2020 New Zealand Architecture Awards Winner
St James Church (1963)
St James’s Church in Hastings demonstrates the power and particularity of the architectural section. As a cut through the body (of a building), the section provides a specific way of imagining space. Reading the building from the exterior, a vertiginous clerestory leads one to believe the interior volume to be semi-gabled and asymmetric. While this is true of the space around the side-lit and shadowed sanctuary, the addition of a subjugated lean-to ‘transept’ yields symmetry to the nave and brings to the architecture a soaring Gothic quality. With this deployment of gable as arch, Len Hoogerbrug (1927–2019) renders a New Zealand contribution to ecclesiastical space.
