Over the motorway from Sylvia Park is Mutukāroa / Hamlins Hill Regional Park. Parts of it can be seen from the motorway and Auckland Council is fighting to keep that view sacred.
If there’s one rule for being a safe driver, it’s keeping your eyes on the road. That may be why so many of us great drivers have failed to notice the majestic view from the motorway heading past Sylvia Park. If you’re travelling westwards on the southeastern arterial or north on the southern motorway, Hamlins Hill creates a nice little green bump on the horizon.
This rounded horizontal sliver of green which is maybe seen by people on their way somewhere else is a significant reason behind Auckland Council finding “no justification” to allow development in the Sylvia Park precinct to rise above an existing height restriction to 100 meters. On October 17, Stephen Kenneth Brown presented a primary statement on behalf of Auckland Council to an independent hearing panel, regarding a request from property developers Kiwi Property Group to raise the maximum height standard across the Sylvia Park Precinct.
Brown, who has practised as a landscape architect for 42 years and in that time worked on many strategic landscape assessments, is especially sensitive to forms, masses and physical presences. Close analysis of the statement reveals he lives in a world where “large-scale building forms” can “impose”, “over-dominate”, “subjugate” and be “potentially quite oppressive”. If they’re too tall, they can turn into “cliff faces” that “loom” over their surroundings, or giant walls that have a “sense of confrontation”. It is easy to imagine Brown writing in his diary each night about how the building on the corner gave him the cold shoulder, the one around the corner shot him a glowering stare and the one across the road whispered the meanest comment. The 150m tall Sentinel apartment tower in Takapuna must haunt his nightmares.
The development, wrote Brown, could also throw off the “proportionality” between the “horizontal plane of the motorway” and “vertical planes of future buildings”. In other words, if the buildings were too tall, they would upset the harmony and balance between the road and its surroundings. He doesn’t seem to have realised this stretch of jumbled roads and strip mall is the ugliest part of Auckland and the road itself the biggest aesthetic culprit.
He’s not writing about hostile architecture made of spikes, boulders and weird angled planes designed to move people on, but rather a development including shops, offices, housing and a design which commemorates the path of a historic stream. The vision from Kiwi Property Group is for “a multifunctional hub where work, home, shops, entertainment and healthcare will all be accessible by foot, bike or public transport.” In Brown’s eyes, this has transformed into a series of monstrous towering planes. These monsters “could well ‘over-power’ [sic] the motorway’s initial sense of connection with Hamlins Hill for north-bound motorists and the presence of its much lower, more subtle, sequence of slopes and open grassland,” he writes. (Note: throughout his document, dramatic, personifying words are set in single quote marks – the reason for this has eluded our analysis.)
The Mutukāroa / Hamlins Hill Regional Park is significant to mana whenua as a rare example of an extensive pre-European settlement. There’s the remains of pits, terraces and middens. But these are not visible from the motorway nor are they mentioned in the document Brown presented. Instead there is a single reference that future development “respects the values of Mutukaroa / Hamlins Hill”. What the values are remains unclear. What is clear is that the park is an open public place that is free to visit, and is enjoyed and appreciated best on-site rather than via glimpse from afar inside a vehicle travelling 100km/h. To make the most of the view from the motorway, the council may want to consider re-routing the road right through the park.
Blocking the motorway’s view of the park is not the only problem with a tall development. Brown was also concerned about the balance between the road and the buildings. If they end up too big, “the roadway is reduced to a disproportionately narrow defile relative to the scale and mass of either side of it.” God forbid a road not be the central landscape feature.
More importantly, it seems Brown does not want to set a precedent for allowing tall buildings outside of Auckland’s CBD. He has a particular interest in “Maunga Viewshafts” and “the broad volcanic profile of the isthmus”. Tall buildings could block “viewshafts” from Takapuna to the coast and sea and from Newmarket to Maungawhau. Tall buildings “have the potential to intrude into, and visually disrupt, the Auckland Isthmus’s broader sequence of volcanic landforms”. In short, Auckland Council does not want buildings to interrupt the lovely view and landscape (sure), even if the view is one from a moving vehicle on the motorway.
So please, next time you find it difficult to find a home, a place to do your errands, or even an office outside of the CBD, drive down the southern motorway and take the edge off by enjoying the view.