Sugarloaf designer returns to his ‘part of the hill’ after 60 years

Monday, 20 April 2026

Christchurch resident Arthur Spiers, 87, won a competition to design the Sugarloaf building and returned for the first time last week to tour the building with four generations of his family.

After more than six decades, the man who designed of Christchurch’s iconic Sugarloaf communications building has returned to the Port Hills site for the first time since its completion.

Arthur Spiers - who won a Ministry of Works competition for the design while in his mid-20s - made the trip with four generations of his family, retracing the steep route to the building that remains a vital piece of infrastructure for broadcasting and emergency communications in Canterbury.

“It was a high-tech building … and it is still functional,” the now 87-year-old designer said.

Built as part of New Zealand’s first nationwide television network, the site has evolved alongside the country’s telecommunications network.

The single-storey structure, which houses transmission equipment, remains in active use.

Next to it, the 120.9m steel tower continues to serve Canterbury and beyond, anchored by a 5m-deep concrete foundation set into volcanic rock.

When the building opened on October 16, 1965 — by then-Minister of Agriculture and Science Brian Talboys — it represented the cutting edge of broadcasting infrastructure.

An historic photograph of the construction of the Sugarloaf building on the Port Hills in the 1960s. The project took three and a half years to complete.

Construction took more than three years, in what was then a remote and exposed location.

“There was nothing here,” Spiers said.

Everything had to be designed for self-sufficiency. Water tanks were built into the structure beneath the reinforced concrete base, and materials were hauled up steep access tracks — sometimes with loaded concrete trucks winched up the hill.

The Sugarloaf tower celebrated its 60th anniversary at the end of last year.

A specially engineered concrete floor reduced electrical interference, while sections of corrugated plastic allowed signals to pass through to dishes mounted behind the walls.

The best view in Canterbury

The harsh conditions forced adjustments during construction — including one moment Spiers has never forgotten.

A plaque commemorates the official opening of the Sugarloaf building by MP Brian Talboys.

A builder flicked a cigarette butt over the edge of the hill. “He took his cigarette and threw it … and it just disappeared.”

The easterly wind was so strong it lifted the cigarette straight upward — prompting an immediate rethink.

“I had to go back to the drawing office and revise all the flashing drawings … because easterly rain came up, not down.”

Kordia owns and operates the Sugarloaf tower, as well as other transmission towers across New Zealand.

Isolation was another defining factor. In bad weather, workers could be stranded overnight.

“The kitchen was originally like a little sleep area … a bedroom. A lot of times they couldn’t come up and down. The weather was too bad.”

But the exposure also brought rewards.

Spiers with his family at Sugarloaf, with the iconic Port Hills communications site in the background.

On a clear day, Spiers said, the view stretches across the crater from Cass Bay to Kaikōura — “the best kitchen and motel view in Canterbury”.

“I feel quite proud of all of us that worked on it,” Spiers said in the kitchen, surrounded by his family 60 years on. None of them had been inside the building before, although it had long been talked about.

Don’t destroy the hill

The mast behind the Sugarloaf building was built after the main building.

Spiers was in his mid 20s when he became the designer of the building.

He entered a Ministry of Works competition as a young architectural draughtsman and approached the design differently from many of his peers.

“I drew it looking at the hill and the building and the mass. All the others drew it as if it was a building down in the city.”

Spiers created the structure to sit with the landscape rather than dominate it.

That approach won him the job and shaped a design that sits with the landscape, not on top of it.

“You have to have function, but the aesthetic.

“Frank Lloyd Wright said, ‘if you build a building on a hill, don’t destroy the hill.’ And that stuck with me.”

“It’s shaped as part of the hill, and the concrete is like the rock colour. It’s not a building by itself dominating the landscape.

“I said they have to say things like ‘is there a building there?’… Now that couldn’t be more credit to me than anything else.”

Following the successful completion of the Sugarloaf project, Spiers spent 35 years tutoring apprentices and technicians at the local polytechnic.

He also worked with the Department of Conservation, guiding students on projects including the restoration of the Carnegie Library in Hokitika, where they used archival photographs to reconstruct the building’s leaking roof and missing decorative masonry.

Sugarloaf is not the project he is most proud of.

That distinction goes to a classroom block for a school for the deaf in Sumner, designed to allow students to connect their hearing aids directly to the teacher’s audio feed.

Sugarloaf will feature in the Open Christchurch programme in May, letting the public take a look inside. Tickets have already sold out.