OLD HOUSE AT THE EDGE OF THE SEA: SKETCHING PERSONAL AND PLANETARY HISTORIES - Full Paper

Just at the edge of the sea in South Bay, Te Waero o te Hiku,1 Kaikōura,2 Aotearoa3 sits an old, rundown family house. It’s a tiny shed-turned-home hand-built in 1953. Earthquakes and southerlies have battered its yellow painted 50’s optimism over the years, and it’s more like flotsam from the sea and reef than a statement of human resistance. The little house seems to be in conversation with its vast context. It has complex miniature microclimates: tiny variations in surface, dust, light, air, sound, birds nesting in the roof—as well as memory, lost gardens, clumsy attempts at repair. Outside are enormous weather systems, immense sea, dynamic rock. Old House explores the strange architecture of this personal and planetary conversation through a multi-media architectural drawing installation. 4 Multiple ‘sketch creatures’ roam through Te Auaha gallery drawn from hand bent music wire, projected images, graphite, stones, seaweed, as well as VR portals, smell and sound. Participants engage with these multi-sensorial architectural sketches, becoming immersed in unruly architectures of the old Kaikōura house and its dynamic landscape context. Old House is part of an ongoing project exploring relations between personal and planetary dynamics through ‘expanded’ architectural drawings. 5 This paper attempts to articulate the research: its poiétic scalar relations—how intimate, personal histories of the house intersect and intra-act with abstract histories in the vast ‘planetary’ landscape beyond. The Old House research looks to destabilise relations between drawing, drawer and the worlds being drawn, and in doing so, highlight the intertwining of personal and planetary histories.