1. What is the architect's role as suburbia changes to post-suburbia in Tāmaki Makaurau?
2. How can Post-(Sub). Urban shared community spaces facilitate suburban design (and architectural) conversations with everyday New Zealanders?
This thesis project investigates the changing character and role of suburbia in our current social and built context. There are fast-paced changes to the established urban patterns of Aotearoa, New Zealand, which were formed between the two world wars. This study has aimed to find out what may be worth saving from our ‘suburban dream’ now that we are almost 100 years from those foundations.
This investigation has focused on two strategies / architectural interventions to frame this conversation for the locals of the established suburb of Green Bay (West Auckland).
Both interventions interact with the existing context of the Green Bay Shops.
— An everyday locus of suburban life.
The Conversation Room sits between the two strategies.
1. A New Landscape located at the main social hub of the suburb (strip of shops).
2. The preservation and raising of an iconic suburban home (one of the Neil House brochure houses) into an inhabitable ‘artwork’.
—The creation of a monument from domesticity).
In between these two architectural approaches is the important arena space for conversation.
The design outcome is a response to the need to pause and instigate conversation – and how architecture can support communities to engage in their own surrounding changing suburban patterns.
