Billionaire enterprise capitalist Peter Thiel has commissioned internationally famend architects Kengo Kuma and Associates for the design of his controversial lakefront hideout in Wānaka. Selecting Kengo Kuma – a apply famend for its cautious consideration of context and materiality – appears shocking. Kuma’s modest design ethos seems in jarring distinction to Thiel’s libertarian-infused, futurist fantasies. But, the transfer to accumulate a starchitect of such calibre for the venture mimics the velvet glove, iron fist techniques beforehand utilized by Thiel to achieve citizenship downunder in 2011. Although the commissioning of Kengo Kuma and Associates doesn’t fairly have the tang of the Bolsonaro–Bjarke Ingels saga, it nonetheless exudes a fancy mixture of vanity, sincerity and naivety.
Misconceptions about Aotearoa’s comparative isolation from the remainder of the globe proceed to be propagated each domestically and overseas. Like all good myths, this narrative accommodates a weird mixture of quirky protagonists and is ready to an idyllic backdrop – a setting that gives the nation with a childlike sense of safety in occasions of world fragmentation. This delusion of isolation sells effectively within the market of concepts and has attracted numerous high-profile people to the shores of ‘the playground of the Pacific’.
Thiel bought the 193-hectares of lakefront land at Damper Bay, close to Wānaka, in 2015. Hypothesis round Thiel’s intentions downunder reached their peak in the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, with many left questioning what the billionaire prepper deliberate to do with the positioning. Nonetheless, conjecture across the constructing of bunkers dwindled after studies surfaced that Thiel was selecting to attend out the pandemic in his oceanfront house in Maui.
Till, that’s, in late August, when Thiel’s firm Second Star Restricted submitted an software for useful resource consent that has since been publicly notified by the Queenstown Lakes District Council. Whereas the idea drawings within the software, as notified, are by Kengo Kuma and Associates, it seems that native panorama structure agency Tough and Milne will act because the venture liaison on the bottom. The venture consists of a sequence of stand-alone buildings that seem to seductively hunker down into the polarising panorama. Like most swathes of farmland in Aotearoa, the Damper Bay web site is topic to the standard fragmentation and disorientation that comes hand in hand with the colonial venture. The proposal has been instantaneously opposed by native gatekeepers, the Higher Clutha Surroundings Society, whose founder doused makes an attempt by earlier house owners to construct on the Damper Bay web site. The Society claims that locals visiting these “extremely frequented public areas will likely be assailed by a lot of buildings unfold laterally throughout the topic web site.” Right here, we discover native nimbyism masquerading as eco-conscious stewardship; whereas sovereign seclusion makes an attempt to camouflage itself as humble idealism.
On a lighter notice, one group has had an unrestrained affect on the venture. Any self-respecting Kiwi will likely be fast to level out the venture’s affinity with the meadow-like mounds of Hobbiton. Like the favored Matamata vacationer attraction, the proposal consists of a sequence of distinctive pods that mix into “hummocky hill landforms”. Break up throughout two ranges, the first lodge homes 4 Visitor Pods and is fitted out with all of the luxuries required to attend out the collapse of the welfare state. The lodge itself can accommodate as much as 24 friends, whereas the Proprietor’s Pod – proposed to the north of the lodge buildings – offers asylum for six. The comparatively small Meditation Pod sits closest to the lake’s edge, inside a small gully on the north-eastern part of the positioning. All pods are topic to an identical formal remedy: gaussian curvature match with a inexperienced roof besides.
“In a gap within the floor there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, soiled, moist gap, full of the ends of worms and an oozy scent, nor but a dry, naked, sandy gap with nothing in it to sit down down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and meaning consolation.” (J.R.R.Tolkien – The Hobbit).
Kuma’s idea – and, by proxy, Tough and Milne’s – for Thiel’s burrow has lots in widespread with quite a lot of modern buildings in Aotearoa. The venture strives to realize topographical integration with an “natural structure that fuses into the panorama and respects indigenous nature”. Very similar to Structure Workshop’s Lindis Lodge, the design undulates each horizontally and vertically, in an try to have interaction in a symbiotic relationship with the positioning’s picturesque views – the identical views used to proceed to advertise Aotearoa’s ‘purity’ to the world. The effusive descriptions of the venture’s relationship with the positioning and surrounding panorama are routine in architectural discourse in Aotearoa. The trope of an structure that blends in with its surrounding panorama can be a typical theme in Kuma’s work and is one thing for which the principal and his international apply of 200 are sometimes extremely praised.
And, but, this supposedly “natural structure” isn’t perceived as an actual ‘nature’ by these on the opposite facet of the fence. The Higher Clutha Surroundings Society has mentioned: “The event is prone to trigger vital antagonistic bodily modifications to the looks of the pure panorama when considered from public locations within the neighborhood.” Right here, the age-old narrative of an exterior ‘nature’ is weaponised by each local people foyer teams and the architect and their representatives. All of the whereas, the continued quest for ecological interrelationship is additional muddied by the ideologies of a consumer who unapologetically sees himself as an autonomous particular person able to bending nature to his will. In his citizenship software, Thiel acknowledged that he’d discovered “no different nation that aligns extra with my view of the long run than New Zealand.”
In the end, this continued pursuit for a self-contained neighborhood – whether or not that be a bolthole in Wānaka or a batch on Barrier – perpetuates legendary tropes of nationhood that proceed to restrict Aotearoa’s capacity to reply to the challenges of the current. It will seem that it isn’t solely structure that should reframe its fetishisation of the panorama however society as an entire. We should collectively try for a type of mutual interdependence. One that permits us to critique and alter the areas during which we’re embedded and that are, in flip, embedded in us.
This text was initially revealed on Structure Now. It’s republished right here with permission. See the unique right here.