Rogernomics gave speculators free rein to bowl heritage buildings and build shiny replacements – or, in some cases, nothing at all.
We architects like to think we lead change and shape the world. In reality, we are shaped by the world and when we see change, we push our way to the front of the line and claim we were there all along. Seismic changes to our built environment can be triggered not by architectural movements but by cultural or political – and sometimes even seismic – events. Napier is the art deco capital of Hawke’s Bay because the rebuild after the earthquake coincided with a fleeting international style. Perhaps in time, Christchurch will be known as the capital of Early Millennial Liquid Cubism.
It is said that if you remember the 60s, you weren’t really there. A corollary, then: if you remember the 80s, you either made or lost a lot of money; sometimes both. It is 40 years since the night of long brandies, crisp apples and deflated tyres set our modest ship of state on a new course; the new captain and his wheelhouse cronies turned the wheel and looked to windward. Who knew what they saw and whither they would take us. The chart was plotted as it happened and perhaps much of it, after it had occurred.
This politico-seismic event had a bearing on the nature of our built environment in the mid-80s, the remains of which are with us still. There is a reason that it is not called “the designed environment”. Builders and developers led the charge, when the brand-spanking economic engine fuelled by Rogernomics was barely out of its box. This was not a change architects understood, let alone a line they rushed to jump. Some did, of course, where there was work to be done and money to be made. The profession was coming to grips with this new style – or anti-style – called post-modernism where, it appeared, anything goes. A perfect fit, then, with the developers laying waste to our city centres.
Gone was the sphincter-tight control of the economy, gone the big freeze of wages and prices; tariffs were gone, money was flowing, and land was, relatively, cheap. The unspoken mantra was demolish now, pay later. In Auckland particularly, existing buildings were seen as a nuisance, an obstacle blocking bare land. They had to go. And go they did, often before anyone knew it.
No time to waste
Buoyed by the economic surgency of the fourth Labour Government, speculators and developers wasted little time trashing the Auckland CBD, often applying for demolition permits on Christmas Eve. Workers would return in the New Year to see gaping holes where once a much-loved building stood. His Majesty’s Theatre – without a Category A listing that would have saved it – was one such casualty. The council issued a permit for its demolition during the Christmas-New Year shutdown of 1987-88 to an engineering consultancy owned by current Auckland mayor Wayne Brown. “It was just a job; I didn’t have a view on it,” he said in 2022. Those who did have a view often saw too late. Protestors gathered and staged 24-hour vigils to no avail.
Around the corner from His Majesty’s on Durham St West stood Broadcasting House, an exemplar of the International Style designed by Alva Bartley and Imi Porsolt, opened in 1941. It was the home of RNZ’s Auckland stations and the Radio Theatre hall, where concerts, plays, variety shows, quizzes and musical comedies were often broadcast live. The building’s horizontal bands met in a rising curved corner with vertical columns of glass blocks, behind which was a curved staircase designed in the shape of a treble clef. In early 1990, it, too, came down. In its place is a carpark.
A few hundred metres away, where Mayoral Drive meets Greys Ave, is another carpark, one open to the air, without a building. There was one here once, the Salvation Army Congress Hall, a strident neo-classical thumper of a building with an ornate turreted box that seems to have descended from space. It also disappeared in 1989, and the site has remained empty, caught up in numerous studies and plans for the Aotea precinct.
The Public Works Act approval to demolish the Congress Hall required that the site be used only for surface car parking until a “higher and greater” use could strengthen the quarter. It is a testament to Auckland’s lack of urban self-esteem that 30 years later, it cannot conceive of a use higher or greater than car parking.
This pockmarking of the city centre was unaffected by the sharemarket crash of 1987. If anything, it was fuelled by it, accelerating a cycle of bust and boom, with too much of the former and not enough of the latter. For many sites, the boom never came; the busters moved on, some to high office.
Fowler’s follies
In Wellington, the damage to its heritage buildings had already been done by the time Labour came to power in 1984. Architect and mayor Michael Fowler dealt with the problem of earthquake-prone buildings by forcing the owners to either upgrade or demolish. As historian and writer Redmer Yska has stated, “During Fowler’s term, half of the 187 at-risk buildings along the city’s Golden Mile were bowled, including ornate Victorian ‘wedding cake’ structures on the western side of Lambton Quay.”
Where Auckland demolishes buildings and leaves sites vacant for decades, Wellington allows temporary buildings to survive indefinitely. Sad indictments of urban neglect include the Oaks shopping complex on Cuba St and Manners St’s Dukes Arcade, reminders that we will put up with anything if it offers shelter or a shortcut.
In the 1980s, the only visible boom was the construction of Civic Square, where civic buildings stand idly around a square that is not a square, with its ground level weirdly raised up to cover, yes, a car park.
The City Gallery occupies the old Wellington Library, a building with inscribed panels between its classical columns. Wedged between “Useful Arts” and “Fine Arts” is “Commerce”. Same as it ever was. Here in Civic Square, the optimism of the 80s delivered neither utility nor beauty. Commerce has also underperformed and the whole area is now out of bounds while it refurbishes itself.
The rush to build across the country occurred at the height of the latest international architectural style, post-modernism. An eclectic, colourful pastiche of classical references, full of ambiguities and playful idiosyncrasies, its emergence allowed some New Zealand architects and indeed whole cities to skip over modernism, a movement many of us didn’t understand and failed to grasp. Here was permission to do anything, build any doodle.
Our version turned out to be a kind of paste-modernism as we copied overseas buildings, column for column, portico for portico. What remains now are pockets of forlorn, pastel, plastic remnants too sweet to be substantial.
Just as the energy, boosterism and ideology of Lange’s government exhausted itself, dwindled and petered out, so, too, did the rampant, sometimes rapacious, development of our built world, particularly in the cities.
The first wave of neoliberal urban development crashed on to our shores. Little did we realise that no more would arrive. Perhaps we don’t care enough to look, to have a view on it. Vast tracts of our inner cities lie empty, desolate reminders of the rush to demolish without the wherewithal to build, exacerbated by a lack of civic passion. As Louise says in Thelma & Louise – you get what you settle for.
Tommy Honey is an Auckland-based former architect.