Project description

The picturesque is dominant in how architecture in Aotearoa New Zealand is understood; architecture is continually viewed as a picturesque object supported by a beautiful landscape. But this is all one way, from our viewpoint, us placing architecture within the landscape to suit our aesthetic desires. What if landscape had a say? What architectures would landscape propose to populate its surface? In this project, the aesthetic voice of landscape is explored through speculative architectural design projects, distilling architecture that is co-authored between human and landscape.

In this research I explore how landscape can have aesthetic agency in architecture, through having an active role in the design process. I speculate on what kind of architecture might emerge from this shift in relations, through a series of design experiments that attempt to draw out dynamic relations between human and landscape. The work has become a merging of the two, with landscape designing the architecture as much as I have.

The research was through three scales of project, each increasing in scale and architectural complexity. I began with an installation at the scale of the body, progressed to mid-scale architectural experiments on an imaginary, drawn landscape, and ended with a large-scale re-imagination of a police college, on a site in Porirua. This complex programme was used to explore a fluid, shared condition, blending the complexities of the police college with those of landscape. An architectural language was developed throughout the research, and was refined in the final project, re-imagining the police college as a series of speculative buildings on a partly real, partly fictive landscape.

This research presents a new approach to how architecture and landscape might be related, how they are inseparable, entangled, and mutually informing. It challenges how we understand landscape and architecture in Aotearoa, giving landscape an aesthetic voice.

Jury citation

Architecture is usually imposed upon the landscape, or constructed in spite of it. But this project asks: If we treated it as a partner rather than an inert presence, what architectures would the landscape propose?

Through a series of design experiments, Chris has formulated a methodology that attempts to draw out dynamic relations between human and landscape. Using an installation at the scale of the body, a mid-scale architectural experiment on an imaginary landscape, and a large-scale re-imagination of the police college in Porirua, he has explored how landscape can dictate or help formulate an architectural language. A gondola comprises the mid-scale section of this project, and the decision to use this form as a site of architectural reinvention in dialogue with the land it moves above proposes dynamic new opportunities for a mid-air architecture.

This project is a showcase for an adventurous design spirit with the ability to leave the well-trodden path of architectural process and forge innovative new methodologies. A consistent and coherent interplay between drawings, models and words shows a strong conceptual mind at work, and a rigorous interest in the craft of architecture. Chris’s exquisite timber models are a tantalising glimpse at what could be achieved using his method, especially as the starting point for engagement with mana whenua, for whom the voice of the land is real, not merely speculative.