Lets block off and entire road opposite Parliament - next to the Court of Appeal, National Library and Ministry of Defence. Then we’ll go to the local rubbish dump fill up a few truck loads of trash and dump it in the middle of the street. Perhaps we can rearrange this trash into a platform to tell a story?

Ok.

What would this say?



Look again was a temporary installation located opposite the New Zealand Parliament buildings and celebrated some of the many untold stories than make this area special. An explicit subtext of this work was a critique of the poor condition of public space in this area and the lack of recognition of Wellington as a Capital City in the areas buildings, streets and public spaces.

This project did not call for Brasilia or Washington style capital making, but rather asked how can we do it our way where Parliament sits comfortably opposite a Fish & Chip shop, Pub, Boutique Apartments Day-Care centre’s and a hardware store. Where the function of the capital is explored and its mandate exposed by building on Wellington’s real point of difference – a Capital that is so integrated with the rest of the city that it occasionally slips in to the background.



How to play with this contradiction of wanting recognition yet appreciating the benefits of a subdued capital function so spatially integrated with the fabric of the city? (What other Capital in the world can you sit on the front lawn of Parliament as MP’s even the Prime Minister walks by?) If you drew a line from Parliament buildings through the city to the Governor Generals residence you would pass within300m of almost every significant Government building in the city, all the major courts, most of the Ministries, National Library, Te Papa, National Archives, National War Memorial (and the proposed Memorial Park). Not to mention the countless headquarters of the various NGO’s institutes etc that all have an interest in Government.

If this is the status quo on which one wants to build, where do you go? There have been many schemes proposed over the lat 100 years to build a Government Centre around Parliament with all the major buildings and capital functions, yet none have come to fruition. Indeed we have often been left with half finished parts to these schemes -Parliament buildings, The Beehive, National Library and National Archives were all parts of a much larger plans.

That New Zealand’s Capital functions have been built and expanded in a piecemeal fashion is obvious, whether as a direct result of a failure of these larger schemes and all the usual cultural reasons employed involving New Zealanders reluctance to make a spectacle or really celebrate achievement, it is the base from which we build.



Project Team; Simon Bush-king, Peter Kundycki, Gerald Blunt, Grant Stevenson, Carole Von Grondelle, Margy Davenport

Image Creditis: Neil Price, Simon Bush-King