Motivated by the urgency of the challenges we all now face - environmental, social and economic - young architects in Aotearoa are inventing new, alternative forms of practice. In September and October 2019, Making Ways: Alternative architectural practice in Aotearoa took place at Objectspace gallery, Auckland. Taking the format of a staged, live, rolling workshop of events, the exhibition included four practices that have emerged in Aotearoa New Zealand in response to this context. Through essays, interviews and photographs, this volume documents and reflects upon the exhibition and contextualises the impetus toward ‘alternative’ forms of practice it captured.

If normative architectural practice is the production of a building for a client, set within market conditions, then ‘alternative’ implies a departure from this in the way that architecture might be realised, and in the way architectural knowledge might be employed. Making Ways seeks to remind the reader that the practice of architecture – and the use of architectural imagination and knowledge – is a practice of multiple alterna­tives, and a diverse and locally inflected undertaking. The exhibition was and the book is invested in the diversity of architectural voices and operations that enable a lively local architectural discipline to contribute meaningfully to the broader cultural space it is part of.