The Community-Led Design Group is doubly delighted to congratulate LandLAB on their second GOLD award for Te Rimutahi in the Private, Public and Institutional Spaces category at the Best Design Awards, announced on Friday 9th October 2026. And again, the Community-Led-Design Group is thrilled to be named as a Kaitautoko / Contributor to this brilliant project. All the long, hard years of advocacy work were worth it.
Judge’s comments:
Te Rimutahi transforms a decade of community advocacy into a genuinely thoughtful public space, where a nuanced, zone-by-zone design weaves through landscape and architecture. By balancing innovation with sensitivity, from the energy of the Canopy to the quiet stargazing of the Passive Park expresses identity, safety, and belonging in an urban environment.
Description:
Te Rimutahi transforms a former industrial site in Ponsonby, Auckland into a hybrid civic landscape where adaptive reuse, ecological infrastructure and community life are seamlessly integrated. Reimagining a former drive-through bottle store as part plaza, part park and part cultural platform, the project demonstrates how underutilised urban sites can become catalysts for social connection, environmental performance and neighbourhood identity.
Emerging from a community-led advocacy initiative, the project was shaped through extensive public engagement and close collaboration with Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, Ngāti Te Ata Waiohua and artist Graham Tipene. This process moved beyond traditional consultation toward genuine co-authorship, embedding cultural narratives, memory and mātauranga Māori within the structure and experience of the landscape. Te Rimutahi references the lone rimu tree once located along this significant ridgeline, grounding the project in whenua, movement and occupation.
At its core, the project is organised through a sequence of interconnected civic ‘rooms’ that mediate between street edge, canopy and planted landscape. Adaptive reuse is central to the project’s identity and sustainability performance, with existing structures transformed into flexible civic infrastructure supporting markets, performances, recreation and everyday occupation. A lush and immersive planting strategy draws from local ecological associations and coastal ridgeline conditions, combining indigenous and complementary exotic species to create a resilient urban ecology.
Environmental performance is embedded throughout through water harvesting, renewable energy generation, adaptive reuse and integrated green infrastructure. Despite its modest footprint, Te Rimutahi has become a highly active neighbourhood destination and establishes a new model for resilient, community-led urban public space in Auckland.
- Pou Auaha / Creative Director: Henry Crothers
- Pou Taketake / Cultural Leads: Graham Tipene, Bela Hinemoa Grimsdale
- Ringatoi Matua / Design Directors: Sam Gould, Jeremy Thompson
- Kaitautoko / Contributors: Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, Ngāti Te Ata Waiohua, Beca Civil, Structural, Lighting, 254 Ponsonby Rd Community Led Design Group
- Client: Auckland Council
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