In this exemplar of high-density housing for the homeless, Stevens Lawson Architects’ architecture of openness and inclusion overcomes isolation to support the city’s most vulnerable.

Jury citation

“HomeGround is an immaculate architectural insertion within the fabric of the city. This building remakes its immediate surroundings, with a legible internal street that serves building users and welcomes all. Layers of accretion have been sensitively removed, returning the Prince of Wales tavern as a meaningful heritage structure to Hobson Street. An architecture of openness and inclusion combines material richness with spatial transparency to embrace the city’s most vulnerable, while integrating public spaces and breaking down the traditional isolation of this typology. Exemplar high-density housing provides access to shared outdoor spaces, views and light. The building is at the forefront of multi-level, engineered-timber construction and sustainability in Aotearoa New Zealand. The layered façade references traditional gabled forms, woven textures and technologies of Te Ao Māori and the Pacific, rendering a distinctively local architectural response.”

Stevens Lawson Architects project description

The Auckland City Mission supports the city’s most marginalised residents and HomeGround improves its delivery of existing services, while extending them to provide wraparound care for up to 80 tenants housed onsite. Centrally located and adjacent to St Matthew-in-the-City, HomeGround is designed to not only support the Mission’s objectives but also connect with the wider community by creating a public laneway, activity rooms and commercial spaces.

The building’s form echoes the geometries of St Matthew, creating an empathetic contextual relationship and connection between these two iconic institutions. Its gabled roof evokes a large house, a home for the city’s homeless, while its façade embodies Māori and Pacific motifs, ensuring a building that’s distinctly of Aotearoa New Zealand. Council regulations limited building height to 39m and the former Prince of Wales Hotel, a Category B Heritage building, required retention in its entirety.

HomeGround’s main structural system is locally sourced Cross Laminated Timber, a prefabricated response that minimises embodied energy, structural depths, construction time and onsite labour. The concrete-and-steel podium utilises an exterior diagrid cross-brace system for lateral stability that provides a strong and identifiable street elevation. Innovative design negated the Auckland Unitary Plan’s requirement for inner-city apartments to be air-conditioned, a considerable cost saving for the Mission.

Project team:

Nicholas Stevens, Gary Lawson, Joshua Warne, Sasha Hendry, Howie Kang, James Hay, Yvonne Mak, Juliana Budel, Elliott Morgan, Yvette Overdyck, Natalie Keane, Kat Hebden, Barry Tobin, Bhavina Le Grice, Woo Min Lee, John Scouller