The Excavated Interior: Vestige of the Lost Canal

Abstract

The site for this project is Wellington's Cambridge/Kent Terrace. The proposal is to transform what is merely a traffic strip at present into a large scale events centre incorporating separate outdoor venues for Theatre, Dance, Music, Fashion (Wearable Arts) and Film – five 'arts' for which Wellington is renowned. The ultimate goal of this investigation is to challenge our understanding of what interior architecture is or could be through a design approach that dissolves and broadens the boundaries of the discipline. In this investigation, interior intervention does not inhabit an obvious architectural structure or form. Instead there are five existing 'traffic islands' that provide little more than footprints along the Cambridge / Kent Terrace site. The challenge of this investigation is to respond to the absence of an obvious architectural structure and yet enable an explicitly interior architectural notion to evolve. The conceptual starting point was the 1855 earthquake that uplifted the Cambridge / Kent Terrace site. This natural disaster transformed the inner city lake into a swamp and destroyed plays to create a canal linking ships from the harbour. The investigation draws on the notion of excavation and ruin establishing 'vessels' as if the canal in a hypothetical way had been given the chance to exist and be put to use, vessels that due to the shifts in land were stranded, fragmented and strewn across an unearthed landscape. Some are embedded and submerged in the earth while others are at the surface or appear to rise up from an initial submersion. Essentially these are artificial ruins and it is as if they have been discovered, unearthed and reclaimed for their spatial and monumental qualities and given new program and purpose. It is the intimate relationship and proximity to the earth and landscape that defines the new architectural interventions as being explicitly of an interior architectural quality. That these forms are an interior architecture of the earth, whether they are embedded and anchored in it or are found at the surface or even 'floating' above, the notion of being taken by an earthquake yet given up through an excavation is inherent of a valid interiority; these spaces are enclosed by both the hypothetical and conceptual architecture of the 'lost canal' as well as the real and physical nature of the earth within which they are embedded. In terms of the 'vestige' or trace, an interior intervention leaves its 'host' architecture and is placed outside of its original context. It appears incomplete and foreign; where there may have been an existing wall, floor or ceiling provided by the inhabited architecture, the former resident interior architecture will appear in moments fractured, fragmented and bare.