A CIVIC CENTRE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19469, 27 October 1926, Page 10

A CIVIC CENTRE.

Sir, —Iri tho year three thousand three huadred and three we assembled ah expedition of antiquaries, which in the course of many wanderings landed in New Zealand. The ancient harbour of the Waitemata had been filled up. With difficulty and by means of map 3, plans and records, we located the site o! a civic centre. Being in a deep valley it had suffered much from the historic eruption of an adjacent volcano, at that time an island outside the harbour, which had poured its ashes out to the destruction of tho city. We lparaed much about the ideals, taste, civilisation, customs of these people in the twentieth century. They were evidently a gay, frivolous, pleasure-loving community. They provided ample space for crowds of motor-cars, halls for spectacular displays, opportunity for indoor and outdoor oratory, but they showed no sign whatever of having any idea that a human being is a spirit-governing body. To them money, pretentious display, pleasure, was everything, but spiritual life and its relation to God was not in the civic life. What provision had been made in the town for religion was clearly not connected with any town planning or civic life at all. We hoped to find the remains of a glorious cathedral built upon the best traditions of the country whance these folk had come, and vro believe it was from the British Isles that they did come. Bnt no. They did not include God in their vision. There was plenty of scope for commercial life. There was a curious morgue-like structure which' oar records said was a picture gallery. It was as devoid of painters' art inside as it wati of architectural art outside. We had thought that the time-honoured maxim "architecture is the poetry of construction." originated in the twentieth century, but apparently it is subsequent to the age of these builders. A building j designated a hotel caused some debate among us; most of us decided it was a drinking tavern with some rooms of a travellers' inn attached, but one of our number desires his opinion to be recorded that it was a temple of the ancient pagan Roman god Bacchus. The amazing thing to us was that these people, being of British origin, could pass on one side the unrurpassed glories of their own country's architecture, and had sought out ideas from that perversion of ancient Greek known as the Renaissance, and in a further debased form at that, as far ■as we could see. What we took for a gaol turned out to be the municipal offices. But the most unaccountable erection was a "bridge of sighs" right across a main street. We suppose it facilitated clerks going from one office to another on that floor. Tt had rested on two traffic obstructors in the fairway of the road; evidently the fall of ashes had been preceded by darkness and the rush of motor-cars to escape from the doomed town had piled up here with a wholesale destruction. We discovered one building on a hill some distance away which had a distinct flavour of English architecture, Elizabethan perhaps, but still English, probably it was the Supreme Courthouse, still beautiful in its neglected ruins, a witness that the city once had aspirations and ideals after graceful architecture. The appalling hiaeousness and absence of all spiritual ideal in the Civic Square made us shudder with grief, and we were fdad to leave the winds and storms to cast back the ashes and bury again the soulless mlns of ijhat dreary valley. W. Edwabd Lush. Octobfir 24, '1926.