Ironbank (Auckland)

Ironbank is a 4,500-m², six-level mixed-used (retail and office) development on Karangahape Road, Auckland city centre, New Zealand. The building also provides a mechanical, automated car stacker for 96 cars, which the robotic system racks in a four-level storage wall.[1][2] It also used a variety of environmentally friendly building facilities, such as reduced energy demands due to a design that can dispense with air conditioning.[2]

Ironbank mostly complete in mid-2009. The "container" structures are more strikingly visible from Cross Street, a parallel street behind K'Road.

A view of the shipping container design of the south side.

The seven-storey building has both been criticised and lauded for looking like "rusting containers", and an architecture critic noted it reminded him of "kindergarten day in a shipping yard", calling it the "most complex and adventurous building" of RTA Studio (designed for Samson Corporation).[2] The building is hoped to achieve 5-star Green Building certification.[3]

In 2009, it received three architecture awards, in the "commercial", "sustainable" and "urban design" categories of the New Zealand Institute of Architects Auckland awards sponsored by the paint company Resene.[4] [1] It then captured second place at the World Architecture Festival, a European award, making it the best-scoring New Zealand entrant ever at the festival, and being praised for "Its sophisticated attitude to the messy urbanity of south-central Auckland".[5]

It was also mentioned in a The New Zealand Herald series where prominent Aucklanders nominated outstanding Auckland buildings constructed since 2000. Urban designer Ludo Campbell-Reid[6] specifically noted that the building was greater than the sum of its parts, that it would help re-invigorate Karangahape Road and its backstreets, and that unlike most buildings, it looked better from the back than from the front side.[7]