The landscape design of the external spaces of the Campus Hub enriches this new social heart to the Kelburn campus. The Plaza is a key destination space that is supported by consolidated student services, student facilities, the informal learning spaces and ancillary retail of the Hub. The positioning and alignment of landscape elements and materials generates a clarity of space and form.
The landscape design recognises the importance of this space as central principle circulation space to the east side of Kelburn Parade and creates generous, high-quality gathering and circulation. It also acts to create the “Great Room” a central space, based on the traditional Quad, an environment that is suitable for large gatherings and events edged with activity.
From the West, the landscape performs a transitional role, whereby the Gully environment of the Gate 3 entry is drawn up to the uncomplicated clean plateau space of the new Quad. This entry is reconfigured to provide at grade shared access for pedestrians and the occasional vehicle. Shallow horse steps on north side of entry access provide for a pedestrian only access, parallel to an asphalt shared access ramp.
A flexible multi-use space quad (ie catering for a range of user groups/ sizes/ - everyday through to event mode), concentrations of detailing at Plaza edges provides seating and gathering opportunities. New large format stone paving visually defines the space bounded by the new Hub, Rankine Brown, Easterfield and Old Kirk building to the north. The paving is drawn across the entire space including the shared access from Gate 3 to reduce the visual and physical impact of vehicle usage and further emphasise the shared nature of the space and the importance of the new Quad in a campus wide context. The exterior groundplane treatments extend through the Hub’s groundfloor, seamlessly integrating inside with the exterior environment, offering a choice of spaces in which users may choose to gather, study or interact.
Rankine Brown’s northern terrace space, provides a sheltered seating and spill out space, the optimises solar access and proximity to both the Student Centre and main campus Library New tree plantings provide amenity (seating/ shade/ shelter) and visual detail, whilst responding to the scale/ mass of the existing and new built fabric of the Plaza. Adam Plaza, Gate 5, Gate 3, Cotton Courtyard lane share a palette of robust surface treatments, furniture and textures, selected to provide an in-obtrusive, but visually cohesive background to the colour and activity of university life.
AWARDS:
NZILA Award of Excellence / Institutional — 2017
Client: Jasmax, University of Waikato
Location: Hillcrest, Kirikiriroa | Hamilton
Collaborators: Architectus, Design Tribe, Jasmax (Architecture), Jasmax (Landscape Architecture – documentation and site stages) Greenstone Group (Project Management), BECA (Engineering), CKL (Traffic Engineer), RLB (Quantity Surveyor), Simon Devitt (Photography)
Year Completed: 2023
Awards:
2024 NZIA National Awards - Ted McCoy Award for Education
2024 Central Property People Awards - Best Team Award
2024 Best Awards - Toitanga - Gold
2024 Best Awards - Spatial: Private, Public & Institutional Spaces - Gold
Built in the 1960’s, the University of Waikato is a typical modernist campus comprising detached buildings arranged according to function. This project sought to reimagine a connected campus by enmeshing landscape and building. Transitional spaces incorporate layering, deep edges, transparency, and overlapping programs blur the distinction between interior and exterior, while gathering once isolated building programmes into a cohesive state.
The landscape spaces cater for large and small-scale events, the intermittent major pedestrian flows between lectures, as well as typical day-to-day campus movements and informal recreation. It mediates ceremonial functions, including graduation ceremonies and pōwhiri, with casual interactions and occupation, such as shared a coffee in a sunny spot. In this way it mirrors and extends the internal multi-use functions of the landmark building.
Client: Kiwi Property Ltd
Location: Sylvia Park, Tāmaki Makaurau | Auckland
Contributors: The Buchan Group, Architectus (Architects) Pragmatix (Project management) AECOM (Civil Engineering) Holmes (Structural Engineering)
Year Completed: 2017
Awards:
2019 Excellence – Commercial category, NZILA Landscape Architecture Awards
The upgraded Dining Lane at Sylvia Park extends the new plaza's design, creating a unified dining and public space precinct. The stone paving and distinctive furniture from the plaza continue along the lane, forming seating pockets around new canopy columns. A varied palette of pots and planting brings a more intimate quality and supports places to linger. A retractable canopy provides shelter and introduces a unique architectural feature with its tree-like columns set into repurposed, defunct tree pits. The planting continue the plaza’s 'Pacific' planting palette and introduces climbing plants that ascend the canopy columns. The design creates an intimate, flexible lane that supports easy movement between the plaza and cone, an open events space, more central to the Mall axis.
Client: Hamilton City Council
Location: Rotokauri, Kirikiriroa | Hamilton
Collaborators: Edward White Architects (Architecture), BrodieHailwood (Project Manager), Designwell (Branding, Signage), Harrison Grierson (Civil) BCD Group (Structural), Feisst Electrical (Lighting)
Year Completed: 2023
Awards:
2023 - NZIA Public Architecture Waikato/Bay of Plenty Awards Winner
Te Kaaroro Nature Precinct connects two of Kirikiriroa’s popular attractions: Hamilton Zoo and the Waiwhakareke Natural Heritage Park, while also integrating the
Observatory of the Hamilton Astronomical Society. The landscape and architecture are structured around linking the entries of these key tourist and visitor destinations
with new open spaces, a café, ecology trail, and viewing tower, creating an animated and varied central spine and a distinctive new place for the city. The scope included
new arrival spaces and a playground within the zoo itself.
The project was initiated through a Hamilton City Council design competition and won by a multi-disciplinary team comprising Wā, Edwards White Architects, and
Designwell. The competition brief called for a new, distinctive entry precinct that included new zoo entrance building/s, as well as new carparking. A road upgrade
was later included to allow service, speed and other design upgrades for the entire corridor. The winning concept established the goal to create an integrated
and cohesive, unique and memorable precinct, which is reflected in the built outcome. Sustainability and ecology are meaningfully and authentically integrated to provide an entry experience suited to the narratives of the two places it serves, while providing actual environmental benefits.
Client: Te Wānanga o Raukawa
Location: Ōtaki
Collaborators: Tennent + Brown (Architects), Dunning Thornton Consultants (Structural Engineering) Aurecon (Civil + Geotech Engineering) ECUBED (Services Engineer)
Year Completed: 2011
The landscape proposal for Ngā Purapura, formerly the Institute of Maori Lifestyle Advancement (IMLA), transforms an unarticulated grass paddock into a meaningful space that reflects local natural elements. The design incorporates an ephemeral wetland at the Tasman Road frontage, enhancing the site's hydrology and visual appeal while anchoring the institute within its environment. This wetland, reminiscent of nearby natural wetlands, also serves as a stormwater detention area.
A welcoming pedestrian entry sequence from Tasman Road includes a wide path, timber bridge over reed beds, and a concrete terrace, transitioning visitors from the public street to the institute's nurturing environment. The exterior spaces around the building use a mix of hard and soft materials to create social and gathering areas with views of the wetland and surrounding tree groves.
To the south, a revitalized stream corridor, widened and planted with native species, enhances the site's ecological value. The proposal emphasizes sustainability, using locally sourced materials and finishes suited to the local climate. Dedicated cycle parking promotes environmental care and community well-being. Overall, the design integrates environmental sustainability principles, creating a harmonious and functional landscape.
The landscape design for the visitor centre at Waitomo Caves embraces the inside-outside dichotomy of the iconic award winning building. Key objectives steering the landscape development are:
– The integration of the new visitors’ centre within its distinctive landscape context
– An amplified visitor experience that engages visitors from the moment they leave their car
The landscape draws upon the existing site’s assets, an impressive forest rich in vegetation and a unique geomorphology of which stone outcrops are a significant feature.
These qualities underpin the detailing and manifestation of the site’s key facilities which include: visitor parking areas and drop off; external spaces; pathways; associated site furniture; signage; and lighting. The proposed structures are functional, robust, legible and relate to the language of the visitors centre and overall caves aesthetic.
SUSTAINABILITY
The landscape design incorporates environmentally sustainable strategies with endemic species integrated into existing, and newly developed areas, of NZ native plant collections.
INNOVATION
The delineation between building and landscape is obscured, a living ponga wall drawn through the building’s belly, shifts perception of what is outside and what is inside The project highlights a distinctive and innovative response: the wall utilises ponga logs that soldier their way beneath the ceiling canopy - a vegetal element that is both structured and soft. A clear link to the exterior forested landscape, the wall supports a collection of NZ epiphytes which imbue the space with an almost prehistoric quality.
The success of this project is largely owed to a highly collaborative project team structure and client group partnership. The design team worked in partnership with the client group, Tourism Holdings Limited, Ruapuha Uekaha Hapu Trust and Department of Conservation, to collectively steer and develop a shared vision for Waitomo Caves.
The transfer of ownership of 1 Ratanui St to Waitakere City Council provided an opportunity to re-instate and expand the frontage of the library and plaza ensuring better visibility and access. The collaborative redesign of Ratanui Street’s southern library plaza delivers a new Waitakere Central Library, a Citizens Advice Bureau, Unitec facilities, a car parking building, a new service lane, a new pedestrian lane (Waitakere Lane) and three new out door public plazas. The project aspires:
- to improve visibility into the library plaza by re-organising structural and furniture elements within the space;
- to provide an optimum number of car park spaces within the site;
- to improve accessibility within the library complex; and
- to consider and provide for the possibility of adjacent commercial neighbours opening out onto the service land and plaza spaces.
SUSTAINABILITY
This project aligns with Waitakere City Council’s values, particularly its emerging identity as Eco City. Specifically this project responds directly to WCC’s aim to protect stream health within the city’s green network. In response to this aim, a key factor contributing to the composition of this project’s landscape is Water Sensitive Urban Design, along with site circulation and architectural geometries, WSUD components express form and drive the conceptual thinking. Storm water run off is collected and filtered in the numerous rain-gardens that articulate the site’s vehicle and pedestrian routes. These gardens are specifically designed to detain and filter stormwater using native reed species that are adapted to both dry and wet conditions.
INNOVATION
New furniture elements are positioned in close proximity to the new buildings to promote the integration of external spaces with interior layouts and themes. Paving, seating and planting along with commissioned artworks are composed to provide high visual and ecological amenity throughout the site for both pedestrians and motorists. The furniture and paving palette employed on this project forms the basis of Waitakere’s citywide urban furniture strategy. This strategy has since been used city-wide on numerous new urban projects within the Waitakere region.
Te Ara a Tāwhaki
Client: Te Wānanga o Raukawa
Location: Ōtaki
Collaborators: Tennent + Brown (Architects), Dunning Thornton Consultants (Structural Engineering) ECUBED (Building Services)
Year Completed: 2018
Awards:
2019 NZIA Regional Architecture Award
2019 Best Design Awards Ngā Aho Silver
Te Ara a Tāwhaki (TAAT) houses the new library learning and student services facilities at Te Wānanga o Raukawa in Ōtaki. The contemporary native landscape design complements the formal qualities of the new facility, while reflecting Ōtaki’s natural landscape character and the historic wetland on which the building is sited.
A densely planted reed garden frames the building’s street side frontage, managing and treating stormwater runoff from the building and surrounding hardscape elements.
A shared pathway connects TAAT and the campus Wharekai, creating an accessible route through the campus as that enhances circulation and retains vehicle services. This also serves as informal space for occupation and activity with the inclusion of a basketball hoop and seating.
Pā Reo
Client: Te Wānanga o Raukawa
Location: Ōtaki
Collaborators: Tennent + Brown (Architects), Dunning Thornton Consultants (Structural Engineering) Land Matters/ Resonant (Civil Engineering) 335 - formerly ECUBED (Building Services) Morphum Environmental (Environmental Engineering) Rider Levett Bucknall (Quantity Surveyor)
Contractor: Mickmillan & Lockwood, Pritchard Civil Contractors
Year Completed: 2023
Awards:
2024 Winner – Te Karanga o te Tui, NZILA Landscape Architecture Awards
2024 Winner – Institutional and Commercial category, NZILA Landscape Architecture Awards
Te Wānanga o Raukawa, in collaboration with Wraight + Associates, has modernized its Ōtaki campus with new facilities for student support, learning, and research. The latest projects, Te Ara a Tāwhaki and Whitireia (Stage 1, opened in 2018) and Pā Reo (Stage 2, opened in 2023), feature timber whares and an administrative building within a landscape that leverages natural dune and wetland features.
The project aimed to create a modern wānanga environment supporting Mātauranga Māori. The Living Building Challenge (LBC) framework was adopted to align with sustainability goals and cultural values, requiring adherence to criteria across various aspects. The Pā Reo project is in its post-occupancy stage of LBC accreditation.
Wraight + Associates designed a unified campus reflecting the Wānanga’s kaupapa and the site’s natural and cultural landscape. A central pedestrian spine connects the timber whares, serving as a movement corridor and spaces for outdoor learning and social interaction. The new buildings are framed by an ephemeral wetland, and a new carpark with raingardens anchors the eastern boundary, making the central campus largely car-free.
The project emphasizes sustainability through water management and greywater reuse, celebrating the unique wānanga environment and supporting Te Ao Māori. Collaboration with Tangata Whenua was integral, with design solutions co-created through regular meetings. The landscape design incorporates significant cultural connections and features a rongoā planting palette for educational and ecological purposes.