Living Canterbury
Living Canterbury is a cooperative venture between Environment Canterbury and the Canterbury Museum, and offers a new way of looking at the relationship between people and their environment.
This long-term exhibit provides visitors with a greater appreciation of their local region's unique and diverse ecosystems - from Kaikoura to the Waitaki River - and enhances visitors' appreciation both of the environment itself, and of the many opportunities for improving the environment.
The first such collaboration between a regional council and a museum, Living Canterbury explores elements of Canterbury's living landscape in a manner designed to capture the imagination.
Clearwater
Clearwater is a new lifestyle resort situated on the north-western outskirts of Christchurch. Set within 460 acres of rural land, it successfully combines land uses in the form of apartments and accommodation with recreational uses, farming and the natural environment.
The golf course designed around an abundance of natural waterways and spring fed lakes is complemented by equestrian trails, jogging tracks, walkways and fishing streams.
The openness of the resort is in keeping with, and provides a great link with, other natural features in the area such as Peacock Springs and the Groynes.
Christ's College Fine Arts and Technology Building
The brief to the architects of this building, Sir Miles Warren and Wilkie & Bruce, was to provide modern facilities for the teaching of fine art, art history, graphics, photography, information technology, design, metalwork and woodwork. In addition to the teaching support areas, new toilets for pupils were required.
The retention of an existing heritage building, Condell's House, now known as Selwyn, was required, with connections to the new building at two levels. This heritage building also required conservation and refurbishment.
The roof forms of the new building acknowledge those of the existing heritage building, and the architects' sensitive approach to the site has also ensured that the new building's overall appearance is compatible with that of the heritage building. The judging panel was impressed by the care taken to ensure that the building relates sensitively to existing buildings when viewed from the main quadrangle, while the elevation to the north, with its layer of large aluminium louvres providing sun control at the upper levels, is blatantly contemporary.
Ceilings in the teaching and studio spaces follow the lines of the complex roof forms on the building's top floor, with generous areas of south-facing roof glazing.
Inside the building, glass has been used extensively in internal partitions, adding to the open feeling and perception of its size.
A posthumous award for services to the environment
Bernard Robert Hansen
9 January 1920 - 23 May 2002
Bernard (Bernie) Hansen was a truly outstanding citizen of Christchurch.
Environmental issues were but one of his preoccupations, yet his contribution to our environment over many decades has been enormous.
Bernie saw the environment as a public resource that would be irreversibly degraded unless the citizenry were active in protecting it. He was passionate about social justice and in defending the rights of the public to enjoy and use publicly owned resources.
Bernie had a very long involvement in planning, reserves, drainage issues, resource consents and the City Plan. He was an advocate for open space on the Port Hills, for public access to beaches and parks, and for protecting the Estuary from many threats. Bernie was a foundation member of the Christchurch Estuary Association and the Friends of the Estuary.
In the Sumner community his contribution was without peer. He was president of the Sumner Residents' Association for several decades. He wrote regularly on both contemporary and historical topics. He founded the Sumner Community Centre and was the instigator of the Sumner Concept Plan process involving the community.
Many Christchurch people knew Bernie best through his frequent letters to the newspaper and to politicians, written in simple forthright style but which went direct to the heart of environmental issues.
Bernie Hansen made an outstanding contribution to environmental affairs in Christchurch stretching over at least five decades. It is fitting that tonight the City is acknowledging his many contributions to and achievements for an environmentally sustainable Christchurch.
