This symposium paper considers the problem of flattening out the characteristics of the so-called 'community' of central European, Jewish, left-wing architects and planners who arrived in New Zealand between 1933-1938 as refugees. It briefly explores the important contribution made by members of this 'community' while raising this historiographical characterisation as a contemporary problem

Leach, Andrew

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Author
Title
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Leach, Andrew
‘Jewish culture and modern architecture in New Zealand’
2005
Devarim NZ - Jewish Culture Symposium
www.uq.edu.au/atch
Jewish Culture and Modern Architecture in New Zealand 
Andrew Leach 
Presented to Devarim II: Symposium on Jewish Culture in New Zealand, Wellington, 31 July 2005 
 
In recent years, I have become increasingly concerned with what is commonly though of as the 
community of Jewish refugee architects who arrived between 1933 and 1939 from Germany, 
Austria, Czechoslovakia and those other central European states that fell victim to Nazi Germany 
at the start of the Second World War. My research on the Viennese architects Alexander and 
Friedrich Neumann, later known as Frederick Newman, as well as my work on the Berliner Helmut 
Einhorn, resulted in published studies that have, to an extent, forced the community of 
architectural historians, here and elsewhere, to change the presuppositions with which we deal 
with New Zealand’s modern movement heritage. Others working in complementary fields have 
likewise observed the importance of this community to New Zealand’s cultural makeup. Speaking 
in the context of a symposium concerned with Jewish culture in this country, I would like to do 
two things. Firstly, I wish to reflect on the extent to which two Jewish architects impacted upon 
the development of modern architectural culture here in New Zealand. In doing so, I knowingly 
speak of a generation of European-born Jews and overlook, for several reasons, the community of 
New Zealand-born Jewish architects, about which I know next to nothing. Secondly, I wish to 
point out the difficulty with which we sustain a notion of ‘community’ as a vehicle for 
considering these individuals in historical terms by recourse to their (1) ethnicity, (2) their 
common language of German, or (3) their apparently shared approach to architectural practice. 
 
Of the refugees who came to New Zealand from Hitler’s Third Reich, numbering more than one 
thousand, over a dozen were professionally trained as architects. Several historians have made 
much of the professional obstacles that confronted a group of, in several cases, well-established 
architects with international experience and reputations. It is true that architects from outside of 
the Commonwealth were required to retrain, or to re-sit professional examinations, before being 
allowed to register as professionals in New Zealand, but that remains true today. In 1938, a 
relatively substantial influx of architects relied, to an extent, upon the availability of architectural 
practice in Government agencies, where they would work in a reduced professional capacity; this 
period in the professional history of the architect in New Zealand thus appears less enlightened 
than that the present, which it is not. I would rather suggest that the speed with which these 
architects came to have a direct impact on New Zealand’s architectural culture, cities, 
infrastructure and regions during a time of war suggests a degree of enlightened intellectual 
leadership within that historical setting. This was largely enabled by Gordon Wilson, head of 
housing construction under the first Labour Government and the Government Architect 
appointed to oversee the vast reorganisation of public works infrastructure that took place in 
1946. There are several Jewish architects about whom we could speak, but I will draw upon two 
primarily: the Viennese Friedrich Neumann (later Frederick Newman) and the Berliner Helmut 
Einhorn. And there are others, I know, who equally deserve our attention. But time is against us. 
 
One of the characteristics of architectural historiography in New Zealand is its tendency to 
privilege the private house as a building type. In so doing, we make an important oversight in 
looking to the post-War project of cementing national identity rather than constructing the 
means for national modernisation. Our subjects today tended to disappear into the latter project: 
Einhorn designed the master plan for the University of Canterbury, Newman and Einhorn were 
responsible for the architectural design of a dozen hydroelectric power stations, Einhorn made the 
Wellington Urban Motorway what it is today, or at least what it was yesterday, took a leading role 
in planning polemics and lead the recognition of the landscape profession in New Zealand; as 
Fletcher’s architect, the Czech Heinrich Kulka took on responsibility as the principle architect in 
the country’s most civic-minded construction company. Yet the private houses designed by Kulka 
and Einhorn for themselves, and Hamburger Ernst Gerson for Irene Koppel (about which my 
colleague Len Bell has written) were understood by a generation of younger architects as a signal 
for a modernist domestic design rooted in European avant-garde traditions, in the tenets of the 
Bauhaus. These houses demonstrated how Walter Gropius’s call for the architect to become 
concerned with scales extending ‘from the teaspoon to the city’ could be manifest here. And so 
we might well credit the work of Gerson and Einhorn, in Karori, for instance, as important 
predecessors of such better known modernist houses as Alington’s and Beard’s, and Toomath’s 
elsewhere. In Wellington, moreso than in Auckland, the constant exchange between public 
architectural responsibility and private architectural expression received significant attention. In 
Auckland, the houses of Kulka remain among the most important modernist houses in the city, 
though their importance is tempered by the over-dominant Group-led discourse on nation building 
through house building. 
 
I prefer to think of the impact of the Jewish refugee community as lying outside of this 
quintessentially New Zealand dimension of our architectural history. It was Einhorn, alongside 
Gerson, Plischke, John Cox and Ian Reynolds, who founded the Architectural Research Group in 
1942 as a local response to CIAM, the international congress of modern architecture, advocating 
planning and good design in all dimensions of civic and private life. Their articles in Better 
Business and Straight Furrows founded a discussion on planning that bridged the professional and 
public domains with such efficiency that their work was internalised into the Organisation for 
National Development, a branch of the Prime Minister’s Department concerned with planning in 
the post-War years, and then completely forgotten by architectural historians. The most 
prominent housing blocks of the Department of Housing Construction from 1938 to 1946 were 
designed by Newman, working in close collaboration with Gordon Wilson. They included the 
Symonds Street Flats in Auckland and McLean Flats in Wellington; Newman’s touch is found also 
in the Dixon Street Flats (the project with the most contested authorship from this time) and in 
Grey’s Avenue. In 1948, Newman was given responsibility as the chief architect in the Hydro 
Design Office, designing Maraetai, Whakamaru, Cobb River and Roxburgh Power Stations; 
Einhorn, as mentioned before, transferred his planning experience to the project team for 
Canterbury University at Ilam, where he drew the masterplan and designed the Engineering 
Campus. He then took over from Newman in the later 1950s as Power Architect in the Hydro 
Design Office, where he oversaw the construction of Benmore, Aviemore and three new stations 
on the Waikato. Newman was appointed as Housing Architect in 1956, where he developed such 
model medium density housing units as the Start Flat and Duplex Flat among a dozen or so 
standardised types. From the late 1960s Einhorn became a staunch advocate of environment in its 
fullest sense of the word, from landscape and ecology to the smart design of cities and 
communities and their collective heritage; this is manifest in the Wellington Motorway, in the 
grounds of Parliament, and in a number of small urban projects around New Zealand. 
 
These are just a handful of examples from two of the most prolific Jewish refugee architects in 
public service during this era. I wish to turn now, to the way in which historians, and thus a wider 
public, have come to characterise the contributions of this community. In the most basic terms, 
to treat such a diverse group as a community is something that I already regard with a great deal 
of suspicion. In our tendency to cover over complex events with simple historical abstractions, 
we now speak easily of a community of Jewish refugee architects. This may, to an extent, and as 
such historians as Anne Beaglehole have demonstrated, be due to a perception of shared 
nostalgias, for a kind of culture specific to the cities of central Europe in the 1930s, and to a 
common language of German, and thus (as cultured individuals, the history goes) sharing 
knowledge of art, literature, music, politics and philosophy that few among the local population 
could relate to in such direct terms. In architecture, this translated into a formula whereby those 
refugee architects (we would say Jewish, but we include also Ernst Plischke) brought first hand to 
New Zealand an experience of avant-garde modern architecture and design, encapsulated in the 
popular memory in the forms and figures of the Bauhaus, and of the Dessau Bauhaus in particular. 
The closer one looks into European architectural history from the end of the Great War to the 
start of the Second World War, the tendency for these architects to import a very specific, and in 
many ways rather homogeneous, brand of architectural debate, attitude towards design and society, 
and formal strategies, seems more and more strange. My most recent writing on this topic has 
thus raised an historical problem: what decides the degree to which an architect from among this 
community of, typically (though not exclusively) Jewish, refugees to set aside their education and 
European experience as architects in favour of a standardised ‘European’ modernism, 
encapsulated in the Bauhaus, and in many cases foreign to their previous work. 
 
Einhorn, for instance, barely worked for two years before travelling to New Zealand; he was 
rather young, and so his record in Europe is limited to a few pieces of furniture and his student 
works. His study environment is the most telling of all; in taking his engineer’s diploma at the 
Berlin Technical University, he was in the studio of Heinrich Tessenow, billed as the arch-
conservative, anti-Semite teacher of Albrecht Speer. This characterisation in itself is only partly 
true. Tessenow was conservative, and his work was hijacked by the Nazi cause, but his design 
principles were very much based on an appreciation of traditional craftsmanship. His architecture 
and planning, most evident in the German garden city of Hellerau, likewise appears conservative 
and regionalistic; his buildings tend to imitate rural huts and he privileges the picturesque quality of 
towns. Einhorn’s final project is conceived in this tradition, and demonstrates little of the claim 
that he, and his family after him, made for the importance of the Bauhaus in his pre-New Zealand 
architectural experiences. Importantly, though, Tessenow was a contender for the first 
directorship of the Bauhaus in its Weimar setting; his emphasis on crafts and on the 
Gesamtkunstwerk differs little from the early Bauhaus and its predecessors.  
 
One would likewise have to try very hard to make a claim on the homogeneity of Newman’s work 
among his refugee contemporaries, and this is perhaps due to his being already a decade older than 
most of those architects who came out to New Zealand. Newman’s work fits easily within the 
tradition of the Viennese bourgeois. His father was a knight of the Empire, and Friedrich in turn 
enjoyed the privileges of wealth: he studied at the Technical University of Vienna, the Ecole des 
Beaux Arts in Paris, and enjoyed an entry to the profession through his father’s well-established 
practice with Ernst von Gotthilf. When the younger Neumann became more politically conscious, 
he joined the hoards of architects who left Vienna behind the red flag of Hannes Meyer (and not 
Ernst May, as I had earlier assumed) to work in Moscow on projects that formed part of the Five 
Year Plans. Nevertheless, Neumann’s work from this moment caters to a vision of Stalin’s soviet 
man rather than that of Lenin’s communism. Thus, the place of collaborative factory 
environments, self-sufficiency and design for life that permeated the German and Austrian avant-
garde throughout the 1920s and 30s, remains ultimately foreign to Newman while in Europe. 
Both Newman and Einhorn, in their writing (neither, it seems, wrote essays prior to their time in 
New Zealand), belie rather conservative notions about taste and aesthetics, but temper this with 
well-defined ideas of public responsibility and social morality that align them, ultimately, with the 
democratic socialist agenda of the Government under which they arrived in New Zealand. 
 
New Zealand’s most important connection with the European architectural avant-garde lies with 
Heinrich Kulka, who settled in Auckland, as did his Czech compatriot Imric Porsolt, who later 
taught at the University of Auckland’s School of Architecture. Kulka has drawn, in the last decade 
or so, an extraordinary amount of attention for his saving of the Adolf Loos archive, though his 
work in New Zealand, as Douglas Lloyd Jenkins observes in his book At Home, is rarely seen as a 
continuity from his architectural and cultural life in Brno or Vienna. This is ironic, precisely 
because Kulka, just a couple of years older than Newman, offered one of the only genuine 
examples among New Zealand’s Jewish architects of continuity from a European avant-garde to a 
New Zealand manifestation thereof.  
 
The overwhelming body of works produced under the authority of Government Architect Gordon 
Wilson owe a lot more to his architectural predilections, evidenced in his work with Gummer and 
Ford and even more explicitly in the Centennial Flats at Berhampore or the Dixon Street Flats, 
where he remains the most likely key designer. The challenge to historians of modern 
architecture, and those concerned with this community in particular, is that of reintroducing the 
complexity into our histories that imbued the landscape of modern architecture in Europe after 
the Great War. Just as it is impossible to describe continuities that bind all of the various strands 
comprising modern architecture in Europe, it is impossible to ascribe meaningful continuities to a 
community forced to leave this professional, cultural and intellectual environment. The story 
that sees these Jewish architects introduce a modern architecture to New Zealand that provokes 
New Zealanders to overcome the tight parameters of domestic housing advanced by a nationalist 
architectural ideology may, in the end, be the right story. But we have responsibility to look at it 
closely and examine it for flaws. And in so doing, we raise a question that is perhaps important for 
this symposium: just how far can a community of professionals and artists whose escape from 
Europe is predicated by a common cause, for many both ethno-cultural and political, be 
abstracted out to stand, one for the other, as a single phenomenon? We have a lot to learn from 
looking more carefully at this moment in our architectural history, but we must remember (and 
this isn’t always easy) to see in it the same degree of complexity that pervades the present. 


Jewish culture and modern architecture in New Zealand

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Jewish culture and modern architecture in New Zealand

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