This paper considers the relationship between the recent historiography (of the last quarter century) of “New Zealand architecture” and the historical notion of “New Zealand-ness” invoked in contemporary architecture. It argues that a more recent programmatic uptake of post-War discussions on national identity and regional specificity has fed the tendencies of practicing architects to defer to history in rhetorical defences of their work: the beach-side mansion as a contemporary expression of the 1950s bach; a formal modernism divorced from the social discourse adherent to the historical moment that it “restates”; and so on. The paper will consider instances in the historiography of New Zealand architecture where historians have compounded, consciously or accidentally, a problem that is systemic to the uses made by architects of historical knowledge (in the most general examples), identifying the difficulties of relying upon the tentative conclusions of an under-studied field in developing principles of contemporary architectural practice under the banners of New Zealand-ness, regionalism, or localism, or with reference to icons of New Zealand architectural history. At the heart of this paper is a reflection on historiographical responsibility in presenting knowledge of a national past to an audience that is eager to transform that knowledge into principles of contemporary production. What, the paper asks, is the historical basis for speaking of a New Zealand architecture? Can we speak of a national history of architecture distinct from a regional history, or from an international history of architecture

Leach, Andrew

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Author
Title
Date
Source
Leach, Andrew
‘The myth of the nation: Historiography of New Zealand architecture since 1907’
2007
The State of the Nation: New Zealand's Centenary as a Dominion: 14th Annual 
Conference of the New Zealand Studies Association
www.uq.edu.au/atch
The Myth of the Nation:  
Historiography of New Zealand Architecture since 1907 
Andrew Leach 
 
 
The title of my paper is misleading, for it implies that the century since New Zealand 
became a Dominion has witnessed the evolution of a discussion on the nation’s 
architectural history. This is only partly the case. As Douglas Lloyd Jenkin’s recent 
anthology New Dreamland reminds us, there has (in that century) been a sustained 
reflection on and projection of what it “means” to practice architecture in New 
Zealand, a discourse that has more or less accounted for the history of that practice.1 
It has only been in the last three or four decades that something approaching a history 
of New Zealand architecture has been formalised outside the classrooms of schools of 
architecture and beyond the internal assessment procedures of the New Zealand 
Historic Places Trust.  
 
The disciplinary structures of architecture itself make this problem muddier than it 
might be otherwise: the history of architecture has been thoroughly embedded in the 
architect’s curriculum throughout the history of professional architectural education 
wherever it has been manifest, in New Zealand or elsewhere. A tendency to 
instrumentalise this history as providing motivations or justifications for architectural 
practice, conceptual levers to position buildings in relation to a canon, has continued 
to characterise New Zealand architecture long after many similar national 
architectural cultures developed historical and critical discourses to balance, and 
challenge, the uses made of history by architects. Indeed, Robin Skinner’s recent work 
on architectural literature of the 1840s and 50s demonstrates that architects in New 
Zealand have long sensed the historicity of their practice, just as those monitoring that 
profession’s development from Britain likewise understood the abstract implications of 
its establishment in the South Pacific colonies.2 
 
The first book to attempt a synthetic account of New Zealand’s architectural history 
was written by the architects John Stacpoole and Peter Beaven. In the introduction of 
their 1972 volume Architecture: 1820-1970, they note that ‘remarkably little has been 
written about architecture in New Zealand, and what has been said about the early 
period, before the profession was organised, has often been based on misconceptions 
or later rationalisations of apparent incompatibilities.’3 The format of their modest 
volume readily accepts the conflicts that lie scattered over New Zealand’s architectural 
history while they themselves attempt to articulate the limits of what that history 
might include.  
 
Several others followed in their wake, notably by Michael Fowler, Martin Hill and 
(again) John Stacpoole. Yet it is David Mitchell and Gillian Chaplin’s book, The 
Elegant Shed (of 1985) that occupies perhaps the most important place in the 
                                                
1 Douglas Lloyd Jenkins (ed.), New Dreamland: Writing New Zealand Architecture (Auckland: Godwit, 2005). 
2 Robin Skinner, “Representations of Architecture and New Zealand in London, 1841-60,” PhD 
dissertation, University of Auckland, 2007. 
3 John Stacpoole & Peter Beaven, Architecture 1820-1970 (Wellington: AH & AW Reed, 1972), 9. 
historiography of a national architecture.4 Mitchell and Chaplin sought both to 
document New Zealand’s architectural history – which for them extended from high 
art to the quotidian – and to map it to a search for a mode of architecture particular 
to New Zealand, an idea that enjoyed a dramatic and popular resurgence in the wake 
of their book and Mitchell’s television series. The Elegant Shed promoted a genealogy 
from “humble bach” to modernist experiments centred on Auckland in the 1940s and 
50s, through to contemporary modernist-revival celebrations, such as you can find in 
any fresh copy of Home and Entertaining or Urbis. This line has become well rehearsed at 
all levels of New Zealand’s architectural culture.  
 
The fundamental work of Justine Clark and Paul Walker, in their Looking for the Local 
(2000), to extend further south the locus of the rhetorical marriage of nationalism to 
modernism has lent a firm scholarly basis to a broad desire to isolate the seeds of a 
modern New Zealand architectural identity.5 As well, several faculty of the Auckland 
School of Architecture led research into the representation of local and indigeneous 
architectural forms in both popular and architectural media; likewise, several students 
of the University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Arts, under the supervision of Ian 
Lochhead, made decisive contributions to the documentary architectural history of 
New Zealand. Lloyd Jenkins’s efforts, as in his book At Home (2004), to share a more 
complicated view of New Zealand’s modernist architectural history with a wider 
readership are unparalleled.6 
 
And yet the broad tendency in New Zealand architectural culture is to dismiss the 
complexity introduced by these communities in favour of an ideology of national 
origins and a rehearsal of the values of local innovations against the odds. This desire 
mirrors much popular cultural commentary in New Zealand, and, in turn, the general 
outlook of any number of cultural settings that revel in the rhetoric of being, to quote 
Kipling, “exquisite apart”. That the popular architectural historiography of New 
Zealand has moved in this direction over the last two decades is understandable and 
certainly has been beneficial for expanding, for instance, the hitherto overlooked 
worth of post-War architecture – even if all but a handful of specialists follow a 
troublingly simplistic historiographical line. It is not, however, without its problems in 
the long-term practice of documenting and challenging the history of New Zealand 
architecture, and this criticism holds true both within the academy and beyond it to 
professional and general audiences.  
 
To illustrate this point, I would like to recall Peter Wood’s 2000 article, “The Bach: 
The Cultural History of a Local Typology”. Wood works backwards from the “bach” 
to a “birth of the nation” bound to an ANZAC myth firmly anchored at Gallipoli in 
order to argue alternative cultural starting points for determining an independent 
national architectural character.7 He argues that the endurance of the bach as an 
architectural type, embedded in the cultural psyche, owes much to the extent to which 
it offers an index to a widely appreciated period of cultural adolescence in which the 
                                                
4
 David Mitchell & Gillian Chaplin, The Elegant Shed: New Zealand Architecture since 1945 (Auckland & 
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 
5
 Justine Clark & Paul Walker, Looking for the Local: Architecture and the New Zealand Modern (Wellington: 
Victoria University Press, 2000). 
6
 Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, At Home: A Century of New Zealand Design (Auckland: Godwit, 2004). 
7
 Peter Wood, “The Bach: The Cultural History of a Local Typology,” Fabrications: The Journal of the 
Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 11, no. 1 (July 2000): 44-61.  
First World War figures largely. While he claims that this offers the bach a cultural 
relevance beyond architectural discourse he also entrenches the type by heaping 
national myth upon architectural. It stands for the values of industry, invention and 
isolation. As a model, it reinforces the New Zealand-ness of those architectures that 
build upon it, and it is on this axis that New Zealand’s architectural historians are 
feeding a more problematic long-term phenomenon.  
 
Charles Walker’s centennial history of the New Zealand Institute of Architects, 
Exquisite Apart, is something of a love letter to these values. It is not the job of architects 
to question the histories handed down by academics, he writes in an introductory 
essay. ‘Architecture is essentially about the future.’8 Of the fifteen contributions that 
add up to a history of the architectural profession in the century since the founding of 
its Institute in 1905, only the first considers that century’s first four decades. Sir Miles 
Warren’s six-page essay announces that ‘the period is best exemplified by three 
architects [Cecil Wood, William Gray Young and William Henry Gummer] whose 
work dominated each of their cities.’9 While the book’s content oversights are legion, 
its framing is more relevant to the points I wish to make. The Institute’s former 
President Gordon Moller prefaces the book by writing that ‘the architectural 
profession has responded [to New Zealand’s development] by developing a unique 
language for the built form for this country, in the way we inhabit our buildings, 
towns and cities.’ Language of this nature, I propose, has become an unchallenged 
closed-code, and speaks of the way that more research-driven historical writing has 
been lumped by architectural culture into two categories: one that supports myths, 
and is celebrated; and one that undermines them, which is ignored. 
  
If, as Wood suggests, we should find in these values reflections of the Gallipoli legend, 
then we ought also to consider the trans-Tasman consequences of Gallipoli’s feeding 
parallel (and often diverging) values in the two countries that celebrate them, rather 
than values we might understand as thoroughly interwoven. Few would speak of an 
Australasian spirit, but rather of characteristics firmly aligned with one nation or the 
other. In the same vein, few would lay claims for the origins of an Australasian 
architecture and yet it is precisely this concept – of an open cultural exchange 
preceding the maturity of either country with Australia’s Federation in 1901 and New 
Zealand’s new status as a Dominion in 1907 – that has been suppressed by the rise of 
a nationalist architectural historiography in both places. 
 
Despite the various factors that render it sensible to differentiate between Australia 
and New Zealand as national cases, with their own histories, cultural specificities and 
historiographical imperatives, there is good reason why we might also turn back to a 
generously regional approach to their history. For example, are we well served by 
holding fast to the national differences between the nineteenth-century architectural 
histories of Australia and New Zealand? Are the differences between Dominion and 
Federation greater than the formerly colonial differences between, say, Tasmania and 
Queensland, or between New South Wales and Victoria? On both sides of the 
Tasman, architectural historians are generally lax in accounting for the apparently 
seamless movement between South Pacific colonies that distinguished the infant 
profession’s history for many of the nineteenth century’s most important architects. I 
                                                
8 Walker (ed.), Exquisite Apart, 12. 
9 Miles Warren, “The First Fifty Years” in Walker (ed.), Exquisite Apart, 16-27; quoting from pp. 18 & 
246. The heavy level of illustration (the book’s only asset) accounts for the other six pages. 
wish to propose that we must grapple with a decidedly anti-national reality to a history 
that has been largely framed according to the values prized by the last two generations 
of architects and writers on architecture. 
 
Perhaps one example will allow me to explain this better. The Treaty House in 
Waitangi was described by Frederick H Newman (who came to New Zealand from 
Austria in 1939) as ‘one of the best examples of New Zealand Architecture,’ writing in 
his 1952 essay “Social Factors in Architecture and their Implications for New 
Zealand.” Newman goes on to wonder why this building, both ‘full of tradition’ and 
‘outstanding for its original treatment and beautiful proportions’ has not had ‘a 
greater influence on New Zealand domestic architecture.’10 While its design was 
intended for the British Residency at the Bay of Islands, and while its broader 
historical importance is tightly bound to the foundations of New Zealand as a British 
Colony, some comments by Stacpoole and Beaven (returning to their book of 1972), 
illustrate the disquiet with which I accept the strong borders of New Zealand’s 
architectural history. The Treaty House is the first illustration of their book, under 
which they write: 
 
Before its restoration in the 1930s the Treaty House appeared rather less grand than it 
does today. It is, however, the first building in New Zealand known to have been designed 
by an architect.  
John Verge, the architect of Elizabeth Bay house in Sydney, was approached by James 
Busby in 1832 for plans for a house to serve as the British Residence at the Bay of Islands. 
Only the front part of the house was then built, the wings being added later, and 
considerable doubt exists as to the extent to which Ambrose Hallen, Colonial Architect in 
New South Wales, altered Verge’s plans. 
The style of the house, colonial Georgian, was firmly established in New South Wales and 
is related to but distinguishable from the more picturesque Regency style. Colonial 
Georgian tends to be formal.11 
 
Several recent architectural histories have mentioned this building in passing. Peter 
Shaw’s 1991 New Zealand Architecture does so, touching upon the building in a survey of 
early, but extant, buildings in New Zealand, noting its Sydney origins with architects 
Verge and Hallen, and describing the building’s disposition and composition. Shaw 
observes that the 1933 restoration of the building by Gummer and Page altered many 
of the details, replacing ‘much of the original building when they tidied up the whole 
structure,’ but that a 1989 conservation (ahead of the sesquicentenary) had attempted 
‘to restore the Treaty House to something approximating its state at the time of the 
singing of New Zealand’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi, on 6 February 
1840.’12 Terrance Hodgson’s 1990 Looking at the Architecture of New Zealand does so as 
well, although briefly and drawing explicitly upon Stacpoole and Beavan.13 In fact, 
Shaw’s slender 1992 book Waitangi is the only instance where an historian has given 
the building and its setting any form of close attention.14 
 
                                                
10 Frederick H Newman, “Social Factors in Architecture and their Implications for New Zealand” 
(1952), in Leach, Frederick H Newman: Lectures on Architecture (Ghent: A&S Books, 2003), 83. 
11 Stacpoole & Beavan, Architecture 1820-1970, 13. 
12 Peter Shaw, New Zealand Architecture from Polynesian Beginnings to 1990 (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 
1991), 18-19. 
13 Terence Hodgson, Looking at the Architecture of New Zealand (Wellington: Grantham House, 1990). 
14 Peter Shaw, Waitangi (Napier: Cosmos, 1992). 
My point is this: there are many reasons why we would position the Treaty House 
within the history of New Zealand architecture, even if it has the curious status of 
being under-studied within architectural culture (compared with Te Papa, for 
instance) and being one of the most common references to architecture within New 
Zealand historiography proper. However, we are obliged, I believe, to recognise that 
there is a clear distance between, on one hand, the rhetorical, instrumental and 
narrative function of this building in New Zealand history and, on the other, the facts 
of its commission, design, pre-fabrication, installation and subsequent alterations. I 
would not go so far as to call the Treaty House a work of Australian architecture, but 
I do believe that the terms under which Stacpoole and Beaven consider it are the 
closest that we can hope for to a history of the building unencumbered by the 
meaning it subsequently came to assume – the building as produced rather than as 
received. In other words, by presenting a summary of the facts – brief though it might 
be – Stacpoole and Beaven make an unambiguous observation as to the fluidity of 
architectural practices among the South Pacific British colonies in the early to middle 
nineteenth century. 
 
These observations, to conclude, are simply examples of the more general challenges 
facing historians of architecture working in the present moment. If my gripe has here 
been the ready invocation of the myth of New Zealand’s “nationality”, it corresponds 
to any number of flimsy historical bases on which architectural culture – ranging from 
academic, to professional, to popular – builds solid edifices treating quick-sand as 
bedrock. The issue lies not in the speculation and referential freedom that marked 
history writing of the 1990s and persists in some quarters today, but in the way that it 
lends to the profession the tools with which to cloak itself in myths of its own devising. 
It is at the moment (now long since passed and thoroughly evidenced) that the 
profession needs this mire more than any kind of real contact with architecture’s past 
that the discipline of architectural history has a problem.  
 
 
Presented to “State of the Nation,” 14th annual conference  
of the New Zealand Studies Association at Birkbeck College 
London, June 28, 2007 


The myth of the nation: Historiography of New Zealand architecture since 1907

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