STATION TO STATION
The City Rail Link (CRL) — New Zealand’s largest infrastructure project — is an essential investment in Auckland’s urban future: a long-overdue intervention that gives us a shot at having a public transport system that is at least passable by international standards. It’s like a quadruple bypass — a way to clear the daily snarl-ups on our archaic, clogged urban arteries, and get the city’s lifeblood moving.
For the past several years, CRL has also been the launch pad for some of the most ambitious design thinking in Auckland’s recent history. The four stations we will access the CRL through — an upgraded Britomart (likely to be renamed Waitematā), a much-expanded Mount Eden (Maungawhau), and the new stations, Aotea (in the CBD) and Karanga-ā-Hape (on Mercury Lane) — represent transformations not only in our transport infrastructure but in how we think about public architecture, its storytelling and place-making functions, and its potential to embody a set of bicultural values that, so far, have eluded the designers of many of our most significant building projects.
The station plans have brought together some of Auckland design’s most serious players: architects at Jasmax (working alongside the international firm Grimshaw, as an embedded team at CRL’s offices); one of our most important Māori architects and design thinkers, Rau Hoskins, of designTRIBE; and a team from Alt Group led by Dean Poole, who were instrumental in developing the concepts, material languages and unique identities for each of the stations. But the essential piece of the jigsaw was the involvement, from the very start, of eight mana whenua groups from across Tāmaki Makaurau.
“The structural relationship that was established at the outset between mana whenua and CRL was critical,” says Hoskins. “You can’t have a good process unless that first principle, that mana principle has been well handled. Mana whenua have got lots of demands on their time, and they quickly work out which groups are really genuine and valuing their inputs, and others who are perhaps a little more superficial with their commitment to their involvement.”
Matthew Glubb, a principal at Jasmax, agrees: “For us, it’s one of the few projects where we’ve seen the engagement with mana whenua happen right at the start of the project,” he says, “which has allowed us to build in the concepts, the values, the beliefs into the architecture from Day One.”
The quality and consequences of that dialogue has recently been recognised internationally: the CRL project won
