An awfully long time ago, I came across a very large tent peg impaled in the pavement just off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. A rope stretched from the top of the peg to a very elegant mansion and a sign above the door identified the building as the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum and announced a show inside that looked promising. I was an architectural neophyte and, while I vaguely knew the names Hans Hollein, Oswald Ungers, Ettore Sottsass, Arata Isozaki and Richard Meier, it was Buckminster Fuller’s name that had me bounding up the steps. It was his name that had fanned the embers of my earlier interest in studying architecture. It was, too, his geodesic constructions that stretched my understanding of the possibilities of building, beyond those of Christchurch’s colonial Gothic and the cool concrete-block modernity with which I had been surrounded in those pre-internet days.

I remember little of the show and suspect I entered a kind of reverie: a sort of fizzing enthusiasm sparked by such a radical reworking of the discipline I had started studying only a few months before. My eyes skidded over tables full of every sort of hammer used in the city, every sort of bread available that day and a cross-section through the city’s subterranean infrastructure. Entering one room, I found myself in a gilded cage inserted within the fantastic opulence of that 19th-century mansion, the detail and finish of which I found as intoxicating as anything on display.

The museum, a branch of the Smithsonian, is housed in the mansion that had been built by Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-American steel industrialist who funded the construction of some 3000 free libraries in the US, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Australia, South Africa, the West Indies, Fiji and New Zealand. I thought of this over the Christmas hols when I found myself in Hokitika, looking out over a very well-stocked B and B breakfast table, through the narrow casement windows and across the road to the town’s museum, housed in one of the 18 Carnegie libraries in Aotearoa. Bankrolling libraries around the world was an extraordinary act of philanthropy and set me to thinking about nation-building and the aggregation of human endeavour that has brought us to this rather strange place in time.

Such holiday rumination was particularly poignant in that town, squeezed between wild ocean and the relative safety of a river harbour: a town full of memories of wealth based on the extraction of gold, coal, timber and pounamu and now adjusting to the uncertainties of an economy more reliant on bikers, hikers and tourists than miners and timber millers.

We are familiar with old Hokitika from Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, its plot played out in the fledgling European occupation overlaying a raw landscape between sea and mountain. It is a society perched on the high-water mark, reached by an uncertain access through the gauntlet of the river bar, lured by the promise of wealth dug from the earth in a narrow strip of land between ocean and the wall of the Alps. That wealth is an unseen hand in the text, manipulating the fortunes of those whose lives we follow in Catton’s story and it is no less potent a shaper of fortunes today as the Coast adjusts to increasing constraints on extraction.

We are well used to the impermanence of artefacts associated with our short occupation of this land, be it the eroded terracing of pā sites, the skeletons of boats that foundered on that river bar or the inexorable rusting and collapse of the machinery for the stripping of coal and gold seams or the felling and cartage of forest timbers. Is there a road on all of that coast that plunges into the bush and does not end at the terminus of an old mine or the remnants of a tramway that once carried logs to the mills? 

Perhaps Denniston best reveals the huge impact that extraction industry has wrought on the land. The history of its lost villages is revealed by nothing more than a school building, the foundations of a bathhouse and the remnants of the extraordinary engineering structures that once barely controlled loaded coal wagons as they careened down the slope to a railhead 500 metres below. The shift in mineral pricing and an increasing regard for unspoiled landscape has changed the economy up and down the Coast and left the land littered with the abandoned artefacts of engineering infrastructure.

Those buildings we might claim as architecture have fared little better.

Early photographs of Hokitika displayed in that Carnegie library reveal a town with buildings making a bit of an effort on main street, the better being dressed with mouldings, reveals and ornamental pediments. True, many concealed corrugated iron barns tacked on behind, but those façades reveal a sense that owners felt they were making the trappings of civilised city life in what must have seemed a far-flung sliver of land. Alas, those same shifts in global politics and economics that have closed mines and shut up forests, and an increasing regard for the destructive power of earthquakes, have seen many fine buildings abandoned, replaced by the ubiquitous branding and dull uniformity of national and international companies.

That sounds like a refrain that might be heard in many of our towns and cities, where the unhappy confluence of an eviscerated international aesthetic and the shift of companies from building owners to tenants invariably generates buildings that take value from their urban context and contribute little. This sounds alarmingly like the ugly refrain “the client made me do it” and as though the soulless main street of every town is evidence of our profession’s inherent toothlessness. This is a strange situation that short-changes the society that educated us and might reasonably have an expectation that we deliver at least a half-pie-decent public realm. Those who labour under a student loan or who are on the libertarian spectrum might challenge the notion of education as a social contract, but it seems a fair assumption to me: that is, that aside from making private delights, we might also do our best on main street for the body politic.

Thinking again about those rusted constructions being reclaimed by the Coast’s lush forest growth, I have a degree of envy for the pragmatic certainty and social necessity that attends our engineering mates’ work. The mining of minerals, damming of rivers, construction of bridges and provision of water are all the results of a social transaction; we invest in education and gain, in return, the ability to build the infrastructural necessities of our community. 

Carnegie’s funding of the Arthur Griffin-designed library in Hokitika is a similar investment, one made in the certain knowledge that lifelong education will have social benefit, though perhaps not immediately measurable in tonnes, litres or kilowatts. The library, even in its current mid-seismic upgrade state, is a poignant reminder that we do not live by bread alone and that we architects have a job of work to do to fulfil our end of the bargain: go out there, use your education and natural genius to make a better main street, argue for the long-term benefit of architecture with your clients and lobby city hall to help them see how vital our skills are. Or perhaps you return to your home town and make a project showing, as architect and cartoonist Malcolm Walker has done in Hokitika, how the repair and reuse of a significant building in the town can precipitate a re-evaluation of the way in which buildings with history and character have a critical role in revitalising the town and fending off the anonymity of architectural globalisation.