Everything gets designed, what varies is the level of effort and ambition that is brought to the enterprise. Scanning the built environment and looking back over time, we can see the contours of this effort and ambition changing. Some things are on the rise. The expansion of urban design as a discipline has seen the normalisation of public spaces that explicitly and abundantly provide for social activity, cultural connection and the natural world. On the other hand, sections of the built environment seem to be dropping out of consideration as worthy of ambitious design.

There was a time when the profession took seriously even the most mundane building types. For decades, the NZIA had a category of national award sitting between the Gold Medal for public buildings and the Bronze Medal for housing — the Silver Medal. It addressed commercial and, specifically, industrial building. Silver Medal-winning projects included such prosaic structures as a vehicle testing station (1956), a sewerage-purification plant (1962), cool stores (1965), a motor parts depot (1968) and workshops (1970), and their designers included the leading figures of the times. More recently, commercial pressures, the demise of government and council architects’ offices, the relentless whittling down of public project budgets, and the general bling-ing out of architecture in the private sector has widened the gap between high and low such that most of our eminent firms would decline such work.

Interestingly, there are other forms of cultural endeavour that are moving in the opposite direction. Much of fine dining relies on the use of the finest and freshest ingredients, and incorporating the exotic and unusual is often an imperative. In contrast, the ‘give me everything’ approach of nose-to-tail eating has emerged as an alternative to this literal cherry-picking. At one level, this is driven by a desire to eliminate waste. Professionally, though, the message is that ‘nothing is beyond — specifically below — the reach of our skills’. Cuts that, in lesser hands, would be pet food or fertiliser are absorbed into gourmet dishes. Is there potential for architects to reclaim the full spectrum of design work in a similar way?

Headquartered on the Waimea Plains, a 20-minute drive from Nelson city, Waimea Nurseries is the nation’s leading supplier of fruit and ornamental trees. Built to accommodate staff and administration activities, Irving Smith’s project sits in the centre of a huge, flat site, a swathe of greenhouses to one side, sheds to another and fields running up to the building on the other two sides. Work here is physically demanding — workers battle with mud and dust, wind, rain and intense sun. Waimea Nurseries is a family-run business but the organisational culture is very flat — the good coffee machine is down in the staff kitchen, not outside the boss’ office. There can be as many 200 employees on site and, once a month, all 200 gather for a meal, perching on every available seat, step and edge. Social connections are critical, and the brief prioritised the utility of the space over the quality of the fabric.

The design absorbed a patchwork of existing buildings — an earthy office block by Min Hall of Arthouse Architecture, lunch facilities and a toilet block. Unsalvageable fabric was pruned away and other functions were rearranged: toilets reconfigured to make them more readily accessible from the outside; the kitchen enlarged and moved to the centre of the compound. New additions define a courtyard — a sheltered seating area runs along one side of the courtyard, and a new two-storey administration block now encloses the other. This new building is informal — the ground-floor rooms are accessed directly from the courtyard. New paving reconciles the various floor levels, with verandahs and canopies allowing staff to move around without getting wet — but they do have to go outside.

With the key connection points at the corners, the compound is porous and hard-wearing; it is designed for use without occupants taking off their work boots. Unsurprisingly, the most important spaces are external — protected from weather, dust and noise but continuous with the surrounding fields. The courtyard constantly hums with activity, Waimea staff coming and going from seemingly every direction. A crew spends a few minutes chatting around the kitchen microwaves before gathering around a large table to eat lunch. A Swanndri-clad foreman perches on a planter with an office worker to exchange dusty sheets of paper for clean ones before disappearing back out of sight.

Kiwi architects have long been fascinated with farm buildings — entire streams of our architectural development have claimed them as a key reference. Elegant sheds. (Oddly, sheds were often propounded as a specifically regional referent, as if other regions didn’t have farm buildings.) We still appreciate the pared-back forms and tough materiality but, these days, a sense of robustness is most often achieved by tucking evidence of sophistication and convenience out of sight. That big glass wall in Group Architects’ 1951 Rotherham House might have used agricultural greenhouse technology but its contemporary successors achieve such effects by employing the full power of high-end detailing and specification, and by hiding the frills in the butler’s pantry.

Waimea Nurseries countenances none of this aestheticisation. The buildings are conceived as farm implements. Dirt and wear are givens, and constant improvisation is required to meet the needs of the day or the season. Irving Smith has recognised the futility of trying to keep this messiness out of sight. The project resists the architect’s urge to hide, tidy up or smooth over. Here, everything is loose, surfaces are patched and history is visible.

For those of us who would still lay claim to the farm shed, or even just architectural modesty, this is confronting. What does it mean for our architecture? It calls us back to the briefs of the Silver Medal era. Waimea Nurseries also reminds us of the aesthetic fragility of much of our contemporary architecture. A misplaced rubbish bin or a notice taped to a wall can puncture the illusion, let alone conduits laid to connect a new system. The ‘hygiene’ obsession of modernism (and neomodernism) lingers and is doing us harm. In an era when we need to be far less tolerant of the wastefulness of ‘tidying up’ or of adding layers to disguise mess, we need to create buildings that can absorb more of what accrues when demands are high: buildings that can wear their histories and tell their stories. Eloquent sheds.