Te Aro School

Te Aro Primary came up as a possible site for our design build studio. At the moment part of the school (the area I’ve labeled “site”) has been borrowed by the team constructing the new artificial playing field in front of Te Puni. Once the new field has been completed the site will be flattened and turned into a (irregularly shaped) soccer field while the school decides on its future.

As I work part time at the school I’ve managed to have a few chats with the principal, Bryce, and gage his interest in the kind of project we would be doing if the studio were to go ahead. He described the site as a ‘blank canvas’, and seemed fairly excited about the possibility of us being able to provide a genuinely useful service to the school through some sort of intervention. He said probably the most useful thing we could provide would be seating or shelters – however as no real plans for the site have been made, he suggested we come up with a proposal for the site and have the school consider it.

One of the most interesting things Bryce said was that for most school playground upgrades he tries to let the kids have what they want. At some stage he’ll go through a process of collecting student ideas for the site, and then will do the best he can to implement them. As a fun experiment at work the other day I got a few of the young kids (5-6year olds) to draw a play area they’d like to have at the school. There were some pretty rad proposals…the highlights being a drawing clearly influenced by Lebbeus Woods and some sort of animal health care centre/ sci-fi zoo. If this studio went ahead it would be awesome for us to incorporate the students in some way…. not just as one of the ways to fulfill the ‘research’ components to the paper, but to ultimately create a more successful project.

I recommend anyone who’s interested to come and check out the site, it’s really quite cool. The walkway next to it is a node of foot traffic where two or three pathways converge into one, and now that the site is being flattened (it was once elevated) it will make it the same elevation as both the walkway and the new artificial field. This makes the site quite a public area, at least, more publicly visible than any other area of the school. The only thing separating the kids from the uni students / adults walking past is flimsy waist high wire mesh fence. I’m not saying I think that’s a bad thing, it just creates an interesting atmosphere. It’s a boundary that could be addressed by any intervention we made.

Small primary schools, such as Te Aro, generally suffer from a lack of funding. They don’t have a lot of money to spend on maintenance, let alone construction projects and especially designers. Te Aro is distinct from other school’s I’ve been involved with in that the range of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds the kids come from is SO diverse. It’s a community in itself, and it embodies a lot of the ‘struggling minority’ aspects that have been addressed by Rural Studio type projects. In that sense I can’t think of a more perfect candidate for a design-build studio.

Next steps anyone?
I reckon a site visit on a sunny day needs to happen,
and probably another meeting / chat with whoever to make this actually happen.

Possible project.

At the meeting on thursday we discussed the idea of a design - build type studio at Vic. We threw round some ideas about what and where, as well who would be involved to make it a possibility (lecturers, Diane Brand etc).

I think some of the key themes were -
1. Agenda - humanitarian? - funding for a small, local community project could be obtained relatively easily / we will get mad warm fuzzy vibes if we actually do something meaningful whilst at school.
2. Scale - if we build under 10ms^2 we can negate the resource consent process...do I have that right? this could be shelters, seating etc.
3. Integration with VUW - this could be achieved relatively easily under the guise of a lecturer supervised research paper, however this would also make the paper an elective and it could be hard to put in as much of a sustained effort as we would like.
Another option would be to integrate the project with a construction paper (the project would potentially have design + professional practice integration possibilities too). Judging by the feedback from my 3rd yr construction paper which has been integrated with the solar decathlon house (as much as I love the solar decathlon project), I think this latter option runs the risk of us removing ourselves from the 'discourse'. VUW is an acedemic body and as a university differs from a polytech type course. This is particularly relevant now that in fourth + fifth year we will be doing a research based masters degree. It's ultimately the lecturers who know about and decide on such things though.

I missed the first meeting but apparently Guy Marriage has been very supportive about this idea - awesome - great lecturer to have on board.

4. Where -some options: A school, Karori Sanctuary / Wilton's bush, Homeless people in Mt Vic, Lower Hutt.
We decided that if we're pro-active and seek out opportunities it is far more likely that this kind of project will be endorsed by the school.
( I'll post some information and an update about a possible site, Te Aro primary school, soon)

5. If none this works out we'll collectively migrate to illegal treehouses in the greenspace in aro valley as part of a radical architectural protest /anarchistic social housing experiment.