The
White Room
01 — The Building
Old exchange.
New exchange.
The world's greatest buildings are defined by two things. What they were built for. And what they become.
22 Durham Street is the former New Zealand Stock Exchange. The room where capital was raised and industries were forged. Where the financial identity of a nation in formation was expressed in the language of commerce. For over a century it stood as the centre of New Zealand economic life.
Some buildings carry a purpose beyond their original function. They hold something — a weight, a readiness — that outlasts every tenant and every era. This is one of those buildings.
The White Room is not a renovation of what was. It is a recognition of what this building has always been capable of becoming.
02 — Auckland
Auckland is
where it begins.
Tāmaki Makaurau is where world-class arts, live culture and the technology beneath them are authored into a single room for the first time. The talent has always been here. The infrastructure arrives now.
03 — What The White Room Is
Not a venue.
An authored experience.
The world's defining cultural spaces are not facilities. They are authored — every element composed in agreement with every other. The Night League authors superclubs as complete creative works. L-Acoustics authors sound so the listener stands inside the music rather than in front of it. The great interdisciplinary labs author environments where members do the work too unconventional for their own walls.
The White Room is authored to that standard. One room, four functions running continuously, two seasons moving through the year, and the collisions between them — the work no single discipline could make alone. A place of coherence. You do not attend it. You step inside it.
Always-on · four functions
You stand inside the performance, not in front of it. Sound authored into the architecture — around you, above you, beneath the floor — so the room does not play the work, it surrounds you with it. Artist residencies and one-off performances designed into the space: the week an artist takes the room and the room becomes the instrument. The production standard of Hï Ibiza — the venue The Night League designed and operates — with a broadcast spine beneath it no room in the Southern Hemisphere can match.
The room where New Zealand works out how to own its intelligence — not rent it. AI capability and the data beneath it flow offshore by default, onto infrastructure the country neither controls nor sees inside. Here it is examined and built: data sovereignty, decentralisation, security and safety as practice, which models serve which work, what enterprise and creative studios are actually deploying. The model of the great interdisciplinary labs — members partnering to do the work too unconventional for their own walls. The founder leaves knowing what to build on. The institution leaves knowing where its data sleeps. This is the fluency that lets New Zealand partner with the world's infrastructure leaders as a peer.
You learn the infrastructure by building on it. How value moves, how ownership is recorded, how contracts execute and settle — not as theory, as the thing you ship before you leave the room. Residents and partners deploying real applications on infrastructure most of the country has never touched. The room where a developer's first on-chain product goes live — where New Zealand stops importing this capability and starts operating it.
Blockchain is the rails. Web3 is the shift they enable — value, ownership and identity moving directly between parties, with no intermediary holding the position in the middle. The most significant change to how assets are held and transferred since the exchange floor itself. New Zealand currently engages with it as a customer of offshore platforms. The White Room is where the country engages as a principal — where founders, institutions and capital work out what direct ownership means for their business, and where the infrastructure is understood before it is depended on. For the Residents, operating proximity to the shift while it is still being defined. For Alberts, the address where that conversation happens. The trading floor is the visible proof. The deeper change is structural: who holds the asset, and who controls the transfer.
Two seasons · scheduled residencies
The room runs two seasons. Each residency takes the building for three to four weeks — the work installed in the room, the evenings authored around it, the closing broadcast to the world. The artist or the label lives in the building. The always-on functions run inside their work.
The first room in the Southern Hemisphere built to the technical specification the work of the world's leading contemporary artists demands. Six residencies a year, each three to four weeks. The Auckland Art Gallery shows the work after it is made. The White Room shows it being made.
Target tier — Michael Parekōwhai · Lisa Reihana · Yuki Kihara · Refik Anadol · Olafur Eliasson · Ryoji Ikeda
A collection launched with a music programme authored for the aesthetic — not an opening act, a collaborator. Six residencies a year at the production specification of international fashion week. The three-day showcase compressed everything into 72 hours. The White Room gives the work the weeks it deserves.
Target tier — Zambesi · Karen Walker · Nom*D · Maggie Marilyn · Wynn Hamlyn · Harman Grubiša
The collision · the room's defining work
The work that happens where the functions and the seasons meet. A fashion collection launched with a music programme composed for it. An art residency that becomes the visual world of an album. A capital summit held inside a contemporary artist's installation. Each collision is a single cultural moment that travels — because two audiences arrive for it together — and produces work no single discipline could have made alone.
Precedent — At NZ Fashion Week 2014, Luke Thompson authored four cross-category launches: Zambesi with Motocade, Nom*D with The Mint Chicks, Huffer with Electric Confectionaires, Charlie Ash with a fourth Aotearoa band. The White Room is built to make that work the room's default rather than its exception.
Figure 01 · The Standard · Three Reference Points, One Principle
Three operations, three disciplines, one principle: the space is authored as a complete work, and the person who enters is placed inside it. The White Room is built to that standard across every function it runs.
Figure 02 · The Comparable · What No Other Room in the Region Offers
The reference points prove the standard. The comparison proves the gap. No room in the Southern Hemisphere operates across these functions, at this window, with broadcast authored into the architecture.
04 — The Floor
The intelligence
in the room.
The world's greatest trading floors are defined by two things. The intelligence in the room. And the edge it creates.
Web3 is the next version of the internet — where ownership, transactions and value flow directly between people, without banks, brokers or intermediaries. The assets are digital. The markets never close. The opportunity is global, and it is happening now.
Most cities do not have a room built for it. Auckland does.
The blockchain trading floor at 22 Durham Street operates through Asia and US market hours on the same floor where New Zealand's financial identity was formed. Real capital. Real signal. An intelligence layer that puts insight in front of every trader on the floor that once required an institutional desk to reach. This is a live operation — the new exchange running on the floor of the old one. The room raised the country's capital for a hundred years. It returns to that purpose now, in the language of the next century.
Thursday to Saturday the same floor becomes the room a performance is built into. 750 capacity. The building moves between these lives without going dark, because the Residents are always here.
Figure 03 · The Building's 20-Hour Cycle · NZST
The trading floor sets the spine — continuous from ASX open through NYSE close. Performance leads Thursday to Saturday. The Residents and the broadcast operation run beneath everything. The building never goes dark.
04a — The Season
The year
has a shape.
The cities that define a generation — New York, London, Berlin — do so because they build rooms worthy of the artists who fill them, and then keep them open. Auckland's cultural calendar has compressed into three-day windows because no room could sustain more. The White Room ends that compression.
The year unfolds across four seasons. Inside each, the art and fashion residencies take the building in turn. Across all of it, the always-on functions run without pause. At the turns of the season, the anchor moments — and the collisions, where the room does its defining work.
Figure 04 · The Annual Calendar · Four Seasons · Twelve Residencies
Four seasons. Always-on continuous beneath. Twelve scheduled residencies — six art, six fashion — each taking the building for three to four weeks. Anchor moments mark the season turns. Collisions fire where the curatorial team brings the categories together. Named residencies are target tier; the calendar fills through curatorial commissioning.
Twelve residencies a year. The always-on functions continuous beneath them. Roughly forty to sixty programmed events annually — every one earning its place, because the curatorial standard is firm. The building is never dark, never between, never compressed into three days. It runs with the rhythm of a season and the precision of a museum.
05 — The Residents
The people
the building chose.
The world's greatest innovation environments are defined by two things. The quality of the people inside them. And what the room makes them capable of together.
The Residents are AI founders, blockchain developers, digital artists and technology leaders — working across disciplines not in isolation but together, in a room with the best infrastructure on the continent beneath them. The cross-pollination between disciplines that do not normally share a room is not a side effect of The White Room. It is the product.
The Residents have the run of everything the building holds. The broadcast infrastructure. The AI cluster. The trading floor. The network. CEO presentations that reach a global audience before the speaker drives home. Innovation summits. Keynotes. Conversations that become content the same day.
06 — A First for New Zealand
How it places you
inside the work.
The world's greatest venues are defined by three things. How they hold the listener. What they make possible. And how long they last.
The White Room is built on a sound system authored to the standard of the world's leading rooms — sound placed around the audience and beneath the floor, so the listener stands inside the music rather than in front of it. Acoustic treatment designed and installed by the people who have spent their careers making New Zealand spaces worthy of the artists who fill them. When the room is right, the artists come. When the artists come, the room becomes something else entirely.
The LED wall that runs the full length of the floor operates as a live trading display through market hours and a generative visual canvas at night — driven by the same AI cluster managing the building.
Behind the elevated DJ box sits a complete broadcast operation. An AI-managed signal chain running from Durham Lane to a global audience with no single point of failure. Every performance is a live broadcast from opening night.
And it is built to last. L-Acoustics energy-efficient audio. Apple Silicon AI — an intelligence layer at near-zero marginal cost. LED infrastructure. AUTEX — New Zealand manufactured. A room running close to 24 hours rather than sitting dark five nights a week.
The production and content infrastructure inside The White Room is in our domain. We have spent our careers doing this work. The sustainable development standard for how it integrates with the heritage building, how it performs across its lifecycle, and how it lands at the standard Alberts and Quattro set across the portfolio — that is your expertise, not ours. We propose to build to it, with Quattro's guidance, because no one in the country has more credibility delivering at that intersection.
07 — The Documentary
The story that
travels ahead of us.
The world's greatest stories are defined by two things. The moment they capture. And who was in the room when it happened.
The White Room is being developed as the subject of a feature documentary — following the build, the negotiations, the technology coming online, the opening night.
For brand partners who come on board during the build, the documentary is a rare position — part of the story as it happens, rather than a sponsor of something already finished.
Every market The White Room enters after Auckland, this story arrives first. The partner that said yes in Auckland is in every frame of it.
Conversations with New Zealand's leading documentary producers are underway.
08 — What This Means for Alberts
Not a tenancy.
A legacy.
The White Room is built on a partnership architecture. Alberts is its foundation — every other relationship activates inside the framework Alberts sets.
When The White Room opens in October 2026, Auckland's tech community, its creative industry, its investors and its founders will know who made it possible.
The building that once held New Zealand's financial story will hold its technological and cultural future. Documented. Distributed. Permanent.
Auckland's most ambitious founders, its most significant artists, its most forward-thinking investors — they will know that Alberts looked at this building and saw what it could become. That Alberts chose vision over the safe option. That Alberts believed in something bigger than a lease agreement.
09 — The Numbers
A starting point
for the conversation.
The White Room is a $10M vision built to last. Auckland consumer spending is tracking 9% below 2024 levels. We know this. The figures below reflect our vision — they will be refined with Alberts and Quattro, in the room.
Figure 05 · Year 1 Revenue · Four Streams · $3.15M Baseline
Four independent revenue streams. Events lead by design. Broadcast scales fastest. Trading floor and Residents revenue compound as the network grows. Three-year trajectory: $3.15M → $4.86M → $6.0M baseline.
The return is measured per experience. All figures are indicative and will be confirmed following review of official schematics and execution of heads of agreement.
10 — Next Steps
Figure 06 · Critical Path · May 2026 → October 2026
The working meeting unlocks the path. Licensing carries a six-month lead time and must run in parallel with HOA and plans. October 2026 is the fixed point.
"If this is of interest —
we should talk."
The White Room · whiteroom.live
22 Durham Street · Tāmaki Makaurau · Aotearoa New Zealand