Capital’s mixed bag of buildings

Press, 18 December 1989, Page 36

Capital’s mixed bag of buildings

Wellington’s New Buildings. By David Kernohan. Victoria University Press, 1989, 222 pp. Ulus. $19.95. (Reviewed by lan J. Lochhead) During the last two decades the central business district of Wellington has been almost completely rebuilt. What began in the early 1970 s as a slow process of attrition became, in the 1980 s, a blitzkrieg as whole areas of the city were systematically raised and replaced with new, multi-storey structures of extremely variable quality. Of the buildings discussed in David Kernohan’s architectural guide to Wellington’s recent buildings, only 13 date from before 1969, 25 date from the 19705, but almost 100 were completed within the last decade. For many Wellingtonians, as for those of us who have visited the city over this period, the American cartoonist’s vision of the redevelopment of Boston, in which two middle-aged women look out of a bus window on demolition sites and construction cranes and comment, “They’re knocking down Boston and putting up something else in its place,” has an all too familiar ring. In a succinct introduction, Kernohan provides a brief history of Wellington architecture and describes the conditions which led to the unprecented level 'of reconstruction which has taken place over the last decade. He is careful to assume a neutral stance, allowing insofar as this is possible, the facts to speak for themselves. The main part of the book, based on the format of Ira Bach’s well known architectural guide, “Chicago’s Famous Buildings,” divides the central city into six sections and provides photographs and commentary on over 140 buildings. The individual sections are logical and form coherent groups; the Government Centre is followed by two sections devoted to the so-called Golden Mile, the Lambton Harbour area, The Terrace, and finally the University. Unfortunately, this arrangement means that 'buildings which front on to both Lambton Quay and The Terrace are discussed in widely separated parts of the book. Much of the information in the building entries was gathered by students at the Victoria University School of Architecture and, quite properly, their names are included at the end of each entry. The

commentaries are the work of the principal author and here again he has endeavoured to adopt an objective stance. As a result, the accounts of buildings are often rather bland, although they do provide much useful information. When, for example, one compares Kernohan’s discussion of the Mid-City Centre with Gerald Melling’s execrations on the same building in his recently published collection of architectural criticism, the former account seems needlessly tame. In trying to be fair Kernohan fails to give the reader a clear indication of which buildings make a valuable contribution to the city and which are inimicable to it. There are however, some perceptive comments; the Michael Fowler Centre, for all its good qualities, is summed up as “an opportunistic building of missed opportunities,” an opinion with which admirers of the Christchurch Town Hall are likely to concur. Yet elsewhere, when enthusiasm seems to be called for, Kernohan remains remarkably restrained. Athfield Architects’ Telecome House, with its green, tile-clad exterior and undulating facade evoking Gummer and Ford’s State Insurance Building on Lambton Quay, is one of the most assured large office buildings to be built in Wellington, or indeed New Zealand, in recent years. Rather surprisingly, Kernohan confines his discussion to the technical innovations of the design and to its rather dubious nicknames, with a very general comment about the building’s quality. One can only assume that he thinks better of it than this, for Telecom House provides the book’s striking cover illustration. Perhaps the greatest service which this guide performs is that it makes it possible to assess Wellington’s new architecture as a whole, and what a sobering picture it provides. In spite of a significant number of fine individual buildings, the over-all impression is of a clamour of disparate voices all striving to be heard above the deafening noise of the city. Buildings jostle for space, light and visibility, seldom with any consideration for their neighbours. Furthermore, the appearance of individual structures suggests that in Wellington, architecture is, all too often, a business rather than an art.

The failure of imagination, passed off as adherence to the aesthetics of the International Style, which marked the large office buildings of the sixties and seventies, has been replaced by the uncontrolled imaginations of the eighties, striving to achieve the many layered effects associated with postmodernism. Too often these latter buildings betray a lack of understanding of the basic language of classicism that is fundamental to an architectural idiom which assumes a wry attitude to its source material. Also absent in too many designs is a sense of decorum, that almost forgotten architectural virtue, especially in the way in which architects use the vast palette of materials now available to them. These shortcomings have been compounded by the relentless demands of developers to sweep sites •clear of any trace of earlier buildings and their desire to maximise profits irrespective of the architectural consequences. There are signs that this situation is beginning to change. More historic buildings are being retained and adapted to new uses and Wellington can boast some significant achievements in this area. There also seems to be a trend towards greater concern for architectural quality on the part of clients, both commercial and governmental, as the heady days of the building boom era are replaced by the more sober climate of the postcrash period. And it is probably, also true to say that architects are gaining greater skill in using the arcane language of classical architecture after decades of adherence to the austere abstractions of the Modern Movement. The projects under construction and those yet to be begun which are included in the guide suggest that the nineties may well be a more auspicious decade for Wellington architecture than the eighties have been. The Civic Centre and Lambton Harbour Developments both indicate a growing concern on the part of Wellingtonians to think of their city as a total entity rather than in terms of individual buildings, and these projects may well redress many of the failures of vision in the recent past For all the shortcomings of its recent architecture,. Wellington’s built, environment provides the architectual tourist with much that is worth searching out. David Kernohan’s well organised and informative guide will help to make this experience more enjoyable as well as more rewarding. For those who must study Wellington’s architecture from a distance, the book will also be of value, but the impression created by its illustrations, the weak point of so many books on New Zealand architecture, is ‘ likely to be disappointing. Too many photographs show buildings leaning awkwardly as a result of perspectival distortion, a problem that, with proper equipment, could easily have been remedied. This is, however, a comparatively minor fault in an otherwise well produced book. “Wellington’s New Buildings” is certainly the most ambitious and the most successful architectural guide to have been produced on any New Zealand city. One can only hope that it is the forerunner of many more similar guides.