Te Rangihīroa is the first purpose-built college at New Zealand’s most collegiate university since the Ted McCoy-designed UniCol opened in 1969. If its novelty makes it notable, its size makes it significant. The $104-million building, more than 14,000 square metres in area, houses 450 University of Otago students in two conjoined six-floor blocks, five minutes’ walk from the main campus.

This part of north Dunedin already had some hefty buildings: the Gregg’s factory, Forsyth Barr Stadium and the former dairy factory that, since 1998, has housed the Hocken Library. Even so, Te Rangihīroa stands out as a Gulliver in the Lilliput of its immediate, two-storey neighbourhood. (Urban design was not part of the brief.) It unequivocally advertises the importance to Dunedin of the country’s oldest university, an institution to which a quarter of the city’s population of 130,000 is in some way connected.

But there’s more to Te Rangihīroa’s significance than its scale. The building is a statement of — as they might say at Otago’s still-extant Classics department — the quod erat demonstrandum variety. It is a realisation of current thinking about a building type and an expression, also, of the University of Otago’s unique selling proposition in an academic system that functions as a competitive market. Otago’s offering of an intense undergraduate experience begins with residence close to the campus in one of 15 colleges, as the halls of residence are locally called. All are owned by or affiliated to the university, and threequarters of Otago’s 4000 first-year students live in them. (Next stop, for the second-years who are up for it: one of the fabled flats in the student enclave centred on Castle Street North.)

Te Rangihīroa continues the University of Otago’s role as both owner and operator of halls of residence. Otago, has thus far and in spite of its financial challenges, remained committed to an accommodation model which, because the university takes a long-term approach to its property holdings, has made business as well as social and reputational sense. The case for control was validated by the investigation following the death in 2019, undiscovered for several weeks, of a student in a for-profit student hall at the University of Canterbury: a scandal that prompted the introduction of a mandatory code of practice for tertiary education providers.

Te Rangihīroa is also a marker in another dimension. The project, from its inception in 2018 to its completion early this year, coincided with an evolution in the university’s understanding of, and approach to, te ao Māori. In particular, the university has sought a stronger relationship with the Kāi Tahu rūnanga with mana whenua status in and around Ōtepoti. On both sides, this has been a learning process and remains a work in progress. Gordon Roy, the university’s Strategic Architect, admits that when he took up his position six years ago, interaction with Kāi Tahu on Otago’s development projects was “piecemeal and sporadic”. Te Rangihīroa was something of a stress test of the cultural guidelines for such projects, latterly formulated by the university and Kāi Tahu.

The specific circumstances of the commissioning of Te Rangihīroa heightened expectations of thorough-going cultural engagement. The college’s name was transferred from an existing, smaller hall of residence on a site threatened by the construction of the new Dunedin Hospital, now under way. Te Rangihīroa was a title that couldn’t be lost or slighted. It was the te reo name of Sir Peter Buck (c.1877–1951), one of the University of Otago’s most distinguished alumni — physician, Māori health administrator, MP, decorated war veteran, anthropologist and long-time director of the Bishop Museum in Hawai’i. The name was gifted to the university by Te Rangihīroa’s iwi, Ngāti Mutunga. The Taranaki- and Chatham Islands-based iwi has further connections to Ōtepoti; men from Ngāti Mutunga were among the Parihaka prisoners transported to the city in the late 1870s, and whānau bonds to local Kāi Tahu families date from that time.

Gordon Roy says there were “nine or ten” expressions of interest in the Te Rangihīroa project from architecture firms. Jasmax “ticked all the boxes”, Roy says, “in terms of experience, the team they put together and value for money”. From the preliminary design stage onwards, Jasmax participated in a designbuild process with Christchurch company Southbase Construction.

Essentially, the design divided a big building into two parts: a pair of towers, framed in steel and faced with folded aluminium panels. CLT construction was considered, Roy says, but security of supply was deemed problematic. (The technology’s sustainability credentials, he adds, will be harder to ignore in the future.) The 5 Green Star building is a kind of H-block, if such a term may be uncoupled from its Northern Irish penal associations. The two towers, aligned roughly north–south, are the stems of the ‘H’, joined by the crossbar of the building’s connecting lift lobby. On its most welcoming elevation, the building’s stems — its open counters, typographically speaking — are splayed like arms, reaching north towards Taranaki and the ancestral homeland of Te Rangihīroa.

Simply, the building is organised as a hotel. Other universities may be experimenting with different layouts for halls of residence, opting for pod-like hybrids of hostel and flat but, with Te Rangihīroa, Otago has stuck with a traditional arrangement of stacked floors of individual rooms on both sides of long corridors. Why? “Because we know it works,” says Roy: an assertion supported by annual surveys of college residents. That being said, he adds, “we have made tweaks”. The challenge for the university and, therefore, its architects was to satisfy programmatic requirements while providing habitational appeal.

Economics dictated that the building had to be big to maximise the advantage of its well-positioned site and meet accommodation demand. Socially, the building had to operate in an inclusive manner. Design had a crucial role to play in bridging the gap between what Roy calls the “social sweet spot” of a hall of residence, 300 students, and the actual population of Te Rangihīroa, which is 50 per cent greater.

The reconciliation of the economically feasible and the socially desirable was achieved through the quality of individual spaces, and the amenity and, importantly, the distribution of common areas. Exterior views through operable windows, built-in furniture and broadloom carpet are standard to all student rooms, whether they are the 11-square-metre regular rooms or the 16-square-metre rooms with en suites. (The annual fee for a standard room is around $19,000; for another $2000, a student can have one of the 150 ensuites, a relatively high marginal return on investment, students, and parents, might think.)

The bedrooms, which are accessed off 1.8-metre-wide corridors, are effectively individual fire cells, connected to an automatic door closer. Common areas include the ground floor whare kai or dining hall, the building’s hub, which is served by a kitchen that prepares three meals a day, and the constantly staffed reception, along with numerous tutorial, meeting and social spaces on the same level. The siting of two whānau rooms on each of the five, 90-room accommodation levels – one to each wing – is a key element of a strategy to combat the alienating effect of life in a large college in a new city. Care has been taken to provide islands of calm in the sea of bustle. Jasmax project architect Matthew Downs talks about neurodivergent spaces with a matter-of-factness that would have been inconceivable a few years ago.

The Te Rangihīroa project negotiated a few obstacles along the way. One was unexceptional: the value-managed substitution of a penthouse level of warden accommodation by several adjacent, street-level cottages, designed by another architecture practice. (Roy says the financially motivated change, which reduced the structural load on the slim towers and saved façade costs, had the coincident benefit of giving wardens some separation from their workplace.) Two speed bumps came by surprise: the COVID-19 pandemic, which, at its height, incapacitated half of the construction workforce and delayed completion by at least half a year, and the failure, near the project’s end, of the original façade manufacturer.

There was another issue that had to be worked through. Both Ngāti Mutunga and Kāi Tahu had reservations about the project’s initial cultural direction. A robust meeting at Ōtākou marae was important in achieving a “re-set”, says Megan Pōtiki, a prominent member of the local rūnanga, who credits Roy for his willingness to engage with stakeholder iwi and his recognition of Ngāti Mutunga’s right “to drive the narrative”. For his part, Mitchell Ritai, Chief Executive of Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Mutunga, says the episode confirmed his belief that, in development projects, “it’s always easiest to have cultural discussions early on”. In the end, says Pōtiki, a “re-set” agreed “with graciousness” was “good for all of us”.

Te Rangihīroa’s many cultural components are most strongly evident in the kaokao pattern — the tukutuku chevron, representing the side of the ribs, that signals protection — on the building’s aluminium façade panels, and the tukutuku frit on the exterior glazing. The ‘ribs’ represent the qualities that provide the life support for a student’s university career: manawa roa (resilience); manawa tina (resoluteness); manawa nui (courage); and manawa toka (determination). The college’s typographic identity is set in a typeface Jasmax derived from Sir Peter Buck’s backward-sloping, left-handed cursive writing. Interior cultural elements include the colour coding that references the hues of the Taranaki land- and skyscape in distinguishing the accommodation floors. (The deep green of whenua/land on Level 1, for example, and the light blue of rangi/sky on Level 5.)

The product of ambition, ability, generosity and considerable mutual forbearance, Te Rangihīroa is, says Pōtiki, “the only building in Dunedin or Otago with a complex cultural narrative”. (Of a Māori nature, that is: the city and the region are not short of buildings that tell settler stories.) While the building’s design has a particular cultural character, the college, as all partners in the project emphasise, embraces students of all backgrounds. It does that, says Roy, while “sending a signal to Dunedin, and New Zealand, about where the university is heading”. And where it has come from: impressively, the college expresses the University of Otago’s commitment to its traditions and, reassuringly, to the welfare of its students.