A Borderline
B
For the Proposal Report we are looking for a design narrative (10 images each with 100 words of text) incorporating your research to date - so we expect you'll take key images from your first two reports and combine them with precedent studies that inform your design concept. We are also looking for critical analysis of your precedents - i.e. a weighing of the arguments for and against. Ideally you would have at least 5 precedents that relate to your design concept and the report should finish with an image, sketch or diagram that expresses your design intentions.
1. As designers we engage with many design precedents in order to be influenced and to
encounter problem fields of similar dimensions to those they have dealt with. We engage with various projects and transform or, in some ways, deform design precedents to fit our projects situated-ness. But design precedence is a veiled game of disclosure and concealment. It encourages you to consider exemplary design and to be influenced by it but not, literally, to emulate it. At architectural design exhibitions one does not see images of design precedents literally pinned up on presentation boards. In a peculiar way, designers play a strange quotation game or game of parody with design precedents. All architecture, every fragment of building, offers itself up to this game.
2. Lebbeus Woods, is known for his engagement with questions of war, conflict, crisis and destruction. For Woods, an order to existing being is essential for his design explorations to create something new. He aims at making the new from out of the detritus of what already exists, the rubble or ruin. It aims to make good what has been destroyed in the sense that none of his projects concern demolition in order to build the new, but ‘salvaging’ what remains by doing architecture that grafts onto existing destruction. So for Woods, destruction and creation as production exist as mixture.
3. A further design precedent dealing with this notion of ‘salvaging’ is the 2012 Serpentine Pavilion in London, designed by Herzog & de Meuron + Ai Wei Wei. This collaborative design process did not set out to recover a past, but rather to install a system of environmental exchange that incorporates water flows, including water collection overhead and revealing a water table at sub-soil levels. In excavating for a hollowed-out revealing of subsoil water, what was uncovered was a complex array of remains, foundation remnants from the eleven prior Serpentine Pavilions that had occupied this site. The project transformed to incorporate the archaeology of its in situ conditions. This incorporation determined primary structural support positions that each acknowledged in a singular way the trace-structures from a past.
4. Hence, from this archaeological finding of the site, a new plan was developed to uncover these foundations and reconstruct a new kind of a pavilion grounded on and by the very milieu of the project’s historicality. In other words, what they did is precisely to salvage or recover the re-covered materials to construct something new, designing from the context of what already exists. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari, they deterritoralized the site in order to re-territoralize it into something new, instigating a process of ‘nomad’ deformations in order to distil a finalized formal arrangement.
5. Another design precedent dealing with method of salvaging or reclaiming the past is a project done by Ben Hayes – an architecture student from University College London. His proposal is for a museum landscape that facilitates restoration and reassembly of 250 wooden Orthodox churches onto Kizhi Island in Northern Russia. Through his architectural design he seeks to restore and bring back what is going to disappear in 1015 years which has spiritual presence that commands respect. In some aspect, the project literally follows the existing and historical building typology but by doing this he seeks to produce something new or different – making good with what is destroyed. 6. In relation to Herzog & de Meuron’s investigation of their site for the Serpentine Pavilion, this project approaches the site via a method of archaeology. It excavates the site metaphorically, physically and historically, primarily through the recovery and analysis of cultural traces and scarring-records that provide the remains of building transformations. 7. Generally archaeology is thought of as a study of the material traces or artifacts of a past. It involves excavation and analysis of data collected. Even with most advanced techniques we can never fully understand what kind of events occurred in the past. In this sense, because we cannot know the past completely, archaeology involves a certain degree of storytelling or speculation, myth and interpretation. With Bayswater marina, very few records exist and we can only know a broad or general field of events that have occurred to the building. This project mobilizes the vagueness of the site’s history, to produce speculative approaches in terms of reading the site and working towards design solutions.
8. Due to densified urban environments, the kinds of architecture seeks to recover the old are common, but in my point of what these building are only doing is act of re-cover where order of the new is covering over the order of old. Of course when you are dealing with a building or a site with historical background it is impossible to recover the past fully, this project suggests that there needs to be a balance. Design is not a practice of recovery nor re-covery, it is rather a practice of salvaging or reclaiming that deals with both as a rhythm between them – as destructive enabling.
9. In terms of architectural history of the site, Takapuna boating club, Takapuna grammar rowing club and the old O’Neill’s point is only built structures that has some degree of historical context. The rest of areas and building on the site are exists in actual time, in other words, because the land of Bayswater marina is reclaimed and not much built environments are transformed, there is no historical context or cultural context. 10. This project approaches Bayswater Marina as 2 different but singular area that is divided by a borderline. One is a linear piece of land where Takapuna rowing club and old O’Neill’s bay is and other is the rest. These two part of Bayswater marina has difference in many levels as they are owned by separate party. One is about investment, growth, hierarchy and other is the opposite. Borderline is the natural space for transformation as it is here that systems overlay and contain great creative potential. Lebbeus Woods states - “The natural space for this transformation is the borderline,
where systems of all kinds collide and abrade, as the world breaks up, not into chaos, but rather into new patterns of order� (Woods 1998, 35). To this end, this project proposes a residential housing on the main marina area and also seeks to salvage the historical building event traces that are situated on the line of original wharf area. This includes historical takapuna boating club, takapuna grammar rowing club and the old wharf.