Freyberg House

Sometimes buildings reveal themselves in ways that are most unexpected. The new mother ship for the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE) is just such a building.By exterior bulk, the building is actually more the scale of an ocean liner, occupying almost an entire city block and offering 21,000m2 of floor-space within its seven-to-eight-storeyed superstructure.Even so, it manages to sit quite anonymously and snugly into the closely knit and historic Stout Street precinct of Wellington ­­­­that has been its home for 75 years and counting.This building’s robust, round-cornered, ‘Moderne’ or art deco style – designed successfully to be seismically sound – was never going to require or be subject to a major new external treatment.