Woods Bagot design principal Bruno Mendes is the design leader of Te Pae Christchurch Convention Centre, in conjunction with Warren and Mahoney. He Zooms in to tell Cityscape the story.

Christchurch was the first New Zealand city Melbournian Bruno Mendes ever visited, long before the earthquakes when he was a student. Years later, he would find himself back here presenting a proposal to design the city’s largest new construction project: a convention centre.

He has two mementos from that 2016 meeting, to remind him of what he set out to do. The first is an image of a high-budget Californian convention centre. “It’s an image of what every convention centre ends up being: a big box,” Bruno says. “Massive eyesores.”

The other keepsake is a photo he took from the aeroplane window as he flew out of Ōtautahi: a classic Cantabrian braided river. Its flowing shapes would inspire the form of elements of Te Pae.

You can see the influence of water – braided rivers, the Ōtākaro Avon River, the sea – in different parts of the building. There are intense blue highlights in the auditorium, and almost every part of the interior is accentuated by curves and flowing lines. The side of the centre that faces the river is fluid in form, responding to how the river meanders around the edge of the building.

The side that faces Colombo Street is more rigid, reflecting the city’s shapes and lines, and there are clever transitional areas between the two zones.

Read more: Ōtākaro general manager John O'Hagan on delivering this Anchor Project

The design team have worked with Ngāi Tahu to present iwi narratives in the design, and had a Ngāi Tahu representative working with them in Melbourne. Bruno says the collaboration produced a building that is reminiscent of the space it occupies, the natural environment of Waitaha, and the principles of mana whenua. The ‘chevron’ pattern of tiles is designed to correspond to the patterns on tukutuku panels in wharenui on marae.

Those patterns on the centre’s cladding are perhaps its most defining feature, and they are completely unique. The tiles were specially made in a factory just outside of Christchurch, and the 43,000 tiles in six colours were individually laid in a prescribed order to ensure a random effect with no repeating patterns.

Though given scope to create a massive piece of the city, the design team fought to keep the project tight. “If anything, we wanted the building to be as small as possible,” Bruno says. “One of the challenges for us was, how do we put in such big elements of the brief and make them seem smaller?” The result is a clever arrangement of spaces, with the auditorium and the hall in the centre, and put smaller elements around the edges.

Read more: An interview with the artists behind Te Pae's Te Aika artwork

With travel restrictions in place, it has been incredibly frustrating for Bruno to have to call in from Australia to observe the final stages of construction instead of seeing them in person. He can’t wait to see the final product after it opens in December.

“These things don’t come up too often, so it is an amazing thing to design a project that is a part of the fabric of the city,” he says. “I’m very fortunate and really, really grateful to be given the opportunity to design such a massive piece of the rebuild of Christchurch.”

woodsbagot.com