A Boutique Pātaka: Revealing Curiosities of Character with an Architecture of Expression in Ngawi

Abstract

Ngawi is a fishing village populated as generously by tractors as it is by people. Clinging to the southernmost tip of New Zealand’s North Island it is riddled with a nautical and whimsical flavour. This small coastal community is one of many isolated villages that the nation identifies as being precious… it is peculiarly different. It is odd. This eccentricity arises from inherent ‘architectures’ of Ngawi, both artefacts and intangible values, often not appreciated as possessing architectural integrity. Unfortunately, Ngawi’s idiosyncratic character is threatened by an imposing invasion of ubiquitous holiday homes disengaged with values of place. This thesis argues that unless Ngawi’s inherent oddities are revealed as architectures, they, along with its distinctive character, will be lost forever. In response to the threat of character colonisation, this thesis endeavours to reveal inherent ‘architectures’ of place with Ngawi as its place case study and compose an architecture of abstracted character values. Architecture acts as a character totem, affronting the incoming tide of holiday homes, ensuring its identity is carried boldly into the future. An unbiased, quirky and honest result is attained by pursuing an impartial experimental architectural approach. This ensures that Ngawi’s uncanny inventiveness is kept, and conventional assumptions of architecture are released. Drawing and modelling experiments conducted upon identity contributors, which are laden with architectural potential, offer place particular principles and design foci from which expressive architecture is manifest. Such an expressive architecture invites a programme also expressive of Ngawi, promoting a crayfish and kumara serving fish and chip shop + dwelling function. Thiis insertion of programme acts as a ‘conceit’ and commentates a sequence of spaces vertically displaced, offering a radical reappraisal of the New Zealand bach’s horizontal phenomenon and the architecturally undervalued fish and chip shop experience. Design imperatives are borrowed from French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, Russian artist and architect Alexander Brodsky and the New Zealand bach to influence meticulous attention to detail, rendering an intimate and active participation with a vertically orientated architecture. Architectural design methods and imperatives prescribed in this thesis are offered to New Zealand as progressive strategies for radically accentuating otherwise dwindling coastal communities. These methods propose an alternative future highly communicative of unrealised eccentricities. The predicted impact of an extension of similar novel structures throughout New Zealand suggests coastal spectrums of dynamic architectures applying themselves to multiple scales of identity. Individually they would articulate whimsical village oddities that subliminally make a place so different. As a collection they would contribute towards bold coastal identity and ultimately the collections would achieve a renewal of regionalisms, celebrating otherwise unnoticed architectural integrities that the nation considers so peculiarly precious.