Forty-five fourth-year Victoria University of Wellington School of Architecture students are teaming up to develop designs that focus on a creative upgrade of buildings on Courtenay Place and Manners Street. The designs are required to take into account seismic resilience as well as regeneration and refurbishment.

Although all proposals must respect the heritage value of the buildings, architectural design lecturer and course coordinator Simon Twose thinks results are likely to be interestingly varied. “The students are tackling it within a spectrum – from reverent at one end to quite experimental at the other – they’re really pushing and pulling at the concept of heritage, so the final designs are likely to be quite provocative on a number of levels,” he comments.

“Students tend to come up with ideas that aren’t necessarily the same as those a practising architect might think of,” says Simon. “Any way of rethinking how the city might operate is always helpful in stimulating debate and public thinking.”

The Courtenay Place project builds on previous successes over the past three years by Victoria Architecture students in creating redevelopment proposals for Cuba Street and Newtown suburb. The project involves close collaboration with the Wellington City Council and Heritage New Zealand.

Students’ reports outlining the retrofitting of each building, which have been guided by a professional engineer, will be available to building owners via the Faculty of Architecture and Design library. “It is hoped these technical reports will give the owners confidence to proceed with seismic strengthening,” comments Andrew Charleson, course coordinator for the integrated technologies aspect of the project.

There are 32 buildings in the Courtenay Place and Manners Street area that are currently on the Wellington City District Plan’s heritage list, including the St James Theatre (1912), Paramount Building (1910-1919), Courtenay Chambers (1920), James Smith Building (1907), and the Opera House (1912).

A public exhibition of the designs, which will include a scale model of Courtenay Place showing the new architectural interventions, will be officially launched at 6pm on Tuesday 3 November. The exhibition can be viewed on the ground floor of Reading Courtenay (100 Courtenay Place, Wellington) until Friday 6 November.