Culture and collegiality | Architecture Now

Te Rangihīroa is the primary purpose-built school at New Zealand’s most collegiate college for the reason that Ted McCoy-designed UniCol opened in 1969. If its novelty makes it notable, its measurement makes it vital. The $104-million constructing, greater than 14,000 sq. metres in space, homes 450 College of Otago college students in two conjoined six-floor blocks, 5 minutes’ stroll from the primary campus.

This a part of north Dunedin already had some hefty buildings: the Gregg’s manufacturing facility, Forsyth Barr Stadium and the previous dairy manufacturing facility that, since 1998, has housed the Hocken Library. Even so, Te Rangihīroa stands out as a Gulliver within the Lilliput of its rapid, two-storey neighbourhood. (City design was not a part of the transient.) It unequivocally advertises the significance to Dunedin of the nation’s oldest college, an establishment to which 1 / 4 of town’s inhabitants of 130,000 is in a roundabout way related.

However there’s extra to Te Rangihīroa’s significance than its scale. The constructing is an announcement of — as they could say at Otago’s still-extant Classics division — the quod erat demonstrandum selection. It’s a realisation of present serious about a constructing sort and an expression, additionally, of the College of Otago’s distinctive promoting proposition in an educational system that features as a aggressive market. Otago’s providing of an intense undergraduate expertise begins with residence near the campus in certainly one of 15 schools, because the halls of residence are regionally referred to as. All are owned by or affiliated to the college, and threequarters of Otago’s 4000 first-year college students reside in them. (Subsequent cease, for the second-years who’re up for it: one of many fabled flats within the pupil enclave centred on Citadel Road North.)

Te Rangihīroa continues the College of Otago’s function as each proprietor and operator of halls of residence. Otago, has to this point and despite its monetary challenges, remained dedicated to an lodging mannequin which, as a result of the college takes a long-term method to its property holdings, has made enterprise in addition to social and reputational sense. The case for management was validated by the investigation following the loss of life in 2019, undiscovered for a number of weeks, of a pupil in a for-profit pupil corridor on the College of Canterbury: a scandal that prompted the introduction of a compulsory code of observe for tertiary schooling suppliers.

Te Rangihīroa can be a marker in one other dimension. The challenge, from its inception in 2018 to its completion early this yr, coincided with an evolution within the college’s understanding of, and method to, te ao Māori. Specifically, the college has sought a stronger relationship with the Kāi Tahu rūnanga with mana whenua standing in and round Ōtepoti. On each side, this has been a studying course of and stays a piece in progress. Gordon Roy, the college’s Strategic Architect, admits that when he took up his place six years in the past, interplay with Kāi Tahu on Otago’s growth initiatives was “piecemeal and sporadic”. Te Rangihīroa was one thing of a stress check of the cultural tips for such initiatives, latterly formulated by the college and Kāi Tahu.

The particular circumstances of the commissioning of Te Rangihīroa heightened expectations of thorough-going cultural engagement. The faculty’s identify was transferred from an present, smaller corridor of residence on a web site threatened by the development of the brand new Dunedin Hospital, now underneath manner. Te Rangihīroa was a title that couldn’t be misplaced or slighted. It was the te reo identify of Sir Peter Buck (c.1877–1951), one of many College of Otago’s most distinguished alumni — doctor, Māori well being administrator, MP, embellished conflict veteran, anthropologist and long-time director of the Bishop Museum in Hawai’i. The identify was gifted to the college by Te Rangihīroa’s iwi, Ngāti Mutunga. The Taranaki- and Chatham Islands-based iwi has additional connections to Ōtepoti; males from Ngāti Mutunga had been among the many Parihaka prisoners transported to town within the late 1870s, and whānau bonds to native Kāi Tahu households date from that time.

Gordon Roy says there have been “9 or ten” expressions of curiosity within the Te Rangihīroa challenge from structure corporations. Jasmax “ticked all of the packing containers”, Roy says, “when it comes to expertise, the workforce they put collectively and worth for cash”. From the preliminary design stage onwards, Jasmax participated in a designbuild course of with Christchurch firm Southbase Building.

Basically, the design divided an enormous constructing into two elements: a pair of towers, framed in metal and confronted with folded aluminium panels. CLT building was thought of, Roy says, however safety of provide was deemed problematic. (The expertise’s sustainability credentials, he provides, will likely be tougher to disregard sooner or later.) The 5 Inexperienced Star constructing is a form of H-block, if such a time period could also be uncoupled from its Northern Irish penal associations. The 2 towers, aligned roughly north–south, are the stems of the ‘H’, joined by the crossbar of the constructing’s connecting elevate foyer. On its most welcoming elevation, the constructing’s stems — its open counters, typographically talking — are splayed like arms, reaching north in direction of Taranaki and the ancestral homeland of Te Rangihīroa.

Merely, the constructing is organised as a resort. Different universities could also be experimenting with totally different layouts for halls of residence, choosing pod-like hybrids of hostel and flat however, with Te Rangihīroa, Otago has caught with a standard association of stacked flooring of particular person rooms on each side of lengthy corridors. Why? “As a result of we all know it really works,” says Roy: an assertion supported by annual surveys of school residents. That being mentioned, he provides, “we’ve made tweaks”. The problem for the college and, subsequently, its architects was to fulfill programmatic necessities whereas offering habitational enchantment.

Economics dictated that the constructing needed to be large to maximise the benefit of its well-positioned web site and meet lodging demand. Socially, the constructing needed to function in an inclusive method. Design had a vital function to play in bridging the hole between what Roy calls the “social candy spot” of a corridor of residence, 300 college students, and the precise inhabitants of Te Rangihīroa, which is 50 per cent higher.

The reconciliation of the economically possible and the socially fascinating was achieved by the standard of particular person areas, and the amenity and, importantly, the distribution of frequent areas. Exterior views by operable home windows, built-in furnishings and broadloom carpet are commonplace to all pupil rooms, whether or not they’re the 11-square-metre common rooms or the 16-square-metre rooms with en suites. (The annual payment for the standard room is round $19,000; for an additional $2000, a pupil can have one of many 150 ensuites, a comparatively excessive marginal return on funding, college students, and fogeys, would possibly assume.)

The bedrooms, that are accessed off 1.8-metre-wide corridors, are successfully particular person hearth cells, related to an automated door nearer. Frequent areas embody the bottom ground whare kai or eating corridor, the constructing’s hub, which is served by a kitchen that prepares three meals a day, and the always staffed reception, together with quite a few tutorial, assembly and social areas on the identical degree. The siting of two whānau rooms on every of the 5, 90-room lodging ranges – one to every wing – is a key ingredient of a method to fight the alienating impact of life in a big school in a brand new metropolis. Care has been taken to supply islands of calm within the sea of bustle. Jasmax challenge architect Matthew Downs talks about neurodivergent areas with a matter-of-factness that might have been inconceivable a number of years in the past.

The Te Rangihīroa challenge negotiated a number of obstacles alongside the best way. One was unexceptional: the value-managed substitution of a penthouse degree of warden lodging by a number of adjoining, street-level cottages, designed by one other structure observe. (Roy says the financially motivated change, which diminished the structural load on the slim towers and saved façade prices, had the coincident advantage of giving wardens some separation from their office.) Two velocity bumps got here without warning: the COVID-19 pandemic, which, at its peak, incapacitated half of the development workforce and delayed completion by a minimum of half a yr, and the failure, close to the challenge’s finish, of the unique façade producer.

There was one other situation that needed to be labored by. Each Ngāti Mutunga and Kāi Tahu had reservations concerning the challenge’s preliminary cultural course. A sturdy assembly at Ōtākou marae was necessary in reaching a “re-set”, says Megan Pōtiki, a distinguished member of the native rūnanga, who credit Roy for his willingness to interact with stakeholder iwi and his recognition of Ngāti Mutunga’s proper “to drive the narrative”. For his half, Mitchell Ritai, Chief Government of Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Mutunga, says the episode confirmed his perception that, in growth initiatives, “it’s at all times best to have cultural discussions early on”. Ultimately, says Pōtiki, a “re-set” agreed “with graciousness” was “good for all of us”.

Te Rangihīroa’s many cultural parts are most strongly evident within the kaokao sample — the tukutuku chevron, representing the aspect of the ribs, that indicators safety — on the constructing’s aluminium façade panels, and the tukutuku frit on the outside glazing. The ‘ribs’ signify the qualities that present the life help for a pupil’s college profession: manawa roa (resilience); manawa tina (resoluteness); manawa nui (braveness); and manawa toka (dedication). The faculty’s typographic identification is about in a typeface Jasmax derived from Sir Peter Buck’s backward-sloping, left-handed cursive writing. Inside cultural parts embody the color coding that references the hues of the Taranaki land- and skyscape in distinguishing the lodging flooring. (The deep inexperienced of whenua/land on Degree 1, for instance, and the sunshine blue of rangi/sky on Degree 5.)

The product of ambition, skill, generosity and appreciable mutual forbearance, Te Rangihīroa is, says Pōtiki, “the one constructing in Dunedin or Otago with a fancy cultural narrative”. (Of a Māori nature, that’s: town and the area aren’t in need of buildings that inform settler tales.) Whereas the constructing’s design has a specific cultural character, the faculty, as all companions within the challenge emphasise, embraces college students of all backgrounds. It does that, says Roy, whereas “sending a sign to Dunedin, and New Zealand, about the place the college is heading”. And the place it has come from: impressively, the faculty expresses the College of Otago’s dedication to its traditions and, reassuringly, to the welfare of its college students.