Waterfront / September 2008
October 2008 | July 2008-
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Icon get no satisfaction
- Eye of the Fish
- It has been announced by the Wellington City Council, that following on from the demise of the proposal for a Hilton Hotel, there will be an ideas competition for the end of the Outer T on Queens Wharf: currently home to an old tin shed, as I’m sure you all know. The Hilton-to-be, as you will recall, was vanquished by the continued badgering of the combined forces of Waterfront Watch and the Civic Trust (go Grey Power!), and no one much seems to have mourned its passing (blogged by Philip back in March). The Hilton’s Auckland architects have left town with their tails between their legs, probably destined never to want to return. While details for the competition for the replacement building have not been clarified yet, there’s one thing for sure: there’s going to be a call for it to be Iconic.
- Tagged as:
- hilton
- waterfront
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Discover Literary Wellington...
- Texture
- Writer David Geary once remarked that if you stay in Wellington long enough, you'll end up sleeping with yourself. I love that line. Wellington has been and is home to a long line of excellent writers: Katherine Mansfield, Bill Manhire, Duncan Sarkies, Jenny Bornholdt and Damien Wilkins spring to mind. I'm not the outdoorsy type at all. A city kid, I tend to come over all panicky if I get too far away from reassuring concrete. But I am bookish. And the Wellington Writers' Walk is a really lovely and fun stroll to take. With September being New Zealand Book Month, now is a perfectly appropriate time to re-discover literary Wellington.Along the route from Chaffers Marina to Frank Kitts Park, there are a series of sculptural plaques and benchmarks inscribed with quotations from New Zealand writers such as Mansfield, Manhire, Denis Glover, Robin Hyde and Bruce Mason. The featured writers have all lived in Wellington at some point, and the walk acknowledges and celebrates the significance Wellington has had in their lives. The concrete plaques (designed by typographer Catherine Griffiths) and benchmarks, three of which are seats (designed by architect Fiona Christeller) have been carefully positioned in delightfully surprising spots. I love the James K Baxter sculpture that juts out of the Te Papa pool, and how the Glover one sort of looks like it has just been washed up on the rocks at the edge of the waterfront. The monuments jump out at you, it's almost as if you're being accosted by them and it makes me imagine unsuspecting tourists walking along the waterfront and being confronted by lovely words set in stone.I love fonts and typography (and let's not forget concrete) and these concrete typographic 'text' sculptures are quite stunning, public artworks. I think Going West is Maurice Gee's best novel, so I reckon the plaque with the inscription from this book is my favourite: Then out of the tunnel andWellington burst like a bombIt opened like a flower waslit up like a room, explaineditself exactly, became thecapital... www.bookcouncil.org.nz/tourism/destinations/wellingtonwriterswalkmap.html - Kiran
- Tagged as:
- waterfront
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