Ash Keating in Christchurch. Photo courtesy SCAPE.
In 2010, Melbourne artist Ash Keating produced Gardensity, an installation for the SCAPE Biennial of Art in Public Space.
Gardensity took the form of a fictional property development and was originally supposed to comment on Christchurch’s ambition to encourage more people to live in the city centre, but took on untold significance when the September quake hit.
Keating and collaborator, architect Dorian Farr, from Studio 505, explain the ideas behind the project.
All images are taken from Gardensity (2010) by Ash Keating in collaboration with Dorian Farr, Patrick Gavin, Chris Toovey and David Campbell.
SIMON SELLARS: How did you come up with the concept for Gardensity?
ASH KEATING: In late 2009 I was invited to do a proposal for SCAPE. We had to respond to this territorial rationale, which was basically about challenging the fabric of Christchurch and coming up with possibilities for public artwork in the city centre. There was a gap site, a vacant site, in Cathedral Square, and Gardensity was originally going to work physically there, like an actual three-dimensional sculptural installation.
However, it became clear that we weren’t going to be able to get permission to use any vacant site, so I started to rethink how I could do the project without making physical artwork, and that’s when it became an animation, designed as if it was put together by a developer, alongside a website and Facebook page.
SS: You then changed focus: instead of commenting on possibilities for public art, you began to respond to plans for the city centre. Pre-quake, there were 8000 people living in the CBD and the council wanted 30,000 by 2026. How did you critique that?
DORIAN FARR: Well, looking at Cathedral Square, we saw it was potentially a great space but lacked any civic vibe at all. It seemed just a tourist spot where you’d take some pictures of the cathedral and move on. With Gardensity, the idea was sort of like a vertical master plan off a very small base. There would be a series of buildings linked vertically, creating a visual epicentre for the city.
We were really thinking about this medium of visualisation and how useful it is to architects, developers and politicians to explain and present ideas to the public.
AK: We were responding to the plan honestly but also exaggerating, I guess, as a provocation. That’s why certain elements are quite grand in scale, alongside others offering public use – digital public libraries, winter gardens and student apartments. It’s a mixed-use proposal: people staying, working, studying and living in the city.
“Gardensity proposes one future vision for inner-city living in Christchurch. It is a contemporary art + architecture + media collaboration in response to Christchurch City Council’s ‘Project: Central City’ – a plan to increase the population living in Christchurch’s central city core, from less than 8,000 currently, to more than 30,000 living within the Four Avenues by 2026.”
SS: I’m told Christchurch was badly in need of such a program. Apparently, there was too much retail space and not enough dedicated to salubrious social interaction. Did you look to successful models from other cities?
AK: Not really, although if you placed our building in the cityscape of Beijing or Seoul it might look like something that could be built in six months’ time, but because it’s out of context, it seems absurd and not necessarily possible.
It’s not unlike the Guggenheim phenomenon, or Federation Square: this place that draws a hell of a lot of negative comment but is also photographic and involves the public.
SS: Of course, Federation Square was attacked for rubbing up rudely against Melbourne’s heritage fabric, yet became accepted over time, absorbed into the mainstream. A project that can spark that kind of public debate about what is good architecture is mostly valuable.
DF: I’ve got to say that we did mean it to look a bit ridiculous. I wouldn’t want anyone to think that that was our idea of what architecture could be! We gave the renders some detail and put materials on it to make it look real, but it wasn’t about any of those moves. We were really pushing up to the edge of that.
SS: How long was the website in the public domain before the first quake hit?
AK: It was online probably only a week or two before, as was the Facebook page, which had a few hundred people signed up at that point. Now it’s got 4500 and a lot of them are ex-pats, who see the page and think it’s run by the city of Christchurch, become ‘friends’ with us and then realise they’re in this project – our project!
SS: That’s interesting in terms of the animation. When you screened it in the faux developer’s showroom outside the art gallery, it must have been challenging for locals to see it just across the road from ruined buildings. Was it satisfying to actually draw people into that concept via the Facebook page, encouraging interaction as if it was real?
AK: That was part of the illusion we wanted to create. I wanted it to be like a developer-style showroom set up out the front of any gap site anywhere. It would have been really surreal if the earthquake didn’t happen.
It was meant to showcase this huge new development, in this fake showroom in Cathedral Square, but then the February quake hit and the CBD was bent out of shape. All bets were off.
DF: Something we hoped to come out of it with was a discussion about the city, and public ownership of the city, about how people feel about their public spaces.
SS: What sort of issues informed discussion of public space pre-quake?
AK: Well, Christchurch needed to be more pedestrian friendly – it was very car-orientated. And then there were parts that were either all industrial or all superstore. It was all about challenging and rethinking how Christchurch operated as a city.
SS: After the quake, your online forum became a conductor for discussion about the city. It seems a conversation people wanted to have, given Christchurch’s traumatised state. It’s good that the revised Central City Plan has drawn on so much public opinion, because it obviously taps into that same sentiment.
AK: That’s it. But it took the second earthquake for that to really hit home, and for the council to realise that, I think. Before the first earthquake, you could tell there had been this huge problem with transparency and the council not listening to people.
And then they moved slowly towards the new plan, and since then it’s been rapid change, although the process is still not perfect. They did eventually bring in a lot of architects to discuss what was right for the city…
DF: …but whether they will actually implement that is another matter.
AK: At least they brought the public into the conversation, and they’re smart to do so, because if people are going to stay in Christchurch they need to feel empowered. I think most people had felt that the council had previously made all the decisions without conferring with anyone.
SS: Do you have optimism for the rebuilding process?
AK: The thing about my role with the website and forum was always to be a facilitator and not present my own views, because that would turn people off. I’m an outsider, so I don’t necessarily think my views as someone that doesn’t live there are entirely relevant.
SS: OK, to rephrase: is there optimism in the air?
AK: People are definitely optimistic that their city will get back on its feet, although there is a sense it’s being rushed through way too quickly. People haven’t even been able to pick up their belongings before having the whole city replanned for them, and also they don’t necessarily have the time and resources and energy to be able to work.
SS: Ash, you were in the city when the first quake hit. Tell me about that.
AK: I was staying in the third level of the Arts Centre as an artist in residence. There was one other person staying there, and at 4.30am we were literally thrown out of bed. I tried to get to a doorway but was thrown out of that, and then I ran down the stairs and was thrown halfway down the stairs! I just thought the quake was going to keep going and get bigger and bigger, and then it stopped. At first light, I went to the central city, took photos and had a look at it all.
That was before it was cordoned off an hour later. I went back to the Arts Centre a few days later and a few heavy aftershocks happened, so they said I couldn’t stay there anymore and put me up at the YMCA. I was there for three weeks and every night the building would shake…
DF: I spoke to him on Skype and he was white faced, emotionally shaken. But you know, we were really scared that people were going to want to kill us, we really were, because we had designed this fictional building that looked like it was going to fall over anyway, even without an earthquake, and the next thing the quake happens. The whole thing kind of touched on people’s nerves about fragile buildings.
SS: What made you stick with it?
AK: I stayed around because I just thought everyone would want to talk about the future of the city within hours of it happening. Previously, we’d hoped Gardensity would be this catalyst for debate about the future of the city, and then the quake trumped us. So, at that point I stayed on and went to town meetings and promoted the project and was trying to get people aware of it.
DF: Let’s be honest, putting aside all the destruction for a second, Gardensity did become more interesting in the context of the earthquake. Being online, it was unobtrusive but accessible.
SS: The public reaction was strong – responses in your online archive run to almost 50,000 words!
AK: Yes. There are people that clearly think that this is a project that is going to be built in the city and just can’t believe it. And then there are others that really get it, who think it’s a great idea to push the boundaries of what the future of the city might be like. Almost everyone had an opinion on the architecture…
DF: The design for the cityscape was ‘play’ based – in colour, in form – like a set of disparate objects picked up off a kindergarten floor. It was meant to engage people on a really simple level, not a sophisticated one. We really wanted to get an emotional reaction.
Ash Keating’s SCAPE artist talk. “Ash Keating’s delivery of Gardensity as part of the 6th SCAPE could not be more apt or timely for Christchurch. First designed prior to the initial September 4 Canterbury earthquake, Gardensity is envisioned as a fictional property development which houses new condensed, sustainable living located in Cathedral Square.”
SS: Regarding the theme of the SCAPE panel ‘Imagined Futures’, which you participated in, can public art help people re-engage with the city? Can that happen in Christchurch?
AK: I’d like for that to happen in Christchurch, but I guess I’m less optimistic about that than I am about the city being rebuilt in a short amount of time. I’m sure that the city will be resurrected well before they envisage bringing something creative in like public art.
In a place like Christchurch, it comes down to the fact that it’s all about tight budgets now. Everything planned or proposed will be under the microscope because it’s a city on its knees, and anything that’s done needs to be useful and responding to that environment. I just don’t think that the creatives can win the argument.
SS: In your archive, a lot of people saw Melbourne as a model for the rebuilding of Christchurch.
DF: Yes. People do admire the moves made in Melbourne over the last 20 years: centralisation, which is probably the big one; the cafés; the interstitial spaces; the rustic finishes; and the celebration of all of that.
SS: But how are they going to reinvigorate interstitial space in Christchurch when all the buildings have been knocked down? There are no laneways anymore.
AK: I think it’s something that people from Christchurch had in their mind before the quake, that Christchurch was heading towards some- thing like Melbourne. Some of the laneways had elements of that. There were interesting little cafés down back streets, like a small-town version of Melbourne. Christchurch had this ownership – it was more ‘Melbourne’, while Auckland is more ‘Sydney’.
It’s something people are, I guess, hanging on to in hope. But you have to have more people living in the city for it to operate like Melbourne. That’s what the Central City Plan, pre-quake, was about.
SS: What’s been the most striking aspect of your time there?
AK: Well, the biggest thing for me is the resilience of the people. They just have to continue to live through aftershocks daily. I was mentally unstable after three-and-a-half weeks of after- shocks, but to stay there and live through that for over a year – that’s toughness.
SS: Resilience keeps cropping up in discussions about Christchurch. In terms of architecture – or city-making, or place-making – what does resilience mean to you?
AK: I think of it as having a resilient attitude in whatever you build and make, whatever spaces you create – that they matter, that they leave something, that they’re relevant to the time, but built for the long term. But ‘place-making’ – I hate that term! It’s just a buzzword. They actually have this Bunnings-style place called Place Making in Christchurch. It’s really funny. I thought they were taking the piss!
SS: As an artist/architect team, do you think there should be more cross-fertilisation?
DF: Yes, definitely. I think architects can easily become self-involved rather than engage with a public audience. So many of the ideas can seem convoluted to the majority of people, and don’t, perhaps, offer much other than visual stimulus. But that’s changing. Architecture needs to be infected by other things, and challenged, because it’s such a complex profession.
There are so many ongoing concerns, including the financial side of any building project and getting things through. There are so many negotiations, and the more you know the more it locks down what your creative outcomes can be, and you can only address that by mixing with different ideas and people. Artists and musicians, I think, have a freedom of thought that architects must envy.
www.gardensity.co.nz
www.scapebiennial.org.nz
