Archiving Fragments of Time

Beneath the urban concrete of Wellington city lies a plethora of lost stories and voices, sometimes only accessible as fragments, which should contribute to the rich polyvocal narratives of a site. Recognition of these stories, even as fragments, enables local inhabitants and a wider audience to begin to understand the significance of place.

Heritage stories transform from one time period to the next, creating overlapping layers of a site’s identity evolving over time. Each layer, while potentially representing its own unique story, contributes to the meta-narrative of a place. This design-led research investigation looks at the problem that arises when important stories of a place are lost when a site has transformed over time. The true story of a site is represented by the hidden layers from previous time periods, which have often fragmented or faded over time. This thesis proposes that lost layers, fragmented stories and faded voices can be reawakened through speculative architectural representation.

Fragments of stories can be used to stimulate the imagination. The allegorical interpretation of fragments can be used to generate dreamscapes. Within a dreamscape, the multiple voices of multiple fragments can be heard together, even when they represent stories from different times. When dreamscapes are captured as allegorical drawing fragments, these multiple voices can be heard and retained even when they have partially faded away.

This thesis explores how an allegorical architectural project, framed within techniques found in allegorical narrative fiction, can be successfully used as a critical method to help reawaken and unveil lost voices of place and generate speculative architectural outcomes that allow these voices to be heard. This design-led research proposes to reawaken lost voices of place through mapping the field of imagination, collage and the creation of dreamscapes, and allegorical drawing fragments.

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams are examples of literary approaches to the allegorical interpretation of fragments. They are used in this investigation as literary provocateurs—allegorical generators to engage the imagination to reawaken lost voices as fragments and allow them to be heard in a collection—an archive of fragments. These two novels are effectively re-presenting place and time as dreamscapes. By enabling a series of fragmented stories to be heard as one, a richly polyvocal narrative is established that allows the reader to understand the significance of a place.

Two neighbouring urban sites along the edge of Wellington Harbour have been selected for this investigation: the Taranaki Wharf Cut-out and the Kumutoto Stream Outlet. Both have unique tales to tell. The Kumutoto Stream Outlet is the site of the first culverted stream in Wellington. This entire stream has been silenced and has disappeared forever, yet it survives deep underground; this narrow outlet along the Wellington Harbour edge is the last vestigial remnant of its tale. The Taranaki Wharf Cut-out exposes the lost shoreline of Wellington before urban expansion. This shoreline has been silenced and has disappeared forever, and the cut-out provides the last visual connection to the lost landscape below. Fragments of the urban concrete have been removed from both these sites to reveal the lost remnants of the sites tales they once concealed. These sites are engaged as allegorical portals that invite a viewer below the surface of Wellington’s urban concrete to explore the lost layers of fragmented stories that lay hidden beneath. These sites are presented as ‘characters’ that narrate ‘stories’ of Wellington waterfront’s surrounding context and the transformation of the landscape over time.

The original heritage conditions of a place often cannot be physically returned to their sites without disrupting the contemporary urban context. In this investigation, sites are not engaged as grounds for architectural intervention. Instead, they are provocateurs for how an allegorical architectural project can dig below the urban concrete and reawaken and unveil lost voices of a place. These voices are presented as a speculative archive of fragmented artefacts that invite viewers to witness, through these allegorical artefacts, an urban environment’s rich litany of heritage stories that may have been permanently lost or displaced. These artefacts take the form of maps, collages and drawings, and they are designed to read both as individual artefacts and together as a collection within an archive, this bound codex of work—an Archive of Fragments of Time.

This thesis asks:How can an allegorical architectural project be successfully used as a critical method to reawaken and unveil lost voices of a place, and generate speculative architectural outcomes that allow these voices to be heard?