Description:

Reanimate:
Animating urban life through the joy of upcycling and craft

The design brief for our Masters AD1 studio centred around the idea of "Care." The brief asked us to address how urban environments both define and regulate yet also allow disruptive realities, behaviours, and contingencies. The latter, we think, gives cities their asymmetric quality. The brief considers adaptation and the urban through the question of care, specifically its enactment or absence architecturally. In turn, we are interested in the distribution of care across people, programmes, communities, and places.

Our project is rich in adaptive possibilities and holds the concept of care at the heart of our design. Our project seeks to reanimate Auckland's urban life through the key ideas of upcycling and craft. Our proposed project on Abbey Street adjacent to Auckland's lively Karangahape road seeks to infuse the urban landscape with vibrant animation, addressing the often-suppressed dimensions of urban life. Upcycled are the existing buildings, a colourful party hire, and a car repair shop; our design actively builds upon the existing characteristics of 'joyful craft' and 'repair.' Our project takes on a sensitive and creative approach to sustainable ways of adaptively reusing old urban buildings, transforming them in a way that continues to care for the stories and narratives they uphold. Our joyful scheme sheds light on the importance of upcycling to renew the purpose of things and bring them a new meaning for objects that are 'left behind', whether it be old clothing, demolished building materials or leftover food from the community.

The architecture works on a sustainable and performative level, collecting, recrafting and serving the people in our community through daytime workshop schemes focusing on puppetry, costume making and cooking. At the same time, the site comes to life at night through puppet performances and food night markets, drawing people in and animating the city to live. These puppets, which range in size from small to larger-than-human, serve as instruments of scale, offering new perspectives on the architecture and urban landscape.

Our in-house performing artists and costume makers reside together on the first floor of the Cook-house, which is designed with radial floor-planning to facilitate communal connection. Our mobile wagons move in and out of the site onto Karangahape Road, collecting food and op shop clothing from the community to be upcycled back on-site in our cooking and costume-making workshops. This mobility and interaction with the urban environment reinforce the building's role in animating the streets and fostering community engagement and sustainability. The food is then redistributed and sold at our night markets, which are located beneath the laneway of the Cookhouse.

The joy of upcycling comes full circle when the crafted items eventually leave the building almost as gifts to the community—costumes are hired, puppets enter the streets, and food wagons roll away. Some creations return, while others leave permanently.