Mix of real and imagined as Objectspace hosts Future Islands Kiwi architectural showcase

Future Islands, New Zealand's official entry in the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, opens Objectspace's new home.

Suspended from the ceiling of an industrial-looking building just off Ponsonby Rd, island-like forms float in the airy space dotted - some more liberally than others - by model buildings. Most of these hanging islands are white but one is spray-painted bright pink in memory of its creator, the late architect Rewi Thompson who, it is said, wanted to build a bright pink building but never did.

Future Islands showcases 55 New Zealand architectural projects, on 22 of these island-like forms, by local designers including architects, design graduates and students. The structures - several sprawling and corporate looking; others akin to tropical getaway accommodation - are a mix of the real and imagined.

Produced by a team led by architects Kathy Waghorn and Charles Walker, Future Islands was our entry at last year's Venice Architecture Biennale. Like the contemporary art biennale, it's held in alternate years - those when its bigger and higher-profile sibling takes a break.

NZ has been to the architecture biennale twice but Future Islands wasn't seen here before it travelled to Italy. Of the exhibition, Walker said: "Islands have always been seen as sites of possibility. They hold the promise of alternative ways of living, and that prospect is now more attractive, and necessary, than ever."

Given that, it seems apt for the work to be shown here for the first time at a new gallery space borne out of a desire to show the possible and the probable to best advantage. Objectspace, the country's only publicly funded craft, design and architecture gallery, opened the doors to its new Rose Rd premises yesterday.

Kim Paton, director of Objectspace Gallery.

Started in 2004, the gallery had outgrown its first home, the former ASB building on Ponsonby Rd; then Creative NZ announced a major increase in its core funding. Objectspace director Kim Paton says this made a move to larger premises possible so a search was launched to find a new space and fundraise for the shift.

In little over a year, the gallery raised $630,000 needed to transform a former warehouse into a new cultural hub for NZ design, with two main galleries, two additional exhibition spaces and a public programme and event space.

Paton says the success is due to help from philanthropy company Brown Bread, strategic partners My Art, Chartwell Trust, Resene and Ockham Residential and a broad community of other individuals and companies who support the project.

The willingness to back the project, coupled with additional CNZ funding, acknowledges the growth in craft and design-based practice during the past decade and the need for these disciplines to have a distinct home of their own.

"Consider the immense pressure and changes occurring on the built environment throughout Auckland and nationally, all of this national debate around urban planning, housing and land use," Paton says. "Design is utterly central to these conversations.
"I think we are almost disconnected from how connected we are to design. It's that experience of walking from one side of a city to another. How you navigate the streets, how you can cross a road and how, when you go into a public park, it feels. Does it feel dodgy? Does it feel safe? Does it feel like there's somewhere to sit?

"All of those things are totally design led and that's exactly the same with buildings. We all know what it's like to stand in a room and, without even thinking about it, for it not to feel right."

Paton has an extensive programme of exhibitions planned for the next two years from a range of creative disciplines, including a major ceramics exhibition and a show exploring the notion of interior design, domestic space and architecture. Jeweller Craig McIntosh, painter Kathy Berry and sculptor Glen Hayward will also hold solo exhibitions - the latter has carved a 1:1 replica of a 1976 Toyota out of recycled timber - while a major survey show will celebrate the contributions of industrial designer Peter Haythornthwaite.

"It's about creating exhibitions that speak the language of craft and design," Paton says. "I don't think we - audiences, art-going audiences - even have the language for experiencing art-based design shows in New Zealand. We just don't have access to that kind of work culturally in New Zealand so, for me, what Objectspace is absolutely aiming to be is the new home for those disciplines and to both create a physical space for people interested in and connected with those domains, so they can come and connect and be part of something, but also to speak to general audiences - to anyone and everyone - about those things."

Lowdown
What: Future Islands
Where & when: Objectspace, 13 Rose Rd, Ponsonby; until September 17