Stunning day for walking the Skyline Walkway. I couldn't figure out how to upload multiple photos so picked that one that shows the most of Wellington.
Update: CCTV sheds light on mystery milk bottles appearing at Alexandra petrol station
They've looked at the CCTV footage:
"The main culprit, I believe, is a delivery driver. So he rocks up early in the morning, and later in the evening ... and gets his diesel and leaves his two bottles on top of the pump."
I flew domestic from Wellington this morning and was still required to take out laptops - though this was Jetstar.
Overall seems like a pretty good result. Disappointing that the heritage buildings will still be protected, but sounds like that was rejected on technicalities rather than due to any desire to retain those buildings.
Looks like they may be doing just that: Police treat painting over of Auckland's K' Road rainbow crossing as hate crime
From the NZIA About the awards programme (which took me a bit to find):
The awards judges assess each project in terms of the following:
The relationship of the building to its site, context and presence
The degree of consistency and completeness in expressing the relationship between concept, form and structure
Light, colour, texture and spatial qualities
Structure, construction, materials and issues of durability and detail
Environmental performance
User satisfaction, value to the client and acceptability of solutions to the brief
Contribution to the advancement of architecture as a discipline and the enhancement of the human spirit
It seems like there's a panel of jurors that visit the sites as well as meeting with the architects and clients
Some other sources:
I know, been kinda conditioned to expect the worst but yeah this seems like great progress. Still has to go through Chris Bishop but from what I understand he's not likely to oppose this stuff.
All completely unrelated but interesting, to me at least, nonetheless.
There's been a few notable gas leaks recently - the other day a street in Petone was closed, and I seem to recall there was an evacuation of some sort somewhere a day or so prior to that.
Yeah I'm not quite sure why it's being done this way - which makes me suspicious. On the surface it seems to me like this is in effect an interest-free loan of $32M with the condition that Reading fix up the site and make it into something viable once more.
I guess the gotcha is that it would be an upfront cost for the WCC which is already having to make big cuts. You could also argue about the optics of having to pay Reading to actually do something with the site, and not just leave it derelict as they have done for the last several years.
But if this pans out, and helps reverse the decline of Courtney Place, then sounds like an okay plan.
Nah didn't do the full thing, just went from Crofton Downs station to Mt Kaukau and back again. That way I wasn't reliant on cars or needing people to pick me up / drop me off - which you kinda need if you're going all the way to / from the Makara end