MIKE THOMAS
INTERVIEW
IMAGES Meg Back
Mike
Thomas is a Principal at Jasmax. He has led their landscape team for
the last eight years after relocating from a four year stint in Hong
Kong and China where he led teams of designers on international projects
and design competitions. He has over 17 years’ experience as a
landscape architect, working predominantly in New Zealand. Mike was the
founder and manager of Jasmax’s Christchurch branch for three years.
Now, back in Auckland, he has an overview of landscape design projects
throughout New Zealand, including NZTA and Auckland Transport projects,
campus masterplans, streetscapes and civic plazas. He has a particular
focus on Christchurch where he is contributing to the design of The
Terraces, Burwood Hospital, St Andrews College and others.
Xsection: What was your first memory of place?
MT:
Oh crikey that’s kind of interesting. I remember making a startling
discovery when I was at Lincoln University. I was an adult student, I
started at 26, and we were doing landscape geology with Phil Tonkin -
famous guy; really, really good. He enlightened me to the fact that
everything is always on the move. You have to slow your thinking down to
geological scale, and when you do that you can understand how things
are actually put together. So we ended up going on a field trip in the
Southern Alps and all of a sudden I saw an alluvial fan that was the
same shape as the hole in the mountain above it. And it just went
“ding”, okay that’s how it works and so that’s how this place got here,
so it wasn’t in any way manufactured. It was just, I guess, a light bulb
moment where I thought okay, I get this, I’ve got to start thinking in
geological time frames from here on in. I think doing that helps you
very much understand place and how something got there. Its story, and
its temporal nature; it helped me a lot with designs from then on. I
started to think of everything as fluid and in a frozen state. Or
everything is in a frozen state and some things are less frozen, so it’s
all on the move - you’re just capturing it at that time. So place is
very ephemeral, you’re living in it for that moment and then it will be
something else. And I guess you can just speed that up if you bring
culture into it.
Xsection:
So when you are thinking of place, our next question is pretty much
what you were referring to: how do you approach the process of design
given what you just said?
MT:
On the process of design I think we’ve got a really big responsibility
as designers of the landscape. I think we’ve actually got the biggest
portfolio of them all, and you know, I don’t say it aloud too much but I
look at buildings sometimes as holes in the landscape. There’s a
landscape and then a building just came along, so they’re the things
that came later and they’re our construct and we may not all agree with
how they’re done, but they’re a kind of a representation of who we are.
So I think it’s our job to keep the memory of places going. So it would
be very easy, if we weren’t here doing what we are doing, to lose all
touch of who we are and where we are, and all of that. There would be no
reference back to the nature of place. So it’s our job to look between
the pores and the cells and everything and see what place is all about.
We should be able to describe it and then respond to that, not make up
something new. It’s your interpretation - that’s the design; so the
cleverness is in being good about saying I understand, I can describe
this place. Then the fun is in what I do with that info.
Xsection: Do you look back on past projects and think about how they’re working, and how you could have done it better?
MT: Always.
And it’s always in the implementation. I have no regrets over the
ideation or the interpretation. I always have regrets over the other
half of the project, how I converted that into the built outcome. It’s
pretty much always a disappointing process because your expectations are
way up here and it just gets chip, chip, chipped away until you end up
with something and go ah, that will do, I’m worn down, I’m officially
worn out and I can’t fight anymore. It might be different in some
practices. Other companies are probably different because they take
complete control of their projects, but they work in medium size
projects. A lot of ours are run by professional clients. That’s their
job, they’re clients and they get project managers in and you’ve got all
of the engineers and all these people 2, 3, 4, 5 times removed from
your thinking and by the time you get to the contractor there’s a big
gulf between you and them. And it’s really so hard to get close to them
and nobody’s going to pay you to do that.
We’ve
got one in Christchurch. We’ve got this really beautiful idea to bring
the memory back into the place, but they want all the stone to be carved
in China. No! This is all about craft, about love of craft. We want
someone with a hammer and chisel crafting every tiny bit, and we want
people to know that. We don’t want it done by a machine or by a person
that has no concept of Victorian architectural heritage in Christchurch.
It’s a fight we have all the time. Mark Whyte is the guy we want to get
to do all the stone work. He’s probably the leading stonemason and
artist. So we’re getting him, but they’ll probably look at it and say
this stone’s $250 a sq metre, Chinese bluestone is $90 landed on shore,
and with a smaller carbon footprint.
It’s
all down to money and the idea is not important, it just gets watered
down. I think the secret is in the quality of your communication, that’s
everything really. I won’t say it’s easy to come up with the ideas, but
you’ve got to read the landscape, come up with the idea, and then
that’s half of it. The other half is how you communicate and get
everyone on board. If you can’t communicate through words, imagery, your
drawings, and your passion and what you say, then all of that’s for
nothing. Another big chunk of it is how to get it built, and if you’re
not really clever down that end then it will all be for nothing. I sound
gloomy, but we’ve just had all sorts of knocks in the teeth from never
quite getting things built the way we want.
Xsection: Back to Christchurch, do you think building in memory will be essential for the sense of place down there?
MT:
I think so. For the Terraces project, the Oxford Strip, there’s a bunch
of buildings that we’re doing and a big courtyard in the middle and
some lanes. And I think that one day everyone’s going to go, shit this
is a nice shiny city, I love this, but what was it again? Because they
do that now, and (I’ve only just moved back up to Auckland so I know
Christchurch really well) everyone feels guilty because they look at
somewhere and go, well where am I, and what was there? And they feel bad
because they can’t remember what was there, we’re going to lose all
that, and we need to build memories.
We
kind of have to build false memories really because there’s no other
way to do it. What I wanted to do was actually build it out of recycled
materials, but that’s just too hard for people, that’s just a bit too
adventurous, so what we’re going to do is recycle some bits. Mark’s
taking bits of buildings all the time, and we’re going to slice them up
and put them in, hopefully. His job is, he goes around replacing bits of
the Arts Centre and the Cathedral and all of that. We’re going to get
bits of those, and we’re going to make new bits. We’re gong to put them
in the ground and then wear them down like an old set of steps. We’re
going to make memory. Engineer which ones we want to wear and become
dishes, catch water and get a bit mouldy, or bits like that, and others are going to be hard wearing so that you get a sense of old and new, worn and rustic.
Xsection: Yep. So you’re almost making new memories…
MT: Yeah,
so you have to engineer them, we couldn’t see any other way of doing
it. I think for something like that, the names will be the cut lettering
in the stone, so that you know where you are and there’s all these
other clues. You wouldn’t do that in Auckland but you’d do that in
Christchurch because there’s a custom of that. There’s a lot of hand
carved elements, it’s a very crafted city, and it’s the best example of
Neo-Gothic architecture in the world. It was the biggest collection of
it, and most of it’s all gone now.
Xsection: Well up-cycling. It’s very trendy at the moment.
MT: But
the problem with Christchurch was first they were just smashing
everything down, and then pouring it into the harbour for the new wharf
extension and they’re probably still doing it. All the buildings have to
be crushed up on site and put in a big pile and then taken away.
Nothing gets pulled apart, oh there are a couple of people who were
pulling apart houses, but commercial buildings are being smashed to bits
of rubble and then taken away. It’s a real shame. They were beautiful
but all those memories are disappearing. If you actually took a building
apart it’s got to be worth so much more than intact, each bit of it you
know…
I
think we do need to redefine the city, but in a positive way, as a nod
to what was good. For example when we went for the Avon River project we
- I should have bought it with me… [starts drawing]. There was this
diagram that Gary did a beautiful job of producing, and it went like
this… The idea was it was a timeline, and there were these icons. This
is about the Avon River and this is now. The Avon River is now a tourist
destination or something to look at, a back drop. Whereas before it was
food, it was transportation, it had spiritual value, it had all these
other sorts of values, and we could bring all of those back. And then
there’s the ecology, the aquatic life, and getting boats on it. So what
we’re saying is that this point here, now is the start of a new
relationship on the River - and it’s a shared one. And Ngāi Tahu comes
back in. So you could say at this point here Ngāi Tahu was told to
bugger off and we took it over and started putting in waste, and at this
point it started to became a conveyor of waste and all that sort of
thing. So our thing was about a new relationship with the river, if
there’s any step to change in Christchurch it needs to be that. What we
discovered was that Christchurch is actually a system, and the Avon
isn’t just a river, it’s a system. That became pertinent because you’re
never more than a metre or so away from water wherever you’re standing.
It’s right below you, flowing, 40-80 year old crystal clear, freezing
cold, water. And you can dig a hole and it will bubble up, anywhere in
the city, it’s amazing. You’re standing on a system the whole time but
nobody knows that. So if you did something with that, like the Romans
did or like in Italy; there are little springs popping up in the middle
of plazas and you walk up and put your bottle in and you’ve got fresh
water. That was our vision for the city; to have that popping up all
over the city so you can go anywhere and get off your bike, fill up your
bottle and off you go, it would have been awesome.
Xsection: It would give you real guardianship too, you’re not going to mess with that water if you like to drink it.
MT: See
I would go to a city like that; I’d like to travel and go to somewhere
like that. Then building on other memories, we wanted to turn the city
into an arboretum. It’s already kind of there, there’s loads of space
for natural habitat, though not everybody buys into it, it’s a shared
culture. To turn the whole thing into an arboretum would be of world
interest. If you could go to Christchurch and travel through this huge
tree museum, it’s kind of there already. You could take just a bit
further, so those are the kind of ideas. It was all about building new
memories, saying - right, what’s good here? Let’s make that better.
