In early December, Victoria University of Wellington \u2013 which owns the 1950s-era building \u2013 confirmed plans to demolish it in a press statement<\/a>, anticipating works to begin that month. But as it turns out, getting rid of an 11-storey, 87-unit complex takes a bit of time and planning. A spokesperson for the university told The Spinoff the demolition project was still on track, with the initial phases due to begin in February.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rather than taking a wrecking ball or a stick of dynamite to the building, the process will be a gradual dismantling over a year-long period. \u201cCeres, our demolition contractor, has started site establishment works and the programme is estimated to take around 12 months,\u201d a spokesperson for the university said. \u201cThe building will be carefully deconstructed in phases, with initial phases focused on the removal of hazardous materials.\u201d<\/p>\n In December, Bishop told The Spinoff he was looking forward to pressing a button on an iPad and watching the building go boom. But controlled implosive demolitions, especially those for large-scale buildings in urban areas, are a heavily regulated practice in New Zealand. Since New Zealand\u2019s first implosive demolition of a large-scale building in 2012, only one similar building has been imploded.<\/p>\n That first implosion 14 years ago, of Christchurch\u2019s 14-storey Radio Network House, was a trial run for further implosive demolitions following the 2011 earthquake. Only one other implosion has occurred in Aotearoa since then: the 2015 demolition of the Christchurch Central Police Station, a 15-storey high-rise.<\/p>\n Given it\u2019s in the middle of a residential area on The Terrace, planning an implosion of the Gordon Wilson flats would likely have contractors encountering red tape over exclusion zones, as well as traffic and environmental management. Instead, the \u201cdeconstruction\u201d of the building may look similar to that of Wellington\u2019s former Civic Administration and Municipal Office buildings \u2013 the latter of which was built in the same decade as the Gordon Wilson flats \u2013 with demolition work running from March 2024 to February 2025.<\/p>\n Bishop had only four words for The Spinoff in response to the headway made on the building\u2019s demolition: \u201cgood progress, crack on\u201d. The minister has previously labelled the building an \u201ceyesore\u201d and \u201cugly scar\u201d, and celebrated the move to remove its heritage protections with an image of himself riding a wrecking ball into the building.<\/p>\n The modernist flats were built in the late 1950s, opened in 1959 and used as social housing until 2012. Housing New Zealand evacuated the building\u2019s occupants in May of that year, citing concerns with structural integrity. How the asbestos-riddled building would handle earthquakes and strong winds was a worry, and in 2010, Housing NZ had received advice from engineering consultants raising concerns that a fall by a single \u201clarge person\u201d<\/a> could trigger its collapse. It was sold to Victoria University in 2014.\u00a0<\/p>\n The flats were given protected heritage status in 1995 as a part of Wellington\u2019s district plan and were listed as a category 1 historic place by Heritage New Zealand in 2021, alongside the neighbouring McLean Flats (also set for demolition). Heritage NZ has previously expressed its disappointment over VUW\u2019s plans to demolish the site, having long called for a refurbishment, rather than a complete knock-down, of the building to retain the city\u2019s architectural history.\u00a0<\/p>\n Heritage NZ director Jamie Jacobs told The Spinoff there was now \u201cno viable lever to compel Victoria University to reinvent this iconic building\u201d. The cost and effort involved in this demolition would \u201cundoubtedly slow the design, consenting, and construction process for any new building\u201d, Jacobs said. The project would be \u201cas far from a \u2018green\u2019 solution or approach to development that an owner can take: the embodied carbon in the building fabric will only be filling up the landfill\u201d.<\/p>\n Jacobs pointed to the boarded-up Dixon St Flats, which have sat empty since November 2024, and efforts by a \u201ccreative owner to reinvent existing buildings, heritage or otherwise, and make them appealing to a new generation of the public\u201d. The same fate could have been achieved with the Gordon Wilson flats, Jacobs argued, but \u201cunfortunately a \u2018demolition mindset\u2019 prevented a more thoughtful process and approach.\u201d<\/p>\n However, \u201clike all Wellingtonians, we look forward to seeing how the university\u2019s stated new residential development on the site comes to fruition as we are all acutely aware of Wellington\u2019s ongoing housing crisis\u201d, Jacobs said.<\/p>\n Tamatha Paul, Wellington Central MP and housing spokesperson for the Green Party, has long called for the flats to be replaced with affordable housing. Paul told The Spinoff she was \u201cstoked\u201d to see movement being made on the site after a decade. \u201cWellington and its universities have been plagued by a notorious reputation for poor-quality flats and ridiculously expensive rents,\u201d Paul said.<\/p>\n \u201cIf universities want students and if city leaders want a vibe that only young people can bring, they need to put affordable student housing on the table.\u201d<\/p>\n As the initial phases of the demolition get closer, VUW will be meeting with representatives from the Architectural Centre, longtime advocates<\/a> of the building\u2019s heritage status. The centre\u2019s Stuart Niven told The Spinoff he hoped the university would be able to show the costing for the demolition, as \u201cwe couldn\u2019t see that [the refurbishment] we\u2019re proposing<\/a> would be more expensive than pulling the building down and starting over again\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n The centre has called for redevelopment of the site, keeping the building\u2019s concrete structure and developing 100 refurbished apartments. Niven argued the building standards of the time the flats were constructed meant they would have \u201cextremely strong\u201d structural components, which is why the building would take so long to bring down.<\/p>\n \u201cThe university is crying poor in terms of their finances available to them and what they can borrow, and here they have a residential area that they could do cheaper than pulling it down and replacing it,\u201d Niven said. \u201c[It\u2019s] staring them in the face, and they\u2019re not prepared to take it seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chris Bishop was planning to have swung into the decrepit building via wrecking ball by now. What\u2019s the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":256140,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[82265,492,147860,3339,111,43,139,69,2935,147861,52],"class_list":{"0":"post-256139","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-chris-bishop","9":"tag-comments-enabled","10":"tag-gordon-wilson","11":"tag-housing","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz","16":"tag-society","17":"tag-victoria-university","18":"tag-wellington"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Gordon Wilson flats (Image: Wikipedia)<\/p>\n
Housing minister Chris Bishop celebrated plans to demolish the Gordon Wilson flats with this photoshopped image.<\/p>\n
The Gordon Wilson flats in the 1950s (Ref: EP-Industry-Housing-State-02. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. \/records\/22299856)<\/p>\n
The design proposed by the Architectural Centre.<\/p>\n