Heritage buildings have become the centrepiece of the community in Hobsonville Point. PHOTO CREDIT: WILLIS BOND & CO.
THINK ABOUT ADAPTIVE REUSE
Case Study 3.3 Hobsonville Point
Imbuing a raw subdivision with a sense of place is no easy thing, but consider the scale of the task when you are creating an entire new township. Such was the challenge confronting the architects of Hobsonville Point, a master-planned urban redevelopment of the former Hobsonville Airbase that will eventually be home to 8000 people.
air force buildings could provide a sense of belonging in an otherwise fresh-faced new suburb. Alongside this preference for repurposing buildings, there was an undertaking to retain as much as possible of the mature vegetation and some original streetscapes. As one resident put it, the new community would be built “on the bones of the old”.
Executed poorly, the venture might have birthed a new part of Auckland with harbour views to die for but lacking a soul. The fact that it has not become a beige commuter suburb on the Upper Waitematā Harbour is due in large part to the far-sighted repurposing of the airbase’s original buildings.
This overarching commitment to historic character was critical, because repurposing these buildings would probably not have stacked up in narrow commercial terms. “You might have looked at those individual buildings and said if we pulled them down the sites would be worth much more,” said Katja Lietz, General Manager of Master-planning and Place-making at HLC. “What we did instead was to say that the value those buildings added to the whole area, and therefore to other properties, was significant. Repurposing them would add value to the project overall.”
Led by the Hobsonville Land Company (HLC), which was established in 2006 as a subsidiary of Housing New Zealand to master plan and develop the township, the venture launched with a strong sense of the importance of ‘place-making’. It had a vision that the base’s surviving houses, hangars and other
The Sunderland Hangar has been adaptively reused to serve a mix of purposes for local residents. PHOTO CREDIT: WILLIS BOND & CO.
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SAVING THE TOWN
