Housing and hope
TALOFA LAVA, READER. I LEFT the column last time with a call for the profession to conceptualise itself as a group of potent co-designers imagining a future that is different from the past. I speculated that heritage concepts in architecture may be expanded beyond the ‘who’ (the architects, most commonly men) and the ‘what’ (the buildings, traditionally civically big, monumental or expensive, and quite often all three) when we remember architectural history. I introduced the suggestion that such notions of heritage may be balanced against other factors, such as relationships to labour and communities and their histories: social and political. And, in the context of housing, to think harder about what we are passing on against what has been inherited.
If the country’s built realm has inherited infrastructure constructed largely by a, I pencilled some of the swirling tides of Pacific movement to Aotearoa New Zealand, and the ways in which we might consider some of those movements as tangled up with a housing narrative.
