The Pacifica

Client | hengyi

TYPE | ARCHITECTURE, INTERIOR DESIGN, DOCUMENTATION

SECTOR | MIXED USE, RESIDENTIAL, HOTEL

STATUS | COMPLETE (2021)

Location | AUCKLAND, NZ

SCALE | GFA: 44,138 sqm

HEIGHT | 57 storeys

Photography | Simon Devitt

Renders | Plus Architecture

Awards
2023 Concrete NZ Awards - Nauhria Premier Concrete Award - Winner

2022 New Zealand Commercial Project Awards - Residential - Gold

2022 NZIA Auckland Architecture Awards - Commercial Architecture - Shortlisted

2021 International Property Awards : Asia Pacific
Best Apartment / Condominium New Zealand Award - Winner

2021 International Property Awards : Asia Pacific
Best Residential High-Rise Development New Zealand AWard - Winner

2021 Property Council New Zealand Rider Levett Bucknall Property Industry Awards - Multi-Unit Residential Property Award - WINNER

2021 NZ Building Industry Awards - ICON CO
PROJECTS OVER $75M - FINALIST

2021 Urban Developer Awards - Development of the Year - High-Density Residential - Finalist

The Pacifica reshapes the Auckland skyline. At 57 stories, it’s New Zealand tallest residential tower.

Standing head and shoulders above Auckland’s CBD is The Pacifica, a stunning new 178m tall, 57-level residential tower designed by Plus Architecture. Commencing construction in 2017 with one of New Zealand’s largest construction providers, Icon, Plus Architecture designed The Pacifica for renowned developer Hengyi.

With its 273 apartments ranging from one-bedroom, to luxury super-penthouses, The Pacifica has arrived at the right time for Auckland’s residential housing shortage, but also fulfills an important role as anchor for an area set for rapid gentrification.

Standing in a precinct once historically dedicated to warehousing and port-trade functions, The Pacifica is amongst a district of buildings of different styles and eras, many of which are earmarked for renovation or development.

The Pacifica brings cohesion at the street level with an efficient, timeless, podium frontage, before pushing skyward with an energetic structure that reaches the heights of Auckland’s tallest manmade and environmental landmarks.

The unique design for the building was inspired by the network of laneways in the district winding their way upwards – criss-crossing in the lower levels until clear of surrounding buildings and then projecting directly skyhigh.

Once above the podium level, the glass tower pays homage to Auckland’s wide open blue skies – but also pulling the darker blue of the harbour up to meet it. A carefully curated mix of blue and clear glass in gloss and matt and an interplay between the reflectivity of the blues and the clears creates a transition from a darker tower in the bottom half, to a whiter, lighter ‘sky’ at the top of it.

“There was a lot of work put into the glass,” says Plus Director and The Pacifica Creative Lead Ian Briggs, “It has an intricate fine granular quality at lower levels, moving up and becoming more settled it reaches the skyline.”

The location of The Pacifica couldn’t be more significant for Auckland’s CBD as it gradually moves its focus from the Queen Street valley, towards the harbour. The reclaimed areas of Auckland’s harbour once played an important role as a place of warehousing and commerce related to port activity. But now, as in comparative cities worldwide where port areas have become places for urban renewal, Auckland’s focus is now firmly on the Waitematā Harbour’s edge.

Positioned one block further back from the Britomart retail and hospitality precinct, and with its back to steeply rising land behind, The Pacifica becomes the map pin identifying the district as a new place to live, with a growing base of amenity and entertainment for its residents.

Briggs says that achieving a ‘sense of place’ for The Pacifica was incredibly important and was something the Plus project team of Director Jaimin Atkins and Associate Piers Bowman spent a lot of time on.

“You can design a seven-story building that is very much of its street - of its neighbourhood, but when you head up into the tower area, suddenly you question, what is its context? It becomes an element in the skyline, but what does it relate to?

“So, that sense of place, for us, was a meeting point of how to bring the macro down to street level, and how to bring the street level back up into the sky,” Briggs says.

“When you're in that street scape, the façade that is flush with the street feels correct to scale. And yet, when you look up, not only does the tower sit back, but also those elements that form the façade on the street scape are seen to then travel up into the sky. So, it works at the street scale, it works at the city scale, and you see the way that those two combine where it coils from street up into the sky,” he said.

Briggs says that deep consideration was given to providing apartment residents with a sense of place within the apartment also.

Apartments at the upper levels feature winter gardens (enclosed balconies) to provide a buffer between the resident and the outside, that mimics the intermediary space that a front garden of your house would provide for example.

And inside, apartment surfaces feature natural materials and slightly darker timbers reflective of contemporary New Zealand design, compared to contemporary Australian or European interiors – more New York than New South Wales.

“Maybe that's because Auckland is an exposed climate. There's more of a sense of warmth and wrapping yourself with materials that are more sheltering and encompassing,” says Briggs.

A function of all Plus projects is the use of Environmentally Sustainable Design (ESD), considering the glass type, the amount of glass, where it's positioned and how much shading it’s able to generate – to ensure the ideal environment for residents.

And despite floor to ceiling glass, the windows themselves are in quite narrow frames, to manage heat and again, to provide some sense of enclosure; “to give you the feeling that you're in a room, rather than living on a platform”.

Amenities throughout the structure are of the highest standard including lounges, a lap pool, sauna, steam room, spa, gym, media room, library and barbecue terrace.

Briggs says it was exciting to be part of building such a strong, bold footprint right at the epicenter of Auckland's development.

“On many levels Auckland, I think, is the one of world’s very best cities. It has a fantastic laneway culture and network of pedestrian spaces with its spectacular harbour. It's a really blessed city.

“And so, for us, that idea of the harbour and of the laneway network were the two starting points for the macro and the micro. A service laneway at the eastern edge of the site, that threads its way through into the main address onto Commerce Street, became a natural extension of an existing network of pedestrian laneways.

“And then we were able to very naturally extend that through our site, and to represent that laneway experience within the architecture of the base of the tower, before becoming vertical elements within the skyline.

“It almost became quite a natural experience, rather than, what wacky shape can we make? It was: what naturally grows out of the human-centric experience of the city at street level, and how does that then grow up into the skyline?”

Briggs says that an important aspect of the creation of The Pacifica was the positive and collaborative relationship with the client. From the moment the contract was awarded, the client expressed that Plus had won the competition because of the process and design journey described.

“For us that was really exciting. So, we threw everything away, apart from our process, and engaged with the client really closely. So, the design of The Pacifica, although it's a really strong, single-minded end result, is actually the result of a very collaborative process.

“I think this project epitomizes that idea of being able to be open to a large number of ideas and a large number of influences and people and community around it, and to still coalesce that into a very strong outcome. We actually went on a journey with a lot of people, and we still got to where we got to,” Briggs said.