Brian Rudman: Old faithful deserves to live again

Illustration / Peter Bromhead

Council’s abandoned HQ could continue as core part of city hub ... and save ratepayers lots of money

When the air-conditioner packed up in my trusty old car a couple of years back, I grew accustomed to driving with the windows up or down, according to the seasons. Then came the night when a heater hose parted and the car filled with steam. The love affair was over. A day or two later I took the derisory discount offered by the car salesman and drove my new car out of the yard, abandoning old faithful to its fate.

This month, Auckland's civic administration building has suffered the same treatment.

When it opened in 1966, it was New Zealand's highest building, and Auckland City's pride and joy; now it stands forlorn and abandoned. More than 2400 Auckland Council staff and politicians from it and neighbouring buildings started the new year in the more luxurious former ASB building just up the hill in Albert St, and their old accommodation is now officially a heap of junk.

First came the typical Auckland response - bowl it over. But with Heritage New Zealand, the Civic Trust and others calling for it to be classified a heritage building, the officials have conceded that's not the answer. At least in the short term. A hearing is scheduled for September.

While they wait for this process to run its course, councillors were yesterday told the building was no longer suitable for reuse by anyone in the council "family" and agreed to call for "expressions of interest" from private developers.

Officials said "there would appear to be no valid financial business case to consider refurbishing this building for continued office use," and that the private sector would only be interested in converting it for residential use, on a freehold basis.

Council advisers estimate the cost of removing asbestos and refurbishing would cost $95 million for office use but only $79 million for residential use. This is considerably more than the $34 million to $53 million estimate last September by Jones Lang LaSalle research director Justin Keane.

While it's good that demolition seems to be fading from the list of options, what remains baffling is the council's reluctance to consider retaining the building as an Auckland Council-owned office block.

For all the agonising over the presence of asbestos cladding around the external steel framing, and the unfashionability of small floor plates - which the building apparently suffers from - in current office layout ideology, the building remains a safe and adequately serviced working environment. But the risk is it won't stay that way for long if it's left empty.

Also, it's not as though the cash-strapped Auckland Council has a surplus of office space. You have only to wander down to the harbour's edge to see council bureaucrats in all sorts of pleasant rental office space.

My colleague Bernard Orsman has calculated that Auckland Transport, for example, is paying $1.65 million annually for three floors of HSBC House at 1 Queen St. Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development has two floors in the old Harbour Board HQ on Princes Wharf, at $681,000 a year, and the Independent Maori Statutory Board pays $253,143 in annual rent for its Viaduct Harbour HQ.

Would it be such a trial to house them in the civic administration building and give ratepayers the rent?

Alternatively, there's long been talk of housing arts organisations such as the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, New Zealand Opera and the like close to the Aotea Centre as part of enhancing the concept of the Aotea Precinct as the focus of the arts.

Council officers say that will have to wait until sometime in the never never after the underground rail tunnel is completed, and a new building can go up on council land alongside Mayoral Drive.

Is it too much to ask that instead of just seeking expressions of interest from commercial property developers, the council properly investigates re-using this building for civic and community activity?

After all, the Aotea Precinct was envisaged as the central hub of Auckland artistic activity, linked to the major theatres, public library, art gallery and major centres of learning. To now privatise a building smack bang in the centre of the precinct and sell it off for cheap residential use is to spit on the whole concept of a planned cultural precinct.

Instead of looking for the quickest and cheapest way of getting shot of the building, we should be exploring ways to reuse it, and to restore it to its role as the precinct's central core.