Art Deco Architecture, Napier, NZ

Napier is a beautiful city located on Hawkes Bay on the east coast of North Island, New Zealand. The city centre was destroyed by an earthquake in 1931 but later rebuilt in Art Deco style, current at that time.

This is a part of Napier known as the Six Sisters and is one of the few remaining examples of what the original City centre architecture looked like.

The Hawkes Bay Earthquake of 1931 killed 256 people.  The city centre was mostly levelled but approximately 4,000 hectares of land, formerly below sea level, were raised up and are now part of the city.

This is Napier today.

Most of the Art Deco buildings survived the renewal programmes of the 1960s, 70s and 80s and in 2007 Napier was nominated as a World Heritage Site, later denied in 2011. Although most of the shop fronts and fascias are modern, the upper floors of the buildings which are largely unaltered. I therefore mainly photographed the upper parts of the facades. The full collection is in the slider gallery below.