Ockham Lecture: Weaving Whakapapa into the Built Environment: Whare Timu

5.30pm doors, 6pm talk starts
Objectspace Level 1, 13 Rose Road, Ponsonby

Join us at Objectspace for an Ockham Lecture with Whare Timu – former Principal at Warren and Mahoney Architects and now the co-founder of Momo Native Designs. Timu will discuss his approach to design as a cultural act: a weaving of identity and imagination that ensures the built environment of Aotearoa is unmistakably its own. He introduces his lecture:

Kaitiakitanga (guardianship) in architecture is an ethic of care – shaping buildings as living companions to whenua rather than objects imposed upon it. The design journey begins in kōrero, in wānanga (discussion) where stories and tikanga (customs) set the kaupapa (approach). From these threads come the first spatial moves: pathways that carry intent, thresholds that acknowledge encounter, openings aligned with the cycles of day and night.

Engagement with whakapapa (geneology) continues through material practice. Native timbers carry the memory of the ngahere (forest) – their fibres holding the rhythm of growth, their weight, recalling the anchoring of earth, their surfaces retaining mauri (living essence) when shaped with tikanga. To build with our rākau (trees, timber) is to embed continuity: each beam and panel not a severance from the ngahere, but a re-articulation of its presence in civic and communal life.

Weaving provides a further model for making, showing how strength arises from interlacing threads, how pattern becomes narrative, and how layering creates both shelter and revelation. Architecture, approached this way, is less a monument than a woven fabric – timber and fibre crossing like warp and weft, enfolding people, memory, and place within a practice of stewardship and renewal.

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Whare Timu (Ngāti Kahungunu, Te Arawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) is a design leader whose work interlaces whakapapa, whenua, and whānau into contemporary practice. Former Principal at Warren and Mahoney, he steered the integration of Māori worldview into significant projects across Aotearoa New Zealand, championing processes based in te ao Māori that move beyond consultation toward partnership.

Today, Timu is Co-Chair of Ngā Aho, a national network of Māori and Indigenous design professionals, and co-founder of MOMO Native, a practice dedicated to Indigenous-led innovation. His practice is less about ornament and more about architecture as narrative – forms that speak of whenua (land), remember histories, and carry futures.

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The Ockham Lecture series is an annual programme of lectures and panel discussions across different themes that critically engage with craft, design and architecture. This programme is supported by Objectspace's Lead Partner Ockham Residential.

Images:

[Header] Whare Timu and David Hakaraia work Pohewa Pāhewa: Te Rūma (detail), photograph by Seb Charles

[1] Whare Timu speaking at the opening of Pohewa Pāhewa: Te Rūma, photo by Seb Charles

[2] Whare Timu and David Hakaraia work Pohewa Pāhewa: Te Rūma (detail), photograph by Seb Charles

[3] Exterior; He Tohu exhibition by Studio Pacific at the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, photograph by Andy Spain, Whare Timu was part of the design team for this project

[4] Interior; He Tohu exhibition by Studio Pacific at the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, photograph by Andy Spain, Whare Timu was part of the design team for this project

[5] Sir Howard Morrison Centre in Rotorua by First Light Studio, Whare Timu was part of the design team for this project, photo supplied

[6] Render for ongoing project Te Manawataki o Te Papa Civic Precinct in Tauranga by Warren & Mahoney, photo supplied