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diminishment is the norm.
If you’ve recently visited Quay
Street, the area between Queens
and Princes Wharfs in downtown
Auckland, you’ll have seen preparatory
works underway for a city changing
civic project. Mature pohutukawa are
being carefully unearthed, their roots
wrapped in hessian. Pipes and services
are being carefully consolidated into
new trenches.
This is just the start. Here,
where the Waitemata is held back
by an old sea wall, where the most
people walk and work and where
tourists throng, Ki uta, Ki tai, a vision
developed with mana whenua is
providing the framework for a new,
co-designed public space as part of
the wider Downtown Infrastructure
Development Programme. It refers
to a holistic Maori worldview about
the movement of water through the
landscape, from mountain to sea,
and all the intricacies of ecology and
biology in between. It’s especially
important at the coast, and especially
important to Tamaki Makaurau,
where we cherish the coast as a place
of arrival and departure, of industry
and recreation.
While our coasts are rich with
life, our urban coasts could be much
richer. Equally, our coasts are rich with
stories from the past that can inform
and differentiate new approaches
to making space. Such narratives sit
behind the concept of the tidal shelf
that will soon extend out from the
shoreline between the Ferry Building
and Princes Wharf. It’s a piece of public
architecture that is the result of a shift
in thinking – can Auckland become
Tamaki? A place with its own identity
rather than one conferred? And,
believing that to be possible, where do
we find inspiration? What aspirations
do we have? What does it mean to be
‘here’ now and into the future?
The process of co-design- collaboration and inquisition
alongside knowledge-holders from
mana whenua, manaakitanga and
miharo, an ambition for extraordinary
process – can shape our responses
to these questions. The design
approach for the tidal shelf recognises
the evolving nature of the working
waterfront environment and its
former coastline (the result of 150-
plus years of sequential reclamation)
and acknowledges the past though
the integration of important and
appropriate heritage elements. It looks
to the future by drawing people in to
Auckland’s front door and making
spaces for wananga, gatherings of
people large and small, and coastal
flora and fauna.
This tidal shelf has an ‘eroded’
edge. It’s an abstraction of the organic
edges of the Waitemata’s sandstone
geology, the layered, pocked and
pitted tidal shelves found between
headlands, extending out to the deeper
harbour. It is a conscious move away
from the ever-extending orthogonal
city grid and responds to a question
about how we form cities today that
reference where we are in the world.
In built form, the shelf will have a
layered concrete surface, rich in shells
and local aggregates, supported on
piles that span the quay diagonally to
Queens Wharf. It is spatially generous,
an accommodating place for people
to move through or linger in, or to
walk out to an outer edge that nips
and tucks in and out beside a timber
leaner rail inlaid with references to
maramataka, the Maori lunar calendar
and the tides. This kupu, gifted by
artist Rereata Makiha, shows culture
and language coming to life.
The shelf really is all about tides.
It sits over water and through a series
of apertures like tidal pools allows
people to safely connect with ebb and
flow of the sea. The tidal pools are not
uniform; some have balustrades that
extend down to the water, a surface
for waves to interact with. Others are
covered with a woven kupenga – a net
or fishing net – designed with artist
Tessa Harris (Ngapuhi/Ngai Tai) for
people to sit or lie on, to feel the cool
of the water on a hot day, or a splash of
spray at high tide when ferries stir the
water. Others still are edged with
seating and filled with native
planting, re-establishing
a terrestrial ecology at
the water’s edge – a
coastal grove of
pohutukawa, the
iron-heart myrtle,
able to bind
land and sea,around piles to re-establish
native ecologies.
This highly visible site can draw
attention to Auckland’s seawater
quality issues and asks the question
around advocacy. One project won’t
fix the problem, but it can highlight it
and show solutions. Suspended marine
ecology lines, technology borrowed
from the mussel farming industry
will illustrate the role mussels play
in water filtration (a single mussel
filters 380 litres of water a day, and
mussel reefs once covered much of the
Hauraki Gulf, but the natural filter for
storm water runoff had collapsed from
dredging by the mid-1900s, finished
off by contaminated storm water,
sediment and maritime industry side
effects soon after).
Concrete pontoons can be
coastal research stations, grafted
with kelp they continue the language
of the tidal shelf into the ferry basin,
and contain baskets for shellfish and
kelp propagation.
Will the tidal shelf be
transformative? We think so – it’s
unlike anything else, a special co-
designed project for Tamaki that's
woven through with matauranga
Maori. It’s an invitation to the water’s
edge, a place of respite and refuge for
people and for coastal life, a place to
learn relax, walk, a knowledge basket
for all who visit, and a breathing point
for everyone and everything who filtersthrough this busy part of the city. (^) ■
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Isthmus team: David Irwin, Sarah
Bishop, Nada Stanish, Travis Wooller,
Alex Foxon, Sophie Fisher.
sheltering people and other species
within and beneath their branches.
Design of the tidal shelf began
with observations of the personality
and peculiarities of the coast and
with shells gathered from a nearby
beach. The design is inspired by Te
Tangaroa, the breath between low
and high tides, tai pari and tai timu,
while the shells represent a ‘nested
ecology’ that hosts life, just as this
project makes space for sea snails,
seaweeds, sponges, crabs, bivalves,
barnacles and sea squirts. New and
existing piles can simulate a ‘hard
shore’ environment – an intertidal
and sub-tidal habitat with perches
for seabirds, textured surfaces and
crevices for barnacles, periwinkles
and seaweeds. An evolution of
existing work at Okahu Bay by
Ngati Whatua and Richelle Kahui-
McConnell (Ngati Maniapoto), will
feature taura (rope), woven from flax
and filled with mussel spat, wrapped
idealog/ISTHMUS