GO NZ: Where to find the best designed buildings in Auckland city

The Excelsior Building's blank wall on its Commerce Street side lately has been put to good use as the canvas for a full-height permanent artwork, Maunga by Shane Cotton. Photo / Russ Flatt

There's no denying it – Auckland, especially the downtown area, gets some bad press. Much of it, unsurprisingly, is road-related.

The temporary disruption is annoying. However, above the streets, the city has another dimension. Like all cities, Auckland – yes, even Auckland – is a vertical creation. If you raise your gaze, you can see the results of a century-and-a-half of design ambition. Up higher it expresses itself in a more sophisticated language – in the columns, parapets and pediments of older buildings and the sleeker facades of more recent structures.

Auckland has a lot to offer the architecturally curious. The latest edition of Auckland Architecture: A Walking Guide presents 65 buildings, grouped into five itineraries in an inner-city catchment defined by the ridgeline running along Ponsonby and Karangahape roads and extending into the Domain. Here are half a dozen buildings worth a closer look.

Sited near the harbour, separated spatially by a couple of city blocks and chronologically by nearly half a century, are the two most elegant buildings in downtown Auckland. West Plaza, on the corner of Customs St West and Albert St, was completed in 1974, to the design of the firm of Price Adams Dodd. The slim, elliptical building is almost impossibly graceful, especially for a commercial building. It's very unlikely that a contemporary developer would opt for such a refined shape over an easily partitioned rectangular box.

From last year, West Plaza no longer exists in solitary downtown elegance. The Hotel Britomart on Galway St is the latest addition to the Britomart precinct. The building, designed by Cheshire Architects, combines clarity of form with textural richness. With its sheer, flat facades clad in bespoke bricks, the Hotel Britomart pulls off the difficult trick of simultaneously standing out from, and fitting in with, the restored heritage buildings on its block.

The Hotel Britomart pulls off the difficult trick of simultaneously standing out from, and fitting in with, the restored heritage buildings surrounding it. Photo / Patrick Reynolds

Those buildings, which look better than ever, are testament to the late Victorian appetite for architectural adornment. The three buildings are best viewed as a group from the south side of Customs Street East, where they read as a strip of ornate urban wallpaper hung between Commerce and Gore streets. The buildings – from west to east, the Excelsior Building (Edmund Bell, 1897), Stanbeth House (Edmund Bell, 1885) and the Buckland Building (Edward Mahoney & Sons, 1885) – were constructed as warehouses on either side of the depression of the late 1880s. In the 1930s, the Excelsior Building lost half its width when Commerce St was widened. The building's blank wall on its Commerce St side lately has been put to good use as the canvas for a full-height permanent artwork – Maunga – by leading New Zealand artist Shane Cotton.

Another surprise sprung in the Britomart precinct is the rehabilitation of Australis House (Mitchell & Watt, 1904) and A.H. Nathan Warehouse (Arthur Pollard Wilson, 1904). The backsides of these neighbouring buildings, which front on to Customs St East, were hidden before the making of Takutai Square. In 2017, in an unusually whimsical gesture, architecture practice Peddlethorp took advantage of the buildings' new visibility by applying a plaster tracery of Australis House's fancy Customs St facade to the formerly plain north face of the building.

Another architectural surprise sprung in the Britomart precinct is the rehabilitation of Australis House and A.H. Nathan Warehouse. Photo / Patrick Reynolds

Auckland Architecture: A Walking Guide isn't just about the CBD. If you'd like to head east, a natural destination is the city's most significant building, Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira. In 2020, just over 90 years since the completion of the original neo-Classical building (Grierson, Aimer & Draffin, 1929), and 15 years after architect Noel Lane suspended a big kava bowl in the museum's 1960 extension (M.K. and R.F. Draffin), the institution opened the re-worked South Atrium, Te Ao Mārama. Designed by Jasmax, FJMT, Design Tribe and Salmond Reed Architects, and featuring artwork by Brett Graham, Filipe Tohi and Chris Bailey, Te Ao Mārama is a determined effort to include in the museum, and in the Auckland story, the living cultures of the city's Māori and Pasifika populations.

The re-worked South Atrium, Te Ao Marama at Auckland Museum is a determined effort to include the living cultures of the city's Maori and Pasifika populations. Photo / Patrick Reynolds

Finally, an excursion to Ponsonby. Vermont St has long had religious associations – these days it is home to both a Catholic seminary and a mosque – so it's appropriate that its most impressive building is a church: Sacred Heart, designed by Thorpe, Cutter, Pickmere, Douglas and Partners. The parish priest wanted an "ultra-modern building", and that, in 1966, is what he got, along with a roof as steep as the spire on a Gothic cathedral.

Sacred Heart on Ponsonby's Vermont St was designed and built in 1966 as an 'ultra-modern building'. Photo / Patrick Reynolds

Auckland Architecture: A Walking Guide by John Walsh, photography by Patrick Reynolds, published by Massey University Press, RRP $25