Public Address | Cafe | Up Front: So Farewell Then, UCSA

Robert Urquhart

Fri, 11 Dec 2015 06:36:46 +1300

A bit strange to have the stage on one side of the amphitheatre and not in the middle *where it’s designed to be*!

Buildings may come and go, but Phil Anderson is eternal.

You are not the only person in my various social media to have made either of those…

Lilith __

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 23:00:15 +1300

Thanks heaps for the photos Robert. So many memories in those little details.

A bit strange to have the stage on one side of the amphitheatre and not in the middle *where it's designed to be*!

Buildings may come and go, but Phil Anderson is eternal.

Robert Urquhart

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 20:23:00 +1300

I went along to the event today; it was actually an even more thinly disguised attempt to tap alumni for money than expected. Jokes on them; I judge not many of the people in attendance were the sort with money to spare.

Of the speakers only one evidenced any real…

Alice Ronald

Sun, 06 Dec 2015 13:33:55 +1300

Thanks, I'm pretty annoyed that there was no contact – it's not hard to find me on Twitter or something. Work's gonna be fun tomorrow...

Emma Hart

Sat, 05 Dec 2015 13:35:11 +1300

Alice Ronald and Tess Rooney’s comments are lifted verbatim!
There’s cheap content and all that
and then there’s theft…

Well. Shit. A couple of days ago I got an email from a Press journo I know, asking if he could put another journalist in touch with me about using some…

Ian Dalziel

Sat, 05 Dec 2015 08:59:36 +1300

Nice to see that The Press has followed Emma’s lead with a nostalgia piece – at least they acknowledged this blog as a source of some of it, in their online version…
but.. not so nice to see…
..in today’s print version they fail to acknowledge __Public Address / Up…

Rob Stowell

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 14:09:56 +1300

If anyone is interested- reminder there's a 'farewell to all that' 10am on Dec 10.
(Meself – haunted those corridors and sunny rooms for years, sometimes lonely, sometimes with mates. A small gang of far-more-sensible-now friends woke me up on my 20th birthday with a side of roast mutton and…

Joe Wylie

Sat, 10 Oct 2015 19:32:19 +1300

the Art school prefabs had two toilets and cold water only for 100 students...The 1975 Commonwealth games used the venue then the Art school across the creek burnt down.
Apart from the Ilam homestead, reserved mainly for art school staff, the School of Fine Arts was housed in a horribly…

Emma Hart

Sat, 10 Oct 2015 13:07:30 +1300

I was sent this last night; the comment comes from the mother of a friend:

The student union building! Ah such luxury. As a fine arts student in the 1960s and 70s when the Art school prefabs had two toilets and cold water only for 100 students the union was…

Stephen Judd

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 15:51:25 +1300

I'll just leave this here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl3mRjydcPw

Joe Wylie

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 13:38:52 +1300

Concerts and plays in the Ngaio Marsh theatre, both in the audience (as a school kid in the 60s and as a student in the 70s)

Seeing as it seems to be OK to go back that far, there was the special meeting in the Ngaio Marsh in 1968 over…

Howard Edwards

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 12:25:49 +1300

Oh boy – so many memories of Studass in the 70s, so few active brain cells ...

Sitting at a desk in the foyer every year trying to sign people up to the Folk Music Club;

Folk club meetings in one of the upstairs rooms, including my first (and hopefully…

Hebe

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 09:38:11 +1300

Venue: the Skinning Common Room?

Ian Dalziel

Wed, 07 Oct 2015 09:10:33 +1300

Only having two subjects in School Certificate, the joys of attending University eluded me, but I did use the facilities at times...

Hebe

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 22:04:36 +1300

No mind: you have happily reminded me of the A4 hand-written Goldfish (eagerly sought after on publication days). Sister Mary made an impression: I remembered some of these, particularly SMG revving up at the lights and on an inclined plane.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/funnypolynomial/sets/72157594326861802/

Robert Urquhart

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 21:56:43 +1300

2008: a few bits of the UCSA building in behind the March for Undead Rights

Sister Mary Gearchange

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 21:46:55 +1300

Ah. I am probably not the Sister Mary you are thinking of. But thank you anyway, just in case I am.

Lilith __

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 15:19:34 +1300

Very handy for when a mixed-gender group had just “fallen” in the river.

South Island rivers can be swift, deep, and treacherous.

Russell Brown

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 13:15:16 +1300

Later on I played at a few, including one gig on the platform over the river where our bass player didn't make it and Paul Kean let me play his (rather iconic) bass guitar.

It is what! Made by his own hand, if I recall rightly.

Emma Hart

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 13:12:26 +1300

The foyer toilets also had showers, IIRC.

They did indeed. Very handy for when a mixed-gender group had just "fallen" in the river.

Lilith __

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 13:07:09 +1300

Toilets also by the LCR and in the Ballroom. Just none RDU-adjacent.

The foyer toilets also had showers, IIRC.

Vivid

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 11:20:58 +1300

As Pavement sang,"Architecture students are like virgins with an itch they cannot scratch, never build a building till you're 50 what kind of a life is that".

Craig Ranapia

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 11:16:25 +1300

I can see how a design which put the toilets in the basement of a three-level building might get refused.

There's a disturbing number of buildings in this world that make you wonder whether architects have to wear adult nappies for life as part of some bizarro initiation ritual into…

Hamish.MacEwan

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 11:09:32 +1300

Jane:
We'll never be able to break the spell

Timothy:
The magic will hold us still.

Jane:
Sometimes we may pretend to forget

Timothy:
But of course we never will.
Three perfect years –

Jane:
Perhaps there'll more?
Life's only beginning you know

Timothy:
Oh yes it's not that I…

Vivid

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 10:21:20 +1300

I remember trawling the queue for Orientation as a 16 year old to find a student who would take me in as their guest. This would have been in 1988. Anyone could buy a ticket but you needed a UCSA member to gain entry, but once you did you could…

Bart Janssen

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 10:04:26 +1300

It does seem as though UCSA and AUSA were clones. So many of the descriptions match my memories of upper and lower common rooms at Auckland.

As a side note speaking of "ugly as fuck" buildings, my place of work is being renovated, rumour has it that when plans were…

Caroline Anderson

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 09:34:08 +1300

I remember the Friday night Steins in the UCSA Building, which we fondly referred to as Studass. You had to buy tickets which you cashed in for beer. Some of the bands were excellent.The burgers from the main café were a special treat when I had a late lecture. The…

Bart Janssen

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 09:28:14 +1300

Those orange couches with the sloping backs? I was there in the 90s. Why was everything so relentlessly 70s?

I think they were hand-me-downs from Auckland student union in the early 80's. That still raises the question of where Auckland got them from.

Darel Hall

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 08:53:24 +1300

My first encounter with the UCSA building was in 1985. I have maintained a long and fruitful relationship with her and so many who lived within her walls and grounds. And live many of us did.

The New Zealand branch of Yoshukai Karate Club trained at the UCSA from 1980.…

Neil Graham

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 08:11:14 +1300

I remember studying in the Library and coming to retrieve my boyfriend from Time Out when I was done. The first time I was invited into the Women’s Room, and how conspiratorial and revolutionary it felt.

I met a girl over a game of Bloxeed (Sort of a more combative…

David Haywood

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 08:04:32 +1300

Thanks for writing this piece, Emma. I was too unhappy and socially awkward (between the ages of 12 and 33 approximately) to do any of the fun things at university described here. But it's interesting to find out what people were doing, and nice to know that they were enjoying…

Ian Dalziel

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 06:15:40 +1300

Just as a Chchch writer (Paul Cleave) wins the Ngaio Marsh NZ crime writers award (for a second time) The UCSA is throwing away her memorial theatre, has anyone told Elric Hooper?

Josh Petyt

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 02:07:20 +1300

Wow. So many people with such vivid memories. I was there 91~94 and don't remember much specific about the building at all. I remember it being pretty big and and I remember those massive sandwiches that they made up for you in the cafe. I have horrible memories of watching…

Richard Westenra

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 00:43:12 +1300

So many KAOSians in here! Hey all.

Many/most of my favourite memories from uni involved the UCSA in some way: Tui/lemon lime & bitters in plastic jugs at the Foundry. Reorientation gigs and unicycling in the ballroom. Snow sports club committee meetings (hey Alice!). Jib the Foundry. The Stein. Getting way…

Andrew Johnson

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 23:34:46 +1300

It's so weird – I had a very very large number of formative experiences in that building, and every time I've gone back to Chchch since the quake, I've been kinda surprised that it's not open.

I spent over 10 years on and off in the Uni performing art clubs,…

Isabel Hitchings

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 22:28:58 +1300

There were definitely times when the UCSA building was more like home than whatever flat I was living in – when I hung around until there was no one else left.

I remember there being lots of little corners (and sometimes the whole UCR) where a young couple could squirrel…

Hebe

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 22:19:46 +1300

The Gordons: I saw them lots. UV lights that made whites glow and made me throw up, without fail.

Jarrod Gilbert

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 22:04:20 +1300

He was called Wobbly. I loved that wee guy.

Robert Urquhart

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 22:02:19 +1300

Unfortunately all my pre-2009 photos are offline but I shall attempt to poke through them over the next week and maybe pull up some representative ones from KAOS stunts during the 00s. For now the best I can do is this battle in the amphitheatre, with glimpses of the corner…

Hebe

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 21:53:33 +1300

I’d like to say I can remember but it’s more smudges of the many punk gigs in the Ballroom, Topp Twins and engineers puking in the amphitheatre, the small room at the end of the corridor by the Shelley, the upstairs caf, the upstairs common room, the subterranean toilets, and…

Mellopuffy

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 21:49:41 +1300

I remember you adopting this kitten that couldn't walk properly and keeping it in your office.

Mellopuffy

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 21:47:12 +1300

Wow. Lots of memories. Tripping out (but totally straight, I was working later that evening) to Roy Montgomery in the Ngaio Marsh. Hanging in the smokers cafe through lunchtimes. The falafel wraps, cheap build your own sandwiches and filter coffee. Sitting chatting to Paul & George in the Student Activities office.…

Hebe

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 21:40:51 +1300

and also a Toy Love show in which Chris Knox appeared to nibble on a broken light bulb

Not sure he ate it.

Jarrod Gilbert

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 21:03:25 +1300

What a terrible shame. So many memories. I had some of the best times of my life in and around that building. I shall bust in and take photos of the whole place as soon as I can.

Miche Campbell

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 21:00:59 +1300

I was in more than one of those there Orientation battles. My favourite was the time I was placed on the other side of the Avon with a small siege engine and tasked with flinging flour bombs at the enemy. One of them landed in a band member's open guitar…

Emma Hart

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 20:56:39 +1300

Wish there were more photos.

I had a quick ferret through Phil’s site. More photos taken in various flats of mine than actually at uni, but there are a couple of the LCR.

This is our corner of the Lower Common Room. Note the way those huge concrete overhangs handily…

Jeanette King

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 20:44:35 +1300

Great to read all the memories. Wish there were more photos. And lovely to hear from Sister Mary Gearchange (above) – would be wonderful to have one of the t-shirts. Late 70s – Māori club in the Upper Common Room with Tainui Stephens and assorted others, orientation battle with The…

Emma Hart

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 20:43:28 +1300

It does make you wonder how Warren & Mahoney stayed in business given their buildings are universally such utter crap.

Bless 'em, Warren & Mahoney's Twitter account has linked to the column and is favouriting tweets calling their building "ugly as fuck", etc. You have to admire that.

Discovering what a Jellybean…

Russell Brown

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 20:41:48 +1300

My next visit, two years later, was the first day of Orientation, and the Detroit Hemroids played in the Shelley Common Room.

Well now. It would be remiss not to point out that I've just had published an article about all that.

Sacha

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 20:23:12 +1300

I mainly recall cramped RDU and Student Job Search down those narrow corridors and a brilliant Orientation gig where Brent McLachlan managed to out-engineer that acoustically awful architecture for Bailter Space and others to spread the joy. Otherwise more familiar with the cafe and the seats outside than the common…

Sister Mary Gearchange

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 20:01:54 +1300

I am of mixed emotions about this. I will not miss it because it is not, and has not, been the building I remember for some time. But at the same time there is the obvious nostalgia for the strong memories associated around it. Clubs days, signing people up for…

amanda.mamaloco

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 18:57:05 +1300

weird apparently one of my not quite superpowers is the ability to bend technology

Michael.Higgins

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 18:52:17 +1300

My first visit to UCSA was in 1976 to see Space Waltz playing a seated gig in the ballroom. I remember a light show courtesy of the cars driving past on Ilam Road; and, afterwards, hearing 'Paint It Black' wafting across the still evening. It was a night that suggested…

Lucy Stewart

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 17:53:16 +1300

Most of the time I spent in the UCSA was in the Ballroom, but never for a ball or even a gig; it's where the fencing club met, because it was free for us to use on Saturday mornings (except when they were having an event, which wasn't that often)…

Mike C Campbell

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 16:59:19 +1300

12 years and more I treated that building as a drop in center, a known fairly clean toilet (yes the actual toilet!!) and a navigation beacon when my gyros were spinning. And as others have said, the games of 500, "Bitch", drinking, drinking, drinking, end of year steins – watching…

Lilith __

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 16:27:44 +1300

Maybe one of the reasons I loved the UCSA building was because University Brutalism was already so familiar...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9St60ZzwGgc

(Shout-out to Stephen and Isabel and other 80s teens xx)

Tess Rooney

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 16:23:45 +1300

Heh, I met my husband in the UCSA building as well. Thanks for the reminder.

Jenny Dawson

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 16:20:59 +1300

This building was where I met the person who eventually became my future (and forever) husband: the day I started work in a wee office near the Upstairs Common Room, Engineering lecturer Derry Gordon introduced me (the new Lay Chaplain) to Jimmy McAloon (UCSA Vice-President) because, as Derry said "Jimmy's…

Paul Campbell

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 16:20:28 +1300

I spent two years there in the mid 70s it was still pretty new and sterile, and didn't seem like it had been grown into yet .... Unlike Otago's that I'd come from.

I do remember one concert played outside by a bunch of car horns (with cars still attached)…

Steve Barnes

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 16:08:11 +1300

So farewell then ucsa
You were a building i never entered
because I went to Auckland Uni instead
but Keith went there and said.
for some reason the building
reminded him of his mum
he never explained why
but she wasn't made of concrete.
E. J. Thrib
17½

Thanks for…

Russell Brown

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 16:03:38 +1300

despite the architecture such a convivial space – typical that the image is sideways

Indeed. Oddly, if you click on it, it enlarges right way up.

Joe Wylie

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 15:55:43 +1300

There's a stainless steel memorial plaque affixed to a large boulder just across the Avon footbridge from the UCSA. From memory it reads:

TOM SKINNER
CAT
FRIEND OF THE UNIVERSITY
KILLED

There's also a year, I think late 1970s. Anyone know Tom's story?

Lilith __

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 15:53:14 +1300

I loved the UCSA building. I know, Brutalist and everything. It reminded me of a platform-and-ladders game. But full of exciting, unexpected spaces where the students were in charge.

I remember studying in the Library and coming to retrieve my boyfriend from Time Out when I was done. The first…

Jason Dykes

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 15:51:27 +1300

Too many memories to list. Remember the protest against student loans where Lockwood Smith jumped out a window to escape? The engineers taking over during St Patrick's Day and performing the (green) helicopter in the amphitheatre. Student politics during Rogernomics (where we played out the national issues in microcosm and…

Xeno

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 15:50:27 +1300

In a sense it was already gone before the quakes. Most of the common rooms including the above mentioned LCR had been locked up for years; the UCSA didn't want to pay for cleaners so filthy students didn't get to use them.

It's been a long goodbye, with plenty of…

amanda petrie-peter

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 15:33:32 +1300

came into the UCSA as a dreaded “adult” student with babies, 13 years as an undergrad & years spent going up and down these treacherous stairs into RDU. Along with the sound of whatever genre was in at the time the UCSA from the cafe of bribes to dodgy production studio…

Tess Rooney

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 15:30:09 +1300

"When you move away from a place that's meant a lot to you, it stays unchanged in your head."

This, totally and utterly this. Whilst I rationally understand that the building needs to go, and that it isn't "mine" there is a part of me that is devastated by the…

linger

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 14:51:03 +1300

I hadn't even realised that was in the Winter Games! Who came first?

Gregor Ronald

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 14:28:14 +1300

Funny, I haven't heard that story before!

Gregor Ronald

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 14:26:24 +1300

I saw Blerta perform in the ballroom in the early 70s. It's a shame that the plans for a new building don't include a replacement for the Ngaio Marsh Theatre, but as the English Department has almost been eliminated I guess there's not a lot of drama happening. Sigh...

Euan Mason

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 14:24:58 +1300

Wonderful graduation balls in the UCSA building, with different types of music in each room – you could choose your style and volume. Vastly better than recent balls at the Horncastle arena with a single large cavern vibrating to a deafening band of dubious quality.

Taking the family to evening…

Russell Brown

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 14:05:11 +1300

All right, 'pristine' is completely the wrong word. Intact. Concretey. Orange. Drear and blocky and completely impractical. Okay, I'm not a big fan of Brutalism. The easy-hose-down decor was at least understandable, but the rabbit-warren of little hallways and windowless (or far too windowed) rooms? Those orange couches with the…

Simone Hindin

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 14:03:38 +1300

When it comes to it I have far more fond memories of the UCSA than I'll ever have of the cathedral that I maybe entered half a dozen times in my life. Dancing in the 'new' atrium, fighting in the ballroom, pretending to play 500 because they needed another hand…

Alice Ronald

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 13:40:31 +1300

One thing I distinctly remember is the weird half levels & steps down into rooms. There didn't seem to be any reason for it.

I spent most Wednesdays camped out at a trestle table in the foyer or outside the entrance closest to the bridge, signing people up for the ski…

Stephen R

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 12:59:35 +1300

Last month, walking through Copenhagen, I looked up at a brutalist concrete building and said to my companion "That looks like the UCSA" – It turned out to be the Copenhagen university ....

I heard Warren tried to sue the UCSA to stop them painting the concrete because he had…

Xeno

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 11:53:44 +1300

The gherkin was me, and I was unreasonably proud of it at the time. I was also the one who coloured it blue later on. It was from a cafeburger though.

Hmm, lets see if I can attach a picture of our local Andrew Eldritch impersonator hanging out in what…

Kumara Republic

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 11:43:57 +1300

I can remember when the UCSA building still had a Time Out spacies branch in the late 1990s.

Russell Brown

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 11:35:20 +1300

As northwest kids, we had pretty much open access to UCSA without even being students. I remember seeing Arthur Baysting as Neville Purvis ("Right. We're not here to fuck spiders") and The Plague during one Orientation.

But mostly it was about finding ways to sneak into the ballroom space for…

Public Address

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 11:35:20 +1300

Discussion from blog post.