"Write a Book, Build a House . . ."

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 147, 18 March 1937, Page 7

"Write a Book, Build a House . . ."

The Language Of Wood And Stone

New Zealand Houses For New Zealand Folk

TN any young country, there arises A sooner or later a strong urge toward nationalism in architecture as well as other things. The first arrivals still cling with an almost pathetic nostalgia to the sights and sounds that remind them of home. Though their hands may build new cities, their hearts turn ever backward to the places of their childhood, where their friends are, and the things they love. In art, in literature, in architecture, they strive rather to produce a • faithful model of the familiar than to launch into different designs, strange shapes, however suitable to their adopted country.

Thus when the first ships came to New Zealand they carried with them a fragment of England, steeped in English tradition and true to English ideals. But the third and fourth generations have outgrown personal ties. They have neither family nor many friends at the other end of the world. Their loyalty is to New Zealand first. Naturally, they are _ no longer content to take their opinions and ideals at second-hand, but will digest and assimilate what comes to them, translating it into a form that harmonises with their surroundings. There have been mistakes and will be more, but only in that direction lies progress. Toward Independence. r PHE process of transition from de- "*■ pendence is going on slowly in architecture, and more particularly in domestic architecture. Not many of the houses of earliest Wellington'are still standing, but what few do remain show 7 how 7 far we have come in house design and construction. Weather-beaten now and dirty, they are under handicap, but even in their pristine youth they would not have been more comfortable than roadmen's huts to-day. Mostly, they are tiny wooden boxes, with narrow windows cut roughly into the blank walls. And back on the farms, building lacked even the unsympathetic regularity of outline of the town dwellings. After the first shacks, built without pretence at design and purely for shelter, the development of architecture in New 7 Zealand shows strongly the English influence. The early colonials swallowed holus-bolus whatever came from the Motherland, and much of it is still here —the good and the bad. From the sound, stolid construction of the nineteenth century it passes through fads and extravagances to a suggestion of picturesque Tudor and to Georgian dignity. True Colonial Houses. T>UT side by side with definite imitation grew the tendency to adapt and alter architecture -to meet different conditions. At the turn of the century the Edwardi.au houses in Wellington, square and regularly broken by windows, or more pretentious with jut-1 ting bay windows and long balconies, were practically identical with other houses in London or Birmingham. There were even the hideous fringes of cast-iron lace as coy decoration. In the true colonial houses, older designs were used boldly for the grafting of new ideas. If some of these distinc-; tive buildings were too startling in ! their originality to endure, the majority were kept safely to the path of tradition. But their high gables flung off Wellington rains, and their walls were snug against Wellington winds. They were not low and rambling like some English homes, yet their upright lines composed well with the steep -harbourland. Colonial architecture was fitting itself to its colonial setting. It borrowed sometimes the half-tim-bers of the Jacobean and Tudor houses,

Renaissance Of Domestic Architecture ( THE Chinese have a saying that it is the duty of every man to beget a child, write a book and build a house. It is advice long forgotten, but the gold of wisdom is in it. Nowadays we take classes in physical culture and play strenuous games for our health’s sake, but how few have the time or the skill to drive in the nails and plane the timber of a modern home? Even though changed conditions make owner-building impracticable, we could still, if we cared, let our houses interpret us in the language of wood and stone. But many of the streets of our New Zealand cities wear discontented and ugly frowns because we live so often in readymade shelters, which have neither friendly warmth nor sturdy character. One holds no brief for Wellington, which strangers call dingy, but it too has its houses of charm, side by side with the dreary facades of smutty-cream weatherboarding, the mean ugliness of narrow box-dwellings. Best of all, many new houses and the houses yet unbuilt ar e true to the finest traditions of domestic architecture, sound in construction, sweet ly simple in line, proud of • the name “home.’ . . , The general mass of ordinary residential work, despite many bright exceptions needs improving. And it is improving as builders and architects realise that the nation has evolved culturally beyond satisfaction with mere shelter.

the oriel windows and gabled roots. It used piled red brickwork like the Georgians, or it went farther afield and took a hint from the shadowed, airy buildings that Englishman had built for their protection against tropic suns. Latterly, it has incorporated the clean beauty that lies in straight lines and unadorned stone. Streamlined modernity has its sane and well-balanced

followers in New Zealand as well as overseas.

r fHE best examples of New Zealand domestic architecture, both of the small house and the larger, can stand with almost anything in other parts of the world. Our architects have done aud are doing excellent -work. But there are still rows upon rows of unsightly dwellings, put up in the days before the public cared or knew much about the appearance of their homes so long as the ranges did not smoke an-d the beds were soft. “Houses are to be lived in, not to be looked on,” commented the dry old statesman, Francis Bacon. And his theory, popularly accepted for generations, is the root of the disfigurement of hundreds of towns and cities.

Only now is a new attitude to housing developing. Architecture used to be an occult science, as mystical as calculus or Sanskrit to the ordinary man. So it remains in ecclesiastical and memorial work. But the domestic branch of it is different. People are beginning to realise that dull and sordid surroundings mean sordid thinking and dull pleasures; aud that it is just as easy and as cheap to strive toward beauty as it is to fashion ugliness. But much more satisfying. With this recognition that there is more in homes than wood and iron, comes intense interest in actual design and construction. When the ordinary man employs an architect to-day he does not feel that he has taken out a lottery ticket, which might bring him a dwelling-place of constant delight, but is just as likely .to produce a structure of bewildering shape that gives him a prickly feeling in the spine whenever he steps inside the door. Modern architects do not impose their ideas upon owners purely for the sake i

of winning an argument. They welcome and adopt suggestions ■which the intelligent layman may make. For the loveliest and the most successful houses are those which mirror the personality of the people who live in them. A house is like a frock which, no matter how well it is cut, hangs limply.

then, are the qualities that lend subtle distinction to a few rare houses, some of them no more than shacks behind a six-foot strip of garden? Why is it that some homes, correctly designed and neatly kept, are quite negative in the impression they create, while others arouse an unreasoning thrill of longing to possess th cm?

The answer can be expressed broad- , ly in one word —suitability; suitability to situation, to purpose, to the people ! who live in it. I Primarily, of course, home is the . place where you can shelter from the ( weather, eat, sleep and have privacy. 1 Once it was a cave dug in the earth, now it is an upstanding pile of materials, cunningly wrought together. And . so it must be comfortable and conveni-

ent, or we might as well be back in our apeman caves. Nowadays, we want houses planned for economy of service and movement, houses warm in winter and ventilated in summer, with light falling softly and air flowing freely. And modernity seeks, too, the beauty of simplicity in mass and in detail.

for the one who enters a home, there are hundreds who pass by and see only Ihe outward form. Therefore, appearance is important. A house should not be forced upon an unwilling landscape, but should melt into it as sweetly as a theme runs through an opera, each enriching the other. It has been said of one such home: “If a lovely tree stood in the way of that house, the house just doffed its cap and went- round it.” On the other hand, there are houses that shout aloud their discomfort. They are the bungalows with heavy roofs that seem to fear a second Hood and peer out from their protection like men in outsize bowler lials; other bungalows with stout pillars, like enormous sausages, supporting nothing at all. There are placid suburban villas self-consciously carrying painted turrets and bastions which would crumple at the shock of a rille's recoil; ami the solid chunks of stone sitting as heavily in tranquil valleys at Christmas pudding sits on the stomach; or Tudor half-timbers as incongruously perched on windswept promontories as a sunhat on an Eskimo.

I knew a girl who, when she was invited to the homes of strangers, never asked about the people, but instead, “What sort of house is it?” On that information she based her judgments. There is a certain shrewdness in this. Ono is relieved to see the modern architect and photographer interested in the interpretation io the public of a city’s graces. Out of consciousness, conscience grows. New Zealand, at long last, has become aware of the