Sh*t's Getting Real: An Architectural Distillation of Waste

Abstract

The densification of Auckland is bringing an influx of people, and an equal efflux of waste. Fort Street, the former foreshore of Auckland, marks the exchange of culture and trade that have catalysed the expansion of this city. This thesis intends to explore and reveal the detritus of these activities through an architectural distillation of both wastewater and a design process. The vacant site where the Auckland Star Times building once existed, is primed for redevelopment. Convention would suggest it be reserved for office space, apartments or a mixed-use complex. However, by utilising this site for wastewater processing it is possible to bring this essential infrastructural service to the forefront of Aucklanders’ consciousness. The current system collects and transports wastewater through a large network of subterranean pipes and pumps to be treated at a peripheral location. This architecture thesis intends to exhibit this primarily hidden infrastructural service, through a process of architectural representation – humanising and emboldening the melancholic zeitgeist of waste. This proposal contends with the search for a new perspective on the necessary systematic piping and uninhabitable volumes required for wastewater treatment, and the inhabitable architectural spaces that are defined by these volumes. Components that have contributed to this collective include themes of entropy and recycling, and architectural precedents that embody ideas of distillation, environmental stratification and idiosyncratic representation. As the project for exposing the hidden materialised, a parallel claim for architecture unfolded – through a disclosure of my own architectural practice. The translation of the qualitative underpinnings of earlier illustration into the project allows this proposal to be an architectural one, rather than an engineered service. Architecture then becomes an advocate between two polarities, allowing an unorthodox program to be hybridised and implemented in a dense urban environment.