The heart of a community: Belonging in architecture

Abstract

RESEARCH QUESTION: How can architecture cultivate a sense of community through an integrated town centre typology?

ABSTRACT: Architecture and the built environment provide a backdrop to our daily lives. If designed well, it can support health and wellbeing, thereby promoting human flourishing. Public dwelling is one of the different facets of a human settlement. Such buildings can host a variety of programmes and have the potential to enrich a sense of community. A sense of community promotes feelings of belonging. When done well, public architecture can be the heart of a community and assist with people’s feelings of belonging in architecture. This leads to the question: how can architecture cultivate a sense of community through an integrated town centre typology?

This project examines the phenomenological experience and how that relates to some fundamental architectural concepts. Ideas such as centrality and axis, form and space, and boundary all provide useful ways of considering the lived world and the experience of existential space. These ideas provide a useful way of considering architecture from an experiential standpoint.

The ideas of third places and third spaces are utilised as ways of architecturally considering community space. Leveraging these concepts, the broader concept of a community commons provides a useful typology for this architectural design project.

The Auckland suburb of Three Kings (Te Tātua-a-Riukiuta) has an interesting geographic history that leaves the area without two-thirds of the geographic landmark that once graced the site. In appreciating this history, the absence of two maunga is an inescapable reality that changes both the present and future of this area. Moreover, this location has significant changes in the future with residential development and the Auckland Council’s intension to improve the Three Kings town centre

Integrating community typologies, key architectural ideas, and contextual considerations leads to a serendipitous overlap of ideas that inform the design outcomes. This leads to an architectural form that incorporates a variety of discrete programmes in the unifying ideas of community commons.