KEY POINTS:
Three 1960s houses in Wellington and Auckland have received Institute of Architects' awards for enduring architecture.
Architects Bill Toomath, Bill Alington and Jack Manning got awards for the houses, which they designed three decades ago.
In Wellington, the Toomath house was a sequence of living spaces along a steep north face of Mt Victoria with a strong rectangular form, the judges said.
And the Alington house in Karori was an exercise in the use of mathematically determined proportioning that produced a prototypical suburban house.
The Manning house in Devonport on Auckland's North Shore was a romantic clifftop home that manipulated scale and proportion to engender a sense of intimacy with its site, the surrounding pohutukawa trees and the building fabric itself.
Pip Cheshire, the national awards convenor and an Auckland architect, said the three homes were special.
"They are great examples of experimental architecture of the 1960s that explored new ways for the nuclear family to live."
