Building a New Zealand Surf Life Saving Club Vernacular

<p>New Zealand’s coastal landscape is a desirable position that holds great significance to our country’s culture. Surf Life Saving Clubs are prominent architectural entities that sit proudly upon New Zealand beaches. Surf Life Saving Clubs have a rich history and are representative of the Kiwi lifestyle. Yet, Surf Life Saving Club buildings, as architecture, have received little serious attention. This thesis investigates characteristic features of Surf Life Saving Clubs in their coastal setting and shows how those qualities can be recognised in future club development. A review of existing research indicates a gap in scholarship around the understand of Surf Life Saving Club buildings as a facet of coastal development. In this research an extensive range of Surf Life Saving Clubs are surveyed in order to gain a greater understanding of the building type; siting, form, and orientation. This is then followed by detailed case studies of active Surf Life Saving Clubs. The research deduces patterns in site, placement, orientation, form, function layout, structure and materiality that influence the buildings’ character. Design Guidelines are formulated whilst utilising Critical Regionalism as a lens to reconcile the opposing imperatives that are inherent in creating a building that is both of the vernacular and architecture. Finally, a Design Case Study allows the Design Guidelines to be developed and tested. Based on these investigations a Design Case Study is produced that models the application of a contemporary Surf Life Saving Club vernacular to a considered work of architecture.</p>

Building a New Zealand Surf Life Saving Club Vernacular

<p>New Zealand’s coastal landscape is a desirable position that holds great significance to our country’s culture. Surf Life Saving Clubs are prominent architectural entities that sit proudly upon New Zealand beaches. Surf Life Saving Clubs have a rich history and are representative of the Kiwi lifestyle. Yet, Surf Life Saving Club buildings, as architecture, have received little serious attention. This thesis investigates characteristic features of Surf Life Saving Clubs in their coastal setting and shows how those qualities can be recognised in future club development. A review of existing research indicates a gap in scholarship around the understand of Surf Life Saving Club buildings as a facet of coastal development. In this research an extensive range of Surf Life Saving Clubs are surveyed in order to gain a greater understanding of the building type; siting, form, and orientation. This is then followed by detailed case studies of active Surf Life Saving Clubs. The research deduces patterns in site, placement, orientation, form, function layout, structure and materiality that influence the buildings’ character. Design Guidelines are formulated whilst utilising Critical Regionalism as a lens to reconcile the opposing imperatives that are inherent in creating a building that is both of the vernacular and architecture. Finally, a Design Case Study allows the Design Guidelines to be developed and tested. Based on these investigations a Design Case Study is produced that models the application of a contemporary Surf Life Saving Club vernacular to a considered work of architecture.</p>

The Global Archive and the Future of Poetics

In defining “the global archive,” this essay refers, first of all, to the historical development of exhibitions in Germany that address a global horizon, a distinct cultural project since at least the Enlightenment. After 1945, modern art, which had been removed from public view by the Nazi state, was reintroduced as a project of reeducation as much as aesthetics. Documenta, beginning in 1955, exhibited modern and later artists in the destroyed buildings of the city of Kassel, and expanded its formal and cultural address to a global scale over its fifty-year history. Documenta itself became a kind of continuous archive of its own exhibition history, a mode of formal presentation that increasingly relied on the works it presented. Here I read in detail the archival strategies and form of dOCUMENTA 13, arguably a highpoint of this effort to archive globality as it emerges. Theorists from Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, and Arjun Appadurai to the “critical regionalism” of Cheryl Herr and the “negative globality” of Alberto Moreiras assist in the project of comprehending the “archive as form,” seen in a series of artists working on a global scale.

Fragments: A Poetic Approach To Place-Making

The notion of regional particularity and sensitivity to place remains in constant struggle with the persistent autonomous approach evident in most contemporary architecture, which under the pressures of globalization has paved the path toward commodification and the creation of universal non-places. Meanwhile the decline of craftsmanship within architecture and the perpetual emphasis on visual images and iconic forms continues to undermine human connection to the built environment. The use of Fragments in architectural design involves a distinct understanding of perception of space that takes its theoretical basis in the communicative and situational character of Synthetic Cubism and Picturesque Landscape theory. Brought into an architectural context, these theories work in contrast to the rational approach based on proportion and perspectival imagery, bringing focus towards the experience of the body moving through space with emphasis on the poetics of construction, materiality, corporeal experience, and details that express craftsmanship, meaning, and emotion. Guided by Kenneth Frampton’s theory of Critical Regionalism with the aim of resisting placelessness, the nature of such tectonic articulation is informed by the context and specificity of a site.

Fragments: A Poetic Approach To Place-Making

The notion of regional particularity and sensitivity to place remains in constant struggle with the persistent autonomous approach evident in most contemporary architecture, which under the pressures of globalization has paved the path toward commodification and the creation of universal non-places. Meanwhile the decline of craftsmanship within architecture and the perpetual emphasis on visual images and iconic forms continues to undermine human connection to the built environment. The use of Fragments in architectural design involves a distinct understanding of perception of space that takes its theoretical basis in the communicative and situational character of Synthetic Cubism and Picturesque Landscape theory. Brought into an architectural context, these theories work in contrast to the rational approach based on proportion and perspectival imagery, bringing focus towards the experience of the body moving through space with emphasis on the poetics of construction, materiality, corporeal experience, and details that express craftsmanship, meaning, and emotion. Guided by Kenneth Frampton’s theory of Critical Regionalism with the aim of resisting placelessness, the nature of such tectonic articulation is informed by the context and specificity of a site.