Irving Smith Jack Architects Highly Commended

Irving Smith Jack Architects Highly Commended at 2015 World Architecture Festival

Nelson’s Irving Smith Architects has been Highly Commended at the 2015 World Architecture Festival (WAF), in Singapore, for the design of two structures at Mapua Waterfront Park.

The award was conferred in the category of Production, Energy and Recycling Category at WAF, which is an annual, presentation-based awards programme that attracts many of the world’s best architecture practices.

Thrilled with the result, Irving Smith Jack directors Jeremy Smith and Andrew Irving say that it acknowledges the strength of community that has helped transform the Mapua site from toxic wasteland to parkland.

“It was exciting enough just to be among the number of New Zealand projects selected to be at WAF, and is humbling to then find some success at an international level,” says Smith. “What we really did at Mapua was provide the community with a way to build architecturally and provide an ongoing invitation to recycle the site.”

At Mapua, the new structures – a toilet block and a services block – are strong, raw forms that help create an identity for the park. They are constructed from weathered steel and timber and are evocative of nearby orchard storage buildings. Located at the edge of an estuary, on a site once used for the manufacture of synthetic pesticides such as DDT, Mapua Waterfront Park is an ongoing project that continues as finance allows.

In its WAF category, Smith says the park was “by far the smallest in scale, had by far and away the smallest budget, and was without doubt the least finished.” Finalists in the category came from all parts of the world, with the winning project, Fabrica de Oliva, an olive oil factory based in Uruguay.

Irving Smith Jack also presented another Nelson project at WAF this year. Upper Queen Street retail deals with an issue familiar to many small towns – how to incorporate large-format retail without detriment to the existing urban environment?

“It’s either small town swallows big box or big box swallows small town,” says Smith. “On this project, the right outcome was achieved.”

The other New Zealand architecture practices shortlisted in 2015 were RTA Studio, Patterson Associates, Cheshire Architects, Warren and Mahoney, Wingate + Farquhar and Monk Mackenzie Architects.

The overall winner of 2015 ‘Building of the Year’ was The Interlace, a stacked series of apartment buildings in Singapore designed by OMA / Ole Scheeren. In 2013, The Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki received this accolade.

ENDS

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