Project description

Auckland, New Zealand. A bustling and fast-growing modern city that is as beautiful as it is diverse. Many cultures and people land on the city’s waterfront creating an active, vibrant scene. This includes the likes of local pedestrians travelling to work or school, or the many tourists who enter and start their exploration of New Zealand through this urban gateway.

Even though there is a large and growing pedestrian presence on the waterfront of Auckland, the streetscape and public realm ultimately still belong to the automobile. Realising the negative effects this has on the public social realm, emergent projects within Auckland’s near future aim to return the cityscape to the pedestrian user, thus creating a stronger social and traversable city.

This project investigates the local context of Auckland’s waterfront and places the concept of a mediatheque along Auckland’s Quay Street. This will be designed alongside the emerging projects of Auckland’s waterfront to ultimately deliver a building that not only adds to Auckland’s cityscape but increases the interactivity of the public and act as a gateway to the city.

The designed social hub will be created to the typology of a mediatheque, a building which provides gallery, event, library and public space for the local context. This idea prompted a look into many architectural theories and styles such as Rem Koolhaas’s lobotomy, Bernard Tschumi’s disjunction, and a strong precedential understanding of Parc de la Villete as well as Centre Pompidou. With these in mind, the Auckland mediatheque aims to promote a playful, Timeless, iconic and socially enhancing structure that will benefit the pedestrian fabric of Auckland, New Zealand for many years to come.

Jury citation

This colourful scheme for a multi-programme public space on Auckland’s waterfront provides a bright, retro-futuristic vision of how providing more opportunities for civic engagement could enrich the commerce-heavy central city.

The dominance of cars has turned Auckland into a place where pedestrians are marginalised and restricted to their roles as consumers, but in this modern mediatheque, people are offered a variety of opportunities to engage with arts and culture, meet friends and whānau, and connect with the landscape beyond the shops and carparks of downtown.

Thoughtfully placed at the nexus of public transit, newly created public space in the form of Te Komititanga, and at the gateway to the Waitematā, Siān’s project provides a place to land for the people of Auckland as they continue their journeys through the city. Through a fun and exciting series of drawings that view Tāmaki through a Pop-Art lens, he shows us the ways that people-centric design and pure, childlike joy are missing from the cityscape.

By combining a series of typologies – folly, gallery and circulation space – Siān has conceptualised an ever-evolving structure with endless potential, a sort of modern interpretation of the infinitely flexible Shed 10 across the street. It’s great to see such a civic-minded project that is both socially sustainable and light-hearted, and informed by a spirit of serious play.