Christchurch museum wins World Architecture award: Why it matters

Ravenscar House Museum in Christchurch won the Cultural Award at the recent World Architects' Festival in Singapore. Photo / Canterbury Museum

It was the 80s and our two boys were small the last time I was in Singapore. I remember a lush tropical Island, shopping on Orchard Road, Singapore Slings at Raffles…

There are photos of us at the zoo, its “open concept” moats instead of fences progressive compared to Auckland Zoo’s then depressing arrangements. I’m the one smiling bravely, so as not to transmit my phobias to the kids, with a python draped around my neck.

At the end of November my partner and I visited again for the World Architecture Festival. He was a judge. I was there because who wouldn’t want to take a layperson’s look at how architects from everywhere are responding to a world that is increasingly challenging on all fronts.

WAF is an epic event. It took place in a huge space at the Marina Bay Sands convention centre: two stages, the room ringed with white, inflatable igloo-like spaces – crit rooms, where architects present their projects to a panel of judges. The crit – the robust feedback that is a foundation of the architecture education – probably explains a lot about the architects. If you can survive years of close critique of your every professional move, your ego is probably fairly undentable.

The categories at WAF are endless: outside, inside, residential, workplace, education, health and fitness, cultural identity, climate, future projects… Where to begin to take it all in?

In the women’s loo, as it turns out, where I met Gold Medal winning Australian architect Kerstin Thompson. She was off to present her project, the new Melbourne Holocaust Museum. The old house in which the museum began is enveloped by a new building of interwoven clay and transparent bricks in a way that renders the original house both ethereal and staunchly present. What was and what is, nothing forgotten. The museum looks magical, something I will visit again in real life.

It was an exhilarating, moving start. We spent three months in the UK in 2010 when my partner was doing a press fellowship at Cambridge University, studying architecture writing in the mainstream media. In the UK, then, most major papers had dedicated architecture writers. The built environment was viewed not just as real estate or starchitect statements but as part of the culture, a potential social good. There were plenty of projects at WAF 2023 that fitted that brief. In the cultural category, the award went to New Zealand’s Patterson Associates’ Ravenscar House Museum, a building to house the art collection of Susan and Jim Wakefield after their home was destroyed in the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake. Out of the ruins.

There were other projects at WAF that involved building out of, or in advance of, major catastrophe. Taiwanese architect Chen-Yu Chiu’s Taiwan Reyhanli Center for World Citizens in Reyhanli, Turkey, is a community centre for Syrian refugees and locals. Public facilities, emergency accommodation, shops, offices, communal areas, spaces for creative and business endeavours … a refugee crisis can elicit a beautiful, life-affirming architectural response.

Personal favourite event: Italian architect Mario Cucinella’s time travelling take on building for climate change. His presentation, The Future is a Journey to the Past, went back to a 13th-century icehouse in what is now the Iranian desert. Storing ice in a place where daytime temperatures can be over 40C, with architecture. He finished with a project he has been involved in, building sustainable houses that look like wasps’ nests. “We built a house by using 3-D printing, but using earth, not cement… Using the latest technology with the oldest material on the planet.” Back to the future.

We were back to Auckland, to get ready for Christmas. We’ll be heartened by the ingenuity and energy some are bringing to building the future in an uncertain world when we toast 2024. The current political climate is a good time in which to consider Cucinella’s advice to embrace other cultures, other times, different forms of knowledge. We’re going to need it all. Happy holidays.