The New Zealand Institute of Architects has awarded its premier individual honour, the Gold Medal for career achievement, to Stuart Gardyne, a director of the Wellington firm architecture+
The New Zealand Architecture Awards’ Gold Medal is the highest level of professional recognition a New Zealand architect can attain. For Gardyne, it acknowledges an accomplished career during which he has achieved consistently high standards for and with his clients.
A born and bred Wellingtonian, Gardyne through his architecture has helped shape the city and its surrounds for close to four decades. Significant projects include the Pataka-Porirua Museum of Arts and Culture, Morrison’s Bush Cabin and Ponatahi House in the Wairarapa, the Hutt City administration building, the acclaimed Conservation House and Spark Central in the city and, on the waterfront, the Te Wharewaka o Pōneke-Te Raukura.
In awarding the Gold Medal, the Institute of Architects noted Gardyne’s generosity – to architecture as a profession as well as the wider public realm.
“Stuart has become an architectural leader as well as an excellent designer, and the profession he so admirably represents has benefited enormously from his collegiality, intelligence and integrity.”
Gardyne, whose work spans residential and commercial projects of all scales, first made a name for himself in the early 1990s with the significant conversion of Wellington Public Library into City Gallery Wellington. He would return to the Gallery in 2006 to design a distinctive extension. Clad in a ‘rusted’ metal skin, the extension respects the proportions of the original building while meeting the requirements of a modern public art gallery. In the coming years, Gardyne will begin a third stage of work that will better integrate the building with Civic Square.
In the late 1980s, Gardyne established the practice architecture+, where he continues to make a name for himself with buildings that respect the people who occupy them and the landscape, whether urban, rural or natural, that surrounds them.
Photos by: Paul McCredie & Patrick Reynolds
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