Architechur Bro

Set in a fantastical place falling off the edge of the globe, Architechur Bro relishes in the mysterious, mythical, and magnificent portrayal of this group of islands. Historian Michael King argues, "what distinguishes New 'Zealand's history from that of other human societies is that these themes have been played out in a more intensive manner, and at a more accelerated pace, than almost anywhere else on Earth… [and] their course and consequences have interest and relevance for human history as a whole". Since Captain Cook's visit in 1769, only 254 years have transpired. Like a series of short architecture stories, the author narrowed this 'thesis' scope by choosing sections from seemingly disconnected origins and interweaving them. To represent this, 2.54 Metres was made. The 2.54 Metres compiled a graphically rich timeline, presenting 254 years as squished 10-millimetre increments, like periodic volumes collecting dust. The print filled an otherwise blank wall in Te Pare. In opposition to the 'NZIA's NEW ZEALAND architecture exhibition, re-erected in 2023 from 1981, view shafts within the display framed the new work above in a pool of light — an Acropolis–Parthenon-like relationship. 2.54 Metres remained installed for three months until it was removed, in the author's fiction, by force… or, in reality, the tape wore thin, it peeled off the wall, and the cleaners binned it.

Architechur Bro destabilises "New Zealand architecture" by employing a three-part critical spatial practice: ‘Cut-Copy-Paste’, ‘Collison’ and ‘Commentary’. “Cut, Copy, and Paste” explored artistic-driven responses to a literary framework through a series of collages, objects, and artefacts. Exploring the relevancy of authorship, distinctiveness, and originality, broadly through the digital phenomena of cutting, copying and pasting, the numerous creative experiments play with “New Zealand architecture” by borrowing or downright stealing, as if architecture is open-source precedent. As a sample, the Artificial Architect’s Artefacts respond to a fable-like exhibition titled The New Romantics. Sampling from exhibitors, Athfield, Walker, Megson, Scott and Beaven, these replicas embody their iconic projects but produce transformative copies, blurring their authorship and suggesting new possibilities. Athfield Mask or Athspirator explores a building-turned-headpiece as a branding exercise and as a mind-altering device. Though not worn during presentations of Architechur Bro, its presence signaled to the viewer that the author sometimes plays a persona whose role is to animate the work. Double Brown conjoins an internationalist pavilion with a regionalist shed, informed by the recent film, Brown vs. Brown — the first feature-length New Zealand architecture film. Here, their dichotomy was synthesised and simultaneously dismantled until only a skeletal byproduct remained. “Collision” and “Commentary” then acted as methods of architectural assemblage, combining the literary and tangible experiments — fabulation and fabrication.

Painstakingly plastered in photocopies of Paradise Lost and Found, the Collision Plinth deconstructs Wigley’s text. Substituted as the “ground” of the project, literature and words are inferred as the project’s “foundation”. Looming above, atop an open-bottom lightbox, a Collision illuminates and obscures the scaleless subversive work below. The site is reduced to a fictional horizontal plane, in which its ground is dissolved and made ethereal. Ignoring standard drawing conventions, the representation is collision-like. Composite drawings overlay plan, section, elevation and axonometric as a single drawing type, “grounded” by a single line, arranged in a triptych, that forever unfolds upward, overturning perspective. The culmination of work presents an architecture on wobbly or wiggly (Mark Wigley) foundations. The Garden is a woven tapestry of bush, pasture and beach. The Elongated Shed indigenizes Shed 10, and cultural anxieties are dealt to with artistic license, hybridizing and hijacking artist Peter Robinson and Colin McCahon’s works, to read: "Boy Am I Scared of Cultural Appropriation Eh!”. Walker Way, a housing scheme, portioned Parekōwhai’s Lighthouse in two. Misty ‘n' Foggy flipped the Cloud on its head; inverting it to shade on a crane-like structure, and ‘jacking it up’ on wheels to actually perform like a cloud. Lastly, a library was tensioned to the wharf. Athenaeum, a translucent ivory tower, hangs off the edge, haunting it like a ghost. Literary-based research is materialized through intertextual storytelling and rigorous sincerity.

You might not expect it from the title but Karl Poland’s thesis, Architechur Bro, adopts the position of the architect as “public intellectual”.  The Collins Dictionary definition of the role refers to “an intellectual, often a noted specialist in a particular field, who has become well-known to the general public for a willingness to comment on current affairs.”  In other words, an expert who participates in the public affairs discourse of society. In such a view the role of the architect is something more than just designing buildings. 

As OASE put it when it examined the idea in 2023, architecture and space are always related to social issues and challenges. “This means that architects may be well placed to contribute to the public debate on challenges related to climate change, mobility issues, the housing crisis, healthcare and migration.”[1] While sociologists, journalists and planners often make the link between the built environment and social issues, designers are rarely heard.  “This may be because both the profession and the public debate reduce architecture to aesthetics and architects to designers.” 

Architectur Bro aims to remedy this situation through its rigorous, often satirical, examination of New Zealand architecture and some of its recognisable, mostly modernist, forms. It’s a relentless interrogation of a rich range of texts, art and buildings represented with an extraordinary array of drawing, collage, models and storytelling. The resulting design project gleans and gathers from this research with a methodology of “Cut, Copy, Paste” and then “Collision”, to create a wonderful reimagining and social commentary of Auckland’s Queen’s Wharf.  The Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects jury citation for the project, a finalist in its Student Design Awards, reads:  “This fabulous work of critique is rich in architecture references, while also being accessible to anyone unfamiliar with the built landscape and people behind it. There is talent for using humour and satire as an entry point for making architecture accessible to a wider audience.”[2]  

– Chris Barton, supervisor