authors: Hannes Frykholm and Henry Stephens . + d3
The city is now so ubiquitous that it is no longer relevant In terms of architectural thought.
Within a globalised, market-driven world, the hyperspeed of urban development is completely out of sync with the capacity of traditional designers to respond. Simply put, architecture in the city is too stow. By contrast, modern rural environments represent a totally undescribed and highly volatile condition in which new, unique architectures and communities are only just beginning to develop. No longer a site marked by nostalgia and tradition, the unrelenting speed of global processes have left behind a weird territory of genetic experimentation, international migration and agricultural mechanisation in the global countryside – a halfway house between the old and the new.
Nowhere is this condition more present than New Zealand’s Manawatu district, a fertile agricultural region in the lower North Island. One of the traditional centres of New Zealand’s wool production, sheep population, and vernacular culture, the Manawatu is now characterised by colossal windfarms and bleeding-edge agricultural science, a situation that demands new architectures catering to a rapidly changing landscape. Our project, Woolopolis, aims to consolidate the various functions and programs of New Zealand’s wool production into one dynamic community. Traditionally the programs associated with New Zealand’s wool economy – pasture, housing, shearing, production facilities and markets have been separated by both geography and context. This separation is no longer effective in a globalised world, so we turn to cohesion as a means of inproving performance Thus, Woolopolis takes the form of a complex network of programs – processing facilties at ground level, housing units tofted above, with the market functioning as the communal center of the complex and mediating between the two.
