First presented as a potential project in 2005 Croftfield Lane was a pioneering project for the application of landscape architecture to stormwater wetlands. It was 10 years before the physical construction of the project began, due to shifting catchment priorities, but the planning and design process immediately influenced the goalposts for the former North Shore City and then Auckland Council, in terms of directing landscape and ecology values into stormwater projects.

The project brief was to deliver a highly functioning and easily operable stormwater wetland. As a demonstration project, the design stripped back the landscape to its pure functions to derive a simple and expressive site geometry. Layer after layer of landscape media were added - landform, planting, and structures, to enhance stormwater function while additionally providing an expressive landscape that could be engaged with by the public.

The demonstration nature of the project, required the team to present many options to the client and stakeholders, showing the same wetland as an ecological showcase of plants, a landscape of folding landforms, and a series of structural axes and treatment cells. Concepts were presented with diagrams, sketches, physical models and animated sequences in presentations and workshops. What followed was a distillation of these initial explorations pared back to simple expressions of this functioning landscape in its industrial context.

Collaborators or mentors - Internal
Mark Lewis NZILA Reg.                                                

Jane Nalder, Chris Punt, Larissa Moyle

Collaborators or mentors - External

• North Shore City Stormwater
• Auckland Council Healthy Waters
• AR Civil
• WEC Limited

Key contractors

Fulton Hogan - Kane Jolly