June Workshop Abstracts

Grace Warne

The Sustainable Industrial Landscape

In a world dominated by headlines on climate change, population expansion, economic issues and social dilemmas, it seems hardly surprising that Landscape Architects are now often being called upon to design landscapes that support sustainability rather than just provide visual appeal. Sustainable design is increasingly pushed as a planning tool in urban areas to solve these issues at a local scale.  Industrial sites with their association with pollution and degradation should be a significant target of this movement towards sustainable design. Industrial sustainability needs to focus on not only environmental issues but on social and economic sustainability as well, to ensure they survive and thrive. A new shift in the approach to sustainable landscape design within an industrial context could generate a more holistic sustainability.

This has resulted in the question “How can landscape architects advance sustainability within industry through the use of social interaction and behavior?”

 Human behavior is recognized as an important element of sustainability, as people often contribute regularly to unsustainable practices. Changing behavior through design, psychological applications, and organizational manipulation can alter how people view sustainability and how they behave in their environments. Positive social interactions can improve personal well-being, environmental awareness and care, and aesthetic perception; which can be utilised to increase sustainable behavior and attitude. This can be used to advance sustainability within an industrial context.

 A design methodology has been developed around the concept that positive social interactions can improve sustainability by altering people’s behavior and attitude. Through the design of an industrial park using a social framework, the project tests whether the social methodology works successfully to improve the site’s level of sustainability through an increase in the quantity and quality of social interactions.

Harbourside Business Park was chosen to test the design methodology. This site is situated within the industrial precinct of Rosebank Peninsula in Auckland and is currently available for landscape development. It is primarily medium to light industry and is not visible from the main thoroughfares. The site has a wide range of opportunities and limitations but struggles with tenancy and landscape management issues. A key issue is the lack of connectivity for people both physically and visually and this presents an opportunity to test how social interaction can be improved and increased to improve sustainable outcomes.

 The proposed Harbourside Business Park design aims to generate social interaction by encouraging visual and physical connections and providing opportunities for engagement between both people and people and their environment. Five main design elements were created to satisfy the aim of social interaction as a means to a more sustainable industrial park.  Terracing of steep inaccessible slopes opens them up visually and physically allowing access through the area and provides opportunities for seating, walking, small groups and similar social activities. They also provide a view point across the site and out over the adjacent estuary and act to absorb stormwater and provide pedestrian access between buildings. Social spaces have been identified as crucial to social interaction and are in a range of sizes from smaller and more intimate to larger community spaces. This will target a wider audience of users while allowing them to use the spaces personally or as a group. Making these appealing and comfortable is crucial to their use as is making them multi-functional.

A pedestrian network prioritises people and allows direct contact between site features, natural environment and buildings within the site. It encourages walking/cycling and reduces the focus on vehicle domination of the site. Use of this network can be employed to link people to their environment and to each other.

Sight lines between building entrance ways, large windows/balconies, and important aspects of the wider environment are identified and marked out on the ground in such a way as to draw the eye to these locations or elements. Having your eyes drawn towards a specific location can increase personal and environmental awareness as well as exposing site initiatives that encourage social interaction and more sustainable behavior.

The proposed design elements aim to improve and increase the level of social interaction on the site and generate awareness of others and the environment as a means to increase the level of sustainable behavior.

Raewyn Davie-Martin

Mountain to Sea - Water for 21st Century Resilient Cities

How can potable and non-potable decentralized water networks re-image cities?

Can the development of parks, with a new synergistic neighborhood buddy water network, be a successful densification model for the urban city?

Globally large water infrastructure projects are being redesigned to use smaller sized grey infrastructure by using operationalized landscapes in conjunction (Department of Environmental Protection 2006).  An example of traditional linear infrastructure with productive natural landscapes with a connected urban water network is Bishon Park, Singapore by Landscape Architect Herbert Dreiseitl (Dreiseitl 2012). The Singapore Island water network design is regulated at government policy level (Dreiseitl 2012). Likewise, precedents from New York City High Performance infrastructure), shows change from the traditional linear water system to alternative holistic infrastructure. (Brown Caputo Carnahan Nielsen 2005). This research will speculate on resilient city planning and city strategies for densification for a distributed city network, which considers water, cluster neighborhoods and eco cities use of recycled wastewater for city resource management (Ed Haas 2012).

The research will investigate precedents from water infrastructure projects for potable and non-potable water network systems for example Singapore. This research will analyze the precedents from Singapore's public utility board reclaimed infrastructure (PUB 2013) and compare this to the Auckland's water infrastructure projects to explore the options for separate potable and non-potable water network systems. The research will consider the use of reclaimed water infrastructure and new technologies. This exploration, will define how hybrid green and blue infrastructure can be designed for future resilient industrial and residential community needs to revue Auckland's current infrastructure (DEP 2006).

Water resources can be divided into a source for potable consumption and a source for non-potable consumption. The reclaimed water from the combined waste and storm water drainage could be used for the increasing city water needs. This secondary water can be recycled for reuse within the neighborhood, for example industrial or agricultural uses for example hydroponic gardening. Developing technologies will redefine the water infrastructure networks to encompass new and old infrastructure practices to redefine the linear infrastructure of the city. The neighborhood water network is the focus and this is where the main change to the developing city densification model is, in this research.

Increasing city density will change ecological functions of land and water. For example the ground water levels and aquifer recharge of the natural water systems will become less efficient. Caused by the increased non-permeable land cover created from the increased built environment. Water runoff from the changing city fabric, will change the natural hydrologic flow patterns. Less water infiltration will cause soils to become less productive.

This research will identify the changing needs for the future city for optimal land performance, when higher population densification affects the city environment for example urban heat, smog, less ground water recharge, city and coastal salt-water infiltration damage to coastal arable land (Novotny 2010).

The research will explore strategies to use reclaimed water for ecological and community consumption. The project will focus on the uses of reclaimed water from waste and grey water, to analyze the best practice outcomes for ecological functions. This exploration will consider a best practice approach opposed to a most practicable approach for the water network infrastructure management currently used by Auckland. The provisional Auckland City Unitary Plan indicates source control of pollution in water networks and this is where the exploratory research is aimed.

This research intends to develop a densification plan with holistic, resilient, blue and green city infrastructure around parks. The research project is aimed to reimage the densification of the 21st Century Auckland city. The incentives for the proposed park - rezoned neighborhood, are to create higher population zones and community water recycling for wastewater credits (similar to private power network incentives for energy generation).

The proposed Auckland city central interceptor project is the motivation. This pipeline is 13 kilometers long and is a combined storm/wastewater infrastructure tunnel designed by AECOM for Watercare to be built in 2017 (Watercare 2013). The tunnel spans the catchments from Western Springs to Manakau Harbor. The proposed site for this pilot case study, the Mt Eden and Mt Albert catchment is a part of the of the total area. This research study is a critique of the whole central interceptor water management system, breaking it into component catchments and analyzing one of them. The object of this study is to reduce the wastewater flows into the tunnel infrastructure and reduce the size of the proposed central interceptor project.

The site of Mt Eden – Mt Albert catchment is the center for the study. The proposed research, will investigate uses for reclaimed water reuse and for a retrofitted two pipe water network system using potable and non-potable water for the catchment of Mt Albert/ Mt Eden.

The smaller scale interventions will show the - neighborhood densification and recycled water uses for the ecological and urban neighborhood - Chamberlain Park and the neighboring rezoned neighborhood densification master plan. The final design plan and strategic sections to be out lined at a later date. The proposed site is a pilot site study, to show the proposed interventions and the retrofit of the design into the existing city infrastructure. Analysis of the catchments will be included in the final Investigation and report for the potable and non-potable system infrastructure upgrade for Mt Albert / Mt Eden with researched strategies for the new technologies for recycled water use, plus seismic and public health standard guidelines.

Helen Frances

At the confluence: heritage, rivers and walking.

How can a river-side walkway be designed to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders, in a site that is rich in heritage? This design project draws on three frames of research.  The primary focus is the practice of landscape architecture in relation to heritage, using the design of a walkway in a heritage-rich site as an applied case study.   Heritage is a cultural construct, a version of the past created by people to serve their needs in the present.  It is intimately related to place, and to people’s sense of identity and belonging.  The research question puts emphasis on the needs of multiple stakeholders.  This emphasis reflects the contestable and potentially complex nature of heritage.  What is significant and valued by one group of people may not be so by others, so within this set of relationships between landscape, heritage, identity and place is a political dimension.  A survey of local residents has revealed that the literal facts of the community’s heritage story has little meaning for most people, but that the story is valued for the sense of community that it generates.  The survey also revealed some resistance to the hegemony of the heritage story, and a desire to hear more diverse and suppressed narratives.

Secondly, site analysis has examined the unique qualities of the rivers in the design site, and their implications for design, whilst locating them in the larger contexts of the spatial-temporal dynamics of rivers, the place of rivers in culture, and the meaning of these rivers to the local community.   Research so far has revealed that rivers and heritage converge in the way in which they both define and reflect a sense of place, and people’s sense of identification with place.    They both engage with, and generate, cultural and spiritual forces of memories, meanings and myths.

Third, the research explores walking in culture, art, and landscape.  Walking as a means of inhabiting the land and “embedding” landscape as part of us converges with heritage and the rivers in the making of place and identity.  The spatial unfolding and the temporal and sensual qualities of walking, and the difference between meandering and purposeful walking also inform design. 

Out of the complex matrix of heritage, rivers, walking and landscape, this project aims to generate a designed walkway for a particular community that responds to the ways in which people forge their sense of place and belonging. 

Eloise Veber

Meeting at the edge. How would we design Te Papa today?

Te Papa Tongarewa has always faced controversy over the lack of relationship to its historically/culturally significant waterfront site, the ocean, and the surrounding urban environment. Not only does this lack of relationship affect the public’s experience of the Wellington waterfront and the public space surrounding the museum, but it in turn affects the user’s sense of journey and orientation through the museum, the spatial orientation of its interior spaces, and any sense of grounding or belonging for visitors to the building. New Zealanders have an undeniable attraction to the coast. As a nation bordering only oceans, natural activity at the edge has captured our attention and imagination since early settlement. We are outward looking, obsessed by our edges. They provide us our nutritional, poetic and spiritual livelihood. Today, with most of our cities on the coast, we radiate our cityscapes from the edge. The seaside promenade becomes the urban climax, and we flock to it, instead of the town square. Waitangi and Bastion Point, places of national contemplation for concepts of land ownership, settlement and belonging, are both on coastal outcrops, scenic lookouts once chosen for good views of an enemy, now raise us high enough for us to admire the power and breadth of the ocean.

These are both sites of self-representation and cultural and political exchange. This project will look at a new design for the Museum of New Zealand. Reading the national museum as a place of self-representation and inter-cultural exchange, the project will explore our obsession with the coast and the foreshore as a place of gathering for New Zealanders, to inform a new design for the museum.

Kelly Henderson

The Body is a Temple, The Suburb is a Crack House

How can challenging the performative potential of Suburbia affect social interaction and the health and wellbeing of residents?

Ideas about health have long influenced the design of cities, communities and buildings. However where the health problems were once infectious disease –typhus, cholera, and TB.

From the original woven whare, our postcolonial housing became solid, strong and impermeable, in order to prevent the spread of infectious disease and greater dictate social conduct. ‘The house is conceived as a strong container or property, a place for the maintenance of the father’s law. It needs solid walls, strong doors, and latches to guard against inadmissible openings. The permeable structure of the woven home, with openings omnipresent, had the potential to lead to dissipation, the loss of life, and the loss of property and name.’ 

There is a malignant undergrowth in suburban NZ and it originates in the way we place ourselves in the world, in relation to other people. We are an island nation with a suitable post-colonial identity crisis. We imported the concept of suburbia, and coupled with our island mentality and nationalist sentiment we are quick to isolate and self-protect. Our fear of the Other generates a quiet racism and subtle but significant class divisions.  Our suburbs are not meeting our capacity for social engagement, support, connectivity.

Our house contains every threshold between the world and ourselves: doorways within and throughout, dictating social interaction beyond. What happens if we then begin to conceptualise suburbia not as a collection of private dwellings that serve to guard against inadmissible openings and prevent the loss of life –sentiments that are largely based in fear, in the unknown and of the other- but as a blueprint of possible social connection and landmarks of collective identity? On the premise that the spatiality of our suburbs influences our social interaction we can begin to challenge the performativity of Ranui: Ranui is a diverse, divided and deprived community of about 10 000 people -comprised of a large number of Maori and Pacific Islanders, with an average income of $22,000 per annum. While relatively benign even by New Zealand standards, the suburb has received some attention for gang related violence and homicide, and is suffering from poor self-image.

Mathew Brown

A way of looking: The architecture of Rudolph Schindler, through an alternate lens.

Rudolph Schindler, at the birth of Modernism, explored new technologies and ways of building to one end: “the creation of space forms”. Whilst these explorations resulted in a small following and spatially complex houses, he failed to become as influential as many of his contemporaries. By designing buildings that required occupation to be fully understood, Schindler concentrated his efforts on aspects of architecture that weren’t necessarily apparent through the media. This decision contributed to the failure of his ideas to be more widely adopted and demonstrates the importance of the media within modern practice.

This thesis explores the nature of architectural representations by carrying out an experiment using comics to represent a building that incorporates the spatial composition found in Schindler’s work. It proposes a way of emphasising those aspects of architecture that Schindler believed were important and therefore looks to encourage an understanding, development and perhaps a demand for his approach to building design.

Included within this thesis is a brief review of traditional architectural representations and discussions around the hypothesis that there is a connection between the structure of those conventions and the message they carry. It concludes that careful choice of representation method is required to demonstrate the strengths of different types of architecture. An architect who understands this has an advantage in how they transmit their message in a way that is clear, transparent and understood.