The Voice of the Landscape

The picturesque is dominant in how architecture in Aotearoa New Zealand is understood; architecture is continually viewed as a picturesque object supported by a beautiful landscape. But what if this human-centred way of understanding landscape and architecture was shifted, and landscape was given aesthetic priority? What architectures might emerge? What kind of space would landscape design? In this research, the aesthetic voice of landscape is explored through speculative architectural design projects, distilling architecture that is co-authored between humans and landscape. The design experiments are supported by theories of new materialism and object-oriented ontology, which place importance on the aesthetic agency of things other than us, such as objects or landscapes. In doing so, all hierarchal structures are removed and rather than aesthetics being subjective, considered through taste or pleasure, aesthetics emerges through the encounter between human and more-than-human entities. The research in this thesis adopts a design-as-research methodology that operates through a non-linear design process employing three scales of project: an installation at the scale of the body, a series of mid-scale architectural experiments, on an imaginary, drawn landscape, and a large-scale re-imagination of a police college. The experiments in this process operate through a diverse range of design media that continually shift between analogue and digital techniques, drawing out the landscape’s aesthetic agency through a series of digital and bodily engagements. This research presents a new approach to how architecture and landscape might be related, how they are inseparable, entangled, and mutually informing. It challenges how we understand landscape and architecture in Aotearoa New Zealand, giving the landscape an aesthetic voice.