A Landscape in Motion

Wellington’s coastal landscape is a layered and changing condition. Informed by landscape architect and theorist James Corner’s insights from “Landscape Imagination”, this research contends that “just as a landscape cannot spatially be reduced to a single point of view, it cannot be frozen as a single moment in time. The geography of a place becomes known to us through an accumulation of fragments, detours, and incidents that sediment meaning” (Corner & Hirsch, 2014). Within this framework, speculative architectural design emerges as a pivotal medium, exploring the aesthetic voice of landscape, and proposing architecture that is co-authored between humans and landscape. This thesis explores the proposition that architecture connects and converses with its environment. Through a speculative design methodology, the research develops a range of architectural techniques as translational tools for landscape ephemerality to become aesthetically agential. This research aims to deepen comprehension of these complex phenomena in order to expand spatial and architectural understanding through explorations of landscape and architecture. The research unfolds through an iterative design process comprised of a series of design experiments, each increasing in scale and architectural complexity. Beginning with an installation at the scale of the body, followed by a series of coastal interventions along the rocky southern coast, culminating in a reimagined ‘urban landscape’ comprised of four interconnected rooftop interventions.

These design explorations are supported by a literary framework drawing from the concepts of poíēsis and sympoíēsis, emphasising the act of collaborative creation, supported by artists and thinkers like Nikolaus Gansterer and Donna Haraway. The explorations utilise a diverse range of design media, continually shifting between analogue and digital techniques, to draw out the landscape’s aesthetic agency. This outcome presents a novel approach to conceptualising the relationship between architecture and landscape, highlighting their connection, entanglement, and mutual influence. The research fosters a rigorous exploration of liminal architectural expressions that engage in dialogue with the landscape, capturing and translating the shifting qualities of the coast. In giving landscape an aesthetic voice, this work challenges prevailing notions of how architecture and landscape are understood and related in Aotearoa.

Throughout this exploration, critical reflection on drawings and design iterations deepen the discourse surrounding the research focus. The thesis investigates the dynamic interplay between architecture and the natural context it inhabits. It speculates on the potential of architecture to act as an agent in an ontological shift, fostering a deeper understanding of the tacit connectedness that exists between built and natural environments. This compels a relational approach to architectural practice, driven by transformative and radical design methods.