Water Shed Bay

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the role architecture plays in facilitating connection between landscape and community. It takes the position that the landscape does not only exist out there, in countryside and wilderness, but can meaningfully exist as part of the urban fabric. Drawing on the writing of the late local academic Richard Toy, it considers unique and defining features of the local environment to be an imperative consideration and locus in the design of communities. Toy wrote specifically about Auckland proposing a radically different vision for Auckland in comparison to the 20th century car-centric planning models which were bestowed on the city. His Auckland was to be Venetian, a water city of self-sufficient, yet intrinsically interlinked communities along the edges of Auckland’s harbours and waterways. Linked by a fleet of ferries and private craft these communities were intended to be shaped as bays, ushering activities inward toward the water’s edge. In close reading of the social and physical history of Onehunga it was discovered that this author’s own community has both potential and precedent to be improved through Toysian intervention. Precedent comes in the form of ferry services which historically ran out of Onehunga around the Manukau harbour to locations such as Waiuku, Cornwallis, Awhitu and Whatipu. Potential comes in the form of a volcanic tuff ring crater, Te Hopua a Rangi. What would have been an ideal Toysian bay, the crater has be ringed in, filled in with hubris and slashed by the southwestern motorway. It is unloved, under-utilised, almost invisible and largely forgotten. Consequently two central moves have become crucial to this thesis, the establishment of a ferry service out of Onehunga and the re-openning and re-flooding of Te Hopua a Rangi. Thus the fundamental challenge asks how architecture can be used to inspire acceptance and integration of this augmented waterside landscape into the existing urban fabric of Onehunga. The physical and psychological presence of the motorway and industrial landscape must be negotiated to re-engender the space and the water to the community. In looking to transform urban blight into urban destination this thesis is interested in the role architecture plays in landscape and architecture as means of landscape creation. With adhocist spirit it considers megaform, landform, and bigness, alongside landscape architecture, urbanism and land art as the essential disciplines and typologies which inform this thesis.