Wellington

Wellington is small, dense, and built on hills. It was never going to look like Christchurch or Dunedin, and it shouldn’t try to. As the seat of government, some scale and some glass make sense for ministries and head offices. What Wellington needs isn’t less modern architecture; it’s a model for combining the two. London manages this constantly: a modern glass tower on one corner, a Georgian terrace on the next, both doing their job. Wellington’s public sector towers can keep rising, as long as the streets underneath them are still built at a human scale, in materials that will still look intentional in eighty years.

Reserve height and glass for a small number of anchor public buildings, and hold every other new building to a masonry, human-scaled street wall: the London model, not a glass monoculture.

London: two eras, one street.

What this could look like.

Not a construction plan. A picture of what Wellington could become if the rules changed and the city chose to build with care. Civex does not build anything itself; we make the case.