Roger That: Looking to Roger Walker, Pedestrian Experience & the Future of the City

Abstract

In the centre of Wellington lies The Oaks. This early 1980’s shopping mall has suffered from incremental alterations affecting the use, function and connectedness of the site as a pedestrian space. Located at the junction of the ‘Golden Mile’ and Cuba Mall, The Oaks fails to capitalise on the pedestrian activity at this pivotal point in the city. The building is dead, architecturally, and yet programmes that contribute to the life of the city continue to survive within. In a commercial sense, these ‘anchors’ foster the cultural image of this precinct as a point on which pedestrians converge. This project is to re-design The Oaks, concentrating on the architecture of pedestrian experience through the re-evaluation of Arcade typology and the work of Wellington architect Roger Walker.

Designed by Warren & Mahoney in 1980, The Oaks arrived at the end of Roger Walker’s sustained period of architectural confrontation beginning in 1968. The ‘Roger Walker Phenomenon’ (as termed by Alexander Best) is perhaps the most appropriate way to describe the reverence for this architect during the 1970’s. Four decades on, the attitude to Walker’s work is somewhat dismissive of its contribution to New Zealand architecture. As early as 1985, the city witnessed the demolition of the Wellington Club, by which time the club buildings designed by Roger Walker had stood for only thirteen years. The architects of their replacement were none other than Warren & Mahoney. While the commercial centre remains hindered by The Oaks - a late hangover from the architect’s brief period of post-modernism - the streetscape of The Terrace still suffers the loss of an earlier and superior example from the hand of its own local architect. For the short time that it held its place on The Terrace, the Walker club buildings demonstrated a positive direction for commercial architecture at a human scale.

Centred on the lessons of the Wellington Club, Walker’s early work is treated as a sourcebook for new design activity. Through typological analysis, the various modes of Walker’s kit-of-parts are unpacked and reassembled in order to utilise the formal and spatial components of this architecture. Emphasis is placed on the exploration of ideas through rigorous physical testing. The re-design of The Oaks returns to the Arcade - a pedestrian architecture - as a model for the re-organisation of public space. From the arcades of the 19th century, Walter Benjamin’s flâneur infiltrates the representation and imagining of architectural encounters that lead the dispersal of pedestrians in the city.

Working in a local idiom offers an approach that draws together regional and imported ideas through a process of recovery and transformation. The outcome responds to local needs, establishing a pedestrian infrastructure on the site of The Oaks, yet has wider significance for the importance of regionalism, fostering a connection to place in architecture of human scale.