Description:

A new sculptural, green and community park that integrates functional, social and environmental infrastructure into a unifying ‘topography’ to create a dynamic, flexible and emergent ‘backyard’ for the precinct’s future residential and working populations. The landscape is merged with infrastructure to reconnect, revitalise, and re-energise this post-industrial site while bringing together ecology, movement, commerce and people.

The project was developed with Auckland Transport, Eke Panuku, mana whenua and Watercare, identifying a need for an open space at the geographical centre of the Quarter. Functional constraints included removing significant petro-chemical ground contamination, providing stormwater treatment and detention, flood resilience and incorporating the pumpstation infrastructure.

Our design response merges the park with the existing language of Wynyard Quarter’s streetscapes and green corridors. The sophisticated park topography explores a relationship between the original Waitemata coastline, the original seafloor beneath and the existing horizontality of this reclaimed site. Acting as a form of furniture, the topography accommodates a range of passive and active recreational activities – occupying, playing, viewing – and a framework that can adapt to the requirements of an emerging new urban community. Placemaking strategies enable the park to continue evolving, activating and catalysing the park’s edges for future development—a place to immerse, occupy, connect and celebrate in.

Significant enabling infrastructure is integrated throughout the park, including a Watercare ‘Pumpstation’ (also part of the design) wrapped within a sculptural cylindrical pavilion - of concrete and corten steel - that references the history of industrial tanks and silos in this area.

In direct contrast to the existing highly programmed, urban and water’s edge spaces nearby, the design unifies the park and surrounding streets via a single connecting surface, extending a carpet of basalt building to building to establish pedestrian priority, disrupting the street network and creating a space you move ‘through’ not ‘past’ by foot, cycle or vehicle.

The design language draws on the site’s post-industrial and coastal character. Furniture elements in the park relate to the interaction of coastal narratives with the area’s industrial history – particularly the folded corten steel standard in maritime construction, shipbuilding and waka. Timber, precast concrete and stainless steel elements recall materials emblematic of this precinct's wharves, warehouses and timber industry.

Integrating elements of the site’s marine archaeology and a native and ecological planting aesthetic supports a water-sensitive design strategy and ecological bio-diversity. The project deploys a complex network of permeable surfaces, swales, bio-retention devices, raingardens and green infrastructure to provide water detention, treatment and flood resilience for this vulnerable, low-lying land as part of a broader network that enables the entire quarter to exceed stormwater treatment standards. Large Pohutukawa trees have been transplanted into the park, evoking a mature coastal forest that predates the surrounding built form.

The park is named after Amey Daldy, a pivotal figure in New Zealand’s woman’s suffrage movement and the wife of Captain Daldy, for whom the adjacent street is named. The park was a finalist in the 2021 Dezeen, World Architecture News and Landezine awards programs.