A liveable city must have outdoor spaces that offer respite from the frenetic pace and hyper-stimulation that are defining features of urban life. As city dwellers we seek the immersive excitement that is the life-blood of urbanity, but we also need opportunities to find solace in sequestered places that offer refuge from that stimulation and cacophony.

A city park is the exemplar of urban sanctuary; and Auckland is well fortified with an abundance of places that extend sylvan serenity.

Freyberg Square (aka Freyberg Place) provides a cosmopolitan canopy of a different sort. It is an urban sanctuary of built form - of material and landscape architectures designed to envelop, gently caress and encourage thoughtful repose - for those alone or with mates.

Whether for morning tea breaks, over the noon hour or brief catch-ups with mates before heading home, Freyberg Square is an integral element of Auckland’s network of cosmopolitan canopies.

Lastly but significantly, as I have documented in a previous post, Freyberg Square is used by several social services agencies to distribute wrap-around services for Auckland’s most vulnerable residents.

A school holiday in commemoration of New Zealand’s Labour Day meant that my wife and I had an opportunity to invite our grandson for a sleep-over last Sunday followed the next day — the public holiday — with a train ride to Parnell, Auckland’s oldest suburb, for a tramp across the Auckland Domain, the city’s oldest public park.

The walk from the Parnell train station to the Domain’s Wintergardens is a proper hike uphill through the woods at one edge of the Domain. Still on the mend after some medical woes, I was delighted to find that my grandson was eager to hold my hand as we made our way from the train station. He is such a thoughtful lad.

It was a grand afternoon, both in the two glass houses of the Wintergardens and across the grounds of the park.

A stand of Pohutukawa trees sparkled in the mid-afternoon light. They obliged me a photograph.

My wife and I had a meet-up planned for the other night with two of our oldest Kiwi friends. Our evening called for drinks at The Nightcar, an Asian restaurant and cocktail bar known for its elegant cocktails. The Nightcar is located in one of the Imperial Buildings on Queen Street. Anticipating our outing and having never set foot inside of the buildings, I was keen to do some research on the history of the Imperial Buildings and its adjacent structure the Everybody’s Building. I was delighted to uncover a treasure trove of architectural history.

The Nightcar is located at 44 Queen Street in one of the two structures that together comprise the Imperial Buildings (44-48 Queen Street). For the curious viewer of my blog, one can find fascinating overviews of the Imperial Buildings here and here. An architectural history of the third building — the Everybody’s Building — can be found here. The history of the cinema located in the Everybody’s Building makes for great reading.

Every curious about the interiors of historic buildings, I wandered about the ground floor of 44 Queen Street for a few minutes before our 5pm booking. At the rear end of the building, which borders on the alley known as Fort Lane, I discovered a stunning space that had been the home of a Danish pastry cafe called Elske. A sculptural staircase connecting the ground and first floors anchored the visual landscape of the former patisserie. The space may now serve as an events venue, but it appeared to be abandoned.

At day’s end in the waning rays of alley light — the only ambient light within the events space save for a few low-illumination lights above the staircase — the visual mood was perfect for black & white photography. My photograph attempts to do justice to that vibe.

Lastly, The Nightcar’s reputation for excellent cocktails and Asian cuisine is well deserved. My wife and I plan to return on a Tuesday night when the bar serves up not only great drinks and food but also live jazz.

At a red light on my walk today, I took the moment’s wait to look around and was not disappointed.

We tattoo our bodies, we plaster our notebooks & laptops, we stitch our backpacks and purses with the imprints that tell our stories - who we are, where we’ve been, how we wish to be seen, understood and noted.

We parade in the guise of autobiographical billboards, lest we not be recognised as unique beings - our fingerprints of social identity.

I try to heed the good advice of the street photographers whom I most admire: find a spot you like — because the light is right; the colours are brilliant; the background creates a dynamic backdrop; etc. — and wait for something to happen.

Patience is the requisite skill.

The other week, I noticed a cool display window at a cosmetics shop on Queen Street, and made a mental note to spend some time there. When I returned to the location the other day, the stars were aligned.

The woman working on her mobile phone appeared to be planted in place. Her placement along a display window awash with dynamic shapes, textures and colours seemed perfect. I waited for a corner anchor — the woman in the yellow shirt at the left edge of the image — because I wanted to add some additional foreground/background depth. Challenging the constraints of a two dimensional medium is always a worthy pursuit.

I believe it’s an interesting photograph.

High Street is more pedestrian walkway than automotive thoroughfare. The street does accommodate one-way car traffic, partly as a short-cut to avoid Queen Street but mostly as a delivery route for the commercial establishments that line the street.

In the past year, I have been part of an exciting council discussion about the street’s redevelopment as a pedestrian zone that would limit vehicular traffic to the bookend ends of the day, or perhaps more modestly close the street to car traffic from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily.

Those plans could accentuate the street’s eclectic vibe as a cultural hub for fashion, books and food. Furthermore, the street is anchored by Freyberg Place and the Ellen Melville Centre, representing important public gathering places within the city centre.

Today’s photograph stretches the definition of the street’s idiosyncrasy. The set-up: I was exiting a shop, having spent considerable time browsing the aisles in one of the street’s brilliant book stores, when I saw the rather imposing figure of a very tall man sporting a very loud suit. I was pleased that I had left my camera on its tether around my neck while inside the book shop, and I took the photograph in haste from waist level without the aid of the viewfinder, hoping that I had angled the lens to capture my subject as he approached me at a clipped pace.

With two mates, my wife and I travelled to the Waikato region of New Zealand’s North Island to spend time at Sanctuary Mountain, the world's largest fenced eco-sanctuary.

The weather was less kind, with extended periods of rainfall on Saturday and Sunday, so our time in the reserve was limited to a four-hour period from late morning to mid-afternoon on Saturday. That being the time when most birds slept after early morning activity, we spotted and heard less bird life than we had eagerly anticipated.

Nonetheless, the walk through ancient forest was magnificent and richly rewarding.

Today’s photograph is one of my favourites. The fractal beauty of fern combined with new and old growth leaf and limb — the dark insistence of tree trunk and gossamer delicacy of tree branch — signify the sylvan signature and visual verity of our walk.

My wife and I took our grandson the other month to the Wētā Workshop Experience in Auckland. Wētā is the New Zealand-based visual effects company of maddeningly talented concept artists, art directors, production managers and manufacturing titans who create the visual effects and production sets for many of the movies we so love (think The Hobbit movies).

Among other things, the Auckland exhibition studio is an immersive experience in the magic of forced perspective.

The subtle forced perspective in today’s image makes it appear that the barber is either very small compared to the pedestrian on the side walk or far more recessed from the street than he actually is.

I believe there are at least two photographic properties that contribute to the forced perspective. First, the proximity of the pedestrian in the foreground exaggerates his height compared to the background content. Secondly, my camera sports a wide-angle (28mm) lens, which also slightly distorts by extending the foreground-to-background distances in a photograph. In combination, the image exhibits a wee bit of forced perspective.

I also love the look of the segmented shop spaces within the building. The full-glass building facade pulls the viewer into the image, creating a feeling of strong visual intimacy - a harmless voyeurism. We don’t expect to be privy to the activities on the upper floor.

A walk after dark the other evening proved profitable.

One of the legacy silos in Silo Park (Wynyard Quarter) sits on a support structure of several cement columns, creating an alcove beneath the silo. It is a perfect spot for dance or musical performers to rehearse. And, on a regular basis, they do so.

From a distance, I spotted 3 or 4 dancers practising one of their performance pieces. Their performance efforts may have been more casual and serendipitous than my attribution suggests.

The artificial light was strong but obstructed by the columns, producing sharp shafts of light against shadow - a perfect scene for black & white photography.

I was pleased to have captured the faint outline of a cigarette in the hand of one dancer and incandescent reflections on the pants of the other visible dancer. At least one other dancer is hidden from view.

I rode the rails for much of Sunday. My excitement was irrepressible, as was that of the thousands of Kiwis who flocked to experience our version of an underground.

The public works included construction of three new train stations. In this post I contain myself to photographs that celebrate the excitement and first impressions of the opening day: the bustle on train platforms; the visual lines of interior spaces; and (yes) the beauty of a subway tunnel. In separate posts, I will explore architectures, both interior and exterior, as well as present the numerous art installations across all three train stations.

Beyond the sheer cuteness of the young child and the resolute insistence of his pose — I have anchored myself here — I was struck by his isolation.

I stood for some time to see if I could catch the furtive glance of the parent. The tacit acknowledgement: Yes, I see you but I, too, am lashed to place.

I surmised that parent was a nearby volunteer busker seeking contributions from pedestrians for some worthy charitable organisation.

The young lad redefined adorable and perhaps exasperation.

I do love photographing people congregated at bus stops. It is a great exercise in people-watching, especially in the age of public screen fixation. Catching people doing something other than staring at their screens is a distinct challenge.

I had been standing across the street for some time, patiently waiting for things to develop. What caught my eye initially, but notably, was the fact the only one person in the scene had a phone in hand, and in that one case it was unclear whether he was lost in scrolling when I captured my photograph. I believe he may have looked up, perhaps distracted by the purposeful speed of the delivery cyclist within the cycling lane of the side walk.

The photograph was taken as twilight enveloped Queen Street. My camera settings were such that a fixed ISO 100 setting forced an auto shutter speed of 1/30th; and the combination produced the blurred motion of the cyclist, which I quite liked. I was equally fortunate to have had comfortable spacing amongst the people presented in the foreground of the image. Mixed poses amongst those seated as well as the contrasting clumping of peoples in the background were also attractive compositional elements.

Lastly, the impress of the awning as a framing device, along with its dynamic representation of strong whites and blacks, punctuate the power of this black and white photograph.

You cannot live in an international city, like Auckland, without hitting up against a crushing reality: most major cities face a seemingly intractable affordable housing crisis. The alchemical formula is elemental. Cities create unimaginable wealth; seemingly limitless but ill-distributed wealth creates insatiable appetites for high-end consumption and investment; housing is usually a highly profitable investment; but the limited supply of a commodity creates upward pressure on its cost — case in point housing.

The histories of urban housing markets suggest repeatedly that private markets alone cannot solve an affordable housing crisis. There’s money to be made in higher-end, and not affordable, housing projects. At least within the context of New Zealand, the construction of affordable housing has required public-private partnerships, and as often as not the sole involvement of governments at national or regional levels.

Built in New Lynn, a western suburb of Auckland, Merchant Quarter was financed as a private-public partnership intended to provide an affordable housing opportunity — very low six-figure apartments in 2014 dollars — for the city’s central district. Auckland Council provided the funds for the civic infrastructural regeneration — a public car park development beneath the apartment complex and improvements to the nearby public transit centre.

I was unaware of this intriguing backstory when my eye caught sight of the Merchant Quarter apartment complex. And, unlike most photographers who gravitated to the gaiety of the complex’s front facade, I was pulled to the rear of the building.

The rear facade is austere in tone - witness the unattractive blackish-grey colouring of the building’s face. Against that flattened backdrop, the Arc Deco-inspired geometric arrangements of the window panels offer a dramatic dose of architectural panache. The elegant and precise window panel variations, along with the playful mix of window sizes, brilliantly militate against the monotony of repeated form. The off-centre placement of five metal rails that traverse the vertical length of the building face further enhances the facade’s visual vibrancy and complex geometric language.

Additionally, against the facade’s dominant vocabularies of rectilineal precision and greyscale shading, the parallelogram form and vibrant colour of the balconies are antidotes to ward off the otherwise numbing effects of uniform repetition.

Lastly, I added to my photograph the textural echoes of geometric fancy to inject an element of dynamism into the colourful but vacant canvas of the sky.

Rents are high so shops along Lorne Street are small. The economic pressures that shape scale result in a row of retail and food shops that resemble so many mouse holes along a wall of low-profile commercial buildings on either side of the street. The commercial buildings on the west side of the street are themselves dwarfed by the towering profile of office buildings along nearby Queen Street, as suggested by the background within today’s photograph.

I traversed this familiar stretch of the central city in the dimming light of late afternoon. Against a darkening streetscape, the Grill Planet BBQ Buffet looked luminous. The orange interior lights were especially inviting. The leading lines of a partially lowered ceiling lent to the compact restaurant a beguiling sense of depth. The dining venue exuded warmth and comfort.

I was bedazzled by Grill Planet’s visual charm.

It’s likely an incontestable assertion. Most people go to an art museum to study what is foregrounded - paintings and other two-dimensional works affixed to walls or three-dimensional sculptures displayed on pedestals.

Perhaps less common, as a conscious practice for a museum patron, is an intended focus on the background - the architecture of the museum or gallery. There are notable exceptions, where the architecture is foregrounded such that we are transfixed by the edifice itself. Those grand buildings dare us to be distracted by other purposes. Dedicated art patrons know those sacred places.

I feel extremely fortunate to have in my adopted retirement city an art gallery whose form - the building’s architecture - is a much the draw as are the formal art works within. I intended yesterday’s visit to the Auckland Art Gallery to be an exploration of interior spaces, having posted any number of past Substack entries on the building’s magnificent exterior, both original building and its astoundingly beautiful addition. I have noted elsewhere that the new[ish] addition, which serves as the gallery’s main entrance, is a glorious example of vernacular architecture.

Of the images I captured, today’s posted image is more prosaic than others, but I like it nonetheless. It’s not grand interior architecture nor especially expressive of this gallery’s architectural charm. Instead - no surprise here - the themes speak of tonality, geometry and perspective.

I was walking north on Queen Street on my way back to my apartment, having been to the central branch of Auckland Libraries to collect a book. It was mid-afternoon and the west side of Queen Street was bathed in the harsh light of the day. The tonal contrasts of that sharp light on the mature trees along the west side of the street were striking.

Few features, built or natural, on the walkways of a city street appear to me as powerful and inviting as that of mature trees.

I queried Claude to prepare a brief history of the urban tree movement in European cities, New Zealand having been colonised by a European nation. I reproduce below that short essay for those inclined to explore the topic.

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A Brief History of the Urban Street Tree Movement in European Cities

From military ramparts to climate-resilient canopies

The tree-lined street is so familiar a feature of the European city that it is easy to forget it was invented. Street trees did not simply grow where cities happened to be; they were deliberately planted, and the reasons for planting them changed dramatically over four centuries — from military engineering and drainage, through royal display and public health, to today’s climate adaptation. What follows is a short account of how the urban street tree became a movement.

^{Medieval beginnings: trees against the enemy}

Before the seventeenth century, European streets were largely treeless. Medieval streets were narrow, crowded and intended for pedestrians and carts, leaving no room for trees, while what greenery existed clustered in churchyards, monastery gardens and market squares. The decisive change came, unexpectedly, from warfare. As siege artillery grew more powerful in the sixteenth century, military engineers in cities such as Antwerp, Amsterdam and Strasbourg began replacing vertical stone walls with massive sloping earthworks — bulwarks — that could absorb cannon fire. To stop these mounds from eroding, engineers planted rows of trees along their length.

The by-product of this military necessity was a pleasant, shaded walkway atop the ramparts, ideal for promenading in peacetime. The very word boulevard descends from the Dutch bolwerk and Italian baluardo, both meaning bulwark. The European street tree, in other words, began life as fortification.

^{The Dutch innovation: trees as infrastructure}

Amsterdam was arguably the first European city to plant trees on a large scale. From the late sixteenth century, as the city dug its famous ring of canals, it planted lindens — and later elms — along each newly cut waterway. This was not primarily decorative. The trees’ roots helped bind and strengthen the soft canal banks, and they were believed to act as natural pumps, drawing water out of the swampy subsoil on which the city was built. They also softened the stench of the canals and the squalor of the streets. By the eighteenth century, elms, which tolerated harsh urban conditions better, had largely replaced the lindens. The Dutch model established a lasting idea: that street trees were a form of civic infrastructure, not merely ornament.

^{The French grand manner: the avenue and the boulevard}

In France, street trees became instruments of display and grandeur. In 1616 Marie de’ Medici, the Italian queen of Henri IV, had the Cours-la-Reine laid out beside the Seine — a wide carriageway flanked by four parallel rows of elms, created expressly for fashionable promenading. Later in the century, under Louis XIV, the minister Colbert and the landscape architect André Le Nôtre extended this taste for formal, tree-lined avenues into and around the capital, planting grand approaches that echoed the drives of aristocratic country estates.

The culmination came in the mid-nineteenth century. Under Napoleon III, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann cut long, straight, broad boulevards through the medieval fabric of Paris, bringing light and air to overcrowded quarters. These new arteries were planted on a vast scale — Haussmann’s administration is credited with adding on the order of hundreds of thousands of trees to the city. Haussmann’s Paris became the template that cities across Europe and beyond sought to imitate, cementing the tree-lined boulevard as the signature of the modern metropolis.

^{The nineteenth century: public health and the reforming city}

Industrialisation gave street trees a new rationale. As nineteenth-century cities filled with smoke, filth and dense populations, reformers came to see trees and parks as remedies for the physical and moral ills of the industrial city. Trees were valued for shade, for filtering foul air, and for offering ordinary people access to something of nature within the crowded city. This period saw the founding of municipal parks and the beginnings of organised civic effort — societies, associations and city authorities — devoted to planting and caring for urban trees. It is here that the scattered practice of planting trees begins to resemble a movement.

^{The twentieth century: decline, science and revival}

The twentieth century tested Europe’s urban trees. Two world wars, the pressures of motor traffic, road widening and post-war reconstruction all took their toll, and diseases — most notably Dutch elm disease — devastated species that had defined cities such as Amsterdam and Paris. At the same time, the practice of caring for city trees became more professional and scientific. The term urban forestry — treating all the trees of a city as a single managed resource — emerged in the 1960s and gradually took hold in Europe, bringing an integrated, strategic approach to planning and managing urban trees for their environmental, economic and social benefits.

^{Today: the tree as climate infrastructure}

In the twenty-first century the street tree has acquired perhaps its most urgent role yet. Faced with rising urban temperatures, heatwaves, flooding and biodiversity loss, European cities increasingly regard trees as one of the most effective nature-based solutions available: cooling streets, absorbing stormwater, cleaning air and supporting mental and physical health. The COVID-19 pandemic sharpened public appreciation of accessible green space still further. Cities now pursue explicit canopy-cover targets and diverse, climate-resilient planting — even as the same warming climate stresses the trees themselves through drought, pests and disease.

Across four centuries the European street tree has been, by turns, a defence against cannon, a prop for canal banks, a symbol of royal power, a cure for industrial squalor and a tool of climate survival. Its history is, in miniature, a history of what Europeans have most feared and most valued in their cities.

^{Selected sources}

Orion Magazine, “The Peculiar Relationship Between City Trees and Medieval Battle”; DeepRoot Blog, “History of Street Trees in Holland” and “History of Street Trees in Paris”; Smart Cities Dive, “History of Street Trees in Paris: The Golden Age of the Boulevard”; Arnold Arboretum (Harvard), “How Trees Were Urbanized”; Forest History Society, “History of Urban Forests”; Springer, “A History of Urban Forests and Trees in Europe”; Forest Information System for Europe (EEA), “Urban forestry: multi-functional greening in the city.”

The Kauri Glen Tree Top Walkway is just that — an elegant wooden walkway that enables the casual hiker to view the forest floor from the heights of its leafy canopy. It is a bird’s eye view.

I walked the tree top trail with my grandson the other day. We both love a walk in the woods. Never one to miss the opportunity to encourage my grandson’s interest in photography, I looped my camera strap around his shoulder and had him direct our photographic exploration.

Today’s photograph is my favourite image from his session portfolio.

words are superfluous . . . these ferns express all that need be conveyed

I enjoy opportunities to walk leisurely and closely examine store fronts. And, for the most part, they are store fronts and not display windows. The latter suggests intention, if not also artful pretence, that I find rare in the commercial districts of Auckland’s central city and its neighbouring suburbs.

The frontage of the retail shops that populate the thoroughfares I walk on a regular basis are for the most part austere, some would say threadbare and utilitarian. The shop owners, often first or second generation immigrants, find the daily struggles of keeping their businesses fully stocked and interiors ordered sufficiently demanding tasks. Concerns for the aesthetics of store-front windows are secondary, given the demands of securing goods and maintaining shelf stock, even superfluous if the business is already well known and customer traffic is brisk.

The store front in today’s entry is a visual presentation in two parts. There is first the window itself, an unassuming indeed chaotic mural of what has been or could be the start a tattoo design - the past, next or first ink-and-needle to skin. Smaller placards, either mounted on interior walls or held upright in easels, line the shop’s interior ledges and floor.

The image also presents a second showcase: an unobstructed and welcoming view, set in deep recess, of the shop’s interior of highly polished floor, of gleaming chest against gauzy curtain and of leg and foot — awaiting customers suggesting the parlour is popular and held in some regard.

I believe the photograph is a handsome black & white image and an entertaining story.

High Street, a narrow thoroughfare directly east of Queen Street in Auckland’s city centre, begins at Shortland Street and terminates, as High Street, at Victoria Street East. From the south side of Victoria Street, the diminutive roadway continues until Mayoral Drive sporting its new name as Lorne Street.

Lorne Street rivals Dominion Road for its density of Asian food restaurants and cafes. I am fairly confident that the cuisines of the vast majority of Asian countries, including India, are represented in the eatery establishments along Lorne Street.

Plus Chicken, the shop featured in this post’s image, is a takeaway-only restaurant on Lorne Street. It is as tiny as the street on which it is located. The fried chicken offerings are prepared in the Taiwanese/Chinese style, a preparation quite different from American fried chicken. Unlike the traditional presentation of American fried chicken of bone-in chicken fried in a thick and bready crust, the Taiwanese/Chinese style prepares boneless chicken that has been flattened into a cutlet and coated with sweet potato or tapioca/potato starch rather than wheat flour. A compliment of seasoning, and notably fried Thai basil leaves, are added after the chicken is fried rather than before frying, as is done in the American style. Finally, Taiwanese/Chinese style fried chicken is served in a paper bag and eaten in the bag from one edge of the chicken to the other, or sometimes on a skewer stick.

As for the photograph, the late afternoon light against the store front first caught my eye. The splash of orange window transom against the black and white building materials also interested me. Finally, the frame within frame portrait of the chef added a nice compositional touch.