Hayman Park playground in Manukau underway
Work is about to begin on a $6.5 million, Wraight Athfield Landscape + Architecture-designed playground in Manukau, part of Eke Panuku’s Transform Manukau project.
Eke Panuku (the council-controlled organisation that delivers urban regeneration in Tāmaki Makaurau) says it’s the second stage of the Hayman Park playground and it will sit alongside the current younger children’s play area, nature play space, new paths, refurbished skate park, toilets and kiosk with canopy shelter.
Wraight Athfield Landscape + Architecture won a design competition in 2010, run by the then Manukau Parks team at Manukau City Council, which called for visionary ideas to regenerate this premiere central city park.
Work is about to begin on the second stage of the Hayman Park playground in Manukau.
The project features a 12.8m high play tower with multiple platforms stretching up four stories with a tunnel slide for those who like a fast descent and a family slide for those who want to enjoy the view on the way down. It will also have two flying foxes, rope play equipment, a flow bowl and a pump track for fun on wheels and learning to ride, and, due to especially high demand, an additional basketball half-court alongside the already pumping half-court
The half-court, flying fox and two tracks will be ready for kids to enjoy by the end of this year, with the play tower due to open mid-2023.
Wraight Athfield Landscape + Architecture won a design competition in 2010 which called for visionary ideas to regenerate this premiere park.
Eke Panuku says much of the overall design form of the proposed park will be recognisable as an extension, accentuation and clarification of the valued landscape qualities of the existing landscape. Unearthing, editing and amplifying the existing are key processes informing the new design form.
The introduced orders reference and reinterpret landscapes from the broader pacific region. Agricultural/ horticultural and ecological landscapes, stone fields, retaining structures and terraces drawn from the collective history of the broader region.
These are landscapes and narratives that will hold particular meaning and relevance to many park users and be vaguely familiar to all. Landscape orders, and the diversity and the spaces of overlap will define the experience of engaging with the park in different ways for different users as the park matures.
Systems of growing/production intersect with topography, water movement and the constructed pastoral and botanical parkland creating a palimpsest that eases from one order to another over different parts of the park. The hierarchy of one order over another is carefully balanced to maintain a critical design tension. Movements and activities traverse the different.
The half-court, flying fox and two tracks will be ready by the end of this year, with the play tower due to open mid-2023.
The waterway acts as the connective vein between the foothills and the flatland ecosystems, extending awareness and connection from the Manukau City Centre Stormwater Collection to the Puhinui waterway and beyond to the harbour. Developed as an ecological system of collection, filtering, retention and re-use, the waterway becomes the primary element through the park: cleansing, nourishing, circulating, activating, calming.
The existing park sits within a topographical system of gentle ridges, valleys and basins.
Project team;
Nathan Young WALA (Wraights) main designer
Michael Cook WALA (Wraights)
Jon Rennie WALA (Athfields)
James Norman WALA (Athfields) main designer
Sub consultants:
Tina Dyer, Park Central – Play Specialist
CLC Consulting Group - Civil and Services Engineer
Enovate - Structural Engineer
eCubed – lighting and CCTV
Arbeco – Adrian Lamont – Arborist
Stocks Ltd - CPTED specialist