NZ Visual Diary - entry 309
Sky World Centre facade
Travelling south on Queen Street from its northern boundary at Te Komititanga Square and Auckland’s harbour district, a visitor would be struck by the preservation of Auckland’s Victorian era architecture. One needs to look up, however, to find that architectural evidence: the street-level store fronts have been refurbished to suit a modern commercial sensibility, both banal and glittery.
Against the backdrop on Queen Street of late 19th & early 20th century architectural representation, the Sky World building is startlingly different. Built in the ‘early oughts’ of the 21st century, the building’s street facade is, broadly speaking, post-modern in design. With its visual transparencies, geometric eclecticism, materials mash-up and hints of fractal forms, the edifice is a demonstrable outlier on Queen Street.
However, as a 2022 article in The Spinoff laments, the interior of the building is commercially moribund:
An entire food court worth of tenants has vacated the premises. Oil is leaking and pooling on the edges of escalators. A digital movie display offers up films — Jojo Rabbit and Rise of Skywalker — from 2019. A floor once full of restaurants is locked up. You can’t get a burger, or a beer. The carpet is exactly the same.
First opened 22 years ago, Auckland’s Skyworld building has been due a makeover for at least half that time. Right now, a visit to 291-297 Queen Street will bring not joy but frowns, with broken walls, blown bulbs and a depressingly gloomy vibe best encapsulated by a comment from a visiting Whangarei resident: “What happened here?” 1
The blight of Sky World’s retail and entertainment interior has the feel of an abandoned suburban mall: cavernously vacant and hauntingly quiet. Time will tell if the commercial life of Sky World Centre can be resuscitated.
The Spinoff | July 9, 2022 |’ It will make a dramatic difference’: Skyworld’s finalised renovation plan is here’
< https://thespinoff.co.nz/business/09-07-2022/it-will-make-a-dramatic-difference-sky-worlds-finalised-renovation-plan-is-here >
I like how your dreamy treatment of post production matches the nostalgia of a once popular building. I love it still and wish it were renovated. There’s a delicacy to the lines at the top which also give some cool editorial content as if to say we all walk a delicate line.
Others have commented on the strange mishmash of styles. I actually found it quite appealing, futuristic and exciting, inside and out. If I stood in one spot staring at the interior space it looked maybe like an Escher picture. If I tried to get somewhere within the building, it felt DEFINITELY like moving around IN an Escher picture! Confusing and (despite the big open spaces) claustrophobic.