Tohu Heritage | Aotearoa Heritage Sites Map

Tohu Heritage documents Aotearoa New Zealand's significant built heritage in photorealistic 3D, freely accessible to everyone. Each site is captured and published with the consent of its owners, then preserved as an interactive digital twin, a lasting record that outlives weather, renovation, and time itself. Anyone can explore a documented building from anywhere, at any time, without needing to visit in person.

Two sites are live so far. Clark House is a Category 1 heritage-listed Italianate villa in Hobsonville, Auckland, built around 1902 by Rice Owen Clark II from experimental hollow ceramic blocks of his own manufacture, a building technique unusual enough that the house itself is part of the historical record. Swan's Arch is a Category 2 heritage-listed brick arch in Te Atatū South, Auckland, hand-built over three decades by Henry Charles Swan, a reclusive Englishman who left no written explanation for why he built it. Both are documented with guided, interactive annotations that explain their construction and history, not just a static 3D scan. More sites are in progress.

Tohu works directly with property owners, who give their consent before a site is documented, and aims to build lasting partnerships with iwi, councils, and heritage organisations across Aotearoa as the catalogue grows. Tohu already has academic support from Renata Jadresin Milic and the team at Unitec's Digital Heritage Research Centre. That collaboration reflects a real gap in New Zealand's heritage sector. Independent research from Unitec (Khan, Jadresin Milic, Su and Vadász, published in Architectural Science Review, 2024) found that while digital documentation tools exist and are already in use, New Zealand has no shared, searchable place for that documentation to live. Records sit scattered across individual hard drives and council servers, disconnected from each other. Tohu's public catalogue is built to be part of the fix.

Documented places are organised into six heritage categories: Residential, Māori Heritage, Civic, Commercial, Industrial, and Religious. Each activates only once a real captured site belongs to it. Nothing built to last should be lost to neglect, demolition, or disaster without a permanent, freely accessible record.