Opinion: Held Together with Ratchet Straps

Arie Joe

The most damning indictment of the state of this Victoria University of Wellington’s building stock is presently on public display above the front doors of the Student Union Building. There, in plain view of every passing student, are blue cargo straps rated to 2,500 kilograms apiece, doing the job that the architects and structural engineers were paid to do thirty-odd years ago. Namely, keeping the roof attached to the rest of the building.

Now consider that Wellington is the world’s windiest capital city. So, on a hilltop campus that catches every gust off Cook Strait, what did someone decide to build? A Student Union Building with a roof shaped like a kite. Two great cantilevered planes flaring outward from a single slender central post.

Visually striking, no doubt. The trouble is that nature applies wind uplift to the widest, least-supported edges of the kite, where the roof does all the rocking and the centre post does all the worrying. If the branches are bigger than the trunk, something is generally wrong with the tree. In this case, something plainly is.

Some architect scribbled up a roof design, then handed it to a structural engineer in the cheery expectation that the laws of physics would politely yield to the laws of aesthetics. They did not. And so, three decades on, engineers have been called in to lash the building to itself with ratchet straps while everyone works out how to fix what should never have been built that way in the first place.

On architectural awards generally

The prefix "award-winning" applied to a New Zealand commercial or institutional building is, in my observation, a near-perfect predictor of inconvenience for everyone obliged to use it. Real estate agents will quietly admit that "award-winning" attached to a house listing is a near-guarantee of buyer hesitation. The media periodically run admiring photo features on award-winning architectural houses, all of which on close inspection turn out to be visual and functional dogs. Living rooms with no obvious place for a sofa. Kitchens reachable only by ladder. Bathrooms with full-length glass walls facing the neighbours.

Meanwhile every sensibly sited, well-laid-out building in Wellington gets ignored, and the prizes go to whichever firm has produced the most photogenic curiosity that year. The Student Union Building belongs in this tradition. Nice from a distance. Disastrous on contact with weather, students, and the actual day-to-day business of being a building.

The rest of the dog

The atrium was designed without natural ventilation, condemning the building to permanent and audible mechanical wheezing, a constant droning reminder that somebody, somewhere, was paid to fail to think about windows. Anyone who has tried to study, relax, or have a conversation in the atrium knows the sound. An architectural cleverness being paid for by every kilowatt-hour drawn from the grid and every dollar drawn from the maintenance budget.

The doors into the atrium are absurdly narrow. A wheelchair user, or anyone trying to bring in a bike, a piece of stage equipment, or a delivery of any size, can vouch for it. This is an "award-winning" building. The judges, I assume, were not in wheelchairs, on bikes, or carrying anything heavy at the time of their deliberations.

The Student Union Building’s compliance schedule and maintenance records make for sobering reading on their own. The scheduled-maintenance register runs to roughly 300 separate planned jobs across two years. The reactive-maintenance log for a single recent period runs to nearly 300 more, dominated by electrical-lighting faults, plumbing leaks, HVAC faults, blocked toilets, fixture failures, and roof issues. This is what is meant by high-maintenance design.

Bear that figure in mind, because it is occasionally floated that the Students' Association should take ownership of the building. Bear in mind also that VUWSA is already operating on the smell of an oily rag, with the President’s election promises lying conspicuously unfulfilled for want of money. Now picture six hundred maintenance jobs every two years, and a rusty, corroded glazing bill that would devour any sensible Association budget several times over. Taking title to this place would be the financial equivalent of catching a falling knife. Whatever VUWSA’s current financial troubles look like, becoming the owner of a poorly maintained, leaking, and strap-bound award-winner is not the rescue plan. 

And then there are the Gordon Wilson Flats

If the Student Union Building shows what happens when the University commissions a building, the Gordon Wilson Flats show what happens when it buys one.

In 2014, Housing New Zealand sold the University an asbestos-laden, earthquake-prone, eleven-storey concrete wreck that they themselves had decided was beyond economic repair. A government agency, with all its engineers and consultants, looked at the building, looked at its books, and concluded that the prudent course was to dispose of it. The University, which likely trained those engineers and consultants, looked at the same building and concluded that the prudent course was to buy it. For more than $6 million.

Eleven years, several abandoned plans, a lost Environment Court case, and a special amendment to the Resource Management Act later, the bill for getting out of this brilliant decision is now $7.25 million for demolition alone, with works dragging on into 2027. The University has no firm design and no committed funding for whatever is supposed to replace it.

This in a year when the institution has just clawed its way back to a $7.7 million surplus after years of financial struggle and a recent round of staff cuts, while the Tertiary Education Commission still rates it a medium-high financial risk. In short, the cost of demolishing one mistake is roughly equal to the entire annual surplus. One firm whisper from the demolition contractor about cost overruns, and there will be cost overruns, and the University is back in deficit.

And there is only ever one place that money comes from: your fees. The bill for somebody else's award-winning pile thirty years ago, and somebody else's bargain-of-the-century property purchase a decade ago, will land in your bank account in the form of next year's tuition increase, and the next, and the next. Welcome to higher education.

There is the further assertion, occasionally heard, that the new build will be "warm, affordable and sustainable student accommodation." Warm, possibly. Sustainable, perhaps. Affordable on a brand-new bespoke build on a difficult Terrace site overlooking the city, with all the associated groundworks, structural engineering, exterior cladding, and consenting costs of a from-scratch project? The far likelier outcome is premium-priced rooms aimed at students whose parents can comfortably absorb the rent. That is not what the city's student housing problem requires.

What ought to have been done, and still could be

The two buildings are different stories with the same moral. In both cases, the bill is being paid by students, staff, and a maintenance budget that was never sized to absorb such contingencies.

What ought to have been done instead of the current Gordon Wilson site plans is what the Wellington City Council has been doing rather successfully. Convert tired old office buildings, of which the city has plenty, into accommodation. You buy the shell, you fit out the interior, and you skip the groundworks, the structural works, the foundations, the exterior cladding, and the worst of the consenting saga. It is faster, cheaper, lower-risk, and produces genuinely affordable rooms rather than what a brand-new bespoke build is going to deliver. 

The Gordon Wilson site itself was always best suited to its original and frankly more useful purpose: a gateway from Willis Street up onto the Kelburn campus. The Kelburn campus is inaccessible from the flat without a hike, which is a pleasant arrangement for the able-bodied and most travel by bus. Sort the gateway out first. Then put affordable accommodation on the flat where the access exists, in buildings the University does not have to invent from scratch.

As for the Student Union Building, a costly permanent fix is required. Whether the lesson stays up is another question entirely. An institution that cannot reliably keep its own roof attached or tell a bad property deal from a good one, has no business pretending it is short of better things to spend its money on.