The 1987 Crash merely exposed the clay foundations that Chase Corp was built on. Many of its buildings didn’t survive the 2016 Kaikoura quakes, namely the Readings parking building and the former GWRC building on Wakefield St.

Nah.

No more than Denton Park suffers from being close to Civic Square.

Gather your rosebuds whilst ye may.

“A Chinese humanoid robot appeared to go haywire at an electronics store in Saratov, Russia on August 31, attacking customers with kung fu kicks before being shut down by pressing a button on its back.”

Hmmmm…. Asimov’s 3 Laws urgently required !

Seriously though we should be able to build that kind of buildings in a city centre, and have it be a completely inoffensive and uncontroversial thing. We are much richer than 100 years ago, and have much more industrial mass production capacity. We should easily be able to produce new buildings that don’t look worse than the old ones.

The 7, 7A and 7B storey is so weird, did the council adopt a maximum number of storeys instead of a form based code or what happened there?

Council has decimated its Heritage department along with its Urban department, so there is very few people in either. Some things should just be left to common sense (assuming that someone has common sense, which may be over stating things). So, in order to be the grown up in the room, I hereby declare the following bleeding obvious:
Karori Tunnel is not Heritage and should be widened / heightened / made more sensible. End of story, although the bigger question is, how you gonna do that and keep it working 24 hours a day? Because there is no other means of access for K town.
Oil Tanks at Miramar – not heritage. Take a photo and pull the fuckers down. End of story.
Defence Buildings at Pukeahu – obviously yes they are heritage, but there is not need to pull them down. Find a use for them, or propose an alternative use for te site. Don’t pull it down just for the sake of it. They’re not hurting anyone by staying put. These decisions are easy to make by someone sensible.
Nemo for Town Clerk !

That was an absolute shocker – mind you, virtually anything by Chase was a shocker. Thank God that never got built.

Too close to Waitangi Park for it to be of any use.

Fair comment – what I am objecting to here is the developer plainly being a bit of a wanker, claiming that there are four floors all called Level 7. That is just being a Dick. There is no need for that sort of stupid behaviour.

But then I got interested and had a closer look, found the developer website, and realised that there are much bigger problems. I’ll do another post on that later – there is a mountain of info to read, as it went to a Council hearing. I’m not sure what the result of that hearing is, as yet – apparently it should have been resolved last week, but I am not sure what the decision is / was / will be.

Will this development make housing slightly less unaffordable? I sincerely doubt it.
Will this development be high quality, high density living? Maybe.
Is it suitable for people who never want to see the light of day again? Probably.

And these are only the humanoid robots. The quadruped and insect-type robots would be even faster I would imagine.