Bill McKay: New design for Freyberg Place misses the mark

Freyberg Place at the bottom of The Metrolpolis Tower.

The council is planning to redesign Freyberg Place. This is one of our most urban public places but the vision we've seen in the Herald is for a bush walk. A cascade of steps, representing lava, winding between stands of trees. At Britomart and North Wharf we have seen that Auckland is at last learning to do urban well, so why can't we have that in High St of all places?

The area has commemorated General Freyberg since 1946 and a statue was added in 1976. The current square design dates from the mid-90s and includes a simple-minded war theme with bombshell-like bollards and street lamps shaped like parachutes, features that ignore a much more sophisticated role Freyberg Place played in Auckland's post-war development.

In 1957, young architecture graduates exhibited in the Auckland Art Gallery a proposal for Auckland's first public square. This "Freyberg Place: High St Rediscovered" scheme didn't eventuate but elements were incorporated by the city architect, Tibor Donner, into the design of the 1963 Pioneer Women's Memorial Hall (also known as the Ellen Melville Hall), one of his many marvellous modernist buildings of the period, which include the Parnell Pools.

The hall included a creche but the 90s saw an erosion of women's presence with the space below the hall filled in and first occupied by a short-lived bar ironically named Baritone. Even the pink panels of the hall were replaced with a boyish blue.

Anthony Stone's Freyberg statue has also always had a rather unfortunate posture; seeming as if he's about to flash open his coat at the ladies over the way. This is in contrast to that earlier graduate scheme that appropriately included a reclining female figure by artist Molly Macallister.

The Metropolis Tower was built in the late 90s on what was then a carpark with a little cafe called The Palms. But before that, at the top of those old concrete steps was a Lands and Deeds Office, which was formerly a courthouse.

The courthouse had been itself an adaptation of an earlier Methodist Church, which can in turn be glimpsed in very early pictures of Auckland in the 1840s.

There is a rich history here of a growing city and we haven't even touched on the Maori aspect. So why does the current design refer back to the bush?

There is so much more to our history. Even those phoenix palms at the foot of Metropolis are part of this. First fashionable in late Victorian times they became popular again in the 1980s. Now they are considered pests so the proposed design will see them all slaughtered.

Cities need to retain layers of their history. These days the Auckland Council and their consultants are too keen to sweep everything away - public places, public art, townscapes and landscapes; the slate wiped clean.

We saw this in the plan to knock over the woman's suffrage memorial mural in Khartoum Place and the recent removal of Terry Stringer's sculpture from Aotea Square. Auckland more than any New Zealand city, as the country's preeminent commercial centre, has an awful propensity not just to demolish but also to forget.

Elements of the existing Freyberg Place are good. The low walls create a warm micro-climate. They square up and contain the space, creating an intimate amphitheatre for events. That water feature with its schist has always seemed more Queenstown than Queen City but it creates a sense of a stage.

The proposal gets rid of seats so we will be back to perching on steps, suggesting that Freyberg Place will no longer be a place to linger, it's a place for moving on.

An upgrade is overdue but let's not wipe everything away. Let's have something smart and cool, urban and urbane, which retains, acknowledges and explores elements of our city history. That's what good cities do as they grow and evolve - build on the best of what has gone before. Not go back to the bush.

Bill McKay is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Auckland.