Liquid Gold: Reimagining Waiheke Island

Abstract

Lying 20km off the coast of Auckland, Waiheke Island is the most extensively populated island in the Hauraki Gulf. The island has developed in the last few years from a rural backwater to a landscape commodity characterised by highprofile architecturally-designed holiday homes, and is esteemed as a luxurious world-class wine region. It’s identity as a holiday oasis and summer retreat defines the island as pleasurable. This limited pleasure confined to a small number of people at certain times of the year is of particular interest to this thesis. Investigating this interesting liminal condition between pleasure and constraint and neither urban, suburban nor rural, it seeks another version of a productive landscape that is pleasurable. Critically questioning this existing condition of Waiheke and positioned around the themes of pleasure and production, this thesis investigates through drawing the extent that the island can be both a landscape of production and of experiential pleasure based on the aesthetics and refinement of olive oil. Pleasure in modern society is often fleeting, isolated and is constituted moment by moment. The pleasure sought in this project looks to provide more persisting benefits within a ground of wider implications that are dynamic and expansive. In the context of existing discourses of landscape and drawing, this thesis has sought to uncover precedential drawings that have informed the otherworldly nature and aesthetics of landscape and spatial realms; it uses these drawings as the context to activate the embedded pleasures of olives and a specific sort of understanding of aesthetics of landscape. Informed by these precedents, this thesis speculates on the potential to reconstruct the industrial landscape over the landscape of pleasure that is not merely utilitarian. Drawing is the key methodology applied in the conceptual development of the design research for this thesis. The drawing is attentive to the conditions of islands and archipelagos and promotes this notion of insularity to operate at all levels as well as encouraging a hybridity of nature and architecture through a mixture of repellent and beautiful images that play between the natural landscape and the industrial landscape. This thesis is a speculative architecture proposition of an industrial landscape – a world that we are not yet inhabiting, but one that unfolds into a pictorial world that can be perverse and different – a ground which is beautifully figured in a visual culture of liquid gold with its products as gifts back to the city.