Urban Mastery — Cheshire Architects

Nearly two decades ago, renowned New Zealand Architect Pip Cheshire brought together the dynamic multi-disciplinary team at Cheshire Architects. The practice was formed around an opportunity to develop and master plan the iconic Britomart Precinct in Auckland, embedding a formative design core around urbanism from the start. Today, the team is a leading design authority within New Zealand’s built environment, working across an extensive portfolio from smaller residential work, all the way to large-scale projects of considerable public significance.

As disinterested in typological boundaries as they are in disciplinary boundaries, the team behind Cheshire Architects instead takes a more nuanced approach. It is this holism – of approaching urbanism and architecture as a way of being in and acting upon the world – that has allowed them to develop a uniquely non-linear approach to design. “We think of design not as a consultancy or a profession but as a confrontation with any complex situation and a synthesising of the opportunities and challenges embedded within that situation,” Director Nat Cheshire explains. “Whether we have an economic problem or an urban scale problem, or are even designing a door handle, the urgent question for us is ‘where can we be most aggressive with orthodoxy; where can we open up new space for the culture to flood into?’.”

While the studio understands that this approach can be riskier and harder to codify, a sense of responsibility is nonetheless felt – a responsibility to leverage the enormous potential of weaving together the diverse functions that characterise our urban spaces.

Nat further attributes the practice’s growth and ability to navigate the multifaceted world of urban design to placing architecture quite far down the food chain. For the team, this means first and foremost prioritising an understanding of how a specific place works before determining their built approach, ultimately looking to ‘software’ over ‘hardware’. “Our aim is to choreograph commercial, cultural and social situations that might be sufficiently new and special as to change the way that people use their own city. It is an approach that requires having confidence in oneself as a craftsperson to suspend the impulse to design with space and form until the ‘software’ justifies our doing so,” explains Nat.

When working at the scale of the city, Cheshire Architects seeks to equitably recognise that any activity beyond one’s front gate is a public activity, challenging the traditional, unnatural delineation of commercial functions and democratic public activities. “One of our key tasks is to erode this boundary, maximising the synergies and delicious tensions that might exist between paid and unpaid public experiences,” Nat says.

Working on projects such as the nine-city-block Britomart Precinct has afforded Cheshire the chance to harness knowledge not only about how a city runs but also how, as designers, they are able to be part of and shape civic systems.

Working on projects such as the nine-city-block Britomart Precinct has afforded Cheshire the chance to harness knowledge not only about how a city runs but also how, as designers, they are able to be part of and shape civic systems. Acknowledging all the extraordinary work that had been done before Cheshire’s involvement, “Britomart’s education of us has no end. We have learnt how design can help even large developments find agility,” reflects Nat. Britomart has also impacted the team by highlighting the incredible power of making incremental changes on the way to major developments, and to perceive how the city evolves in response to these interventions. “The tiny six-month or six-year projects – that are often speculative and experimental – are as important for us as the larger buildings that eventually replace them. They teach us that the best big things are made from many small things,” Nat describes.

Looking forward, Cheshire Architects is excited to uncover opportunities to collide large format civic, institutional and commercial enterprises with the realm of public life on the street. “We are pursuing a model for the design of large and tall buildings that acknowledges that the ground plane must be shaped by profoundly different forces from the cloud-like layers of commercial space above it,” Nat explains.

Nearly two decades ago, renowned New Zealand Architect Pip Cheshire brought together the dynamic multi-disciplinary team at Cheshire Architects.

Cheshire Architects’s passion, skill and demonstrated design agility expound a body of work bursting with cutting-edge, boundary-pushing and human-centred civic spaces. The team are driven by a conception of time that is deeply intergenerational – and an intrinsic part of the Māori way of being – which further consolidates their masterful consideration of not only the great urban challenges we face today but also those we will face tomorrow.