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January 24th, 2016

25/1/2016

The inside of number 4 Dorset Street, taken around 1958, by photographer Martin Sydney Barriball (1929-2012), shows the interior as decorated by it's architect/owner/occupier Miles Warren, who lived in the flat between 1957 and 1965, and still later, used the flat as overflow office space for the practice of Warren & Mahoney.

The original is held in the Architectural Centre Collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ. PAColl-0811-09-18-03-2. Used with permission.

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January 17th, 2016

18/1/2016

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Of course, legibility was also important to the New Brutalists in Britain, and you can see their influence in the work of Sir Miles Warren in Christchurch in the 1960s. Miles made a great play of how he put his buildings together, articulating every joint, which is a fabricator’s way of looking at architecture.

In the 1960s New Zealand architects started to join houses together again. That didn’t really happen until after Sir Miles Warren designed the Dorset Street Flats in Christchurch [1957].

“The Pacific Gene”, David Mitchell in conversation with John Walsh, Last Loneliest Loveliest: The New Zealand Pavilion, 14th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, John Walsh (ed), NZIA, 2014, p.47, pp.54-55.

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January 10th, 2016

11/1/2016

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In the south, architects also searched for a more casual style of living but had to build more solidly against the elements. Interiors were often cutting edge, but exteriors remained solid, with pitched roofs. Miles Warren, influenced by his work with the London City Council, and realising that the Group’s style of timber housing was not suitable for the colder Christchurch climate, began using concrete block. In 1959, his Dorset Street Flats, which were in fact more like modern townhouses, featured exposed concrete beams and concrete-block walls. Among the most celebrated domestic buildings of the decade, the Dorset Street Flats captured the imagination of architects and their clients. By the 1960s, a distinctive Christchurch style had evolved, which drew on the city’s colonial heritage by incorporating traditional cottage-style traditions, but also integrated new principles of light and flow and modern technology.

CARLYON, JENNY and MORROW, DIANE, Changing Times: New Zealand Since 1945, Auckland University Press, 2013, ISBN 978 1 86940 782 7.

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