Description:

Amey Daldy Park is an urban, undulating, iconic open space that creates a lush green heart for Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter. The park integrates social infrastructure, low impact design and a ‘designed topography’ into a contemporary new park space, establishing a dynamic ‘backyard’ for the precinct’s anticipated growth of residential and working populations.
The brief for the project was developed between the city’s transport and development agencies, identifying a need for an open space at the geographical centre of the Quarter. In contrast to the nearby water’s edge spaces which serve the broader population of Auckland, this space would be oriented toward the local community. Key functional constraints included addressing significant ground contamination, providing flood detention and resilience, and incorporating pumpstation infrastructure within the park itself.
Our design response proposed interweaving the park with the existing language of Wynyard Quarter’s streetscapes and green corridors. The sophisticated park topography explores a relationship between the coast, original seabed beneath, and the horizontality of reclaimed land. Acting as a form of informal furniture, the topography accommodates a range of passive and active recreational and event programs that support and adapt to the requirements of this new, growing urban community. Purposeful placemaking strategies enable the park to continue to evolve, activating the parks edges.
Significant enabling infrastructure is integrated throughout the park including a Watercare ‘Pumpstation’ wrapped within a sculptural cylindrical pavilion 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 of Amey Daldy Park unifies the park and surrounding streets via a single connecting surface, building to building (a carpet of basalt), establishing pedestrian priority, disrupting the street network and creating a space you move ‘through’ not ‘past’.
Large Pohutukawa trees from the former site have been transplanted into the park, evoking the sense of a mature coastal forest which predates the surrounding built form. Furniture elements in the park relate to the interaction of coastal narratives with the industrial history of the area – in particular the folded corten steel common in maritime construction, hulls and shipping containers. Timber, precast concrete and stainless steel elements recall materials which were emblematic of the wharves and warehouses of this precinct.
The design language draws on the site’s post-industrial and coastal character. It integrates elements of the sites marine archaeology and establishes a native and ecological planting aesthetic which supports a water sensitive design strategy and ecological diversity. The project employs phytoremediation throughout an interconnected series of raingardens and green infrastructure. A vast vegetated swale provides significant flood capacity on this vulnerable, low lying land. Landscape is prioritised to reconnect, revitalise, and re-energise this post-industrial site while bringing together people, ecology, infrastructure, buildings and landscape.
The park is named after Amey Daldy, a pivotal figure in New Zealand’s woman’s suffrage movement, becoming the first such movement in the world to win women the right to vote.