frame of reinforced-concrete columns for the Dorset Street Flats, but later acknowledged that this was not necessary. The Christchurch public was as bemused by these flats as the Aucklanders who had dismissed the Group’s houses as barns or chicken coops. The first occupants had no difficulty in adapting to their compact and solidly built surroundings in which varnished rimu board ceilings contrasted warmly with the painted blocks, and foliage quickly softened the enclosing garden walls.

PETER SHAW, "A History Of New Zealand Architecture", 3rd Edition, Hodder Moa Beckett, 2003, ISBN 1-86958-958-0, p 160.
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