Keeping it in perspective: Stantiall Studio turns 25
Chrissy Hill and Ian Stantiall of Wellington-based Stantiall Studio.
The Owhiro Bay Information Centre (2007) for Wellington City Council.
The Australian Memorial for Pukeahu Park (2012) for Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects, Australia.
The Odlins Redevelopment (2003) for Athfield Architects.
With work in both Aotearoa and abroad, Wellington-based Stantiall Studio has been creating architectural illustrations and perspectives for 25 years. To celebrate, studio founders Ian Stantiall and Chrissy Hill’s work will be exhibited at Wellington’s Thistle Hall Gallery, from 20 to 24 August.
Opening today, the exhibition includes a curated collection of the studio’s illustrations, from New Zealand projects to international commissioned works, alongside a collection of their personal works – Hill’s bold, graphic oils on canvas and monoprints and Stantiall’s pen and wash sketches and wood cut prints.
Over the past 25 years, Stantiall Studio has received a number of international awards, including from The American Society of Architectural Illustrators (ASAI) and the Japanese Architectural Renderers Association (JARA), with one judge commenting: “Ian Stantiall has now joined a prestigious group earning one of the highest honours the architectural illustration profession can bestow.”
In 2012, Stantiall received an NZIA President’s Award with the commendation: “Through his painterly visualisations of as-yet unrealised projects, Ian Stantiall provides a valuable and even flattering service for many New Zealand architects”.
Stantiall and Hill say their work plays an important part in helping to communicate the designers’ and planners’ intent. The studio has had a role in many of the country’s major urban design projects requiring considerable public consultation, including Silo Park and Wynyard Quarter in Auckland and Waitangi Park and Pukeahu Park in Wellington. They cite projects by Athfields and Wraight + Associates as some of their most meaningful but there have been many other strong relationships with architects, urban designers and local authorities, from Warren and Mahoney, Patterson Architects, Cheshire Architects and Ports of Auckland to Tennent Brown, Architecture Plus, Herriot Melhuish O’Neill, Stephenson and Turner and Assembly Architects, amongst others. All have had prospective projects brought to life at the hand of the studio.
Stantiall began his illustrating career at Athfield Architects in 1990, leaving the Khandallah practice in 1999 to establish Stantiall Studio with Hill. 25 years on and in the face of sophisticated rendering and AI, the pair are “still in the game!”
Stantiall says the business has learned to adapt with changes in technology. “We started off with the Grant Enlarger and a fax machine and now have the latest computer software,” he says, adding that there’s still demand for evidence of the human hand “to provide a level of a familiarity, comfort and artistry that is often absent in computer-generated imagery”.
“Hand-drawn images are such a useful and evocative way to present early-stage concepts, prior to more developed design and digital modelling,” says Stantiall. “They retain a sense of abstraction – fitting for preliminary design thinking. We still use hand-drawn and watercolour components from our extensive image library collection and, on occasion, set up perspectives on the board from first principals. And there are also still some architects who don’t have rendering programmes; they require the old school approach that we are happy to provide.”
In Perspective: 25 Years, Together & Apart
Thistle Hall Gallery
Wellington
20–24 August, 2024
