Tom Collins from Waipapa Taumata Rau, The University of Auckland, Te Pare School of Architecture and Planning is a finalist for his project 'Lost Property: Towards a Spectral Urbanism'.
Project description
When the motorway junction was constructed in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland mid-last century, approximately 15,000 houses were demolished from Grafton Gully, Newton and Freemans Bay. Forcibly acquired by the New Zealand Government, the houses disappeared from the city’s collective memory.
Lost Property proposes a historical wallpaper archive and pedestrian bridge that imagines the ghosts of Auckland’s lost houses returning to haunt the city. In doing so, it proposes a wider architectural practice, or methodology, titled Spectral Urbanism.
The two design proposals constitute a journey through time and an uncovering of the repressed darkness that lies beneath the colonial domestic scene. Taking cues from the villa and motorway languages, this architecture demarcates a territory of absence, conceived of as something akin to Auckland’s Bermuda Triangle.
Lost Property is a meditation on absence, asking how architecture might recall a lost past. In a city that has erased much of its history, this is a critical inquiry into understanding 21st-century Auckland and, indeed, Aotearoa New Zealand. It reveals the privileging of particular narratives over others, providing insight into the ideologies that shape our whenua (land), cities and culture. Both the villa and motorway can be seen as the consolidation of power. The importance of remembering history, be it natural, oral, written or architectural, could not be understated in a country with so little of it.
Jury citation
Lost Property is a meditation on absence and an inquiry into the privileging of particular narratives over others in Aotearoa’s built environment. Through two interventions, the project gives voice to an erased architectural and lived past – in this case, the loss of 15,000 homes from the central city to make way for a motorway junction.
As a form of spectral urbanism, these design proposals journey through time and the city’s collective memory to uncover ghosts that lie beneath the engineered environment, lost in Tāmaki Makaurau’s own Bermuda Triangle.
There’s a high degree of skill in this eloquent, thoughtful and compelling execution, which offers the viewer a cinematic experience. The detailed work and research have been undertaken with care and sensitivity, with respect shown to lost houses and the lives lived within them. Through searching and provoking, the uncanny is brought to light and into the present.
