Our work

Rooftop Bird Sculpture

When the head office of New Zealand's Royal Forest and Bird moved to a central city location in Wellington, they wanted an iconic statement to mark their new residence. They commissioned Izzat Design to create a large tui feeding on kowhai flowers for their rooftop.

Because the tui is one of the best known and loved backyard birds, the team at Izzat had to be thorough research the bird's look, stance, and overall character. Their result was a great success, and the addition of a new landmark Wellington's rich artistic and architectural landscape.

From Royal Forest and Bird

When Forest & Bird moved offices in 2006, it was struck with a dilemma:  how to replicate its distinctive, colourful conservation presence in Wellington’s cityscape? Our previous office was housed in a large art deco building completely covered in a huge mural of forests, birds, dolphins and other wildlife. The new office was a very ordinary second-storey office space, with no distinguishing features to “make it our own”.

We approached the guys at Izzat Design to see how they could help us put our stamp on our new home.  The solution was a four-metre long tui perched atop kowhai blooms on our rooftop, warbling and whistling over the city streets to announce Forest & Bird’s presence. Right from the start of the creative process, talking to Forest & Bird’s team and coming up with ideas and designs, through to the technical aspects of turning the vision into reality, Izzat was fantastic to work with.  Forest & Bird was involved right the way through, and got to see each stage along the way – the design drawings, the scale model of our tui, then watching him emerging full-size and 3-D was a really fun process and kept us in the loop the whole time.

The biggest excitement was the day that a huge crane came to lift the tui onto his perch on the rooftop.  We all breathed a sigh of relief when he landed in one piece, but we needn’t have worried:  Izzat may be creative people but they also had all the technical and safety issues in safe hands.
Our giant tui remains the crowning glory of our office – if we ever need to direct a new visitor to our offices we just tell them “look for the tui”.  In honour of the great job done by Izzat we even named the tui “Izzy”

 

Royal Forest and Bird - Sculpture