Unbound

Through careful exploration of architectural techniques employed throughout subject homes, this thesis seeks to understand why the population so reveres this kind of architecture. Informed by this research, this thesis realises a gateway park on Picton’s foreshore. The design sees the existing park, filled with an abundance of kitschiness in the form of existing site features, become a curated experience of Aotearoa’s leisure identity through architectural intervention. These currently understated features are enhanced and linked together through architectural input, with new moments created as a direct result of anticipated public interaction.

Picton was selected as the subject site given its nature as the gateway for travel into the South Island, and as a regional town that has been somewhat neglected in recent years. Like many regional locations in New Zealand, Picton has become home to ‘the bach’ – the building typology in question - while also housing populations that are less likely to experience it. Picton represents the disparities present in the architecture of New Zealand, which negatively affects the general population’s perceptions of the architectural profession.

 

Altering the lens through which the architecture is viewed forces the aesthetic condition, with its limited variables, to be reworked in relation to the new context. The project takes all that it means to us and offers an answer as to what else it could be. The challenge is to produce an outcome that still has a feeling of familiarity and can be understood, yet is an entirely new design that changes how this familiar architectural condition is perceived and experienced.