Gatley Julia - Vertical living: the architectural centre and the remaking of Wellington

VERTICAL LIVING

THE ARCHITECTURAL CENTRE AND THE REMAKING OF WELLINGTON

JULIA GATLEY AND PAUL WALKER

In 1946 two architectural associations were founded in New Zealand, Aucklands Architectural Group and the Wellington Architectural Centre. Members of both were young and idealistic, and they shared common beliefs in the transformative potential of modern architecture, in the need for urban development to be carefully controlled, in the desirability of planning for a better future. The Group and the Centre even shared some members. But one of these associations has been remembered much better than the other. The index of Peter Shaws important historical survey New Zealand Architecture from Polynesian Beginnings to 1990 lists fifteen entries for Group Architects and the Group Construction Company, but the book does not mention the Centre at all. And this despite the fact that the Group survived as such for just over a decade and then as Wilson & Juriss until Bill Wilsons premature death in 1968 while the Centre exists as an active organisation still.

Why this difference? It is because of the issues that each took up. Though they had a common beginning point, the interests of the Group and those of the Centre soon diverged. The Groups energies focused on the design and The Centre remained focused on the bigger but vaguer issue of the urban realm. It built but one house the Demonstration House of 194849 and never again concerned itself with the details of the free-standing, single family dwelling. It has instead been concerned with how houses go together to make suburbs, with what kind of suburban development will help our cities to grow, with the ways in which those people who do not belong to the archetypal nuclear family might best be housed, with how the central city and the public realm within the conurbation should be developed or recuperated in the face of economic and infrastructural change. In the historical record, the Centre has suffered because of its interest in these issues, though it has always approached them quite concretely. New Zealand, despite being one of the worlds most urbanised, or at least suburbanised, places, does not draw its self-image and its myths from its cities. Its imaginary has continued like that of other new world societies to be drawn from an idealised or now historically remote version of rural life. The wool-shed and the bach are the icons that signify this in architectural terms.

It was a negative view of the city even paranoia that motivated the Centres engagement. The city as slum and the city as sprawl blighting the countryside: these were common motifs in local discourse on architecture and the city in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1947, John Cox, the first elected president of the Centre and a key government planning official, painted a dark picture of a future Wellington rotten at its historic core but spreading 50 miles into its hinterland to accommodate a population of 10 million people! These extreme comments were made as Cox launched the Te Aro Replanned project of 194748, which on completion was one of the major achievements of the Centres early years. The Centre envisaged virtually the complete demolition of the built fabric of the area known as Te Aro Flat about half of downtown Wellington. It was to be replaced with green parklands studded with modernist high-rise slab buildings accommodating strictly zoned activities.

What is interesting about this project is not just its audacity, but also the tremendous public and official reception it was given. Its image of the modernist city was one that excited people. In 1948, it seems, there was an audience for a vision of architecture in New Zealand that was not the carefully wrought timber house. It was a vision for which people had perhaps been prepared by the presence above the city of the gleaming mass of the Dixon Street Flats, completed by the government in 1944. The scale of that building, its modern aesthetic, its apparent cleanliness, were striking in contrast with the intricate Victorian and Edwardian houses around it and the relatively low-rise commercial buildings that occupied most of central Wellington, suffering as they were from the neglect of the depression and the war years.

Following Te Aro Replanned, much of the work of the Centre has tried to cultivate that audience. It has had a direct effect on Wellingtons physical development and its political culture. The Te Aro project began a pattern of engagement between the Centre and the civic authorities that has been testy sometimes, amicable at others. The Centre in fact became directly involved in city politics in the 1950s. Frustrated by a lack of progress in town planning matters in Wellington, two Centre members one of them the organisations founder George Porter became city councillors. Architectural involvement in local politics was of course to culminate in Michael Fowlers mayoralty of 197483; Fowler is remembered for overseeing the rebuilding of the commercial heart of the city. But Porter had an earlier impact that was just as profound. As chair of the councils Housing Committee in the 1960s, he was responsible for a public housing programme that not only made the Wellington City Council one of New Zealands largest housing providers (second only to Housing New Zealand and its precursors) but also an important client which gave a number of talented architects major commissions. All of this housing was collective in nature, the earliest being in site and form not unlike large fragments of the Te Aro Replanned project.

But despite the notable achievements of the Centre in linking architecture and urban issues, the singular house kept winning all the attention in journal articles on and histories of New Zealand architecture. It still does. It was an argument over the primacy of the house, for example, that scuttled the Centres own attempts in the late 1950s to publish a book on New Zealand architecture: if that book had come to fruition as first envisaged it would have encompassed a surprisingly wide array of building types and locations.

Our ambition in this history of the Architectural Centre, then, is to do something other than chronicle a voluntary organisation whose fortunes have waxed and waned, waxed and waned over the years. We are also trying to begin writing the city back into the history of architecture in New Zealand. We have therefore left many of the Centres stories untold: rather than attempting to document all of the organisations activities and personalities, we have been more interested in identifying and exploring the major themes, ideas and events to which the Centre has responded over time, in the expectation that these together might throw light on the development of the architecture and urban culture of Wellington and even of New Zealand since World War II. Urban culture here includes the arts: though the name may suggest otherwise, the Architectural Centre has never been only an association of architects. It has been concerned with the state of the visual arts and design at every level. This multi-disciplinary aspect was especially notable in its early years, perhaps when the idea of the modern itself seemed to entail correspondence between the fabrication of cities, buildings, interiors, furniture, paintings, sculptures, typefaces and so on.

Though the Centre still draws its membership from a wider constituency than professional architects and architectural students, it is much less multi-disciplinary than once it was. This reflects on the one hand the increasing array and specialisation of organisations and institutions available to support the aspirations of those interested in design and related fields there is no need now for such an enterprise as the Centres gallery, which operated from 1953 to 1968. But it also reflects an end to the coherent vision of modernism that pertained still in the post-war years. It is very timely to look back on that modernism and consider its aftermath, beset as we are now with the return of some semblance of the architectural motifs of the 1940s and 1950s in much current design, a kind of neo-modernism. There is a return, too, in architecture to a fatalistic view of technology as inevitability. But is the current condition really like that of the modern period? What could the reactivation of mid-century forms mean if it is not?