Dynamic designer garners gold One of New Zealand’s most creative architects recently became the youngest winner of the NZIA Gold Medal, the highest honour an architect can receive and rarely given mid-career
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ounder and creative director of Patterson Associates, Andrew Patterson is responsible for some of the country’s most distinctive and exciting buildings, ranging from a prestigious golf club to New Zealand’s only single artist gallery. Along the way he has also found time to venture abroad, designing the New Zealand Pavilion at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair and the New Zealand China Concept Store in Shanghai two years later. Impressive achievements one and all but perhaps only to be expected from a determined individual who always wanted to be an architect – even though his father had other ideas, Patterson told the New Zealand Institute of Architects (NZIA) awards ceremony in November. “My father was a doctor and he was equally determined that I would go to medical school, so I ended up in Dunedin, which is about as far away as you can get
from an architecture school in New Zealand. “I remember the grade to get into medicine was an A+ and the grade to get into architecture was a B-, so it was only with very considered under-achievement that I became an architect.” “I arrived home to my very disappointed doctor dad to say sorry, and in the middle of the living room was this drawing board that he had bought for me.” However, it wasn’t just any drawing board: “it was the Rolls Royce of drawing boards and it’s still in the office, much to the curiosity of anybody under 30 and the complete disgust of my partner Andrew Mitchell.” On the drawing board his father had placed his secret to life, which was a copy of Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man and his dictum “Know only facts”. “My granddad fought at Passchendaele, so he was 92 when I went to medical school and his
hobby was translating Latin,” Patterson recalled. “Most of you know firmitas, utilitas, venustas, the Latin test for architecture, and I asked him about it. “He said venustas is not the work for beauty or delight per se, it’s the word you use for the delight of the natural world – and in an instant my whole architectural philosophy was formed.”
Local inspiration
Buildings had to be as beautiful as the New Zealand natural environment – they had to match the local environment. “I was excited and I went back to architect school with this renewed vigour.” At the time, New Zealand’s buildings, and they still are, were copies of overseas buildings and graduates would go on their big OE. However, armed with his newfound philosophy, Patterson was
“absolutely determined” not to travel. “I wanted my education to be in New Zealand in the landscape – I wasn’t going to have a bar of going overseas.” Joining a firm, he remembers being told “don’t worry about the back of the building, nobody sees the back of the building; don’t worry about that flashing line, it’s high.” Clearly the eager young architect and the staid, conservative firm had different ideas. “Thankfully the architect waited till the day I was registered, the very morning, before sacking me.” All was not lost, though, as Patterson’s burgeoning talent had been recognised before he even graduated with a commission to design a house – although it had been completely overlooked by the awards system. Coincidentally, architects Pip Continues on Page 59
YEARBOOK 2018
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