This is NZ's most earthquake resilient building

Wednesday, 4 June 2025

Construction of the new $290 million Heke Rua Archives NZ building has been completed, and it is the country’s most seismically resilient public building.

Heke Rua in Wellington has 36 triple-pendulum base isolators, the largest installed in New Zealand, with each isolator weighing more than 13 tonnes.

That means the building can shift 1.6m in any direction, which allows the building to disconnect from ground movement during a major earthquake.

The building sits on piles 55m deep, double the height of the building, to anchor it into the ground and support the 775,000kg of archival shelving inside.

A particularly high level of strengthening was involved, with the eight-storey structure equivalent in weight to a regular 30-storey office building.

LT McGuinness, the country’s third biggest building company, led construction work on the state of the art building on the corner of Mulgrave and Aitken streets since construction started in early 2022.

More than 300 people have worked on the building, which will house more than 7 million important documents .

LT McGuinness director Sean McGuinness said the build was a “once in a lifetime” project, but very challenging on many levels.

Not only did the finished building need to be able to survive a massive earthquake, but it had to be functional after an event, and had to meet stringent airtightness and thermal requirements to preserve the documents, he said.

“It had to be safe, like a fortress, so we had to build it to international archive standards. Typically, such buildings are big, concrete bunkers in the middle of nowhere.

“But our brief was not for that type of construction. It’s in the CBD so we needed to be sensitive to the environment’s architecture and urban design, and reach the standard of a conventional office building.”

That made for a lot of work on, and innovation around the facade to achieve that, he said.

The exterior features 300mm thick, fully insulated panels which are airtight, thermally efficient, and seismically resilient, while the design tells the story of Taranaki Whānui and Te Ātiawa, the descendants of the Pipitea Pā whenua on which the building sits.

McGuinness said what was required from the brief was not something that had been done before.

But the end product was a landmark building, and featured some of the most advanced seismic engineering ever undertaken in New Zealand, he said.

“We have built something that is capable of surviving almost a biblical type event.

“And while we’ve delivered some of the country’s most technically challenging projects, this one stands out for many reasons - the scale, the complexity, the cultural responsibility.”

It was also an example of a private developer and a government agency working together to get a good outcome, and showed what a successful public private collaboration could deliver, he said.

“It was not a true public-private partnership, more a hybrid take on one, but that is probably what the market in New Zealand is suited to in terms of sophistication and level of risk.

“There is always a hangover around big construction projects that don’t go well, but you really hear about the ones that do, and this build demonstrates some of the real cutting edge innovation going on here.”

Heke Rua is on the site previously occupied by Freyberg House, which was damaged in the 7.8 magnitude Kaikōura earthquake in 2016 and demolished in 2018, just 11 years after being officially opened.

Archives NZ will take a 25-year lease on the new building, with multiple options to extend, and it is set to open to the public in 2026.

McGuiness added that while the construction industry was going through a downturn, LT McGuinness had a solid pipeline of work in Auckland, Tauranga, Palmerston North and Wellington.

There was a lot of civic infrastructure in that mix, and it was good to see further infrastructure projects being planned and rolled out for the industry, he said.