City's long-harboured hope

Party central. Ridiculous that such a tired cliche has spawned an architectural debate.

But it has and, true to form, Auckland has risen to the occasion with aplomb. Great idea. Waste of money. Yeah, nah.

The city with the beautiful harbour surrounded by the ugliest of architecture desperately needs somewhere for Rugby World Cup fans to gather and have a good time.

There are other places this could happen, such as Viaduct Basin or Aotea Square.

But officials have seized on the newly acquired Queens Wharf at the foot of Queen Street as the place for the shindig.

It's understandable. Aucklanders, for so long cut-off from their harbour by a voracious port company have finally been given the opportunity to go down to the sea again.

But already wheels are turning once again to privatise this hard-won public space for commercial purposes.

Architects are working hard on both sides of the fence. The first plans and ideas to emerge are distressingly mediocre. But there are more plans coming and questions aplenty - whether the existing wharf sheds should be demolished, whether the wharf is the best place for cruise ships and how to re-establish the wharf as an extension of Queen St.

Pete Bossley, one of the lead architects of Te Papa museum, asks an obvious question about party central. "Shouldn't we be supporting all the bars and pubs around the waterfront that are already there?"

Surely that's where the real party happens after the games - around the Viaduct - as it did after the America's Cup races. Others point out the potential for great party atmosphere simply by closing streets - such as part of Quay St from the ferry building to the Viaduct.

But if the city must have gathering on the wharf, they could do worse than bringing in Mike Mizrahi. He organised Louis Vuitton glamour events, put the giant inflatable rugby ball in Paris during the last Rugby World Cup, and transformed the Auckland Town Hall into a psychedelic light show for the launch of Telecom's new mobile network.

"Give him 18 months and he'd turn the wharf into a magic place for six weeks," says Bossley. "They wouldn't have to do anything to the sheds. You could do it with lighting and temporary structures - probably clean the buildings up a bit, but not much. You could even treat it as a kind of ruin that you have these great parties in."

It's an argument that says before we charge off spending millions of dollars to refurbish a couple of rumpty wharf sheds, lets think a bit more about what we want to achieve.

Celebrated architect David Mitchell, who knows quite a bit about sheds and New Zealand architecture, having written the book and done the TV series The Elegant Shed is worried about the mad rush too.

"I don't believe temporary buildings done up are temporary buildings any more. My guess is they are there for good." He's not that impressed with the sheds' elegance either.

"As heritage objects I don't believe there is much merit in them. They're a couple of sheds. They're all right, but there is nothing architecturally distinguished about them. What I see is a couple of shells that would need a terrific amount of work to turn them into anything really habitable."

Pause for thought and write a proper brief, is also the message from Ivan Mercep, a founding member of Jasmax, New Zealand's largest architectural company and the 2008 recipient of the New Zealand Institute of Architect's Gold Medal.

"The important thing is to not rush into a temporary solution and spend a lot of money on it, but to have a temporary solution which is cost-effective and spend the rest of the money on determining what are the appropriate uses for that area."

Take, for example, the proposal that the wharf should become a cruise ship passenger terminal. Mercep points out that at present, passengers coming off the ships are quickly whisked away to buses going to other destinations for the day.

"They don't hang about there [at the wharf]. Has anybody checked out what you require for a terminal? It may be nothing like what some people have in mind."

Bossley agrees. "Nobody has shown us a long-term strategy plan for the waterfront saying that's the best place for the passenger terminal."

The idea of a cruise ship terminal dominating the wharf and squeezing out the public worries ARC councillor Joel Cayford. He is determined that the privatisation of public space that happened with the Hilton Hotel and the existing terminal on neighbouring Princes Wharf is not repeated on Queens: "Having destroyed public use on one wharf, do we want to destroy another?"

He laments the poor quality of public space in Auckland and believes that rather than an iconic building like the Sydney Opera House, what Aucklanders really want is an iconic public space. "We need to say first and foremost that this wharf is a public space."

The architects the Herald spoke to agree - all pointing to the extraordinary potential of the expansive northern end of Queens Wharf with its openness and magnificent views of the harbour. Several spoke about open spaces like Federation Square in Melbourne and said if a cruise ship terminal was to be part of the brief, that public access should be the prime consideration.

Many pointed to the terminal at Yokohama providing public access over its entire area with undulating timber boardwalks and grass roofs, as an example of how that could be achieved.

Cayford, who has worked with Urban Planning Masters students, says the key ingredients for successful public spaces, especially for families and older people, are very simple - public toilets, public seating and nearby places to buy cheap food like sandwiches, pies and soft drinks.

But finding all three basic amenities in central Auckland public spaces is almost impossible. Or, in places where they do exist, such as the downtown ferry terminal, the public are excluded unless they have purchased a ferry ticket.

Cayford urges more consideration of the potential of the existing sheds too, pointing out that in their original form nearly 100 years ago they had wide verandas on both sides - making them ideal spaces to shelter from the vagaries of Auckland's weather.

Many of the architects suggest that if the immediate needs of the Rugby World Cup are dealt with by some kind of low cost temporary event space, what's really needed is an international design competition to properly explore what could or should be done on the wharf.

"It should be international because I don't think most New Zealand architects are up to it," says Mitchell. "It should be densely occupied with buildings and public use and open space that allows views of the water - lots of that. It's not shed talk, it's, 'let's get excited about something'. It's got to be deeply attractive to the public."

Several architects are busy with wharf schemes to promote what might be possible. Gordon Moller of Moller Architects and Sky Tower fame has done one incorporating a 700-seat theatre for the Auckland Theatre Company, but seems reluctant to reveal it to the public. Barry Copeland of Copeland Associates is working on a scheme that he hopes to show next week.

Critical to making Queens Wharf an attractive public space is providing new ways to cross Quay St which Copeland sees as a a more significant barrier than the red fence. "When it was first built, it was called the Queen St wharf. It seems to me that somehow if we re-establish the street on to the wharf, we re-establish the connection for the public."

His design approach is pragmatic. "You have to have a long-term view. But the Rugby World Cup is a catalyst and this is the moment to seize."

Copeland believes even with the short timeframe requiring building to start early next year, there's an opportunity to put a "lightweight steel structure with tension membranes" on the wharf that caters to the World Cup party, cruise ships and beyond.

Think City of Sails, fabric-covered roofs, fast-building technologies and tensile structures like the Millennium Dome or the multicoloured plastic foil air panels of the Allianz Arena football stadium in Munich. Sounds great. But whether the city will get an iconic public space is far from decided.

Going on past history, we're far more likely to get, as one architect put it, another "cheapo, half-cocked Auckland affair".