Getting there is important in architecture. Staying on the road requires some navigation but it’s a whole lot easier than getting all intrepid and going off-road. On the map, you can follow a plan and work at journeying to where you are going. But, before you download only the road code, why not remember those travels into the new? Travel that teaches you to find what you find.

Researching with students is that kind of exploration: more backpack than suitcase, more OE than holiday. To practising architects, teaching might worry the accounting but there’s reward in the find. That’s just the adventure I’ve shared with American architect Marlon Blackwell, who journeyed well off the beaten track to come to Aotearoa as the 2024 International Architect in Residence at the University of Auckland’s Te Pare School of Architecture and Planning.

Blackwell and I have roamed buildings, studios and some of the woods and waterways in the American South and now, down here, and have found architecture in places where there supposedly isn’t any architecture at all. Experiencing authenticity is important to the work of Marlon Blackwell Architects.

Ask Blackwell why he both teaches and practises, and he points to the responsibility of theory and practice in shaping the built environment and challenging social complacency. “Creative research and teaching are truly inseparable to me, and lessons from each solve challenges in the other. Teaching establishes the expectation that my creative research operates at a very high level because my practice is my research.” He’s right; that’s why our office invests to teach. Architecture needs finding and, if you go looking for new in all the same places, you risk finding only what you know. Think more fishing than fish shop. To pack a different bag and learn something, you need to cast out a little wider. For, just as it’s easy to practise what you practise, it’s equally easy to teach what you know — and there’s a difference between teaching and critique.

After driving together to some of Blackwell’s buildings, American critic Aaron Betsky wrote of Blackwell that he did “not know of any other living American architect who is as accomplished at the making of buildings in and for communities.”¹ On route, they talked all things architecture, just as I did with Betsky last year looking at our buildings. But it’s a short drive to the output when compared to months of process in the studio and time behind the wheel counts. So, with a week to go ’til hand-in and the students angling their schemes on home, Blackwell and I hang it out more than a little and trout our way deep into the Kahurangi to unpack ‘The Figure-Figural-Figuration of Place’ studio we’ve been undertaking with 18 third-year architecture students. We travel light, taking only ourselves, and a friendly fishing guide and helicopter to speed things along. Getting there is, after all, important and this studio runs a different-than-usual schedule.

“Talent moves quickly,” Blackwell tells the students on arriving from the States at the start of the course in July. This is a turbo-charged studio, both practically and on the calendar. Most teaching processes are a bit like a 12-week, long-haul drive, stopping to meet a couple of times a week with the work happening on the road in between times. But, with Blackwell’s and my own practising schedules seemingly everywhere but here, we run the studio morning and afternoon for several days at a time and then break to pick things up a week or three later. It’s a bit like this helicopter: in and out, and with everyone holding on. There’s no “let’s see it Friday”. This is make-then-review, catch and release, as we practise finding the figure, the figural and the figuration all at the same time. “Show us in an hour!”

Quite an ask for any student thinking they might go around the roundabout a few times before choosing a turn-off and developing a scheme. But the opportunity is stacked in chasing the Blackwell approach that has seen him practise his way to the AIA Gold Medal in 2020 while being the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture and a Distinguished Professor at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design in Arkansas. He’s taught from Harvard to Cornell, with Peter Eisenman to Julie Snow, and run studios from Mexico to Rome. There’s much to learn from Blackwell’s singular-figure approach.

It’s an ‘architecture of the architecture’ that resonates to be ‘in the Place, of the Place and for the Place’. The belief that “architecture can happen anywhere, at any scale, at any budget — for anyone”² founds in being regionally contextual. He jokes it’s learned “driving forward and looking sideways”, for it’s deeply observational and roads in the south can be delta flat. Yet, it shapes what’s seen into something new, be it between “figuration and abstraction, the sacred and the secular, the natural and the constructed, the archetypal and the ad hoc, the local and the global”.³

Life down here is understandably quite different from the American South. For one thing, our roading is rarely laned or straight. We might more regularly be “driving forward and looking forward” but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from other methodologies. “We start by learning a new alphabet,” Blackwell smiles to the students.

In our isolated and hilly terrain, architecture can get elegant-shed elemental pretty quickly, in both its learning and application. Our buildings often have bits added, in a ‘put something here’ approach that Jeremy Salmond documented into as many as 216 addition options to the good old New Zealand villa.⁴ These are ‘combination’ forms, typically grouping into T, H and F letter-shaped plans which, in Blackwell’s spelling, don’t readily sound-out to singular forms. He’s writing Is, Js and Ss and variations to Vs and Ys on a whiteboard and crossing out more letters that have 90-degree re-entrant corners like Es, Ls and Xs. He explains: “from a fish head, you can protrude a body and tail, even appendage some fins, but you can’t add or cross DNA.” From there, the interiority and exteriority mould with each other, shaping light and volume within the figure with some kind of productive irritant or disruptor to the norm often found in programme. It’s kind of a Venturi meets the South approach of “designing from the outside in, as well the inside out” but with the “necessary tensions”⁵ informing the spelling.

We start the studio by transcribing, with each student randomly drawing a two-dimensional figure from the Bildbauten series by Swiss architect and artist Philipp Schaerer, which they study, draw and model to enable accuracy in extruding the figure into a three-dimensional form. New alphabet and fish heads at the ready, we get local and site ourselves at a place that was once a community resource and where the water didn’t use to be so deep that cruise ships could moor in close.

We head to Queens Wharf, dodging the road cones, Uber drivers and overseas arrivals that road over the water. Imagine the community food market accessible by land and water that was set up here by the Auckland Provincial Government in 1868 and promptly closed by the Auckland Harbour Board in 1871.⁶ The students are then asked to upsize the thinking, American-style, to a 3000m² public brief holding a kai-kitchen and market, an oceanic exhibition space and either a kayak-manufacturing, small semi-submarine port or floating wedding chapel facility. All to play the figure to the figural with the tonal, indirect Zenithal lighting and the disrupting figurations that demand going “full-Marlon”. We then cast off the wharf by prompting:

If the Pacific site is the “edge between land and water,”⁷ and one where “an island’s boundaries can never be fixed”,⁸ then, why are we being held away from the ocean in downtown Tāmaki Makaurau? The city’s water edge has been progressively filled in, wharfed over, road-ed off, marina-ed to the wealthy, deepened and fenced. An architecture physically separated from water has followed as we continue to build behind or on marine infrastructure, and in a way that remains largely unchanged from 170 years ago. Challenging this horizontal ground plane suggests “Terra firma” be seen as “Terra fluxus”.⁹ For, as island dwellers, if we are to connect our inner city to its Pacific place and respond to the challenges of climate change and sea-level rise, we physically and socially need to unearth oceanic water. Architecturally, we need to get a little wet.

The outcome is a collective studio search for the place where Queen Street meets the oceanic water’s edge: a contextual methodology that might be applied to unearth other separated water edges and learn from the tidal context to contribute to our collective understanding and typological response to sea-level rise. We are all learning and the search is thrown wide between offices.

Architect and director at Marlon Blackwell Architects Meryati Johari Blackwell keeps winding the designs back to the figure at the mid-crit. “This is like MasterChef. If you are given a mango to cook with, use the mango; don’t cook with a carrot!” Studio director Justin Hershberger is out in Week 8, developing composite section/perspectives that draw in structure and materiality to develop an interiority from the exteriority. Irving Smith’s Andrew Irving pops in and out, championing courage and technical endeavour. There’s no spinning here; schemes mend left and right. 1:100 plans and sections cover the wall and are drawn over supporting large physical models as the primary mode of representation to the process. Smaller sectional-models nymph out light and interiority. The table of cardboard leftovers grows high as each student learns to prioritise building over wharf, and extrude their figures and public spaces downwards and into the water.

With the fish found, we park things up and haul in some critics to destinate a conclusion. Like any good OE, where we went and what we found pictures-out insta-style to the experience. Packed in the take home are some clear de-wharfing methodologies that allow public space to readily travel back down to the water’s edge. We don’t even need to go far off the road to get there. Turns out architecture can get wet. Go figure!

References

^{1. Aaron Betsky, 2023, ‘The Remarkable Marlon Blackwell’, Architect magazine. 
2. Peter MacKeith and Jonathan Boelkins, 2022, Radical Practice: The Work of Marlon Blackwell Architects. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 11–12.
3. Marlon Blackwell and Tanzil Shafique, 2018, ‘Contexts’, in Gail Borden (ed.), New Essentialism: Material Architecture. ORO Editions.
4. Jeremy Salmond, 1986, Old New Zealand Houses 1800–1940. Auckland: Reed Methuen, pp. 74–75.
5. Robert Venturi, 1977, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (2nd ed.). New York: The Museum of Modern Art, p. 86.
6. Ben Schrader, 2016, The Big Smoke: New Zealand Cities, 1840–1920. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, p. 183.
7. M.R. Austin, 1990, ‘Regional Identity in the Pacific’. Proceedings of the eleventh biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of People and their Physical Surroundings. Ankara, Turkey, Volume 5, pp. 143–150.
8. James Hamilton- Paterson, 2009,‘Objects of desire’, in Seven Tenths: The Sea and Its Thresholds. New York: Europa Editions, p. 63.
9. James Corner, 2006, ‘Terra Fluxus’, in Charles Waldheim (ed.), The Landscape Urbanism Reader. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 21–33.}