Research Round-up: the Architecture of the Leisure Class, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and the Ōtātara Arts Centre
New research from the Wellington Faculty of Architecture and Design Innovation contextualises the influential American economist Thorstein Veblen, investigates how Traditional Ecological Knowledge is a catalyst for urban landscape regeneration, and explains people’s attachment to a heritage place.
The Architecture of the Leisure Class: Thorstein Veblen and the University of Chicago
In The Architecture of the Leisure Class: Thorstein Veblen and the University of Chicago, Associate Dean of Postgraduate Research Joanna Merwood-Salisbury concludes that present-day academic literature overlooks how the immediate social environment of the American economist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) influenced his concept of ‘conspicuous consumption’.
Veblen is most famous for the concept of ‘conspicuous consumption’, the wasteful display of goods to demonstrate social superiority, in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class: And Economic Study in the Evolution of Social Institutions (1899).
Professor Merwood-Salisbury contextualises Veblen’s concept within his architectural context of the Gothic Revival-style University of Chicago and its role as an intellectual environment, a social institution, and an aesthetic manifestation of leisure-class values.
Veblen associated the revival of Gothic architecture with the regressive tastes of the capitalist descendants of warlike northern Europeans, and presented American culture as dominated by the desire to display wealth and position rather than to serve pragmatic needs.
Cross-cultural Rongoā healing: a landscape response to urban health
Cross-cultural Rongoā healing: a landscape response to urban health by Associate Dean of Academic Development at the Wellington Faculty of Architecture and Design Innovation Bruno Marques, Senior Lecturer at the Wellington School of Architecture Jacqueline McIntosh, and Summer Research Scholar Celia Hall details how Traditional Ecological Knowledge is a catalyst for urban landscape regeneration by incorporating the biophysical dimensions of place and environment.
Traditional Ecological Knowledge is what people learn from individual and communal experiences and oral narratives handed down through generations on how to live in balance with the environment. It defends that all things are connected, as no single entity can co-exist without its supportive web of interrelationships.
The research finds that using a Māori Rongoā Rākau (traditional Māori healing system) learning garden opens dialogue with both Māori tribes and Western planning officials and municipal authorities to explore cultural awareness and representation.
The research states that the “re-emerging interest in Rongoā Māori offers significant opportunities for local tribes to embrace their cultural history and support the sustainable practice of Rongoā Māori within the wider community.”
An Investigation into Heritage, Sustainability, and Place Attachment: The Ōtātara Case Study
New research titled An Investigation into Heritage, Sustainability, and Place Attachment: The Ōtātara Case Study from Professorial Research Fellow at the Wellington School of Architecture Brenda Vale, along with Dr Mazin Bahho and Dr Taciano L. Milfont, investigates the factors that explain people’s attachment to a heritage place, including the Māori population’s unique connections to land, while designing a sustainable project that looks to the future.
Through focus groups with individuals who refurbished a log cabin of the former Ōtātara Arts Centre site at Ōtātara Pā in Hawke’s Bay, the research finds an attachment to the place that gives a unique heritage and historic quality which has outlasted the arts centre. The attachment emerges when the participants highlight the power of the context as an influence and inspiration for their ideas for the project design.
The research states, “the physical world of the site where people used to live, although relatively small, has sustained people’s spiritual roots and hence has now allowed others to maintain these and their connections with the past.”
The refurbishment of the log cabin demonstrates not just how to make a sustainable building, but of the influence of the intangible human values of the former Ōtātara Arts Centre.