THE PAGODA | CHOICE PLAZA / ORIENT TOWERS

An intimate site visit, and a small act of archival repair.

With thanks to Choice Backpackers, we were given rare access to Choice Plaza / formerly known as Orient Towers - Ron Sang's postmodern pagoda tower on Wellesley St, and the most distinctive of its kind in Aotearoa. A tiered crown layering Chinese architectural vocabulary onto a downtown high-rise, it is visually unmistakable yet almost entirely absent from New Zealand's formal architectural record.

So we decided to change that by capturing the building as it currently exists. We leave with archival content, photography, and an article published in Architecture NZ (Mar/Apr 2026)

Read on ARCHITECTURE NOW

With thanks to Darryl Sang, Sang Architects

Photography: Pat Diswat, Oliver Ray Chaudhuri, Michelle Wang