Slept very heavily last night, woke up at 11:30 to Geoff asking if I wanted to go into town for food and stuff. So I of course crawl out of bed put on a bandana to hide my messed up hair and out the door. Geoff and I talk about his upcoming rangering stuff and how I can shadow him a little bit and one of the big jobs this year is dog control on the beaches. So we head into a new town for me, Henderson, Geoff has some business to do in town for a while so I get to wander a bit. Henderson is the home of the Waitakere City Council and is one of the larger cities compared to some of the others around the Ranges. I take a little tour of the Council. The plazas and architecture of this building are really really well done. The building sits next to a rail station, so workers in the council can simply get onto an escalator and it takes them up to a sky walk over the tracks. The walk is glass and goes over to a step of stairs that goes out the other end of the building and splits down 2 hallways. One goes into the office area and the other goes into the “council hall” a big area where large scale meetings must be held. I was unable to go down these hallways but was able to look in to see a very highly ornate inside. The outside was a very modern look, with lots of steel and glass. It also seems to be a NZ thing but they seem to use a lot of reds, blacks, and whites for their color schemes not just in buildings but in many other things as well. Realized this quite early as these are the same colors as my car: black car, white rims, red calipers. All three colors contrast with one another and make the white and red really stand out.
To the north of the building is a Japanese inspired garden… found it funny that a tranquility garden was adjacent to a train station haha. Oh situational irony. Neat features and details were in the garden, including bamboo fences that not only block out views to the train but also give shade and seating areas. The water also made some noise to drown out the commotion of the busy city and trains. A neat detail was the water flows across the sidewalk in a 6” wide ¼” deep trench and then a collection area with a pump to return it to the top of the waterfall.
This theme was present in the other plazas as well, open concrete sidewalks with uncontained water, of course the water drops between cracks to recycle it but there are no physical barriers that stop people from walking right into or through the water feature. It was also incorporated into the seating area where the water flows around under or on top and down the concrete benches.
The council was definitely a highlight of my trip so far as it was just so well put together, it was very enjoyable, and it goes to show that when something is planned and designed very well people really appreciate it… at least other planners and designers do heh.
The rest of the city was nice as well, things were oriented very close to one another yet it did not seem overcrowded or busy. The plazas and sidewalks were the rule here, they seem insistant on being the focus of the town. And fortunately they were all very nicely done. One of the ones I liked was in front of the mall, it uses a boardwalk and a stone wall swirling in and out of one another with planters in between. It had nothing to do with the mall but it looked nice and it provided a nice desire line to the mall entrance.
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