BY GWENETH LEIGH, ASLA
Wraight + Associates and Taylor Cullity Lethlean have domesticated a waterfront in Auckland, New Zealand (though you can still smell the fish).
FROM THE JUNE 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
For more than 30 years, shipping activity within historic ports has been in rapid decline. Facilities are often relocated to larger and more modernized harbors where the machinery is bigger, the roads are closer, and the waters are deeper. Left behind is a postindustrial waterfront that?s seen by the city as an opportunity for a glamorous maritime makeover. But in the effort to maximize development profits, these face-lifts often erase the industrial beauty marks that make these places unique. In their place, generic recipes are followed for creating comfortable waterfront living: one part cobblestone street, two parts pedestrian walkway, a healthy dose of waterside eateries, with a dash of history through a moored two-mast schooner. The experience may be clean and comfortable, but it?s also terribly bland. The Wynyard Quarter waterfront in Auckland, New Zealand, is different. It?s a landscape that has been mopped, but not sterilized. Active maritime industries cling to the edges of the site and activate it with a purpose that isn?t sugar-coated. The discord of a lunchtime stroll can include the smell of raw fish being loaded into delivery vans, the cacophony of passengers boarding a ferry to Devonport, the thunderclap of dump trucks towing loads of ...