Hospes: A Curatorial approach to complexity in the city

Abstract

This thesis, as part of the Urban Pedagogy Lab, investigates how to design within the complex city. Collaborating with the Auckland District Health Board, this thesis develops a methodology for speculating about the future of the Greenlane Clinical Centre. Located in the middle of the Auckland isthmus, the site is encompassed by urban artefacts: an imposing civic park and significant maunga, a prominent racecourse and showgrounds, and a low-rise residential neighbourhood. For decades this site has developed in an ad hoc, ‘top-down’ manner, collecting a myriad of problems which effect staff and patients daily. The site operates as an insular modernist campus, confined by the DHB boundaries and at an impasse with its issues. Floating in space, the site is a bubble separated from the urban realm. In response, this thesis initially interrogates existing design approaches to complexity; principally those of Cedric Price and his ‘material-semiotic method.’ Employing his method and framework, the city is re-cast as an ‘ecology’, where a built object is an intervention in existing systems and networks. Using mapping as a generative tool to visualize this ecology, the Greenlane site is shown to operate beyond its most discernible spatial thresholds. Every spatial, social, institutional, economic and cultural connection is a form of interdependence with the wider city - the Bubble is burst. By embracing this density of relationships, complexity is an opportunity, a tool. Connections become catalysts for design; capturing the latent potential of the ecology. This methodology is tested in the design of a collection of dwellings. By leveraging the connective agency of the users and allying public institutions, the project emerges from the gap between the utopian and the realist. The design extends beyond the architectural object, to include the surrounding ecology of the structural, social and economic. Ultimately, this thesis presents a new role for the architect. In the tangled complexity of the urban, the architect curates the threads of connection, of relationships, and assumes the role of curator.