Industry Leaders EP12 with Hamish Davies

Seton Walsh-Rose sits down with Hamish Davies, a director of Plus Studio — the trans-Tasman practice (formerly Plus Architecture) whose Auckland and Christchurch studios he leads with business partner Matthew Charles. A New Zealand architect who grew up in rural Manawatu and built a career across Wellington, Ireland, Melbourne and Auckland, Hamish brings three decades of perspective and a refreshing lack of ego to the question of what architecture is actually for.

It’s a conversation about people first and buildings second: why Hamish calls architecture a communications-and-psychology business, what the Roman idea of ‘firmness, commodity and delight’ still teaches us, how New Zealand lives with its brain drain, what he learned selling a studio into a global multinational, why the future is partnerships, and where AI helps — and where it risks stripping out the human craft and the delight that make the work worth doing.

Episode Chapters

• 00:11 Welcome & Introduction
• 00:38 Who is Hamish / Plus Studio
• 01:51 Pacifica — NZ’s Tallest Tower
• 03:19 From Manawatu to the World
• 05:12 Moving Between Markets
• 05:40 No States, ~70 Councils
• 07:10 Why Diversity of Typologies
• 09:55 Auckland, 2004 — 20+ Years On
• 11:11 Becoming a Director & the GFC
• 12:36 Economic Cycles
• 13:39 Graduating Into a Downturn
• 15:46 The Brain Drain
• 17:42 An International Profession
• 19:04 “Bring In Some Mates”
• 19:53 Practice Sizes
• 20:20 Selling Into a Multinational
• 23:26 Architecture Inside an Engineering Firm
• 24:24 Plus Architecture → Plus Studio
• 25:30 Place-Making
• 28:24 The Discretionary Profession
• 29:52 Master Builder to Slivers of Service
• 33:01 It’s a People Game
• 33:22 Communications + Psychology
• 37:09 The Privilege of Legacy
• 41:17 Designing With Constraints
• 42:15 Firmness, Commodity & Delight
• 48:13 Passion, Performance & Sketching
• 50:36 AI & the Risk to the Craft
• 57:45 “Nothing New in Architecture”
• 1:02:10 Trades, the Olympics & What Won’t Change
• 1:05:33 Book Recommendation & Close

Key Takeaways

• Architecture is a people business
• Firmness, commodity and delight
• The brain drain is real — but obsessing helps less than getting on with it
• Bigger isn’t always growth
• The future is partnerships
• Constraints beat a blank page
• The fracturing of disciplines is a warning
• Projects live or die on people
• AI is a powerful tool — protect the craft
• What won’t change

Sound Bites / Quotes:
“Architecture is all about people, really. It’s all about humanity — understanding how people are thinking and giving them back those thoughts as a built representation.”
— Hamish Davies, ~08:08

References & Resources

• Matthew Charles — Hamish’s business partner; leads the Plus Studio Christchurch office.
• Creative Spaces — Auckland practice Hamish directed, later acquired by GHD.
• GHD — global multidisciplinary firm: ⁠https://www.ghd.com ⁠
• New Zealand Registered Architects Board (NZRAB): ⁠https://www.nzrab.nz ⁠
• Dr Paul Walker — architecture theory lecturer (Victoria University of Wellington), quoted: “there’s nothing new in architecture.”
• The Pacifica, Auckland — New Zealand’s tallest residential tower, by Plus Studio: ⁠https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pacifica_(Auckland) ⁠
• Closer Economic Relations (CER) — the Australia–New Zealand agreement behind trans-Tasman work rights: ⁠https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93New_Zealand_Closer_Economic_Relations_Trade_Agreement ⁠
• Vitruvius / ‘firmness, commodity and delight’ (De architectura):⁠ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_architectura⁠
• Frank Lloyd Wright & Fallingwater / Johnson Wax — referenced on engineering and cantilevers: ⁠https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallingwater ⁠
• Revit, AutoCAD, ArchiCAD, SketchUp, Microstation — the design-software timeline discussed.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez: ⁠https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hundred_Years_of_Solitude