Te Rangihīroa is the primary purpose-built school at New Zealand’s most collegiate college because the Ted McCoy-designed UniCol opened in 1969. If its novelty makes it notable, its measurement makes it important. The $104-million constructing, greater than 14,000 sq. metres in space, homes 450 College of Otago college students in two conjoined six-floor blocks, 5 minutes’ stroll from the principle campus.
This a part of north Dunedin already had some hefty buildings: the Gregg’s manufacturing unit, Forsyth Barr Stadium and the previous dairy manufacturing unit that, since 1998, has housed the Hocken Library. Even so, Te Rangihīroa stands out as a Gulliver within the Lilliput of its fast, two-storey neighbourhood. (City design was not a part of the transient.) It unequivocally advertises the significance to Dunedin of the nation’s oldest college, an establishment to which 1 / 4 of town’s inhabitants of 130,000 is ultimately related.
However there’s extra to Te Rangihīroa’s significance than its scale. The constructing is a press release of — as they may say at Otago’s still-extant Classics division — the quod erat demonstrandum selection. It’s a realisation of present desirous about a constructing kind and an expression, additionally, of the College of Otago’s distinctive promoting proposition in an educational system that features as a aggressive market. Otago’s providing of an intense undergraduate expertise begins with residence near the campus in certainly one of 15 schools, because the halls of residence are domestically known as. All are owned by or affiliated to the college, and threequarters of Otago’s 4000 first-year college students dwell in them. (Subsequent cease, for the second-years who’re up for it: one of many fabled flats within the scholar enclave centred on Fortress Road North.)
Te Rangihīroa continues the College of Otago’s position as each proprietor and operator of halls of residence. Otago, has to this point and despite its monetary challenges, remained dedicated to an lodging mannequin which, as a result of the college takes a long-term method to its property holdings, has made enterprise in addition to social and reputational sense. The case for management was validated by the investigation following the demise in 2019, undiscovered for a number of weeks, of a scholar in a for-profit scholar corridor on the College of Canterbury: a scandal that prompted the introduction of a compulsory code of follow for tertiary schooling suppliers.
Te Rangihīroa can be a marker in one other dimension. The challenge, from its inception in 2018 to its completion early this 12 months, coincided with an evolution within the college’s understanding of, and method to, te ao Māori. Particularly, the college has sought a stronger relationship with the Kāi Tahu rūnanga with mana whenua standing in and round Ōtepoti. On each side, this has been a studying course of and stays a piece in progress. Gordon Roy, the college’s Strategic Architect, admits that when he took up his place six years in the past, interplay with Kāi Tahu on Otago’s improvement tasks was “piecemeal and sporadic”. Te Rangihīroa was one thing of a stress take a look at of the cultural pointers for such tasks, latterly formulated by the college and Kāi Tahu.
The precise circumstances of the commissioning of Te Rangihīroa heightened expectations of thorough-going cultural engagement. The faculty’s title was transferred from an current, smaller corridor of residence on a website threatened by the development of the brand new Dunedin Hospital, now beneath approach. Te Rangihīroa was a title that couldn’t be misplaced or slighted. It was the te reo title of Sir Peter Buck (c.1877–1951), one of many College of Otago’s most distinguished alumni — doctor, Māori well being administrator, MP, embellished battle veteran, anthropologist and long-time director of the Bishop Museum in Hawai’i. The title was gifted to the college by Te Rangihīroa’s iwi, Ngāti Mutunga. The Taranaki- and Chatham Islands-based iwi has additional connections to Ōtepoti; males from Ngāti Mutunga have been among the many Parihaka prisoners transported to town within the late 1870s, and whānau bonds to native Kāi Tahu households date from that time.
Gordon Roy says there have been “9 or ten” expressions of curiosity within the Te Rangihīroa challenge from structure companies. Jasmax “ticked all of the bins”, Roy says, “by way of expertise, the workforce they put collectively and worth for cash”. From the preliminary design stage onwards, Jasmax participated in a designbuild course of with Christchurch firm Southbase Development.
Primarily, the design divided an enormous constructing into two elements: a pair of towers, framed in metal and confronted with folded aluminium panels. CLT building was thought-about, Roy says, however safety of provide was deemed problematic. (The expertise’s sustainability credentials, he provides, might be tougher to disregard sooner or later.) The 5 Inexperienced Star constructing is a type of H-block, if such a time period could also be uncoupled from its Northern Irish penal associations. The 2 towers, aligned roughly north–south, are the stems of the ‘H’, joined by the crossbar of the constructing’s connecting carry foyer. On its most welcoming elevation, the constructing’s stems — its open counters, typographically talking — are splayed like arms, reaching north in the direction of Taranaki and the ancestral homeland of Te Rangihīroa.
Merely, the constructing is organised as a resort. Different universities could also be experimenting with totally different layouts for halls of residence, choosing pod-like hybrids of hostel and flat however, with Te Rangihīroa, Otago has caught with a standard association of stacked flooring of particular person rooms on each side of lengthy corridors. Why? “As a result of we all know it really works,” says Roy: an assertion supported by annual surveys of faculty residents. That being stated, he provides, “we’ve got made tweaks”. The problem for the college and, due to this fact, its architects was to fulfill programmatic necessities whereas offering habitational attraction.
Economics dictated that the constructing needed to be massive to maximise the benefit of its well-positioned website and meet lodging demand. Socially, the constructing needed to function in an inclusive method. Design had a vital position to play in bridging the hole between what Roy calls the “social candy spot” of a corridor of residence, 300 college students, and the precise inhabitants of Te Rangihīroa, which is 50 per cent higher.
The reconciliation of the economically possible and the socially fascinating was achieved via the standard of particular person areas, and the amenity and, importantly, the distribution of widespread areas. Exterior views via operable home windows, built-in furnishings and broadloom carpet are customary to all scholar rooms, whether or not they’re the 11-square-metre common rooms or the 16-square-metre rooms with en suites. (The annual payment for the standard room is round $19,000; for an additional $2000, a scholar can have one of many 150 ensuites, a comparatively excessive marginal return on funding, college students, and fogeys, may assume.)
The bedrooms, that are accessed off 1.8-metre-wide corridors, are successfully particular person fireplace cells, related to an automated door nearer. Widespread areas embody the bottom ground whare kai or eating corridor, the constructing’s hub, which is served by a kitchen that prepares three meals a day, and the always staffed reception, together with quite a few tutorial, assembly and social areas on the identical stage. The siting of two whānau rooms on every of the 5, 90-room lodging ranges – one to every wing – is a key component of a technique to fight the alienating impact of life in a big school in a brand new metropolis. Care has been taken to offer islands of calm within the sea of bustle. Jasmax challenge architect Matthew Downs talks about neurodivergent areas with a matter-of-factness that might have been inconceivable a couple of years in the past.
The Te Rangihīroa challenge negotiated a couple of obstacles alongside the way in which. One was unexceptional: the value-managed substitution of a penthouse stage of warden lodging by a number of adjoining, street-level cottages, designed by one other structure follow. (Roy says the financially motivated change, which lowered the structural load on the slim towers and saved façade prices, had the coincident advantage of giving wardens some separation from their office.) Two velocity bumps got here unexpectedly: the COVID-19 pandemic, which, at its peak, incapacitated half of the development workforce and delayed completion by no less than half a 12 months, and the failure, close to the challenge’s finish, of the unique façade producer.
There was one other situation that needed to be labored via. Each Ngāti Mutunga and Kāi Tahu had reservations in regards to the challenge’s preliminary cultural path. A strong assembly at Ōtākou marae was essential in reaching a “re-set”, says Megan Pōtiki, a outstanding member of the native rūnanga, who credit Roy for his willingness to interact with stakeholder iwi and his recognition of Ngāti Mutunga’s proper “to drive the narrative”. For his half, Mitchell Ritai, Chief Govt of Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Mutunga, says the episode confirmed his perception that, in improvement tasks, “it’s all the time best to have cultural discussions early on”. Ultimately, says Pōtiki, a “re-set” agreed “with graciousness” was “good for all of us”.
Te Rangihīroa’s many cultural elements are most strongly evident within the kaokao sample — the tukutuku chevron, representing the facet of the ribs, that indicators safety — on the constructing’s aluminium façade panels, and the tukutuku frit on the outside glazing. The ‘ribs’ signify the qualities that present the life assist for a scholar’s college profession: manawa roa (resilience); manawa tina (resoluteness); manawa nui (braveness); and manawa toka (willpower). The faculty’s typographic identification is ready in a typeface Jasmax derived from Sir Peter Buck’s backward-sloping, left-handed cursive writing. Inside cultural components embody the color coding that references the hues of the Taranaki land- and skyscape in distinguishing the lodging flooring. (The deep inexperienced of whenua/land on Stage 1, for instance, and the sunshine blue of rangi/sky on Stage 5.)
The product of ambition, potential, generosity and appreciable mutual forbearance, Te Rangihīroa is, says Pōtiki, “the one constructing in Dunedin or Otago with a posh cultural narrative”. (Of a Māori nature, that’s: town and the area aren’t wanting buildings that inform settler tales.) Whereas the constructing’s design has a specific cultural character, the faculty, as all companions within the challenge emphasise, embraces college students of all backgrounds. It does that, says Roy, whereas “sending a sign to Dunedin, and New Zealand, about the place the college is heading”. And the place it has come from: impressively, the faculty expresses the College of Otago’s dedication to its traditions and, reassuringly, to the welfare of its college students.