Making Ways: Alternative Architectural Practice in Aotearoa

Motivated by the urgency of the challenges we all now face - environmental, social and economic - young architects in Aotearoa are inventing new forms of practice. These moves respond to a range of overlapping factors that draw practices in different directions and see them developing new and alternative ways of making architecture.

Making Ways takes the format of a staged, live ‘rolling event’, bringing together four practices that have emerged in Aotearoa in response to this context. Shaping their ways of making architecture by charting a new course through these concerns, each practice has developed a week-long project that brings to life aspects of their practice. Sequentially inhabiting the gallery, Objectspace is recast as a hybrid studio, laboratory and wānanga as Making Ways includes lectures, slide shows, interviews, workshops and other evolving live events. Come and join a conversation about ways of making architecture now and into the future.

Making Ways is part of the Festival of Architecture.

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Led by architect and University of Auckland lecturer Mike Davis, Unit Y straddles the space between the office, the school and the market. Re-invigorating the idea of the ‘project office’, an international model where architectural offices used to operate out of architecture schools, Unit Y brings current students and new graduates to work in small teams on projects for community clients that do not often engage architects. Positioning students and recent graduates at its core, Unit Y utilises and validates their skills and expertise to produce critical architectural content for a range of clients and presses toward the realisation of buildings.

Makers of Architecture engage in design making by utilising and developing mass customisation technologies to support the development of sustainable and resilient constructed environments. Makers of Architecture set out to close the gap between architecture and building, establishing Makers Fabrication, a prefabrication construction company, delivering projects throughout New Zealand. The two Makers companies work in collaboration with the design, university research and architectural communities, to build, test, iterate, prototype and develop the potentials of architectural design and build manufacturing. This allows Makers to be innovative, accurate and sustainable in their; design, planning, budgeting, timing and construction methods, while delivering high quality client and site-specific designs.

Based in Te Taitokerau, Northland, ĀKAU (Ana Heremaia, Ruby Watson & Felicity Brenchley) is a design and architecture practice that places people and community at the heart of their projects. Creating opportunities for youth to be involved in the design of real projects in their community through a wānanga approach ĀKAU operates as a connection point between client, consultants, taitamariki and the wider community. ĀKAU values authentic collaborative design approaches, resulting in project outcomes that are more meaningful, appropriate and speak of the people and place in which they are built.

Hatch Workshop is a research and design partnership (Hannah Broatch and Mason Rattray) from New Zealand currently working in India specialising in corporate social responsibility design projects for the Global South. As a design - build duo, they collaborate with companies, local NGOs and workers with an intention of improving the quality of housing, associated amenities and working environments through appropriate incremental interventions. Their goal is to bring dignity to the conditions of overlooked citizens.