Why I'm suspicious of the phrase "award-winning"

I’ve said for years – not that anyone was listening – that two of the most useless words in the English language are “award-winning”.

Award-winning wine, award-winning magazine, award-winning artist, award-winning TV commercial, award-winning restaurant, award-winning book, award-winning movie, award-winning building … Many of these accolades can be dismissed as meaningless. I wouldn’t necessarily condemn them all out of hand, but people should be very wary of accepting them at face value.

I speak from some experience, having been a judge of journalism and newspaper awards, restaurant awards and even cheese awards. Though in all those instances the judging process was as transparent and fair as it could be, my misgivings grew to the point where I declined to be involved.

The reliability of awards depends on too many variables. Who was eligible? Who were the judges? What were the criteria? How could anyone ensure judges’ decisions were not subject to potentially unfair personal bias? Of critical importance, who bothered to enter and who didn’t? (Often, the best practitioners in any field don’t bother to enter competitions because they don’t need to. Wine competitions are a case in point.)  

Awards often don’t tell you what you most need to know. Just as a glowing review of a new car doesn’t tell you how reliable it’s going to be once it’s left the showroom, which is the crucial factor for most buyers, so an award for an individual piece of work doesn’t necessarily prove anything in the longer term.

In the same way that a clever winemaker can craft a wine that will stand out in a competition where judges might have to taste several hundred samples in a day, it’s possible for a newspaper or journalist to produce an individual edition or article that attracts high praise. But the real test is the ability to do the job to a high standard consistently over weeks, months and years.

Keri Hulme’s celebrated novel the bone people comes to mind. Hulme won the Man Booker Prize in 1985 and was lionised by the literati, but she appears to have done nothing of any note since. Which raises another question: how long can someone go on being described as “award-winning” before the award recedes so far into the past that it’s no longer relevant?

The honour showered on Hulme's novel, which some critics described as incomprehensible,  raises another problem with awards. Sometimes they represent the verdict of a rarefied elite that almost takes pride in being out of touch with popular taste. Art awards are another case in point.

The intimate (some might say incestuous) nature of New Zealand society presents additional risks. There’s always the danger that people will be judging the work of friends – or just as insidiously, enemies and rivals, especially in the bitchy literary community.

Returning to journalism, which is the field I know best, I can think of reporters who won acclaim for outstanding stories and never rose to the same heights again. As an editor, I once hired a reporter on the basis of a major award he had won but whose performance was mediocre. Some people thrive in a particular environment but, for whatever reason, are unable to reproduce that same level of excellence once they move on.

I know other editors who had similar experiences. A reporter I once worked with in Australia had several major newspaper titles bidding for his services after he happened to score a prize-winning national scoop simply by being in the right place at the right time (he happened to be close to the scene of a terrible accident in a remote location), but who proved a disappointment to the paper that ended up hiring him.

Digressing slightly, what about those stickers on wine bottles which purport to assure buyers of the wine’s quality? They guarantee nothing. As Michael Cooper pointed out in a recent Listener wine column, the relationship between some wine “critics” and the wineries that supply them is sometimes ethically compromised, to put it politely. Some critics are hired guns, paid to talk up a wine (though they presumably wouldn’t risk their reputations by putting a five-star sticker on an indifferent product).

Right now, the international media are getting excited about the most celebrated awards of all – the Oscars, which take place in a couple of weeks.  But it can be instructive to go back through the lists of past Academy Award winners. Many of those that scored the coveted Best Picture gong are soon forgotten. They came and went and made no lasting impression. Birdman (2014)? Moonlight (2016)? The Shape of Water (2017)? I rest my case.

Conversely, many movies that people still watch over and over again – true classics – never got recognition from the pompously named Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Even Citizen Kane, widely acclaimed – rightly or wrongly – as the greatest Hollywood movie ever made, failed to win either a Best Picture or Best Director award. (How Green Was My Valley won Best Picture that year – a wonderful film, but it didn’t have the staying power of Orson Welles’ magnum opus.)

And who knows, in the opaque maelstrom that is Hollywood, what political factors or studio power plays might have influenced the nominations?  

Arguably the Oscars will have even less credibility now that ideology, in the form of a continuing backwash from the Black Lives Matter and Me Too! movements,  has intruded. In future the awards are likely to be handed out not on the basis of how good a film is, but on how well it’s deemed to reflect ethnic and gender diversity. Could this be the final kiss of death to an overblown ritual that has outlived its usefulness?

Now, to get to the point (finally, I hear you say) of this rambling dissertation. My long-standing scepticism about that phrase “award-winning” has been resoundingly vindicated today by two stories on Stuff. Both concern buildings described as award-winning.

One, a house at Pekapeka, on the Kapiti Coast, was demolished in 2016 at a reported cost to the owners of $1 million. The avant-garde house, designed by Wellington firm Parsonson Architects, was a Home of the Year finalist and won an NZIA colour award. Unfortunately it didn’t keep the rain out. The owners were quoted $800,000 to fix leaking windows and mould-damaged cladding, but decided instead to demolish the house and replace it with one built by Lockwood.

To be fair, it appears the problem was caused by the building products used rather than by any inherent design fault, but the owners clearly weren’t impressed by architect Gerald Parsonson’s reported refusal to discuss possible solutions.

It was hardly good publicity for the architect, and made even more embarrassing by the fact that the owners contacted Stuff after reading about another “award-winning” Parsonson home, this time in the Wellington suburb of Northland, that was pulled down last month because of similar leakage issues. This was after the owner had spent $200,000 on remediation.

She ended up selling the property to a developer for $1.4 million – the value of the land. Earlier attempts to sell the house for nearly $3 million failed when building reports identified moisture damage to the timber framing.

In this instance the architect’s shame should be shared by the New Zealand Institute of Architects, which gave the condemned Northland house its “Supreme Award” in 2003. Oh, dear.

But wait, there’s more. Stuff also reports that the Altera Apartments in Auckland, built by Fletchers in 2015, is the subject of a TV documentary (screening on Prime tomorrow night) which reveals the building has leaky curtain walling and is not fire compliant. Stuff reports that repairs are expected to cost $15 million which will be covered by the builders.

Do I need to add that Altera Apartments won a 2016 NZIA award for the architects, Warren and Mahoney? Probably not. Readers of this blog, being an unusually astute and prescient lot, would have sensed that coming.

I have long suspected that some architects design buildings chiefly to impress other architects. Obviously I can’t prove that this was the case in these instances, but let’s just say my suspicions haven’t been erased.

I have similarly suspected for a long time that advertising people make ads to impress other advertising people. Architects and advertising agencies seem to share an insatiable appetite for awards and peer recognition, to the extent that I believe the prospect of an award is often more important to some agencies than whether an ad succeeds in generating business for the client.

I’m encouraged in this belief by the advertising news updates that regularly arrive in my inbox, which largely consist of a stream of announcements detailing who’s won what in the latest awards, which seem to occur almost weekly.

No other industry celebrates itself, or congratulates itself, with greater zeal. But I often wonder where the clients’ interests fit in, if indeed they do.  

Further confirmation of this apparent obsession with what other ad industry practitioners think came recently from an unlikely source: Margaret Hayward’s 1981 book Diary of the Kirk Years, which is a fascinating account of 1970s politics from the inside.  At one point Hayward describes an exchange during the 1972 election campaign between Labour leader Norman Kirk and a young Bob Harvey (now Sir Bob, and a former mayor of Waitakere City), who was handling Labour’s advertising.

Kirk was trenchantly critical of Harvey’s efforts, and cited one of his ads – a TV commercial which a Labour supporter mistook for a coffee ad – as evidence that the ads were not hitting their target. To which Harvey protested that two other agencies had been in touch with him to say how good the ad was, as if that emphatically settled the issue.

Was it an award-winning ad? Very likely.

Footnote: The writer has never won any awards, though he vaguely recalls being awarded with a certificate for an editorial (on sport, of all things) that he was reluctantly persuaded to enter in a competition in the 1990s. 

 

An earlier rumination on architecture

As I was posting my recent column on Wellington buildings a couple of days ago, I remembered a speech I gave at a debate on architecture in Greytown in 2010. I dug it out of my files and was agreeably surprised to discover that I don't disagree with anything I said then, which is not always the case. For what it's worth, here it is:

"ARCHITECTURE IS THE MOTHER OF ALL ARTS" – GREYTOWN, AUGUST 13, 2010

I have to confess that initially, I didn’t quite understand the motion of this debate. The statement that architecture is the mother of all arts seemed just too abstract and esoteric, so my first inclination was to invoke Gary McCormick’s first rule of debating and ignore the motion altogether.  But then I did some research – which broke Gary McCormick’s second rule of debating – and discovered that the motion is based on a quote by the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

What he actually said was: “The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilisation." So when you see the quote in its entirety, you start to see where he’s coming from.

What I take from Wright’s statement is that our most potent and lasting symbols of culture and nationhood are not works of art, but works of architecture. And when you think this through, it’s inarguable.

Ancient Greece has no more recogniseable symbol than the Parthenon. Ancient Rome has no more recogniseable symbol than the Colosseum.

Entire civilisations are identified by the structures they left behind: Macchu Piccu in Peru, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Petra in Jordan – “a rose red city half as old as time”, in the words of the famous poem by John William Burgon.

France’s most potent symbol, one that’s instantly recognised worldwide, is the Eiffel Tower. And what could be more symbolic of Russia than the famous onion-shaped domes of St Basil’s Cathedral, which has stood at the very heart of Moscow since 1561, and still represents the apotheosis of Russian architecture?

Think of India, and you’re likely to think of the Taj Mahal. Moving closer to home, what image could be more representative of Australia than the iconic lines of the Sydney Opera House? And what could better exemplify the brashness and self-confidence of early 20^th century American capitalism than the Empire State Building?

Speaking of which, how many of you knew the Empire State Building was completed in just 410 days? In New Zealand, you’d wait that long for a resource consent to build a chookhouse in your backyard. But I digress.

Buildings such as the ones I’ve just mentioned give people a sense of who they are and what they value. They are emblematic of their culture and society. What’s more, buildings belong to the people in a way that other works of art such as paintings and sculptures can never do. By their very nature they are public, enabling ordinary people to share a sense of ownership.

Architecture, it’s been said, is the art form that most impacts on our lives. It belongs to us all. We don’t just live and work in buildings created by architects; we walk among them and look at them every day of our lives.

That makes us all experts on the subject. I certainly consider myself an authority on architecture, by virtue of the fact that I was born in a building and have lived and worked in them all my life. If that doesn’t qualify me to talk with authority on the subject, I don’t know what does.

In fact I suggest that we should all reclaim ownership of the discussion about architecture from the architects, who have tended to control or at least dominate the conversation in the assumption that only they are qualified to talk about it. Events like this debate are a good way to start.

Now, I’ve talked about some of the iconic buildings of other countries and their importance as expressions of national pride. The question then arises, how does New Zealand measure up?

I think it’s fair to say that we have no equivalent of the Sydney Opera House. Okay, so it was conceived by a Dane – but it has been embraced by Australians, and it has come to symbolise boldness and audacity and opportunity. Can we say that of our own architectural icons?

I’m one of the many who believe we missed a golden opportunity to create an iconic building with Te Papa. It’s a brutal, unappealing building from the outside and doesn’t make any sense internally either. Fortunately as the native bush on its waterfront side has grown it has softened the harsh lines of the building – a reminder of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous quote that the physician buries his mistakes, but the architect can only advise clients to plant ivy to cover his.

The building that’s most often described as an instantly recogniseable New Zealand icon is the Beehive. But the concept was created by a Scotsman, Sir Basil Spence, and the building doesn’t say anything about us as a country. Its only virtue is that it’s distinctive. Internally, it’s appallingly impractical because of its shape. In fact it’s a classic reversal of the design dictum that form should follow function. Spence created his sketch and then left it to Ministry of Works architects to make it work, but of course it never did.

So what else have we got? Well, I checked on Te Ara, the website of the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, and it listed 12 buildings that it described as iconic. They range from the Hundertwasser toilets in Kawakawa to the Civic Theatre in Invercargill.

The Sky Tower is there – but although it’s emblematic, like the Beehive, I think of it as representative of Auckland rather than New Zealand. It’s has a dramatic quality because of its sheer scale, but I don’t know that anyone would describe it as aesthetically pleasing or inspirational. In any case, there’s little to distinguish it from similar “statement” towers in overseas cities.

Many of the other buildings on the Te Ara list, such as Christchurch Cathedral and the Rotorua Bath House, are colonial derivatives of British architectural styles. Even the lovely National Tobacco Company building in Napier is a knock-off of the art deco style that you can see in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Interestingly enough, the Te Ara list doesn’t include a building that is often cited as one that is unmistakably unique to New Zealand because of the way it combines modernist design with Maori influences. I refer to the Futuna Chapel in Karori, which David Kernohan is going to talk about at greater length.

So we seem to be a bit impoverished architecturally, at least when it comes to public buildings. Perhaps, as Johnny Mathis sang, it’s just a matter of time.

The Roman architect Vitruvius thought buildings should raise people’s spirits, but you certainly couldn’t say that of a lot our corporate architecture. I regard buildings like the Majestic Tower in Wellington as Gordon Gekko buildings, after the character in the movie Wall Street. They are dominating and assertive but no more than that.

And there must surely be a special place in Hell for the architects who created the brutalist government buildings that rose in many provincial cities during the 1960s and 70s. I suspect that there once existed a secret government department called the Ministry of Architectural Abominations. There’s no reference to it in official records but we know it must have existed because we can see the evidence of its labours in places like Palmerston North, Napier, Nelson and Masterton.

I believe this department was staffed by draftsmen specially trained in East Germany, Bulgaria and North Korea. Their brief was to make provincial cities feel more important by putting high-rise buildings in their central business districts, whether the residents wanted them or not. 

The result is that virtually every provincial centre in New Zealand is blighted by at least one brutally ugly government building that towers above its neighbours and blends in to the cityscape with all the subtlety of an All Black prop in a corps de ballet. The very worst of them is the high-rise Nelson Post Office building, which would be my nomination for the title of ugliest and most incongruous building in New Zealand.

The people responsible for these atrocities should not go unpunished. Like war criminals, they should be hunted down like dogs and made to account for their crimes. They are the Slobodan Milosevics of architecture.

From my layman’s perspective, if there’s a definitive New Zealand style of architecture, it seems to be expressed more in our everyday domestic architecture. You could argue that the definitive New Zealand building, one that really says something about our lifestyle and our values and aspirations, is the humble Kiwi bach, which was celebrated in a television advertising campaign decades ago.

And again, from my layman’s point of view, it seems to me that if there’s an emerging character in our architecture it’s a certain eccentricity and playfulness. You can see this in the work of Ian Athfield, in Roger Walker’s Mews apartment development in Hataitai and in Hundertwasser’s toilets at Kawakawa. You can see it in the Puke Ariki gallery at New Plymouth, which looks as if it’s been built from driftwood washed up on the beach. You can also see it in the idiosyncratic building now taking shape at Wellington Airport, which has been dubbed The Rock.

Now, since I’ve touched on the subject of the New Zealand home, I’d like to say something about the ostentatious suburban homes known as McMansions, which are spreading like gorse over the hills of Greater Wellington.

It’s a strange quirk of human nature that as families get smaller, houses get bigger. New Zealand suburban homes have grown in inverse proportion to the size of the families inhabiting them, and to the sections they occupy.

Thirty years ago the average new house had a floor area of 127 square metres; now it’s 175. A typical new subdivision consists of large, ugly houses, typically occupied by two adults and one or two children, packed cheek-by-jowl on pocket handkerchief-sized pieces of land. But of course they have to have a double garage, preferably with enough room for the jet-ski that gets used once every summer.

These are symptoms of what has been labelled affluenza, a disease said to be running rampant in a society afflicted with terminal consumerism.

Oddly enough, a similar thing has happened with cars: engines have got progressively bigger and more powerful while interior space has diminished. In the mid-1980s, 40 percent of the cars on our roads had engines of less than 1.6 litres and the biggest-selling model was the Toyota Corolla. But when I last checked a couple of years ago, cars under 1.6 litres accounted for only 12 percent of the national vehicle fleet and the biggest-selling car was the 4-litre Ford Falcon.

When I was a kid, families of six would squeeze into a 1.6-litre Morris Oxford or Hillman Minx. The Morris 1100 was marketed as a compact family saloon. Now a 1.6-litre car is considered too small for anything other than a trip to the supermarket, and many 3-litre cars will accommodate only four adults.

Incidentally, can anyone here envisage a time in the distant future when today’s McMansions will be admired for their style? Housing fashions go in cycles and at some point most architectural styles become desirable again. The villa, the Californian bungalow, the art deco home, even the 1950s state house … they’ve all acquired a retro cool. But I’m going to stick my neck out and predict that no one in a few decades’ time is going to be desperate to acquire an early 21^st century McMansion, even assuming they last that long. They look cheap and tacky now, and they won’t improve with age.

I’ll leave it there for now, Mr Chairman. I’ve strayed off topic a bit but I’m sure I’ve established beyond all shadow of doubt that architecture is the mother of all arts, even if, as a young and relatively immature society, we still have to look overseas for the most compelling evidence of that. Thank you.

Contemporary architects have failed us

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, June 27.)

Earlier this year, France mourned when fire partially destroyed the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.

It was striking to see Parisians on their knees in the streets, praying and singing hymns – this in a country that was generally thought to have largely renounced Catholicism.

But it wasn’t just the French, or Catholics, who grieved. The world shared their pain, because Notre- Dame is acknowledged as one of Western civilisation’s architectural gems. Something about the sight of this ancient and glorious building in flames clearly touched even irreligious people.

The worldwide reaction to the Notre-Dame fire reminded us that buildings are important. Great architecture, like great music and great literature, has the power to inspire us. It’s also capable of making powerful statements about our history and culture.

So what great New Zealand buildings deserve to be celebrated? Er, not very many.

Of course we have no Notre-Dame, St Paul’s or Hagia Sophia, for the obvious reason that we’re one of the youngest countries in the world, in terms of human settlement.

But even allowing for that, our architectural heritage is pretty thin. Taking Wellington as an example, it’s hard to think of any building erected in my lifetime that evokes feelings of pride, still less awe. Lambton Quay, The Terrace and Molesworth Street are lined with monuments to dreary, functional conformity. There is no sense of vision or daring.

At best, Wellington has a handful of modern buildings that could be described as quirky. The Beehive – originally sketched on the back of a table napkin – arouses curiosity purely because of its novelty. It has minimal aesthetic appeal and must be cursed daily by the unfortunate occupants forced to work within its strictures.

Another famous oddball edifice is Roger Walker’s whimsical 1970s Park Mews in Hataitai – but again, it earned its fame as a conversation piece rather than for aesthetic merit.

On the rare occasions when an architect has created a modern building of enduring appeal, as John Scott did in the 1960s with Karori’s Futuna Chapel, it hasn’t always been treated with respect. Futuna was allowed to fall into disrepair (since rectified) and ended up hemmed in on all sides by town houses and barely able to breathe.

As for the significant public buildings that might be expected to make a statement about our values and aspirations, our architects have failed us.Te Papa, in its prime site beside the harbour, remains a slabby monstrosity that makes little sense inside or out.

And our supposedly “iconic” Supreme Court building, enclosed in a bronze thicket that’s intended to represent wind-blown pohutukawa and rata trees but looks more like tortured matagouri or a crown of thorns, is poorly served by its proximity to the elegant 19^th century building that preceded it. The juxtaposition serves only to highlight the folly of contemporary architects straining for symbolism.

In fact look almost anywhere in the capital, and you can’t help but be struck by the contrast between buildings constructed in the latter half of the 20^th century and those of earlier eras.

Sadly, some of those older buildings – among them the characterful Spanish Mission-style Midland Hotel – are long gone, but it remains true that the buildings which command our admiration today are mostly older ones. Perhaps even more remarkably, they have withstood earthquakes that rendered much newer structures uninhabitable.

St Gerard’s Monastery and Weir House are handsome buildings that make the most of their commanding locations. The latter bears the distinctive imprint of William Gray Young, who designed it in collaboration with Charles Lawrence.

Young left his mark all over the city, having also designed Wellington Railway Station, the Wellesley Club and the two-storeyed neo-Georgian gem in Kent Tce known as Elliott House.

Another architect who made an enduring contribution to Wellington’s architectural heritage was Frederick de Jersey Clere, who designed St Mary of the Angels and the lovely Wellington Harbour Board buildings that line Customhouse and Jervois quays.

Those who appreciate architectural aesthetics still admire these buildings. Will the same be true of structures such as the Michael Fowler Centre in 100 years’ time? I doubt it. The MFC looked outdated 10 years after it was built.  

And now it seems Wellington’s character homes may be at risk too, as the city council looks at ways of squeezing more people into a limited area of land. High-rise apartment buildings occupy a smaller footprint than old houses – but at what aesthetic price?

Just as the historic inner-city suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney give those cities much of their distinctive character, so Wellington’s older homes have a personality that its commercial and public buildings conspicuously lack. But with the city’s record of architectural vandalism, no one should assume their future is secure.

Baby Zachary - the ultimate gay fashion accessory?

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, January 4.)

HOW DOES a jaded, ageing but fabulously wealthy pop singer amuse himself when the hits stop coming? In Elton John’s case, the answer is to have a surrogate child – the ultimate gay fashion accessory.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this turn of events. Remember that in 1984, John married Renate Blauel in Sydney. In a sense, she appeared to be an accessory too – a convenient means of fending off speculation about his sexuality at a time when it might have been detrimental to his popularity.

If that matrimonial charade was a career move, this latest undertaking looks like a vanity project.

Just as it suited John to take a pretty young bride then, it apparently suits him now to have a baby. Fashions change, after all, and there are few things more fashionable in 2011 than single-sex parenthood. But it’s hard to escape the feeling that John’s need for self-gratification takes priority over other considerations, such as the effects on Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John of having a father 63 years older.

We can only hope, for young Zachary’s sake, that John’s sudden enthusiasm for parenthood is more than just a passing dilettantish fancy, similar to that of people who buy a cute-looking puppy for Christmas then tire of it and dump it at the SPCA six weeks later.

* * *

MANY occasional visitors to the Wairarapa regard the Rimutaka Hill road as a formidable obstacle. I once met a family of Canadian tourists who spent an enjoyable summer’s day in Masterton, where I live, but were anxious to get back “over that mountain pass” to their Wellington hotel before nightfall.

Most Wairarapa residents, on the other hand, are accustomed to crossing the Rimutakas and think nothing of it. Many regard the physical barrier between them and Wellington as part of the region’s charm.

But there’s a type of driver frequently encountered on the Rimutakas who is a pain in the neck. These are Wairarapa locals, almost invariably male, who are determined to show everyone else how fast they can go. I call it the Rimutaka Syndrome.

Peak commuting times in particular are when these macho road warriors like to display their nerve and skills with risky passing manoeuvres or by tailgating slower vehicles to hurry them along.

It’s a daily display of one-upmanship and I suspect that for many of these drivers, it’s their only chance in life to feel superior to others.

It goes without saying that they are not terribly bright. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that notwithstanding their breakneck haste, they almost invariably end up stuck behind slower traffic further along.

This was borne out for me one afternoon recently when three vehicles that were in a desperate hurry to get past me on the hill road reached their eventual destinations – Featherston and Greytown respectively – only seconds ahead of me.

If they had wiped themselves out, you could only conclude that it was natural selection in action.

* * *

I SEE that another architectural abomination has risen on a prime site on the Wellington waterfront. I refer to the $11 million building erected to house two ceremonial Maori canoes near the southern end of Frank Kitts Lagoon.

On seeing this eyesore for the first time I literally recoiled. My first thought was that someone must have slipped something into the architects’ coffee. But no; it seems the clever people from Architecture+ were seeking to create something profoundly symbolic. The ugly, asymmetrical roofline is supposed to represent a Maori cloak thrown over the building.

The capital seems determined to set some sort of benchmark for ugly public buildings. The $80 million Supreme Court, with its silly bronze thicket supposedly representing the strength and durability of the rata and pohutukawa trees (more strained symbolism), is an object of ridicule. Te Papa was a tragic wasted opportunity and the new airport terminal, ostensibly inspired by the rocks of Wellington’s south coast, looks more like a pair of Halloween pumpkins.

For heaven’s sake, can’t our architects just concentrate on creating buildings that work aesthetically and practically, rather than desperately trying to be “edgy” or attempting to make symbolic statements?

* * *

REPORTING on last week’s storms, a TVNZ journalist said there had been violent wind gusts on Mt Cocoa. For those not in the know, this is a peak in the Cadbury Range above Khandallah. I waited eagerly for word of wind speeds on Mt Milo and Mt Ovaltine but these were not forthcoming.

Later that night I heard a radio reporter talking about flooding in the Pellarus River. I’m not sure of the location of this river but wonder if it’s anywhere near the Bay of Plenty town of Operticky, which I recently heard mentioned by another radio journalist.

In the meantime I remain keen to establish the whereabouts of Te Arower, where, according to another radio bulletin, the freezing works burned down in December.

We're still waiting for a Sydney Opera House

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, August 18.)

I was recently invited to take part in a debate about architecture. The motion we were debating was that “architecture is the mother of all arts” – a statement that had me stumped until I tracked down the original quotation in its entirety.

It came from Frank Lloyd Wright, probably the most famous of American architects, who wrote: “The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilisation.” Syntactically, it’s a bit clunky (Wright was an architect, not a writer), but you can see where he was coming from.

It set me thinking. What I took from Wright’s statement is that our most potent and lasting symbols of culture and nationhood are not works of art, but works of architecture.

The Parthenon still stands as a memorial of ancient Greece, just as the Colosseum does of Rome. Entire civilisations are identified by the structures they left behind: Macchu Picchu in Peru, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Petra in Jordan – “a rose red city half as old as time”, in the words of the famous poem by John William Burgon.

France’s most potent symbol, one that’s instantly recognised worldwide, is the Eiffel Tower. And what could be more symbolic of Russia than the onion-shaped domes of St Basil’s Cathedral, which has stood at the heart of Moscow since 1561?

Think of India, and you’re likely to think of the Taj Mahal. And nothing could better exemplify the brashness and self-confidence of early 20th century American capitalism than the Empire State Building (built, remarkably, in 410 days - roughly the time it would take in New Zealand to get a resource consent for a chookhouse in your backyard).

Moving closer to home, nothing more readily identifies Australia in the eyes of the world than the iconic lines of the Sydney Opera House. Okay, so the building was conceived by a Dane – but it has been embraced by Australians, and it has come to symbolise boldness, audacity and opportunity.

Buildings such as these can give people a sense of who they are and what they value. What’s more, buildings belong to the people in a way that works of art such as paintings and sculptures can never do. By their very nature they are public, enabling ordinary people to share a sense of ownership.

All of this got me thinking about how New Zealand measures up.

We certainly don’t have anything to match the Sydney Opera House for its architectural daring. We had an opportunity with Te Papa, and we blew it. What we got was a brutish, insensitive building, ill-suited to its commanding site. It's unappealing from the outside and doesn’t make any sense internally either.

The building that’s most often described as a New Zealand icon is the Beehive. But the concept was created by a Scotsman, Sir Basil Spence, and it doesn’t say anything about us as a country. Its only virtue is that it’s distinctive.

Internally, the Beehive is appallingly impractical because of its shape. In fact it’s a classic reversal of the design dictum that form should follow function. Spence created his sketch (on a table napkin, the story goes) and then left it to Ministry of Works architects to make it work, which it never did.

Te Ara, the website of the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, lists 12 buildings that it describes as iconic. The Sky Tower is there, but although it’s instantly recogniseable, like the Beehive, I think of it as representative of Auckland rather than New Zealand. It has a dramatic quality because of its sheer scale, but I don’t know that it could be described as aesthetically pleasing or inspirational.

Many of the other buildings on the Te Ara list, such as Nelson’s Anglican cathedral, the Otago University clock tower and the Rotorua Bath House, are colonial derivatives of British models. Even the charming National Tobacco Company building in Napier, another on the list, was a knock-off of the Californian art deco style that was in vogue at the time.

Interestingly enough, the list doesn’t include a building that is often cited as unmistakebly unique to New Zealand because of the way it incorporates both modernist and Maori influences. I refer to the Futuna Chapel in Karori, designed by the late John Scott and shamefully neglected by the Catholic Church before being rescued by people who recognised its importance.

As for our corporate buildings, well … the Roman architect Vitruvius thought buildings should raise people’s spirits, but you certainly couldn’t say that of the glass and concrete towers in the Auckland and Wellington CBDs. I regard many of them as Gordon Gekko buildings, after the ruthless executive in the movie Wall Street. They are dominating and assertive, but no more than that.

And there must surely be a special place in Hell for the architects who created the brutalist government buildings that rose in many provincial cities during the 1960s and 70s. These drab, East German-inspired edifices blend in to their surroundings with all the delicacy of an All Black prop in a corps de ballet.

If there’s a definitive New Zealand style of architecture, one that we can truly call our own, it seems to be expressed more in everyday domestic architecture than in showpiece public buildings. You could argue that the definitive New Zealand building, one that really says something about our lifestyle, values and aspirations, is the humble Kiwi bach, which was celebrated in a television advertising campaign several years ago.

And it seems to me that if there’s an emerging character in our architecture it’s a certain eccentricity and playfulness. You can see this in the work of Ian Athfield and in Friedrich Hundertwasser’s public toilets at Kawakawa (not that I care for the latter). You can also see it in the Puke Ariki gallery at New Plymouth, which looks as if it’s been built from driftwood washed up on the beach, and in the idiosyncratic building taking shape at Wellington Airport, which has been dubbed The Rock.

Perhaps we just need to be patient. We are, after all, one of the youngest countries in the world; even Australia had a 50-year head start on us. By my reckoning, that gives us 13 years to come up with an iconic public building to match the one that was opened by the Queen on Sydney’s Bennelong Point in 1973.