A guest post from Ken­no…

Wai­t­an­gi Park, yeah, sigh, it leaves me flat. Be warned, that will become the most overused descrip­tion of the next few years. It’s an urban space sur­round­ing the mar­vel­lous Te Papa and there­by it’s not sim­ply a Welling­ton space but a space that should might­i­ly reflect the nation­al char­ac­ter.

Well, if the idea was to reflect bland con­ser­v­a­tive con­formism and lock-step sim­ple mind­ed­ness with all the indi­vid­u­al­i­ty and self expres­sion of a school­girl uni­form, then it will suc­ceed. I, for one, thought we might want to reflect oth­er, per­haps more appeal­ing aspects of the nation­al char­ac­ter. Don’t get me wrong, this place would real­ly wow them in Nel­son or Timaru, but, this city is a lit­tle beyond that, a bit more mature, slight­ly more cos­mopoli­tan and far­ther away from pig-dogs and pad­docks. Right? God, I was real­ly try­ing to under­state the case.

Okay, it’s flat. It looks like it was done on the cheap. It could­n’t have been though, you can not bury that many meters of con­crete and not spend a lot of mon­ey. There is obvi­ous­ly some kind of sur­plus of con­crete that had to be dis­posed of that no one was telling us about. How­ev­er, as a park that is also an excess of con­crete, it does­n’t sep­a­rate the city from the sea, like the bru­tal­ist Frank Kitts fortress park. Who are try­ing to repel from our board­ers with that any­way?

The con­strained path­ways of Wai­t­an­gi Park appear as if peo­ple should look at them but not walk on them. Cer­tain­ly, there is to be no lack­adaisi­cal mean­der­ing, hand­hold­ing qui­et romanc­ing, joy­ous romp­ing in the spring sun­shine and delight­ed play­ful­ness or any oth­er form of recre­ation­al friv­o­li­ty. This is a seri­ous park, an edu­ca­tion­al park that has but two pur­pos­es. The first is seem­ing­ly to employ gen­er­a­tions of broom push­ers and rake pullers, there’s a whole quar­ry of loose agraget in there. The sec­ond and most educa­tive pur­pose of the park, I shall return to in a moment, with the same pompous arbi­trarism that the park’s design­ers seem to crave. You see, dis­ci­pline implies your dark desire to be con­trolled and you can get that now in a pub­lic space — it’s a won­der.

Wai­t­an­gi Park miss­es on many things such a piv­otal park should do, like man­age bik­ers, skaters and jog­gers on their own paths there­by allow­ing us bipeds to remain so. The sheep fenced chil­dren’s area is a third of the size it should be. It’s also as var­ied and inter­est­ing as a bowl of por­ridge, but nice­ly close to the toi­lets. The skate park, well, I’ll leave that alone, there should be a place where the new gen­er­a­tion, can inflict neu­ro­log­i­cal dam­age at tax­pay­ers expense. The large rock arrange­ment, I just don’t get. It’s not a rock, it’s a sculp­ture because it is but­tressed by thick iron pipes, or it’s a rock the Earth Quake Com­mis­sion would only approve with thick iron pipes hold­ing it up, or it’s an iron­ic state­ment, like drop­ping the screw of a ship into a hole filled with agraget. Maybe it’s the birth of a new style of land­scape archi­tec­ture, Mon­typython-juxa­po­si­tion­al­ism.

Now, back to order. You’ve seen chil­dren cramped into a hold­ing pen, watched the future of our coun­try inflict brain dam­age and pon­dered over why giant rocks need indus­tri­al sup­port. You’ve had enough fun for the day. Now, you need to be told a few things. This park, with all the exu­ber­ance of a failed geog­ra­phy teacher who was too live­ly to teach Church School, is here to edu­cate you. It knows bet­ter than you, so look, don’t touch, don’t talk, just learn and go away. The west­ern end is some kind of les­son, fash­ioned in sort of a Unit­ed Nations Aqua­cul­ture dis­play that would have done the six­ties eco­log­i­cal move­ment proud.

Hordes of tourists and locals a like can look over the raw rust­ing iron of a pre­tend ship’s hull, and see grass, a huge expanse of the stuff. Grass that grows in water, grass that grows in sand, grass that grows in peb­bles, grass that grows in stones. Yes, grass, the most ver­sa­tile form of cel­lu­lous on earth today. Now look. All the grass is in straight lines, well ordered grass, no grass grow­ing out­side the lines, qui­et respectable grass that knows its place. Flour­ish my chil­dren, only keep in step. On the east­ern side, things are a bit more lib­er­al. Yes, there is more grass there, but it’s arranged in a wild, cre­ative, why almost a wan­ton, dare I say, nat­ur­al way. On the east side edged up between the con­crete foot­paths is a pre­tend coast­line. It’s the coast­line that would be there if they let the park hit the sea. You could think this to your­self. Yes, fac­ing the oppo­site way around, there is this pre­tend grassy coast­line where the grass grows all the way from the stones, through the peb­bles and into the water. It makes you think.

It made me think this stag­nant grass-clogged water will turn into a marsh in the sum­mer and stink. Ah, but that’s the mes­sage, an uncon­trolled unordered col­lec­tion allowed to express its nature will only revert to the wild prim­i­tive stink of nature. Ah, but grass is a metaphor for the cit­i­zen­ry. What pith! It’s a hard les­son, but it’s not the last.

There is one last les­son and one more vast expanse of, you guessed it, grass. This time how­ev­er, it is the grass of the Christchurch front gar­den, sans the pick­et fence. This huge open space, I swear it would sup­port three hun­dred sheep or an equiv­a­lent sized dairy herd, is there for you, but not for your plea­sure, no, for your eru­di­tion. Obvi­ous­ly it’s some sort of gigan­tic field for pub­lic per­for­mances — they’ll have to fix the drainage before any­one will sit down on it though. It’s backed by a large build­ing which ensures you will pay atten­tion and not let your lazy mind wan­der off by look­ing at the har­bour. Like those schools they have in some towns where the win­dows are blocked up to keep lit­tle imag­i­na­tions from form­ing.

At present, the build­ing is not just an atten­tion deficit deflec­tor, it’s a, you guessed it, a pub­lic edu­ca­tion poster hold­er. If you were to sit on the sod­den grass, while your bot­tom-half becomes increas­ing sub­merged in the brine, your eyes can not miss the weird­ly rhetor­i­cal Civ­il Defence ques­tion. Would you get through? There is a five sto­ry high pic­ture of a Tsuna­mi behind the writ­ing.

It’s com­plete­ly unnerv­ing. While sink­ing into water, your view of the ocean blocked, you are remind­ed that you can’t even see it com­ing. From where you are sit­ting, which is so low and flat, even the three hun­dred sheep that could live on that space would know they are wet wool if the wave hits. Yikes, this is not just twist­ed irony, it some kind of pho­bia induc­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­gram­ming. Ah, but there again, there must be a les­son there, too.

It just a slight chal­lenge to try to describe the over­all effect of the place. It’s clear­ly some type of neo-social­ist Peo­ple’s Park with Pur­pose, but it tries not to exert itself or be not too bland. You could­n’t say, it’s Sovi­et, for instance, it’s not grand enough or proud enough, a march­ing order of the New Zealand Defence force in full dress would look quite out of place, then again so would a fam­i­ly of pic­nick­ers. It’s a dry and bland kind of social­ist space, sort of a post-colo­nial reac­tionary style, like maybe Mex­i­co, Bolivia or per­haps Argenti­na might try to pull off. What’s Kiwi about this mas­sive park in the Cap­i­tal sur­round­ing our Nation­al Trea­sure store? You got me, unless it’s the stuff I men­tioned.