First up, in the commercial category, 56 Pollen Street in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland - a boutique building with a pixelated red-brick coat. Judges called it a “delightful intervention on a tight city plot” and praised how it relates in scale and proportion to the adjacent heritage building.
Our Hawke’s Bay studio has a lot to celebrate, taking out a trio of awards for: Tribune Precinct, the conversion of five former newspaper buildings into a work-and-play hub in central Hastings; Joll Road Stage Two, a retail, food & beverage, and commercial development that sets up a series of laneways to connect the village of Havelock North to the residential zones; and finally an interiors award for Joll Road, an exemplar of future-forward, human-scale design.
Two houses also made the podium: one on the shores of Lake Taupō, with a distinctive saw-tooth roofline that was conceptualised as a cluster of boatsheds; the other at Sumner beach designed on an awkward triangular site. Its form (an angular split gable) is defined by function (living in one section, sleeping in the other) and we were particularly pleased that this house was also named the People’s Choice in the HOME NZ magazine 2024 awards.
Finally, it’s the awards that you don’t see coming that are perhaps the most delightful. Architizer, a global online platform founded in 2009 with a mission to inspire architects to build better buildings, better cities and a better world, recently ranked their 25 Best Architecture Firms in New Zealand based on the number of awards received in their A+Awards programme combined with number of projects featured over 15 years. RTA Studio was excited to be announced as the Number One practice as deemed by this, the world’s largest online community of architects. An honour indeed.