Telling Many People's Stories
This thesis found its position through my perspectives on questioning the multicultural representations through architecture of my country, Malaysia and Aotearoa/New Zealand.
When I began my thesis year, two questions nagged at me: firstly, how do individual immigrants arriving here with different cultural baggage find a place for their culture to help them feel at home, and secondly, how can building designers respond to the challenge of cultural representation and relevancy for an increasingly multicultural population?
As our communities become increasingly diverse, cultural buildings raise complex questions of representation and definition. In this thesis, I shall investigate how the social and cultural representation of museum architecture depicts the narrative of a culturally diverse city. I shall apply my findings to a design for a multicultural building: a museum in Manukau City’s Hayman Park.