Matakana Village Complex

NZIA Practice: Noel Lane Architects

Category: Urban Design

The Matakana Village Complex is a timeless urban design scheme that delivers through sensitive built form and a landscaping strategy with a strong sense of place and identity. It is what it says it is: a revived village with a growing sense of civic pride and community that centres its commerce and activity around a small stream, new shops, cinemas and a central market place or village heart. The built form also has a modesty, homogeneity, cohesiveness and human scale about it which will serve it well over time.

Beaumont Quarter

NZIA Practice: Studio Pacific Architecture

Category: Urban Design

This 2.4-hectare inner city Auckland site adjacent to Victoria Park was conceived as a mixed-use residential community. A collaborative team of local and international architects and landscape architects interpreted a masterplan consisting of an architect’s precinct and staging plans. The project succeeds in its diverse range of housing typologies organized around simple, legible spatial planning.

Hillcrest Road Bridge

NZIA Practice: Jasmax Limited

Category: Urban Design

This bridge turns the constraints of top-down construction into an opportunity to echo the old ridgeline with an elegant, slim deck structure. Creative thinking from the architect and engineer replaced the usual centre pier with two struts that narrow the motorway and reduce the excavation. The struts are brightly coloured, forming an appropriate highlight in the landscape. Like all popular structures it has attracted a nickname - the Pukeko Bridge.

This is also a recipient of a Resene Colour Award

Throughout history architects have used colour to highlight tectonic elements and their formal relationships. Bold red colour isolates the supporting struts and reinforces the slender concrete deck structure above in this bridge. Motorways are highly visible parts of our country so the use of bold colour to improve architectural and engineering elements is to be encouraged.