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- NZILA Category Winner Student — 2024
Kauri Mountain Farm will become a regional park that embodies sustainable land use practices, restores the mauri of a Te Tai Tokerau mountain-to-sea ecosystem and creates a destination for people to learn and explore. As the land is not suited to conventional farming, it will be phased out, backed by a kaitiakitanga approach and alternative indigenous productive land use. Nukurārangi Regional Park will complete a 20km stretch of protected coastline in the Manaia ecological district. Thus, allowing biodiversity to flourish, enhancing a place for people to explore via a range of recreational experiences, and learn through first-hand interactions with a diverse natural environment. Low impact infrastructure will facilitate this experience at the nucleus of the regional park.
This project creates a regional park in Te Tai Tokerau covering a 240 hectare around Ocean Beach east of Whangarei. The project posits solutions for a landscape involving, sustainable land use and biodiversity, recreation, education and tourism.
It is confident and thorough at each scale, focuses on the visitor experience and ecology site wide, is logical and well communicated at the mid scale and where staging is proposed, and the designs are logical and beautiful with excellent conceptual thinking at the smaller scale. The project dabbles in architectural responses and the design language of hard and soft landscape is thorough, appropriate and well communicated.
The thinking and presentation in this project would do credit to a professional industry document and it is a thoroughly deserving winner of the Students category.
Ella Christian Farrow
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