The Railway Keepers House

2022

Pirinoa

Mehemea koe kei te rongo i te tamūtamū i te takiwā, engari kāore koe i te kite tangata, he parangēki tērā, he tiramaka tērā, ko te hunga wairua tērā. / If you hear a murmur in the vicinity, but you can’t see anyone, that is a sense of foreboding, a portent of a tragic event, and that is the company of spirits.

Pirinoa is a small rural settlement in the Wairarapa. It sits west of the Rimutaka Ranges and East of Aorangi Forest. Lake Wairarapa lies to the north and Lake Ōnoke to the South. All of these land marks are significant to Māori and to Pākehā for very different reasons. Pirinoa was once part of one the largest wetlands in Te Ika a Maui. In 1963 the government changed the flow of the Ruamahanga river decimating Lake Wairarapa and draining the surrounding wetlands. Dairy farming is still intense in this area, causing concern for the future.

This investigation aimed to understand the forces affecting the Wairarapa landscape from intensive farming to prevailing wind flows. Printmaking becomes the driver for a farm topology as it is perfect translation of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s discourse surrounding the production of presence.

I am enabling the production of presence through the unconscious interpretation of aerial and perspective images. This process is then scrutinised intensively over multiple scales through photography, with focus on depth of line, transparency, texture, contrast, edge conditions, and balance. When combined with conventional drawing, this process enables an abstract understanding of site and its conditions and helps to define an architectural concept.