WHAT WE DO
Architecture Workshop Aotearoa (AWA) creates calm coordinated places, tailored to both client and location built around a multi-discipline integration in a design hierarchy. In short we hold spatial, technical, and social problems in the same frame at once, and are answerable for the resulting design. Our role is both that of an integrator as well as a maker; a spatial thinker who sits at the centre of a widening circle of consultants, contractors and compliance. Our value, evident in the design process dialogue and summarised in the documentation, is the critical spatial judgment, risk-bearing, and design authorship that can't be outsourced to AI-assisted tools or project managers. Established in Wellington, Te Whanganui-a-Tara more than 30 years ago, we bring a wide range of international experience, urban design and disciplinary expertise to our projects in Aotearoa.
Our primary design response is inspired by an engaged questioning of the specific site. This includes research into both, “the historic forces of formation to which the land owes its uniqueness and the operations on the natural landscape by human hands.”
Ref: Luigi Snozzi, Ticino Architect, The Lecture of Territory
In the words of AW principal Christopher Kelly,
“The quality of both our constructed and natural environments in the future, will depend on an expanded architectural canon and the spatial judgement to reference locally authentic precedents. Most critically in Aotearoa, design awareness will depend on a culturally convergent understanding of whenua and land.”
”The key to re-imagining will be the landscape”
Geoff Park, Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape and Whenua.
Our Services
Include master planning, feasibility assessment, strategic advice, and architecture and urban design. Our approach is conceptual in nature, with the key organising ideas refined and developed during an iterative design process. Our staff utilize the latest in digital software, with a particular expertise in parametric modeling and BIM – reflecting the landmark projects on which we have worked. In addition to design, AW project-manage the construction process and delivery of the building, including construction methodology, cost and value management, procuring the builder and administering the contract during construction on site.
Our Clients
Include leading government, education and tourism organisations, and ambitious individuals. They are located in New Zealand and overseas, and have aspiring visions for diverse and often challenging sites. AW is selected for our blue-sky thinking and the way in which we tailor each design to the client and location – producing both subtle, place-based solutions as well as the iconic buildings for which we are especially recognised.
Our Experience
Encompasses designing for many of New Zealand’s most beautiful and remote places, as well as our increasingly diverse cities both in Aotearoa and Australia with Kerstin Thompson Architects. Architecture is about increasing the opportunities for people to connect. Our portfolio includes creating new buildings, the adaptive reuse of heritage buildings, resolving complex master plans and reinvigorating tired precincts.
Our People
'Our architectural purpose is to help people realise their potential, be it technical craft in realising design or cost-focused project management.'
Christopher Kelly, Founding Principal
View Our Work
The environments we curate strives for authenticity that integrate structure and services in our design thinking, and together these generate an intensified quality of place.
Image (above): Lindis Lodge
A new five-bedroom suite lodge is excavated into the moraine folds of the earth, the soaring timber ...
