“I was in London at the LCC, extraordinarily fortunate to be sitting right in the middle of the birth of Brutalism… and like so many architects, came home brimful of ideas and determined to force them onto an unsuspecting public.”

Between 1953 and 1955, Miles Warren was employed by the London County Council Architects Department - the largest and most progressive architectural practice in the country. He was put to work draughting for the Alton West Estate - a Corbusian-influenced project in the southwest of the city.

     "I was hired, and with the greatest good luck joined a group that was to produce some of the best London City Council architecture in its heyday.”

Read more:
www.dorsetstreetflats.com/europe-london-and-alton-west

In 1953, Miles Warren left New Zealand for London, England, where, for the next two years, he was employed by the London County Council working on the seminal Alton West Estate at Roehampton. This was his introduction to the world of brutalism, providing him with many of the ideas he was later to incorporate in the Dorset Street Flats.

Next week, we'll be posting pictures of our recent visit to Alton West, where we spent the day with members of the Alton Regeneration Watch - a group fighting for the preservation of the mostly-Grade II* listed estate.

The magazine of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust marks the awarding of Category 1 status for the Dorset Street Flats in May 2010.

Architecture of the Avant-Garde

Before its time in its simplicity and use of industrial materials, a block of Christchurch flats has now been recognised as a milestone in mid-20th-century architecture.

     Sir Miles Warren’s Dorset Street flats (one of the architect’s earliest designs) were built in 1956-57 and were described back then as “one of the ugliest buildings in the city”. Busloads of jeerers drove past and for a while the flats were known as Fort Dorset and their Corbusier and new brutalist-inspired detailing compared to a prison block.

     However, the building’s compact, integrated, clean-lined elegance and effective use of mundane concrete Vibrapac cinder blocks created a sense of efficiency, security and reassurance. It was the first in the Christchurch style of modernism - low and sturdy against the Canterbury winters and in stark contrast to Plischke’s airy wood-and-glass Bauhaus manner or the old Edwardian and Victorian houses. In May this year it was honoured with Category 1 historic places status.

     Reading the times exactly, Sir Miles provided a new kind of residential living in New Zealand: compact, purpose-designed, modern, modest-sized, one-bedroomed flats for independent urban singles with few possessions. He designed built-in furniture and fittings for all the flats, reflecting his passion for total design. They became the inspiration for many single and multi-unit houses in the city. Commonplace now, Warren & Mahoney’s use of load-bearing concrete block was revolutionary.

     Sir Miles writes of this in his 2008 autobiography: “Like most young New Zealand architects coming to Europe for the first time, I discovered a sense of the solidity of masonry walls - their weight, their load-bearing capacity, their sense of enclosure, all in marked contrast to our thin 4 x 2-inch partition walls”. The Christchurch City Council was so concerned about stability (the Napier earthquake was still a far-from-distant memory for New Zealanders) that it insisted on reinforced-concrete columns for additional support.

     When interviewed by the Christchurch Art Gallery Bulletin on the occasion of the gallery’s Warren retrospective (Miles: A life in architecture, 2009), owner of the flats and former resident David Turner had this to say: “Miles’ choice of materials, colours and building-style brought a breath of fresh air to the staid and rather ordinary architecture of the day. He gave a huge amount of thought to how people would live in these spaces and he provided the necessary tools for them to live in a modern way.

     “The front of the living-room area has a huge glass door which slides back to give a great indoor/outdoor flow and the bedroom has a glass Dutch (two-part) door that allows access to the courtyard garden. The concrete beams give a sense of solidity and in their battleship-grey colour look almost industrial. With their timber slatted ceilings over a dark base, the downstairs flats have a very cosy and comfortable, almost cosseted, feel”.

     The expert consensus is clear. These buildings are a special taonga in the canon of New Zealand modernist architecture.


Andrew Paul Wood

BETTE FLAGLER (ed), “New Zealand Heritage”, Spring 2010, New Zealand Historic Places Trust, 2010.  ISSN: 1175-9615, p 9.

http://www.dorsetstreetflats.com/heritage.html