20 years ago — November 1999:
• Developers of the canned Britomart transport terminal in downtown Auckland were considering suing the Auckland City Council. After months of negotiations with development partners, the council terminated the contract for the $164 million underground terminal.
It was to instead consider a smaller, more user-friendly terminal in an effort to bring buses and trains into the city to ease growing transport congestion.
The project had already cost more than $30 million — $21 million spent by the council and around $10 million by developers.
The council terminated the contract because financier, Salomon Smith Barney, and developer Britomart Investments had missed three deadlines to agree to the terms of the resource consents.
Developers were considering what some observers were saying could amount to $300 million in compensation.
15 years ago — November 2004:
• The Department of Building and Housing was established on November 30, 2004, after the dissolution of the Building Industry Authority (BIA).
The Department was to absorb the functions of the BIA, and was to have primary responsibility for the regulation of building practitioners. It was envisaged that the new department would provide a one-stop shop for building and housing policy and regulation.
10 years ago — November 2009:
• A report into the future of New Zealand’s built environment was released by building research company BRANZ.
The report, Building the Future, outlined a number of scenarios which illustrated the type of business environment the construction industry might operate within in 2025.
It was to help inform the research agenda of BRANZ in the coming years so that it best met the industry’s requirements. It also aimed to stimulate a discussion in the industry about how it could ensure New Zealand’s built environment served the needs of the wider community.
BRANZ chief executive Pieter Burghout said the report’s authors consulted widely across the industry, with architects and urban planners to property developers and government departments, to create scenarios which took account of key drivers of potential change in the industry.
5 years ago — November 2014:
• A tool to help increase the use of Building Information Modelling (BIM) by New Zealand’s construction industry was released.
The New Zealand BIM Handbook was launched by the Building and Construction Productivity Partnership at the Auckland Infrastructure and Procurement Forum attended by construction industry leaders.
BIM is the digital representation of the complete physical and functional characteristics of a built asset. It involves creating a model with real life attributes within a computer, and sharing that information to optimise the design, construction and operation of that asset.
