Poneke Wellington's City to Sea bridge designed by Rewi Thompson and John Gray with sculptor Para Matchitt. Photo: Paul McCredie
Whether Wellington's iconic City to Sea bridge stays or goes, one architect says its impact as a trailblazer of Māori urban design will remain.
The fate of the bridge, which links Civic Square and Whairepo Lagoon in central Wellington, has swung back and forth over the past few months, with the latest twist coming through the government's shake-up of earthquake strengthening laws, which could offer a lifeline.
The bridge was designed by the late architect Rewi Thompson (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Raukawa), along with John Gray, and opened in 1993.
Jade Kake is an architectural designer and - with Jeremy Hansen - the author of Rewi: Āta haere, kia tere. Thompson was a foundational figure within the architectural profession in New Zealand and beyond, she said.
"We found, outside of the architecture industry, a lot of people didn't know who he was and they might know some of the projects he had been involved with, but didn't actually know that he was a part of it.
"He's an absolutely foundational figure to anyone in the architecture world, but because we felt that he was perhaps under-recognised, this book was a really important thing for us to try to get that out more broadly beyond the architecture profession."
Thompson's celebrated public projects include Pacific-influenced canopies in the Ōtara Town Centre, the Pūkenga School of Māori Studies at Unitec, but Kake said the City to Sea Bridge is certainly his most well known.
Architect Rewi Thompson was a foundational figure in the architecture world. Photo: Jane Ussher
Kake said Rewi himself might have felt differently about the demolition of his works than other architects who have a connection to them.
"I think Rewi wouldn't be obsessed with kind of being frozen in the past, but I would like to think that those who are making decisions around the likes of the City to Sea Bridge and the future of the city might consider how important that aspect is.
"If there are new works commissioned, ensuring that there are Māori leads on those projects and that mana whenua are involved, and that our identity is really clearly and overtly displayed in the landscape and through the built environment..."
Kake said Aotearoa only recently began to see public works that overtly expressed a Māori worldview and narrative, and in that sense, the bridge - which was opened in 1993 - was a trailblazer.
"I think [Rewi] was OK with things kind of returning to the whenua and things don't have to last forever. That said, how I personally feel about it is that it's a very high-profile public piece of architecture.
"It was a very important commission for a Māori architect to be leading this and he did collaborate with others. You can very much see that the cultural narrative and what it says about our place in the world was something that he very firmly had control over.
"It was a very bold statement at that time and I think it still would be now."
The narrative surrounding the structure is seemingly simple - it's the story of Māui fishing up the North Island/Te Ika a Māui. Pedestrians pass through a split pyramid topped with real pounamu, representing Te Waipounamu from where Māui threw his net, while the brick paving patterns represent his line and matau (fish hook) on the harbour side and his net on the city side.
Jade Kake is an architectural designer and an author of Rewi: Āta haere, kia tere. Photo:
The City to Sea Bridge was part of a suite of projects that included Te Ngākau Civil Square - designed by Athfield Architects, with Sir Ian Athfield as chief architect - and the Capital E building, but Kake said the projects were so well integrated and cohesive that it could be hard to tell where one ends and one begins.
That's a marker of a successful urban scale project, she said.
"There's no reason that these elements couldn't be reconfigured in some way, if that's deemed appropriate, but also just remembering that we want to have this kind of cohesive approach to the urban environment. If we lose one chunk of this, we don't want to lose the coherence of our urban landscape."
Kake said, whatever happens to the bridge, it had undeniable impact and was a turning point for Māori architecture.
"I guess that one consolation is that, even if the physical structure doesn't exist anymore, it still had that positive impact on our built environment, on the people who worked on it, the people that have experienced it, and the people who've been shaped by these experiences and then have gone on to shape the environments themselves, which arguably is all of us, not just architects and designers and engineers."
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