Dorset Street Flats featured in the NZIA architectural guide to Christchurch City.
Dorset Street Flats
Warren & Mahoney
1966
These eight flats were designed for four owner/occupier friends to lease and 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 scale of the relatively small rooms.
These flats were the first conscious use of concrete block inside a New Zealand house or flat. They were thought at the time to be prison-like.
Internally, the bare walls were seen as a counterpoint to rich furnishings and, externally, the garden walls as a background to luxuriant planting.
GAVIN WILLIS, "Selected Architecture - Christchurch: A Guide", NZIA, 2005, ISBN 0-473-10711-2, pp 82-83.
Dorset Street Flats
Warren & Mahoney
1966
These eight flats were designed for four owner/occupier friends to lease and 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 scale of the relatively small rooms.
These flats were the first conscious use of concrete block inside a New Zealand house or flat. They were thought at the time to be prison-like.
Internally, the bare walls were seen as a counterpoint to rich furnishings and, externally, the garden walls as a background to luxuriant planting.
GAVIN WILLIS, "Selected Architecture - Christchurch: A Guide", NZIA, 2005, ISBN 0-473-10711-2, pp 82-83.
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