The Topography of Succession: Architecture in a regenerating landscape

Abstract

In a rapidly growing Auckland, rapid architectural solutions, such as prefabrication, will likely govern the expression of our living spaces in the coming decades. As our urban isthmus expands, vacant sites are quickly oversaturated and the land remaining for native flora and fauna decreases. If forests are not given the time and space required to recolonise open ground, they will continue to be pushed to the periphery and, perhaps, out of existence. Mediation is therefore essential, and prefabrication, with is proclivity for efficient assembly and disassembly, holds a unique potential to accommodate a mediation of space over time. This thesis asks how off-site construction methods could create a symbiosis between architectural place-making and landscape regeneration. Places and landscapes, understood as assemblages of physical, cultural and atmospheric contexts, are constantly in the process of reshaping and being shaped. This thesis explores shifting attitudes towards placemaking in the wider landscape, uncovering a fundamental theme of temporality, where our attempts to make place in the landscape take the form of a continual struggle for control. This temporal struggle is echoed in theories of regional architecture.Over time, architecture withstands, repels and absorbs the environmental and cultural contexts of a specific place. The outcome of this struggle gives that place a physical architectural ‘voice’ which, in the context of a regenerating landscape, could be concretized in the additive tectonic of prefabrication.This thesis is tested through the hypothetical design of a new housing typology in western Auckland. It proposes an iterative mapping and designing methodology, which enacts design moves through site survey. Completed annually, this map allows for architecture to participate with its changing landscape context. Over increments of time, the design explores how a single housing block might grow with and adjust to a regenerating forest.