Vertical Living: The Architectural Centre and the Remaking of Wellington
Julia Gatley and Paul Walker
Auckland University Press, $60.00,
ISBN 9781869408152

The very notion of so rapid and wholesale a change to a city’s fabric … is a high-risk undertaking, not unlike performing open-heart surgery with a Kango hammer. The feverish uncoordinated fingers of the city’s many, self-appointed quacks have ripped out flesh and transplanted organs with almost total disregard for the patient’s ability to survive in any recognisable form. Not surprisingly, the city is bleeding – badly – with many of its inhabitants in deep, post-operative shock.