The Hundertwasser Art Centre project is the culmination of efforts beginning over 30 years ago when Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser gifted his design to the city of Whangarei. The Trigg construction team won the bid for the project in early 2018 and have since worked to the many rules that the building form and finish had to follow to honour the IP of the Hundertwasser Arts Foundation in Vienna.

The 2 level building has a ground floor area of approx. 3,000m2 and includes a third level as a living garden roof with 800m3 of engineer designed soil, 150 trees and over 3000 plants. The concrete was poured insitu, due to the fact that the entire building - walls, floors inside and out – have been either tiled or plastered. The thick reinforced concrete walls, floor piles and the roofing precast meant the structure has been described as being the equivalent of a seven-storey building squashed into two! 

Some of the highlights/challenges can be summed up as follows:

• The Cupola atop of the viewing platform which is 8m diameter and 8m high, is covered with over 10,000 hand gilded gold leaf panels at 1,000th of a millimetre thick, so it takes 1000 of them to equal 1mm.

• Over 35,000 recycled bricks have been used from the demolished building on the site

• Recycled native timber from the demolished building has been used for the flooring , doors, vanity tops and everything in between.

• The tiled floor is undulating, set to contours supplied by the Foundation in Vienna

• Concrete of the spiral stairs up to the roof top were poured insitu.

 This project has been a challenging but rewarding process. The entire Trigg team have been involved in the project at some stage, and they are incredibly proud of the achievement to date. The Hundertwasser is set to open to the public in December 2021.