A Living Building for the Chinese Diaspora of Aotearoa

It is quite apparent that our planet and our very being is in a state of disrepair. My thesis seeks to answer the question: How can the built environment heal nature and a community?

More specifically, can a framework such as the Living Building Challenge bring healing to our physical environment and to the Chinese community of New Zealand? How can this be done through an Anglican spirituality?

There is a congregation of about forty to fifty worshipping at the Anglican Chinese Mission. The building which they worship in is not just a church but a community building with a multi-purpose basketball court and hall equipped with commercial kitchen and stage used by many groups throughout the week.

The building was designed in 1976 by Bill Alington and being a signature design of its day as well as distinctly Chinese, spoke aloud, where Chinese had often been denied, to give them a place in a country that they had settled in and wished to call their own. It is a well-loved building to this day. This particular church wishes to reach the entire diverse Chinese New Zealand population, and ought to be a much larger congregation considering the nationwide proportion of Chinese Christians.

A healthy community building would also be attractive to the wider New Zealand population being used for local and national events, a place in the words of the vicar, Reverend Henry Yap, “to be respected and honoured by the nation”.

Taking the premier regenerative framework in the industry today, the Living Building Challenge, among the sustainable frameworks available, the aim is to design through an iterative Design by Research (Research-led) process of analog and digital methods, a new church and community building for the site located on the corner of Tasman and Rugby Streets, Mt Cook. The result is a project that hopefully answers a primary need for this community which is one of belonging. Also, it is a project that hopefully answers secondary needs that are spiritual and are for fellowship, and then also answers an identified desire for this community to build sustainably.