Military Museum at Takapuna
The historical reserve of Fort Takapuna is itself immersed in the military history of New Zealand with its own subterranean and hidden constructions. Designed for the strategic and beautiful headland, the museum sits on the boundary between earth, water and air. It hovers in the landscape and projects over the cliff edge, oriented towards Auckland’s most celebrated landmark, Rangitoto Island. An architecture of absence such as scale and typology eschews a standard language of occupation. It is an architecture of landscape, an empty ‘socle’, that forefronts the view across the gulf. Its abstract whiteness suggests modernity however its form is more archeological. The body of the building functions in the same way that proteins within the human body are constructed from the 21 amino acids, the number and sequence varies determining the type. Whilst this project is about construction here spaces are eroded as with the dramatic cavernous headland that is situated over. The strict geometry regulates its outer form, as well as its language of excavation, by the simple intersection of slab and hemispherical spaces. Like the fort beside it, here the architecture of excavation such as ancient Etruscan tombs and Ethiopian churches, allows for exceptional form. The implications of the use of spherical geometry are privileged over the concern for the use of the interstitial spaces with respect to the outer shell. Theoretically, the restricted formal language of domes of very different dimensions sensitises one to the specific subtleties of the scale, light and weight of each of the spaces. To investigate the weight of the architecture, 3 bronze models were made which involved making polystyrene and nylon sacrifi ces which were coated in multiple plaster coats, burnt out, into the cavity of which liquid bronze was poured. Subsequently the plaster exterior was removed and the model was polished with a grinder and linisher. The modeling process suggests a constructive process of an indivisible whole. With a whitened white pine base, the quality of the privileged and crafted object is intended to highlight the contrast between the site and the intervention.
