The Town Hall debacle

Joel MacManus writes:

The Wellington Town Hall is a building that has lost most of its architectural and aesthetic value. It is notoriously earthquake-prone and seems almost certain to face more issues in the future. The city already built the Michael Fowler Centre, the venue that was intended to replace it, 40 years ago. The council has already moved its offices to a different location and doesn’t plan to return. 

This week, Wellington City Council approved another $147m to bring the heritage-listed building up to code, bringing the total cost as high as $330m – more than the construction of Spark Arena and the new Tākina Convention Centre combined. 

The Stadium in Wellington cost only $130 million, and the Council is spending more than twice that on reopening a building that has been closed for ten years.

With the Michael Fowler Centre under construction, the question became: what to do with the old town hall? The Historic Places Trust in 1978 commissioned a report on the building’s heritage quality by William Toomath, one of New Zealand’s most prominent architects and a graduate of Harvard’s school of design. 

That report has never been available online, but a scanned copy was provided to The Spinoff by Heritage New Zealand.

 “Externally, the building in its present state is of dubious merit both historically and architecturally,” the report said. “This building has lost the greater part of its original Victorian swagger, pomposity, and grandeur, an ill-proportioned mockery of a classical work of architecture.”

“As it stands now, the building’s external design is inexpressive and insignificant… As a townscape or scenic unit in the texture of the city, the existing building has little to offer.

“The building might be allowed to stand as a sad joke, regarded with kindly humour and tolerance. But it is another question whether the expenditure of considerable amounts of public money would be justified for the sake of preserving such a debased work under the guise of a worthy example of the classical style in architecture. This, categorically, it is no longer.”

Basically the building is a dog. We’re paying $4,000 a household for a building that will have only a minuscule proportion of the city actually use it.

It began in 2012, with a $30m budget. A year later, it was re-estimated at $43m. This was the figure that started to set alarm bells ringing. The council’s chief executive Kevin Lavery warned it was “an awful lot of money for zero return” and property council president Ian Cassels said the town hall was becoming a “white elephant”, asking, “Is it important enough to justify the amount of spend?”

It was a bad deal at $43 million and an insulting one at $330 million.