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Wellington Waterfront Limited are currently seeking feedback on the concept design for the second stage of the Kumutoto Precinct.

A new building  - 10 Waterloo Quay – has been designed by Studio of Pacific Architecture for the Newcrest Group. Isthmus have  extended the public spaces of Kumutoto Stage 1 northwards along the quay, and collaborated with the architects to pull the external space under the building. 60% of the ground floor of the building is (semi) public open space. The building above the ground floor will be five levels of office space in line with the use contemplated in the Wellington Waterfront Framework and the proposed District Plan Variation 11.

Kumutoto landscape masterplan

The site has been vacant since the 1980s since which time it has seen many development proposals (see below). Hopefully the time is right and this one will get off the ground….. although as we have seen over the last twenty years, new buildings on Wellington Waterfront are not met with enthusiasm by all.

Hear David Irwin talk about the design concept for the public space:

Back to the 80s

(when Kumutoto was known as North Queens Wharf)

This is the late 1980s development proposal on the site of 10 Waterloo Quay. That’s about 11 floors of building, growing out of a fake warehouse.

And this is what was planned for Kumutoto. Note the tower strategically placed in the Johnston Street viewshaft, the elevated walkway over Waterloo Quay and the sun umbrellas…..

by Brad Coombs, Director, Isthmus

 image: www.catspawdynamics.com  

Ever wondered how big your feet really are?

A few years ago I used to tick the ‘Air New Zealand Environment Trust’ donation box whenever I booked flights on the Air New Zealand web site.  So I went walking… to find out where the money that is donated to the Trust is going.  I found a re-vegetation project in Auckland and a school planting project in Wellington, but nothing that was local to where I worked, and where we consume carbon in the running of Isthmus everyday.   

So I started looking into how we consume carbon within the business, and for ways that we can measure, report and offset that carbon consumption.  Through our Sustainable Business Network membership we found a carbon calculator from Catalyst R & D. The calculator is an Excel spreadsheet which you input key operational consumption data into.  It measures the carbon consumption in your main areas of business.  I started to measure our foot print. 

Our areas of carbon use at Isthmus include flights, petrol, waste, electricity, line losses and refrigerant losses.  We monitor, measure and report to the Board on our areas of carbon consumption every month, in much the same way as our financial results.  Once we’ve measured our carbon footprint for the month, we apply the international price for carbon and set aside the equivalent amount of money into our Isthmus Environment Fund account.

We are also very mindful that the advice that we give our clients results in the consumption and offsetting of carbon.  We make informed decisions when giving advice to our clients and we aim to minimise, and where possible reverse  the carbon footprint of our construction and planting projects. 

We have been measuring our carbon footprint for over 12 months now and we have been accumulating into our Isthmus Environment Fund account.  The fund is available for our staff and clients to apply for funding for carbon offsetting projects in the places and communities where they work, live and play.  We have guidelines and representatives from each of our studios to assess Isthmus Environment Fund applications.

We are proud to have taken the step to measure our carbon footprint and to offset it in a meaningful way to our business.  In a way that relates to our projects, our staff, our communities, and our clients. 

The Isthmus Environment Fund is now open for applications from our staff and clients for carbon offsetting projects. Why not measure your own footprint?

Ponsonby Road, Auckland (Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries)

Recently I wrote about the streetcar genesis of Auckland’s suburbs. All of the historic tram line streets still serve as key movement infrastructure primarily providing central city access.

It’s intriguing to imagine what city life would have looked like 100 years ago. While it may not bear much resemblance to city life in these videos of San Francisco or Barcelona, it is likley that there was more public life along the streets and plenty of movement from one side of the street to the other.

The streetcar fabric is inherently spatially integrated since it was designed primarily for a transportation system based at least in part on pedestrian movement.  Below is a test of the  ’centrality’ of the Auckland suburbs using the recently developed Urban Network Analysis toobar for ArcGIS, by MIT’s City Form Research Group. The software developers explain the concept of centrality studies “[as helping to] explain, for instance, on which streets or buildings one is most likely to find local commerce, where foot or vehicular traffic is expected to be highest, and why city land values vary from one location to another.”

The red dots indicate a higher score of “closeness”, basically places are close to other places via connecting streets within a given distance threshold (in this case 400m to model walkability). The black outlines show streetcar lines, revealing the natural relationship of closeness with the underlying street grid and street car fabric. Note too the how the motorway development appears to defeat closeness.

Centrality test in Auckland’s streetcar suburbs, showing ‘closeness’

This map gives a false impression, however.  I believe that there is not nearly as much closeness or spatial integration occuring along these arterials today. Over the last several decades the priority of movement  has been given to through traffic to the city center, at the detriment to local trips, especially those made on foot. In addition to high traffic volumes and excessive speeds when congestion doesn’t prohibit it, there are several other design conditions that limit local connectivity: poor pedestrian design at intersections, limited protected crosswalks or traffic signals, and insensitive public transport conditions (namely speeding buses along street edges).

Take the example of pedestrian crosswalks. Along a comparable streetcar arterial in Vancouver such as 4th Ave there are traffic lights and/or pedestrian crosswalks located every 140m; in places along Granville Avenue they are even closer, about 90m. Here is a map showing the historic tram lines of Auckland in red. The green segments show places with pedestrian crossings or street lights at distances of less than 200m. (The ITE manual Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares uses the metric 200m as the upper end range for the distance between pedestrian crossings. )

Historic tramline routes with areas in green showing higher pedestrian access

Below is an example of a particularly bad intersection that exemplifies the priority through traffic is now given in the streetcar suburbs.  The traditional street geometries balloon out here to fill what might have been a roundabout. For much of its length Sandringham Road carries two lanes of moving traffic, but it explodes out here to six lanes, and an incredible eight lanes on the Balmoral side. Pedestrians crossing here have  to navigate a dangerous free-flowing slip lane, wait again for pedestrian signals, cross travel lanes, and then finally cross the remaining slip lane. Altogether this trip covers about 45m and takes about two minutes. Is it any wonder that few people walk to school or to St Lukes Mall?

Intersection overkill: Sandringham Road, Auckland

So why does it matter? Two hundred and fifty thousand people live in Auckland streetcar suburbs. Many of these people living in this streetcar fabric could easily walk to local services for their daily needs. Increasingly evidence shows that people who live in close proximity to shops and services walk more, as transport experts from the University of California Transportation Center  recently confirmed:

Our results show that the number of businesses per acre is the single most robust indicator of whether people are likely to walk in their neighborhood. We find that people living in neighborhoods with more business establishments per acre conduct more of their travel within their neighborhood and are more likely to travel by walking.

In my opinion, the easiest way to leverage and improve this highly desired AND low-energy lifestyle would be to increase access to amenities (eg. businesses, transit stations, parks) by providing the convenience and safety for people to get from one side of the street to the other. This would effectively double the number of places people have access to as well as provide double the number of customers for businesses.

This concept recalls the classic urban design study conducted by Donald Appleyard that examined the personal relationships of residents located along streets with varying levels of traffic volume. He concluded that residents living on busier streets had fewer personal contacts and used the sidewalks only as a pathway, whereas streets with lighter traffic had increased social interactions and presumably better business environments for local stores.

Updated version of Donald Appleyard’s Study showing the Influence of Traffic Volume on Street Life (Revisiting Donald Appleyard’s Livable Streets)

Without getting too design nerdy about it, the goal here should be to stitch these streetcar neighborhoods back together so that these places are once again connected and more spatially integrated. Reducing traffic speeds and volumes is a start. Other interventions should include additional pedestrian amenities such as crosswalks, ‘context sensitive’ public transit, and thoughtful urban intensification.

Most of the big infrastructure projects Isthmus are involved in – such as highways, windfarms, geothermal power or water storage – necessitate significant modification of landforms. As designers we strive to minimise the scale and effect of earthworks and seek to integrate infrastructure with existing landforms. However there is often the challenge of dealing with cut faces and fill batters. To avoid and mitigate the visual and ecological effects  and support natural processes of ecological colonisation and succession, we need to understand and utilise innovative rehabilitation techniques.

During the consenting phase of these projects more and more certainty of outcome is being sought through the RMA process i.e. exactly how will that 60m cut batter be revegetated, how long will it take, what will it look like and how can you be sure it will work?  Revegetation is a natural process and a complex set of factors affect plant establishment, but new technologies being pioneered in New Zealand by companies such as RST Environmental Solutions offer landscape architects a broad range of ecologically engineered products and processes.

Planting or hydroseeding on compacted subgrade or cut slopes provides challenges due to issues of topsoil limitation, unsuitable substrates, biological sterility, pH extremes, nutrient deficiency and moisture retention.  What this means is that post-construction treatments should be aimed at achieving the holistic regeneration of the disturbed site, facilitating natural regeneration through microclimate modification and creating suitable environments for natural succession.

Hydroseeding technologies provide an important means of sealing cut earthworks to prevent excessive erosion and sediment discharge by strawmulching, hydroseeding grass and the use of geobinding substances.  However, it is not just a means to establish grass cover for initial sediment control; innovative methods now use pioneering plants to kick-start regeneration on disturbed surfaces.  Species and treatments are tailored to suit the specific site, its aspect and substrate and to modify the environment in order to enhance germination. Species combinations of moss and lichen can be utilsed on extreme sites and native plant species can be chosen in more favorable situations.  Elements can be added to the hydroseed mix to moderate pH levels to suit growth and fertilizer to enhance growth and the introduction of biological elements such as symbiotic mychorizol fungi.  Additional organisms that facilitate decomposition such as earthworms can be added manually to fill sites.

New developments in hydroseeding improve success rates in extreme environments and can provide significantly increased certainty in the rehabilitation of cut and fill slopes.

Auckland 2012: Building form and use changes that can typify one-way arterials

One way streets “one-ways” came hand in hand with the radical transformation of western cities with the advent of the automobile, superhighway, and associated suburban development patterns. City designers used the combination of highways and one-ways to increase travel efficiencies into the city centres of many large cities. While much of the work was  conducted throughout the 5o’s and 60′s, the inspiration is most regularly cited as starting with the 1939-1940 New York City World’s fair exhibit called Futurama and the popularisation of a modern vision of cities as proposed by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van de Rohe.  Both Futurama and Le Corbusier imagined a city free of congestion and its associated noise, smells and dirt, and a place where citizens were wisked to their destinations via a series of wide expressways in private motorcars.

The one-ways in many ways were disasters for cities as Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs told us they would be. The mono-functional nature of the streets tended replace the prime purpose of the city in the first place — proximity and connectivity of people (not cars). Instead, one-ways became economic dividing lines working much the way inter-city freeways do today to choke cities of their vitality.

Now half a century later the movement to return the one-ways to two ways  is moving in earnest. Several such examples can be found in New Zealand.  In Christchurch during the early post-earthquakes redevelopment schemes architect Ian Athfield took an admirable  stance by issuing an “ultimatum” that the one -ways would have to be converted back or he would not be involved. To his credit and others involved, the recently released Christchurch Central City Plan calls for the the one-ways to be changed back to two-direction with the addition Copenhagen-style cycle tracks, and other public realm improvements.

Previous to the earthquakes Isthmus worked with Christchurch City Council to evaluate the urban design outcomes of developments located throughout the centre city. Interestingly, poorly scoring developments were all located within a donut-shaped ring around the cbd which also happened to correspond to the one-way street network. The one-way streets  were clearly influencing the type and quality of buildings.

In Auckland, the Draft Auckland Central City Master Plan calls for the two-waying of Hobson and Nelson Streets, both currently 4+ lane feeders to the motorway adjacent to the cbd. The Plan calls for the streets to become “attractive boulevards or ‘green links’, that invite people into the city.”

The Two-Way Plan for Nelson and Hobson Street in central Auckland (Source: Draft Auckland Centre City Masterplan)

Here is a great article from the National Post (Canada) on the international movement of cities to restore one-way streets back to two. The article describes recent success stories in Canada, and mentions the transformations that have been occuring all over North America and Australia too. The article contrasts the long history of two-way road travel compared to the relatively short and auto-centric application of the one-way city street.

The Romans held their empire together with 80,500 kilometres of paved two-way roads, and when Incan porters carried supplies to Machu Picchu, they often passed llama caravans going the other direction. For the past 100 years, however, we have lived in a peculiar age of one-way streets. But as blighted downtowns across North America try to woo suburbanites back into the core, the brief, shining reign of the one-way seems to be drawing to a close.

The article references several studies that show that one-ways are both more dangerous and destructive to urban life. Peter Calthorpe brings some levity to the conversation by arguing that not all one-ways are bad,“There’s this sad oversimplification going on where some people are just saying, ‘One-way streets are bad.’”

This is true of course; and it’s important to remember that one-way streets by themselves are not the issue, but instead it is vehicle speed, traffic volume, lack of pedestrian amenities, and reduced spatial connectivity – it just so happens that one-ways typically bring with them all of these problems.

Perspective for Resource Consent: The bridge will be a distinctive gateway on State Highway 20, with a different character experienced when travelling east and west.

As a signature element of the Onehunga Foreshore Restoration, the pedestrian and cycle bridge will become a key linking element between the existing Onehunga Bay Reserve and the new coastal parkland and beaches. It will form part of a recreational loop and connect with the Waikaraka Cycleway and the future Taylors Bay coastal walkway.  The project is currently making its way through Auckland Council’s Resource Consent process.

Plan for Resource Consent: The project seeks to re-establish the natural character of Onehunga Bay through the creation of 6.8ha of usable parkland and rocky promontories as well as dynamically stable gravel and sandy beaches.

Bridge design

The bridge design was led by Isthmus who developed the key concept and aesthetic elements of the proposal within the parameters determined by the Principals Requirements. This included the need to balance the gateway directive with the need to ‘fit’ and being keeping with the Onehunga environment and to completely span the motorway.  A key component of the concept was for the bridge to belong to the land and therefore the Onehunga community and this differentiated it from the series of cable stay bridges currently on the motorway network. With the concept embedded Isthmus worked with the URS bridge engineers to develop a steel truss system that could be clad. Similarly Isthmus worked with Tonkin and Taylor Civil and Geotechnical engineers to develop the form of the abutment mound and degree of cladding.

Developed Design: structure and cladding design

The bridge and approaches provide a gateway that is elegant, low and unobtrusive as well as being responsive to coastal and heritage values through material selection and detailing. Constructed over a steel truss and with a concrete deck the bridge has a hardwood timber balustrade to the windward side and a ‘folded flax’ marine grade weathering steel balustrade to the leeward side. The timber balustrade element references the wharf and maritime history of the port of Onehunga, once a thriving west coast port as well an major trade node for Maori. The folded flax speaks of the vegetation that formerly grew on the coast as well as its use as a raw material by Maori.

Concept Design digital model

The bridge is embedded into earth embankments at each abutment  to ensure that the bridge feels part of the land rather than the motorway;  each embankment cut is partially faced in exposed basalt aggregate panels to reference the local volcanic crater. The 5m wide bridge completely spans the motorway and has a 48m central span and two 16m back spans. The spans are supported by two concrete piers. Concrete upstands on the piers are detailed as entranceway features and suggest a traditional palisade post in the approach and departure directions while the developing pier form below the bridge deck is suggestive of an anchor stone when viewed from oblique angles.

Preliminary physical model

Early in the preliminary design phase a physical model was developed to aid conceptual development of the bridge and to allow for visualization of external parties such as the Client team. A key practical consideration was the adherence to NZTAS structural code for the maintenance of the main structural members. A key practical consideration was the adherence to NZTAS structural code for the maintenance of the main structural members. Balustrades were designed to be demountable to allow visual assessment and servicing of the bridge structure and was designed in conjunction with the structural engineers.  Digital modelling and visualization was undertaken to further develop the concept.

Alan England, Visualisation Technician, Auckland

why do you ride a bike?

There is nothing quite like the simple pleasure of riding a bike.

what are you riding at the moment, and why do you like it?

I have just returned from holiday at Otama Bay in the CoromandelPeninsula, we drove there from Auckland and I took my 20 (Raleigh20, 1970s ish).  She’s a great old bird, and everything still works. It was perfect for a kiwi summer bach bike.  Good for riding to and from the beach and shops – it was heaven.

what types of riding do you do?

I commute as much as I can, and try to get out for a lunchtime cruise to keep the blood flowing. Every Tuesday evening go for a social ride around Auckland with friends, which is really an excuse to ride to a pub and then eat pizza.  Very occasionally I will do the odd 100km+ ride on the weekend with my roadie friends.

how many bikes do you own?

Too many.  At the moment, I have 4 complete bikes, and 2 frames which I am restoring.  One of the frames is an old NZ made Healing tandem mixtie, which has really got me excited.  It has been stripped and is now ready for powder coating.  I am new at the bike building game, but am learning hand over fist from my friends and Sean Burke (bike guru) from the Auckland studio.

your best/worst recent bike experience?

My best recent bike experience was on a Tuesday night social ride where we rode across Auckland from town to Half Moon Bay where we jumped on the last ferry back to downtown.  Not only was it a great ride, but there were plenty of new faces which is what made it extra special.  My all time worst bike experience was being run over from behind by a 4WD while I was struggling up a hill in a marked bike lane.

weekly kms?

It changes quite a lot but I usually ride about 150-300km per week.

(first published with Gordon Price on spacingvancouver)

A borrowed concept based on the Copenhagen model of non-defined roadways, the response from drivers has been somewhat different than European cities which have implemented similar design concepts within their respective CBD’s.  In Auckland, the absence of kerbs and initial lack of signage to define parking spaces has led to a free-for-all by motorists claiming free parking by travelling up onto what used to be sidewalk space, finding themselves in-between street trees now surrounded by paving on random angles and in some cases, double parked.

The building-to-building paving has indeed provided a blurred definition between pedestrian and vehicular spaces; unfortunately in the early days of this experiment it was the vehicles that used this new condition to their advantage.

Things have changed since then; the council has added new signage and enforced time limits on parking.  New streetscape elements such as light poles, litter bins, movable planters and benches have been added to ironically define the very travel lane that was removed.  So this begs the question: if the goal was to reduce the speed of traffic in these spaces, perhaps leaving the kerbs but narrowing the lane dimensions would have the same effect through the creation of traffic friction for the driver.

Creating a continuous level ground plane has succeeded in providing flexible urban spaces that can be programmed to accommodate a range of activities; in this sense I applaud the city for successfully adding a new dimension to the central city.  I do however question the use of monolithic granite paving surfaces installed from one end to the other at considerable cost to define spaces that are ultimately being shaped by the benches, movable planters, and restaurant furniture that has positively activated the edges of these streets while taming the wandering car parking antics of motorists.

In the case of my favourite shared street (Fort Street), it’s the space-claiming urban furniture for dining and socializing added by the adjacent drinking establishments and eateries that has in essence replaced the kerb edge as the barrier to vehicles while adding a new vocabulary for placemaking in the city.

Now that’s Urban Living!

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 22 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.