Centre plan 'erodes' arts site heritage

The proposed Christchurch music school building is architecturally inappropriate, a heritage report says.

The heritage-impact assessment by Australian consultants McDougall & Vines, obtained by The Press under the Official Information Act, said the planned music conservatorium would "erode the heritage values of the Arts Centre".

It would result in "unacceptable adverse effects" on the character of the century-old Arts Centre buildings.

The Christchurch City Council, which commissioned the report, said yesterday the draft assessment had been discussed with the school applicant, Canterbury University.

The university had made design changes that had been accepted as a "definite improvement" by assessor Elizabeth Vines, a cultural heritage professor at Melbourne's Deakin University.

In the High Court in Christchurch yesterday, Justice Fogarty rejected an injunction bid from opponents of the $24.5 million school that would have delayed the resource consent hearing scheduled for February.

He said a separate hearing on whether the Arts Centre trust board had wrongly changed its deed to allow development would be fast-tracked to be heard early next year.

The draft Vines report said despite the Arts Centre being designed by several architects from 1877 to 1923, all the buildings were designed to be indistinguishable from the complex as a whole. All had been built in stone in the Gothic-revival style with intentional "well-mannered consistency".

"It is considered that the current development proposal does not continue this well-mannered consistency," the report said.

Vines wrote that the proposed building was a single large structure that would be bigger than the existing buildings, breaking the "rhythm" of the Arts Centre's design.

"The architectural consistency ... will be disrupted by a large building, of greater footprint than other single buildings, and which does not use design elements complementary to the established Gothic-revival design idiom," she wrote.

It was recommended the new building be designed to look like two structures by removing a proposed lift shaft that projected into the Hereford St streetscape, "accentuating the bulk of the building". A revamped design unveiled last week showed the lift shaft had been moved northward to reduce the building's "perceived bulk".

Vines raised concerns that the regular gabling of the Arts Centre roof line would be broken by flat sections on the proposed building's roof.

Hedge-planting recommendations were agreed to by the applicant.

In a letter to the council last week, Vines said the revised plans were "a definite improvement". However, there were areas needing more work.

Vines said some issues could be dealt with as resource consent conditions.

A council spokeswoman said last night that the final Vines report was expected next month.