The Benefits of Looking Up (The Secret Observation Deck on Wakefield St)

BY SALLY CONOR

Cities are prismatic. They change with the light and reflect new qualities from every angle. Auckland is a city of hidden surfaces - at times it can seem dull and grainy, with its character leached and corroded by commerce, sprawl and the blight of apartment buildings like limescale on the surface of some bright blade. But at other times, and with the right guide, it is radiant and crystalline. Those of us who love Auckland know its freckles and foibles: we know its crannies and sparkling moments; we seek out the sides of the prism that reflect the best light. And we know that there will always be new discoveries to make us fall in love with it all over again.

I have a friend whose great talent is for seeking out these ways to see the ordinary through entirely new eyes – when you spend time with her, you find life takes on new urgency and lustre, possibilities open up before you where you thought there were only blank walls. One day recently, she took me on a serpentine walk through town, promising to reveal a great new secret of Auckland. Like Alice’s white rabbit, she led me through a doorway and a tunnel of sorts (in this case, an upward journey through a lift-shaft to the seventeenth floor) and out onto a deserted rooftop Wonderland of mouldering turf, weird box gardens of aloes, and an unexpectedly bright panorama of our city. She had brought me to an observation deck, poorly disguised a pseudo-garden of the lowest possible maintenance, with seating and places to walk, sheltered areas for viewing and… that is all. No one else was there, and it felt dreamlike, nonsensical… a place straight out of Lewis Carroll in fact, verging on pointlessness in its under-use, if it weren’t for the quite extraordinary perspective of Auckland that it offered.

From the skytower, Auckland becomes a flat mosaic crawling with puny movement. From this angle, Auckland retains its dimensions but presents a weathered, weary face of lumpen rooftops, back alleys, silence and assorted architectural triumph and shame. The encroachment of the new is all too depressingly obvious from the seventeenth floor, with cranes infesting the skyline like wiry harbingers of the beige mediocrity soon to follow. Gems like St Matthew’s cathedral and the Smith & Caughey building defiantly jostle for light among the encroaching apartments and badly thought-out office spaces (does anyone else think that new skyscraper going up on lower Queen St looks exactly like a cheese grater?) and their beauty is all the more poignant for it. Anyone who loves Auckland can surely feel their heart breaking for our city’s slow, aesthetic death.

Anyway, the point is that despite the dawning horror of being able to see clearly what is happening to the architectural character of central Auckland, viewing the whole patchwork from up here is exhilarating and newly inspiring. The glow of light and life from the ocean and Gulf islands shines greenly over the entire panorama. Advertising is remarkably absent this high up – no billboards are visible, no tagging or postering has ascended, even music and the constant burble of imperatives to buy buy buy are lost in the altitude. The only iconography that survives the climb are the neon beacons atop our tallest towers: ANZ, ASB, VERO… and the City Mission cross (God is fighting a daily battle for skyline dominance with the fallen angels of finance). Also pleasing is the surprising amount of green clustered between the building blocks of civilisation… Albert Park and the Domain provide the velvety, shadowed places that are such cool refuges from the reflected glare of thousands of CBD windows. This green frequently inhabits the non-spaces – the redundant bits of air between buildings that contain defiant patches of weeds, hardy trees reaching for life, or the small victory of grass in the cracks of our paved-over land.

Perhaps what one sees most clearly from up here is the unused concrete expanse of all the nearby rooftops – one can’t help but wonder, what if all those roofs contained gardens like this one, but with real grass and leafy trees, flowers and ferns, moist earth and teeming life? What if Auckland had a whole secret world seventeen floors up? What if we blanketed our coarse but necessary commercial lives with a tapestry of nature between us and our atmosphere, or perhaps more crucially, protected our atmosphere from us? What would it do for our carbon emissions? For our quality of life? It’s just a nice thought.

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The other extraordinary thing about my friend who brought me to this place is that her fiancé is a ninja. I’m not even kidding. He has a black belt in ninjitsu. Not only is this fun fact testament to her unique quality, it also informed the way she presented this garden to me. She passed on a story he told her about how people hardly ever bother to look upwards in their everyday lives. Apparently ninjas are taught to be ultra-aware in three dimensions, and to frequently use the spaces above them to hide from their enemies who are unlikely to look beyond what is right in front of them. Those of us without ninja powers are so often guilty of viewing our world with a lazily shallow gaze, and it is so simple to just glance upwards every now and again, to see things differently, discover our habitat anew and appreciate the entirety of what surrounds us. I like to think of my visit to this rooftop garden as an extreme expression of that idea: I looked up, all the way up to the seventeenth floor, and what I found there was an entirely new way of seeing my world, of seeing Auckland.




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