Documenting Time

Abstract

Artist, urban planner, inventor; the architect has been known to adopt many roles. With the modern world in a constant state of flux, the architect must be above all an observer, if he is to fulfil this moral responsibility to document his own time. The long established and on-going enquiry into autonomy vs. instrumentality as modes of architectural approach will be utilized to explore this question of responsibility further and to establish a personal position on this theoretical debate. The vehicle for this design research enquiry is the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes building situated at 1 Kent Terrace, Wellington, host to BATS Theatre Inc. As a historic theatre, this program is fundamentally cultural and establishes the original building as an architectural instrument of culture. This building will be used to explore how key points in architectural theory might be employed to 'document our own times'. The sentiment of New Zealand cultural product is difficult to define, though distinctively individual. Certainly moody, dark, and even slightly macabre across the disciplines, it is the, most personal of motivations for this design undergraduate to ensure the design holds a place on the platform of this New Zealand aesthetic. Regardless of the buildings potential future in performance space, the intervention invites architecture into this cultural collection representing New Zealand's sensory identity. Making use of culture in order to approach the project, clearly offered opportunities to allow the designer to comment socially, and in turn grow closer to the project as a documentation of present time. Michael Hays describes instrumentality within architecture as an explicit correspondence between culture and form, and in this way BATS behaves culturally instrumental both with program - as it houses experimental theatre - and with redesigned intervention, which seeks to glorify the most ordinary of cultural tasks. However, Hays goes on to discuss the distinctly retrospective nature of this 'temporal convention of interpretation', commenting that 'architecture is seen as already completed [...and that] meaning must be recovered by a disciplined reconstruction of the cultural situation in which the object originated'. The redesign of BATS denies this retrospective approach, looking instead toward new thoughts on theatrics and a novel elevation of the ordinary spaces which currently do not take priority, while still maintaining the historical programmatic requirements.