Miles Warren - Style In New Zealand Architecture.
From an address to the 1978 Annual General Meeting of the NZIA Auckland Branch.
Architecture still has no “200 Years of New Zealand Architecture”, nothing except a modest picture book, one or two biographies of obscure early practitioners and an odd essay. I am told the School of Architecture disseminates words of wisdom on architecture - New Zealand as it was, is and will be - but it doesn’t reach the profession.
So with great effrontery, no research, just a faulty memory, gossip, hearsay and what is politely called intuition, I propose to talk about style in New Zealand architecture.
I was led to this by reading last week an issue of the Architectural Review, a Jubilee issue covering the 25 years of Elizabeth Regina. It dawned on me that I was in London during the Coronation, working on the Roehampton Lane flats at the LCC and I started practice the year after. So like a number of other older codgers I have been making buildings for 24 years - an awfully long time. The essays in the review were written by an architect who wasn’t even born at the time of the Coronation. The young was having a crack at the old. So I am now looking through the other end of the telescope, as it were.
What I propose to do is to take a definitive examples that best expresses the architecture of 25 years ago, and another more recent example, and then to fill in with buildings between that might indicate the whys and wherefores of the changes. I have chosen specific buildings because architects think better, at least I do, with visual images rather than abstract ideas. And inevitably in New Zealand the examples are mostly houses or housing.
If New Zealand has any claim to architecture of international quality it is in the design of small houses, very small houses by overseas standards, for modest money and for a whole range of people.
I think you will all agree that the first and second Group houses of Bill Wilson, Ivan Juriss, Brett Penman, Campbell Craig, Jim Hackshaw, Bruce Rotherham and Allan Wild epitomise the best of architecture 25 years ago. They demonstrate its principles, hopes and ideals.
The Group houses were the first expression of modern architecture in the country. Early so-called modern buildings provided the trappings and style but not the essence.
Now almost every principle that formed the basis of the Group houses has been rejected by today’s younger architect.
What are those principles?
First, that form follow function, or at least that form be symbolic of function (even that qualification was a wee heresy).
Second, that buildings should not be divided into a series of static volumes connected by doors but that space should flow. The Barcelona Pavilion of Mies van der Rowe was the ultimate model. The first book on Mies appeared that year. I remember Peter Beaven showing me the precious volume - Peter never cared for it!
Like all passionately held ideals this handling of space was carried to absurdity. The most OK plan was a rectangle with one or two penetrating partitions, with the circle of a shower drawn very thin, plus a beautifully drawn bog in the best manner of the Le Corbusier “oeuvre complet”, which incidentally came out volume by volume each year. It was an enormous advantage in Studio to get a Corbu volume before the library.
Third, that the building be embraced by one roof, preferably of low pitch and the wrong way, that is with the gable over the long side of the rectangle. This roof form with the characteristic sharp wall-roof junction gave the houses their distinctive memorable image. They were described as looking like woodsheds. We all took this for a great compliment.
It meant that they had the crisp clean forms of functional buildings and, first hints of things to come later, it gave these houses an indigenous early colonial character.
The structure of these relatively modest buildings, which presented no real building challenge, were nevertheless rigorously investigated and developed. Each member had to be loaded to its full capacity. Studs at 18” centres merely supporting linings were wasteful so posts at 4’0” and linings of diagonal boarding or ply were used. If a 6” x 2” rafter would span easily, a 5” x 2” just on the point of sagging was chosen.
The whole timber frame system was pulled apart stud by stud, and rethought and rebuilt.
So was each building material. Timber, concrete, ply and corrugated iron were in, bricks just acceptable, wet plaster naughty and wallpaper wicked. You were excommunicated for marble. I can imagine Bill’s horror at the sloshy swirls of plaster of today’s grotty Spanish style. Construction had to be dry and preferably prefabricated; each material exposed and each separate part articulated. Each material should be used au naturel. Timber should be neither painted nor stained. If used inside it should be waxed. God, the hours I spent waxing rimu! A whole new system of detailing was devised. Junctions without architraves, recessed detailing etc. Windows and walls, solids and voids were handled in a Corbusian way.
I remember the excitement and astonishment of seeing a house in Wellington by Bill Toomath, designed for his parents (how long-suffering and patient are guinea-pig architect parents), where the terminal vent was seen as a vertical element in the composition and was consciously used as such. It seems all old hat now, but to make every small element from wastepipe to electrical conduit grist to the architect’s mill was a considerable innovation at the time.
Those sharp clear minds of that generation of architects, applied to what was a relatively simple building type, cleared away all the rubbish and saw house in its simplest terms.
At the time I thought, and I think most of our generation (and architects for the next say fifteen years thought the same) that architecture, now solidly based on irrefutable principles, was destined to blossom forth, to develop in ways unimaginable and to captivate the world.
In the cynical, hesitant 70s, it is hard to recapture the ideals and aspirations of the mid-fifties. We believed in architecture for the masses, architecture for a brave new world, architecture solving all the problems of society; La Ville Radieuse. Modern architecture, socialism and the post-war world were inseperable.
Looking back, you can see a strong element of puritanism. We made a virtue of necessity. If there was a scarcity of money and materials then sparse minimum was idealised. If you couldn’t get or afford carpet and wallpaper they were dismissed from the vocabulary.
Nobody had much money then, architects would work for the ordinary men - to hell with the rich - the average man was idealised.
However, the Group house was probably the nearest that New Zealand architecture had come to making something of its own.
Now let me try and plot the drift away from this unique burst of daylight, and here I am afraid I regrettably talk about myself. Why? Because I don’t know the facts and dates of other people’s work heading in the same direction.
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.
But there was another influence at work. We are the product of our environment and training. My first two years in architecture were virtually as an articled pupil for Cecil Wood - the Binney of Christchurch or the Chapman Taylor of Wellington. Wood was the nephew of Norman Shaw. He was a superb exponent of the arts and crafts movement and the best draughtsman I have ever seen. In his seventies, he reverted from American colonial back to simple little arts and crafts cottages, and so back to his London training in the early 1900s.
While readily accepting the Group-come-Brutalism principles, I had a sneaking regard for Wood’s work at Christ’s College, the Goodhue gothic of the dining hall and the Norman Shaw of the library. These buildings were wicked because they committed the worst sin. They were designed in a historic style. Even the word style was abhorrent. It suggested fashion, something ephemeral and changing, not based on solid principles. I, being well brought up, dismissed the early cruder bandaged blood lavatorial gothic of the university, but my enjoyment of Wood’s work I could not resist. It was a secret vice not to be admitted in stern architectural circles.
We designed a number of low-pitched Group-like forms but were never able to achieve the purity or absolute quality of the Group work. Our clients demanded the usual subdivision into separate compartments. But the houses seemed to sit unhappily in flat Christchurch suburbia and more important they had a minimum, even cheap, insubstantial quality that was not acceptable to my clients, who tended to be of the over 55 relatively affluent establishment.
Searching for appropriate forms I turned back to earlier influences; the simple modest houses of Denmark where I had spent a happy week or two, and Wood’s houses. That is, turning back to the traditional European house.
First came a house much modelled on one by Finn Juhl. It had two blocks, one long and thin with bedrooms strung out in a row under one gable, a flat roofed connection and the living rooms in a square. Roofs were tiled and about 35 pitch°.
Then a house in the country standing bold and bare on the huge broad river terraces in the foothills. We designed it like a barn with rooms, tucked up with one large steep embracing roof. It seemed the only shape that would survive in the enormous scale of the landscape: it had a 45° roof. This led to a house for my parents. As many of you will know, parents though long-suffering are not the easiest of clients - they are inclined to say exactly what they think, not sparing the architect son’s delicate sensitivity. For my parents, then in their sixties, a house had to look like a house. It had to have a roof. Fortunately they were living in a house designed by Cecil Wood which had coved ceilings, steep hipped roofs and excellent roof-to-wall proportions. I divided their house into three blocks - living rooms, bedrooms and garage - the conventional subdivision, and strung the rooms out under the long gables with the gable width equal to the room width. The blocks were slid against one another. The spatial extension was along the glass line connecting the sequence of rooms.
The roofs were steeply pitched 40° (not 45°), and roof comfortably dominated wall. It looked like everybody’s idea of a simple cottage, early New Zealand colonial and trad European house.
This was achieved by the smallness of the three blocks and by scale and proportion alone, not by details of glazing bars, finials and so on. The pattern of windows, the solid and void relationships were carefully contrived and by no means conventional.
The house was immediately approved by a section of the public and had a host of imitators.
We did four or five more for the same age group and type of client, exploring modifications to the groupings of the blocks, varying proportions and introducing half gables, verandahs and so on.
We stopped the moment I heard an architect in the office say, “Here comes another Pixie house”!
At the same time, 1960, Christchurch College was being built and I was designing our house and office in Cambridge Terrace. Both these two buildings introduced what can only be described as willful half gable skylights, one dashing lot over the maids’ bedrooms at Christchurch College and one over our draughting room. Both were seen as minor embellishments and frivolities to the stern brown bread and butter of the brutalist design.
Peter Middleton did one of his bewildering literary criticisms of my house and office. He described the stairs as tautological which is a literary term meaning more than one and the building as a whole as Butterfield-like. I suppose only one in fifty architects then knew much about Butterfield. It would have been clearer if he had said gothic like, but Pud had recognised the spiky verticality of the building.
The movement away from the Group continued. Ted McCoy was designing houses of a similar character in Dunedin.
Ian Athfield worked as a student in our office when 65 Cambridge Terrace was being built in 1961 and he did the sketch plans, until I will admit firm direction, of three houses for a maiden lady. They were three two-storey houses, called bluntly flats in those days - one behind the other with the middle one set half a gable forward. To avoid the gawky look of a pitched roof perched on a small two-story house the 45° roof was brought down to about 3’0” above the first floor and the windows moved up into the gable. This is of course a conventional Scandinavian device. They were I think by far the most popular houses we had ever designed and they became the forerunner of what is now rather pretentiously called the town house. We thought we were losing our touch. Tourist buses used to detour to stop outside the flats in Dorset Street. They had the accolade of being the ugliest buildings in town!
Roger Walker also worked in the office a little later. I don’t claim to have influenced this astonishing pair, but at least they were aware of what was happening, the arguments behind what was being designed and how things were being made.
I have mentioned Peter Middleton. His influence in the School was all-important. He, more than anybody, suggested the design of buildings could be more than a dour intellectual exercise. It could be amusing and witty. Peter had a brilliant protege in Ian Athfield.
Peter also introduced a literary quality into New Zealand architecture. Do you remember his famous lecture at a conference in Auckland? He dropped names left, right and centre, three-quarters of which I for one had never heard.
His house in Grafton Road, completed as I recollect about 1961, had an enormous influence on students and architects. Here were the small spaces, the complex roofs suggesting early colonial origins, and with tongue in cheek here were wooden barge boards a poor detail rejected by the Group, and as joke a turned finial. The house had a beguiling charm.
The New Zealand house had a humanist face again.
At the same time Peter Beaven designed a number of houses that progressively moved away from the Group ideals. Though Peter was a contemporary of the Group he did not subscribe to the intellectual discipline of Bill Wilson.
Peter has never been circumscribed by the theory that form should follow function, nor has he regarded structure as all-important. It was to be used, misused or ignored as the occasion demanded. Sammy Crookes nearly failed him in his final year at the school - not one of his designs would stand up. No, Peter is essentially an intuitive designer with an extraordinary sense of style and form, the direct opposite of the intellectual Bill Wilson. It was inevitable that Peter would quickly respond to the change of style overseas. Peter’s houses became progressively more complex, exotic and willful as money and clients would permit. (I don’t mean that in any derogatory sense; most of us including Bill Wilson would have been delighted to have such free creative talent.)
Even for a Christchurch architect it is difficult to pinpoint the significant buildings and their dates. Peter’s work doesn’t progress, it tiptoes lightly through the tulips jumping from one thing to another.
The important buildings are probably his own octagon, Mr Niel’s house and Dr Carson’s house, and of buildings other than houses, the Tunnel Road Authority building, the voluptuously curved structure with a lean-to on the top.
The group of town houses in Rossell Street designed after an European trip is the forerunner of all later blocks of town houses.
This brings me to the Athfield-Walker era.
I am well aware of how different these two architects are and how they must cringe when they see some of the work of their imitators, but like it or not their names attach to the style and you all have a mental image of what I mean. I have tried to devise an appropriate name other than the derogatory “Noddyism” but so far no luck. I will just call it A & W.
The Athfield-Walker style is the direct opposite of everything the Group and the architects of the fifties and early sixties held dear.
Where the Group planned with the minimum of subdivision and connected indoor and outdoor with extended planes to make the spaces appear as large as possible, A & W architects carve up their buildings into as many small rooms as can be squeezed out of the programme. Some become little more than closets with vertical dimensions greater than horizontal. Each room is further articulated with projections and recessions making small nooks and crannies. If rooms are joined together to make a continuous space this is as likely to be vertical as horizontal. The broad calm horizontal expanse of the Group is replaced by an intricately modelled collection of spaces with a vertical emphasis.
The structural elements tend to be used as decorative devices, not as a finely calculated minimum members. The spaces are generally so small that there is no real structural problem but massive exaggerated timber posts and beams and diagonal struts and ties galore horse about in strange places, plumb through the middle of the room and bang over the face of the windows.
Roofs are steeply pitched, often above 45°, not placed to embrace the whole building as in the Group manner, nor placed over a string of rooms as in the 60s, but over each individual room which for preference should have an extending lean-to, a dormer or half a gable. The resultant collection of gables, half gables and slices thereof are juxtaposed together to produce complex sculptural shapes, sometimes looking like a willful uncontrolled collision.
Form no longer develops from function. No functional requirement can justify the complex exotic roof forms.
The Group house was supposed to be the result of a careful analysis of the requirements of the occupants of the house. The elevations merely grew. The authors of many A & W designs clearly start with an external visual image into which the function of the house, the airport or shopping centre are ingeniously stuffed.
They have been unkindly described as an ego trip for the architect or the occupants or both. But don’t get me wrong, superb architecture or rather culture has emerged from this process. Vanburgh’s Blenheim Palace has been described as a fine piece of sculpture in which you may incidentally live.
Whereas the Group house was thought to be styleless (which of course it wasn’t) and thought to be the result of a logical synthesis of function, space and structure, A & W work has all the trappings of an architectural style. It commits the worst sin of the fifties - it wears what Bill Wilson would have called an evocative fancy dress.
The paraphernalia of the style are the steeply pitched and curved roofs; the owners and turrets preferably cantilevered whether required by plan or not; the circular elements, drainpipe windows, curved heads of doors, spherical plastic bubbles, cut-outs in curved plycopyne if the money was short - all these derived from pop art; the forms derived from structure used decoratively; the various forms derived from early colonial architecture - verandah detailing, finials, barge boards; the colours - any strident colour splashed diagonally and clashing as outrageously with its neighbour as possible; diagonal shapes in plan and elevation; skylights galore.
Nothing must look like itself, especially doors. As an Australian critic aptly said, “If entry is found first time around, go back to gaol, collect £200.”
Why has this extreme architectural style (some might call it an odd-ball aberration) blossomed and flowered so vigorously in New Zealand?
As far as I know, no other country has carried such small buildings to such frenetic shapes and embellishment. One can list overseas sources of most of the elements - pop art and architecture for the circles; complex geometric shapes from the western states; southern Europe and “Architecture without Architects” for the continuous plastered surfaces over wall and roof in defiance of structure, materials and weather, and to our own colonial past for historical elements and so on. This is of course not said in criticism. The parent sources and influence of all good work can be dissected.
However, visiting architects from the States and Australia, many experienced and able critics, are astounded by the A & W work and always end up using the word “Disneyland”.
As I see it, these are the reasons for the rapid acceptance and spread of the style.
It was started by able rebellious young architects more than a decade ago thumbing their noses at the university, the establishment and the last flutter of the puritanical fifties and early sixties - it has elements of an extended university prank.
It arrived on the scene when young architects in an affluent confident society could immediately on graduating do their own thing, start their own practice. This happens rarely in other places and the way things are going will not happen again here for a while. And probably for the first time in New Zealand there were relatively young people with the money and confidence to have a go.
So the older practising architects had no chance to beat the hell out of them, to knock out the enthusiasm and creative energy nor to impart the proper restraints of good craftsmanship.
Young architects starting in a fully fledged A & W style competing for clients’ attention could only develop more extreme forms.
The A & W style coincided with New Zealand’s belated but now intense interest in the past. Colonial architecture, especially wooden gothic, has become the darling of public and architects alike.
It is surprising how late and sudden was this change in taste.
For three years starting in 1969 the Christchurch Club, the home of the conservative establishment, debated whether it should pull down its large Victorian wooden club house and rebuild. In all the debate with five architects and many professionals in its membership, no one suggested that the building be preserved for its architectural or historic value. An illustration of the proposed new multi-storey building in the press produced no public comment defending the present club house. In the end, for economic reasons, it was decided to alter and refurbish the wooden building. It must have been one of the earliest and still one of the largest restorations in the country. We pulled down thousands of square feet of rotting black offices and rebuilt large portions leaving only the street facades and two or three rooms much as they were.
Our work received undue acclaim. As we saw it, all we had done was to peel the banana. It was all sitting there waiting to be revealed, and with my good classical training it was no problem to run coarse timber moulds and maintain the hearty Victorian character. The wheel has turned full circle and the Club is now on the list of buildings that must be preserved.
The Club fought the City Council before the Town Planning Appeal Board and was instrumental in having the Amenity Regulations of the Council thrown out as not being within the terms of the Act. We had fun at the hearing explaining that the Council appeared to be trying to preserve some genuine Warren and Mahoney. The Club was worth preserving because it is a good, well made, well designed structure used for exactly the same purpose now as when it was built.
From ignoring the past we have gone to the other extreme. Anything that is old and preferably of stone is therefore good, beautiful and worth preserving.
The Christchurch City Council aided and abetted by Christchurch architects now talks of preserving the clumsy piece of neo-Italianate-gone-wrong of the Post Office in the Square. It wasn’t even on the first lists of interesting buildings made only ten years ago. Now we are saying, in effect, that today’s architects could do no better - God help us.
I fear that architects have been equally uncritical of early New Zealand work. They are prepared to borrow the bits and pieces, the obvious details rather than to understand the substance. A few glazing bars, a criss-cross verandah rail and a dormer and you have a colonial house.
The small scale forms of the A & W style have their obvious historical overtones and the client happily accepted the package. A bit of applied gew gaw, old doors, crude stained glass, any old junk from the breakers’ yard could be incorporated.
To what extremities Middleton’s finials have led!
What the Australians called “out-backery” started earlier there. Old Victorian pictures, gloomy cracked oils of dubious value were resurrected and flogged off for huge prices. Old houses were discovered and a seemingly endless array of sketches sold.
It is argued in England that the chief reason for our present interest in the past is television. It is said that it has opened vast numbers of people to visual culture in much the same way that, 500 years before, the invention of printing opened to people a literary culture, and in the nineteenth century the gramophone to music. The first need of people in this intoxicating situation is to discover their historical roots. To quote from the “Review”: “For this the Modern Movement’s monocular aesthetic, its tiny repertoire of acceptable forms and its disdain for the past, is most unsuitable.”
Well, where to from here? It is easy enough to be critical and to take snide pot-shots, as anyone who has to make things and stand by them knows. The intensity of the criticism is often the measure of the work. The better the work the more vigorous the reaction.
I do not see how the A & W style can proceed much further. There is a limit to the number of parts into which a small building can be dismembered and the ways it can be reassembled. The style has all the hallmarks of decadent extremism. The initial shock tactics have become a bore and even the wit wears thin.
There is also a limit to the design and detailing input a small building can stand. Some designs must cost their authors dearly in detailing time, others have indulged in complexity and have obviously not spent the effort putting the thing together properly. The result is disastrous, a happening not a piece of craftsmanship.
I should have mentioned in my explanation for the A & W style, my belief that young New Zealand architects don’t have enough to do. With only one or two houses on the boards there is a tendency to overwork each design. Each house gets the mostest and is crammed full of every creative thought. They would do better to have more to do.
If you want to see the results of unbridled A & W imitations, have a look at an OK hill suburb with architects’ and draughtsmen’s houses jumping up and down shouting for attention. The results of my mind are horrific. It makes standard builders’ suburbia look decent and orderly. Maybe New Zealand architects only deserve to do 5% of the domestic work.
Because what takes place within the building is not the principle generator of form, the style is not self generating as post war modern architecture was presumed to be. The A & W style is essentially applied. Of course it has the enormous vocabulary of the past to delve into (what my generation called mere fashion). However, it has ben said that “There is only one thing stupider than restoring crummy old buildings and that is designing new buildings in imitation of crummy old buildings”.
The A & W style seems to be limited to domestic buildings or to where the elements of the building are small and varied. With great ingenuity and straining of logic it has been applied to little airports and shopping centres but is has not been applied (I use the word advisedly) to a large repetitive programme like an office building.
In his TV programme Ian Athfield showed a sketch of a multi-storey office building. It had a skirt of playful forms about its base, an exposed trunk of a prosaic mundane diagram of offices, and exotic frummery on top. I presume that this was a tongue-in-cheek Athfield spoof, but it aptly demonstrates the dilemma.
Having been trained in the fifties, I suppose I will be hung with puritan functionalism. I have a twinge of conscience and do mental gymnastics to justify applied stylistic elements.
I would plead for a return to the first element of the old architecture definition: commodity, firmness and delight.
Maybe we have over-emphasised the delight to the detriment of commodity, and even some of our firmness is questionable.
In commodity I read calm, generous spaciousness. What about a return to those former architectural virtues, quiet logical order and simplicity?
The Earl of Shaftesbury, oracle of the age of reason, described English baroque as vain, unmanly fripperies. Is that a fair criticism of some of today’s work?
One of the architect’s principle duties has been to make logical order out of a chaotic world.
These days we talk glibly about the conservation of energy. Simple building would, for usable volume gained, cost a whole lot less in labour and materials and much less in the labour of design effort.
If we must look to the past and to the New Zealand architectural past especially (but I again express grave doubts about this process) why must we confine our attention to little gothicky forms, jolly and quaint though they may be? What about the orderly spacious symmetrical houses of the neo-classical revival?
When we were building a hotel in Queenstown we acquired an old stone house near Arrowtown for John Blair to occupy. It was just four rooms, with a central passage, lean-to at the back and an attic over the four rooms with little windows starting at the floor line. It was a Scottish crofter’s idea of a Georgian house gone wrong with an Italian solidity.
In the process of painful slow restoration, I came to appreciate what a delightful house can be achieved with so few elements, simple well-proportioned rectangular rooms, two window types, one door type. It had survived a succession of owners with innumerable children, received them happy, not imposed itself upon them. Each could do his own thing and leave the house unharmed. Could you say that of our houses today?
It had survived ninety years of indifferent maintenance. Will our present day complexities manage so well?
I conclude by quoting the November Architectural Review, where the editorial comment sums up the situation so much better than I can.
“One of the most disturbing discoveries of the middle-aged intelligentsia is that they have undergone a considerable change in taste. This worries them. This worries them, because, when they were young, the intellectual world was dominated by a single, fixed, thought-to-be-unchangeable aesthetic based on functionalism. To find themselves liking something now which they can remember themselves disliking intensely only a decade or two ago suggests that they are ‘unprincipled’. In fact, we have all experienced a fundamental shift in the basis of visual culture.
“After the emergence of Pop, “Modern Architecture” became an historic style, to be put alongside the other historical styles in the Showcase of the Mind, where all become the objects of legitimate choice. This is eclecticism, a straightforward ideology based on the idea that what people like is important to them.”
I am a middle-aged architect who believes that an aesthetic based on functionalism still has something to offer, but I have my nagging doubts. These doubts and my confusion have been well demonstrated by this talk.
From an address to the 1978 Annual General Meeting of the NZIA Auckland Branch.
Architecture still has no “200 Years of New Zealand Architecture”, nothing except a modest picture book, one or two biographies of obscure early practitioners and an odd essay. I am told the School of Architecture disseminates words of wisdom on architecture - New Zealand as it was, is and will be - but it doesn’t reach the profession.
So with great effrontery, no research, just a faulty memory, gossip, hearsay and what is politely called intuition, I propose to talk about style in New Zealand architecture.
I was led to this by reading last week an issue of the Architectural Review, a Jubilee issue covering the 25 years of Elizabeth Regina. It dawned on me that I was in London during the Coronation, working on the Roehampton Lane flats at the LCC and I started practice the year after. So like a number of other older codgers I have been making buildings for 24 years - an awfully long time. The essays in the review were written by an architect who wasn’t even born at the time of the Coronation. The young was having a crack at the old. So I am now looking through the other end of the telescope, as it were.
What I propose to do is to take a definitive examples that best expresses the architecture of 25 years ago, and another more recent example, and then to fill in with buildings between that might indicate the whys and wherefores of the changes. I have chosen specific buildings because architects think better, at least I do, with visual images rather than abstract ideas. And inevitably in New Zealand the examples are mostly houses or housing.
If New Zealand has any claim to architecture of international quality it is in the design of small houses, very small houses by overseas standards, for modest money and for a whole range of people.
I think you will all agree that the first and second Group houses of Bill Wilson, Ivan Juriss, Brett Penman, Campbell Craig, Jim Hackshaw, Bruce Rotherham and Allan Wild epitomise the best of architecture 25 years ago. They demonstrate its principles, hopes and ideals.
The Group houses were the first expression of modern architecture in the country. Early so-called modern buildings provided the trappings and style but not the essence.
Now almost every principle that formed the basis of the Group houses has been rejected by today’s younger architect.
What are those principles?
First, that form follow function, or at least that form be symbolic of function (even that qualification was a wee heresy).
Second, that buildings should not be divided into a series of static volumes connected by doors but that space should flow. The Barcelona Pavilion of Mies van der Rowe was the ultimate model. The first book on Mies appeared that year. I remember Peter Beaven showing me the precious volume - Peter never cared for it!
Like all passionately held ideals this handling of space was carried to absurdity. The most OK plan was a rectangle with one or two penetrating partitions, with the circle of a shower drawn very thin, plus a beautifully drawn bog in the best manner of the Le Corbusier “oeuvre complet”, which incidentally came out volume by volume each year. It was an enormous advantage in Studio to get a Corbu volume before the library.
Third, that the building be embraced by one roof, preferably of low pitch and the wrong way, that is with the gable over the long side of the rectangle. This roof form with the characteristic sharp wall-roof junction gave the houses their distinctive memorable image. They were described as looking like woodsheds. We all took this for a great compliment.
It meant that they had the crisp clean forms of functional buildings and, first hints of things to come later, it gave these houses an indigenous early colonial character.
The structure of these relatively modest buildings, which presented no real building challenge, were nevertheless rigorously investigated and developed. Each member had to be loaded to its full capacity. Studs at 18” centres merely supporting linings were wasteful so posts at 4’0” and linings of diagonal boarding or ply were used. If a 6” x 2” rafter would span easily, a 5” x 2” just on the point of sagging was chosen.
The whole timber frame system was pulled apart stud by stud, and rethought and rebuilt.
So was each building material. Timber, concrete, ply and corrugated iron were in, bricks just acceptable, wet plaster naughty and wallpaper wicked. You were excommunicated for marble. I can imagine Bill’s horror at the sloshy swirls of plaster of today’s grotty Spanish style. Construction had to be dry and preferably prefabricated; each material exposed and each separate part articulated. Each material should be used au naturel. Timber should be neither painted nor stained. If used inside it should be waxed. God, the hours I spent waxing rimu! A whole new system of detailing was devised. Junctions without architraves, recessed detailing etc. Windows and walls, solids and voids were handled in a Corbusian way.
I remember the excitement and astonishment of seeing a house in Wellington by Bill Toomath, designed for his parents (how long-suffering and patient are guinea-pig architect parents), where the terminal vent was seen as a vertical element in the composition and was consciously used as such. It seems all old hat now, but to make every small element from wastepipe to electrical conduit grist to the architect’s mill was a considerable innovation at the time.
Those sharp clear minds of that generation of architects, applied to what was a relatively simple building type, cleared away all the rubbish and saw house in its simplest terms.
At the time I thought, and I think most of our generation (and architects for the next say fifteen years thought the same) that architecture, now solidly based on irrefutable principles, was destined to blossom forth, to develop in ways unimaginable and to captivate the world.
In the cynical, hesitant 70s, it is hard to recapture the ideals and aspirations of the mid-fifties. We believed in architecture for the masses, architecture for a brave new world, architecture solving all the problems of society; La Ville Radieuse. Modern architecture, socialism and the post-war world were inseperable.
Looking back, you can see a strong element of puritanism. We made a virtue of necessity. If there was a scarcity of money and materials then sparse minimum was idealised. If you couldn’t get or afford carpet and wallpaper they were dismissed from the vocabulary.
Nobody had much money then, architects would work for the ordinary men - to hell with the rich - the average man was idealised.
However, the Group house was probably the nearest that New Zealand architecture had come to making something of its own.
Now let me try and plot the drift away from this unique burst of daylight, and here I am afraid I regrettably talk about myself. Why? Because I don’t know the facts and dates of other people’s work heading in the same direction.
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.
But there was another influence at work. We are the product of our environment and training. My first two years in architecture were virtually as an articled pupil for Cecil Wood - the Binney of Christchurch or the Chapman Taylor of Wellington. Wood was the nephew of Norman Shaw. He was a superb exponent of the arts and crafts movement and the best draughtsman I have ever seen. In his seventies, he reverted from American colonial back to simple little arts and crafts cottages, and so back to his London training in the early 1900s.
While readily accepting the Group-come-Brutalism principles, I had a sneaking regard for Wood’s work at Christ’s College, the Goodhue gothic of the dining hall and the Norman Shaw of the library. These buildings were wicked because they committed the worst sin. They were designed in a historic style. Even the word style was abhorrent. It suggested fashion, something ephemeral and changing, not based on solid principles. I, being well brought up, dismissed the early cruder bandaged blood lavatorial gothic of the university, but my enjoyment of Wood’s work I could not resist. It was a secret vice not to be admitted in stern architectural circles.
We designed a number of low-pitched Group-like forms but were never able to achieve the purity or absolute quality of the Group work. Our clients demanded the usual subdivision into separate compartments. But the houses seemed to sit unhappily in flat Christchurch suburbia and more important they had a minimum, even cheap, insubstantial quality that was not acceptable to my clients, who tended to be of the over 55 relatively affluent establishment.
Searching for appropriate forms I turned back to earlier influences; the simple modest houses of Denmark where I had spent a happy week or two, and Wood’s houses. That is, turning back to the traditional European house.
First came a house much modelled on one by Finn Juhl. It had two blocks, one long and thin with bedrooms strung out in a row under one gable, a flat roofed connection and the living rooms in a square. Roofs were tiled and about 35 pitch°.
Then a house in the country standing bold and bare on the huge broad river terraces in the foothills. We designed it like a barn with rooms, tucked up with one large steep embracing roof. It seemed the only shape that would survive in the enormous scale of the landscape: it had a 45° roof. This led to a house for my parents. As many of you will know, parents though long-suffering are not the easiest of clients - they are inclined to say exactly what they think, not sparing the architect son’s delicate sensitivity. For my parents, then in their sixties, a house had to look like a house. It had to have a roof. Fortunately they were living in a house designed by Cecil Wood which had coved ceilings, steep hipped roofs and excellent roof-to-wall proportions. I divided their house into three blocks - living rooms, bedrooms and garage - the conventional subdivision, and strung the rooms out under the long gables with the gable width equal to the room width. The blocks were slid against one another. The spatial extension was along the glass line connecting the sequence of rooms.
The roofs were steeply pitched 40° (not 45°), and roof comfortably dominated wall. It looked like everybody’s idea of a simple cottage, early New Zealand colonial and trad European house.
This was achieved by the smallness of the three blocks and by scale and proportion alone, not by details of glazing bars, finials and so on. The pattern of windows, the solid and void relationships were carefully contrived and by no means conventional.
The house was immediately approved by a section of the public and had a host of imitators.
We did four or five more for the same age group and type of client, exploring modifications to the groupings of the blocks, varying proportions and introducing half gables, verandahs and so on.
We stopped the moment I heard an architect in the office say, “Here comes another Pixie house”!
At the same time, 1960, Christchurch College was being built and I was designing our house and office in Cambridge Terrace. Both these two buildings introduced what can only be described as willful half gable skylights, one dashing lot over the maids’ bedrooms at Christchurch College and one over our draughting room. Both were seen as minor embellishments and frivolities to the stern brown bread and butter of the brutalist design.
Peter Middleton did one of his bewildering literary criticisms of my house and office. He described the stairs as tautological which is a literary term meaning more than one and the building as a whole as Butterfield-like. I suppose only one in fifty architects then knew much about Butterfield. It would have been clearer if he had said gothic like, but Pud had recognised the spiky verticality of the building.
The movement away from the Group continued. Ted McCoy was designing houses of a similar character in Dunedin.
Ian Athfield worked as a student in our office when 65 Cambridge Terrace was being built in 1961 and he did the sketch plans, until I will admit firm direction, of three houses for a maiden lady. They were three two-storey houses, called bluntly flats in those days - one behind the other with the middle one set half a gable forward. To avoid the gawky look of a pitched roof perched on a small two-story house the 45° roof was brought down to about 3’0” above the first floor and the windows moved up into the gable. This is of course a conventional Scandinavian device. They were I think by far the most popular houses we had ever designed and they became the forerunner of what is now rather pretentiously called the town house. We thought we were losing our touch. Tourist buses used to detour to stop outside the flats in Dorset Street. They had the accolade of being the ugliest buildings in town!
Roger Walker also worked in the office a little later. I don’t claim to have influenced this astonishing pair, but at least they were aware of what was happening, the arguments behind what was being designed and how things were being made.
I have mentioned Peter Middleton. His influence in the School was all-important. He, more than anybody, suggested the design of buildings could be more than a dour intellectual exercise. It could be amusing and witty. Peter had a brilliant protege in Ian Athfield.
Peter also introduced a literary quality into New Zealand architecture. Do you remember his famous lecture at a conference in Auckland? He dropped names left, right and centre, three-quarters of which I for one had never heard.
His house in Grafton Road, completed as I recollect about 1961, had an enormous influence on students and architects. Here were the small spaces, the complex roofs suggesting early colonial origins, and with tongue in cheek here were wooden barge boards a poor detail rejected by the Group, and as joke a turned finial. The house had a beguiling charm.
The New Zealand house had a humanist face again.
At the same time Peter Beaven designed a number of houses that progressively moved away from the Group ideals. Though Peter was a contemporary of the Group he did not subscribe to the intellectual discipline of Bill Wilson.
Peter has never been circumscribed by the theory that form should follow function, nor has he regarded structure as all-important. It was to be used, misused or ignored as the occasion demanded. Sammy Crookes nearly failed him in his final year at the school - not one of his designs would stand up. No, Peter is essentially an intuitive designer with an extraordinary sense of style and form, the direct opposite of the intellectual Bill Wilson. It was inevitable that Peter would quickly respond to the change of style overseas. Peter’s houses became progressively more complex, exotic and willful as money and clients would permit. (I don’t mean that in any derogatory sense; most of us including Bill Wilson would have been delighted to have such free creative talent.)
Even for a Christchurch architect it is difficult to pinpoint the significant buildings and their dates. Peter’s work doesn’t progress, it tiptoes lightly through the tulips jumping from one thing to another.
The important buildings are probably his own octagon, Mr Niel’s house and Dr Carson’s house, and of buildings other than houses, the Tunnel Road Authority building, the voluptuously curved structure with a lean-to on the top.
The group of town houses in Rossell Street designed after an European trip is the forerunner of all later blocks of town houses.
This brings me to the Athfield-Walker era.
I am well aware of how different these two architects are and how they must cringe when they see some of the work of their imitators, but like it or not their names attach to the style and you all have a mental image of what I mean. I have tried to devise an appropriate name other than the derogatory “Noddyism” but so far no luck. I will just call it A & W.
The Athfield-Walker style is the direct opposite of everything the Group and the architects of the fifties and early sixties held dear.
Where the Group planned with the minimum of subdivision and connected indoor and outdoor with extended planes to make the spaces appear as large as possible, A & W architects carve up their buildings into as many small rooms as can be squeezed out of the programme. Some become little more than closets with vertical dimensions greater than horizontal. Each room is further articulated with projections and recessions making small nooks and crannies. If rooms are joined together to make a continuous space this is as likely to be vertical as horizontal. The broad calm horizontal expanse of the Group is replaced by an intricately modelled collection of spaces with a vertical emphasis.
The structural elements tend to be used as decorative devices, not as a finely calculated minimum members. The spaces are generally so small that there is no real structural problem but massive exaggerated timber posts and beams and diagonal struts and ties galore horse about in strange places, plumb through the middle of the room and bang over the face of the windows.
Roofs are steeply pitched, often above 45°, not placed to embrace the whole building as in the Group manner, nor placed over a string of rooms as in the 60s, but over each individual room which for preference should have an extending lean-to, a dormer or half a gable. The resultant collection of gables, half gables and slices thereof are juxtaposed together to produce complex sculptural shapes, sometimes looking like a willful uncontrolled collision.
Form no longer develops from function. No functional requirement can justify the complex exotic roof forms.
The Group house was supposed to be the result of a careful analysis of the requirements of the occupants of the house. The elevations merely grew. The authors of many A & W designs clearly start with an external visual image into which the function of the house, the airport or shopping centre are ingeniously stuffed.
They have been unkindly described as an ego trip for the architect or the occupants or both. But don’t get me wrong, superb architecture or rather culture has emerged from this process. Vanburgh’s Blenheim Palace has been described as a fine piece of sculpture in which you may incidentally live.
Whereas the Group house was thought to be styleless (which of course it wasn’t) and thought to be the result of a logical synthesis of function, space and structure, A & W work has all the trappings of an architectural style. It commits the worst sin of the fifties - it wears what Bill Wilson would have called an evocative fancy dress.
The paraphernalia of the style are the steeply pitched and curved roofs; the owners and turrets preferably cantilevered whether required by plan or not; the circular elements, drainpipe windows, curved heads of doors, spherical plastic bubbles, cut-outs in curved plycopyne if the money was short - all these derived from pop art; the forms derived from structure used decoratively; the various forms derived from early colonial architecture - verandah detailing, finials, barge boards; the colours - any strident colour splashed diagonally and clashing as outrageously with its neighbour as possible; diagonal shapes in plan and elevation; skylights galore.
Nothing must look like itself, especially doors. As an Australian critic aptly said, “If entry is found first time around, go back to gaol, collect £200.”
Why has this extreme architectural style (some might call it an odd-ball aberration) blossomed and flowered so vigorously in New Zealand?
As far as I know, no other country has carried such small buildings to such frenetic shapes and embellishment. One can list overseas sources of most of the elements - pop art and architecture for the circles; complex geometric shapes from the western states; southern Europe and “Architecture without Architects” for the continuous plastered surfaces over wall and roof in defiance of structure, materials and weather, and to our own colonial past for historical elements and so on. This is of course not said in criticism. The parent sources and influence of all good work can be dissected.
However, visiting architects from the States and Australia, many experienced and able critics, are astounded by the A & W work and always end up using the word “Disneyland”.
As I see it, these are the reasons for the rapid acceptance and spread of the style.
It was started by able rebellious young architects more than a decade ago thumbing their noses at the university, the establishment and the last flutter of the puritanical fifties and early sixties - it has elements of an extended university prank.
It arrived on the scene when young architects in an affluent confident society could immediately on graduating do their own thing, start their own practice. This happens rarely in other places and the way things are going will not happen again here for a while. And probably for the first time in New Zealand there were relatively young people with the money and confidence to have a go.
So the older practising architects had no chance to beat the hell out of them, to knock out the enthusiasm and creative energy nor to impart the proper restraints of good craftsmanship.
Young architects starting in a fully fledged A & W style competing for clients’ attention could only develop more extreme forms.
The A & W style coincided with New Zealand’s belated but now intense interest in the past. Colonial architecture, especially wooden gothic, has become the darling of public and architects alike.
It is surprising how late and sudden was this change in taste.
For three years starting in 1969 the Christchurch Club, the home of the conservative establishment, debated whether it should pull down its large Victorian wooden club house and rebuild. In all the debate with five architects and many professionals in its membership, no one suggested that the building be preserved for its architectural or historic value. An illustration of the proposed new multi-storey building in the press produced no public comment defending the present club house. In the end, for economic reasons, it was decided to alter and refurbish the wooden building. It must have been one of the earliest and still one of the largest restorations in the country. We pulled down thousands of square feet of rotting black offices and rebuilt large portions leaving only the street facades and two or three rooms much as they were.
Our work received undue acclaim. As we saw it, all we had done was to peel the banana. It was all sitting there waiting to be revealed, and with my good classical training it was no problem to run coarse timber moulds and maintain the hearty Victorian character. The wheel has turned full circle and the Club is now on the list of buildings that must be preserved.
The Club fought the City Council before the Town Planning Appeal Board and was instrumental in having the Amenity Regulations of the Council thrown out as not being within the terms of the Act. We had fun at the hearing explaining that the Council appeared to be trying to preserve some genuine Warren and Mahoney. The Club was worth preserving because it is a good, well made, well designed structure used for exactly the same purpose now as when it was built.
From ignoring the past we have gone to the other extreme. Anything that is old and preferably of stone is therefore good, beautiful and worth preserving.
The Christchurch City Council aided and abetted by Christchurch architects now talks of preserving the clumsy piece of neo-Italianate-gone-wrong of the Post Office in the Square. It wasn’t even on the first lists of interesting buildings made only ten years ago. Now we are saying, in effect, that today’s architects could do no better - God help us.
I fear that architects have been equally uncritical of early New Zealand work. They are prepared to borrow the bits and pieces, the obvious details rather than to understand the substance. A few glazing bars, a criss-cross verandah rail and a dormer and you have a colonial house.
The small scale forms of the A & W style have their obvious historical overtones and the client happily accepted the package. A bit of applied gew gaw, old doors, crude stained glass, any old junk from the breakers’ yard could be incorporated.
To what extremities Middleton’s finials have led!
What the Australians called “out-backery” started earlier there. Old Victorian pictures, gloomy cracked oils of dubious value were resurrected and flogged off for huge prices. Old houses were discovered and a seemingly endless array of sketches sold.
It is argued in England that the chief reason for our present interest in the past is television. It is said that it has opened vast numbers of people to visual culture in much the same way that, 500 years before, the invention of printing opened to people a literary culture, and in the nineteenth century the gramophone to music. The first need of people in this intoxicating situation is to discover their historical roots. To quote from the “Review”: “For this the Modern Movement’s monocular aesthetic, its tiny repertoire of acceptable forms and its disdain for the past, is most unsuitable.”
Well, where to from here? It is easy enough to be critical and to take snide pot-shots, as anyone who has to make things and stand by them knows. The intensity of the criticism is often the measure of the work. The better the work the more vigorous the reaction.
I do not see how the A & W style can proceed much further. There is a limit to the number of parts into which a small building can be dismembered and the ways it can be reassembled. The style has all the hallmarks of decadent extremism. The initial shock tactics have become a bore and even the wit wears thin.
There is also a limit to the design and detailing input a small building can stand. Some designs must cost their authors dearly in detailing time, others have indulged in complexity and have obviously not spent the effort putting the thing together properly. The result is disastrous, a happening not a piece of craftsmanship.
I should have mentioned in my explanation for the A & W style, my belief that young New Zealand architects don’t have enough to do. With only one or two houses on the boards there is a tendency to overwork each design. Each house gets the mostest and is crammed full of every creative thought. They would do better to have more to do.
If you want to see the results of unbridled A & W imitations, have a look at an OK hill suburb with architects’ and draughtsmen’s houses jumping up and down shouting for attention. The results of my mind are horrific. It makes standard builders’ suburbia look decent and orderly. Maybe New Zealand architects only deserve to do 5% of the domestic work.
Because what takes place within the building is not the principle generator of form, the style is not self generating as post war modern architecture was presumed to be. The A & W style is essentially applied. Of course it has the enormous vocabulary of the past to delve into (what my generation called mere fashion). However, it has ben said that “There is only one thing stupider than restoring crummy old buildings and that is designing new buildings in imitation of crummy old buildings”.
The A & W style seems to be limited to domestic buildings or to where the elements of the building are small and varied. With great ingenuity and straining of logic it has been applied to little airports and shopping centres but is has not been applied (I use the word advisedly) to a large repetitive programme like an office building.
In his TV programme Ian Athfield showed a sketch of a multi-storey office building. It had a skirt of playful forms about its base, an exposed trunk of a prosaic mundane diagram of offices, and exotic frummery on top. I presume that this was a tongue-in-cheek Athfield spoof, but it aptly demonstrates the dilemma.
Having been trained in the fifties, I suppose I will be hung with puritan functionalism. I have a twinge of conscience and do mental gymnastics to justify applied stylistic elements.
I would plead for a return to the first element of the old architecture definition: commodity, firmness and delight.
Maybe we have over-emphasised the delight to the detriment of commodity, and even some of our firmness is questionable.
In commodity I read calm, generous spaciousness. What about a return to those former architectural virtues, quiet logical order and simplicity?
The Earl of Shaftesbury, oracle of the age of reason, described English baroque as vain, unmanly fripperies. Is that a fair criticism of some of today’s work?
One of the architect’s principle duties has been to make logical order out of a chaotic world.
These days we talk glibly about the conservation of energy. Simple building would, for usable volume gained, cost a whole lot less in labour and materials and much less in the labour of design effort.
If we must look to the past and to the New Zealand architectural past especially (but I again express grave doubts about this process) why must we confine our attention to little gothicky forms, jolly and quaint though they may be? What about the orderly spacious symmetrical houses of the neo-classical revival?
When we were building a hotel in Queenstown we acquired an old stone house near Arrowtown for John Blair to occupy. It was just four rooms, with a central passage, lean-to at the back and an attic over the four rooms with little windows starting at the floor line. It was a Scottish crofter’s idea of a Georgian house gone wrong with an Italian solidity.
In the process of painful slow restoration, I came to appreciate what a delightful house can be achieved with so few elements, simple well-proportioned rectangular rooms, two window types, one door type. It had survived a succession of owners with innumerable children, received them happy, not imposed itself upon them. Each could do his own thing and leave the house unharmed. Could you say that of our houses today?
It had survived ninety years of indifferent maintenance. Will our present day complexities manage so well?
I conclude by quoting the November Architectural Review, where the editorial comment sums up the situation so much better than I can.
“One of the most disturbing discoveries of the middle-aged intelligentsia is that they have undergone a considerable change in taste. This worries them. This worries them, because, when they were young, the intellectual world was dominated by a single, fixed, thought-to-be-unchangeable aesthetic based on functionalism. To find themselves liking something now which they can remember themselves disliking intensely only a decade or two ago suggests that they are ‘unprincipled’. In fact, we have all experienced a fundamental shift in the basis of visual culture.
“After the emergence of Pop, “Modern Architecture” became an historic style, to be put alongside the other historical styles in the Showcase of the Mind, where all become the objects of legitimate choice. This is eclecticism, a straightforward ideology based on the idea that what people like is important to them.”
I am a middle-aged architect who believes that an aesthetic based on functionalism still has something to offer, but I have my nagging doubts. These doubts and my confusion have been well demonstrated by this talk.