Home of the Year 2011 entries

Entries to our annual Home of the Year award close at 5pm this Thursday March 17. As many of you already know, the Home of the Year award is New Zealand's richest architectural prize, with a first prize of $15,000. We welcome submissions from architects and homeowners.

This year we're also delighted to announce the support of our new awards partner, Altherm Windowr. Altherm are also generously supporting the visit of the international member of our Home of the Year jury - whose name we will be revealing later this week.

In the meantime, you can download the Home of the Year entry form here.

We like: Beijing (part one)

It's Jeremy here - I've just been on holiday to Beijing and thought I'd show you some of my (very amateur) photos. The Chinese capital, of course, is justifiably well-known for the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the charming old hutong neighbourhoods, and many other older buildings. But China's incredible economic growth also means its capital serves up a feast of fantastic contemporary architecture. I won't show it all to you here (I'll save some other shots for subsequent posts) but here are some highlights. First, the airport, by Foster + Partners. Huge, elegant and swooping:


Almost everyone knows what Herzog and de Meuron's 'Bird's Nest' stadium looks like. Here's my favourite image that I took of it:

Still not quite occupied is OMA's CCTV Tower, partly because the fire at the TVCC Tower to the left (which you can see charred and scarred in the photo below) set back progress. I was fascinated by the almost organic patterns of the steel structure of the main building. It reminded me of an object that had been trussed with twine to hold it up.

The building didn't dominate the cityscape like the I thought it would - partly because the city is so big and because, at 54 storeys, it isn't unusually tall. But there's no getting away from it once you get into the general vicinity.

Tomorrow, I'll post images of some of the other contemporary highlights of the city - buildings by Steven Holl and Kengo Kuma in particular.

We like: Beijing (part two)

A bit more Beijing contemporary razzle-dazzle, this time Steven Holl's 'Linked Hybrid' in the city's northeast. This ring of towers (with nifty coloured insets around their windows) is joined by a series of spectacular skybridges.

Travellers' tip: pretend to be a rich expat looking for Beijing accommodation like I did, and you can get a tour of the apartments. Or one of them, at least. The disappointing aspect of this was that the apartments were really poorly finished inside, with crap paintwork and cracked tiles in the bathrooms, as well as dust everywhere. Where's the glamour? My Beijing friends tell me this is typical of many new Beijing developments. Quality control is apparently difficult, and everything happens at breakneck speed.

Unfortunately our tour didn't include any of the bridges, because a security guard wouldn't let us in there. Strange. Also, the swimming pool, located in one of the skybridges, isn't functional yet. A woman I met who lives there said she doubts it will ever be. I don't think that's for design reasons - she thought it was probably just because the developer had moved onto other things.

Over in the centre of town - just west of Tiananmen Square, to be exact, is Paul Andreu's National Grand Theatre, otherwise known as 'The Egg'. You have to buy tickets to a show to get into the auditoriums, and unfortunately there weren't any on the few nights I was there:

Here's a shot inside the Water Cube in the Olympic park. The building was more impressive inside than I had expected, although it's already showing terrible signs of wear and tear, and it's less than three years old:

This is a building by Kengo Kuma in the area of Sanlitun, a cool restaurant and shopping area in the eastern embassy district. Kuma also helped out with the masterplanning of this 'village', which aims to replicate the feel of the alleyways of the city's old hutong districts. To me, it seemed like a really successful way to group retail and food outlets in a contemporary way without resorting to a mall-like structure. Here, you had to go outside to move between shops and eateries:

Also by Kengo Kuma is The Opposite House, one of the hotels I stayed in (which is just north of the village complex pictured above). The hotel's terrific (as is the Sanlitun area generally), and highly recommended.

Still to come - shots of the older parts of Beijing, as well as the 798 art district. I'll post them sometime soon.