The swimming group used to wait for the tide to drop below the boulders so that we might enter the water on the hard, grey, waterlogged sand. It was a pretty ragtag group of three or four who would gather at the steps over the sea wall, impatiently awaiting the first glimpse of sand that would have us, lemming like, hopping from rock to rock to the waves below. 

Though we were all reasonably confident water people, the oldest of the group kept a weather eye on us, his presence reassuring parents as we disappeared from sight down the rocks. It was he who bought a surfboard: 10 feet of varnished plywood stretched over wooden ribs, a black mermaid painted on its nose and a cork to drain water from the hollow innards. Though my slender young body and my crouched, one-legged stance meant I had little impact on the board’s direction, I was hooked. 

For a while, I was fully part of the tribe of the committed: those who, before beach cameras and surf reports, would abandon study, jobs and girlfriends when we sensed a special combination of storm, air pressure, tide and wind direction. We would race north, east, south or west to a special curve in the coastline that we hoped would deliver the perfect wave. 

There was a smugness in that, for a few brief seconds of dancing the delicate balance of gravity and the wave’s energy, we would require no infrastructure and leave no trace. It was a smugness that joined with other elements of the hippy counter-culture of the time to eulogise freedom from ‘the man’, that age’s constraining amalgam of responsibilities and society who ensnared those who didn’t heed the call to ride the wild surf or travel the hippy trail. Leaving no trace is naïve nonsense of course. As the early plywood constructions gave way to the carefully crafted fibreglass foils we see at the beach these days, a Faustian pact had been made. The freedom to fly across the ocean ‘leaving no trace’ comes using an unsavoury mix of petrochemicals with little downstream re-use and an uncomfortably long afterlife.

We architects have a not dissimilar dilemma in the conjuring of sublime experience out of materials that are injurious to an imperilled planet. To our profession’s credit, however, an increasing number of practitioners are seeking to ameliorate the effects of their designs and specification of scarce and/or deleterious materials. They are achieving this through education, rigorous research on products used, the assessment of  carbon in construction and use, the substitution of materials with a high environmental cost for those with a more benign footprint, and so on. 

Given the relatively few buildings that architects are involved in, it might be argued that the impact of their endeavours on the planet is minor, yet some of the projects undertaken have an important polemical role to play. The identification of their virtues, and the publication of them in the public realm, can have influence on others, nudging architects to strive for similar outcomes in their own projects. Studio Pacific Architecture’s Air New Zealand Hangar 4, with its use of large-span timber arches and ETFE roof, is surely a potent, inspirational image to inspire others to meet operational briefs while having high regard for their environmental impact and making a good-looking building at the same time. 

A critical aspect of a project’s impact lies in the dissemination of the ways by which the project has succeeded in addressing the many challenges of making a building, including those having a lesser impact on the planet. Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects has seen its awards programme as a way of acknowledging and celebrating the best in the country’s architecture, and the resultant publicity from the programme as a way of communicating its activities to a wider public. The extent to which this has been successful is a moot point, its programme increasingly fighting for column inches and pixels in an increasingly crowded awards calendar. We architects are fortunate in having one of the few awards programmes in which each project is visited in person, thus allowing the jury to debate its merits in depth rather than rely on the skills of the entrant’s photographer, or on effusive entry text. 

A feature of many of the awards programmes, including that of the institute, is an increasingly finely divided set of entry categories. Organisers seek to level the playing field, such that a fishing hut by the member in the Chatham Islands has a fair chance against, say, a university behemoth from a cabal of the country’s larger practices. This is a reasonable concern, as is the desire on the part of the institute to nudge the awards in the direction of one or another specific concerns, such as te ao Māori objectives or carbon accounting, by developing award categories focused on these attributes. The overt favouring of judging criteria to meet institute objectives, however, has some unintended consequences, not the least of which is confusion as to what it is that is being honoured. 

The failure of the general public to understand what architects do has long been a source of frustration for architects and it is likely that too many awards add to the confusion by identifying architects as specialists in the category in which they have been successful. The proliferation of categories and the ensuing confusion regarding the standing of various awards frustrate what should be the institute’s primary opportunity for promoting the work of its members, and for explaining what it is that we do. 

Perhaps an awards programme could, at its national awards level, identify that it is the synthesis of those values that are currently the focus of the various categories that is at the heart of architectural excellence, rather than favour one aspect only. Thus, an outstanding project, one worthy of national recognition, might be, say, a wonderful school building that superbly synthesises a client’s pragmatic and aspirational brief with social, cultural and environmental considerations. Perhaps Corbusier’s “masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light” becomes something like ‘the outstanding synthesis of pragmatic, social, cultural, environmental and aesthetic forces brought together in light’. 

Having celebrated those who achieve such excellence through the incorporation of those criteria that might be less obvious, the embedded and operation carbon, or the project’s engagement with tangata whenuatanga, for example, the institute then has a small group of award-winners whose work might be presented in some depth in public talks. Perhaps, in time, identifying and celebrating the comprehensive synthesis of skills that lie at the heart of our work may answer the witless brief from some of our current government ministers who have ordered that projects commissioned by their ministries may not be entered for design awards. The implication is that gaining an award says nothing of value about a project. This is an absurd situation and a strong critique of the current programme’s effectiveness at communicating what architects do. I know there are several strands of work being undertaken by the institute in regard to the awards programme and look forward to robust changes that will precipitate a series of public talks that get beneath the skins of our best buildings, and perhaps, too, of a few of our dimmer ministers of the crown.