Audry Yu from Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau, Huri Te Ao Hoahoanga, Auckland University of Technology, School of Future Environments is a finalist for her project 'A Local Place for Hauora: An Enmeshed Architecture Within the Interconnections of Everyday Life'.
Project description
A Local Place for Hauora explores the health and wellbeing of a community through ‘enmeshed architecture’. The design engages with the social, cultural and biophysical ecologies of Avondale, in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, seeking out how a neighbourhood can resolve its own pathways to health.
The proposal also responds to the suburb’s rapid intensification, including the uncertain future of its racecourse, which is partially reimagined as an urban ngahere (forest). The two proposed outcomes are Hui Kōrero, a building, and Three Waka, which are mobile interventions.
Hui Kōrero is in the town centre, edged by the ngahere, and engages with all aspects of hauora (health and wellbeing) through a community garden and plant nursery, spaces for kai (food) and raranga (weaving), alongside a barbershop, health clinics, beehive towers, a shared office and a bike workshop. The programme is uniquely Avondale, bringing together diverse activities not normally framed as health.
Through pocket spaces and blurring thresholds between different types of health, the building provides opportunity for community wellbeing and social exchanges alongside medical treatment. To further slip healthcare into the everyday, the second proposition is three waka – the bike, boat and bus – that distribute social, ecological, clinical and civic health into the wider West Auckland community.
Jury citation
Resolutely positive in outlook, this project rejects architecture that dictates its intentions. Instead, this design proposition serves a neighbourhood by honouring its idiosyncrasies with a holistic approach to individual and community health. The response intends to empower and transform through adaptable interventions that lay pathways to wellbeing.
The proposition incorporates a neighbourhood landmark, the Avondale racecourse, and reimagines it as an urban ngahere (forest) surrounded by value-added activities and services that contribute to individual and collective wellbeing. ‘Pocket’ and ‘edge relationships’ within this proposition are detailed and considered, and the layout gives understanding to everyday life, activities and relationships.
The three mobile interventions – bike, boat and bus – demonstrate strategic thinking in how health can be addressed in multiple ways, while challenging traditional ideas around health care and service delivery.
