Deus Ex Machina: Intervention

Abstract

The New Zealand National Archives rests in the interstitial space between Mulgrave Street (West) and Thomdon Quay (East). Municipal archives represent a beautiful tradition of vestige and memory presenting many opportunities for designs that exude both nostalgic and empathetic experiences. Mulgrave Street sits on a gradual incline rising approximately twelve and a half metres higher than Thomdon Quay's listless topography. Among other phenomena, this unique geographical situation created many of the main parameters within which theoretical ideas, based upon transformation and interrelationships of both form and space could start to manifest. It is within this East/West conflict that a crucial theoretical dialect be established. Incubation (East) and Isolation (West) are two inherent thematic precedents that conflux throughout the space and create the key interrelations of formal and atmospheric dispositions of space. The original site possessed an archetypal four by nine grid structure of vertical columns and bilayer, circular foundations spanning throughout all six floors and through the archives' annex, situated on the Eastern facade of the main construct. One can be liberated somewhat by responding to this reasonably uniform structural system in a highly disorderly fashion. Creating an atonement of disorder through form and atmosphere is a theme that runs analogous to the Incubational and Isolative spaces amidst the construct. The interrelation and site-specificity of these themes, within an existing architectural context create the parameters within which one can start to explore and ultimately challenge ideas such as Form, Program and Atmospherics. The relationship to site and the conservation of existing architectural confines ultimately result in a stronger and more vitriolic intervention therefore taking a truly projective view on contemporary notions of interiority. It seems the more historicism and richness one can extrapolate from ones site and its convictions; the more one has to transform it...