| New Zealand architecture of the 20th century has reflected the country's strong cultural ties with Europe and the United States on the one hand and a romantic wish for national identity on the other. Influences from international metropolitan centers were taken up in turn as they emerged and were disseminated through architectural journals and books. New Zealand architects, always acutely aware of the country's geographic isolation and small scale, also traveled widely and brought direct experience of international precedents to bear on their own work at home. The concern for a local architecture became strong at midcentury as a reaction to the centennial in 1940 of the establishment of British rule and the relative isolation experienced during the war years. This localism was played out most self-consciously in small, timber houses. Their designs reflected both the adoption of modernist principles and a wish to establish identity through links to a putative local pioneer tradition from the early days of European settlement. Architecture in New Zealand has consequently focused on the small house as its most important achievement, to the neglect of the urban realm.
In the first part of the century, architecture in New Zealand was overtly derived from American and British models. The best work of William Gray Young, one of the most successful architects of the prewar years, reflects his interest in English Georgian architecture, as in the Wellesley Club (1925) in Wellington. However, his most notable public work, the Wellington Railway Station (1937), is influenced by American precedents. The work of the distinguished practice Gummer & Ford also has a mix of American and British themes. William Gummer spent periods in the offices of both Edwin Lutyens and Daniel Burnham before returning to practice in New Zealand in 1913. Principal works are the Auckland Railway Station (1930), the Dominion Museum (1936) in Wellington, and the State Insurance building (1941) in Wellington.
After World War I, suburbs in the towns expanded quickly. Popular housing since the 1880s had followed American precedents; the Californian bungalow style became dominant in the 1920s in part under the influence of Hollywood movies. However, the popularity of this type can be attributed not only to the ongoing New Zealand enthusiasm for American popular culture but also to the flexibility of domestic organization it entailed. Economic depression following the global economic downturn in building activity, although after the major earthquake of 1931, the towns of Napier and Hastings were rebuilt in a modest but consistent Art Deco style. The earthquake also led to an ongoing interest in improving the seismic performance of building stock in the country.
In the years following 1937, the government built tens of thousands of conservatively designed "state houses." However, this housing program also included experiments with high-rise slabs—notably Dixon Street Flats (1942) in Wellington—designed in a much more contemporary style under the guidance of Gordon Wilson. Modern explorations increased after the arrival of several Central European refugee architects in the late 1930s. Most notable was Ernst Plischke, who had worked for Ely Kahn in New York in the late 1920s and designed important buildings at the Vienna Werkbundsiedlung (1930–32) and for the Government Employment Office (1930–31) at Leising, Vienna. Before returning to Vienna in 1963, Plischke undertook town-planning work for the New Zealand government and designed private houses, such as the Sutch house (1956) and, with Cedric Firth, the Massey House office block (1957), both in Wellington.
In 1947, Plischke published Design and Living, one of a number of postwar initiatives to promote modern architecture in New Zealand. Others included the foundation in 1946 of the Architectural Centre in Wellington and the Architectural Group in Auckland. The Architectural Centre evolved into a still-extant lobby organization, and in the 1950s the Architectural Group developed a domestic architecture based on local timber building construction coupled with modernist economy of plan and structure. Its experiments with the small, single-family house were the most rigorous of the period and are now the most locally revered. The Group's 1946 manifesto, On the Necessity for Architecture, called for an architecture specific to New Zealand.
By 1960, a number of architects were employing a language of concrete-block walls left unrendered, concrete frames, and roofs with complex timber structures. An early achievement in this idiom is the Futuna Chapel (1960) in Karori by John Scott, also influenced by Maori building traditions. However, the most successful devotees of this Brutalist mode, the Christchurch architects Peter Beaven and Warren & Mahoney, were still looking to Scandinavia and to England. As well as restrained domestic work, these architects were responsible for a number of innovative institutional buildings: the Lyttelton Road Tunnel Authority Building (1965) by Beaven and Christchurch College (1966) and Christchurch Town Hall (1972), both by Warren & Mahoney.
During the 1960s and 1970s, there was expansion in office and industrial building, but quality was uneven. In the 1960s, in reaction to the lack of character in emerging urban and suburban environments, Wellington architects Ian Athelid and Roger Walker began to make intricately scaled buildings that extended the vernacular references of earlier New Zealand domestic work but no longer framed them in modernist terms. The village-like qualities of their work offered a challenge to the social isolation of the dormitory suburb and the functional separations of modern town planning. Athelid has continued to develop material and social complexity in the work of his increasingly prominent practice (Wellington Public Library, 1992, and Palmerston North Public Library, 1997).
Economic reform from the mid-1980s has generated wealth for an entrepreneurial Auckland business class. Its members have commissioned adventurous and often indulgent houses from architects such as Marshall Cook, David Mitchell, Pete Bossley, Pip Cheshire, and Noel Lane. They have worked under a range of international influences: Cook seems to have been heavily influenced by Charles Moore, for example, whereas Cheshire's most accomplished building to date, the Congreve house (1994), apparently reflects a careful study of Mario Botta and other Ticino architects. In response to this eclecticist, the firm of Architectus Bowes Clifford Thompson has retrieved the consistent structural and constructional rigor of the immediate postwar years (Mathematics and Statistics and Computer Science Building, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, 1998), and Rewi Thompson has developed an approach based in material directness and aspects of Maori culture.
PAUL WALKER
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O). Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005. |
