In the second of this four-part series I promised to recollect and review two events — the Great Debate and Asia Kiwi Architects’ Asia, Aotearoa, and the Architecture of Crisis exhibition. After a little hiatus, I am back with my thoughts on the latter event, which took place over the weekend of the 27^th and 28^th of September at the University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau’s Neon Foyer.

(AKA) is the brainchild of Michelle Wang, an interdisciplinary creative and professional teaching fellow at Te Pare School of Architecture and Planning. It recognises and creates a network for a community of Asian practitioners in the architectural sphere here in Aotearoa New Zealand — a platform for the dissemination of work. A relatively nascent organisation, AKA splashed into the mainstream at the 2024 Festival of Architecture in Tāmaki with a sold-out showing of The Temptation of Rossano Fan. Asia, Aotearoa, and the Architecture of Crisis was AKA’s first exhibition, and platformed a selection of speculative work and installations from students and practitioners alike.

The exhibition’s hinge was the pecha kucha inspired quickfire slide show on Saturday evening, where six practitioners shared high-level insights into their work. Michelle started the evening with a recognition of Sameh Shamout’s (a Palestinian-Jordanian lecturer at the Unitec School of Architecture) work Windows of Palestine, an installation-based collision of architectural models and performance art. Shamout’s work aims to challenge traditional media and give Kiwis a real-time perspective on the material impact of the atrocities in Gaza, by inviting participants to assist in creating a model of the city, replicating landmarks (many of which are now lost) like churches, hospitals and wells. Whilst co-creating the city, participants are invited to share songs and memories, with the performance of each installation culminating in its destruction; a small-scale reflection of the very real loss of culture and humanity faced by Palestine today. While Shamout was unable to physically attend the event, his work and its intent provide an important and sobering insight into the social role of architectural practice, and highlight the contemporaneous concerns of the exhibition.

Dr I-Ting Chuang, a senior lecturer at Te Pare, share Walking for Pleasure, a presentation summarising her research examining why so many Aucklanders still choose to drive, even in walkable areas (and I confess, even I am occasionally guilty of borrowing the flatmates’ cars for a perfectly walkable distance — though the research connects to a wider, nuanced relationship between various indices of deprivation and infrastructural provision). Dr Chuang is a Taiwanese academic whose work combines analytics with design thinking to examine how we may best create more inclusive urban environments.

, academic programme manager and senior lecturer at Unitec followed with a reflection on his approach to teaching architecture through fabrication. Fabrication-based pedagogy at Unitec is, under Dr Patel, applied collaboratively with local communities, and connected to social responsibility, particularly locally in Tāmaki Makaurau. Some of these student projects are still standing: one such example — a bench-cum-graffiti wall — can be found at Falls carpark in Henderson. These projects are symbiotic: providing small-scale infrastructural interventions for the communities they are built in and providing students with hands-on learning experiences.

Iman Raza Khan, lecturer at Unitec, graduate of Te Pare, and co-founder of sidewalk, wove together a few of her research practices. The approach of “collective sense-making” underpins much of Khan’s research, and as such, each of her shared projects recognised and celebrated the many other names involved equally alongside her own. In doing this, Khan reflects the wider spirit of AKA as a community and network, and recognises that our practices do not exist in a vacuum, but rather are a collective outcome. Khan’s shared projects focused not on physical architecture, but rather the practice of architectural thought beyond the physical realm: discursive, historical, analytical, conversational, etc. Khan’s work with the Digital Heritage Research Centre involved scanning demolition-slated heritage buildings to create a digital recollection, her work with the Lote Tree Trust seeks to develop community-centric placemaking, and she co-founded sidewalk, an alternative practice group that uses the communal walk to talk architecture, and to carefully observe site.

, PhD candidate at Te Pare and member of Māpihi (Te Pare’s Māori and Pacific Housing Research Centre), shared a rumination (the best kind of lecture) on his research examining the relational and architectural complexities and agencies of the Sri Lankan diaspora. Madagammana’s talk was not a self-indulgent wander through project-after-project, but rather a deeply personal storytelling of a childhood spent as a member of a diaspora, of family evenings, of a culture inhabiting a place and an architecture different from their own. He walked us through the anatomical nuances of a Sri Lankan family dinner, transposed into a standard New Zealand house, and the value of gathering around a dinner table as a means of creating and continuing community. Madagammana also acknowledged that many of us will share similar recollections of our own ethnic specificities — and that we will all have ways of making “New Zealand Architecture” our own.

Ben Everett, architectural graduate at Mellow Architects and moonlighting lecturer at Huri Te Ao (AUT’s School of Future Environments), shared some of the resilience-and-recovery-relationalities between Japanese and New Zealand architectural approaches. Everitt’s lecture showed us Japan through his eyes. We examined the planning of the town of Onagawa, whose 12-metre-high seawall was defeated by a 13-metre-high wave in 2011, leading to a consolidation and managed retreat uphill, and the creation of a community centre in Sukagawa, facing liquefaction from the 2011 collapse of the Fujinuma dam. For Everitt, these (and further) examples represent the possibilities held by architecture to site in the overlaps of identity, climate, and crisis, and how that thought might be applied to the practice of architecture locally in Aotearoa.

The night wrapped with a (very) fast speedrun of the exhibiting designers (and I am proud to count myself among the many contributors) and a gathering around a table of our own. The exhibition itself remained open the following Sunday. I was there both days and had many an interesting conversation with an enticed passer-by (as well as a few slightly confusing engineering students wondering what on earth had become of an otherwise undisturbed study space for the weekend).

I only wish the exhibition could have stayed up longer and much more public (consider this a call to see the work set up in Waitematā Station or the Art Gallery or at Commercial Bay?)– much of this sort of work is rarely platformed, and I think the general public stand to gain a lot from engaging with this sort of thinking. The 2023 census states that 31.3% of Auckland’s population identify with an Asian ethnicity — we are not a small minority. Asia, Aotearoa, and the Architecture of Crisis weaves a recognition of this statistic with a recognition that we are sitting in a multiplicity of crises, and that architectural practice can (and should!) engage with these crises. Another triumph for AKA, I hope that the momentum around these discussions continues to grow — this platform provides a springboard for an Asian voice, a recognition of the values of an Asian contribution to architectural practice, and hopefully ensures that our national identity — a multicultural nation on Māori whenua — is reflected in our architectural one.