Dialogue: 'Classical' architecture a blot on modern suburbia

The classical-style housing that has sprung up around Auckland is an architectural abomination excusable only on the grounds of market demand, writes DAVID TURNER.


Caption1: OUT OF PLACE: The inescapable problem of classical architecture is that it is divisive, intrusive and an alienating influence in the friendly suburban subculture of architecture.

Body1: For good reasons the Resource Management Act does not permit our planning authorities to interfere with design.

Except in areas with heritage designations, such as Parnell or parts of downtown Napier, the prejudices of planning officers cannot direct the choice of architectural style in suburban housing design.

Our suburbs are, therefore, becoming collections of everything architecture has had to say about housing design for 500 years, or more if you include the rare (but wonderful) medieval Scottish baronial castles dating from the days of fiefdoms and Macbeth.

The Spanish mission-colonial style is popular, sometimes expressively and gloriously confused with other sources - art deco, for instance, well known to New Zealand in the 1930s.

Tudor-bethan gets regular outings, traditional French and Italian chateau-farmhouses are good runners (but never the modest traditional cottage), and the Queen Anne style, the free classical exuberance of some early NZ housing, still makes an appearance here and there.

The most common design form now is what might be called the suburban-modernist stepped-stack shed, after its derivation from height-to-boundary regulations - an architecturally pragmatic solution without obvious roots in history, economical and always with a pitched roof and painted external walls.

But it's the neo-classical dimension that delights - or perhaps alarms - the critic of architecture the most. The dilemma of classicism, the great argument of the modern movement in architecture and earlier, is evident all over the suburbs like a rash.

Almost all the pioneers of architecture last century made or tried to make their peace with classical design, whether by systematic rejection or by an accommodation through proportioning theory or the substitution of a new order.

Classicism is a vehicle for universal order, the way to achieve unity and civic dimension. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as "of the first class, of acknowledged excellence, outstandingly important, and well-proportioned, with clarity of outline or formal design, restrained, harmonious, and in accordance with established forms. It is based on the study of Greek and Roman antiquity".

No doubt for these reasons classical design has been expropriated to serve on over-endowed university campuses and for housing the seriously rich in the US.

But before getting too carried away with what classical architecture is, and what it is for, we should remember that New Zealand has had its tradition of classicism, too. Institutions, banks, museums and agencies of Government were all happy to embrace the style and put it to good use.

The difficulty is in knowing how to understand classical architecture as a suburban phenomenon. In this context it seems to take on a different quality altogether.

Conflicting notions of the meaning of classicism are not easily put aside, even in suburbs sometimes genuinely enlivened by these buildings.

When a professor of architecture says, "There are things [the classical language] cannot say and there are things so entrenched within it that it cannot shed them", we can understand clearly that in the suburbs the messages of excellence and importance do not come without baggage.

Bombast, for instance, and a misplaced self-importance are uncomfortable in our egalitarian suburban community.

On the other hand, Stalin is said to have said that the people, too, had the right to columns. Sadly, there is no record of whether the people were consulted. Consultation on such things was not one of Stalin's habits.

Our traditions in suburban housing design - particularly during the past half-century, which has seen the huge expansion of low-density suburban living - are generally based on unpretentious values. These include a Presbyterian modesty that rejects ornament, avoids display and exhibition and conforms to a collective spirit of equality in all things.

Colour was acceptable, even strong, bright colour. There was always the sense that another owner could change it and it was a cheap way to express a degree of individuality.

The architecture is governed by a great economy of means, exemplified by the work of the Auckland group of architects in the 1950s.

But now we have in some places rows of neo-sub-palladian villas packed on to 350 sq m sections, usually with a drive-through portico and a double-height front door enclosed by loosely arranged polystyrene columns painted a stoneish shade of beige, the new colour of suburban New Zealand.

In the Auckland version of classical architecture every detail is a mockery, from site layout and external spaces to the arched aluminium windows flush with the external wall and the very materials the houses are made of.

Rules of proportions, composition, geometry - all essential to the language of classicism - are ridiculed, distorted, abandoned or disregarded, if in fact they ever existed in the designer's repertoire. All we get is the Oxford Dictionary's clarity of outline.

Classical architecture in the suburbs is a market choice. It is moderately adaptable to our climate and to the functions of modern living. It costs little more than the alternative design options. It stands apart from fashion and it gives expression, as intended, to aspirations of permanence and continuity, superiority, order and high standards.

The inescapable problem is that for the same reasons it is also a divisive choice, an intrusive form and an alienating influence in the friendly suburban subculture of architecture.

The good reasons for having zero design control through the resource consent process are tested to the limits by these manifestations of ancient Greece and Rome.

Market theory rules are the last line of defence, indeed the only defence, available to our suburban classicists. Certainly, there is nothing to be found in architectural criticism that can be called to support their case.

Of course, the answer to the dilemma could also be that this kind of building has nothing to do with architecture. Then the problem becomes a different one because the owners would most probably disagree.

* David Turner is a senior lecturer in sustainable architecture and design methodology at Unitec.