Freyberg Building

Edward Lovelace

Sometimes buildings reveal themselves in ways that are most unexpected. The new mother ship for the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE) is just such a building. By exterior bulk, the building is actually more the scale of an ocean liner, occupying almost an entire city block and offering 21,000m2 of floor-space within its seven-to-eight-storeyed superstructure. Even so, it manages to sit quite anonymously and snugly into the closely knit and historic Stout Street precinct of Wellington \u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00adthat has been its home for 75 years and counting. This building’s robust, round-cornered, ‘Moderne’ or art deco style – designed successfully to be seismically sound – was never going to require or be subject to a major new external treatment.

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