Pringle House (New Zealand)

Last updated

Pringle House
Top back of Pringle House.jpg
The top of Pringle House
Pringle House (New Zealand)
General information
Location142 Wakefield Street, Wellington, New Zealand
Coordinates 41°17′26″S174°46′41″E / 41.29056°S 174.77806°E / -41.29056; 174.77806
OwnerEyal Aharoni
Technical details
Floor count10

Pringle House is a vacant building in Wellington, New Zealand. An earthquake-prone building, it was damaged in the 2013 Seddon earthquake and has been empty since then. The Greater Wellington Regional Council bought it in 1987 just after it was built, and sold it in 2015 to Eyal Aharoni.

Contents

Building

Pringle House is ten storeys tall [1] and is located at 142 Wakefield Street. [2] It was built in the late 1980s.

History

In 1987, the Greater Wellington Regional Council bought Pringle House for $22 million ($45.2 million in 2014 dollars). [1] [3] After the collapse of the CTV Building in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake led to 115 deaths, buildings throughout the country were checked for non-ductile columns (i.e. columns that will not bend but only break), a feature that led to the CTV Building's collapse. Pringle House was found to have non-ductile columns, as well as other flaws that inspectors considered serious, [4] including foundations that were not designed to respond well to soil liquefaction (the soil under the building has "high potential" for liquefaction [4] ), piles that were lightly reinforced and, according to The Dominion Post, its "concrete floors were liable to fail in a major quake". [1] This information led the regional council to decide in late 2012 that it would leave the building. However, the council was still using the building when the 2013 Seddon earthquake occurred. That earthquake caused damage to the building, [4] [5] including cracked shear walls and burst pipes that flooded five floors. [1] [4] The council then vacated the building and moved to Shed 39 on the waterfront. [6]

In 2014, the earthquake-prone building was valued at $2.3 million, which would have represented a loss by the regional council of 95 per cent of its investment. [1] [3] In 2015, the property was valued at $3.2 million, which was no more than the value of the land. [7] It was estimated that it would cost $5.2 million to bring the building up to 40 per cent of the New Building Standard (below 34% is considered earthquake-prone [8] ) and $32 million to bring it up to 100 per cent of the standard. [4]

In 2015, the building was listed for sale by the regional council [4] and it was bought by Eyal Aharoni, who also owned 61 Molesworth Street. After the November 2016 Kaikōura earthquake, the Wellington City Council reported that they had found evidence that Pringle House was being lived in about two months before the earthquake, despite it being condemned. In September the council received complaints about people living in the building, and people speaking to The Dominion Post reported seeing what appeared to them as about ten secondary school drop-outs living in the top floor and using it for parties. The council said, however, that it believed that no one was in the building when the earthquake struck. [7]

Because people have been illegally entering the building, several methods have been used to prevent people from continuing to do so, including adding barricades. [9] [10] In June 2024, an employee of the building's owner said that they had removed 18 trespassers from Pringle House in the preceding 90 days. That month, a man was critically injured after falling three floors down an earthquake-damaged stairwell. [2] [10]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 "Council may lose $40m on vacant HQ". The Dominion Post . 17 June 2014. ProQuest   1535671578.
  2. 1 2 "Man in critical condition after falling three floors down damaged stairwell in vacant Wellington building". The New Zealand Herald . 11 June 2024. Retrieved 11 September 2025.
  3. 1 2 "95% loss for Regional Council – value of Wakefield St building drops by $43m". Scoop . New Zealand Taxpayers' Union. 17 June 2014. Retrieved 11 September 2025.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Wellington Regional Council building for sale". The Dominion Post . 4 April 2015. Retrieved 17 September 2025.
  5. ↑ "Council finds people living illegally in second Wellington office building". Stuff . 2 December 2016. Retrieved 9 September 2025.
  6. ↑ Campbell, Georgina (22 October 2020). "Wellington's historic Farmers department store redeveloped". NZ Herald. Retrieved 19 September 2025.
  7. 1 2 "Council finds people living illegally in second Wellington office building". The Dominion Post . 3 December 2016. Retrieved 17 September 2025.
  8. ↑ "How we assess and manage earthquake-prone buildings". Wellington City Council. 19 June 2025. Retrieved 11 September 2025.
  9. ↑ "Wellington building where man fell down stairwell was an 'accident waiting to happen'". Stuff . 11 June 2024. Retrieved 9 September 2025.
  10. 1 2 "Squatter falls three storeys in derelict Wellington building stairwell". RNZ . 11 June 2024. Retrieved 9 September 2025.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.