Architecture NZ – Opinion

Published in Architecture NZ – January 2015 (Issue 1)

On one of the first nights that my son and I went to sleep in our house in Earthsong, a co-housing community in West Auckland, I experienced a shift in my spatial connection with my surroundings. Instead of feeling as though I was asleep inside my house and the threshold to the outside world was through those walls, I felt distinctly as though I was going to sleep inside the boundaries of Earthsong. My concept of home had expanded. It included not only our four walls but also those of the three-acre site and the 70 or so people within it. Later, the juxtaposition of this middle-class, eco, co-housing situation, in contrast with the banal and poverty-stricken landscape of Ranui, would be the beginnings of my Master’s research, leading me to question: “How and why are these invisible social boundaries put in place? What is the role of architecture in their formation and the subsequent effect on social interaction, connection and well-being?”