Here it invigorates our main street, whereas lower down off Greys Avenue it would be compromised by the tunnel entrance to the Civic Car Park. The architect has made the right decision to place the entrance and main space level with Queen Street. It is a tricky site though: a steep wedge south of the town hall, near where Mayoral Drive and Myers Park cut a hole in Queen Street. It will contribute to a performing arts heart in the centre of town. This location is the right one, near the Aotea Centre, the Civic, the Town Hall and the Classic. For a decade, the trust has been looking all over town for a site, with architect Pip Cheshire involved all that time. Q has arisen from the same need for a flexible four-hundred-seat theatre that the temporary Watershed Theatre down on the waterfront addressed. The rear of the Auckland Town Hall can be seen at left. View south across the multifaceted rear facade of the building. The cafe and bar crowd are gathering, however, even before the curtain’s gone up on the place and anyway, from Mayoral Drive and Greys Avenue, where you’ll be parking your car, the collision of big multifaceted cubes is unmissable. From Queen Street, it is so integrated with the existing between-the-wars shopfronts that you may actually overlook it – hopefully it will be less coy and sprout a few signs soon. In stark contrast to this still-to-be-resuscitated modernist precinct is an intricate and urbane new addition to the area: Q, a little performing arts complex next to the Town Hall. Selwyn Muru’s marvelous carved and painted waharoa is still there, richly embellished and vigorous, one of the few signs around here that we are actually at the southern tip of Polynesia, not in bloody Finland. I wasn’t a great fan of it but, like a submarine conning tower breaking through a bleak, polar plain, it did add, as they say, visual interest to the bland expanse of plaza. The football-field-sized “square” has lost the Terry Stringer sculpture that stood there for years. That grande dame of late modernism and centrepiece of our arts precinct, the Aotea Centre, despite a facelift that has planted a cafe on its steps, remains a lifeless iceberg, remote and frosty as ever. But, meanwhile, in our Civic Precinct, that dead centre of the city, Aotea Square has reopened without much fanfare and is still looking pretty bloody ordinary. The good news has been the fab new North Wharf development in Wynyard Quarter, showing perhaps what can be achieved when politicians stay out of it and let designers run the show. It’s not surprising that Auckland’s focus has been on the waterfront lately, what with the Rugby World Cup “Party Central” wild goose chase and the debacle of the Queen’s Wharf competition. There’s a lot happening in our brand new supercity.
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