In Here Now HOOPLA worked with University of Auckland architecture students and staff to design and fabricated fifteen large scale installations. Each installation made aspects of New Lynn’s past or future visible and experiential.
The installations occupied the vast, persistently vacant, retail spaces on the ground floor of the new, lone, high-rise apartment building in the town centre, and other shops vacated as high-street retail gives way to the centrifugal pull of the nearby shopping mall. Here Now opened a space of conjecture—how might this ‘ground’ be considered not only as a space of commodification but, perhaps like an urban park, be conceived as a space to foster an expanded capacity for social exchange.
Collaborators & Credits
Here Now was part of the Auckland Heritage Festival, 10–14 October, 2013.
Projects for Here Now were developed by second year architecture students from the University of Auckland with guests Tezuka Architects (Japan).
Here Now was supported by the Whau Local Board and project-managed by Esther Mecredy. Photos by Amy Yalland (Index).