Dorset Street Flats
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November 29th, 2015

29/11/2015

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Picture
Flats Dorset Street
Christchurch
1956-1957

These eight flats - designed for four owner-occupier friends, each with one to lease - were the perfect commission for a young architect, Miles Warren, brimful of a year and a half in London and determined to make a building stuffed full of everything he knew.

It was just that. The essence of the building is that it is masonry. Solid masonry walls obviously bearing the weight of the building, instead of the typical New Zealand light timber-framed structure or, after the Napier earthquake, a reinforced frame with masonry infill. Each flat is 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 within the outer box. The ground-floor block walls stop at door height and support 600-millimetre deep fairface concrete beams, reducing the apparent height of the walls and also the scale of the relatively small rooms. This device was used to good effect in later flats and at Christchurch College.

Recessed window and door detailing - with the frames set away from the wall to show the depth of the concrete block - was developed. The roofs are low pitched, timber framed, and covered with corrugated iron. Their eaves and verges were set back, again to demonstrate the substance of the walls. In contrast to the bare clockwork and concrete inside, the ceilings were battened and lined with varnished rimu boards.

In the end, the concrete-block walls were not as load bearing as they appeared.

The city council engineers insisted that there be a frame of reinforced concrete columns - but the late Lyall Holmes, that most creative of structural engineers, eventually won the battle for reinforced concrete block and thereafter that is how they were built.

These flats were the first conscious use of concrete block and fairface concrete inside a New Zealand house or flat. They were thought at the time to be prison-like. The tour buses detoured past the flats to jeer at what was dubbed “Fort Dorset”. Internally, the bare walls were seen as a counterpoint to rich furnishings and, externally, the garden walls as a background to luxuriant planting. In retrospect, however, the question arises: would we have done it if one knew of all the motels to come?

A number of blocks of flats were designed along the same lines: they all opened to the north on to private gardens contained within concrete-block walls.

Miles Warren

WARREN & MAHONEY ARCHITECTS LIMITED, “Warren & Mahoney Architects, 1958-1989”, Warren & Mahoney Architects Limited, 1989. ISBN 0-473-00840-8, p 2.

http://www.dorsetstreetflats.com/warren--mahoney-architects.html
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November 12th, 2015

13/11/2015

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Click on photo for full report.
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November 08th, 2015

9/11/2015

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Flashback to 2011. These pictures were taken on 2nd March 2011.

The 6.3 earthquake which hit Canterbury on 22 February 2011 at 12:51pm caused extensive damage to the Dorset Street Flats. The courtyard walls collapsed, cracking appeared in the concrete block-work, liquefaction occurred beneath the building floor plate, and the land slumped westwards towards the Avon River, causing a split between the two blocks as the land moved. The flats were later stickered as uninhabitable and in danger of collapse, though this was later removed. The red brick stable block at the rear however was considered dangerous and unrepairable, and was demolished in October 2011.

http://www.dorsetstreetflats.com/rebuild.html
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November 01st, 2015

1/11/2015

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Picture
ASSESSMENT CRITERIA FROM HERITAGE NEW ZEALAND: CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE.
​
(g) The technical accomplishment or value, or design of the place.
The Dorset Street Flats are one of the earliest attempts to construct a building in New Zealand from load-bearing concrete block. Although this form of masonry construction was not fully- resolved in this complex as local authority engineering requirements necessitated the use of reinforced-concrete columnb, this project enabled the exploration of this construction method which was fully exploited in later developments by the architect and building contractors.
The design of the Flats constitutes an early expression of the aesthetics of New Brutalism in New Zealand in the use and treatment of materials, structure and form. Warren's total design approach is also significant and the complex possesses high integrity as many of the original elements of his design remain unaltered.

Summary of Significance or Values
This place was assessed against, and found it to qualify under the following criteria: a, b, e and g.

CONCLUSION:
​
It is considered that this place qualifies as a Category I historic place.
Miles Warren's Dorset Street Flats are outstanding as a pioneering example of a building type, construction method and aesthetic approach that was repeated in other projects by Warren and later architects that constituted a characteristic Christchurch architectural idiom of the post-war period. The Flats are recognised as one of the most important Modern Movement buildings constructed in New Zealand, as identified by DOCOMOMO New Zealand.

http://www.heritage.org.nz/the-list/details/7804

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