Awaroa Lighthouse (top)

From the hill it appeared, in the other-worldly beauty of the shore: a strange vessel, elegant and angular against the southern sky. We climbed down, past black crosses shipwrecked in the windswept sand, and entered a container of mystery and disquiet. What first seemed monolithic, muscular, is now fragile, vulnerable to weather and romantic ruination. The historic form of the lighthouse as a marine warning system is reimagined to operate in oceans of data, monitoring endangered species, fragile environments, global satellite images and seismic activity from similarly unsettled sites. Here, architecture occupies a volatile mid-point between the beauty of the New Zealand landscape and the collective anxiety of despoiling it latent within the national psyche. At the edge of land and sea, between light and dark, we pause to consider at what point an alien influence in the natural order threatens to figuratively destroy what it is designed to functionally preserve. (text: Charles Walker, Future Islands catalogue, Trading Islands).

Location:
Awaroa Bay, Abel Tasman National Park

Designers:
Henry Stephens, Nick Roberts and Jansen Aui

Status:
Speculative