The Intertidal Compass: Navigating Transient Architectures of Tidal Whenua

Throughout my architectural education I have encountered and studied, at surface level, themes of personal

identity, cultural heritage and politics in relation to Aotearoa New Zealand’s history. These deeply personal

themes are traversed and reconciled in this thesis project and merged into a design outcome that reflects my

years of introspection, while charting a course toward an individualised architectural practice. In particular, this

thesis acknowledges and draws from the composite nature of my existence as a Samoan and Pākehā woman in

Aotearoa.

This research was provoked by the ‘Silueta’ (1973-1980) series of Cuban-born artist, Ana Mendieta, who

created over 200 imprints with her body in various grounds using burning, carving and moulding, etc. It led

to investigating the works of artists and architects who explore themes concerning individual identity, which

were analysed and interpreted through full-scale explorations of the landscape, layered collages and moving

images. These explorations resulted in the formulation of Tidal Whenua – the ever-changing zone between the

sea and the shore – which, encompassing the spectral nature of contemporary Pacific identity, becomes a site for

architectural intervention.

This led to devising a design brief where the principles of intertidal whenua were applied to the design of a

spatiotemporal intervention for Te-Ihu-o-Mataoho Reserve in the Manukau Harbour of Tāmaki Makaurau. The

outcome is an Intertidal Compass, proposing a land art gesture as performance space that acts as a catalyst for

relationships between people, the land, the ocean and the sky.

When architecture is a product of its contextual narrative and architects are able to exercise agency over this

practice to induce social changes, the Intertidal Compass points both inward and outward. As an instrument

of navigation, its purpose is to contribute to architectural discourse through attention to growing indigenous

representation via a project that spatialises the realities of contemporary Moana identity as multiplicitous,

turbulent and spectral.

The compass is an instrument of navigation; it orients you, shows where you are in relation to your environment

and helps determine your direction. The Pacific compass typology specifically, is the manifestation of the rich,

interdependent relationships between the tides, the land and the body. The Pacific navigational compass is

reflective of this thesis project, which draws an architectural conclusion through the navigation of personal

identity.

This project was submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for

the degree of

Master of Architecture (Professional) and Heritage Conservation,

The University of Auckland, 2023.