I recently drove through the hills and gullies of Mahurangi to Brick Bay, the wonderful sculpture garden within Christine and Richard Didsbury’s winery estate.  The occasion was the opening of a folly. The annual Brick Bay Folly competition is an important event on the architectural calendar with proposals reviewed by a group of luminaries and the winning scheme constructed in the garden.  

Richard Didsbury has described the project’s debt to the Serpentine Pavilion, that annual construction in Hyde Park by the Flash Harrys, and the occasional Harriet, of world architecture. With typically Kiwi pragmatism, he lauded the importance of the winners here actually building their design. While the necessity of following through a solid bout of Rhino with time on the tools might lead more canny competitors to simpler arrangements, this year’s winners eschewed such gamesmanship and ‘went for the doctor’. The scheme submitted by Leo Zhu, Dorien Viliamu, Daniel Fennell and Wenhan Ji is well covered in the last issue of Architecture New Zealand and is a cunning arrangement of interlocking timbers creating a zoomorphic form squatting on its pond-edge site.  

The formal opening of the folly was in Noel Lane’s lovely pond-spanning pavilion and, in his address, Richard talked to the importance of offering opportunities for students, recent graduates and younger architects to realise projects and start to build their reputations within an industry that invariably favours experience and proven form over innovation and enthusiasm. He spoke, too, of the value to the winners of having grappled with the transition of a design from flickering pixels to troublesome bits of wood. 

Richard also talked of the importance of the young – in general and in particular – calling on them to address what he described as the rather poor quality of architecture in Auckland. Those of us from the trade in the room may have looked a little crestfallen and Richard was quick and effusive in his praise of our residential work. I know it’s a comment we have all heard before and that it’s a reasonable, if rather broad-brushed, assessment but that didn’t stop my psyche dredging up a deluge of unspoken explanations for our collective poor performance.

In short order, I ran through the full gamut of blame-shifting: all the big ones being done by architects from across the ditch, the damned council, the budget, an impoverished and under-skilled building industry and the client, though the latter seemed a bit churlish, given our generous host’s role as client for a number of the city’s more significant buildings.

There’s little argument that Auckland has a fair bit of swishing up to do, that its buildings and public spaces are rather shown up by its spectacular natural setting and, though the last few years have seen a bit of activity from city hall, there is still the sense that, as David Mitchell observed, Auckland’s urbanity is forever hobbled by having too many great places for quick getaways. By this logic, one might expect citizens trapped by a tough topography to have greater regard for the quality of the city than do those for whom escape is as close as Westhaven or, perhaps, a weekend stalled on State Highway One in Dome Valley.

By and large, Wellington and Christchurch support the thesis, the former contriving a pretty interesting little city with a decent crop of Kiwi-authored buildings, the latter, even before Rūamoko’s restlessness laid much of the innercity to waste, being a perfect staging post from which to leave for the Alps, the Port Hills or anywhere really.

If people were all it took to make a good city, Auckland should be on the up and up as the consequences of the Unitary Plan take effect and occupation densities of all but the most far-flung ’urbs begin to rise. For all that, the city seems to drift in and out of focus: sometimes, a rich and complex coverlet of human endeavour overlaying the majestic volcanic field; and, at others, it seems, the discordant detritus of avaricious capitalism and the misguided meddling of planning apparatchiks. 

Any city is a petri dish, an agglomeration of calcified exemplars, each the apotheosis of political, economic and, yes, architectural thinking. There is internationalism’s pragmatic rectangularity cheek by jowl with colonial deco, faded modernism, regional modernity and a raft of other players struggling to achieve a presence in the crowded cityscape.

There are moments, as one approaches Auckland from the north, when the quality of architecture is to the fore: a moment as one nears the Harbour Bridge and is able to take in the shapes, textures, colours and composition of the city. As we jockey for a lane on the bridge or, perhaps, pause at a pedestrian crossing, we might take in the quality of one or another building. These are important moments that add together to form a composite impression of the city. I wonder, though, how much it is the quality of individual buildings that is at issue in Richard’s question.  

Some years ago, a visiting English architect remarked that it really didn’t matter what we built as long as we built to the lot line. The sentiment echoed that of ‘Doc Toy’ some decades earlier when he declared, on my first day of architecture school, that “architecture has nothing to do with buildings but is all about the space between them”.

The point both were making is that the establishment of the public realm, be it street or square, is crucial in the creation of the city, and that buildings will come and go in the inexorable cycles of redevelopment but the patterns of circulation and open space remain. This begs the question of whether or not those lot lines create the quality of public space that makes a great city.  

The relatively young age of our cities and their rapid growth during a time dominated by privileging the circulation of the private car has left us with few well-worn patterns of pedestrian occupation and use. There are, for example, few places where the confluence of streets created by generations of human passage creates an opening in the city’s mass, a widening of the space between buildings and an opportunity for social intercourse. Where they do exist, we have often been uncertain about how to treat them and, inevitably, we reach for the grass seed rather than, god forbid, a bench, a table, some shade and a little commercial activity.

We are slowly getting better at the manipulation of those few public spaces we have, though much of the work involves regaining streets ravaged by traffic engineers to provide more hospitable urban space. There are two forces at work here: the ability of territorial authorities to create a city that is safe, lively, attractive and efficient, and the implicit question of whether or not such a self-consciously constructed city is a desirable goal. This is a microcosm of the New Zealand condition in which the derisively named ‘nanny state’ squares off against cowboy capitalism, the hapless architect little more than collateral damage. 

Those brave young souls who realised their folly in the north will increasingly need to navigate these fields if they are to answer Richard Didsbury’s implied challenge. Though the assembly of material into discrete buildings is important, the real challenge lies in navigating the many forces at work on the ground plane to ensure that what one creates is hitting above its weight, that to answer a client brief is just the start of the matter and that the urban gaze looks both ways across the lot line.

This article first appeared in Architecture New Zealand magazine.

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