Museum of Lost Christchurch

This project followed on from an installation from 2013 – entitled Model Home – presented at the 5th Auckland Triennial. That installation centered on a one-to-one paper model of a house, one of the key goals behind the design being to minimize the waste created when it was demolished at the end of the exhibition. The paper walls and roof simply went into the recycle bin, and the slender support frames were to be disassembled so the timber could be re-used by architecture students.

However, just as the jumble of old frames was about to be dismantled, we received a last-minute invitation to present an installation on the theme of the rebuilding of Christchurch at Design Shanghai 2013, a massive exhibition held at the Powerstation of Art in Shanghai. As seems often to be the case in China, there was a huge space to fill, but very little money and even less time available.

With no time to gather material on the Christchurch rebuild, we proposed a literal rebuilding of our pile of demolished timber frames, hoping to embody both the sense of loss and the energy to reconstruct that characterizes Christchurch’s post-disaster situation. The timber frames were sawn in half to fit them into a shipping container, and some were given quick modifications to create design flexibility. The frames were then sent to China – they made the last possible ship only by minutes – and the design challenge of how to use them was addressed.

The installation was reimagined as a paper building site. A new configuration for the frames was developed, the new structure modeled on the many Victorian timber gothic structures that had suffered in the ‘quakes. Every aspect of the design and construction sought to minimize costs, had to be able to be carried to Shanghai as luggage, and be assembled with minimal equipment. The walls were clad in huge versions of construction drawings - printed on standard 80gsm printer paper, hand folded and joined with double-sided tape. These showed the building under repair, complete with construction workers, materials, tools, and even a red sticker on the door. The roof was shown still under construction, alongside tools, a boombox, and a worker eating his lunch. The interior was filled with paper building materials and equipment, as well as super-thin saw horses and a paper contractors table bearing plans of the paper building. The installation – which could be read as either a ghost of lost Christchurch or a projection of the new Christchurch – was a literal, but full-scale document of the current state of the city.