FUTURE REMNANTS
Where downtown Auckland meets the sea, towers soar skyward, massive and very tangible evidence of the value of land at the city's heart, and of the power the money has in driving a city upward, even forward. Commuters swirl around the base of these towers; like tides, only at certain times of day. Other times they are hives for activity, or unoccupied, casting light out across the harbour. New towers spring up regularly, replacing, crushing, or out-competing what once was there. Construction workers bustle around a site at the bottom of Queen Street, assembling a monolithic podium, one that does not suggest at all a relationship with the street in the conventional sense, but rather the beginning of something much larger... ~ Auckland is inextricably linked with the sea. It was built for the harbour and then built out of the harbour. And one day, the land reclaimed from the harbour could disappear back into it. This future is unknown. For architects this is a problem, designing for a future that is at best it is uncertain, and at worst, entirely unpredictable. Challenges accelerate towards us at a frightening rate even as technology promises a healthier, more democratic future. The city stands on the brink of possibility - a cities will shape the future, are the future. ~ We are still uncertain whether severe climate change could be averted, or if it will thunder in with a cascade of environmental breakdowns. Populations still climb steeply, yet we are still uncertain whether they will climb out of poverty or will be trodden down.
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What is certain though, is that the towers downtown epitomise our lack of forward planning, whether by clients, developers, or architects. They are built up as far as immediate budgets and other constraints allow, still stretching higher, becoming more slender and seemingly ephemeral. How long will architecture like these towers of downtown last? It is not a question we have ever had to answer.
Cathedrals grow over centuries, with no single architect and no concrete plan, merely a vague blueprint, a potent and all-consuming collective idea. They are not built for individual immortality or gratification. Craftspeople, the builders and stonemasons, design as much as the architects themselves. Their protracted build imbues them with an entirely different meaning to the corporate skyscraper, and opportunity to understand the building as its form gradually wrangled from raw stone. ~ Instead of envisioning a single future - that even the best predictions of the relatively near future could get wrong - and designing architecture for that, perhaps a building should emulate this; no set plan, instead blueprint an architecture that can grow when it needs to, and last centuries.
In a city where architecture serves only a few, for only a short self-serving space of time, and in the face of an increasingly unknown future, something changes. Auckland's residents are tired of a city where public space is disappearing and private space is unaffordable. It becomes increasingly more obvious that future buildings will have to weather more severe storms, higher temperatures, rising seas, and that inevitably, some will profit from these changes, some much more than others. Architecture that was once deemed appropriate is dismissed as unstable for the future. Plans for the downtown site are shelved. The Westfield Mall has already been razed to make way for the steel and glass tower of Commercial Bay, but instead of the shiny glass edifice driven skyward by the desire for a floor area target, a massive stone podium is laid across half the site. The podium serves as symbolic foundation stone, an object that could weather centuries of uncertain trials, as well as a collective reminder that the land being so enthusiastically built upon is by no means permanent - or permanently above the shoreline. ~ Dredges scour the harbour seabed, dragging up sediment, making waves crash where they never have before. Land is so prized it is being created, hauled out of the sea and into existence in the name of progress. Whether in the expansion of the Ports of Auckland or the militarised islands of the South China Sea, reclaimed land has special connotations - islands especially. An Auckland where towers are islands subject to the flow of money and the whim of individuals far removed from the city, is one where a public space is sorely needed. A flat public square, bare but for unending possibility, now occupies the bottom of our main street. It opens up to the harbour, diagonally framed by the monolithic stone podium, the island in the centre on the city. On here one can sit above the frantic hordes, still in the open air, on a different kind of urban island, a statement of public power as well as a refuge.
SITE MAP
1:500
Brick by brick, concrete pour by concrete pour by concrete pour, a tower emerges from the foundations. Disregarding a conclusive plan or a single architect, the hero figure who will shape the future has died – this is a building dictated by the public. Instead of the language that shaped urban towers, building up as much as the envelope will allow, or one industrially anchoring ocean structures to the seabed, this combines them, each stage of the building adjusted to a time that could not have been imagined initially.
The tower grows according to its previously unknown needs, outwards when necessary, upwards when necessary. Like growth rings on a tree, its past is visible in its structure - the constant fluctuations of population and prosperity are obvious.
At the beginning, the building and the site are one. The tower reflects the site, literally, the steps of the tower reflected as the island at a possible new waterline. What it is used for is up to the people who will use it. Office block? Mall? Library? Council chamber? Waterfront stadium...?
STRUCTURE EVOLUTION 1:2000
John Soane once imagined his new Bank of England as a ruin, centuries in the future - an appreciation that despite their monumentality, his architecture would change with time, but remain just as beautiful. The tower is all structure, no ornament - why should it be? Ornament is subjective. Opinions are fickle. Ornament is just another reason to tear a building down... The resulting building is unintentionally, even unashamedly, a brutalist one. Perhaps this is needed, one of architecture’s most publically hated styles, to ironically last longer than any current fleeting fashion. Its raw form provides a framework life and culture, just as the immense Barbican of London is a hub once again.
THE BARBICAN LONDON UK
As a framework, the tower is an opportunity for the public to create their own architecture. A crucible to fill with their own ideas of what makes an ideal city, culturally, politically, aesthetically – and, contained in the staggered walls, isolated from the volatile forces of compromise. It is not a solid mass, but permeable, gradually becoming more dense to support increasingly lofty heights. An atrium carves through the full extent of this height, rays of light streaming down through the posts and beams. Beams of raw concrete that jut out over the city, unfinished yet complete. ~ As the tower inches skyward, the extremes resemble ruins. Abandoned but for builders, the raw edge of the tower's creation is, just as in the paintings of John Soane as beautiful at the beginning of its life as it will be at the end.
SECTION 1:500
READ/WRITE ARCHITECTURE EDWARD DUNCAN BOOK III