13 Maidstone Street

Commercial

14 Mar

13 Maidstone Street was first developed in the early 1960s as a city fringe commercial building. It is an unremarkable example of this building type which we see scattered throughout the inner Auckland suburbs. Over the past 25 years, the site had been occupied by Youthline to provide a range of community services, and the building had been heavily partitioned internally for individual counselling rooms.

As Youthline are a charity, almost nothing was spent on maintenance during their quarter century of ownership and the building deteriorated to the point where only significant redevelopment or demolition could be considered. The new owners, who had redeveloped the neighbouring ASC Architects office, were committed to finding a sustainable way to give the existing building a new life. From a sustainability perspective, reuse and repurposing were the redevelopment drivers for this project. The core project theme was to retain everything possible on the existing site, renew or refurbish every element possible and replace only what was not repairable.

An additional key driver of the project was to open the street facing façade to its community for the first time in sixty five years. The opening and glazing of the frontage was an intentional strategy to create connection, passive surveillance and real activation of the street.

Location
Auckland

Date Completed
2024

Project Contact
John Sofo

Interior Design and Fit out
Wonder Group

Tenant Collaborator
Motion Sickness

Photography
Jono Parker

The major collaboration and contribution to the project came initially form the tenant, Motion Sickness, who provided great support for the sustainable and urban design intentions of the architectural design strategy. This support then translated to their tenancy interior design which was provided by Wonder Group who further translated these strategies to the fitout design.

Apart from opening the street façade, the only other significant architectural intervention was to clad and illuminate the secondary stair at the northern edge of the building. We did this for three reasons, to provide weather protection, to signal a secondary entry to the upper floor and to provide an illuminated end to the north of the site which is open to the street for safety reasons. This “lantern” has become a focus of activity as the tenant has developed a small garden adjacent for its staff to enjoy.

There was a strong desire to preserve the fabric and original programme of this building as far as was practical. A majority of the project revolved around demolishing interiors, revealing existing concrete structure, removing asbestos and then carefully inserting new services throughout.

No attempt was made to hide the unashamedly humble nature of the original design or materials. In fact, we saw that celebrating and revealing these materials was a key factor in preserving and celebrating the origins of this project.

ASC Architects treated this project as an experiment to understand how efficiently and effectively this kind of renewal and repurposing could be achieved. We tried to minimise waste, deliver a far better urban connection to the street, reduce consenting cost and complexity by only changing the bare essential building elements and treating the majority of work as refurbishment of existing fabric.