TE PAPA
Te Papa was a student project drawn in 1988. It was a final year design project to design a National Museum on the Wellington waterfront, Te Papa Tongarewa, literally, ‘container of ’treasures’. The studio project was entitled ‘The Construction of Order’ and focused on how the museum framed understanding through its taxonomic ordering of objects within it.
Auckland University
THESIS
1988
The Te Papa project was drawn in the context of the ‘paper architecture’ of the day and was part of the reappraisal and elevation of drawing as a linguistic, coded mechanism. The project used the museum brief to engage with questions of order, ordering and collection. It was designed to be a museum entirely composed of its exhibits; every element of the building was a reference to or a manipulation of some key historical building, drawing, mathematical system or representational technique.
