In the leafy Auckland suburb of Kohimarama, the place pitch-roofed clapboard houses line well-kept streets, a putting gray ziggurat rises from the subtropical foliage. It appears to be like like a defensive fortification, greeting the street with a monolithic, windowless facade. Slender arrow-slit openings puncture the edges of its clean, blocky bulk, as if conserving a lookout for bands of marauding neighbours. “I do know folks hate my home,” wrote Rewi Thompson, the architect of this arresting house, which he constructed for his household in 1986. “I assume it’s too totally different from folks’s concept of a home in Kohimarama, or too defensive or difficult, or pure cultural shock!”
Thompson, who lived right here till his dying in 2016, was one of many boldest, most influential Māori architects in Aotearoa, or New Zealand. By means of constructing, drawing, writing and educating, he pushed his conviction that structure had the facility to strengthen Māori cultural id, and restore a way of company to a folks forcibly estranged from their land. As a brand new era of younger city Māori architects and college students embrace their Indigenous tribal heritage as by no means earlier than, Thompson’s work has been compiled in Rewi, a landmark e book that gives a wealth of inspiration via his constructed and unbuilt initiatives, delivered to life with a vibrant assortment of interviews with purchasers, colleagues and college students.
The strident architect’s own residence was a stunning arrival to the standard suburban context when it poked up from the bushes within the Nineteen Eighties. It was an act of defiance, standing as an apt reflection of a person who needed to wrestle in opposition to the chances to see his work realised, within the face of systematic prejudice. Not that he cared a lot what others thought. “It has by no means been our intention for our neighbours to grasp the message expressed within the pondering behind the home,” he wrote. “My work shouldn’t be about being accepted. I do what I’ve to do. Structure could be a lonely enterprise.”
Turning its again to the road, the home as a substitute opens as much as the land behind, the place bushes and shrubs tumble down a steep slope to fulfill an enormous image window. Robust on the surface, it was conceived as a refuge on the within – a metaphor for Māori survival within the face of colonial violence. “I’ve by no means seen the home as violent or aggressive, but it surely does seek advice from Auckland as a spot of violence,” Thompson mentioned. “Inwardly, the home is peaceable, because it displays the whānau (household), aroha (affection), awhi (embrace) ideas.”
The outside partitions, which seem like forged concrete from a distance, are in actual fact plywood, stained pale gray – an inexpensive, pragmatic answer that anticipated restore and alternative as a part of the pure ageing course of. “He didn’t aspire to permanence,” writes the e book’s co-author, Jeremy Hansen. “As a substitute, he was comfy with the thought of buildings assuming new lives or, extra radically, finally crumbling to mud.”
In conventional Māori tradition, constructing timbers are sometimes left to decompose and return to the soil from whence they got here, to rejuvenate the mauri (life pressure) of the land. For years, that appeared to be the doubtless destiny of Thompson’s home, as its partitions turned evermore encrusted with black mildew, making it look much more like a forgotten temple, unearthed from the jungle. After the architect’s dying, the house was bought in 2017, and has not too long ago been present process restoration, with the plywood changed and the sharply-hewn ziggurat – a kind that nods to the Māori poutama, or stairway to heaven sample – wanting crisper than ever.
Born in 1953 and raised in Wellington, the place his father labored as a bus driver, Thompson was one of many first era of city Māori who grew up within the metropolis, away from their tribal roots. He skilled as a civil and structural engineer at Wellington Polytechnic and labored as a structural draughtsman, earlier than leaving to check structure on the College of Auckland in 1980, the place he was recognized for his jazzy Hawaiian shirts and stunning pink jandals, and all the time wielding a pack of highlighter pens. His work was simply as eye-catching as his outfits.
“All the scholars tried to tone their buildings in with the bush, all aside from Rewi,” recalled one former tutor. “He painted his vibrant pink and, boy, did it look good. It was a sign concerning the future.” Fittingly, his hand-scrawled title shines out from the e book’s blue material cowl in neon pink, making certain it received’t go unnoticed on the cabinets.
Thompson’s prize-winning commencement undertaking imagined a futuristic marae (a sacred tribal assembly place), designed as a startling megastructure rising from the ocean, like a supersized waka (conventional Māori canoe), beached on the slopes of Mount Victoria. It set the tone for a collection of dreamy speculative initiatives and summary visions that he continued to concoct all through his profession, compiled in a piece of unrealised designs in the back of the e book. They embody a prismatic tower encasing a large T-Rex, and clusters of totemic cantilevered platforms suspended from poles within the ocean, depicted in fantastical gnomic drawings that recall the work of Archigram and the Japanese metabolists. “Ominous and thrilling,” write the authors, commenting on the designs, “their goal is unclear.”
The identical radical, otherworldly sensibility infused Thompson’s constructed work, whether or not in papakāinga collective housing for the Māori neighborhood, his college and healthcare buildings, or the dramatic tent-like cover and winged stage set he designed for a Papal go to in 1986. His social housing undertaking in Wiri, South Auckland, was imagined as a “wilderness”, with rows of housing interspersed with native planting. It included one group of houses below an undulating roof, in addition to erratically organized homes hovering on poles, beneath curved mono-pitched roofs. In an article on the time, Thompson ominously commented: “All the homes have pure finishes, they are going to climate and maybe decay in time.” Little hint of them stays.
His work on the Ngawha correctional facility in Northland was extra sturdy. At a time when half of the nation’s jail inhabitants was Māori (a determine that is still related at this time), Thompson was pushed by a perception that structure may heal the wairua (spirit) of individuals damaged by their circumstances. He advocated for porches dealing with vital options within the panorama to allow inmates to reconnect with their ancestral locations of belonging, and look forward to life exterior of jail.
“For Māoris,” he wrote, “the affiliation with the land is religious versus an understanding that’s industrial which pervades a western viewpoint. This results in a unique interpretation of structure relative to the positioning.” The Division of Corrections had initially deliberate to bulldoze the hilly web site to create a flat tabula rasa, however Thompson inspired them to embrace the chances of the panorama, provided by the pure terraces and a stream, to create a village-like compound with a way of openness, the place curved buildings featured beneficiant overhangs.
Equally, in his work for the Mason forensic psychiatry clinic, he advocated for the inclusion of enormous, open foyers to accommodate pōwhiri (Māori welcoming rituals), kaumātua (elder) rooms and marae as a way to incorporate whānau (prolonged household) for visits and stays. At a time when public establishments included token nods to Māori tradition at finest – within the type of artworks on the wall, or geometric patterns caught on the facades – Thompson’s method began with first rules, understanding the significance of household and cultural traditions within the means of rehabilitation.
“It was a breakthrough undertaking when it got here to institutional design,” structure professor Deidre Brown tells co-author Jade Kake in an interview within the e book. “He and different architects had been pushing to boost the query, can you could have a marae in a safe facility? These are troublesome areas, however he wasn’t shy of working in them.”
Brown taught with Thompson on the College of Auckland, the place the division of structure was not too long ago renamed “Te Pare” (the brink) after his academic philosophy. He might not have left behind an enormous amount of buildings, however his affect lives on within the tons of, if not 1000’s, of individuals he taught and impressed. Karamia Müller studied below Thompson within the early 2000s, and later taught a design studio class with him. “We’re in a unique time now, the place Indigenous inventive practices are being extra recognised,” she says. “However at the moment there weren’t many individuals there that I knew of who had been brown, and had been designing in a radical manner that drew on Indigenous ideas.” He embodied a novel mix of utopian, transformative pondering and pragmatic, buildable know-how, enthusing college students with a relentless “effervescent up of concepts.” Because of Thompson, she provides, “we’ve acquired an archive, we have now buildings, we have now a pedagogy: a canon, in a manner.”
The e book bubbles with Thompson’s power, optimism and wit. It’s a stunning useful resource, prepared for the following era to choose up the mantle.
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