Brian Rudman: Blake mausoleum out of place

The ancient Egyptians entombed their great god-king in a giant stone pyramid. The Sir Peter Blake fan club are planning a rather more high-tech mausoleum to their fallen hero, a great glass coffin on stilts in Auckland harbour.

It makes one wonder what even grander gesture our masters have in mind to memorialise Sir Edmund Hillary when the time comes? Commissioning the artist Christo to wrap one of Auckland's mountains in white plastic, perhaps?

Not a bad idea when you think about it, given that Sir Edmund is patron of the volcanic cones society. And what a way to save Mt Roskill - that's if the road builders haven't got to it first.

But getting back to this tomb to Sir Peter. Has anyone ever come with anything more fantastical and, shall we say, un-New Zealandish? I mean no disrespect to the man or his memory, but when did we start building $10 million monuments to each other? Even to a champion sailor who died in unfortunate circumstances while cruising up the Amazon?

To put it in some perspective, we're only paying $300,000 for a belated tomb to an unknown warrior - a pyramid, as it happens, in form - being erected in Wellington to honour the 27,000 New Zealanders killed fighting last century's foreign wars.

There are only three monuments I can think of approaching the scale of the proposed Blake one. One is the great obelisk atop One Tree Hill, left by Sir John Logan Campbell as his tribute to what his generation thought was the dying race of Maori.

The others commemorate two of our great Prime Ministers, both wartime leaders who died in office. Bill Massey, Prime Minister from 1912 to 1925, lies in a tomb incorporating an old gun emplacement at Point Halswell at the entrance of Wellington Harbour. Public subscription raised $10,000, the Government paid $20,000.

Michael Joseph Savage, the most loved of all our Prime Ministers, died in 1940 and is buried on Bastion Point. The Labour Party paid the $8000 cost of his monument, the Government paid for the surrounding park.

These were two unique leaders being honoured in special times and circumstances. In New Zealand's pantheon of secular gods, it's hard to imagine even the most ardent of Blake fans putting him on the same plane.

To most of us, he'd be sharing a room with All Black captains and Olympic gold medallists, and as far as I'm aware, no one has raised great graven images in their memory.

It's not just the idea of a temple to one man that makes me uneasy, it's the form of the one being proposed and how it came about.

Prize-winning architect Pete Bossley sees his work as "an exhibition case for a very large object and it has to be treated like a valuable jewel". Mercifully he's not talking of exhuming the body and returning it to New Zealand. The object in question is Black Magic, the yacht that won the America's Cup in San Diego in 1995.

Visually, you have to worry at the placement of this huge glass box cheek by jowl with the traditional lines of the National Maritime Museum. When architect Richard Harris created the museum 10 years ago, his whole aim was to restore and refurbish the historic wharf buildings to capture the existing atmosphere. He writes, on the Jasmax website, of the new buildings he created having "a robust honesty typical of a working wharf".

While Mr Harris was working on this $6 million conversion, his partners, Mr Bossley and Ivan Mercep, were leading the team building the monolithic $135 million Te Papa museum in Wellington.

Mr Bossley has now been brought in, to bring a little of Te Papa to Auckland.

Mr Harris laughingly says, "You'll get no outrage from me" when I ask whether he feels the glass box detracts from his creation. He sees the Bossley addition "as a display case rather than a building".

We can only hope he is right and that it will look less dominating than in the artist's impression. Inside the glass case will be displays that, according to Sports Minister Trevor Mallard, "will integrate the themes and milestones in Sir Peter Blake's life with New Zealand's long, innovative and illustrious yachting history". It will also showcase his later work (which, if we are honest, had hardly begun) in "promoting the care of life in, on and around the waters of the world".

Now perhaps if the display was to be about the exciting struggle of a tiny nation to win this rich man's trophy, with an appropriate acknowledgement of Sir Peter's part in this saga, I'd feel more comfortable.

But what we seem to being offered by Te Papa, the Wellington-based national museum which has its oar well into this Auckland project, is a Blakecentric version of New Zealand yachting and the cup adventure.

For Te Papa, it's been a great way of getting an embarrassment off their hands. Team New Zealand gifted Black Magic to it in 2001 but it's been in Auckland in storage ever since. The national museum has had nowhere to put it.

Now it's latched onto this project, and is lauding its move, for the first time, into another city. I'm not quite sure why we need them here. But if they're here to share some of their huge taxpayer-provided wealth, they're welcome.

As for the $10 million mausoleum they want us to have - of that, I have grave doubts.