From The Ground Up: Inside Monk Mackenzie

Their iconic bright pink Lightpath cycleway on Nelson Street in Auckland’s CBD speaks for itself, but that is just the tip of the iceberg for Monk Mackenzie. Hamish Monk and Dean Mackenzie, the brains and namesake behind the architecture and design studio Monk Mackenzie, pack an impressive breadth of experience on projects that span across North America, Europe and Asia.

Since returning back to our shores four years ago, Monk Mackenzie have quickly let their unique brand of poetic, sculptural architecture be known, ranging across a bevy of residential, commercial, infrastructural and cultural projects. Monk Mackenzie do things their way and they do it from the ground up.

How did you two meet?

Monk: We met in London, we were both working for a firm called Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. It was a large, multinational company that do a lot of very large-scale, commercial work. We briefly crossed-paths in London, but then came back here and worked at the same firm in New Zealand briefly as well.

When you guys were working for a big firm like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, what was the big difference in the working culture between there and New Zealand?

Monk: It was the scale of the firm, but they actually harnessed and utilised young talent a lot better than some New Zealand firms. It’s probably all to do with the scale, but they had enough slack to allow students and graduates to explore new ideas, new technologies and interesting ways of working. They definitely harnessed fresh ideas a bit better than some firms here in New Zealand, I know that’s a huge generalisation but it seemed to be that way when I was there.

Mackenzie: The scale of their work is much larger than that of New Zealand. There are 2,000 people across the different offices in North America and London. You sort of feel the scale of the company in some regards but you’re always in a small team, which is similar to how it is here. With a large-scale company, you meet people that are world-class in doing the various things that they do. There are a lot more niches, whereas New Zealand firms are a bit more generalist because by definition we’re a bit smaller. The biggest companies here might be 200 to 250 people. Whereas when you’re talking 2,000 people it’s a different scale. The pace of work, oddly enough, is slower at a big firm. You need to work on very large projects. I was there for six years and I probably worked on six projects. Even a medium-sized firm here, you might touch 20 a year. It’s a lot faster moving here.

Was that the reason why you guys decided to return home?

Mackenzie: I think it’s just being a Kiwi. You go overseas, explore, but you eventually always come back and you kind-of want to ‘nest’ again. We were both away for a long time, Hamish was away for nearly eight years and I was away for thirteen. But you do eventually return home.

Monk: Second to that is the desire to start up a practice with our partnership and it was almost easier to do that in New Zealand where I could network with friends and colleagues. It’s a lot less daunting than living in a city like London or New York where you’re trying to establish yourself and a practice. It seems a lot more familiar here.

So, you guys were away from New Zealand for eight or thirteen years at a time. What differences did you notice when you got back, in particular with Auckland and urban areas?

Monk: I guess Auckland has definitely evolved, changed and matured a lot over that time, with new precincts like Britomart and Wynyard Quarter. It’s really encouraging to see how the city has changed over time. There’s also been a bit of a move towards medium and high-density housing which is also great. In most international cities, it’s desirable to live in the CBD or the central city, and we’re starting to see that in Auckland now. Over time it generates more nightlife, restaurants, and bars to accommodate the people living in the city.

Mackenzie: Coming back I noticed a big demographic change in New Zealand, especially in Auckland. I felt when I left Auckland it was a mostly Pasifika, Maori and Pakeha city. But coming back it seems to be much more international. There’s definitely been a huge influx in the last 15-20 years of people coming from different places especially Asia. I think [this] is fantastic for making Auckland feel a bit more like a connected world city than it was previously. In our opinion, it seems to be more aligned with new ‘world cities’, you’d find in North America and even Australia. This is a great thing for Auckland and New Zealand in general, and with that comes a different attitude to housing.

In the news, you hear ‘housing crisis’ a lot, which is a big trigger phrase. What tips and ideas can city-planners take from architects and designers to help remedy things, in light of housing and population issues?

Mackenzie: I think it’s been half-tackled with things like the Unitary Plan, which has addressed some of those things in terms of density and freeing up areas. There’s going to have to be a bit of a change in people’s mentality with separate houses in different parts of Auckland and a shift towards housing becoming denser. Auckland is no different to what any other city has gone through. Every other city in the world has had to make that adjustment, from being a city with under a million people to slowly approaching two million people. You just can’t just keep spreading out, you have to become denser. With that you get really positive urbanism. You get lively neighbourhoods, a better patronage of restaurants, bars, cafes and better precincts generally rather than just having suburbia everywhere. For both of us having been overseas for a long time, we love urban architecture, and this is a generalisation, but residential in urban areas hasn’t been done extremely well. That’s probably because of a lack of context, perhaps. If you grow-up in a European, or an older North American [country] you’re surrounded by urbanism, whereas if you grow-up in a much younger country, you don’t have it generally and you’re not used to it.

Monk: From an urban perspective, it’s interesting to ask how we can develop and design higher-density apartments and buildings for the city. How can we create an identity into its fabric? It’s not necessarily building and competing for attention. It’s a really positive, interesting time in Auckland. Hopefully, we get the opportunity to help reinvent the city in the future. It’s a great time to be working in the city. Because of the demand of people moving to Auckland, the possibilities are limitless. It’s an exciting time to be here, partly it’s economics, partly it’s demographic, partly it’s demand.
Tacking onto your sentiments of urbanism and cultural differences and the way we think about houses, is it still too far-fetched for us to hold onto that ‘kiwi quarter-acre section, house and garden’ dream?

Mackenzie: You’re always going to have that, and I think the only problem with that is it has only really been that ‘dream’. [Auckland’s population] had been denser in the past for various different reasons. You’re always going to have that dream. You just have to get used to the idea of increased density.

Monk: Unitary changes identified key transport nodes where density can flourish. Economics is probably a big driver in these things. House prices and construction is very expensive at the moment in New Zealand, because the demand is so incredibly high. You want to look at apartments ultimately because you make better use of the land and prices theoretically should actually be less than a quarter acre section. The growth in the economy, especially with apartments making a better use of the land is where prices should, theoretically, be less. The Unitary Plan identifies key areas around transit and where density should occur geographically.

To talk more specifically about Monk Mackenzie, what were the challenges you faced when you got back home?

Monk: We returned to New Zealand before we started the partnership. Getting new work when you’re starting a business was a challenge. We started off the back of three or four projects that we thought were pretty solid. One being a transport interchange pitch, another being an apartment block in Malaysia, and another one was a housing development in Queenstown. We thought we had a raft of good large-scale work and every single one of those fell over when we started [laughs]. The key challenge for any business that’s starting is balancing workload with staff. It wasn’t as bad in those days. It was just the two of us. We just ran the office until we left. One thing that we both noticed was how to keep up the momentum in the business. The more types of projects we get would dictate how large our client base would be and also the consultant groups we work with. It’s really snowballed these last four years.

Mackenzie: One thing that we did very strategically, and very differently, was when we came back we didn’t want to necessarily be an architectural firm that does just residential work. Again, because there are so many firms in that space, and it wasn’t really our backgrounds. Our backgrounds were larger and in commercial, civic projects. Our aspiration was to continue with that scale and of that typology. When we began, we looked at four areas: those were residential with a focus on medium-density apartments. We could do some houses but our work primarily for the past few years has been medium-density residential. The next are we looked at was commercial. Infrastructural also interested us with the likes of bridges, etc. We really enjoy public projects. The last one is cultural projects. We’ve worked in the past with Iwi groups, and really love that convention of work. It’s a deliberate strategy to have a diverse base and one that was a little atypical for a small firm, but did it so we could compete against larger firms and use the strengths and skill-set brought back from overseas.

It’s good that have four defined categories and a clear identification of the approach and the philosophy of each client. Take me through the process of a Monk Mackenzie project. How much leeway do you get to unleash your creativity?

Monk: It’s a bit different every project. It’s changed over the years since we’ve been in business. When you’re a new business and you don’t really have an established brand, people don’t really know what you do. You quite simply design to someone’s brief and work hard to solicit more work. As the brand and business plan develops, people come to us because they like what we do and the style of architecture and approach to the work we do. With every new project, we like to bring a kind of freshness and open approach to new work. There’s no pressure to come up with ideas or ways of doing it necessarily. Over the years, being in business and designing multiple projects, Dean and I have ways of working that are conducive to certain types of projects. We’d like to think that we’re both flexible in that type of space. There’s lots of dialogue and conversation about projects and the direction ahead. We love to identify a key trend or common vein to each project. We want the project to be bold and singular, just as long as it isn’t overly fussy or embellished. We like to strip things back to the ‘key ingredients’.

Mackenzie: The last four years has been us finding ourselves and finding our kind of evolution of how we work together and how we can lift the brand. There’s a type of look that we like. It’s quite sculptural, timeless. Generally there is a reasonably singular idea to it and things then build on that rather than just loading it up like ‘graphically designing’ a building. We want to make it more sculptural.

Where do you guys typically draw your inspiration from? When you have a really beautiful building, it’s not just the building, it’s the surrounding as well. Do you take cues from the setting, other pieces of architecture or nature itself?

Mackenzie: It varies. Sometimes it sparks from an idea from a client. It can be something abstract. They may think of an idea that isn’t architectural and it gives us a thought. Sometimes we work purely with the site and a sense of originating with the site, especially with the more sculptural projects. Sometimes it’s a single bold idea we have, something that ‘feels’ like the right thing to do. Sometimes, it’s research. We try to do research in understanding similar contemporary projects, or even just original research to get a sense of quality or materiality. It does vary. If you look at our work, it certainly isn’t identical. There are some architects be it American or European where their work is very formalistic.

Monk: We try and build a singular direction. Not necessarily extremes, but to really try and push one part of the project really hard. We want the project to have a sense of self so that it’s not referencing other buildings or being overly fussy in that respect.

Talking about specific projects you guys have worked on, obviously, there’s Lightpath, but what are some current projects that you want to draw attention to?

Monk: So, we’re doing a number of apartment buildings, we’ve got Edition in Parnell, which are large, high-end apartments overlooking St. George’s Bay. It’s a well crafted glass/brick elevation, it’s a fascinating project. We’ve got a number of apartment buildings, one in Hobsonville, we have Soto in Meadowbank, and smaller boutique apartment building on Jervois Road. We’ve just picked up a very large commercial job which is a 9,000 square-metre office building for Foodstuffs, which Auckland Airport are building on their land. That’s a huge win for our business and, I guess, our first really substantial commercial project in this country.

Mackenzie: We’re picking up a couple of hotel projects. For the upcoming America’s Cup and APEC there’s a lot of demand on hotels. You may have heard recently The Cordis on K Rd and Symonds St is adding on 250 rooms to become a 650 room hotel, so you can see there’s a lot of demand. That’s not one of ours, but we’re working on one hotel at the moment and we’ve got two others potentially. We’ve also been working on a project in India. We’ve done work before overseas but we’ve got aspirations to get back overseas and find work. The project in India is made up of two bridges, a 500 metre long bridge used for pilgrimages up to a temple and to a statue. The statue is 133 feet tall that sits just off the coast. It’s a very different kind of project.

That ties into my next question. That project would fit under the ‘cultural category’, and I know you guys have worked on the Tainui Masterplan, of course. With these cultural projects, there’s an element of storytelling involved. How do you balance the design and cultural elements in a cultural project?

Monk: I guess, it’s always such a great starting point where there’s kind-of a rich layering in a cultural background, and before you start, it needs to be understood. In particular I guess with the Tainui Masterplan and Hopuhopu, the first thing was understanding the site, the connection to the site and the surrounding area, certainly the connection with the Waikato River, with Mt. Taupiri and Turangawaewae, which is their marae that sits in Ngaruawahia. It’s not just a geographical and geological understanding of the site, it’s also to do with the lineage and how the cultures identify themselves. It’s the relationship with those spaces. A lot of that master-plan was creating a way for those stories to be told, and it’s not necessarily the architecture trying to work too hard to tell those stories but creating the framework for those things to happen. It’s a unique privilege we have here in New Zealand that we can tap into and understand Maori culture and how things work, and moving forward and helping make a positive difference in the architecture that comes out of this country. It’s something in the practice we want to keep doing and do more of because it’s some of the more interesting work we’ve done.

Mackenzie: Sometimes in the past with some of the work that’s been done, it’s been done in a way that uses cultural imagery and references in a pastiche or slightly patronising way. All of our work it must be contemporary, so those things are taken starting points, and not the end point. Yeah, there’s just been a number of projects that we’ve noticed that do seem to be very ‘token’ in the way that they’ve approached things, or very bland like a cultural ‘stick on’ at the end. So we try not to do that.

What’s a style of project you have yet to work on but thought “damn, I want to work on that”?

Monk: Well, I guess anything on the Auckland waterfront would be a nice challenge to take on. Those kind of projects for practices like us, we’re not really invited into or they’re quite hard to secure. The Auckland City waterfront, but also as Dean mentioned, we like working with different cultures as well, whether it’s India, Asia, China or the Middle East. There’s always a unique challenge that comes with a different environment that you find fascinating.

Mackenzie: I think probably what would be really satisfying would be to get back to some of the stuff we’ve done in the past. Things like towers, highly sculptural projects. A stadium would be pretty fun. They don’t really come along very often. You could do a really sculptural stadium, there’s been some really cool stuff in the past. That would be a lot of fun. One aspiration that Hamish touched on was to get back overseas. Whether it’s China, Malaysia etc. We’ve just talked with a potential client in China about a huge Masterplan project just outside of Guangzhou recently. Even looking at North America, that would be really interesting. We certainly have aspirations of becoming a bit more robust, where we become a little larger and work on interesting projects from different parts of the world.

Where do you guys see Monk Mackenzie in 10 years?

Monk: We definitely want to see the business evolve, change and develop in the next five to ten years. We don’t want to stagnate and do the same things in a few years time, there’s definitely a push to keep moving and changing.

Mackenzie: I think we’d both like to travel. We want to expand the business significantly and grow the size of the business. I just want to tackle my projects that we are able to get. Potentially, even, have another location or two in terms of offices. The key thing is, we just really want to evolve. We don’t want to imagine that our highlights were projects we have on now or projects we’ve had in the last two years – that’d be a bit depressing. The next 10 years are going to hold very exciting developments that we couldn’t have imagined a couple of years ago. Projects that are exciting on an architectural level, but also on a business level.

Monk: The other side is that we like to work with and collaborate with creative people. The studio here is full of talented minds and designers, so it’s all about fostering the relationships with key people and collectively moving forward to do great work. We want to work with people that want to do things differently and have fresh ideas, I always find that intriguing.

Mackenzie: We don’t want to be perceived as just an architectural firm. We might look at doing other sorts of things like products, graphics, installations. For us, we like to tackle things we haven’t tried before, collaborate with people we haven’t worked with before. It’s part of the evolution.