Strategic ordering system

Concept master plan

Schematic longitudinal site section

Schematic section of the collection and retention basin

Schematic section of the park landscape

Schematic section of the reliquary

Schematic section of the transcending vessels

Re-emergence of the Kumutoto stream

Collection and retention basins

Collecting rushes and reeds from the working wetland

The park landscape and water collection/storage towers

The reliquary

The transcending vessels

The retained site and light vessels

The concept weaves over and under the motorway

Site analysis and circulation diagrams

PARADISE LOST

MASTER'S THESIS

Wellington, New Zealand

Ordered patterns of roadways play a major role in establishing the clarity of urban fabric. However, problems arise when new motorways cut across and damage original ordering systems or when economic decline or political change cancel a new motorway project before its completion.

In such cases, legibility is destroyed by a failed structure that offers very little back to the city. Rather than stitching the existing fabric back together, these rudimentary infrastructures leave the site as a divisive transitional zone with a thick boundary edge. Such events happen frequently in major cities with rapidly expanding populations, leaving permanent scars. Typically, these zones will be capped with an under-utilised concrete surface (a grey bandage) or seeded with grass (a green bandage).

This condition is evident at the Clifton Street carpark in Wellington. The original ordering system has disappeared and the incomplete, elevated motorway is fragmented from a linear incision into the urban fabric. At either end, a green ‘bandage’ in a permanent state of incompletion is applied in an attempt to mitigate some of the discontinuity wrought to this now transitional zone.

The task of designing for these exposed or fragmented spaces on the peripheries (both adjacent to and beneath motorways and transport veins) is critical for landscape architecture. This project engages with significant historic cues and past identities as a means to re-appropriate and give purpose back to these spaces, so they can become inhabitable and flexible infrastructure for the urban community.

For further reading and to view the entire thesis please follow this link.

All work displayed was undertaken while studying at Victoria University in Wellington.