Block Newsletter – August 2006

08
2006
Modern Lessons
Andrew Barrie ponders what we
might learn from Japan
BLOCK
saturated cities of Japan (and other parts of Asia) have been studied as models for the
future. With Kyoto-based maestro Waro Kishi coming to Auckland to present a lecture as
part of next month’s Architecture Week program, we might ask ourselves what lessons
Kishi and his Japanese contemporaries offer us here, in twenty-first century Aoteraroa.
In the 1930s, certain strains of traditional Japanese
architecture began to be understood as a kind of
proto-modernism. The direct handling of materials,
functionally arranged spaces, clarity, modularity,
and lack of applied ornamentation found in Japan’s
refined vernacular were seen as being in profound
sympathy with modernist ideals. Since that time,
there has been an ongoing tendency for architects
in the West to see Japan as a source of “lessons” for
contemporary architecture.
Kishi established his reputation with a series of compact houses in the densely-built innercity neighborhoods of Kyoto and Osaka. These houses are abstract compositions that
directly express the technology of their construction - concrete walls, crisp steel frames,
glass and metal enclosures. The Kim House (1987) is a one-room-wide steel framework in
which the rooms of the house are arranged around, and connected by, an open courtyard
– moving between rooms requires going outside. The House in Nipponbashi (1992),
perhaps Kishi’s best known work, is a crisp four-storey-high steel structure that stands
on a site just 13m deep and barely 2.5m wide - the extraordinary compression of the site
is relieved on the top floor by a 6m-high living-dining room and living court that provides
views of the sky and the city’s roof tops.
In the years after the Second World War, traditional
Japanese architecture became a model for
California’s Case Study Houses, and the seeming
simplicity, modesty, and - above all - the wooden
construction of Japanese buildings exerted a
powerful influence on New Zealand architects,
particularly through work of the Group. The way in
which Japan went on to establish its own unique
brand within the International Modern architecture
franchise had a profound impact here at a time
when local architects were engaged in a search
for their own uniquely Kiwi form of modernism. In
recent years - as issues of density, infrastructure,
and technological development have come to center
stage in the West - the high-density technology-
In recent years, Kishi has been working at a larger scale and in more diverse locations
– recent works include public buildings, interiors, and houses on larger sites in newer
city-fringe suburbs. In some respects, the increasing size of Kishi’s commissions has
diminished the shock value of his early works, but a new richness has been gained
through an expanded palette of materials and more expansive relationships to the natural
landscape.
Kishi is in an unusual position in that his work is much better known abroad than at home,
due in large part to the publication of his work as a full issue of high profile El Croquis
magazine in 1996. The ready reception of his work internationally is perhaps due to
the ease with which his work could be understood outside Japan – his concerns could
be described as ‘universal’. Kishi’s work is focused on extending and refining some
of the central lines of modernist thinking – particularly the obsession with steel-framed
construction which extends from Mies van der Rohe through the Los Angeles moderns
(Craig Ellwood, Charles & Ray Eames, etc) to British Brutalism and high-tech. As one
commentator has put it - as Meier is to Corbusier, Kishi is to Mies. NZ architects will
likely find Kishi’s work both familiar and highly palatable – the craft and technology of
construction, the sophisticated handling of materials, the composition and sequencing of
spaces. Like Mies, Kishi makes “architect’s architecture”.
In thinking about Kishi and Mies, it is worth noting that of all the key modernists Mies
was among those least concerned with social agendas. It is instructive, then, to compare
Kishi’s work with that of Kazuyo Sejima, another young Japanese architect whose
career was given an El Croquis-powered boost in 1996. Sejima, along with sometime
collaborator Ryue Nishizawa, has produced a series of aesthetically restrained but wildly
innovative buildings, establishing herself one of the world’s most exciting designers. Her
relentlessly abstract buildings – so pure as to be described as ‘diagram architecture’
– arise from concerns not dissimilar to Kishi’s: construction systems, spatial composition,
materiality. However, Sejima’s work also represents a remarkably clear-sighted
exploration of the way in which changing social conditions might be expressed in built
form; her buildings and writings explore the nature of the family unit and the status of the
individual within society. Sometimes the solutions Sejima proposes are so closely tied to
local conditions that her work, particularly her houses, seem almost incomprehensible to
viewers outside Japan. If there is a “lesson” here, it is that a highly abstract architecture
need not imply a lack of attention to modes of habitation or the realities of prevailing
social conditions.
One of the most extraordinary aspects of New Zealand architecture at present is the
almost complete absence of such concerns. Looking over the high-profile houses
produced in recent years, one is soon struck by the incredible uniformity of lifestyles
they represent. For a country that takes pride in cultural diversity and an independent
spirit, when it comes to housing we seem to have remarkably consistent middle-class
aspirations. Seen through its houses, Aotearoa-New Zealand is still a bastion of the whitebread suburban values we thought the nation had largely shed in the 1980s.
House in Nipponbashi, Osaka, (1992).
Few houses have been produced recently that express a lifestyle fundamentally different
from the suburban nuclear family ideal established in the 1950s – a list of innovations
is short, including houses such as Nigel Cook’s Kelly House in Paraparaumu (1987),
Mitchell and Stout’s own house in Freemans Bay (1990) or Melling:Morse’s Skybox
(2001). Apart from the long-overdue rise of inner city apartment living in the 1990s,
architects have produced few convincing expressions of changing social conditions or
non-conventional lifestyles – working from home, the dissolution of the nuclear family, the
aggregation of the extended family, the shop-house, the office as residence, the house as
gallery or studio.
Continued over...
The Patient Search
Pip Cheshire talks to Fearon Hay
I understand that David Mitchell has lately been expressing his view that we are beset by
boring buildings. I have not had the opportunity to enquire whether Mitchell’s frustration
is born of nostalgia for the exuberant experimentation of Beaven and Warren in 1960s
Christchurch or Athfield and Walker in 1970s Wellington, mixed with disappointment at
the relentless roll-out of revisited mid-century modern. Nor have I found out if he feels
boring architecture is a local Auckland phenomenon or a malaise of our age.
His comments have set me to thinking about the contrasting stratagems that an architect
might pursue in the course of a career. On the one hand there is the compilation of an
oeuvre based on the exploration of a consistent approach to design, the evolutionary
development of a parti or a motif, and on the other the relentless pursuit of the new, each
project a complete experiment in itself. Between the two there are a range of variants,
Wright’s progression through geometries (the octagon years, the triangular work, the
spirals) for example. Both positions are some distance from the model of architect as
professional servant in which the aesthetic and programmatic intentions of the client are
delivered with care and responsibility.
To better understand some possible reponses I met with Jeff Fearon and Tim Hay, two
architects whose commercial and professional success is in no small part based, in
their residential work at least, upon the evolution of a consistent parti; that of the open
free plan pavilion housing public activities enclosed by more cellular private spaces.
They made the point that this was, ironically, a received schema, that their first project,
the Ricketts House in the Bay of Islands, was an alteration in which two pre existing
boatsheds were refitted as bedroom wings and linked by the new, near flat roofed,
open-sided living pavilion. This fortunate genesis aside, they described how subsequent
iterations of this plan have developed dynamic complexity through subtle placement of
the few built elements within to set up diagonal relationships and a layering of secondary
spaces.
The combination of a subtly manipulated free plan in a house’s public space coupled
with the comparatively labyrinthine quality of the more private zones produces a feeling
of complexity and bigness within apparently simple formal assemblies. This complexity
is also facilitated by the richness of surface and the wealth of ‘good ideas’ that populate
many of the projects, as if freed from the necessity to reinvent the basic parti at each
project they are able to spend that energy on the fresh articulation of a familiar theme.
Recent projects have taken them off the North Island water’s edge and into the South
Island hinterland and in so doing have led to a more complex building section, as they
say “you can’t cut mountains off with a flat roof soffit”. Where the Ricketts house’s
apparently flat roof conceals a complex assembly and the Coromandel Inglis house’s
apparently simple formal structure is crowned by a roof that gently opens to sun and
view, the robust landscape of the Deep South requires more aggressive reworking of the
model. These evolutions have to fit within a fairly rigorous language of form and element
that, while having been evolved as a common ground between them, is now zealously
guarded by each and generally expected of them by their clients.
Sir Miles Warren, in an Architecture School studio talk in the 1970s, lamented the
closeting expectations of clients lining up for “yet another 45 degree roofed, white
concrete block and blue in situ linteled Christchurch villa” and I wondered whether these
two might be suffering a similar feeling of self imprisonment. Though they acknowledged
the implicit limits of client expectations built on a consistent body of work, their own
steadfast commitment to the schema and its evolution is a more rigorous constraint than
client briefs and leads to some interesting conundrums as the pair expand the ‘language’.
The apparently simple process of window opening has, for example, become a major
research and development process as they attempt to reconcile partial opening for
ventilation with the strictures of floor to ceiling window elevations.
The inexorable development of a consistent theme has parallels with a number of artists
whose exploration of a motif and manipulation of few elements generate complexity,
subtlety and richness. The issue of complexity and the leverage achievable from the
small incremental manipulation of few elements is an interesting comparison between the
two disciplines. Where artists like Albrecht or Bambury work through the implications of
chromatic variation within a common motif architects invariably shake loose everything
in a project: form, space, materials, light, colour, texture - it’s all up for grabs. This might
well produce moments of innovative exuberance, and occasionally of sublime invention,
but we might do well to ponder the Pandora’s box we have opened. Donald Judd’s essay
“Some thoughts about colour and red and black in particular” is a useful commentary in
this regard, with its vivid description of the complex spatial relationships generated by the
manipulation of few elements in a field.
In a country in which the easy construction of fantasies - be they suburban or beachfront
- has begot so many indulgences, Fearon Hay’s projects are knowable and familiar within
a tradition that begins somewhere in mid twentieth century America. That this is a source
referenced by many at present does not diminish its fit with our climate and lifestyle and
while we might like to leaven the beach scene with a few more flamboyant gestures it
does not diminish the impact and value of such a well developed body of work as these
two are producing. Pip Cheshire
Continued from page one...
Does this conservatism originate in our nation’s
clients or its architects? It may even be a side-effect
of the current (recent?) housing boom: perhaps
our obsession with resale values militates against
unique solutions; perhaps our best architects are
so busy building they have no time (or motivation)
to innovate? These questions will addressed in an
Architecture Week panel discussion entitled “The
Next Housing Revolution or How to Stop New Homes
Being Boring”. Remarkably, this event is being
organized by Home & Entertaining magazine and
moderated by its editor, Jeremy Hansen– that it is
being left to a body as supposedly mainstream as
Home & Entertaining to ask such questions might be
taken as evidence that we architects have taken our
eye off the ball.
The Architecture Week program, then, includes
what seems a slightly disconcerting inversion – an
international lecture showcasing Kishi’s “aprèsgarde” architecture at one end of the program, and
H&E’s search for a new avant-garde at the other.
The lesson on offer may simply be to note how
fragile the balance of our architecture culture is that
such reversals are possible. Between the positions
represented by these two events, however, lies the
debate that is likely to drive New Zealand architecture
over the coming years. Andrew Barrie
WARO KISHI LECTURE
6.00pm Wednesday 6th Spetember
Dorothy Winstone Theatre
Auckland Girls Grammar School
Howe Street
Tickets $25, book through Ticketek
Sponsored by Fletcher Aluminium
and Pilkington.
In the Collection
Mike Thompson psyches us up for Nonda
Melbourne is a city with clearly defined Architectural Camps. Including
the stylistic professionalism of Denton Corker Marshall (DCM), the
detached intellectualism of Ashton Raggart McDougall (ARM), the late
modernism of Darryl Jackson (DJ) and the postmodern explorations
of Peter Corrigan (no acronym). It also has a strong history of
publishing and criticism, due in no small part to the efforts of RMIT
(Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) which has articulated
and strengthened the theoretical basis of the various strands of the
Melbourne’s architecture. The result is a city with arguably the finest
collection of buildings from the last 25 years in Australasia. What is
more, unlike Sydney which imports from overseas, they are the local
product.
Occupying a somewhat iconoclastic position in the Melbourne scene is
Nonda Katsalidis, architect and developer, to the horror of some in the
intellectuals’ camp “...but he takes a financial interest in his buildings!”
envy perhaps? Nonda started his practice in 1979, operating a design
and construction business that carried out inner city residential and
historic building conversions. Subsequently as part of Axia Architects
he designed two medium scale towers at 171 and 300 Latrobe Street,
Melbourne, notable for the careful detailing and slick sensuousness
of the curtain wall. Then, as Katsalidis and now Fender Katsalidis
Architects, he is perhaps best known for his timber, container like,
beach house at St Andrews south of Melbourne and the Melbourne
Terrace apartments, a crusty organic exploration of the possibilities
of pre-cast concrete and copper cladding. Other well known projects
include the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne,
the Republic apartment tower and most recently the Eureka Tower
on Melbourne’s Southbank, at 88 stories the tallest residential tower
in the world. Nonda’s work is distinguished by an eye for detail and
for materials and their sensual characteristics, assembled without
complexity. His buildings are always beautifully crafted constructions.
He has written of “the non physical dimensions of a material that are
sensed rather than experienced …The issue of touch and smell and
the memories and associations they may evoke” and later in the same
article notes, “The site, the climate, the quality of light, the colour and
texture of materials, are ingredients that must be integrated with the
technology of construction so that the poetic potential of a situation (is)
realised.” Certainly Melbourne is richer for his attempts to do just that.
Michael Thompson
Katsilidas will give an “invitation only” lecture on Tuesday 12th. We’re still
trying to figure out how to wrangle an invite.
BLOCK’S
ARCHITECTURE WEEK
TOP TEN
1
Gearing Up for a
Design-Led Renaissance
2
Waro Kishi Lecture
1.00pm Wednesday 6th
Britomart Pavilion
6.00pm Wednesday 6th
Dorothy Winstone Theatre
AGGS
Here is a chance to get an
up-close look at Ludo CampbellReid, Auckland City Council’s
new urban design manager. He’s
been given the fairly nebulous
tasks of “promoting the urban
design agenda” and “initiating
a ‘design-led’ approach to the
future development of Auckland”.
However, given that Auckland’s
economy remains fairly buoyant,
and that its urban design has
experienced both conspicuous
failures and significant successes
in recent years – making clear
both what we have to gain
and what we have to fear – the
current moment may prove highly
conducive to the work CampbellReid has taken on. Game on.
MC’ed by Mayor Dick Hubbard.
Born in 1950, Kishi is one of
the generation of architects to
established themselves during
the heady years of Japan’s
economic bubble. While many
of his contemporaries busied
themselves with extravagant,
attention-grabbing works, Kishi
focused on quietly extending
the Modernist idiom. When the
bubble burst, many of the 80s
young-guns disappeared almost
completely from the architecture
scene, their places at center
stage being taken by the more
restrained work of figures such as
Kishi, Shigeru Ban, and Kazuyo
Sejima. Buildings emerging from
a commitment to the modernist
lineage seem to be at the fore
in New Zealand architecture at
present, so Kishi’s presentation
will provide plenty to think about.
Sponsored by Fletcher
Aluminium and Pilkington.
Tickets $25, book through
Ticketek - www.ticketek.co.nz.
3
Shaping Auckland’s CBD
4
1.00pm Thursday 7th
Britomart Pavilion
This lunchtime session moderated by Charles Walker - is
a presentation by Patrick Clifford
of Architectus and Pip Cheshire
of Cheshire Architects, both of
whom are now working on urban
redevelopment projects of a scale
almost without precedent in the
history of the city. Given that it
will soon be possible to walk
from the ports to Wynyard Point
without leaving environments
designed by one or other of these
architects, this presentation is
sure to provide insights into the
future shape and character of our
inner city.
7
Art & Architecture
Discussion
1.00pm Sunday 10th
Britomart Pavilion
The most memorable scenes in
the (perhaps ironically named)
Concert of Wills documentary on
the making of the Getty Center
in Los Angeles were those
depicting a battle for control
between architect Richard
Meier and artist Robert Irwin;
the unfortunate result was the
realms of architect and artist
being completely separated.
This discussion will look at the
relationship between art and
architecture and the potential for
collaboration between artists and
architects – alternatives, that is, to
the profanity-based interactions
of Meier and Irwin. Participants
include artists Billy Apple and
Stephen Bambury, master carver
Lyonel Grant, arts maven Trish
Clark, architect Pete Bossley,
and landscape architect Henry
Crothers.
Barcode Installation
Opening
5
Gummer & Ford Tour
6
Tour of the Auckland War
Memorial Museum’s
New Atrium
8.00pm Friday 8th
Britomart Square
2.00pm Saturday 9th
11.00am Sunday 10th
A scan of the Architecture Week
program reveals what a hold the
Baby Boomers currently have on
Auckland architecture. We’ve got
Boomers like Bossley and Clifford
(and Kishi and Katsalidas!)
filling the speaking slots, and
even the exhibition on Vernon
Brown and the Group seems to
cater to Boomer taste in heroes.
So, Barcode presents a key
opportunity to see Auckland’s
Millennial Generation avantgarde-in-waiting doing their thing
- a series of site-specific, 1:1
scale installations by students
from the University of Auckland
School of Architecture, the
School of Dance, and the AUT
School of Spatial Design. This
event doesn’t, of course, answer
the interesting question of why
Auckland’s architectural GenX’ers seem to keep such a low
profile.
In the Roaring 20s, Gummer
and Ford were the rock stars
(er, big band?) of New Zealand
architecture. Transitioning from
Beaux-Arts Classicism through
Arts and Crafts to
proto-modernist styles, the firm
pulled in NZIA Gold medals
for Remuera Library and the
Auckland Railway station, and
completed high profile public
buildings, offices, and houses
around the country.
Organized by the Gus Fisher
Gallery, this tour of houses and
other buildings will be led by
Bruce Petry, an architect with
Salmond Reed, key players in NZ
architectural conservation.
Bookings essential: contact
p.hunt@auckland.ac.nz or phone
373 7599 ext 86806.
Don’t forget the fantastic
exhibition Past present: The
visionary architecture of Gummer
and Ford which runs until
September 13th at the Gus Fisher
Gallery, 74 Shortland Street.
Open Monday-Friday 10am-5pm.
The seven-storey, 9,000m2
structure nearing completion
within the Museum’s existing
southern courtyard promises to
become one of Auckland’s most
exciting public spaces. An early
clue to the building’s appeal:
as with the highly videogenic
glass weatherboards of the
Britomart Station, the atrium has
become a backdrop for television
advertisements while still under
construction.
The tour will be led by architect
Noel Lane of Noel Lane
Architects. Limited numbers, so
bookings are essential – contact
bookings@aucklandmuseum.
com or phone 306 7048.
8
Matisse Sustainability Series
Do No Harm
5.00pm Sunday 10th
Britomart Pavillion
The press copy for this event
reads: “The time has come for
architects to also take an oath
to protect life. Sustainability can
be a complicated balancing act
but the only ethical question
which needs to be asked is very
simple: does this building do no
harm?” Serious stuff, but in this
presentation by Tony Watkins,
one of New Zealand’s most
experienced and successful
sustainability advocates, the path
forward will be illuminated with
Tony’s characteristic insight and
charm.
9
The Next
Housing Revolution
10
Jasmax Film Festival
1.00pm Monday 11th
Britomart Pavilion
August 31st – September 6th
Academy Cinema
With its sponsorship of the
Jasmax Film Festival and a
new lecture series, NZ Home
& Entertaining magazine has in
recent months been radiating
a new energy. For Architecture
Week, the magazine is presenting
a discussion with the fantastic
sub-title of “How to Stop New
Homes Being Boring”. With a
panel including Pip Cheshire,
Rau Hoskins, Gary Lawson,
Megan Rule and Tony van Raat
and moderated by H&E editor
Jeremy Hansen, the discussion
will address the questions “Where
is all the innovation?” and “Why
does everybody want to live the
same way?” Simple questions,
but problems likely to be at the
heart of the devlopment of NZ
architecture over the coming
years. Not to be missed.
Cinema presents architecture in
its most readily digestible form,
but consumer-friendliness need
not imply a lack of intensity; here
at BLOCK we are still mulling
over Sidney Pollack’s sometimes
fascinating sometimes infuriating
Sketches of Frank Gehry,
which showed at the Auckland
Film festival back in July. The
program of the Jasmax Film
Festival includes films on the life
and works of an assortment of
international heavyweights - Mies,
Le Corbusier, Rem Koolhaas,
Santiago Calatrava, Norman
Foster, Glenn Murcutt - as well as
films on suburbia, Chicago, and
Soviet–era Poland. Lie back and
let the CPD points come rolling
in.
For more info see www.jasmax.
co.nz/filmfestival/Default.htm or
www.academycinemas.co.nz