Artificial Islands by Owen Hatherley

Author:Owen Hatherley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781914420870
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Vericality, organic and otherwise

The university gives a small picture of what planning might have looked like on the volcanic landscape, in the form of the original Grafton Campus, designed by Stephenson and Turner in 1967. Clearly modelled on the “New Universities” of 1960s Britain, and built only a couple of years after these, it consists of a megastructural complex of square or angular blocks of precast concrete panels, linked by walkways and pedestrianised squares; the service towers of these blocks provide a spiky roofline. It is a brave attempt, especially for the way it actually animates the complex fall of the land, with exciting journeys up, down and across; but oddly what is less enjoyable about it is how relentlessly urban the space is, with what were surely great possibilities for an integration of the green gullies into an architectural design lost in concrete and asphalt. But unlike the university’s dull and similarly UK-style business park buildings of recent years, at least it notices where it is. So too does by far the most interesting of the university’s recent buildings, the assembly hall of Fale Pasifika, a grand wooden structure built using traditional Pacific Island technologies by a team of artists and designers under the Samoan-raised architect Albert Refiti. Now, this you would not find at the University of East Anglia. The enormous dome is held up with complicated wooden trusses, carved by artists in the traditional local styles — rather than being twee, however, it gives a real sense of communal space, something which is all too rare here.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.