KEY POINTS:
The much-maligned ad hoc development at Quay Park has been held up as a reason to provide a masterplan for the coastal Orakei headland.
Planners and a landscape architect want a development for 146 apartments put on hold while a masterplan is developed for the unique and high-value 5ha headland that acts like an island between Orakei Basin and Hobson Bay.
Developer Tony Gapes, who is seeking resource consent for 146 apartments at 228 Orakei Rd and has permission for 42 apartments at 246 Orakei Rd, told the Herald a masterplan was the best outcome for a world-class development.
But he said a masterplan would require a plan change. That would take two to three years and, for commercial reasons, he could not put his developments on hold for that long.
Talks between Mr Gapes and council planners on a masterplan have so far proved fruitless. The planners have been preoccupied with individual applications and maintaining a cloak of secrecy about plans for the area, including the council-owned Pinot function centre and a web of land deals.
Landscape architect Bridget Gilbert and planner Brian Waddell have separately highlighted Quay Park to criticise Mr Gapes' plans and argue in favour of a masterplan for Orakei.
Mr Waddell said separate plans for Orakei, including residential development and a park-and-ride facility at Orakei railway station, were like the cumulative ad hoc result widely criticised at Quay Park.
"I hope that we are not about to repeat those mistakes on the Orakei Peninsula site," he told the resource consent hearing over the application by Mr Gapes to build the 146 apartments.
Bridget Gilbert, giving evidence for the Orakei Residents' Society, said a masterplan would allow a thorough analysis of the constraints and opportunities for the entire area.
She said the proposal was an "overwhelmingly ordinary solution" typical of many of the apartment buildings in and around Quay Park.
"This typically anonymous building character may be suited to commercial sites and possibly inner-city apartment buildings. However, in my opinion, it does little to reinforce the unique location and context of the 228 site."
Ms Gilbert gave the four planning commissioners photographs of several apartment developments to demonstrate the kind of principles she believed were appropriate for the site. They were not intended to advocate a specific architectural style per se, she said.
They included a stepped series of terraced apartments opposite a wetland near Olympic Park in Sydney; the Trinity Apartments on Parnell Rd, showing a simple building block with a clear base, middle and top breaking down the scale and relating the building to the street; and Lighter Quay in the Viaduct Basin, again a simple building block.
Another planner acting for the society, Anne Leijnen, said the unique piece of land forming part of an important natural feature deserved a carefully planned and integrated approach rather than a piecemeal and incremental approach to development.
Mr Waddell said his client, the Auckland Regional Transport Authority, supported the level of density at 228 Orakei Rd but little had been done to ensure that the land use was integrated with the railway station, and that residents in the apartments would actually use the train. He was critical of the applicant and council's transport reports and urged the commissioners to use planning tools stipulated by two new pieces of legislation to come up with a masterplan that addressed the wider transport and land use issues.
The hearing on Friday also heard from Owen Hayward, who lives right up against the proposed development in a house he built over a manufacturing plant at 234A Orakei Rd.
Mr Hayward said he was not against the development but strongly objected to the entrance to the development being built below his bedroom window.
He questioned plans by Mr Gapes' company to build the entrance alongside a 14m tall pohutukawa tree. Arborist Seth Thompson, who was hired by Mr Hayward, said plans to remove roots was unacceptable.
* IN FAVOUR
The architecture has been aesthetically tailored to provide a richness of texture and form and subtlety of colour appropriate to its seaside location, bearing in mind the views that the public will have of it.
David Mitchell, architect for development
The proposed development of this brown-fields site will sit comfortably into its landscape and coastal environment setting with no more than minor adverse landscape, visual or natural character effects on either the immediate context or more distant residential areas.
Rachel de Lambert, landscape architect for Tony Gapes
* AGAINST
The built form is typical of many of the apartment buildings in and around Quay Park and in my opinion does little to reinforce the unique site location and character, and appears to be an overwhelmingly ordinary solution.
Bridget Gilbert, landscape architect for Orakei Residents' Society
Unscrupulous developers, driven by greed, stood before you for the past three days in an effort to persuade you of the merits of replacing this piece of paradise on Earth with 15-high concrete blocks.
Orakei resident Mony Paz
