AUTHOR: SAM DAY
N
orthland is home to some of New Zealand’s best travel destinations. Whether you’re diving off the Poor Knights Islands or driving down 90 Mile Beach, the region has something for everyone. One of its more obscure attractions, though, is a public toilet squeezed into a tiny section on Kawakawa’s main street. The Hundertwasser bathrooms may be small, but they pack plenty of punch; the public loo attracts 250,000 tourists each year and has become an integral component of Kawakawa’s local economy. The attraction has also stimulated the development of Te Hononga Kawakawa Hundertwasser Park: a community-led project that centres around the creation of a cultural hub. Te Hononga’s new centre will contain a memorial to Hundertwasser himself, a public
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gallery and viewing platform, a council service centre, and a community workshop. Kawakawa’s public library, once a dilapidated Eighties-style construction wedged beside the famous toilets, will now be housed in the park centre and a new ātea (town square) will take the place of the old library, serving as a meeting place and joining together of cultures for the community. The Park is also expected to take some of the strain off Kawakawa’s main street and off Hundertwasser’s famous bathrooms themselves. It will contain showers and toilets for freedom campers to use, as well as coach and car parking. The cultural hub is representative of the joining together of Māori and Pakeha, of tourists and locals, of man and the environment, as well as of Kawakawa’s community and Hundertwasser himself. This joining together is embodied in the
This photograph, taken early in the development of the hub, shows the framework for the insulated rammed earth wall. The wall in the foreground was built using soils and sands gathered within a 160km range of Kawakawa.
IMAGES COURTESY OF KAWAKAKA HUNDERTWASSER PARK CHARITABLE TRUST/SUE SHEPHARD.
Known around the world for its quirky, colourful Hundertwasser public loos, Kawakawa is acknowledging this renowned artist and his connection to nature with the development of the new Te Hononga Kawakawa Hundertwasser Park—the first New Zealand commercial building to use rammed earth construction techniques. NZ Plumber takes a look at progress.
