Dorset Street Flats feature in the updated "Ōtautahi Christchurch Architecture" walking guide.
Dorset Street Flats
2–16 Dorset Street
Miles Warren, 1957
Historic Place Category 1
In 1957 the Dorset Street Flats, whose reputation is inversely proportional to its scale, announced the architectural arrival of Miles Warren and declared his design intentions. When he designed the flats, Warren was in his mid-twenties, and not long returned from a couple of years abroad, during which he worked in the Le Corbusier-influenced housing section of London County Council’s architecture department. He also visited Modernist pilgrimage sites such as Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz’s Woodland Cemetery (1940) in Stockholm, and Corb’s Unité d’Habitation (1952) in Marseilles, the apartment building whose rough-cast concrete, or ‘béton brut’, structure spawned the ultimately unfortunate term ‘Brutalism’. Warren was primed for a breakout project; with the Dorset Street Flats, he was to write, ‘I was able to put my theories into practice and stuff the design full of everything I knew.’
The building could be called a pioneering work of bachelor Modernism. Warren developed the flats with three male friends, all at the time single, on a rectangular site with a 35-metre street frontage, a two-storey building with two offset groups of four single-level flats. There was a flat for each of the project partners and four for letting; upper-level flats got a balcony and ground- floor units a garden. The essence of the building, Warren wrote, was the use of solid masonry walls, made of load-bearing concrete blocks, soon to be a Warren and Christchurch design trope, instead of the timber framing typical of New Zealand’s domestic architecture. The flats were basically 45-square-metre boxes; in their well-detailed interiors, the concrete of blocks and beams was left exposed in an expression of Modernist material honesty. To Warren’s delight, the Dorset Street Flats, their roofs low-pitched and eave-less, were sufficiently transgressive to be locally notorious. Now celebrated, they were restored by Young Architects in 2021.
JOHN WALSH & PATRICK REYNOLDS, Ōtautahi Christchurch Architecture: A Walking Guide, Massey University Press, 2023, ISBN 978-1-99-101638-6.
Reproduced with the permission of the publisher.
Dorset Street Flats
2–16 Dorset Street
Miles Warren, 1957
Historic Place Category 1
In 1957 the Dorset Street Flats, whose reputation is inversely proportional to its scale, announced the architectural arrival of Miles Warren and declared his design intentions. When he designed the flats, Warren was in his mid-twenties, and not long returned from a couple of years abroad, during which he worked in the Le Corbusier-influenced housing section of London County Council’s architecture department. He also visited Modernist pilgrimage sites such as Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz’s Woodland Cemetery (1940) in Stockholm, and Corb’s Unité d’Habitation (1952) in Marseilles, the apartment building whose rough-cast concrete, or ‘béton brut’, structure spawned the ultimately unfortunate term ‘Brutalism’. Warren was primed for a breakout project; with the Dorset Street Flats, he was to write, ‘I was able to put my theories into practice and stuff the design full of everything I knew.’
The building could be called a pioneering work of bachelor Modernism. Warren developed the flats with three male friends, all at the time single, on a rectangular site with a 35-metre street frontage, a two-storey building with two offset groups of four single-level flats. There was a flat for each of the project partners and four for letting; upper-level flats got a balcony and ground- floor units a garden. The essence of the building, Warren wrote, was the use of solid masonry walls, made of load-bearing concrete blocks, soon to be a Warren and Christchurch design trope, instead of the timber framing typical of New Zealand’s domestic architecture. The flats were basically 45-square-metre boxes; in their well-detailed interiors, the concrete of blocks and beams was left exposed in an expression of Modernist material honesty. To Warren’s delight, the Dorset Street Flats, their roofs low-pitched and eave-less, were sufficiently transgressive to be locally notorious. Now celebrated, they were restored by Young Architects in 2021.
JOHN WALSH & PATRICK REYNOLDS, Ōtautahi Christchurch Architecture: A Walking Guide, Massey University Press, 2023, ISBN 978-1-99-101638-6.
Reproduced with the permission of the publisher.
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