Dorset Street Flats
  • Read
    • The Architectural Review
    • Architecture 1820-1970
    • Atlas Of World Art
    • An Autobiography
    • At Home
    • Block Itinerary
    • Bulletin
    • Business South
    • Changing Times
    • Concrete
    • The Dictionary Of Art
    • The Elegant Shed
    • Europe, London and Alton West
    • Heritage New Zealand
    • A History Of NZ Architecture
    • Home And Building
    • Home New Zealand
    • Last Loneliest Loveliest
    • Long Live The Modern
    • Looking For The Local
    • The Modernist World
    • Neo-Avant-Garde and Postmodern
    • New Dreamland
    • New Territory
    • New Zealand Architect
    • New Zealand Architecture
    • NZ Architecture
    • NZ House & Garden
    • Ohinetahi
    • Practical Guide To Home Landscaping
    • Rolleston Avenue and Park Terrace >
      • Rolleston Avenue and Park Terrace Slideshow
    • Selected Architecture
    • The Press
    • Warren & Mahoney Architects
  • Look
    • The Original Drawings
  • Watch
    • The New Zealand Home (2016)
    • Brutal Beauty (2011)
    • New Zealand At Home (2006)
    • The Elegant Shed (1984)
  • Rebuild
  • Blog
  • Contact

January 28th, 2017

28/1/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
In 1953 the young Christchurch architect Miles Warren (b. 1929) had travelled to England, where he worked with the London County Council on the Roehampton Estate. He had begun architectural work in 1946, when at the age of sixteen he entered Cecil Wood’s office; this was followed by a period of study at the Auckland University School of Architecture, from which he graduated in 1950. In London he was, in his own words, “extraordinarily fortunate to be sitting right in the middle of the birth of Brutalism” and had the unique experience of of being shown over the Hunstanton School (1954), Norfolk, by it’s young architects, Peter and Alison Smithson. Scandinavian influences were prominent at the London County Council’s Department of Architecture at the time, and the Roehampton Estate was, as Nikolas Pevsner observed, Swedish in inspiration.

Miles Warren travelled to Denmark and saw the work of the architect Finn Juhl, whose 1941-42 house at Ordrup has been widely illustrated in periodicals of the day. This house and other small-scale houses, provided the New Zealand architect with a model for the early Christchurch houses he built after coming back to New Zealand “brimful of ideas and determined to force them on an unsuspecting public”. He quickly realised that Group-style timber housing was unsuitable in the cooler Canterbury climate and so began to design flats and houses which had walls of white-painted concrete block. The first such building was the sequence of eight Dorset Street Flats (1956-57), which the architect has described as “simply a box of concrete block walls - with two full-height openings to the north and slots to the rear, and other solid boxes for the bathroom and wardrobe”. The block walls stop at door height and support fair-faced concrete beams; door and window detailing shows the depth of the concrete block; roofs are low pitched, timber framed and covered with corrugated iron, their eaves and verges set back to reveal the thickness of the walls.
The Christchurch City Council engineers, unfamiliar with concrete block load-bearing walls, insisted on a frame of reinforced-concrete columns for the Dorset Street Flats, but later acknowledged that this was not necessary. The Christchurch public was as bemused by these flats as the Aucklanders who had dismissed the Group’s houses as barns or chicken coops. The first occupants had no difficulty in adapting to their compact and solidly built surroundings in which varnished rimu board ceilings contrasted warmly with the painted blocks, and foliage quickly softened the enclosing garden walls.

​
​PETER SHAW, "New Zealand Architecture: From Polynesian Beginnings To 1990",1st Edition, Hodder Stoughton, 1992, ISBN 978-0340533208, p 160.
0 Comments

January 22nd, 2017

22/1/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
​Excerpt of Miles Warren's 1978 lecture to the AGM of the NZIA Auckland Branch, entitled "Style In New Zealand Architecture".

As I have said, I was in London at the LCC, extraordinarily fortunate to be sitting right in the middle of the birth of Brutalism. I went over the Hunstanton School with the Smithsons and Ove Arup - that is the Miesian steel and brick building, suffering now badly from the salt spray of the Wash. I went to the great debate at the AA about the Leeds housing competition, lapped up the Corbusian influence of the LCC led by Bill Howell, Killick, Amis, Partridge etc. and like so many architects, came home to New Zealand brimful of ideas and determined to force them on an unsuspecting public. We designed within the principles clearly laid down by the Group. Modest blocks of flats followed one after the other. The Brutalist bare brick of England became white concrete block used as far as I know for the first time as an architectural element in a habitable room in flats in Dorset Street. Think of all the grotty motel rooms that has spawned! Fairface concrete beams sat firmly on load-bearing reinforced masonry - all has European substance. The sequence of flats led to Christchurch College whose design began in 1960. It still surprises me today that such a pillar of the establishment should instruct an architect just in his thirties to design and then accept such a building. That was also the year we began the Students’ Union in Canterbury, aptly describes as a skeletal encrustation.


MILES WARREN, “Style In New Zealand Architecture”, New Zealand Architect, No. 3, NZIA (New Zealand Institute of Architects), 1978, pp 3-5.
0 Comments

    Author

    Keep up to date by joining our Facebook page. Click on the icon above.

    Archives

    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Copyright 2015-2023 dorsetstreetflats.com.  All permissions sought wherever possible.