St Mary’s Old Covent Chapel was designed by Edward Mahoney and built in Ponsonby in 1865-66 as the first purpose-built chapel by the Sisters of Mercy in New Zealand. Salmond Reed Architects led a full external restoration of this Category A Gothic Revival chapel, working alongside specialist craftsmen to undertake numerous timber repairs, restoration of the beautiful lead light stained glass windows and reinstating the heritage colour scheme.
During the scheduled site works to the Clock Tower, Salmond Reed also designed a photographic scrim for the major scaffold, which screened the restoration works, in order to provide an aesthetically pleasing backdrop and continuity of photographic opportunities during graduation ceremonies, a custom that is quite common in the cities of Europe.
Salmond Reed has developed intuitive digital reports for each building for the University to plan and programme the maintenance of the Heritage Precinct for the years to come: a series of interactive photographic elevations, maps and databases that analytically collected archival research, photographic surveys and observation of the condition of the fabric, assigning priorities of repair on a trade-by-trade basis, which can be kept as a live digital tool into the future.
