OUR HOUSES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21414, 11 February 1933, Page 1 (Supplement)

OUR HOUSES

BY KOTARE

A WORLD-WIDE PROBLEM

The late Mr. Justice Alpers had a pretty wit. I once heard him give a sketch of his own composing which mado such an impression by its sheer cloverness that it remains in my memory as my outstanding experience in that particular line. Long before he had any aspirations toward the bench ho published in collaboration a volume on Now Zealand history which may have been superseded by mora authoritative studies, but which still bears reading for the vivacity of its comments on various aspects of Dominion life. This was his youthful opinion of New Zealand architecture. "The architecture in New Zealand towns is of the crudest description. The builders •of business premises and private houses seem to have a single eye to utility and economy. More than ninety per cent of the houses are of wood • timber is cheap and earthquakes not 'uncommon. Wellington, the chief town of the colony, is probably from an architectural point of view the ugliest in the world. Its square wooden houses are roofed with galvanised iron; and looked at from the terraces above the town resembles nothing so much as a collection of derelict kerosene tins. The average New Zealand villa or cottage is a square box with a four-to-six-foot passage pretentiously called a hall running through it from front to back. On either side of this, arranged with all a Scotch gardener's love of symmetry, are sitting-room and diningroom, bedrooms and kitchen. The roof is usually of glaring galvanised iron left unpainted for cheapness' sake, and there is no attempt at either internal or external decoration. If Gothic architecture drew its first inspiration from the leafy aisles of the German forest, the evolutionary starting-point of the New Zealand villa must have been the tin-lined packing-case in which the pioneer settler imported his goods and chattels." The Pioneer That is certainly a point of view and something could be said in support of it. But there are many factors that require a little more emphasis than this amusing chronicle has seen fit to give them. For one thing a pioneer country is not concerned to any great extent with building for the centuries. Its whole life consists in meeting emergencies as they arise. There is no stable background of culture or experience. Everything is new, and each day's needs have to be met by a swift adjustment that to-morrow may prove inadequate. The impermanence of the changing conditions of his lot induces in the pioneer a mentality that enables him to make the best of what he has, without complaining unduly of what he has not, and without looking too far ahead. Every pioneer country has to be satisfied with makeshifts. The higher arts flourish only after long years of peace and prosperity; the strongest effort of a people in the making is necessarily for many years dedicated to the creation of the conditions which later will make the arts possible. It is idle to condemn your apple trees because they do not give you their fruit in the spring. I was once riding along a bush track in the upper Bdngitikei. The Main Trunk was still a promise in the distance. I overtook a man leading a pack horse. There were two windows slung on either side of the plodding horse. The man was a pioneer farmer who was building his house in the depths of the wild. He had to pack everything with which the bush would not supply him along that rough track for over twenty miles. When I saw his house I reckoned it one of the finest monuments to pluck and patience you would find anywhere in New Zealand. He had hewn all the boards with his axe. He had packed in galvanised iron for roof and chimney. The floor was the bare earth trodden hard. And here at last were the windows. He was prouder of his handiwork than if he had designed and built Westminster Abbey.

Local Conditions The people who were building these houses so contemptuously described by the youthful Mr. Alpers were the ordinary citizens who ware slowly getting on their feet as the conditions of colonial life gave them opportunity—an opportunity they would never have had in England. They were experiencing the thrill of ownership. Their resources were small. "An illfavoured thing, sir, but mine own." Utility plus economy was the idea. And though they may seem ujrly to our eye to-day they had the highest beauty to eyes made partial by the surprise and delight of possession. "Why, even the bungalow fashion that we imagine has given such signal proof of our advanco in taste may seem as ridiculous as the squat villa to the next generation. Already they label it the 'bungaloid growth' in England. And why deride the inveterate New Zealand habit of building in wood. That is your true pioneer material. If the wooden building is inartistic and ugly, as it often is, then at least it has the saving graco of impermanence. It will not affront man's aesthetic sense for centuries. If it is a blot on the landscape it is an ephemeral blot. It has its day and ceases to be. A building of stone may shout our lack of taste to the crack of doom. New Zealand may in time evolve a form of house architecture that is the product of our special environment. The Maori came here from the tropics and had to adapt the ideas of house building he brought with him to the necessities of life in the temperate zone. He had to build in more durable material. Finally he was led to build a house strong enough to keep out the cold, and he superimposed upon it as decoration the traditional conception of a house that he brought with him from the warmer north. So far we have been imitative. What is not usually realised is the undoubted fact that this villa type of architecture which so incenses the critics of our culture is not a colonial product at all. It was introduced into New Zealand from England. England's Problem A. R. Powys thus describes the principles of house-building that governed English architecture in the early nineteenth century and that flowed over into Now Zealand as most English ideas did. ''The plan of houses had by gradual evolution become a collection of rooms opening from narrow and often dark passages. The whole object of house architecture seemed then to be to find how many rooms, each with a separate entrance, could be contrived within the narrowest and cheapest space. "That is English domestic architecture remember. Anyone who has seen the endless rows of drab houses in the manufacturing districts of England will understand that far more savage things have been said of England's ideas and taste than the most indignant critics of New Zealand have thought of using. True we have nothing to boast of. Wo added to the standard English design the Victorian idea of flimsy and meretricious decoration. Inside and out there must be no space unadorned with irrelevant wood scraps, tortured into every fantastic shape 1 the lathe could contrive. But here'again tve were imitative, and wo have grown aeyond the stage. The bungalow is more ndividual. But it too is becoming standardised. The whole civilised world is grappling vith this problem of domestic architecture. No one anywhere is satisfied with ' >resent achievement. What some people issume to be a purely New Zealand pro)lem that has been settled everywhere ! ilse is no nearer satisfactory solution in - lie old world than it is here. We can at - east take comfort from that.