Federal Street

Elenberg Fraser love Auckland. We have long admired the city and its exports in culture and business and the arts. Almost 20 years ago we published the works of the great Rewi Thompson in Transition magazine, it is powerful work that we have absorbed and never forgotten. So our response to the Federal Street site is a personal and complex one. In contemporary architecture, landscape is often reduced to view lines and decoration. But we have sought to evacuate the ground plane and to reinstate the traditional forests of the New Zealand Taraire. We see this as a gift to the city, a visceral tactile forest experience with waterfalls and rocks and moss and layered dense vegetation – a real, living forest experience for residents and visi... More