The story
On 22 February 2011 an earthquake tore through central Christchurch, and the city's art gallery became its emergency command centre. For seven months the glass-fronted building, designed by the Buchan Group of architects and opened in 2003, housed the Civil Defence headquarters. Then it stayed closed for almost five years.
The repairs went right down to the ground. Liquefaction had shifted the soil beneath it, so engineers re-levelled the building and set it on 140 base isolators, bearings that let it move up to 600 millimetres in any direction during a quake. The gallery reopened on 19 December 2015. Its Māori name, Te Puna o Waiwhetū, is usually translated as spring of light.
From 1932 the city's collection lived in the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in the Botanic Gardens, and New Zealand art is still at its heart. Look for the Dutch-born painter Petrus van der Velden's views of the Otira Gorge, roaring alpine torrents he returned to again and again after his first visit in 1891. A much smaller treasure comes from the Dutch Golden Age. Gerrit Dou, Rembrandt's earliest pupil, painted The Physician on copper in 1653, a doctor holding a flask of urine up to the light while a woman peers round to see. Another version hangs in Vienna. The Christchurch picture came to the gallery in 1965, a bequest from the local architect Heathcote Helmore after decades in his family.
