Parliament buildings have been modified, destroyed by fire, half-built and restored; the parliamentary places and spaces have formed an important part of New Zealand's history.
For 100 years the state has provided rental homes for tens of thousands of New Zealanders unable to afford a home of their own. State housing has made a huge contribution to our national life.
Self-contained communities are being built on the outskirts of our cities. This project at Trentham is designed so that the houses will surround a park.
Auckland was a bustling place in 1854 when Parliament met there for the first time. The buildings were located in paddocks on what was then the edge of town, Constitution Hill, between Official Bay and Mechanics Bay, close to the present-day University of Auckland.
In 1911, a competition was held for designs for a new building to house Parliament. From the 33 proposals, John Campbell's was selected and building began, although it did not all go as planned.
Although Wellington's first restaurants opened in the nineteenth century, the mid 1930s saw the emergence of a different type of establishment, the milk bar, which in many ways was the forerunner to the modern cafe.
New Zealanders have called many structures home. Some have been solid and permanent: kauri villas set in lawns and gardens, row houses on cramped Dunedin sections, sprawling state house communities in Otara, mock-Tudor mansions with three-car garages in Remuera, penthouse apartments in inner-city Wellington
Railway stations came in all shapes and sizes, ranging from imposing big-city monuments to elegant wooden provincial structures and tiny rural shelter sheds.
The design of state houses has been fodder for armchair and professional critics since the beginning. Detractors slagged the first workers' dwellings for bei'too swell' and called for simpler shelters. Half a century later the complaint was the exact opposite
The old Departmental Buildings were photographed from Parliament grounds in 1955. The building survived plans for demolition in 1908, and today it serves as the Victoria University Law School.
The first pencil impression of the Beehive concept in Sir Basil Spence's notebook Spence was rumoured to have whipped up his design for the Beehive on the back of a napkin during dinner with the prime minister in 1964.
This elevation of the Molesworth Street frontage is John Campbell's redesign with two storeys. Older wooden three-storey offices (not coloured) are to the left.
After the fire of 1907, this building housed Parliament, and the governor lived at Palmerston North until the new (present) Government House was ready. It was demolished in November 1969 to make way for the Beehive.
In this plan for the Maori housing settlement at Waiwhetu, Lower Hutt (c. 1947), houses are clustered around a marae, with the Waiwhetu Stream in the foreground. The complex subsequently built closely resembled this plan.
