Unfolding the Archipelagic Void: Site Intervention for Victoria Park

Abstract

Architecture survives the idea of the city in the many explorations to create potential discourses. The city as subject and context is understood through a series of filters or ideologies, acknowledging the city is in a condition of coexistence. This thesis continues Ungers’s concept of the archipelago, introducing the urban schema as a foreign overlay stemmed from the definition of the current urban city to be reinitiated as a single whole. The project comprises a metaphorical ideology accepting the fragmented state of the splintering form of the city to be generated as a thematic form of the project itself. These islands are an engine for the schemas described as experimental laboratories introducing new order of material, fragmentation as displacements, resulting in an uncommon landscape for Auckland. These urban islands propose schemas of possibilities—rather than actualities—to be manifested, the archipelago overlay being an ideological landscape within the city environment. For the endeavours of the collective urban spaces, acts of possibilities are to redefine each urban situation presented as deep and superficial aestheticisation. The selected urban island is Victoria Park projecting and reflecting the issues investigated from the underpinnings of the site. In the acceptance of a critical lens, site speculation and historical background are used to re-appropriate and re-initiate the site synthesized with context as material and spatial dimension to challenge its urbanism. The site as in-between is moreover challenged as conception; the ideas of boundaries, permeability, and movement which lie around the site will be accentuated as an exploration of site. The landscape that was once exposed as residual is overturned as a strategy where the project shifts from being created by the context to becoming the context. Re-initiating from the foundations of the site fabricates the terrain to activate the void. The geological forces rooted in the mechanisms exist as the urban desire to manifest the intervention as a synthetic process, reflecting how spaces can be shaped. Throughout the thesis, the notion of city and archipelagos guides the project for an act of possibilities, which can move between practical and theoretical concerns in illuminating and reviving the city of explorations.