Kopupaka Reserve

Kopupaka Reserve
Local Projects on the global stage
 

Kopupaka Reserve represents a design-led approach that integrates community amenities with engineering and ecology.

The humble strawberry is an unlikely victim of the changing face of Auckland city yet, in west Auckland, the acres of strawberry fields that once defined the landscape are being replaced with the infrastructure of a new town centre at Westgate, part of an Auckland Council strategy to cope with a predicted population boom. Interpreting the existing site hydrology, the notion of weaving histories and overlapping functions together is the dominant design narrative of the park, with a concept of 'thread, weave and gather' articulated in physical form through the strawberry furrow, merging tributary and constructed wetlands of the park. This is a hybrid park, an integration of infrastructure with the natural.