Awaroa Lighthouse

Located within New Zealand’s Abel Tasman National Park, this work situates architecture in the mid-point between the otherworldly beauty of the New Zealand landscape, and an anxiety of destroying it latent within its national psyche. Recording material seismic data from a local network of telemetric rods at its base, this work questions the extremity of human influence for the sake of preservation. Historical citation for the project belongs to the lighthouse, which is addressed as both an architectural typology for inquiry, and for its imagistic quality. Historically pictured amidst precipitous coastline and shrouded by violent waters, its solidity, stability and reassuredness within its siting becomes the idyllic reference point for the vertical structure romanticised on shaky ground. Functionally, the historical processes of the lighthouse as a navigational, directive, and organisational structure are re-imagined here as a symbol of foresight in the event of an earthquake or related natural disaster. Formally, the geometric composition of the tower enfolds its functional concepts in exposing a play of opposites. It is at once austere, and monolithic, when confronted in one elevation, however a shift in viewline reveals the mass as potentially fragile, susceptible to decay and weather. Awaroa Lighthouse is a project interested in collective memory and prevailing emotional undercurrents; in parallel narratives, over time, space and scale, teetering between the softness of a gesture, and the hardness of a fact.