GIBERT WONG looks at a discovery which which reopens the debate on architecture's modernist trend in New Zealand.
It started for Justine Clark and Paul Walker with a hefty, cardboard box stored in the Alexander Turnbull Library. Staff knew it was there but time and lack of funds had left it to gather dust.
For Clark, a National Library Research fellow in 1998, and architectural researcher and partner Walker, a lecturer at Melbourne University's architecture school, the box was a motherlode of modernist ambition.
A sift through its contents revealed images that documented more than 200 architectural projects in photo albums held together with yellowed and hardened sticky tape; elegant sketches; blurry snaps taken at construction sites.
The box had been left at the library in the 1970s and was the raw material for a book planned by the Wellington Architectural Centre that would express all that was best about the new architecture that was being created in the post-war years until 1958.
At the time the centre newsletter proposed: "We believe that a collection of the best New Zealand work will prove to be a great deal more impressive than is normally assumed and that it is worth making such a collection for the delectation of New Zealanders and people abroad."
Architecture, like painting and literature, was in a state of foment in the 1950s. The post-war years brought the return of servicemen and women who had travelled extensively and come back with fresh ideas. There was also an undeniable recognition that New Zealand was no longer merely an outpost of Britain.
The book was an attempt to express the thinking of the time in architecture but it was never to be published, as arguments over its purpose and intent sapped energy.
The Architectural Centre, an organisation made up of architects and those interested in the discipline that exists today, began to focus on town planning, particularly waterfront preservation.
The book may never have been formally scrapped, merely put aside until its moment was past.
Upon rediscovering the material, Walker and Clark saw the box as a chance to reopen the modernist debates prompted by the times, debates, they believe, continue to be relevant. The result is their book Looking for the Local: Architecture and the New Zealand Modern, published by Victoria University Press last week.
"We're trying to look at the motivations to make a New Zealand architecture. That was an idea that everyone talked about after World War Two," Walker says.
In Auckland the band of architects that became known as The Group set out their agenda:"New Zealand must have its own architecture, its own sense of what is beautiful and appropriate to our climate and conditions."
But as Walker says, the modernist traditions, a reaction to the austerity of the war and the drive to find a local vernacular that would say who we were in our architecture was a concern for many other young architects.
In the box he discovered works from Hawkes' Bay and Gisborne, areas not well served by architectural history.
The project is also timely because so many of the buildings and houses it features have been badly transformed; retrofitted with little sympathy for the architectural heritage of the building.
Walker notes that a pre-eminent New Zealand building, the Futuna chapel in Wellington designed by Sir John Scott, has been sold to property developers. Yet the building expresses, he says, a Pakeha and Pacific tradition that exists nowhere else.
"I'm not saying there are plans to do anything to the chapel, but our fear is that property owners don't necessarily see the value in reasonably recent work that they might see in Edwardian or Victorian work."
So the book serves as a time-capsule into the late 1950s, but Walker believes it speaks to people concerned about their cityscapes today.
"The merits of modernism in the 1950s was a more public debate on how to articulate national identity rather than slavishly imitate foreign styles. It's a debate that is not happening today outside architecture circles."
Modernism has already been making a determined comeback.. Cool, minimalist retro decors have become de rigueur in hip bars, clubs and apartment. Call it the Wallpaper phenomenon for the fat, successful magazine whose success is based on the aesthetic.
But Walker feels that much of the reinvented modernist architecture and decor is merely nostalgic and lacks the substance of the debates that once drove the philosophy: the issues of finding a vernacular, the need to marry functionalism, aesthetics and form and the egalitarianism.
Modernist thinking lives on in the decks, open-plan spaces and indoor-outdoor living that have become a part of most of our housing, he says.
"I don't think the debate really went away. We just stopped having it in public. We're hoping that by recording the heritage of modernism we have, we can start kindling the debates that we still need to have about our buildings."
* Looking for the Local: Architecture and the New Zealand Modern, by Justine Clark and Paul Walker, Victoria University Press, $59.95.
Looking for the local in architecture
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