A few years back, wandering around Ōtepoti Dunedin in search of modernist buildings (as you do), I found myself walking through the University of Otago campus. While the university’s branding always features the fine old neo-Gothic stone wedding cakes the campus is so well known for, it also has some really nice modernism. And on that cold winter’s day, I came around a corner, smack bang into a building that appeared to be raised on stilty sort of legs, built from solid concrete with super-graphic, bright-blue numbers. It was love at first sight.

‍

The Archway Lecture Theatres were designed by Ted McCoy in the early 1970s and finished in 1973. The building verges on forbidding: it’s almost entirely closed. It sits on the site of a former tennis court in front of the stone Home Science Building, which was meant to be demolished but never was – instead, McCoy’s building was slotted at a 45-degree angle to the rectangular former tennis court.

‍

It’s a classic brutalist building – raw in its finish, unadorned except for the corduroy patterning on the precast concrete panels. Cross-shaped in plan, with a central circulation area, you can read the rise of the lecture theatres on the outside, its undercrofts ascending, supported by chunky legs. It turns its four bums to the rest of the campus, quite deliberately: it’s about what happens inside and that is made perfectly, rationally clear.

‍

It is a remarkable building that still functions well, and which continues to meet modern earthquake standards: last year, the Dunedin City Council made noises about heritage-listing it. And yet, remarkably, inexplicably and – if you ask us – stupidly, the University of Otago has decided to demolish it. Shame!

‍

For multiple reasons, this is something of a crime – against architecture, and the planet, considering how much embedded carbon is sitting in all that concrete. Around the world, modernism – and particularly brutalism – is at threat, sitting in that awkward phase between fashion and reverence.

‍

So we implore you to get behind Genevieve Robinson’s campaign to save it – her father was the engineer on the building. There’s a petition, and you can also buy merch to support it.

‍

Because buildings this good deserve to be treated better than this.

‍

Save brutalist NZ

‍
change.org

‍

‍