Remember this? In December 2021, Objectspace – the design and architecture museum in Tāmaki Makaurau – commissioned architectural photographer (and friend of Here) David Straight to document the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the built environment in the city. 

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The outcome is a new publication featuring photographs taken at eight sites across Auckland – dispersed between two unprecedented regional boundaries instated under the Covid-19 Alert Level system. 

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Locations of Interest functions as a document of these sites, both to record them for posterity and to provoke thought about our built environment as a place of socio-political action. What kind of access and use is prioritised in its design, and how well can it adapt and shift in response to the needs of its users?

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As the memory of lockdowns and cordons (thankfully) fades, Straight’s work is a reminder of our strange, yet everyday interactions with bureaucracy and systems of organisation – where cones and arrows, signs and check-in posters, not to mention a profusion of institutional chairs, ordered our days. A fitting reminder. 

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Locations of Interest by David Straight

Pre-order: info@objectspace.org.nz

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