Kelly Tarlton's Sea Life Aquarium

Brief Information

Kelly Tarlton's Sea Life Aquarium is housed not in a conventional exhibition building, but in former underground wastewater tanks on Auckland's waterfront. From this technical foundation grew the place's main distinctive feature: a long acrylic tunnel inside the old tanks, where visitors view the marine environment not through separate windows, but from within a curved passageway.

Opened in 1985, the aquarium was conceived by marine archaeologist and diver Kelly Tarlton. A method was developed for it to shape large sheets of transparent acrylic by heating them, in order to create curved tunnels rather than flat panels. So here it is important to see not only the animals, but also the engineering idea itself: an old municipal structure was turned into an underwater stage with controlled visitor movement.

What to Notice First

It makes sense to compare the three types of “shells” through which the sea is presented here. The first is the 110-meter acrylic tunnel in the former tanks: its shape explains why the aquarium was unusual for its time. At the same time, water and acrylic distort scale, and the fish appear about a third smaller than their real size; this changes the reading of any large inhabitants behind the transparent wall.

The second shell is a concrete seascape of caves and reefs, created after the old tanks had been tested for watertightness. It masks the technical origin of the space, but it is precisely the contrast of concrete, tanks, and “reefs” that shows how this artificial environment was assembled. The third is Turtle Bay, an open-topped acrylic tank: its volume and depth emphasize a different type of viewing, no longer tunnel-like, but through a large transparent bowl. Separately, one can note the Antarctic section with controlled temperature and a replica of Scott's hut: here the aquarium extends beyond the sea and presents the environment as a reconstruction of living conditions.