Flying the flag for New Plymouth
Richard Bain's educated choices in life have lead to him being made a Fellow of Tuia Pito Ora, the New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects.
NZILA President Debbie Tikao (left) and David Irwin of Isthmus (right), with one of NZILA's newly inducted Fellows for 2025: Richard Bain.
Born in Masterton, Richard initially followed the footsteps of his father George Bain into teaching after graduating from Victoria University with a degree in geography. He went directly into spending seven years at Melville High School in Hamilton where he was quickly elevated into a role that included providing a full gamut of guidance counselling for students.
Choosing to make a significant career change was spurred on by the happy accident of discovering the pathway offered at Lincoln's School of Landscape Architecture.
"This gelled with the geography studies I'd loved so much, the family holidays my sisters, brother and myself were taken on around New Zealand and their emphasis on visiting landscapes - like dams - as a destination, as well as my enjoyment of tramping. You could say the direction this took was baked into my DNA. Landscape architecture was a natural progression".
"The move to the South Island, which I enjoyed, was a big adventure for my growing family - made all the better by not being the only 'mature student' and being part of a class that grew to be very tight".
Richard remembers that seeking jobs in the early 90s coincided with Government jobs drying up and when it was still early days for the private sector options represented first by Boffa Miskell and then Isthmus.
He recalls the bleak employment prospects of the recession that preceded the influential years of the RMA well, and draws different kind of parallel to the harsh current economy and prospective law reforms.
Having located to New Plymouth in 1992 to be near to extended family the choice of establishing his own self-named landscape architecture business, albeit as a newbie to running one, had a strong, compelling logic.
Employing his gregarious nature, Richard embarked on spreading the word he had arrived in town by doing things like "taking up speaking engagements to anyone who would have me".
Rotarians, for instance, were introduced by Richard to subjects like the benefits of increasing vegetation and of improving the amenity of city streets through better design.
When formally presented with his new status as a Fellow in May, Richard commented that a challenge for the profession is that "it's still an issue that not many people outside of this room know sufficiently what we do".
"Selling the idea that we are all about taking a holistic approach and that we work as value-adding generalists can be a hard sell, especially in an age of specialism when people are always looking to break things down into areas of absolute expertise.
"Rather than being focused on separate parts, we are the sum of the parts".
Looking back on the success of his business, now named bluemarble, Richard makes a refreshing observation that operating in the commercial world is "more like a friendly collective than dog eat dog, aided also by professional bodies like the institute being a great mechanism for building contacts and relationships between our flagship large firms through to intermediate and small practices".
"Taken together, and viewed as a small but perfectly formed profession, we really do need each other," he says, adding that events like the recently held NZILA Firth Wānanga in May are "positive collegial proof of that, helping to pull us towards usefully different topics and viewpoints".
Richard is slowly reflecting on what his NZILA Fellow citation describes as 3+ decades of being a trail-blazing all-rounder - a landscape architect whose track record of contributions locally, and across essential roles with the NZILA, served to set in place his own credentials at the same time as lifting the mana and integrity of the profession within the context of ongoing developments and with local government.
"My career has never been boring, filled as it has been with all kinds of challenges from landscape design to the Environment Court. Receiving this recognition from my peers means a lot," says Richard.
Some of the imprint of Richard Bain’s working life as a landscape architect in and around Ngāmotu New Plymouth.
Richard appreciates all of the opportunities he, and people in his practice, have had through a sustaining continuity of landmark projects – such as extensions of the Coastal Walkway, Te Henui Bridges and Walkway, Fitzroy Reserve, ‘Bowl of Brooklyn’, Puke Ariki Landing and more; with the same care being applied to smaller and private projects as to the major projects.
“I will always be proud of the legacy of the New Plymouth Coastal Walkway, a defining project that I was contracted to Isthmus for as project manager, and that became credited with a renaissance of the city, winning the George Malcolm Award in 2006″.
In sum, Richard has enjoyed the part he plays as a “humble local” and is grateful for having access to New Plymouth notables such as Grant Porteous of the New Plymouth District Council and architect Ian Pritchard who has been a valued business mentor and friend throughout Richard’s career.
“I’m an unabashed champion of living and working outside of the main centres. New Plymouth is not a perfect city but, by and large, it is more of a city than many far bigger”.
Other strings to Richard’s life are that he is both a keen traveller and a keen writer, with the two often combining.
“Landscape gives you an interest in everything. Through my landscape architect’s gaze I now bear witness on any travels I take to everything from the glorious to the mundane. All of it … paths, roads, signs, buildings, trees.
“Everything now contains a truth waiting to be unravelled through analysis of the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ sitting behind the spiritual succour, pleasure and recreation.
“At heart I am a regionalist and have been grateful to be surrounded by what my colleague Renee Davies calls some of the most important landscapes in Aotearoa New Zealand.
“We should recognise just how much landscape has become the ultimate point of difference in giving us a sense of place.
“We can’t make that point enough, and if one outcome of my career is that I’ve flown the flag just a little bit for New Plymouth, then I’m happy.”
SIX MONTHS IN A LEAKY BOAT by Richard Bain
Richard’s writing skills were put to great effect in 2017 in this article, originally published in Regeneration, the Ozone Coffee Roasters’ Journal. He confides that his more ‘unleashed’ writing side, revealed on an occasional blog, owes much to seeking relief from heavy-going landscape reports. “Let’s be honest, we become landscape architects to design cool stuff, not to spend all of our days writing assessments”.
London has more billionaires than any other place on earth, seventy-seven at last count. This is not because if you live in London you will become filthy rich (although I hear there’s money in coffee), it’s because London is so desirable that the well heeled choose it as home.
Whether it’s football oligarchs or Internet moguls, London is a playground for the wealthy. Disneyland without the mouse. The city has everything. Leather bound shops, parks, pleasant tree-lined streets, art galleries and museums, more clubs and restaurants than fish in the sea, all perfectly packaged within an ambience of refined civilised excitement.
However, this was not always the case. London is not accidentally nice. Back in the 1830’s when Charles Dickens was writing about London life and conjuring up his loveable little thieving urchins, the city had just come of age. It had grown from one million toothless pasty-faced residents in 1811 to 1.65 million in 1837.
London was fast becoming the capital of the world, but is was far from pleasant. Squalor was the city’s middle name as sewerage was nonchalantly hurled onto manure-laden streets. By 1900 there were over 50,000 horses transporting Victorians around London, including Mrs Brown herself. Can you imagine the clippy cloppy din! London was about as desirable as a dose of smallpox, which many people duly endured.
However, and remarkably, over the subsequent two hundred years, London evolved from a cholera-ridden cesspool into the world’s most desirable urban playground. Nary a horse in sight.
Meanwhile in the antipodes …
While London’s story and place in the world is well known, its colonial outreaches have also moved with the times. I live in a little city called New Plymouth on the wild west coast of New Zealand. Home to Māori for hundreds of years, in the 1840’s snappily dressed British arrived by the boatload and this remote place at the bottom of the world grew into a small modern city that virtually no one has ever heard of.
And yet, this mini-metropolis has a level of wealth and amenity that if everyone knew about it would be immediately inundated with smiley faced optimists.
While post-WW2 growth is responsible for the city’s overall development, a significant period in New Plymouth’s maturation came in relatively recent times thanks to a surge in urban regeneration. As recently as only a dozen years ago, a good cup of coffee was as elusive as a Macfarlane’s wallet, and although a coastal city, the sea was hidden behind a bevy of rail-yards and concrete. It was as if the six months in a leaky boat it took to arrive from mother England cured everyone of ever wanting anything to do with saltwater again.
In the mid 1990’s this changed. The sharemarket dreams and big hair of the 80’s collapsed, and the city resolved to make itself better. New Plymouth’s urban regeneration was about to begin.
Over the subsequent twenty years, the city has progressively reinvented itself from a utilitarian backwater to the front pages of Lonely Planet. Thanks to a rich combination of visionaries and collaborators, a shared purpose was established, borne from distinctive regional identity. Designers, business owners, council and residents came together to shape the city in a series of projects ranging from snazzy streetscapes to poncy pizza plazas.
Significant amongst these developments was the initial redefining of the main retail heart. Adorned with andesite bluestone, smart deciduous street trees and mountain-to-sea imagery, the central city set the tone for urban renewal.
This regeneration immediately prompted the city to take a look at its coastal connection. Ignored for so long, and like so many other cities separated by road and rail, the coastal walkway project would finally and resolutely reconnect the city with the sea.
Creating this link also involved working with tangata whenua (Te Āti Awa) who owned a significant area of the foreshore. Shared values around landscape and recreation, especially for childrenk, resulted in the creation of open space and play structures at the centre of a 13 km walking and cycling project that hugs the city’s coastal edge like a lover’s long embrace.
On the back of the hugely successful coastal walkway project, regeneration accelerated as the community discovered its own doorstep. New urban-shared spaces centred on Puke Ariki Library and Museum were created, and the Huatoki stream plaza completed the link from city to sea. All of sudden, New Plymouth seemed to have found itself.
Contemporary arts had always been strong in New Plymouth and as home to the works of kinetic sculptor Len Lye a new shiny stainless steel curtained gallery [emerged]. Citizens and visitors can now literally look at themselves in reflected artsy cool.
With the big pieces in place and a new vibrancy in the air, the hospitality and business sector have well and truly come to the party. The newly branded ‘West End Precinct’ that includes regentrified buildings and boutique hotels, now boasts business and pleasure that your average hipster would be happy to be seen dead in. Throw in the annual Operatic Society showstopper and World of Musical and Dance (WOMAD) hippiefest [and] the place is busier than a one armed barista.
London and New Plymouth. Half a world apart, yet so much in common. City-making is the new game in town as the world moves relentlessly to be with each other.
By 2050 most of the planet’s population will live in cities, and it’s competitive. The pressure is on for cities to regenerate and evolve into places for people to live, work and play. To attract the requisite perky folk, cities have to offer their own distinctive texture and flavour – to be savoured longingly.
Thanks to a common vision and collaborative mindset, New Plymouth is well underway.