I've visited the transitional cathedral; it was an extraordinary edifice. I really don't know what the lifespan of a cardboard building could be, though!
Indeed. My thought is that it might be possible to salvage the non-cardboard elements and replace cardboard elements, since it is a fantastically inexpensive building material, and if that is the case, it might also be possible for it to be relocated or even stored, so as to function as an inexpensive pop-up church that could be deployed throughout New Zealand and other Anglican churches in the volcanically active Pacific, for example, the Church of Melanesia, in response to major seismic events, volcanoes and tsunamis. I am going to look into that. If not, at the very least, we know there is a design which can be replicated for an inexpensive interim church building for use in the aftermath of such disasters that is built largely using recycled cardboard, which can itself be recycled.
I am very sad at the way that the direction for that Cathedral has played out, (from what I understand of it from here), with the church being forced to rebuild the old cathedral rather than choose a new design which better suits contemporary needs and mission, but I suppose there is no point fighting a losing battle indefinitely.
There was considerable pressure from the community to rebuild the old cathedral, because its aesthetics were greatly loved by the residents, and I do have a lot of sympathy for that, because if the cathedral is rebuilt well, that would create a good relation with the community, and there has been massive outside pressure for the salvage of the building since the disaster occurred. Indeed even some random eccentric entertainer who pretends (or perhaps actually is from a new age perspective) a wizard who performed in the cathedral square managed to get written up in the Telegraph, the UK newspaper, calling for it to be rebuilt.
However, my understanding is that the rebuilt cathedral will include new facilities to improve its overall utility, for example, a diocesan office complex. Of course all this is expensive, and the project has already gone massively over budget after it was discovered the earthquake cracked the foundation, requiring it to be replaced (this is not surprising), but the diocese was under legal pressure as well as facing increasing public hostility over the planned demolition.
My own view is that they probably could have gotten a better result by agreeing to rebuild a cathedral with the same external appearance from the square, but had done the construction from scratch (and it was always planned to salvage the stained glass windows). The fear from the public that forced them into the extremely expensive rebuilding of the nearly destroyed cathedral, which seems almost on a par with the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche in Dresden in terms of how much of the building was destroyed, albeit in a city with a much smaller regional population and economy, was that the diocese wanted to build a cathedral which would have, from the outside, looked radically different, the sort of architectural disruption that King Charles III made a career opposing before his coronation. Now the old cathedral was not actually that impressive as Gothic cathedrals go, particularly compared to those in Australia, but it was arguably the best Gothic Revival cathedral in New Zealand, and the southern part of the South Island does seem to try to cultivate the feeling that one is in Cambridgeshire or Somerset, to the extent that Sir Michael Palin once joked in his travelogue Around The Pacific while punting down a river near Christchurch while someone nearby was on the bag pipes that he felt as though he was participating in an advert for the British Tourism Board.
But the upshot of this is that making the people happy will hopefully encourage visitors. A major utility of architecturally impressive structures is their ability to evangelize by virtue of their mere existence.
Indeed this why I am also keen to see the Transitional Cathedral kept around as long as it can safely be done, given in mind the lifespan of its concrete elements, as it has itself attracted visitors and been a really great success in terms of architectural evangelism given the low pricetag). But even if that proves impossible, the positive attention it garnered given its price is something that might be worth repeating, in terms of pure bang for buck, since it cost less than a third as much as a commercial at the Super Bowl in the United States cost this year. Even adjusting for inflation, I feel the group that spent money on a very controversial Super Bowl commercial would have done much better to build a church along the lines of the Transitional Cathedral.
