The chaos of nature can be hard to replicate, although Michael Graham, the landscape architect who orchestrated the design of the rock- and water-infused terrain that fringes one side of the new Student Centre at Waikato University, might not necessarily agree. Upon this steeply sloping plane a cascade of decent-sized stones has been distributed in a most natural fashion. It’s well executed, for it’s a deceptive slope with a tricky level drop. If you said there was a fair bit of digital manipulation involved in getting it right, then you’d be correct, although it wasn’t digital as in, ‘related to the computer’, it was old school digital, an exercising of the fingers… and hands, and backs… of the contractors involved.

“You really have to rely on the contractor having an understanding of what you’re trying to do,” says Graham. “The contractor we had does a lot of Department of Conservation work – at one stage we were comparing photographs of the river beds that we wanted it to look like, so he had a good sense of where we were heading. They were very good company to work with.”

High praise. However, if there is one indication of this project’s success, then it’s that the new terrain looks like it preceded the new building; it even looks like it preceded the old, brutalist, part of the new building. In creating this effect, the landscape architect’s motivation to retain many of the mature trees surrounding the site has borne out and, of course, stone also has a certain ageless appeal.

The UoW Student Centre was recently redesigned by Aecom and Warren and Mahoney. The pre-existing building was big and heavy, in the brutal mode, it also had elements with a pleasing symmetrical. Much of the facade that flanks this new rock garden is glass, through which can be observed the circulation of the building – the stairs – and a rectangular meeting room that hangs in the atrium. From inside the building you can acquire a topographical view of the landscape below, and notice the arrangement of river stones, sourced from a Taumaranui quarry, loose, and contained in stepped gabion walls.

The naturalistic display is balanced with more orderly mechanisms. The terrain is interrupted at the midway point by a quartz chip-infused pathway. An anchor in the naturalistic rock garden is a six-tonne sculpture that is also a water feature. Water from the building’s rooftop rain collection unit is reticulated through a stream that snakes down through the fern-dotted garden. There are eight deviations in the sculptural rock, representative of the eight man-made interventions in the Waikato River, explains Graham. The sculpture is obvious focal point in the wedge-like space. The planting on the site is predominantly fernery, organised by Mike Thompson from the university.

Waikato University is notoriously difficult to navigate. From the outset – for visitors, anyway – it is hard to define what or where your destination might be. Graham thinks the disorientating effect may come start at the main carpark, where cars are parked at a 30 degree angle to the main access way. One thing this new building has going for it is a clarity of wayfinding. The building is the object, the gardens are a low-rise support act. As a part of this project, new pathways were also installed, and they are clear and direct.

Graham, from established Hamilton landscape practice Mansergh Graham Landscape Architecture, which now also has an office in Dunedin, has worked on other projects at the university, including its pièce de résistance – a timber boardwalk that fringes the university’s shallow lake. This neat intervention tidies the lakeside fringe (image above), curving through established plantings and rock gardens to create order, and providing, through slatted timber public furniture, a pleasant place to observe the daily mechanisms of university life.