A New Waiwera Topography

The purpose of this thesis is to suggest and clarify viable directions for the future of sustainable coastal landscape design and architecture. Thus, it ambitiously invokes both tradition and invention through methods such as adaptive reuse to bring forth a renewal of landscape and attitudes towards it. This objective contains an underlying belief that landscape has the capacity to engage society both physically and metaphysically as an active instrument in shaping modern New Zealand coastal culture. Insight of the topic and design is made through the investigations of the selected East Coast township of Waiwera with its long history in water recreation, particularly its abandoned thermal resort.

This thesis also aims to investigate the potential of New Zealand Coastal environments as a therapeutic landscape in a contemporary context and propose design strategies that reflect these findings. Therapeutic landscapes have been described as places that have achieved lasting reputations for providing physical, mental and spiritual healing. Landscape, in this case, becomes considered as an explicit thematic genre, as it is when set in the foreground in cultural imagery, art and literature.

Theories of Phenomenology and Atmospheres are utilised in a transformative sense to form a subtle unimposing architecture that deeply connects with the user and environment. To complement this, the desired architecture uses landscape as more than just decoration under the base of buildings, but assumes a deeper role of contextualisation, heightening experiences and embedding time and nature in the built world.