The goal of stacking games is to position elements, such as cards or blocks, strategically, above or beside one another to gain height without collapse. These games test a player’s motor neurone skills and are enacted in physical (House of Cards, Jenga…) and digital (Tetris…) forms. Given the societal value of play, stacking has, naturally enough, toppled over into architecture.

Architectural stacking became a late-20th-century design strategy for layering building spaces and volumes (vertically, horizontally, diagonally) to address urban density, structural efficiency, functional organisation and technological advancement. As with stacking games, architectural stacking is evident in many forms. With metabolism, Moshe Safdie’s prefabricated Lego-like modular units in Habitat (1967).¹ In postmodernism, Philip Johnson witfully deployed a classical pediment atop a modern skyscraper (1984 ).^{2, 3} High technician Richard Rogers stacked service elements ‘inside out’ on Lloyd’s Building (1986).⁴ In deconstructivism, Frank Gehry ‘haphazardly’ interlocked titanium volumes as the Guggenheim in Bilbao (1997).⁵ 

It is the Dutch variant of architectural stacking I find most impressive in its rationale. With MVRDV’s inaugural project, Villa VPRO,⁶ the open-plan libre of the modern office was transformed into the section libre. Flipped and folded floor plates punctured with cascading voids brought daylight into the deepest plan (50m) in the Netherlands. In response to the innate flatness of the countryside, MVRDV later stacked absent topographies of artificial hills, lakes, dunes and dykes into the Dutch Pavilion of Hannover Expo (2000).⁷ The section became the façade. 

A university campus is a micro-city. When developed in coordination with its host city, the campus has context. Gown engages town. Consider the playing field, which is the University of Auckland city campus. At 23 hectares, it’s the size of the Wynyard Quarter, yet, at its heart, has the density, grain and vibe of Britomart. 

My office⁸ looks directly towards the University’s new Recreation and Wellness Centre, or Hiwa (more on the name game later), by Warren and Mahoney (WAM) and Canadian community-sports specialist MJMA. Over the past four years, I have witnessed amenity, budget and ambition unfold at scale. “Physical activity is widely recognised”, the client notes, as an “important contributor to student wellbeing, engagement, retention, and academic success.”⁹ Given one requisite for good architecture is a good client, Hiwa stacked up on paper like an architect’s dream job. So, how did the project play out?

The original Recreation Centre, completed in 1977, was designed by Ivan Mercep of JASMaD. Mercep left quite the architectural legacy on campus: Waipapa Marae and Māori Studies, the Fale Pasifika, the Arts and Commerce Building and International House. Although the Rec Centre won an NZIA Enduring Architecture Award, it had, by the early 2010s become progressively compromised thanks to the burgeoning demands of a growing campus cohort. When it opened, the student roll was around 12,000, and the gym weighed in at 4500m². Thirty years later, “the positive impact of the old Rec Centre was being hindered by its physical constraints”.¹⁰ With no pool, overcrowding and poor ventilation, the Rec Centre met the wrecking ball. That alternate Centre of student well-being, Shadows Bar, where having “a jug is a rite of passage akin to donning a graduation robe”,¹¹ was strategically relocated. Nearby. 

Things have evolved somewhat. 

With 6330 full-time-equivalent staff¹² and a student cohort of 46,045,¹³ the University of Auckland is today, after the Auckland District Health Board (c. 12,268)¹⁴ and Auckland Council (11,181 FTE),¹⁵ the city’s third-largest employer. If the School of Architecture were an architectural practice, it would be the country’s largest. The University of Auckland is a sizeable city, comparable to, say, Nelson (55,200).¹⁶ Its population is dispersed across several campuses, including Grafton, Newmarket, Manukau, Waitematā, Te Tai Tokerau, Leigh Marine and Waiheke – with its deliciously named Goldie Wine Science Centre. 

With the nation’s top-ranked university¹⁷ as a client, considerable research might be anticipated within the architectural brief. Cited references included: “College Students Working Out at Campus Gyms Get Better Grades”¹⁸ and “The Impact of Engagement in Sport on Graduate Employability”.¹⁹ In terms of planning data, the brief called for a 60 per cent expansion of facilities, a 260 per cent larger sports hall and 800 per cent more storage. Additional demands were a 33m, 10-lane pool and a 2000m² multi-purpose outdoor astroturf pitch. 

Hiwa is a game-changer. The ambition is stratospheric. Neither Copilot nor ChatGPT finds a better exemplar of a tertiary recreational centre. Here is the scorecard of sorts for this game of architecture. 

Although Hiwa is a big box (50m wide, 75m long), its scale does not feel out of place. Rising 35m high along Symonds Street, the building is still four storeys lower than Architectus’ 22,000m² multi-atria Science Centre (Building 302) next door. The building’s Gross Floor Area measures 22,280m² – 70 per cent of the benchmark (of 0.92m² per student) set by the National Intramural Recreational Sports Association (NIRSA).²⁰ Using this metric to calibrate the ‘competition’ (for international students), the brief examined 14 universities. Only Ohio State University scored higher. The University of Auckland has upped its game in terms of recreational provision, and architecture has improved the University’s global reputation by creating an “outstanding experience for recreation, wellbeing, sport and exercise related teaching and research facilities”. 

I use the pedestrian crossing on Symonds Street to get to Hiwa. Red light. Waiting and watching, this viewpoint is advantageous for reading the building, particularly at night. Aligned perfectly with the crossing stands a big shiny box, simultaneously split and unified by a central circulation zone. Green light. Once on the other side, there is, however, no central access as the entrance sidesteps right towards a lobby (some commentators might consider this arrangement to be a little incongruous). 

The lobby features what is becoming a recurring motif in educational buildings: the bleacher foyer. A grand public stair draws students inwards beneath vast volumes above and facilitates the level change between Princes and Symonds Streets. The new Student Plaza is a mound-shaped roof that is formed to emphasise a 3m diving board below. It’s a great fan zone from which to watch football on the giant new screen. Cross-campus permeability means one can pass through the building without even entering the sports facilities. 

Many tours of buildings require a ride to the top and a spiralling walk down. With Hiwa, a cleaved figure-of-eight-track laned hīkoi (walk) and oma (run), greets one on the rooftop with a rare 360-degree panoramic loop of the campus-city connect.

As a metric, floor area reveals little about how spaces stack up as a unified whole. Project Architect Blair Johnston talks of Hiwa’s “non-malleable volumes”. For example, the volume of a squash court (6.4x9.8x5.6m = 350m³) differs drastically from that of a futsal pitch (40x20x5m = 4000m³). Where the plan was once the generator, contemporary architecture uses the section. Vertical relationships are the priority: height, volume and circulation the emphasis. The success of Hiwa is partly the result of the skilled stacking most apparent in the section that runs parallel to Symonds Street.²¹ Instead of placing the two tallest interior volumes, which are both 10m in height, on the same floor, the Event and Practice Sports Halls are staggered to create a split level. Aside from halving the climb length of the stairs to reach an active floor (Haumi’s carved balustrade cuffs provide intimate moments in cultural wayfinding), staggering enhances interconnectivity and community between what otherwise could have been a stack of closed black boxes. In Hiwa, the sports halls are surprisingly fully glazed, naturally lit and refreshingly finished in white; black is reserved for the central two-stair zone. Buffering the monochromacy between Sports Hall and hallway is a multicoloured interplay of vertical battens (whakapapa to Sauerbruch Hutton’s Brandhorst Museum) and biophilic greenery from the adjacent mature trees but, most of all, from the coloured sportswear of active students. For further reading in experimental social psychology, see ‘Color-in-Context’ theory.²²

Technological ambition is on display with the southern hemisphere’s first glass reconfigurable sports floor. A touchscreen activates six different court lines via white LED lights beneath matt black glass flooring, avoiding the confusion caused by multiple markings on a conventional gym floor. Dimpled ceramic dots provide grip whilst the floor itself is flexible, allowing for ball elasticity and bodily shock absorption. It was manufactured by Germany’s ASB MultiSports; think glass ‘floor Sprung durch Technik’!²³

This building is all about movement: through, around, across. Unlike other university auditoria, there is little seating except for the extractable audience seating in the Event Sports Hall and the bleacher lobby. You’re on the go.

The new Centre is called Hiwa after Hiwa-i-te-rangi, the youngest star in the Matariki cluster and, according to WAM, “symbolises aspiration, growth and ambition – a perfect fit for this vibrant hub for wellbeing and community”.²⁴ Meanwhile, Te Aka dictionary offers a more pragmatic reading of ‘hiwa’: “to be vigorous, active… entertaining”.²⁵ Te reo linguist Ray Harlow has written of the practice of gifting Māori names which are opaque and metaphorical and do not reveal anything of the host, thus requiring an English name as well.²⁶ “Some years ago, I was asked for advice on a Māori name for the Southland Museum. On suggesting Te Whare Taonga o Murihiku, I was told that would not do; the Māori name had to be poetic.”²⁷ Can a building have a name that does exactly what it says on the tin?²⁸

With Hiwa, the tin is a stainless-steel-and-glass box, which shrouds the actions within, except at street level. It is unfortunate not to marvel at a vertical stack of pumping, kicking, hitting, running, shooting and sweating students.

Hiwa is, without a doubt, a student HIIT.²⁹ The membership fees are just $200pa – easily beating CityFitness at $364pa. Fees for staff ($1040 pa) and the wider community ($1500 pa) are far less competitive, signalling that this building targets the student body. When I quizzed a Les Mills gym bunny (one club membership $1350pa) about whether or not she would switch to Hiwa, the riposte was that, while the facilities are undoubtedly world-class, the programming seemed underwhelming when up against Les Mills’ BodyAttack, BodyBalance, BodyCombat and The Trip. Perhaps post-occupancy programming is beyond the remit of the architect. Nonetheless, there will be few student complaints as the membership data testifies. Within the first few weeks of Semester One, Hiwa already has more than 10,500 active members, of which 96 per cent are students. 

In the contemporary global marketplace, universities operate with a student-customer focus. In the QS World University Rankings 2025, the University of Auckland has five subjects in the Top 50. What is the highest-ranked subject? Sports, at 24th!³⁰ As an academic facility, Hiwa shows the University of Auckland to be flexing its sizeable economic muscle through the astute architectural gymnastics of its new student body building.

REFERENCES

^{1  archdaily.com/404803/ad-classics-habitat-67-moshe-safdie}

^{2  archdaily.com/611169/ad-classics-at-and-t-building-philip-johnson-and-john-burgee}

^{3 The design whakapapa of a classical-modernist stack is locally evident in Miles Warren’s
23 Customs Street.}

^{4 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd%27s_building}

^{5 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guggenheim_Museum_Bilbao}

^{6 mvrdv.com/projects/172/villa-vpro}

^{7 arquitecturaviva.com/works/pabellon-de-los-paises-bajos-en-la-expo-2000-0}

^{8 Office 422, Building 421 East}

^{9 UoA Recreation Centre Redevelopment Brief, 3 February 2016.}

^{10 UoA Recreation Centre Redevelopment Brief, 3 February 2016.}

^{11 facebook.com/ShadowsBarNZ/posts/10156829581245910?ref=embed_post}

^{12 auckland.ac.nz/assets/about-us/our-ranking-and-reputation/key-statistics/018-24-key-stats-2023-v3.pdf}

^{13 University of Auckland Annual Report, 2023.}

^{14 adhb.health.nz/assets/Documents/About-Us/Planning-documents/ADHB-Annual-Report-202021.pdf}

^{15 aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/about-auckland-council/performance-transparency/pages/information-about-staff.aspx}

^{16 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson,_New_Zealand}

^{17 topuniversities.com/where-to-study/oceania/new-zealand/guide#:~:text=The%20University%20of%20Auckland%20is,and%20a%20wine%20science%20centre}

^{18 purdue.edu/newsroom/archive/releases/2013/Q2/college-students-working-out-at-campus-gyms-get-better-grades.html}

^{19 shura.shu.ac.uk/16226/}

^{20 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intramural_and_Recreational_Sports_Association}

^{21 Page 6 of the Architect’s Statement.}

^{22 sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780123942869000020}