Design Report

RECONSTRUCTING SUBURBIA

With land prices and population increasing, there is a need for a new ideal home and land. Central Ponsonby is quickly becoming a popular development due to its close proximity to the city, a growing ideal for many New Zealanders; yet still maintaining suburban qualities, an old yet strong ideal for the New Zealand home. 

This design deals with high-density living and the desire for visual privacy on a multi-family site. By designing 4 units with an internal focus, each family can maintain privacy, an ideal that has grown over the last 50 years. This is achieved through controlling window openings and the use of central light-wells that enable views across the house, giving the illusion of larger rooms by visually borrow the adjacent space. Each unit is self-contained with communal spaces explored in the entrance hallway, guest toilets, shared laundry and parking spaces. The hallway acts as a threshold between the street and the private units, a transitional space that encourages interaction within the multiple families helping to create a community within the site.

Outdoor living areas are an important part of the New Zealand home and have been specifically designed to give each of the four families a private outdoor space with consideration to each families current phase of life. The design blurs the threshold between inside and outside through the use of the central open-air light-wells and direct outdoor living spaces.

Emma Farmer: Final Exhibition, June 2013.

This idea of a blurred threshold is further explored through the group installation designed to represent an ideal for the group of 5 friends. The installation consists of three deconstructed doorframes placed in a triangular configuration to represent three families (2 couples and a single friend) living together. It uses one point perspective to show each doorframe as a whole with the central space depicting the communication between the three (also portrayed with the poems etched down the side of the frames). Inside and outside sounds are incorporated within the frames to further blur the threshold and cause you to question what is inside and what is outside. All three doorframes have the same central white framing to signify their unity, but are clad with three different mouldings to represent their independence. This idea of repeating something in a slightly different way is also demonstrated in the individual design through the continuous roof that connects the four family units as one house yet varies in height and pitch to give individuality to each home. The building uses familiar building materials, a weatherboard cladding and corrugated roof, to evoke a traditional feel to the site in conjunction with new building technologies and systems to create a uniquely new New Zealand home.