NZ visual diary - entry 75

22 Kitchener Street

Kitchener Street has its calling cards.

The Auckland Art Gallery sits on the south end of the street.

Albert Park, with its fabulous stands of Pohutukawa trees, magnificent gardens and stately statues, stretches along Kitchener's eastern edge.

The city square, home to a magnificent mural celebrating the women's suffrage movement in New Zealand, descends from Kitchener's western boundary.

The northern end of Kitchener Street spills into the University of Auckland city centre campus.

I have never entered the Cosmo Coffee Shop on Kitchener, but I have stopped often to admire the building's symmetries. For its rectilinear precision it is an exacting building.

The building's architecture allows for the slightest hints of curvilinear accent, and then almost by accident. There are the odd squiggles at the lower right-hand edge of the building; the suggestion of a curve in the awning above the entrance and plate glass window; a bend in the electrical conduit above the door; and the curved metal work at the top of the fire escape.

This image was photographed at night, which made for the uneven, almost dappled, play of light and shadows.

Although the image in colour was striking, I prefer this black and white rendering for the way in which the precise lines of the facade are dramatised.