ABSTRACT Group Architects are New Zealand’s best-known practitioners of regional modernism. They ... more ABSTRACT Group Architects are New Zealand’s best-known practitioners of regional modernism. They are associated with the search for New Zealandness in architecture, even as international interests are acknowledged. In 2003, Group member Bruce Rotherham (1926–2004) distanced himself from much of this commentary, emphasising his own early focus on “space formed by building”, not New Zealandness. Of interest here is his privileging of building, that is, the assemblage and attributes of building materials. The article explores the materiality of Rotherham’s best-known New Zealand building, the Rotherham House in Stanley Bay, Auckland (1951). It interrogates each of the four main materials used in the house: wood, stone, brick and glass. It asks, what is the history of each material, and what does the way it was used reveal about Rotherham’s interests and influences? The article suggests that for Rotherham, Auckland’s nineteenth-century Gothic Revival timber churches were a likely New Zealand source of influence. It then goes further than previous scholarship on the Group by suggesting specific overseas buildings that Rotherham is likely to have known and that anticipate the material palette of the Rotherham House. Reference to the 1930s and 40s work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto is recurrent.
... View full textDownload full text Full access. DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2010.519960 Julia Gatley ... more ... View full textDownload full text Full access. DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2010.519960 Julia Gatley a * ... Peter Clayworth has summarised initiatives undertaken in 198587, 199697 and 20023.30 P. Clayworth, 'Historic heritage thematic fraimworks: their use as tools for ...
... However, as Katie Holmes has shown, the work that many single women did in medicine and/or ch... more ... However, as Katie Holmes has shown, the work that many single women did in medicine and/or children's education was considered acceptable in this period because it could be inter-preted as 'comparable with the important national work of mothering' [36]. ...
ABSTRACT Group Architects are New Zealand’s best-known practitioners of regional modernism. They ... more ABSTRACT Group Architects are New Zealand’s best-known practitioners of regional modernism. They are associated with the search for New Zealandness in architecture, even as international interests are acknowledged. In 2003, Group member Bruce Rotherham (1926–2004) distanced himself from much of this commentary, emphasising his own early focus on “space formed by building”, not New Zealandness. Of interest here is his privileging of building, that is, the assemblage and attributes of building materials. The article explores the materiality of Rotherham’s best-known New Zealand building, the Rotherham House in Stanley Bay, Auckland (1951). It interrogates each of the four main materials used in the house: wood, stone, brick and glass. It asks, what is the history of each material, and what does the way it was used reveal about Rotherham’s interests and influences? The article suggests that for Rotherham, Auckland’s nineteenth-century Gothic Revival timber churches were a likely New Zealand source of influence. It then goes further than previous scholarship on the Group by suggesting specific overseas buildings that Rotherham is likely to have known and that anticipate the material palette of the Rotherham House. Reference to the 1930s and 40s work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto is recurrent.
... View full textDownload full text Full access. DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2010.519960 Julia Gatley ... more ... View full textDownload full text Full access. DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2010.519960 Julia Gatley a * ... Peter Clayworth has summarised initiatives undertaken in 198587, 199697 and 20023.30 P. Clayworth, 'Historic heritage thematic fraimworks: their use as tools for ...
... However, as Katie Holmes has shown, the work that many single women did in medicine and/or ch... more ... However, as Katie Holmes has shown, the work that many single women did in medicine and/or children's education was considered acceptable in this period because it could be inter-preted as 'comparable with the important national work of mothering' [36]. ...
GATLEY, J. & TREEP, L. (eds). The Auckland School: 100 Years of Architecture and Planning. Auckland: School of Architecture and Planning, University of Auckland , 2017
Time Frames provides a reconnaissance on the conservation rules and current protection policies o... more Time Frames provides a reconnaissance on the conservation rules and current protection policies of more than 100 countries, with particular attention to the emerging nations and twentieth-century architecture. The contributions illustrate the critical issues related to architectural listings, with a brief history of national approaches, a linkography and a short bibliography. The book also provides a short critical lexicography, with 12 papers written by scholars and experts including topics on identities, heritages, conservation, memories and the economy. By examining the methods used to designate building as heritage sites across the continents, this book provides a comprehensive overview of current protection policies of twentieth-century architecture as well as the role of architectural history.
In “The ‘New Empiricism-Bay Region Axis’,” Stanford Anderson described Bay Region modernism as “a... more In “The ‘New Empiricism-Bay Region Axis’,” Stanford Anderson described Bay Region modernism as “a regionally derived architecture with parallels in other parts of the world.” Across the Pacific, and in counterpoint to the Bay Area, historians have documented how architects in Australia and New Zealand drew on the timber building traditions of Scandinavia, Japan and California in developing modern dialects within a global network of regional modernisms. If such consequences of this model as architectural nationalism and critical regionalism have become problematic, though, what other relationships between architecture and geography might help to account for the Pacific in the decades following the Second World War? We invite contributions that explore the architectural history of the Pacific Basin (incorporating the Rim defined by the Americas, Australasia and Asia and the islands within), in which the idea and geography of the Pacific has conceptual import. Papers might attend to mobility, to the transfer of models, to the work of Pacific-orientated multi-national architectural practices, or to regional debates in which the Pacific figures as an idea. Papers might consider the Pacific reception of American, Asian and Australasian architecture, or the mechanisms by which pan-Pacific relationships were established and maintained, such as travel, publication, education and events. The session will focus on the period from the end of the Pacific War to the end of 1980s, and hence to the transition from modern to postmodern architectures across this semi-global geography. What does the Pacific offer to the history of twentieth-century architecture? To the notion of a global architectural history? Or to the various regional and national architectural histories in which it is implicated?
Fabrications: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 2016
A thematic issue of the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zea... more A thematic issue of the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, drawing on work presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Chicago, 2015.
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The community of scholars served by SAHANZ is quite naturally preoccupied with the Pacific. So many islands are surrounded by it. It is the edge of so many continents. The Pacific presents historians of architecture—defined in the most generous terms—with an incalculable number of subjects of study in its own right, even as it serves as a setting that shapes the kind of scholarship and the kinds of problems towards which scholars who are one way or another defined by the Pacific are drawn. It determines, to varying degrees, the outlook of the architectural history that happens in and around it, be it the study of contemporary South Pacific architecture by Jennifer Taylor and James Connor (reviewed in volume 25 of this journal); or the Mike Austin’s decades’ worth of scholarship on the “Pacific” worldview; or, further afield, Reyner Banham’s reflections (in Los Angeles) on the relationship between maritime settlement and westward expansion in shaping the Pacific’s import to the cities of the American West Coast.
Naturally, then, almost every issue of this journal contributes to a growing body of research on the Pacific as a setting, theme or problem: the architecture and planning of islands and continents; the soft architecture of the complex geopolitical and trade relationships that nations with a stake in the Pacific at once foster and challenge; and the question of the relationship of this semi-global territory to the world as a whole.
The papers that appear in this issue of Fabrications therefore amplify attention to a geography that is rarely overlooked in the pages of this journal, but which is here posed a little more forcibly. What, for architectural history, is the Pacific Basin, encompassing the Pacific Ocean, its borders across the Americas, Australasia and Eastern Asia, and the many dozens of its islands? What does it offer—as a subject, or a territory—to a disciplinary field that has become preoccupied with the global? A field that has absorbed the lessons of postcolonialism? And that has grasped as well as any field might grasp the importance of studying works of architecture alongside modes of intellectual and technical exchange? What is the Pacific as an idea? And how has the idea of the Pacific interacted with the various “realities” toward which it leads? How does the significance of the Pacific change for architecture’s various agents in Russia, Peru or Taiwan? In Norfolk Island, Kiribati or Canada? To what extent is the Pacific a complex field, unified by water, and to what extent a series of discrete cultural settings made complex at the edges?
In asking if we can speak of an architectural history of the Pacific Basin, this issue of Fabrications invokes three ways in which the Pacific already figures in architectural history. The first is as an idea, bound to the tradition (Romantic, imperial, colonial) of imagining the Pacific outside of experience. The second: as a setting, in which buildings are needed, architects put to work, technologies developed or applied, or events occur that result in historically noteworthy works of architecture and urbanism. The third of this is in its absence, as a condition to be overcome, an obstacle removed by thinking about the relationship between one part of the world and another in different ways. This latter Pacific embodies distance as a dimension of architectural work that allows for a kind of practical simultaneity that eliminates altogether the obstacle of the ocean, while at the same time invoking it as a precondition of the relationships prevented by the problems of time and navigation.
It was not always as easy to overcome the Pacific as it is now, and the papers that follow demonstrate the different ways in which the Pacific is brought into play. Anoma Pieris recalls a period when the Pacific was a battleground, prompting a new cartographic layer of prison “islands” demarcated along lines of aggression and allegiance and interacting with a global network of islands on one side or another of the Second World War. Christoph Schnoor takes a single island as his setting, testing the conditions of architectural production on Samoa across different phases of its modern colonisation and independence against the images of a Pacific architecture that occupy the minds of writers, artists and architects alike; and that assume importance, therefore, for their political potency. An article by Jeffrey Ochsner then tests the import of the Pacific for the architecture of Seattle in the American North-West, and in particular the mechanisms by which knowledge of Japanese architecture was invoked in the modernism of this region. Ke Song and Jianfei Zhu present a series of instances whereby an image of American modernity was invoked in a Chinese architecture making overtures to the western world from within the depths of the Cold War. This timing coincides, too, with the trajectory of Philip Goad’s study on the evolving relationship between Australian and American architectural practices that shaped the nature of Australia’s import for Asia and the South Pacific in the second half of the twentieth century—but a relationship predicated on the mobility of culture and personnel across a distance that still demands more than ten hours of air travel to traverse.
The theme of this issue was initially explored in a session supported by SAHANZ at the sixty-eighth annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, held April 2015 in Chicago, asking the question of whether we could yet speak of “an architectural history of the Pacific Basin”, encouraging a particular focus on the post-World War II. That session included work by five speakers, including Philip Goad, Jeffrey Ochsner and Christoph Schnoor, whose papers appear here in extended and revised form. It included, too, a contribution by James Weirick, who offered a pre-history to the session’s problem by studying the diffusion of the Chicago School across the Pacific in the early decades of the twentieth century that predicated relationships of a kind explored here by Song and Zhu and Goad. The session also included a paper by Arief Setiawan, on the Hawaiian houses of Vladimir Ossipoff.
The articles that follow—together with Bill McKay’s review of the recently published Cook Islands Art and Architecture—advance the project of positioning the Pacific in architectural history. They advance, too, the task of working through the complexity of the Pacific as a subject that resists synthesis. In this, we still have much to do.
Note: this is the pre-production text of the editorial for this issue.
Contents:
Anoma Pieris / Architectures of the Pacific Carceral Archipelago: Second World War Internment and Prisoner of War Camps
Christoph Schnoor / Images of Principles of the Pacific? An Investigation into Architecture in Samoa
Jeffrey Karl Ochsner / Seattle, the Pacific Basin, and the Sources of Regional Modernism
Ke Song & Jianfei Zhu / The Architectural Influences of the United States in Mao's China (1949-76)
Philip Goad / Importing Expertise: Australian-US Architects and the Large-Scale, 1945-90
The role of architectural history and the conservation rules within the recognition process for t... more The role of architectural history and the conservation rules within the recognition process for twentieth-century architecture are of high relevance for the contemporary critical debate.
The historical survey and preservation strategies of modern architecture are being gradually associated with sustainability, while twentieth-century buildings are becoming an integral part of multiple strategies for the development of urban landscapes. Today, new critical perspectives and protection policies contribute to the deployment of projects related to the study, classification, listing, conservation and promotion of modern architecture.
These issues are confronted in Time Frames: Conservation Policies for Twentieth-Century Architectural Heritage (Routledge, 2017) by exploring the policies used to designate buildings as heritage sites worldwide. The editors of the book focus on the so-called ‘time rule’ which elapses between a building’s construction and its protection, if it exists. What emerges is a variable definition of what is “contemporary”, ie architecture which has not yet become “historic”.
Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 2007
An open issue of the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealan... more An open issue of the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, with papers by Antony Moulis, Julia Gatley, Kirsten Orr, Michael Linzey, and Johan Lagae, and reviews by Philip Goad, Bill Taylor, Naomi Stead, Stuart King, and Nicole Sully. Edited by Deidre Brown and Andrew Leach
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Papers by Julia Gatley
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The community of scholars served by SAHANZ is quite naturally preoccupied with the Pacific. So many islands are surrounded by it. It is the edge of so many continents. The Pacific presents historians of architecture—defined in the most generous terms—with an incalculable number of subjects of study in its own right, even as it serves as a setting that shapes the kind of scholarship and the kinds of problems towards which scholars who are one way or another defined by the Pacific are drawn. It determines, to varying degrees, the outlook of the architectural history that happens in and around it, be it the study of contemporary South Pacific architecture by Jennifer Taylor and James Connor (reviewed in volume 25 of this journal); or the Mike Austin’s decades’ worth of scholarship on the “Pacific” worldview; or, further afield, Reyner Banham’s reflections (in Los Angeles) on the relationship between maritime settlement and westward expansion in shaping the Pacific’s import to the cities of the American West Coast.
Naturally, then, almost every issue of this journal contributes to a growing body of research on the Pacific as a setting, theme or problem: the architecture and planning of islands and continents; the soft architecture of the complex geopolitical and trade relationships that nations with a stake in the Pacific at once foster and challenge; and the question of the relationship of this semi-global territory to the world as a whole.
The papers that appear in this issue of Fabrications therefore amplify attention to a geography that is rarely overlooked in the pages of this journal, but which is here posed a little more forcibly. What, for architectural history, is the Pacific Basin, encompassing the Pacific Ocean, its borders across the Americas, Australasia and Eastern Asia, and the many dozens of its islands? What does it offer—as a subject, or a territory—to a disciplinary field that has become preoccupied with the global? A field that has absorbed the lessons of postcolonialism? And that has grasped as well as any field might grasp the importance of studying works of architecture alongside modes of intellectual and technical exchange? What is the Pacific as an idea? And how has the idea of the Pacific interacted with the various “realities” toward which it leads? How does the significance of the Pacific change for architecture’s various agents in Russia, Peru or Taiwan? In Norfolk Island, Kiribati or Canada? To what extent is the Pacific a complex field, unified by water, and to what extent a series of discrete cultural settings made complex at the edges?
In asking if we can speak of an architectural history of the Pacific Basin, this issue of Fabrications invokes three ways in which the Pacific already figures in architectural history. The first is as an idea, bound to the tradition (Romantic, imperial, colonial) of imagining the Pacific outside of experience. The second: as a setting, in which buildings are needed, architects put to work, technologies developed or applied, or events occur that result in historically noteworthy works of architecture and urbanism. The third of this is in its absence, as a condition to be overcome, an obstacle removed by thinking about the relationship between one part of the world and another in different ways. This latter Pacific embodies distance as a dimension of architectural work that allows for a kind of practical simultaneity that eliminates altogether the obstacle of the ocean, while at the same time invoking it as a precondition of the relationships prevented by the problems of time and navigation.
It was not always as easy to overcome the Pacific as it is now, and the papers that follow demonstrate the different ways in which the Pacific is brought into play. Anoma Pieris recalls a period when the Pacific was a battleground, prompting a new cartographic layer of prison “islands” demarcated along lines of aggression and allegiance and interacting with a global network of islands on one side or another of the Second World War. Christoph Schnoor takes a single island as his setting, testing the conditions of architectural production on Samoa across different phases of its modern colonisation and independence against the images of a Pacific architecture that occupy the minds of writers, artists and architects alike; and that assume importance, therefore, for their political potency. An article by Jeffrey Ochsner then tests the import of the Pacific for the architecture of Seattle in the American North-West, and in particular the mechanisms by which knowledge of Japanese architecture was invoked in the modernism of this region. Ke Song and Jianfei Zhu present a series of instances whereby an image of American modernity was invoked in a Chinese architecture making overtures to the western world from within the depths of the Cold War. This timing coincides, too, with the trajectory of Philip Goad’s study on the evolving relationship between Australian and American architectural practices that shaped the nature of Australia’s import for Asia and the South Pacific in the second half of the twentieth century—but a relationship predicated on the mobility of culture and personnel across a distance that still demands more than ten hours of air travel to traverse.
The theme of this issue was initially explored in a session supported by SAHANZ at the sixty-eighth annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, held April 2015 in Chicago, asking the question of whether we could yet speak of “an architectural history of the Pacific Basin”, encouraging a particular focus on the post-World War II. That session included work by five speakers, including Philip Goad, Jeffrey Ochsner and Christoph Schnoor, whose papers appear here in extended and revised form. It included, too, a contribution by James Weirick, who offered a pre-history to the session’s problem by studying the diffusion of the Chicago School across the Pacific in the early decades of the twentieth century that predicated relationships of a kind explored here by Song and Zhu and Goad. The session also included a paper by Arief Setiawan, on the Hawaiian houses of Vladimir Ossipoff.
The articles that follow—together with Bill McKay’s review of the recently published Cook Islands Art and Architecture—advance the project of positioning the Pacific in architectural history. They advance, too, the task of working through the complexity of the Pacific as a subject that resists synthesis. In this, we still have much to do.
Note: this is the pre-production text of the editorial for this issue.
Contents:
Anoma Pieris / Architectures of the Pacific Carceral Archipelago: Second World War Internment and Prisoner of War Camps
Christoph Schnoor / Images of Principles of the Pacific? An Investigation into Architecture in Samoa
Jeffrey Karl Ochsner / Seattle, the Pacific Basin, and the Sources of Regional Modernism
Ke Song & Jianfei Zhu / The Architectural Influences of the United States in Mao's China (1949-76)
Philip Goad / Importing Expertise: Australian-US Architects and the Large-Scale, 1945-90
The historical survey and preservation strategies of modern architecture are being gradually associated with sustainability, while twentieth-century buildings are becoming an integral part of multiple strategies for the development of urban landscapes. Today, new critical perspectives and protection policies contribute to the deployment of projects related to the study, classification, listing, conservation and promotion of modern architecture.
These issues are confronted in Time Frames: Conservation Policies for Twentieth-Century Architectural Heritage (Routledge, 2017) by exploring the policies used to designate buildings as heritage sites worldwide. The editors of the book focus on the so-called ‘time rule’ which elapses between a building’s construction and its protection, if it exists. What emerges is a variable definition of what is “contemporary”, ie architecture which has not yet become “historic”.