I received a message this morning: the redoubtable Tony Watkins picking up the cudgels in defence of a building. It is a fine, robust bit of contemporary architecture with a façade of stone, whose embedded fossils have alienated some neighbours and the councillor chairing the local planning committee. The latter has issued orders for the building’s demolition.

I suggest that, if you were not at the recent Institute conference to see and hear Amin Taha’s presentation, you have a look at the building in question online (15 Clerkenwell Close demolition order). You will notice the building is in London. We might take comfort in being at some remove from bureaucratic wallahs who will go to such lengths to promote their views of the city, yet some might say we are still unreasonably influenced by English city-making, and we ignore such precedents at our peril.

The Amin Taha project appears, initially, to have escaped the vigilance of neighbours and councillors through some bureaucratic oversight in public notification. There are a fair few recent buildings on our shores whose existence I would like to ascribe to bureaucratic oversight but demolition seems a drastic step and an irresponsible waste of resources given the state of the world.

We are thus thrust into more intense scrutiny of both proposed and existing as we seek to make our towns and cities something more than the detritus of an unfettered market. The debates that attend upon such scrutiny are played out in the barrage of ‘Section 92’ requests, which seem to have become the weapons of choice for planners.

We have little choice but to slug it out with those issuing the Section 92 missives. To take umbrage is to invite yet more pernicious enquiry, and risks incurring the wrath of clients, whose consultant fees roll over faster than dollars at a petrol pump. As ground-breaking, and ground-shaping, as the Resource Management Act is, the strictures of the law often constrain the extent of debate, and issues vital to the body politic are often excluded.

The fate of some historic baches at Taylors Mistake, a bay near Christchurch, is an interesting case played out in a more-public arena. The varying objectives of the bay residents and the users were in conflict over the retention, or otherwise, of a range of informal baches dating to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. None has a clear title and all are located on paper road and coastal reserve land, including, in one case, a public walking track threading through a bach’s foundations. 

Difficult access in the 19th century led to a degree of isolation that facilitated the occupation of coastal-edge land. Better access, increasing usage of the bay and the sprawling development of hilltop suburbs above the bay have led to conflict over the legal status of the buildings. This has pitted bach occupants against landowners and residents of the neighbouring hilltop suburbs, the latter troubled by the haphazard nature of some of the structures and, perhaps, by their informal tenure of highly valued land at the water’s edge. Lease issues were further occluded by the lack of sanitary facilities in some of the buildings and the risk from rockfall, were there to be further earthquakes of any magnitude. The debate had been to the Environment Court but a new District Plan and post-earthquake evaluation reopened the matter.

To its credit, Christchurch Council sought a solution via a consultation and submission process, balancing property rights, public safety and the heritage values that the baches represented. Fortunately, the owners had purchased some land within the bay to which they may have relocated their baches, though to do so would have precipitated the full focus of current building requirements and the buildings’ makeshift charm being lost amid a plethora of drained cavities. The purchase did, though, remove the argument of owners acting out of self-interest alone.

A number of arguments were mounted in the successful retention of the baches, including the occupants’ role as custodians of the public space, most notably as informal lifesavers at the steeply shelving and exposed beach. Other arguments cited the significant destruction of heritage buildings in the area during and after the earthquakes and argued for the value of the group of buildings as exemplars of informal self-builds, illustrative of a robust national character played out in extremely close proximity to a sometimes-tempestuous ocean.

The recognition of the collective value of somewhat ad hoc buildings is at some remove from the manipulative efforts of the Auckland Council where the ambiguous wording of the Auckland Unitary Plan appears to be used in the implicit gentrification of some high-value inner-city suburbs. The buildings in those areas covered by a special character overlay in the Unitary Plan are equally variable in age, type and quality as are those humble dwellings at Taylors Mistake, yet those buildings not suggesting a late-19th-century genesis seem to be considered aberrations and overlooked as measures of street character.

In some cases, this leads to ersatz Victoriana, constructed or altered by architects still walking this mortal coil, being used as criteria in the assessment of proposed dwellings. This is the crudest form of assessment, easy work for the form-fillers at city hall, but bypassing more careful analysis of the actual values of the area, and of the history of replacement and refreshment that gives each such area its character.

I am mindful of the value that character areas bring to a city, of their role as exemplars of early occupation and of the city’s history made manifest. I am mindful, too, that these are areas in which buildings used to establish special character values have often evolved and transformed in a process of inexorable, creeping gentrification as home-owners seek to maximise their investments by the addition of decorative doodahs. 

An unfortunate consequence of this doctrinaire approach to character assessment is the denigration of heritage as a valuable cultural determinant, and its increasing use as a dumb constraint on innovation in which a more thoughtful approach to context is rebuffed for want of weatherboards, a pitched roof or a percentage of glazing. This is tedious and vexatious in residential work but, in the inner city, the stakes are higher as the adaptive reuse of existing building stock finds momentum in the coupling of heritage and efficient resource-use imperatives in the development of new and existent buildings.

We architects must push back against the application of dull rules and argue for the thoughtful, careful and experienced assessment of proposals, lest we find ourselves forced to confront the bulldozers as we might at Amin Taha’s 15 Clerkenwell Close.

This article first appeared in Architecture New Zealand magazine.

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