Ockham’s 21st development sees the Auckland ‘urban re-imaginers’ return to Grey Lynn. The Feynman’s architectural designer, Hannah Chiaroni-Clarke, explains what inspired her.
“The aim wasn’t to create a landmark building,” says Hannah, “but rather a building that instantly feels at home on Great North Road, like it’s always been there. It’s not every day you get to design an entire block: I saw this as an opportunity to reinstate the original grain and scale of the street.” What she came up with will bring a certain cadence to the streetscape.
A single building wrapped in a series of seven shoulder-to-shoulder brick facades, the overall look of The Feynman is evocative of an old town high street that’s evolved over time.
“I looked to High Streets in London, in Prague, to the iconic canal houses of Amsterdam, say, or, closer to home, the clever upgrade of Vinegar Lane,” Hannah says.
On the building’s Elgin Street end, the heritage ambience of the area has been acknowledged with traditional red brick cladding and arched windows, while the Harcourt Street side features a curved, modern look, rendered in a black gloss and cream brick. “One edge of the building speaks to the future, the other nods to the past,” Hannah says.
Bookended between the two are five more brickwork frontages in a range of tones, a pastiche that winks at other Ockham projects around Auckland — a shimmery black like Modal in Mt Albert, a verdant green that hints toward The Greenhouse in Ponsonby. When taken as whole, The Feynman’s multiplicities coalesce into one readable form.
Or, as Richard Feynman himself put it: “Every once in a while, we have these integrations when everything’s pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.”
Richard Feynman: physicist, teacher, student
Nobel prize-winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman dedicated his life to understanding the abstruse and fearfully complicated and rendering it intelligible. Yet he retained an enchanting intellectual humility: “I’m not absolutely sure of anything,” he once remarked, “and there are many things I don’t know anything about.”
Feynman, more than most great thinkers, accepted uncertainty and doubt as the necessary engines for learning. He would begin each new notebook by inscribing on the first page ‘things i don’t know about’…
The Isaac, named after Sir Isaac Newton, on Surrey Crescent. Feynman’s work was immersed in the profundity of physics: among his many labours he grappled with quantum electrodynamics, tangoed with the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and wrangled a path integral formulation of quantum mechanics. While we respect all that (and understand...ah, some of it), Feynman’s a thinker we revere not only for his contributions to his field, but also for his ability to reduce the extremely complicated to the bearably simple.
For Feynman, most things could be dissected into parts, contemplated, and explained to another person. Anything he laid his eyes could become an instance of anything else. “It is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough, we see the entire universe,” he wrote. “There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition, we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars.”
"We quite agree. Most complex things are simpler (and often more elegant) when broken into smaller pieces, like, say, an inner-city block apartment development, portioned into a succession of architectural components. But more than that, there’s also an aesthetic, a poetry, in the puzzling-out itself."
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