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The Context report will research the historical, political and social aspects of the site and students will be expected to provide a detailed critical analysis of these issues, again conducting their analysis using a variety of media.
1. 19th century European immigrants to New Zealand brought with them the landscape values which were prevalent at that time, so they largely saw and understood landscape in picturesque (as well as survival and resource) terms. Whereas landscape values in Britain and much of Europe have since changed, the dominant discourse for Pakeha New Zealand has remained the scenic concept – the idea of landscape being something ‘out there’ and somehow distant from people who live in the landscape. 2. For European settlers, land of New Zealand was just a new land for development and resource. Even in the modern days New Zealand sells itself as pristine mountains and sandy beaches without people. The clean and green image of New Zealand landscape is not about people, or even about where people live, but somewhere else, the scene ‘out there’.
3.
Maori, for example, understand landscape as relationships, and as part of people. In terms of development of Bayswater Marina, I think important factor for an architect is to observe the project site not just as a resource or an object just as how developers sees it, but rather critically consider its social relationship with the people who developed rich relationship with Bayswater landscape. Longstanding opponent of marina housing Paddy Stafford-Bush said: “This is reclaimed land from the seabed and it belongs to the people. It’s nice the way it is and people are comfortable with it and the way it looks and works.”
4. Unlike how the developers perceive the site as ‘waste land’ , for the locals of Bayswater Marina, the site is not something ‘out there’ but it is rather a place within them which they build memories upon.
5.
In the pre- reclaimed context, the site was full of public amenity with the Takapuna boating club actively operating. Currently, after a large part of the site was reclaimed it is mainly for individual use for car parking and people who owns a boat mooring. This shift in situated-ness of the site changed how people perceived the site radically in two context. Relationship that the locals had with the site was ruptured by the view of developers who saw the site a land of opportunity and resource.
6. Landscape has long been depicted as a physical object, as an ‘external pre-given reality observed and represented from detached position by an independent perceiving human subject. A contrasting set of interpretations suggests that landscape is not so much a physical phenomenon as it is a record of symbols, bearing and transmitting the beliefs and power relations of different social groups.
7. Whether considered as an external reality or a way of seeing, landscape does not stand still. Formed by evolving and iterative dialogues between an environment and its people, a landscape is ‘never complete: neither built nor unbuilt, it is permanently under construction’.
8. Regarding these two ways of understanding Bayswater Marina, neither of two views are right or wrong, there needs to be a negotiation. After all, design is a practice of negotiation, dealing with the in-between, a rhythm between the opposite.
9. Opposed to the developers view on Bayswater marina as a blank site, there is never a blank site. What you are only ever doing is recovering whatever is there, recovering in a double sense of re-locating, salvaging from out of a milieu, but also erasing and re-inscribing traces of whatever is there to be encountered, recovering as one would worn couch. So, recovery has two differing meanings. It means to re-find something but also to hide something, to hide something and find something, just as with salvaging something. What you salvage can never be what once was. There is a loss of context, a certain degree of destruction. One tries to make good with what is destroyed – as destructive enabling.
10. For this design brief ‘Architecture Reclaimed’, I seek to develop an architectural intervention that ‘reclaims or salvages’ the past to produce the future of Bayswater marina. This project attempts to assemble the two opposing parties of locals and the developers. In particular, I will consider Gilles Deleuze’s concept of assemblage and becoming as a way to conceptualise and read the sites development as a way of becoming rather than change into something new.