In the early 1980s, Ian Athfield, Ian Dickson, Graeme Boucher and Clare Athfield designed the wondrous, whale-like building for the First Church of Christ Scientist in Wellington – the form conceived to accommodate the church organ – and, on its roof, a staircase that appeared to have been created “for the sheer imagining of its rise”.

The Willis Street site was sold by the church in 2021 to make way for high-density apartments in the city and, in October 2022, the building was demolished. In the months preceding the building’s demise, efforts were made first, to save the building and then to retrieve artworks commissioned at the time of the church’s design: stained-glass windows by James Walker, ornate ceramic capitals by Clare Athfield, Darren Matthews and Neville Porteous, and a vast Doreen Blumhardt tiled wall.

This exhibition at Objectspace brings together fragments from the building and its loss. Simon Devitt’s photographs of the demolition offer glimpses of the heart of the church – an octagonal auditorium rendered in pink and creamy whites with amusingly eccentric bent columns, which once flanked a rostrum designed for effect with mirrored ceiling and reflecting pool.

The title of the exhibition references the small fraction of the building and its crafted artworks remaining today, as well as the generous 5 per cent budget allocated at the time of design to the contributing artists.

Less than 5 per cent includes an inventory of the surviving ceramic floral capitals and evidence of Doreen Blumhardt’s tiles, saved in the church’s final hours. It is an incomplete record of the building’s life and making, of a special place no longer there.

Less than 5 per cent: Athfield’s First Church of Christ Scientist
18 March – 14 May 2023
Objectspace