Cover Story
Shape of the new
by Douglas Lloyd Jenkins
Continued from page 2...
Gerald Melling is an architect and a long-time observer of the development of local architecture. Yet it is only in the past five years that the work of his firm Melling Morse has captured the imagination of New Zealanders in a significant way. He did it first with a little house designed in Wellington for a baroque violinist who insisted on building her home herself – a Kiwi tradition if ever there was one. Perhaps because of this, the house avoided the more complex building technologies and turned instead to timber. The result is vitally different from the finely detailed Clifford/Forsyth house, but it illustrates a way in which an aesthetic that seemed to grind to an end with one century can be reborn as something direct and essential. The Pugh house was spectacular enough to make the finals of the 2000 Home & Entertaining Home of the Year Award – although it lost out to one of the aforementioned millionaires’ playthings.
Melling and Allan Morse repeated this approach with the Melling house, called Skybox (2001), and then the Jarvis house, called Samurai (2004), both of which were also placed in the Home & Entertaining Home of the Year finals – but you can guess the rest of the story. Both the Pugh and Jarvis houses were wooden, but they are also innovative and essentially modest. Each came in at a budget that did not exceed $100,000 – affordable in today’s terms. If budget restraints seem to bring out the best in New Zealand architects, then so it seems do tight planning controls.
When architect Malcolm Walker designed and built the Arapai and Urale house in Freeman’s Bay, Auckland (see Listener, August 21, 2004), he did it under the watchful eye of a city council determined to prevent modern architecture from making much of a mark in the inner city. The result wasn’t just an architectural success but also a cultural triumph for a sort of New Zealand house that had until then seemed no longer possible. Clearly designed to extend the New Zealand traditions of both the villa and of the modest, affordable New Zealand house, the Arapai and Urale house again indicated clearly that that distinctive domestic architecture was still under construction. When, in another part of Auckland and under the same restrictions, architect Megan Rule designed (and also built) her own home through 2003, she also adhered strictly to the principles of modesty, affordability, innovation and woodiness – the first three are evidenced on the exterior, but for the fourth one had to venture inside.
Rule is significantl younger than the other architects mentioned here. She represents an increasingly rare commodity in a New Zealand in which both architects and clients are ageing. Whereas younger architects once built for equally young clients, architecture now rests under the comfortable belt of the more than middle-aged baby boomer. Older clients tend to go to older architects and together they have generally pursued an aesthetic first perfected in the early 1990s: one that reflects their origins in the 1950s. It is to architects like Rule, and others whose names are for the moment less familiar, that we will look to see just what the new 21st-century house is really going to be. As expected, then, from the outside the Rule house is markedly different from its neighbours. Step inside and you’ll get a clue as to the changes that will become familiar to new homebuilders over the next decade. Rather than provide expansive spaces dominated by large windows and an emphatically open plan, the Rule house pioneers a move away from such spaces and uses intimate gathering places of a type we haven’t seen since the 1970s.
Even if architects manage to pull the new house back within reach of a greater number of New Zealanders, all of this talk about architect-designed houses can seem a little abstract. Only a small percentage of New Zealanders will ever a build a new house, let alone an architect-designed one. Fewer still of those who go to an architect want to use their house to make a statement about the progress of local culture. Yet opting out of innovative architecture doesn’t mean that Kiwis are immune to the pressure to update their homes, or that they won’t, through the decorating choices they make, be able to shape the form of the 21st-century house.
Over the past decade, New Zealand has become house-obsessed and contemporary-style obsessed. In part, you can look to escalating house prices. Some of the figures now appearing on property valuations across the country are far in advance of anything we ever expected to see connected with something we owned. Furthermore, as television makeover programmes like Hot Property have taught us, a house is not much of an asset unless you can sell it quickly. Whether such programmes are responsible or not, New Zealanders have become highly aware of the role that home interiors play in determining individual self-image (how we feel about and define ourselves) and also our public image (what other people think). Once, your car said most about you, but today the new car, famed for its rapid devaluation, can hardly compete as a status symbol when an escalating property market offers a more glamorous alternative.
