Abstract:
Tāmaki Makaurau’s (Auckland) urban city environment, similar in character and evolution to many cities, has been changing under the movement of modern architectural language and urban planning pressures of land development:
altering urban place usage and scale. The city
emerged against the Maoritanga (Māori practices and
cultures), indigenous to the land, filled with the importance
of ‘home’, community, social rationality, and connection
within its settlements. Roger Trancik, an urban
designer, relates the Modern Movement as disruptive to
the social values within space, developing public spaces
within the city that have lost the sense of ‘place’ and ‘right
for people to appear’.
Aotea Square is a site projected to be the focal point of
civic life, a site of a Civic Centre and the one place to be
called the ‘heart’ of the city. Planning intentions of Aotea
Square, designed in the mid-20th century, induced the
issue of the Civic square as a ‘lost space’ and ‘heartless’ in
the urban landscape of Tamaki Makaurau. It has evolved
into an empty and unused space with no social connection,
community, or significant interaction to this day- unsuccessful
in the eyes of the urban design experts and the
public.
The ‘home’, the ‘domus’, an eventful environment filled
with performance, is the incentive of this thesis as spatial
development to resuscitate the ‘heart’ of the city, to bring
a place of ‘home’, a sense of community back to public
space. The conceptual ideas of the ‘Domestic’ are essential
to this scheme as the expression ‘heart of the city’
narrates from the ‘heart of the home’. The domestic and
the urban are blurring with societal changes seen through
elements of the domus in the urban fabric. The term
urban domesticity is explored and ‘event’, the narrator of
forming the spaces, playing out this new ‘social scene’,
improving the social connection and applying growth of
community, interaction, and adaptability.