Groundworks underway for a new building at New Zealand's Parliament, 26 February 2024. Photo: Johnny Blades / VNP
Parliament is about to expand, and it's not the number of MPs potentially rising - although that is something that the plan to expand is taking into account.
A big new wooden superstructure is about to be built out the back of the Parliament precinct, and it is projected to be ready to fit dozens of MPs by the 2026 election. The building’s completion will also mean various Parliament staff who have been working elsewhere around the Wellington CBD can finally come back to the precinct.
For a few years now, some backbench MPs’ offices have been stashed away in virtual cupboards in the attic of the Parliament Library. Such is the lack of room in the main Parliament Building that MPs have had to be accommodated here and there in temporary offices across the complex like a motley jenga construction. It’s an inefficient layout, but change is coming.
‘Siberia’
Groundworks have just been completed for what will be the first significant new building on the Parliament precinct since 1977 when the Beehive got up and running.
Built to “environmentally conscious design”, using New Zealand materials and recycled materials to reduce construction waste, the six-storey wooden building will be located around the back of Parliament House on Museum Street, the little road that juts off Bowen Street at the intersection with The Terrace and runs behind the Beehive.
A little over a quarter of MPs, or around 30, will be accommodated in the building, according to Dave Wills, the manager of the Buildings Project Management Office at Parliament, who spoke to The House about the Future Accommodation Strategy project.
The new building for MPs will stand in what was until recently the rear carpark of Parliament. Wills noted that this carpark space has had many buildings on it over the years, including less than glamorous offices that earned this particular part of the precinct the ‘Siberia’ tag.
“It was referred to by one of our past Prime Ministers as ‘Siberia’, out the back there. It was a location for backbenchers at the time. And the new building will very much be focused on backbenchers and the parties that support them as well.”
Render of the new Parliament building currently under construction, a six-storey building for MPs on the left. Photo: © One to One Hundred Ltd
The project, which is to be funded under a $257.5 million budget appropriation, also encompasses a new security building, also to be constructed out the back on the carpark space, where it meets Balantrae Place.
“We have a very small security building at present where all goods and contractors coming on to site need to be screened or report to. This facility provides a lot more flexibility and serviceability for the security teams to be able to screen everything coming on site,” Wills said.
Constraints
Another aim of the Future Accommodation Strategy is replacing the former press annexe behind the Beehive. The annexe is earthquake-prone, and its proposed replacement would be a dedicated building for ministers (who currently cannot all fit within the Beehive). However this remains only at the concept design stage.
The need for seismic strengthening of buildings in Wellington’s CBD is a driving factor behind the strategy. As Speaker of Parliament Gerry Brownlee explained, Parliament’s operational functionality is constrained by its condition and its size.
“That pressure on the space that we have available was exacerbated by the building just below the library (a separate building), dropping from around about 70 or 80 percent of building code down to 15 percent of building code inside an eighteen month period, largely due to the way in which the code was re-written at Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
“Parliament couldn’t ignore a piece of government advice, and so eighteen MP offices had to come out of there and be located somewhere else,” Brownlee said.
Exacerbating the office-space squeeze that the project aims to fix is the loss of the Parliament Offices in Bowen House, across the road from Parliament. They had been used for years by MPs, staffers and others but were exited in 2020 when it emerged the building needed seismic strengthening.
Render of the new Parliament buildings currently under construction, with the security hub building on the left, and a six-storey building for MPs on the right. Photo: © One to One Hundred Ltd
Wills described the temporary office situation for some MPs at the moment as "very cramped".
He said the costs of the new building stack up well against the lease-based operating model that applied with Bowen House.
Flexibility and resilience
The six-storey wooden building is designed to be of the highest seismic rating, and ultra flexible.
“Wood moves a lot more than concrete and steel. And combine that with base isolators which move your building around beautifully,” Wills explained.
“I think back to [the] Kaikōura [earthquake of 2016] when Parliament House actually moved a couple hundred millimetres out over the cobbles and back again, and had no damage inside other than some superficial cracking down on the basements and things. That was the effect of the base isolators doing their job.
“So it does move it around. During the design phase we were looking at a metre to a metre-and-a-half of movement in the upper building. So we've also included dampers into the building as well (that you see in a lot of buildings going in now), and that'll minimise that movement of the structure itself as well."
The main new building is designed to be operational in the immediate aftermath of a big earthquake and self-sufficient for days following such a disaster, Wills said.
Groundworks underway for a new building at New Zealand's Parliament, with a heritage protected oak tree in the background, after it was moved from its original location closer to the original Parliament Building. Photo: Johnny Blades / VNP
The new building’s flexibility extends to being able to reconfigure Parliament’s MPs’ offices at speed. This will be invaluable during post-election periods, because currently it can take months to facilitate room change-overs and have new occupants settling in before things are workable again.
“So what we were finding is it's very expensive to take out wooden plaster walls, and you make a lot of waste. The new Museum Street building, each of the floor plates is just a big floor plate, and we can reconfigure those with what we're calling demountable petitions, we can form another office and reconfigure it within about two hours without wasting anything.”
Wills added that the new building will be “future proof for twenty, thirty years” and this includes having the capacity to accommodate more MPs should the size of the Parliament, in terms of number of members, increase.
