1017 Beach Road, Torbay, North Shore, New Zealand

It's time this blog featured an architectural failure, to complement the rundown and mysterious properties already here.  A few weeks ago, we paid a visit to the North Shore in New Zealand.  As a Wellingtonian, I feel better about my life and my relationship with the planet as long as I say I went to the "North Shore" instead of admitting I set foot in Auckland.*  However, I felt much worse about my eyesight and my relationship with architects the moment I set eyes on this monstrosity.  Trust me, the blurry photograph above is for the best; a nice, sharp one might do damage to your vision.

*Warning: sentence may contain high dose of exaggeration.

When we last passed through here, this was a vacant lot.  Now, as part of all the unnecessary development taking place along the fringe of Long Bay Regional Park, a house has cropped up here.  And not just any house, but a truly bleak, boxy piece of rubbish. Seriously, it looks like one box precariously balanced on top of another.  The colour is confronting, sinister, and about the last thing that should be beside a pleasant park.

The windows add to the sinister feel. Some walls have all too few, creating the impression more of light industry than of somewhere homely and inviting.  Others are just slits high on the wall, as you can see in this also mercifully blurred photo:

I cannot fathom what the architect was thinking, or perhaps more to the point, what gave him such a bad trip to design this or how he persuaded anybody to accept the design and build it.  The house itself is presumably perfectly liveable, so I can't award it one of our lower ratings, but I'm coming down on it like a sack of bricks - and maybe, if we're lucky, it'll be condemned not as structurally unsound but as aesthetically unsound.

Rating: Damnable, with a stern eye to Condemnation the moment any wear and tear develops.