IN EARLY 2022, THE WELLINGTON SCHOOL of Architecture began two studio projects in collaboration with Te Awa Kairangi Hutt City Council that brought specialist professionals and council officers with expertise in urban design, sea-level rise, housing and mobility together with students to expose academic studio design inquiry to the live technical complexities of city-making. The collaboration grew from a shared ambition to generate diverse, design-led thinking, re-imagining possible future living and built environments. We were motivated to align situated university studio projects with council imperatives and activate community discussion on potential built environment legislative changes and significant climate impacts faced by the city.
Hutt City Urban Design Team Lead Isaac Velasco said the opportunity allowed new dialogue about re-imagining the city with a new generation of citizens: “those citizens that, in the future, will take important decisions, with more human-centred, indigenous and environmental design approaches”.
The Wellington School’s architectural and landscape architecture design studios at master’s level pursue areas of disciplinary specialisation, stretching students’ strategic, conceptual, spatial and technical competencies in complex contexts. Imagination and visioning form an integral part of this skill set, where students’ abilities to project futures through the agency of disciplinary knowledge and change correlates with their skills in navigating the complexity of the present. Converging with these pedagogic demands, the studios embodied the emerging opportunities for urban change in Te Awa Kairangi ki Tai.
The Re-imagining Mass Housing architecture studio responded to Isthmus’ RiverLink Urban and Landscape Design Framework, “a transformative project for Lower Hutt City, envisaged as a catalyst for the revitalisation of river and city, people and
