Simon Jo.
Tutors: Robbie Anderson.
Located within a speculative plot of the Felton Mathew plan of Auckland (1841), Te Nohoanga O Te Atua: God’s Abode, explores postcolonial architectural ideas through means of mitigating one of the long-lasting impacts of colonisation: hijacking of vision.
Circus plan, a common European urban design scheme, converges the vision to the central civic monument which makes a grand statement about the human capacity to conquer. Instead, Māori design scheme: Pa, diverges the vision outwards to the natural realm, treating it as something that should be eternally feared, revered, and borrowed.
Over the course of colonisation in Aotearoa, however; the vision that connected the people of this land has been severed by the taller buildings that flood our cities.
The tower not only exist as a singular monument, but also as the nexus for the inhabitants of the circus and Tamaki Makaurau’s nature, framing the unchanged vistas of the Waitemata Harbour: the realm of voyage.
The design borrows Māori’s deification of the natural phenomenon. It begins from the dark, enclosed tunnel space, (Papatuanuku = Earth Mother) symbolising her womb, ascending all the way through to sky. (Ranginui = Sky Father) Along the journey, a series of openings controlling the vision gradually open up, removing the notion of ‘suggested space’, and viewers are met with the panoramic embrace of moana at the top, as if breaking out of an egg which is the colonial world.
External perspective render
Section
Looking up from the ground
Looking across the slit at mid-level
Looking down from mid-level opening
Looking out at the exterior viewing deck
Panoramic view of moana at the top
