Te Whare Atapō | The House Before Dawn

Within a Eurocentric perspective, the built environment is predominantly conceived to safeguard us from the outside natural environment. The mātauranga Māori worldview, in contrast, offers a more fluid understanding of our relationship with the wider contextual environment and one another. It avoids notions of separation, offering instead a blurring of boundaries between our built (inside), natural (outside), and cultural (within) environments. This view positions Māori into otherworldly threshold realms, governed by a spatial and temporal understanding of inside, outside as well as past, present, future as one; this worldview is typically conveyed through oral narrative (pūrākau), which allows us to pass our stories through the generations. This thesis looks at how Māori pūrākau can be integrated into an allegorical architectural framework as a way to help disenfranchised Māori youth reconnect with their whakapapa.

To begin this research investigation two preliminary design sites were explored: urban Te Aro Pā, Wellington and rural Tokomaru Bay, Gisborne — sites representing Māori heritage in direct opposition, reflected in their urban versus rural environments and the inhabitant population. These sites offer critical terrain where inhabiting a mātauranga Māori worldview was explored through the contextual relationships, implied dynamics of cause and effect, and opposing dialogues represented by each site. The developed design site is situated at Ngāpuwaiwaha Marae, Taumarunui, the author’s marae. It is representative of an architectural context defined by the emotional and physical use of the immersive, interactive and habitable characteristics within pūrākau.

This investigation addresses the cultural reconnection of Māori youth by adopting an allegorical architecture framework that positions pūrākau at the forefront. As a generator of ideas and an allegorical ‘provocateur’, this thesis uses the Māori pūrākau of Hine-tītama, the Dawn Maiden, who evolved into Hine-nui-te-pō, Guardian of the Night and Custodian of Souls. The design experiments awaken the voice of pūrākau by engaging key mātauranga Māori symbols within the narrative so that the architecture begins to immerse its inhabitants emotionally and physically within the world of mātauranga Māori. The principal research objectives of this design-led investigation are: 1) to explore the mātauranga Māori concept of storytelling, where key elements are situated in opposition (dialogues), 2) to explore the mātauranga Māori concept of spatiality, where inside and outside occur at once as a blended, liminal relationship, and 3) to explore the mātauranga Māori concept of temporality– “Ka mua, ka muri” – where past, present and future occur at once. This design-led research investigation translates pūrākau into allegorical architecture, as a vehicle to explore and architecturally translate the perspectives of mātauranga Māori within immersive and habitable allegorical architecture.