Kāhui Whetū
Toi iho
Toi iho
Jacob Manu Scott
- e
- c Scott Design, Mauvan Scott Architects Ltd, Hihiko Ltd
- region Te Tai Rāwhiti
Discipline and Expertise:
Our legacy needs to be considerate, good for people, good for life on earth. Exploring Mauri, empowering whānau, supporting Tino Rangatiratanga, whanaungatanga and establishing tikanga for holistically enhanced living.
I ahu mai i te kore.
To go to things without answers. To begin from a space of Te Kore, the point of nothingness, from there everything is possible.
Te Matau-a-Māui is our wharenui at Matahiwi Marae. The Māui narrative is key to my identity and development, especially Māui as the innovator game changer personality. My kaupapa is ever evolving. I enjoy a strong heritage with my father John Scott, architect. My great-grandfather, JB Blake, who was a surveyor and Māori land court scribe back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. My grandmother, the matriarch, my son, and an architect daughter. Five generations now with full-time lives and attention devoted to hands-on practice in the whenua, built environment space, whare taonga, contemporary Māori Art & Design and Māori Arts Education.
Within Ngā Aho, we're involved in conceiving and actualising. I remember when Carin Wilson got this piece of rope and laid it out on a table, and then along that rope, these aho, they're all unwinding. You can imagine a broken bit of rope that's been under tension and snapped with strands or aho hanging down from it. And then along that, there's a timeline and what's happened in terms of development along those timelines over the period, over the length of that bit of rope. What it illustrates is that there are significant points along that timeline which caused that fraying.
Our culture is really fragile. So fragile that now a key reference for everything is the marae. You go back to the marae to get the essence of what things are about. It’s worth thinking historically about those aho, but also about which bits need to be reconnected. There's a group of people who you don't have to educate to do something. They're equipped, they're ready, and they're primed. When we activate that button, special things can happen that need to happen.
It's imperative to take away the whole idea of a one-size-fits-all, and utilise the opportunity to encourage and support exploration and difference, and look for moments of change in that.
One of the big, pressing issues at this moment is housing. There's a whole complexity of social health, environmental placemaking, concepts of people having a relationship with the whenua, building whanau, and their own kind of connections to the land. All of those kinds of things need to be strategically thought about in the design mix. The system is putting people into boxes. We need to unbox it, and Ngā Aho can do that collectively.
Our legacy needs to be considerate, good for people, good for life on earth. Exploring Mauri, empowering whānau, supporting Tino Rangatiratanga, whanaungatanga and establishing tikanga for holistically enhanced living.
Within Ngā Aho, we're involved in conceiving and actualising. I remember when Carin Wilson got this piece of rope and laid it out on a table, and then along that rope, these aho, they're all unwinding. You can imagine a broken bit of rope that's been under tension and snapped with strands or aho hanging down from it. And then along that, there's a timeline and what's happened in terms of development along those timelines over the period, over the length of that bit of rope. What it illustrates is that there are significant points along that timeline which caused that fraying.
Our culture is really fragile. So fragile that now a key reference for everything is the marae. You go back to the marae to get the essence of what things are about. It’s worth thinking historically about those aho, but also about which bits need to be reconnected. There's a group of people who you don't have to educate to do something. They're equipped, they're ready, and they're primed. When we activate that button, special things can happen that need to happen.
It's imperative to take away the whole idea of a one-size-fits-all, and utilise the opportunity to encourage and support exploration and difference, and look for moments of change in that.
One of the big, pressing issues at this moment is housing. There's a whole complexity of social health, environmental placemaking, concepts of people having a relationship with the whenua, building whanau, and their own kind of connections to the land. All of those kinds of things need to be strategically thought about in the design mix. The system is putting people into boxes. We need to unbox it, and Ngā Aho can do that collectively.
Our legacy needs to be considerate, good for people, good for life on earth. Exploring Mauri, empowering whānau, supporting Tino Rangatiratanga, whanaungatanga and establishing tikanga for holistically enhanced living.