Moving Grounds: Irrupting Three Kings' Inverted Volcanoes

Abstract

Once a complex of mighty volcanic cones, now an eccentric scoria quarry pit hemmed in between low-rise suburbs, the Three Kings Quarry is now on the verge of becoming a mass housing redevelopment. The current proposal to backfill the quarried land and fill with homogeneous terrace houses and multi-storey apartments refuses to recognize the significances of the articulated volcanic landscapes and is argued in this thesis to be an act of normalizing extremities and effacing traces. Auckland, described as ‘a city nurtured in a nest of volcanoes’, is characterized by a natural turbulence in which Aucklanders live, work and play.1 The volcanoes in Auckland which once established their significance as points of reference and assemblage – from Maori fortresses to water resources, signal stations for ship, surveying points and forts – now survive as park lands or as remnants of economic contributors supplying materials for roads and buildings. The disappearing volcanoes and their residue implicated by industrialization of the environment have generated a unique urban condition that provokes a rethinking of our social, environmental, and political policies. Neither praising nor disgracing the industrialization, the thesis discusses the urban issues that have emerged throughout the landform transformations, including decontextualization of place, homogenization of form and disguise of urban conflicts. Premised on the instability of ground and built environment, the thesis also seeks to interrogate the subject of time and change in architecture and landscape, from the perspective of the ephemeral, the time-based and through the notion of becoming. Within the proximity of the inverted volcanoes, can the dazzling manufactured landform suggest an architecture that offers functional devices and empirical propositions that question our existing policies, mode of practice, and way of living? Can the hybridization of architectural functions and unorthodox site settings suggest a new architectural expression for Three Kings as well as Auckland? Addressing these questions the thesis seeks to manifest interventional architecture – positioned around the themes of the event, emergence, dislocation, and divergence, in order to question our relationship with the eccentric altered landscape and spatial territories.