Dwelling in the View What does the bach settlement of Taylors Mistake reveal about cultural attitudes toward living in nature amongst New Zealanders?
Ben Wareing McGill University, Montreal August 2014 An Urban Design and Housing Research Report submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of post‐professional Master of Architecture. © Ben Wareing
Abstract
This study uncovers and explains the cultural attitudes toward nature that have contributed to the development of the bach settlement of Taylors Mistake in Christchurch, New Zealand. This coastal community was founded in the late nineteenth century and reflects the sensibilities of landscape romanticism. The scenery was originally appreciated for its natural picturesque characteristics, which were altered and accentuated in the construction of a landscape which reflected the rolling hillside pasture of the English countryside, interrupted by the irregular and sublimely jagged coastline. The baches (small and simple holiday cottages) nestled into the cliffs provided a source of animation and emphasised the power and harshness of the climate, reflecting an ideology in which landscape encompassed both the human and the natural. At this time, the natural environment was interpreted through the constructs of educated taste. Nature was understood as malleable, manipulated in the design of landscape to express the ideals of the refined aesthete in the irregularity, roughness, variety and sudden deviation of the picturesque. By controlling and understanding nature based on these cultural parameters, the land was commodified and sovereignty expressed, enabling appropriation and colonisation.
Whilst reflecting the aesthetic preferences of the early British settlers, the picturesque landscape of Taylors Mistake became endowed with meaning through the practice of dwelling. This was influenced by the war experiences of the return servicemen bach builders, a new spirit of nationalism and societal changes. The bach in the landscape became a refuge and the relationship between the dwellers and nature more embodied and significant. Dwelling represents a meaningful model of stewardship, encouraging environmental responsibility and sustainable practice. To allow for such a relationship with nature, the dominant modern environmental paradigms which separate the human and natural must be reassessed. Place and dwelling need to find translation in the central city of Christchurch as it rebuilds following the major earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 in order for its residents to be able to connect with their environment meaningfully and sustainably.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my supervisor Professor Nik Luka for his insight, encouragement and assistance. This was particularly useful in helping me organise my thoughts and structure this study in a coherent and meaningful way. Professor Vikram Bhatt, too, offered his time and advice. I’d like to thank Richard Sewell and Hamish Campbell for helping me gather source information from Christchurch and sending it to Montreal, providing me with invaluable material that I could not have otherwise accessed. Finally, I’d like to express my gratitude to
Catherine Quigley for her thoughts and support over these last few months.
Contents
Introduction 1 Methodology 4 City Context 6 The Bach 9 Taylors Mistake: Setting the Scene 16 The Cave Mansions 19
Landscape Romanticism 25 Background: Changing Ideals 26 Aesthetic Theory 27 Picturesque Travel: Nationalism and Colonialism 32 Picturesque Architecture: The Discovery of the Vernacular 39 The Picturesque Cottage 41 Appropriation 53 ‘Man Alone’ Together 57
A Coming of Age 62 Learning how to Dwell 65 The Genius Loci 70 The Hut goes Full Circle 74 The Development of the Bach 77
Conclusion: Contemporary Environmental Discourse 85 Guardians of the Mistake? 88 Dwelling in the Modern City 92 It’s Our Fault: Considerations for the Rebuilding of Christchurch 96
Reference List 104
Image References 114
Introduction
On the 4th of September 2010, Christchurch, the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand
(fig. 1), was struck by a powerful earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale. This was followed by a series of severe aftershocks in the following days and months and a far more devastating seismic rupture on the 22nd of February, 2011. This affected the immediate collapse of several buildings and caused such compromise to structural integrity that three quarters of the central city has required demolition (fig. 2). The Christchurch City Council has issued the
Christchurch Central Recovery Plan which propagates inner‐city living, something previously lacking in the city. If this is to be successful in attracting residents from the sprawling suburban environment, it must respond to the city’s immediate context and the cultural influences that give it particularity.
To address the sense of place and better understand the cultural context of Christchurch, this study investigates one of its more curious and significant settlements. It endeavours to discover what the ex‐urban settlement of Taylors Mistake (fig. 3 & 4), New Zealand’s earliest bach community, reveals about cultural attitudes toward living in nature amongst New Zealanders. A historic analysis of this once thriving seaside settlement reveals how and why it came to be, how the built interventions relate to the natural context and how this relates to the dominant cultural ideologies of the time. The demise of the Taylors Mistake settlement will also be interrogated and drawn into wider debate regarding the development of environmental paradigms. These findings will help inform considerations for the future of the city and architecture in the country.
1
FIGURE 2 Aerial Image of the Christchurch central city, revealing the prolifera on of vacant lots and en re empty blocks following the earthquakes. This photo was taken in July 2012, since then even more of the city has disappeared as part of the extended demoli on process.
2 FIGURE 3 The western end of the Taylors Mistake bach se lement, Hobson’s Bay, in 1926.
FIGURE 4 The same area of Taylors Mistake in 2010.
3 Whilst grounded in this specific context, more far reaching ideas and values are explored. Our relationship with nature is important to address in light of the impact that the cycle of exploitation and consumption has had around the world. Global warming is real and is happening; the planet’s oil reserves are being exhausted and rampant development and pollution has had an irreversible ecological impact. Attitudes toward the environment need readdressing if we are to limit further destruction and find a way to live more responsibly on earth. In this way, addressing the past of a specific context to inform its responsible and appropriate growth may act as a model for the development of other places.
The bach has been mythologised as New Zealand’s architectural origin, directly influencing many of the country’s most respected architects and their efforts to discover a national approach to architecture. This study explores the meaning of the bach and its relationship with the land and critiques the notion that it provides an honest and inclusive model in which to base a modern vernacular. Through this provocation, the entire narrative of New Zealand settlement may be reinterpreted and the course of architecture in the country redirected.
Methodology
This study weaves together some complex issues and narratives based on an in‐depth study of the literature pertaining to not only the bach and the ex‐urban environment of New Zealand, but to aesthetic theory, the picturesque, eighteenth and nineteenth century politics, colonisation, war, dwelling and modernity. Rather than containing a distinct literature review section, sources are introduced, referenced and critiqued throughout. Whilst many of the issues
4 discussed in this study have a history of analysis and critique, it is my aim to draw fresh connections and perspectives in order to produce a new understanding of cultural attitudes to living in the environment in New Zealand, significant now as Christchurch begins the process of reconstruction.
Following this methodology, academic sources from a variety of periods and perspectives are analysed. In order to map out and understand the context, material from New Zealand relating to the bach, the landscape and Taylors Mistake is consulted. This includes formal, academic papers from well respected theorists and professors and informal and colloquial ‘coffee‐table’ books, magazines and documentaries. Historic Newspaper articles also help to better understand the values and attitudes of the bach dwellers throughout the settlements existence.
In order to place and comprehend the influences on these attitudes, historic material important to the society of the time is reviewed and critiqued. Traditions are traced to their origin to reveal latent connections, relationships between places and movements and the correlations between particular interpretations and general human conditions. Paintings and photos, too, are analysed for what they reveal and reflect of society in New Zealand and Britain from the eighteenth century until the current time. Other secondary sources consulted and critiqued include the Christchurch Central Recovery Plan and other documentation from the Christchurch
City Council and the Department of Conservation.
5
What follows is an exploration and meditation on a variety of ideas. The narrative drawn between them aims at uncovering and explaining historic cultural attitudes towards nature, encouraging a reinterpretation of the picturesque, meaning and dwelling in our present condition. No concrete principles or specific instrumental approaches are advocated; this is not an endorsement or explanation of the city planning of Camillo Sitte, Townscape or New
Urbanism. Instead I mean to frame the issues in a broader context, with general but far reaching implications for architecture, urban design and living in both the urban and exurban contexts.
I’d like to think that the reflection and critique of the issues following their introduction and description conveys a sense of understanding and meaning which parallels the ascension from an aesthetic to a more phenomenological interpretation of living in the land as documented in the study.
City Context
Christchurch is located within the province of Canterbury, on the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand. Before the earthquakes the population of Christchurch was 377,000; its urban area 450 square kilometers and its urban density 860 people per square kilometre. It is known as the Garden City, though it bears no resemblance to the models established by Ebenezer
Howard. Rather, its position on the Canterbury plains and its English heritage has influenced the domestication of the environment and the enclosure of gardens within sprawling suburbs. As observed by a visitor in 1887, “Here in drawing rooms overlooking smooth lawns, you can take a cup of afternoon tea; the surroundings are so homelike that it requires no imagination to fancy
6 yourself within fifty miles of London.”1 The city’s civilised English Anglican character has been mythologised and has acted as a source of collective identity since its inception. It betrays, however, the struggle of the early pioneers and their tense and sometimes ambiguous relationship with a raw, uncultivated landscape.
Christchurch was originally a swamp. It took decades to drain the wetlands and create a landscape more congruent to farming and development. The settlers of the city fought hard to transform the environment from its natural state into one symbolic of mans domination and
“the triumph of art over nature,” as celebrated in the Illustrated Guide to Christchurch and
Neighbourhood of 1885.2 The general colonial practices followed in the establishment of
Christchurch were typical of nineteenth century imperialism and reflected even more far reaching narratives regarding mans place in nature. The treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, establishing British governance over New Zealand and the original Maori inhabitants; ten years later, Christchurch took root as a city with the arrival of the celebrated First Four Ships carrying
English immigrants. In general, the land was interpreted as standing reserve or wasteland anticipating transformation into something more beautiful, arable and profitable. This process was seen as one’s entitlement and duty, a pervasive idea with biblical origins.
1 John Cookson, “Pilgrims’ Progress: Image, Identity and Myth in Christchurch,” in Southern capital: Christchurch: towards a city biography, 1850‐2000, ed. John Cookson and Graeme Dunstall (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2000), 28. 2 From the Illustrated Guide to Christchurch and Neighbourhood, 1885, as quoted in Eric Pawson, “Confronting Nature,” in Southern capital: Christchurch: towards a city biography, 1850‐2000, ed. John Cookson and Graeme Dunstall (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2000), 62. 7
Carolyn Merchant has argued that the primary narrative of Western civilisation has been of a
“precipitous, tragic fall from the Garden of Eden, followed by a long, slow, upward Recovery to convert the fallen world of deserts and wilderness into a new earthly Eden.”3 This ideal has taken on new dimensions since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, new discoveries and technologies making the cultivation of the earth into a vast, utopian garden a more obtainable long‐term goal. Henry Sewell, deputy director of the Canterbury Association and politician who was to become the first Prime Minister of New Zealand, echoed this ideology exactly in stating “the first creation was a garden, and the nearer we get back to the garden state, the nearer we approach what may be called the true normal state of Nature.”4
Domination and transformation meant progress and redemption to the city’s early Anglican settlers.
How, then, does the settlement of Taylors Mistake fit within this paradigm? Does it represent the edge of the colonising sword, or a contrarian approach to living in nature, one with greater cultural significance that could help influence the future development of Christchurch and provide more pervasive lessons relating to dwelling, stewardship and responsible environmental practice? These are essential issues to address given the current context of Christchurch and the environmental problems we are all presently faced with.
3 Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003), 317. 4 Henry Sewell, quoted in Pawson, “Confronting Nature,” 63. The Canterbury Association was established in London with the purpose of establishing a colony in the province of Canterbury, of which Christchurch is the main city. 8
The Bach
‘Bach’ is a colloquial term in New Zealand for a small and simple holiday cottage typically constructed in a rudimentary manner by the inhabitants themselves from salvaged or second‐ hand materials (fig. 5). It is interpreted by many as a continuation of the tradition of basic pragmatism originating in New Zealand with the pioneer hut.5 The uncivilised and idiosyncratic nature of these structures is usually their only commonality, there being no specific typology or easy way to categorise the bach in formal architectural terms.
Baches are traditionally constructed alongside the coast, though they are also found by lakes and rivers. They are generally located close to towns and cities, in the accessible exurban area from where safety and provisions are never far from elements of the romanticised wilderness.
They have often been constructed on land of Crown or ambiguous title in a ramshackle manner without building permits or compliance with the national building code. As remembered by
George Meadows, the bach settlement alongside the Whananaki foreshore developed spontaneously: “first up, best dressed, got where they wanted. There was no building restriction, no by‐laws, and if you got here first, you took that site… There is no title or anything, it just grew, grew like top‐seed.”6 Whether this form of appropriation represented a type of stewardship outside the realms of normal capitalist practice or a more covert colonisation is important to discern and will form an important part of this study.
5 See, for instance, David Mitchell and Gillian Chaplin, The Elegant Shed: New Zealand Architecture since 1945 (London: Oxford University Press, 1984). 6 George Meadows, quoted in John Milligan (director), A Summer Place (TVNZ, Screened in New Zealand 22 October 1996). 9
FIGURE 5 S lls of some of the baches of Taylors Mistake from the documentary The Elegant Shed, 1984.
10 The word ‘bach’ probably derives from the noun ‘bachelor’. As described by Paul Thompson:
The unmarried man who lived by himself in simple surroundings was said to be baching or keeping bachelor's hall. Men who were without the assumedly civilising influence of a wife were taken to be undomesticated and lacking in the necessary housekeeping and culinary skills required to live in a 'proper' manner, so 'to bach' or 'baching' referred to a basic level of living. Many men lived like this in the pioneering days when there were neither proper houses nor ‘proper’ women available to run such homes.7
As elaborated by Peter Wood, “the bach seems to refer to a condition of living that is remarkable for its rejection of traditional home values. The bach is for the unmarried, it is uncomplicated, uncivilised, undomesticated, it is the place of the improper house.”8 Decoding the bach’s etymology further, Harry Orsman, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary of New
Zealand, suggests that the term descends from the transitive verb ‘bachelorise.’ This meant to live in a domestic arrangement characterised as temporary, uncivilised and independent but within a communal context. It originally involved private lodging with shared living quarters.9
Upon visiting New Zealand in 1933, D’Arcy Cresswell wrote “I am writing snugly in bed in my new apartment, what they call a bach in this barbarous land, though it’s simply a self‐contained
7 Paul Thompson, The Bach (Wellington: V.R. Ward Government Printer, 1985), 7. 8 Peter Wood, “The Bach: The Cultural History of a Local Typology,” in Fabrications 11 (July 2000): 44. Christine McCarthy, too, refers to the improperness and perversity of the bach, representing the “anti‐house” in its rejection of domestic values. To McCarthy, the “avoidance of notions of stability, security and the legitimate,” make the bach a disturbing origin of national architecture. As she states, “If this identity is indeed sited within an architecture which denies conventional notions of domesticity, then the architectural discourse of New Zealand is founded within an unsettling ideology...The bach also sites a femininity which is deprived of censoring operations of the symbolic. It is depraved, horrific and sinister. It threatens domesticity, and the masculinity which redefines the domestic.” Wood, too, notes the grotesque nature of the bach but argues that “the bach does not represent a violent transgression of domestic condition, it is precisely the opposite; it is that the bach threatens to reveal the suppressed violence of everyday domesticity that makes it so subversive, it is a type of bastion against violence.” As he continues, the “‘sub‐standard’ construction” of the bach “realises the constructed sub‐standardness of domesticity in a suburb that has otherwise successfully maintained its sanitary mask. Suburban domesticity is constructed on the principle of suppression where deviancy and deficiency are actively fought. Against this model the bach is foreign.” See Christine McCarthy, “The Bach,” in Interstices 4 (1996), 1‐2; Wood, “The Bach,” 47‐48. The violence of the house relates to the hidden domestic mechanisms of control, manipulation and exploitation operating on the natural environment. This may be contrasted with the sparing and preserving of dwelling as defined by Martin Heidegger in “Building Dwelling Thinking.” This will be discussed in a later section of this study. 9 Harold Orsman (ed), The Dictionary of New Zealand English: A Dictionary of New Zealandisms on Historical Principles (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1997); as quoted in Wood, “The Bach,” 45. 11 room like many I’ve had in London…”10 This indicates the importance of the context in which the bach is located – the term only bestowed on the precarious structures found in the midst of a savage environment.
The ‘Man Alone’ of New Zealand architectural mythology has reinforced the romanticism of masculine refuge. This narrative began with a photo displayed as part of a 1954 exhibition entitled “HOMEBUILDING 1814‐1954 the new zealand [sic.] tradition.” This image depicts a solitary male figure sitting on a box on the verandah of a simple wooden structure surrounded by dense Manuka vegetation and flax (fig. 6). The abode is well proportioned and utilitarian with an exposed structure of slender elements. The light overhanging roof seems to be a skillion of low pitch. From the verandah posts, a clothesline has been fashioned from a piece of rope. In place of a balustrade, a simple kickboard ensures the purity of the composition. The exposed piles and cross bracing beneath the verandah reveal the depth of the surrounding bush.
The image as presented at this point was devoid of reference. Its date, photographer, and location were all anonymous. This helped it obtain its mythical status; it was nowhere and everywhere at once. The photo was originally unearthed from a plate glass negative held at the
Alexander Turnbull Library. Its location was identified as King Country: an inaccessible and raw bush area in the centre of the North Island. This was the site of heavy conflict between the
European settlers and the indigenous Maori tribes in the 1860s during the New Zealand Land
10 D’Arcy Cresswell, as quoted in Wood, “The Bach,” 56. 12
FIGURE 6 The Man Alone.
13 Wars, representing an unknown and disputed part of the country. Significantly, the photo was the only to be captioned at the exhibition, bearing the words “simplicity, honesty, realism.”11
The image was subsequently displayed “like a banner of truth” in the library of the Auckland
School of Architecture, for many years the only architecture school in the country.12 It reached a much wider audience in 1984 when it was featured in the last episode of the 6‐part television series “The Elegant Shed.” The host, David Mitchell, captioned the image ‘Man Alone,’ a label borrowed from a novel of the same name by John Mulgan from 1939 and evoking a New
Zealand literary tradition describing “an individual man living in a raw environment, at odds with wider society.”13 This propagated and further mythologised the cultural trope of masculine refuge.
Both in the television series and subsequent published book, Mitchell draws parallels between the pioneers hut and the bach tradition, suggesting a genesis of the bastion to the poetic imagination.14 Mitchell admired “the simple pragmatism of the hut builder” and used this to construct a narrative of national architectural origins.15 Within the architectural profession, the bach has greatly influenced the search for a vernacular modernism; Vernon Brown and the infamous architects of the Architectural Group have referenced the simple, unadorned and
11 The narrative weaved from the ‘Man Alone’ photograph has been comprehensively explored and unpacked by Robin Skinner, with others, such as Peter Wood, offering insightful commentary. See Robin Skinner, “The Whare in the Bush: Unpacking a Twentieth Century Tradition,” in Fabrications 18 (2008): 58. 12 David Mitchell, quoted in Skinner, “The Whare in the Bush,” 58. 13 Skinner, “The Whare in the Bush,” 58. 14 Mitchell and Chaplin, The Elegant Shed, 104. 15 Mitchell and Chaplin, The Elegant Shed, 17. 14 honest qualities of the bach as a direct source of inspiration, spawning the ‘Auckland Style.’16
The bach occupies a sacred position in the national psyche, becoming “part of the fabric of our lives – an icon of Kiwiana,” mythologised and celebrated throughout.17
Although Mitchell romanticised the bach dwelling culture of New Zealand, he did recognise the prevalence of the humble country retreat tradition elsewhere, stating “The early bach was that straightforward cottage that is reinvented everywhere in the world where a simple house is needed.”18 The bach finds its parallel built in the landscape throughout North America as the cottage, in Australia as the weekender, in Switzerland as the chalet or Ferienwohnungen,
Norway and Sweden as the hytte and Russia as the dachas, to name a few.19 Similar informal and marginal cottage communities have existed, too, in England: the Plotlands were a collection of shacks along the coast to the south east of the country and along such rivers as the Thames.
16 Mitchell has recognised this style as an almost literal interpretation of the bach, including surfaces of varied tone and colour, simple geometries, honesty of materials and ordinary building techniques, commenting “the Vernon Brown house looked for all the world like a big bach.” McCarthy, too, has noted “At home, in New Zealand, the ‘architypal Kiwi bach’ is often posited as an origin of New Zealand architecture. It is frequently referred to as establishing a lineage for a specific architect’s work, such as Vernon Brown and the Group, around which New Zealand attempts to construct its identity.” According to Robin Skinner, other New Zealand architects during the 1940s, including Paul Pascoe, Courtney Archer, Ernst Plischke, C. R. Knight, Cedric Firth and Barbara Parker, were influenced by the simplicity and honest construction of New Zealand’s vernacular timber huts. See Mitchell and Chaplin, The Elegant Shed, 30; McCarthy, “The Bach,” 1; Skinner, “The Whare in the Bush,” 61; Paul Walker and Justine Clark, Looking for the Local: Architecture and the New Zealand Modern (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2000). 17 Jeff Grigor, Baches and Cribs: A Pictorial Journey through New Zealand’s Favourite Holiday Places (North Shore: Penguin Books, 2008), 1. 18 Mitchell and Chaplin, The Elegant Shed, 17‐18. 19 Although there is a varied tradition of second home building around the world, the masculine origins of the bach give the trope some significance. In other contexts, such as in “cottage country,” Ontario, the second home is a family oriented retreat. See Nik Luka, “Le «cottage» comme pratique intergénérationnelle: narrations de la vie familiale dans les résidences secondaires du centre de l’Ontario,” in Le mode de vie des familles de banlieue: mobilité, intégration, sociabilité et différence entre les générations 8 (Spring 2008), accessed at http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/018493ar. See also Nik Luka, “Sojourning in Nature: The Second‐Home Exurban Landscapes of Ontario’s Near North,” in Landscape and the Ideology of Nature in Exurbia: Green Sprawl, ed. Kirsten Valentine Cadieux and Laura Taylor (New York: Routledge, 2013), 130; Norman McIntyre, “Introduction,” in Multiple Dwelling and Tourism: Negotiating Place, Home and Identity, ed. Norman McIntyre et al. (Wallingford: CIB International, 2006): 9‐10. 15
In France, the practice of owner‐built “spontaneous, shack‐like spas” has given rise to unplanned communities alongside rivers close to the urban environment.20 How, then, has the bach come to be such a significant cultural trope in New Zealand?
Taylors Mistake: Setting the Scene
Taylors Mistake is a coastal environment now within the boundary of Christchurch City, located in the Godley Head reserve along the jagged shoreline between Sumner beach and Lyttleton
Harbour. This is at the south‐eastern periphery of the city, twelve kilometres from the city centre where Banks Peninsula begins to jut out from the mainland into the vast Pacific Ocean.
At this point an undulating pastoral landscape is abruptly interrupted by rocky clay cliffs which descend dramatically into the raw ocean swell.
The study area includes Hobson’s Bay, Taylors Mistake beach, Harris Bay and Boulder Bay, together constituting the broader Taylors Mistake coastal settlement (fig. 7). The rocky coastline which links the bays forms part of the flank of the long extinct Lyttleton volcano. Rugged hills frame the small bays, which are fringed by mostly introduced species of shrub and grassland, succulent and woody weeds with the occasional grouping of planted Pine trees scattered about within gullies (fig. 8).
20 The Plotlands were comprised of land otherwise neglected by developers or farmers. The cottages were owner‐ built and together composed “a world of single storey houses, simply built and often using wood, though never refusing whatever material (corrugated iron, asbestos, pre‐cast concrete and bricks) lay at hand.” As with many baches, including two on ‘Rotten Row’ in Taylors Mistake, some dwellings within the Plotlands were constructed from old railway carriages. The inhabitants of the French owner‐built shacks are sometimes referred to as ‘habitants paysagistes.’ See Roland Foster, “Baches in the Landscape and their Contested Recognition as Heritage: Case studies of Heritage Landscapes at Taylors Mistake and on Ragitoto Island” (Masters diss., Lincoln University, 2003), 23‐24. 16
SUMNER SCARBOROUGH
Hobson’s Bay Boulder Bay TAYLORS MISTAKE
Harris Bay
GODLEY HEAD
FIGURE 7 Map of Taylors Mistake and wider context, Christchurch
FIGURE 8 The coastal scenery of Boulder Bay
17 Since the Crown purchased the 252 hectares comprising Godley Head from the original Maori inhabitants in 1849 and transferred ownership to the Canterbury Company, the land has had reserve status. A lighthouse was built at the eastern extreme of the headland in 1865 and a 60 hectare reserve established around it in 1876; the rest of the land was leased in 1885 as a sheep farm. Several military surveillance and defence structures were constructed on site during
World War Two which remain as solemn artefacts. The picturesque and sublime nature of the landscape, however, has been recognised since European settlement. Godley Head accommodates a variety of recreational activity, including trekking, sight‐seeing, picnicking, fishing and swimming. In 1987 the area came under the control of the Department of
Conservation and became known as Godley Head Reserve.
In defiance of the law, the baches of Taylors Mistake began to be constructed on Crown land from the end of the nineteenth century, on an area of the foreshore known as the Queen’s
Chain. This is a strip of land encompassing the area within one chain, or 20.1 metres, of the high tide mark. The baches are constructed from simple timber frames and clad in recuperated materials, including old sheets of corrugated iron and timber weatherboard from demolished buildings in the city and stone from the beaches and cliffs themselves. There are currently 36 baches in the Taylors Mistake region, including 9 in Boulder Bay, although at the settlements peak there had been as many as 81. However, due to council ordered demolition, abandonment and severe weather conditions, many have been lost forever. These include the 20 original cave dwellings built into the cliffs between Taylors Mistake beach and Boulder Bay.
18
The Cave Mansions
The cave baches of Taylors Mistake are the earliest examples of purpose built recreational shelters in New Zealand. As explained by Maggie Barry in the documentary A Summer Place,
“These early or ‘proto‐baches’ displayed the kind of ingenuity that would become a hallmark of the owner‐builder, do‐it‐yourself tradition.”21 Examining the motivation and thinking of those responsible for these primitive dwellings will help explain the ideological foundation of the bach and how the early settlers related to the landscape.
Taylors Mistake began to be frequented by leisure seekers in the later part of the nineteenth century. Alfred Osborne, one of the first to construct a dwelling in Taylors Mistake, began to spend his holidays in Taylors Mistake from the 1870’s.22 Throughout the 1880’s, fishermen slowly built out the mouths of the caves along the cliff face to allow a greater degree of protection inside. The first regular dwellers were reportedly the three Kennedy brothers,
William, John and Hans, and their brother in law, Alexander Bickerton, who camped in the caves in the early 1890’s.23 The first permanent residence in Taylors Mistake was that of Thomas
Archbold, a painter from Christchurch. He built his cave dwelling in 1897, establishing the practice of enclosing space within a cave through the erection of a cottage‐like facade (fig. 9).
This pioneering residence included a fireplace with a chimney, bunk beds, a rain water supply and a bath by the shoreline constructed from rocks.
21 Presenter Maggie Barry, in Milligan (dir.), A Summer Place. 22 This is verified by an entry in the visitors’ book of Alfred Osborne on 15 November 1932, in which he states “The most perfect day I have seen since coming down about 60 odd years ago.” See Jo‐Anne Smith, “The Pilgrim’s Rest at Taylors Mistake,” The Press, 18 January 1996, 16. 23 This was less than fifty years since the establishment of Christchurch and the arrival of the original settlers. See Gordon Ogilvie, The Port Hills of Christchurch (Wellington: Reed, 1978), 24. 19
A telephone link, supported by insulators made from lemonade bottles, was later established between this cave dwelling and the second to be constructed at Taylors Mistake, that of Alfred
Osborne, known as Pilgrims Rest. Osborne, too, was involved in the arts, employed as in engraver in the city of Christchurch and maintaining a house in Worcester Street in the centre of town; his daughter would become a prominent Canterbury painter. This early dwelling also contained many of the conveniences of privileged domestic life, even boasting a camera obscura.24 Over the following years, several more baches were built into the caves, crevices and overhanging cliffs surrounding Taylors Mistake, including the Hermitage, one of the most well known of the cave dwellings, constructed in 1906.
The Hermitage (fig. 10) was built by Jesse Worgan, a Christchurch dentist, from materials salvaged from the International Exhibition held in Christchurch earlier that year and scraps from
Fullers Old Theatre. These were either carried over the hill separating Sumner and Taylors
Mistake and lowered down by rope or dropped off from Sumner by raft on rare calm days. The dwelling was sizable, measuring nine metres wide at the cave mouth, five metres high at its apex and stretching back nineteen metres into the cave. Significantly, a small cave next to the main dwelling contained a separate bedroom for occasional female guests.
Most of the time these men were in their own company, only returning to Christchurch to work and only occasionally bringing their wives and families over for the weekend. Thomas Archbold
24 Hill, Living on the Queens Chain, 27; Don Long, “The Cave Houses of Taylor’s Mistake,” The Third Earth Catalogue, ed. Alister Taylor and Deborah McCormack (Martinborough: Alister Taylor publisher, 1977): 98. See also “The Cave Dwellers,” The Press, 3 April 1911, p. 8, accessed December 14, 2013, http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi‐bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=CHP19110403.2.43&srpos=4&e=‐01‐1911‐‐ 05‐1911‐‐10‐‐1‐‐‐‐0cave+dwellers‐‐ 20
FIGURE 9 Hobson’s Cave House, Taylors Mistake, 1910
FIGURE 10 The Hermitage, Taylors Mistake
21 almost always left his wife and daughter, Daisy, at their city residence on Worcester Street. He did, though, plant an oak tree above his cave bach to commemorate his thirty‐sixth wedding anniversary and he regularly flew a flag made by Daisy. Baching was not a way to forget one’s family and obligations, but a means of retreat. Families and large female groups did, however, frequent Taylors Mistake for commemorative occasions and events.25
In their chronicling of the Taylors Mistake Surf Life Saving Club, Ray Cairns and Barry Turpin describe these early dwellings as ‘superbly‐equipped cave mansions.’26 The interior of the
Hermitage, for example, was adorned with an array of fine Victorian furniture, including a settee, a three metre long oak table and chairs, sideboards complete with dinner set, a duchess, a crystal set radio, an Edison cylinder phonograph and even an upright piano.27 The ceiling and walls were composed of bare painted rock, with a floor of linoleum laid over a concrete base.
Kerosene heaters and gas lanterns added to the comfortable domestic ambiance. The residents slept in bunk beds, a more utilitarian use of space, revealing something of the privileging of the public spaces of the house and the desire to entertain and keep up appearances.
According to a newspaper article in The Press from 1911, the cave dwellings regularly attracted around three to four hundred visitors every Sunday for dinner and entertainment. In contradiction to the mythology of the Man Alone, withdrawing from society and escaping into the New Zealand bush, the residents were upstanding and socially engaged citizens. The article
25 Ray Cairns and Barry Turpin, Guardians of the Mistake: the History of the Taylor’s Mistake Surf Lifesaving Club, 1916‐1991 (Christchurch: The Club, 1991). 26 Cairns and Turpin, Guardians of the Mistake, 13. 27 See Cairns and Turpin, Guardians of the Mistake, 15; Damien Cairns, “Taylors Mistake,” accessed 14 December 2013, http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/Heritage/Places/Public/Taylors‐Mistake/ 22 describes them as “respectable married men occupying responsible positions in the business world.”28 Ivan Densem recalls that in the years before World War One:
there were dozens of concert parties that went over there. They would play during the week and after their final performance in the Theatre Royal on the Saturday night, they’d go over to this cave with the grand piano and they’d have a ‘hideo’ for two or three hours; then walk back to Sumner and an old taxi would take them back to their hotel.29
Photos of these early dwellings constructed from the late nineteenth century until World War
One further reveal a society of cultured and well attired cave inhabitants engaged in civilised activity. The women guests wear their best white dresses, seemingly unsuitable for the rough conditions, as they picnic or pose in the cave openings. Men in three‐piece suits, pocket watches with chains looping through their waistcoats, sit at well equipped and adorned kitchens
(fig. 11), or pose proudly in front of the entrance facade of their abodes, the interiors of bare rock contrasting with their crisp white shirts and the delicate Victorian furnishings. Why, then, would ‘respectable’ and ‘responsible’ men of culture and high social standing spend their weekends dwelling in caves?
Throughout this period Christchurch maintained a distinctly English character and prided itself on its “wise, enlightened and disinterested citizenship.”30 English literature and landscape painting traditions were followed closely; the writings of John Ruskin and paintings of JMW
28 “The Cave Dwellers,” The Press, 3 April 1911, p. 8. Accessed December 14, 2013, http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi‐bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=CHP19110403.2.43&srpos=4&e=‐01‐1911‐‐ 05‐1911‐‐10‐‐1‐‐‐‐0cave+dwellers‐‐ 29 Cairns and Turpin, Guardians of the Mistake, 213. 30 From “Our Debt to the Pioneers,” The Press, 15 December 1900, as quoted in Jim McAloon, “The Christchurch Elite,” in Southern capital: Christchurch: towards a city biography, 1850‐2000, ed. John Cookson and Graeme Dunstall (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2000), 194. 23
FIGURE 11 Hobson’s Cave House, Taylors Mistake, 1910
24 Turner and John Constable proving largely influential.31 The arts provided a connection to civilisation and to the traditions of home in a far away land. As noted in an editorial from the
Christchurch Press in May 1864, the motivation of the engaged Christchurch citizen was that
“which has operated on the upper classes of society in England during the last hundred years – the elevation and extension of refined tastes.”32 An analysis of the development of taste and its connection to landscape will help explain the attitudes of these early British settlers and how the bach came to be.
Landscape Romanticism
They were viewing the landscape with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing, and decided on its capability of being formed into pictures, with all the eagerness of real taste. Here Catherine was quite lost. She knew nothing of drawing – nothing of taste – and she listened to them with an attention which brought her little profit, for they talked in phrases which conveyed scarcely any idea to her.33
So begins Catherine Morland’s journey to the summit of Beechen Cliff with the Tilney family in
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Upon her insistence, Henry Tilney instructs her on the correct manner in which to read the landscape.
He talked of fore‐grounds, distances, and second distance – side‐screens and perspectives – light and shades... and by an easy transition from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the inclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics.34
31 See Jonathan Mane‐Wheoki, “The High Arts in a Regional Culture – From Englishness to Self‐Reliance,” in Southern Capital: Christchurch: Towards a City Biography, 1850‐2000, edited by John Cookson and Graeme Dunstall (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2000). 32 “The Musical Society,” The Press, May 25, 1864, 2. 33 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (London: J. Murray, 1818), 112. 34 Austen, Northanger Abbey, 113. 25
This ability to interpret the land and draw generalities came readily to the ruling class of educated English gentlemen in the nineteenth century; the picturesque landscape was imbued with political meaning. By exercising fine taste, one could discern and design a painterly landscape, the intricate composition distinguished in tint, light and shadow and complete with the requisite variety and irregularity of ground, forest, rock and water found in an idealised natural setting. By controlling and understanding nature based on these cultural parameters, the land was commodified and sovereignty expressed, allowing for appropriation, both real and imagined.
Background ‐ Changing Ideals
Beauty, as understood throughout the Renaissance, relied on the intellectual interpretation of stimuli and judgement. As put by Alberti, beauty was not judged “from mere opinion, but from the workings of a reasoning faculty that is inborn in the mind.”35 As the classical belief in a divine and natural beauty expressed through proportion and order dissipated, new ideas began to generate. Aesthetic sense began to be recognised as distinct from reason and morality, beauty becoming a question of taste rather than perfection.36 The concept of aesthetics, understood as the reception of empirical sensation, changed the relationship between art and nature, rational judgement becoming associated with the experience of both.
35 Leon Battista Alberti, as quoted in Robert Jan van Pelt and Carroll William Westfall, Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 274. 36 This transition in the accepted nature of beauty was progressed through important ontological ruptures such as that occasioned by Claude Perrault in the seventeenth century. For more on this change, see John Macarthur, The Picturesque: architecture, disgust and other irregularities (New York: Routledge, 2007), 4. 26
Scientific and theological developments following the Renaissance had a considerable impact on the changing interpretation of nature. The theories of Isaac Newton greatly influenced a shift in belief in God’s presence contained within divine geometrical order, to an understanding of
God’s immanence in nature, absolute in time and space. Nature began to be understood itself as both rational and miraculous, its mathematical laws expressing divine presence. As articulated by Charles Francois Dupuis, God as understood in this context is “destined to express the idea of a universal force, eternally active, which impresses motion to all of nature, following the laws of a constant and admirable harmony, pervading all matter and being its principle of animation.”37 This conception of an omnipresent God, expressed in motion, whose active force is manifest in the movement of the material universe itself, became the commonly held belief and the only appropriate position of religion amongst thinkers of the Enlightenment.
Aesthetic Theory
In 1757, Edmund Burke published his influential treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.38 This work analysed the physiological effects of natural stimulus, Burke separating aesthetic experience into the two distinct categories of the
Sublime and the Beautiful. Beauty encompasses those things which soothe the senses and provoke feelings of love. The sublime, on the other hand, has the effect of exciting the senses and is associated with fear and terror, provoking the strongest emotional response. The small, smooth and delicate are characteristic of the beautiful; the vast, abrupt, and powerful are
37 Charles Francois Depuis quoted in Alberto Pérez‐Gómez, Built Upon Love (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), 170. 38 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958). 27 attributes of the sublime. Burke’s thesis attained great popularity and was widely influential, interpreted by many as instructions for artistic production.39 Burke’s analysis of the sublime and its subsequent development in such works as A Critique of Judgement by Immanuel Kant greatly influenced the romantic painters of the period, such as JMW Turner, and their preoccupations with violent storms, shipwrecks, daunting cliffs and vast mountain ranges.
Through the expounding of the aesthetic experience of natural phenomenon, nature began to be understood as the ideal state, rich in beauty and the sublime. The closeness and reciprocity between garden, art and nature began to represent the subtlety and sophistication of an educated English taste. William Kent, who had designed the irregular gardens of Lord
Burlington’s villa at Chiswick around 1715, proclaimed “all nature is a garden.”40 This may be interpreted as representing the imperial predisposition to appropriation and what amounts to an aesthetic tautology, “the desire to transform the countryside into a garden that resembled the countryside.”41 Nature was filtered and conceived through specific romantic sensibilities.
Irregularity and a sense of wilderness were contrived and designed, differentiations in nature becoming tools in the repertoire of the artist and gardener. As articulated by Thomas Whately in
1771:
Nothing is unworthy of the attention of the gardener, which can tend to improve his compositions, whether by immediate effects, or by suggesting a train of pleasing ideas. The whole range of nature is open to him, from the parterre to the forest; and whatever is agreeable to the senses or the imagination, he may appropriate to the spot he is to
39 Macarthur, The Picturesque, 5. 40 For the attribution of this dictum to Kent and its variations, see Macarthur, The Picturesque, 4 and Allen Weiss, Mirrors of Infinity (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), 15. 41 Weiss, Mirrors of Infinity, 15. 28
improve: it is a part of his business to collect into one place, the delights which are generally dispersed through different species of country.42
In his addressing of the picturesque, Whately encourages the landscape painter to exclude, combine and rearrange elements of nature discriminately to form the most pleasing composition possible. The resultant exhibition of an idealised nature was to form a sensuous experience for the viewer and an “excellent school wherein to form a taste for beauty.”43 Earth, forest, rock, water and building were to be manipulated based on their context, the time of the day and season when frequented. In summer, for example, one must endeavour to best exhibit within a scene:
...the richness of the produce of the earth, and the luxuriance of the foliage in the woods, the sensations of refreshment added to the beauty of water, the ideas of enjoyment which accompany the sight of every grove, of every building, and every delightful spot; the characters of rocks, heightened by their appendages, and unalloyed by any disconsolate reflections; the connection of the ground with the plantations; the permanency of every tint; and the certainty of every effect.44
Both Uvedale Price and picturesque pioneer William Gilpin, too, conceded that “there are so few perfect compositions in nature,” granting license to the painter and gardener alike to take liberties and invent their own wilderness.45 Price’s Essay on the Picturesque of 1794 was a widely read and very influential work. Here, in opposition to Burke’s earlier treatise, he defined the picturesque as an aesthetic category distinct from the beautiful and sublime. For Price, its irregularity, variation and roughness placed it between the smooth of the beautiful and the
42 Thomas Whately, Observations on modern gardening (London: T Payne, 1771), 256. 43 Whately, Observations on modern gardening, 146‐147. 44 Whately, Observations on modern gardening, 254. 45 Uvedale Price, An essay on the picturesque, as compared with the sublime and the beautiful (London: J. Robson, 1796), 69. 29
FIGURE 12 Author’s sketch of the picturesque seashore of Boulder Bay. Here, ramshackle baches sit on a rocky and irregular ground interwoven with ru ed lanes which mingle with dishevelled foliage and twisted tree trunks and brunches, crea ng a scene of varia on, roughness and irregularity. An old, rusted wince anchors the view and reflects the weathering and deteriora on of the environment.
30 abruptness of the sublime.46 Price praised the irregular picturesque propagated by Gilpin and derided the formulaic naturalism exhibited in the landscape design of Lancelot ‘Capability’
Brown. He argued for asymmetry and a localised interpretation of the everyday lived environment, describing the picturesque nature of rutted lanes, dishevelled foliage and crumbling cottages.47 This helped define the principle characteristics of the picturesque as irregularity, roughness, variety and sudden deviation.
One significant feature of the picturesque landscape was the grotto. These were constructed within picturesque gardens, including within the prominent parks of Painshill, Stowe, Stourhead and Clandon. Throughout the nineteenth century, naturally forming Grottos such as Fingal’s
Cave were visited by interpreters of the picturesque including JMW Turner, William
Wordsworth, John Keats and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and conveyed in poetry and painting. Other naturally formed grottos in New Zealand, such as the Waitomo caves, have been celebrated in such publications as Picturesque New Zealand, written in the early twentieth century by
American picturesque traveller Paul Gooding.48 The landscape of rolling hills, crooked trees and rutted paths giving way to rocky cliffs and foaming seas at Taylors Mistake is thus clearly recognisable as picturesque, made explicit through the literal digging out of caves to form inhabitable grottos by the early dwellers.
46 Edmund Burke contended that “The ideas of the sublime and the beautiful stand on foundations so different, that it is hard, I had almost said impossible, to think of reconciling them in the same subject, without considerably lessening the effect of the one or the other upon the passions.” He explains that the two produce physiologically contrasting effects and if synthesized, these effects would neutralise each other, producing an easily consumed but ultimately trivial result. Although Price praised Burke’s thesis, he maintained that the picturesque formed a distinct aesthetic category which satisfies a want for stimulus and irritation, between the repose offered by the beautiful and the fear and awe inspired by the sublime. See Price, An essay on the picturesque and Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 193. 47 See Macarthur, The Picturesque, 9‐11. 48 Paul Gooding, Picturesque New Zealand (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913). 31
Picturesque Travel: Nationalism and Colonialism
The eighteenth and nineteenth century mark a period of English tourism, imperialist expansion and resource extraction. As observed by Patricia Jasen, picturesque travel and appreciation
“often preceded – or accompanied – immigration and resource exploitation.” 49 As she elaborates, “romanticism’s association between images, commodities, feelings, and personal fulfilment was a vital contributing factor in the development of consumer capitalism, including the growth of the tourist industry.”50 The English picturesque tourist viewed the land of the country as an object of consumption and derived great pleasure from exercising their valued sense of taste in its interpretation. By travelling to picturesque landscapes near and far, these privileged tourists claimed the land as a part of their aesthetic property.51 This inferred the right to subjugate and manipulate it as seen fit.52
The stimulation of the traveler’s emotions through the interpretation of the land became a highly valued pleasure, encouraging the production of the picturesque landscape and the establishment of picturesque voyages. William Gilpin was a pioneer of the picturesque and was
49 Patricia Jasen, Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario 1790‐1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995): 4. 50 Jasen, Wild Things, 11. 51 See Elizabeth Helsinger, “Turner and the Representation of England,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994): 105. 52 It is important to appreciate that even without human intervention, the virgin picturesque landscape still represents a cultural construction. Power is exercised in framing, assessing and judging a landscapes value and fate. Mick Smith evokes Carl Schmitt’s famous words in stating in the context of conservation: “Sovereign is he who decides the exception.” This argument has been posited by William Cronon and elaborated by Timothy Morton, who contends that humankind has such an impact on the world and is so implicated in the environment that nature no longer exists. See Mick Smith, Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xiv; William Cronon, “The trouble with wilderness: or, getting back to the wrong nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995); Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2010). 32 hugely influential in its popularisation. After travelling around the English countryside from
1768‐1776, Gilpin published manuscripts of prose and painting describing his experiences of the landscape (fig. 13). These were published from 1782 and encouraged other leisure seekers to follow in his footsteps, many carrying with them a Claude glass: a convex mirror apparatus used to distort and frame the land in order to capture it more conveniently in painting. This device made explicit the separation of the viewer and the interpretation of the landscape as subject.
Gilpin conveyed this separation and otherness of the viewer and subject in questioning “shall we suppose it a greater pleasure to the sportsman to pursue a trivial animal, than it is to the man of taste to pursue the beauties of nature?”53 The imperialistic attitude of the picturesque tourist is further reflected in his assertion that “After the pursuit we are gratified with the attainment of the object.” Here the landscape is hunted and captured through its careful visual interpretation and painting, leading to sentiments of right and possession.
By the early nineteenth century, many other such picturesque publications were in circulation, encouraging real and vicarious tourism.54 William Wordsworth was the author of one such guide, representing England as “a sort of national property,” open to those with “an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy.”55 This was only inclusive, however, of those with social and
53 William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; & on Sketching Landscape (London: printed for R. Blamire, 1792), 48, accessed June 20, 2014, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/004863369.0001.000 54 These guides instructed the reader on how to view and appreciate the landscape. John Urry has noted, too, the change in emphasis within treatises on travel throughout this period from encouraging scholarly research and discourse to concentrating on the value of first‐hand observation. See John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (London: SAGE Publications, 2002). 55 William Wordsworth, A Guide through the District of the Lakes in the North of England: With a Description of the Scenery, &c., for the use of Tourists and Residents (Kendal: Hudson and Nicholson, 1835): 88. 33
FIGURE 13 A sketch by William Gilpin of Penrith castle and the picturesque landscape as perceived through a Claude glass, 1786.
34 geographic mobility and education in the correct taste to allow a proprietorial interpretation of the landscape. In this way the picturesque reinforced class distinctions and further disenfranchised the working class.
Picturesque travel through the lake districts and English countryside became an important part of the bourgeois lifestyle. This led to social constructions of national identity expressed through the landscape.56 The designed ‘naturalness’ of the picturesque was seen to reflect English political liberalism, in contrast to the authoritarianism expressed in the geometrically ordered
French Garden.57 Poets, painters and gardeners constructed British national identity through the careful representation of an idealised natural landscape, the shared experience of which formed an ‘imagined community.’58 These constructs sought to solidify the empire as a secure and powerful united entity, this projection important to the ruling classes given the actual state of political turmoil.
The picturesque developed in Britain at the same time as extensive agricultural reform which saw many poor agrarian workers lose land and rights. Commons were reduced considerably through a process of enclosure, making rural workers more dependent on wage labour, increasing unrest and acts of rebellion. As put by John Macarthur, “Those people who were developing an aesthetic appreciation of the landscape of Britain were also in a state of low‐level
56 See Jasen, Wild Things and Brian S. Osborne, “Some Thoughts on Landscape: Is it a Noun, a Metaphor, or a Verb?” in Canadian Social Studies, 32:3 (Spring 1998): 93‐97. 57 Macarthur, The Picturesque, 8. 58 Francesco Crocco, “National Eyes: Romantic Poetry and the Rise of British Nationalism,” (PhD diss., The City University of New York, 2008): 2. 35 civil war with its inhabitants.”59 The picturesque, as a tool, could quell revolt through an appeal to nationalism.
These constructs of British identity were not isolated to England. Giselle Byrnes argues that the picturesque represents “a ‘distorting preconception’ applied to nature, in order to translate the distant and exotic into familiar images with which a given audience can identify.”60 It was used as a mechanism to enable the subjugation and exploitation of new land as the British Empire spread to distant corners of the earth. As Byrnes elaborates, “reading the land was the first step in colonising the land, transforming it into landscape. Reading the land involved revealing the land not just as a physical entity, but as an allegorical repository of reference.”61
New Zealand was consistently described and represented by landscape artists as reminiscent of the lake districts and rolling countryside of England during its colonisation beginning in the mid nineteenth century. Landscape painters embellished and manipulated the land in their representations which were sent back to England to entice future immigrants, the artists depicting recognisable pastoral scenes and ascribing picturesque characteristics to Indigenous
59 Macarthur, The Picturesque, 8. 60 Byrnes, “As far as the eye can reach,” 70. William Mitchell posits that New Zealand and the South Pacific in fact provided a fertile ground in which the picturesque could be evaluated and developed. As he contends: “The South Pacific provided, therefore, a kind of tabula rasa for the fantasies of European imperialism, a place where European landscape conventions could work themselves out virtually unimpeded by ‘native’ resistance, where the ‘naturalness’ of those conventions could find itself confirmed by a real place understood to be in a state of nature.” See William Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994): 18. 61 Byrnes, “As far as the eye can reach,” 38. 36
FIGURE 14 Edward Ashworth, Auckland looking north-west, c. 1843.
FIGURE 15 John Waring Saxton, ‘The town and part of the harbour of Nelson in 1842,’ 1845.
37 flora and fauna (fig. 14 & 15).62 Marion Minson has observed within the picturesque paintings of the early colonists the practice of “conversion of the New Zealand bush into English park; with emphasis on controlled and controllable beauty.”63
Art historians such as Francis Pound have argued that the transforming of the land into a familiar landscape had the explicitly political function of appropriating the land from the original
Maori inhabitants, who were alienated and disenfranchised by this foreign aesthetic.64 Patricia
Jasen posits that when actually acknowledged, indigenous cultures in colonised countries became part of the attraction themselves, their only depiction in picturesque painting aiming to assimilate them within the landscape and render them harmless subjects. Establishing cultural relationships in this manner made coercion and exploitation easier further down the line.65
Travelling sketching parties were common during the colonisation of New Zealand and they were often accommodated by Maori tribes as they set about reimagining the land. Their depictions represented visions both objectifying and appropriative, the picturesque acting in this context as “a potent instrument of colonisation.”66
62 See McCarthy, Christine. “A Summer Place: postcolonial retellings of the New Zealand bach.” In Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2, No. 2 (August 1998); Byrnes, “As far as the eye can reach”; Jacky Bowring, Pidgin picturesque, in Landscape Review 2 (1995): 56‐64, and E.A.S. Killick, “Landscape Art in New Zealand,” in Art of the British Empire Overseas, ed. Charles Home (London, New York: "The Studio" Ltd., 1917). 63 Marion Minson, quoted in Bowring, “Pidgin picturesque,” 60. 64 Pound denies that “there is a ‘real’ New Zealand landscape with its ‘real’ qualities of light and atmosphere.” Rather, he has revealed that landscape painting conventions were imported into New Zealand from Britain and passed off as a national style. See Francis Pound, Frames on the Land: Early Landscape Painting in New Zealand (Auckland: Collins, 1982), 11. Nik Luka and Nina‐Marie Lister have commented on a similar practice in the Central Ontario Lakelands, where the presence of the First Nation aboriginal people within the landscape was obliterated as a cultural landscape of European sensibilities was constructed and celebrated in the paintings of such artists as Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. See Nik Luka and Nina‐Marie Lister, “Georgian Bay, Muskoka, and Haliburton: More Than Cottage Country?” in Beyond the Global City: Understanding and Planning for the Diversity of Ontario, ed. Gordon Nelson (Montreal & Kingston: McGill‐Queen’s University Press, 2012) 188‐189. 65 Jasen, Wild Things, 13‐20. 66 Byrnes, “As far as the eye can reach,” 76. 38
To the original Maori inhabitants, Taylors Mistake was known as Te One‐Poto – the little beach.67 Although no permanent settlement is recorded, local Maori would also have taken shelter in the cliffs, fished and gathered shell fish amongst the rocks.68 The community of cave dwellers that emerged and appropriated the region between the nineteenth and twentieth century, however, was entirely European and male. The original native forest vegetation of
Godley Head was removed by the early colonists to form an undulating hillside pasture resembling that of the English countryside. Plant species from England, including pasture grasses such as Cocksfoot, were planted, fulfilling the colonial mission “to claim, tame and redefine the meaning of landscape in specifically British terms.”69 The architectural response to dwelling in the landscape also reflected the picturesque traditions emanating from Britain.
Picturesque Architecture: The Discovery of the Vernacular
The development of taste and philosophical aesthetics and the appreciation of nature by the picturesque aesthete lead to the discovery and influence of vernacular building traditions on architectural practice. Architects and clients studied the works of picturesque theorists such as
Price and Humphry Repton and began to replicate the houses in the landscape of rural workers and peasantry.70 Repton, an influential English landscape designer and theorist, advocated the use of decorative cottages to anchor the scene in the picturesque view and practiced this idea in
67 Gordon Ogilvie, The Port Hills of Christchurch (Christchurch: Phillips and King Publishers): 21. 68 See Foster, “Baches in the Landscape and their Contested Recognition as Heritage,” 32; Cairns, “Taylors Mistake.” 69 Byrnes, “As far as the eye can reach,” 39. 70 As John Macarthur explains, “Architects and clients read Price and studied prints like those by Smith, and in a few short years, from the end of the eighteenth century, the ornamental frivolous buildings built in the gardens and parks of the British great houses changed from exotic samples of antiquity or China to being ornamental versions of the housing of the rural workers just outside the gates.” Macarthur, The Picturesque, 123. 39 his own garden design, incorporating for instance a decorative woodman’s cottage in the Blaise
Castle Estate.71
One of the most famous ornamental cottages of the eighteenth century picturesque garden estate was at Painshill, owned by Charles Hamilton and visited and admired by Thomas Whately and William Gilpin. Here, an unfurnished and neglected hut of wood and thatch housed an ornamental hermit who was to receive 700 guineas for 7 years service. The hermit possessed all the decayed grandeur of the human picturesque: a long scraggly beard, a wrinkled, weather‐ beaten face and long dirty nails. The hermit was to remain silent and hidden except when paraded in front of guests. It wasn’t long, however, before the novelty wore off for the ornamental hermit and he was fired for absenteeism after being spotted at the local pub.72
The romantic portrayal of the ornamental cottage in the landscape in picturesque paintings also helped it join the palette of the landscape designer. Price collected the paintings of English landscape artist Thomas Gainsborough, who was a friend of his grandfather, and was no doubt influenced by the attention he paid to humble subject matter. Gainsborough produced a series of paintings of rural life entitled ‘fancy pictures’ which constituted “a serious preoccupation with the problems of how man can live a productive and virtuous life in a fallen world.”73 From his astute observations of nature, Gainsborough reflected variety and character in his depiction
71 Macarthur, The Picturesque, 271. 72 John Timbs, English Eccentrics (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), 146. 73 Marcia Pointon quoted in Macarthur, The Picturesque, 122. 40 of cottages (fig. 16). The appeal of such rustic cottage scenery was described by engraver John
Thomas Smith in 1797:
the weather‐beaten thatch, bunchy and varied with moss – the mutilated chimney top – the fissures and crevices of the inclining wall – the roof of various angles and inclinations – the tiles of different hues – the fence of bungling workmanship – the wild unrestrained vine…the broken basket – the fragment of a chair or bench…the mischievous pranks of ragged children…and the unrepaired accidents of wind and rain – offer far greater allurements to the painter’s eye, than more neat, regular or formal arrangements could possibly have done.74
While Gainsborough’s irregular cottages appear as natural objects in the landscape, Smith’s own etchings show the cottage as an “object in entropy,” a decaying manifestation of wretchedness
(fig. 17).75 The details indulge the varieties of neglect and squalor of the rural poor. This reflects the detached self‐interest of the eighteenth‐century picturesque aesthete, delighting in conditions of misery and poverty.
The Picturesque Cottage
What began as a somewhat frivolous eighteenth century practice of mimicry and detached amusement soon developed into a more authentic appreciation of the vernacular throughout the nineteenth century. John Ruskin was instrumental in this shift of attitude, deriding the heartlessness of the ‘lower,’ exploitative picturesque and championing a more powerful and sympathetic aesthetic appreciation influenced greatly by the paintings of JMW Turner. This
‘noble’ or ‘high’ picturesque was based on humility and sought truth in humble rustic scenes,
74 John Thomas Smith, Remarks on rural scenery; with twenty etchings of cottages from nature; and some observations and precepts relative to the picturesque (London: 1797), 9. 75 Macarthur, The Picturesque, 123. 41
FIGURE 16 Thomas Gainsborough, ‘The Co age Door,’ c. 1780.
FIGURE 17 John Thomas Smith, ‘On Merrow Common, Surrey,’ 1797.
42 engendering the rural poor with a respectability previously lacking in the picturesque.76 Turner’s paintings portrayed the rural peasantry as harmonious inhabitants of the British landscape and took a sympathetic disposition to their poverty. He chose his subject matter carefully, never exploiting scenes of misery and neglect for aesthetic pleasure, but celebrating the relationship between the land and its inhabitants. A collection of Turner’s water‐colours painted whilst travelling throughout the British countryside at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century depict a collection of humble cottages scattered along the picturesque seashore at the base of rocky cliffs, strikingly resembling scenes from Taylors Mistake (fig. 18 &
20).
From the latter half of the nineteenth century until World War One, Ruskin was the most popular and influential British critic of art and architecture, read enthusiastically by the cultured
Christchurch populace. His endorsement of the Gothic in The Seven Lamps of Architecture
(1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851) inspired Benjamin Mountfort and other Christchurch architects in their design of the city’s landmark buildings, including the Cathedral, Canterbury
Museum, the Provincial Council building and Canterbury University.77 Ruskin’s works were widely distributed throughout the colony but were particularly influential in Christchurch, where
English traditions continued to pervade more intently. Mountford’s 1866 design of the New
Zealand Trust and Loan Company building, his Twentyman and Cousins Store of 1879 and the designs of architect W.B. Armson including the Fisher’s building of 1880, the New Zealand Loan
76 See John Ruskin, Modern Painters, v. 1‐4, London: J.M. Dent and co: 1923; Macarthur, The Picturesque, 96‐103; and John Macarthur, “The Heartlessness of the Picturesque: Sympathy and Disgust in Ruskin’s Aesthetics,” Assemblage 32 (1997), 126‐141. 77 Ian Lochhead, A Dream of Spires: Benjamin Mountfort and the Gothic Revival (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 1999). 43
FIGURE 18 JMW Turner, ‘Briton Ferry: A Fisherman’s Co age and a Boat Pulled Up under a Low Cliff,’ 1795-6. FIGURE 19 A complementary scene at Boulder Bay, Taylors Mistake.
44 FIGURE 20 JMW Turner, ‘Scene in Lancashire or North Wales,’ c.1808.
FIGURE 21 Hobson’s Bay, Taylors Mistake.
45 and Mercantile building of 1881 and the J. Lewis offices of 1877 all reflect the Venetian Gothic and the direct influence of The Stones of Venice.78
For Ruskin, the production of beauty in our artefacts represented the ultimate human calling.
The Gothic appealed to him for its fine ornament and craft expressing the nature of the maker.
The picturesque, however, was more closely related to the sublime, the human that came closer to nature than to art. The presence of human life allowed a gauge of the natural and the sublime, the age, decay and weathering of the human constructed environment reflecting and elucidating that of the landscape. Throughout the mid to late nineteenth century, Ruskin expounded on the attraction of the picturesque cottage and its relationship with nature. In the
Lamp of Memory chapter in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ruskin describes a picturesque scene in the forest above the city of Champagnole in the Jura of France:
It is a spot which has all of the solemnity, with none of the savagery, of the Alps; where there is a sense of a great power beginning to be manifested in the earth, and of a deep and majestic concord in the rise of the long low lines of piny hills; the first utterance of those mighty mountain symphonies…the far reaching ridges of pastoral mountain succeed each other, like the long and sighing swell which moves over quiet waters from some far off stormy sea.79
Ruskin then recounts with a “sudden blankness and chill” his endeavour to imagine the same scene in “some aboriginal forest of the New Continent,” isolated from human presence:
The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river its music; the hills became oppressively desolate; a heaviness in the darkened forest showed how much of their former power had been dependent on a life that was not theirs, how much of the glory of the imperishable, or continually renewed, creation is reflected from things more precious in their memories than it, in its renewing. Those ever springing flowers and ever flowing
78 Ian Lochhead, “Venetian Gothic” in Reconstruction: Conversations on a City, ed. Sarah Pepperle and David Simpson (Christchurch: Christchurch Art Gallery): 40. 79 John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & co., 1880), 232. Accessed at http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015008540638;view=1up;seq=25 46
streams had been dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue; and the crests of the evening sky received a deeper worship, because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron wall of Joux, and the four‐square keep of Granson.80
Ruskin argued that the affinity of any picturesque scene is dependent on its juxtaposition with the man‐made, leading him to conclude that “the graceful irregularity and marked character of the whole must be dwelt on with equal delight by the eye of the poet, the artist, or the unprejudiced architect.”81 For Ruskin, the aim of the humble cottage dwelling in the landscape was to animate the scene without disturbing its repose. In The Poetry of Architecture, Ruskin states “Of all embellishments by which the efforts of man can enhance the beauty of natural scenery, those are the most effective which can give animation to the scene, while the spirit which they bestow is in unison with its general character.”82 It is for this reason that Ruskin devotes much attention to the cottage and its relationship with its natural setting. Whether scattered along the shoreline or clustered on a mountain side, the cottage expresses “a quiet life‐giving voice, that is as peaceful as silence itself.”83 Its humbleness, irregularity and lack of ornament reflect and enhance the effects of the rawness and variation of its surroundings.
Further in this work, Ruskin describes the qualities that a cottage should possess based on its landscape context. In rocky terrain, such as the mountainous environment of Westoreland,
England, a cottage should be constructed as to attain the following nature:
Everything about it should be natural, and should appear as if the influences and forces which were in operation around it had been too strong to be resisted, and had rendered all efforts of art to check their power, or conceal the evidence of their action, entirely
80 Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 234. 81 John Ruskin, The Poetry of Architecture: Cottage, Villa, Etc. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1877), 22, accessed at http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015005265080;view=1up;seq=7 82 Ruskin, The Poetry of Architecture, 7. 83 Ruskin, The Poetry of Architecture, 8. 47
FIGURE 22 Sketch of old cave dwelling by the author.
“surrounded with cliffs to which it bears some propor on; and if it be par ally concealed, not intruding on the eye, but well united with everything around, it becomes altogether perfect; humble, beau ful, and interes ng. Perhaps no co age can then be found to equal it; and none can be more finished in effect, graceful in detail, and characteris c as a whole.” - Ruskin, The Poetry of Architecture, 38-39.
48 unavailing. It cannot but be an alien child of the mountains; but it must show that it has been adopted and cherished by them…it can never lie too humbly in the pastures of the valley, nor shrink too submissively into the hollows of the hills; it should seem to be asking the storm for mercy, and the mountain for protection: and should appear to owe to its weakness, rather than its strength, that it is neither overwhelmed by one, nor crushed by the other.84
Ruskin’s endorsement of the vulnerable character a dwelling should possess against the power and dominance of nature reflects the nature of the settlement at Taylors Mistake. Here the ramshackle baches cower into the crevices of the cliffs, just out of reach of the pounding surf.
Several baches in fact tread this line too finely, many damaged and some even completely swept away during powerful storms, including six during a particularly violent storm in 1918, or crushed by falling rocks.85 This precarious positioning of the baches and their meek construction emphasised the force of the surrounding natural phenomena.86
Following Price’s An Essay on the Picturesque, a number of works surfaced encouraging the construction and habitation of cottages by men of culture and station. James Malton appealed to “those Noblemen and Gentlemen of taste, who build retreats for themselves, with desire to
84 Ruskin, The Poetry of Architecture, 44‐45. 85 The bach of poet Don Long, who wrote several poems about Taylors Mistake, was one to suffer the fate of being swept out to sea. See “Long, Don (D.S),” New Zealand Book Council, accessed May 24 2014 at http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/longdon.html; Don Long, “The Cave Houses of Taylor’s Mistake,” in The Third Earth Catalogue, ed. Alister Taylor and Deborah McCormack (Martinborough: Alister Taylor publisher, 1977), 100. See also “Omnium Gatherum,” Otago Daily Times, 26 March 1918, 8; “High Seas: Damage at New Brighton,” The Press, 15 September 1919, 7. 86 The description of the Taylors Mistake settlement by the landscape architect of the Christchurch City Council, Andrew Craig, in a hearing regarding their conservation, closely echoes Ruskin: “the very nature of the baches, the fact that they are stylistically vernacular are small, humble, rumpty‐do and precariously located in an environment that threatens them with extinction at any moment probably says more about the character of their setting than if they were not there at all. In this sense the baches tell a story about the dynamic animation and sublimity of their environment that probably could not be better told. Again, if we are talking about preserving the natural character of this coastal environment then these baches, in my opinion, go a long way toward defining it.” As quoted in Foster, Baches in the Landscape and their Contested Recognition as Heritage, 82. 49 have them appear as cottages.”87 Malton implored these gentlemen and persons of cultivated taste to “take the Cottage under protection; which, unless speedily done, will be found to exist no where but on the canvas of the painter.”88 He gave instruction as how best to construct a picturesque cottage, emphasising the importance of irregular form, the variations and effects coming of weather, time and accident, diverse and harmonious colouring and interaction with wild plant life. The requisite “distinguishing character” relied also upon an entrance porch, irregular breaks in wall direction, asymmetry, boldly projecting roofs of various forms and materiality and walls of various angle and composition.89 Malton was explicit in his instruction, stating:
One point, however, is principally to be regarded by those, who are desirous to build picturesque rural dwellings; which is, never to aim at regularity, but to let the outward figure conform only to the internal conveniency; and rather to overcharge projecting parts than in any wise to curtail them; for on a judicious contrast of light and shade, does the picturesque in a great measure depend.90
Treatises such as An Essay on British Cottage Architecture were widely read throughout Britain and greatly influenced the embracing of a vernacular architectural tradition once looked upon with mere aesthetic disinterest by those of taste. From 1834‐1838, John Claudius Loudon published Architecture Magazine, where between 1837‐1838 Ruskin’s descriptions of the picturesque cottage in The Poetry of Architecture was originally serialised. These journals were much sought‐after and widely distributed throughout North America and Australia. In 1833,
87 James Malton, An Essay on British Cottage Architecture : Being an attempt to perpetuate on principle, that peculiar mode of building, which was originally the effect of chance. Supported by fourteen designs, with their technography, or plans, laid down to scale ; comprising dwellings for the peasant and farmer, and retreats for the gentleman; with various observations thereon: the whole extending to twenty‐one plates, designed and executed in Aqua‐Tinta (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1798), 2. 88 Malton, An essay on British cottage architecture, 11. 89 Malton, An essay on British cottage architecture, 6. 90 Malton, An essay on British cottage architecture, 27. 50
Loudon published An Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture. This work was hugely popular and brought cottage construction and dwelling to a wider audience. This work disseminated the knowledge and skills requisite to construct a cottage of one’s own from readily available materials. The humble cottage was now something for the cultured aesthete not only to admire with a detached gaze, but to built and inhabit themselves, at least on weekends. This work developed many of the ideas of earlier picturesque pattern books, including the propagation of an irregular external form reflecting a simple and efficient internal organisation.
This practical development of architectural planning preceded modernism and was to become the basis of the ‘picturesque utility’ as theorised in the mid nineteenth century by Augustus
Welby Pugin. Pugin derided the construction of a contrived picturesque, arguing that it should evolve from pragmatic concerns. He insisted on an efficient plan dictating the external form of any building, stating:
...when modern architects avoid this defect of regularity, they frequently fall into one equally great with regard to irregularity; I mean, when a building is designed to be picturesque, by sticking as many ins and outs, ups and downs, about it as possible. The picturesque effect of the ancient buildings, results from ingenious methods by which the old builders overcame local and constructive difficulties. An edifice which is arranged with the principal view of looking picturesque, is sure to resemble an artificial waterfall, or a made‐up rock, which are generally so unnaturally natural as to appear ridiculous...for to make a building inconvenient for the sake of obtaining irregularity, would be scarcely less ridiculous than preparing working drawings for a new ruin. But all these inconsistencies have arisen from this great error – the plans of buildings are designed to suit the elevation, instead of the elevation being made subservient to the plan.91
91 See Benjamin Ferrey, Recollections of A. N. Welby Pugin, and his father, Augustus Pugin; with notices of their works (London: Edward Stanford, 1861), 285‐286. 51
Pugin advocated, too, for honesty in construction and truth to materials, deriding superfluous ornament and attempts to conceal or beautify a buildings constituent elements. These ideas were to make Pugin another popular architect and theorist with the cultured elite of
Christchurch, his works in Britain being highly publicised and admired. He was also commissioned to design several churches in Australia and his architect sons carried on his legacy with buildings in Australia and New Zealand. Benjamin Mountfort, the most prominent and prolific Christchurch architect of the nineteenth century, was greatly influenced by Pugin. From
1844‐1848 Mountfort was apprenticed to Richard Carpenter, a good friend and follower of
Pugin’s, and Mountfort even possessed one of his original drawings.92 Samuel Farr, another popular architect of Christchurch and designer of the Christchurch Normal School of 1876, was also greatly indebted to Pugin, reflecting his extending influence over the architectural heritage of Christchurch.93
The early baches of Taylors Mistake were simple structures made from beach stones, driftwood, dunnage from passing ships, flattened kerosene tins, rotting weatherboards and other reusable materials. Their irregular forms resulted from the practical arrangement of internal space within precarious sites, their interaction with the caves and projecting rock. The blistered paintwork, rot and rust coming of age and weathering was embraced by the bach dwellers and reflected the rawness and harshness of the environment. The asymmetry, juxtaposition of different materials, walls of various direction and composition and the projecting forms of the early
92 W. David McIntyre, McIntyre, David W, “Onwards and Upwards – Building the City,” in Southern Capital: Christchurch: Towards a City Biography, 1850‐2000, ed. John Cookson and Graeme Dunstall (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2000), 98. 93 Deborah Shepard, The Architectural Heritage of Christchurch: 1. The Normal School (Christchurch: Christchurch City Council City Planning Division, 1981), 5‐6. 52 baches render them veritable manifestations of the picturesque. In this way, the builder occupiers reflect the ideas and influence of theorists such as Price, Loudon, Ruskin and Pugin.94
From this history of taste and the picturesque it is clear that the ideological foundations of the bach lie not in the pragmatism of the pioneers hut but in a much deeper British aesthetic tradition. This tradition, as propagated by John Ruskin throughout the mid to late nineteenth century, is responsible, too, for the Gothic heritage of Christchurch City. Whilst the Gothic revival architectural artefacts of the city reflect the beauty and humanity of the new civilisation, the baches of the picturesque landscape provide animation and a gauge of the sublime power of nature.
Appropriation
As explained by John Macarthur, “A degree of ownership is irreducible in the picturesque... to look at something as if it were a picture is also to imagine it as a product of viewing; a thing to be had.”95 With the picturesque origins of the baches of Taylors Mistake outlined, it is important now to elaborate on how the subjugation of the landscape led to its appropriation and naturalised acquisition.
A year after Price published his important treatise on the picturesque, Humphry Repton released Sketches and Hints on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. Repton wrote
94 Paul Walker and Justine Clark make mention of Ruskin’s ‘high’ picturesque and Pugin’s ‘picturesque utility’ in their description of the baches of Taylors Mistake. See Walker and Clark, Looking for the Local, 31. 95 Macarthur, The Picturesque, 176. 53 less about the aesthetic theory of the picturesque and more about its inherent social and cultural principles. Here he introduced the concept of appropriation, the idea of commodifying the landscape as a product to be viewed and owned. Repton gave instruction as to how the background context of a landscape park could be made to appear a natural part of the property, sometimes even encouraging his clients to extend their legal boundaries in order to complete the composition. As he explains:
A view into a square or into [city] parks may be cheerful and beautiful, but it wants appropriation; it wants that charm that only comes with ownership, the exclusive right of enjoyment, with the power of refusing others should share our pleasure.96
This reflects a strongly imperialistic attitude; picturesque taste was seen as emblematic of power and privilege, the view representing sovereignty over the land.
Repton argued for the design of prospects: views down over the land from an elevated position which could not be successfully conveyed in landscape painting. This followed on from the ideas of Thomas Whately, who proclaimed that a gardener “is not debarred from a view down the sides of a hill, or a prospect where the horizon is lower than the station, because he never saw them in a picture.”97 The prospect represents a view of the land from an omnipotent position, the privileged point from which one may observe and order all below, asserting dominion over the land. This is closely associated with imperialism, William Mitchell contending that “Empires move outward in space as a way of moving forward in time; the ‘prospect’ that opens up is not just a spatial scene but a projected future of ‘development’ and exploitation.”98 This early
96 Repton quoted in Macarthur, The Picturesque, 178. 97 Whately, Observations on modern gardening, 148. 98 Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 17. 54 development rendered the picturesque “a theory of how taste could be normalised within an elite and in relation to objects appropriated by that elite.”99
At Taylors Mistake, the baches have been constructed without permission on Crown land; the cave dwellers and bach builders set up where they wished and staked a claim to the site.
Christine McCarthy argues that the bach appropriates more than just its direct footprint, the view interiorising the wider landscape. As she contends, “Built to produce views, the bach drags the sea into the land,” allowing one to “occupy the view as another domestic interior.” As she elaborates:
New Zealand’s obsessive and possessive claims to ‘nature’ pervert and endorse the scenic perpetration of the bach. The beach is what the bach desires for its interior… Situated at the water’s edge, the bach casts its interior without itself, outside inside New Zealand and the natural. It is here in the bach’s external interior that New Zealand’s national identity founders and in that act of foundering, colonisation (literally) takes place in… the desire to ‘knock up a bach in front of a great view.’100
The carefully‐framed window, or even the framing of the cave openings (fig. 23), draw in the picturesque as much as they cut out the distasteful; the same way in which picturesque landscape paintings framed the view and instructed the cultured aesthete how to interpret the landscape.101 In this way, the exterior of the bach is inside the picturesque view, the inhabitants
99 Macarthur, “The Heartlessness of the Picturesque,” 139. 100 Christine McCarthy, A Summer Place. 101 Whilst framing views in this manner, the viewer is in fact alienated from the landscape as a detached outsider, Paul Shepard stating that this reflects a tradition in which “Man withdrew from the picture and turned to look at it.” This highlights the difference between ownership and belonging, visual surveillance and embodied experience, to be elucidated shortly. See Steven Bourassa, The Aesthetics of Landscape (London: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 1991), 3‐ 4; Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness. London: Pion, 1976. For more on the frame of the picturesque painting, see Francis Pound, Frames on the land: early landscape painting in New Zealand (Auckland: Collins, 1983) and Jacky Bowring “Putting the frames in perspective” in Landscape New Zealand, November/December 1999. For a more general and theoretical discussion of the role of the frame in painting, see Georg Simmel, “The Picture Frame: An Aesthetic Study,” in Theory Culture Society 11:1 (1994), 11‐17 and for a comparison with the window, see Georges Teyssot, A Topology of Everyday Constellations (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013). 55
FIGURE 23 View from a cave hollowed out for dwelling, Taylors Mistake.
56 in a way appropriating the entire composition; while inside, the window of the bach interiorises the landscape in a possessive manner, extending sentiments of ownership. The window of the bach, then, echoes the apertures of the World War Two fortifications built into the hills of
Godley Head; the view representing the territory of perceived ownership, its encroachment often exciting sentiments of apprehension and defence. This establishment of a seemingly private domain in and around Taylors Mistake has provoked much debate and complaint from some members of the wider public who have felt disenfranchised and alienated from the land.102
‘Man Alone’ Together
A paradox exists in the mythology of Taylors Mistake, some residents romanticising the isolation and their own self sufficiency whilst clearly finding comfort in company. As expressed by past
Taylors Mistake bach resident Fred Andrews, “Who wants town… I like my own company. You can do what you like out here. You are not told to do anything you don’t like doing.”103 Ivan
Densem also fondly reminisced of “a world apart with this background of rock, the sun, and the sea… you could be down there for a week and not see anybody.”104 Yet the popular Sunday gatherings at Taylors Mistake in the years prior to World War One were infamous and photographs of the baches from this period often capture groups of men together and occasionally families. The very fact that the baches exist in a community testifies to a desire to
102 John Urry discusses the gaze of the tourist and its appropriating nature in Urry, The Tourist Gaze. For a comprehensive record of the contested nature of Taylors Mistake, see Foster, Baches in the Landscape and their Contested Recognition as Heritage. 103 Long, “The Cave Houses of Taylor’s Mistake,” 100. 104 Hill, Living on the Queens Chain, 30‐31. 57 share the experience of living amongst nature and maintain a civilising connection with society.105
At this point it is pertinent to mention the true origins of the ‘Man Alone’ introduced earlier in this study. In 1997 the photos history was uncovered: its true location was revealed to be Piha, a coastal settlement near Auckland; the date found to be around 1916 and the lone male figure identified as Hans Peter Knutzen, a Dutch immigrant. Word quickly spread through architectural circles and further details emerged. Aside from this hut, Knutzen owned a house in Auckland where his family resided, in the affluent, inner‐city neighbourhood of Ponsonby. The hut was owned by the Piha Sawmill where Mr Knutzen was manager. Rather than being alone in the bush, it was part of a community and overlooked several other houses occupied by workers and their families (fig. 24). The privileged position of his hut, central and elevated above the rest, indicated Mr Knutzens important role in the company hierarchy. He even had a housekeeper,
Robin Skinner remarking “Rather than being man alone he was man attended.”106 Further photographs of the hut emerged, revealing a well adorned interior with scientific objects and a full bookshelf of academic works (fig. 25)
105 Raymond Williams has gone some way to unpack the associations held by many regarding community life in the town and country and debunk popular preconceptions and myths. As he states, “we have, finally, to refuse any simple contrast between country and city, or knowable and unknowable communities. Our actual history is one of constant and increasing interaction between them, and the only limits to our understanding are the fixed forms in which various stages of this process, and various specific interpretations determined by temporary conditions, become influentially embodied.” See Raymond Williams, “Country and City in the Modern Novel” (paper presented at the W.D. Thomas Memorial Lecture, University College of Swansea, 26 January 1987), 15. 106 Skinner, “The Whare in the Bush,” 68. 58
FIGURE 24 A.P. Godber, ‘Panorama overlooking the mber se lement at Piha,’ c 1915-16.
FIGURE 25 A.P. Godber, ‘Hut Interior,’ c 1915-17.
59 As opposed to an individual who rejected society to live on his own terms in the bush, Knutzen was of high social standing, well educated and amassed a relatively high degree of wealth. He supported his family from his second home and resided over a working community in the heart of one of New Zealand’s most profitable enterprises. Rather than living harmoniously amongst nature, Knutzen was there to exploit the natural resources of the area in the milling of giant native Kauri trees.107 This cornerstone of the pioneer narrative has thus been exposed as a romantic myth constructed in the twentieth century which further dispels this theory as the ideological origin of the bach. New Zealand art critic Francis Pound further critiques this notion of romanticised solitude, proclaiming “the whole painful ‘silence’, ‘isolation’ and ‘blankness’ business was an intellectual’s construction.”108
The grouping of cottages to form picturesque settlements was in fact something of concern to nineteenth century theorists. Ruskin wrote that “when a number of these cottages are grouped together, they break upon each other’s formality, and form a mass of fantastic projection… full of character and picturesque in the extreme.”109 After a dozen baches were constructed in 1910 alone, there were a total of 30 nestled within the cliffs from neighbouring Boulder Bay to
Taylors Mistake beach. The collection of baches responded directly to their setting, anchoring and animating the scene and reflecting the raw character of the environment of rough seas and steep, rocky cliffs. Amongst this environment, a strong community of dwellers emerged.
107 See Skinner, “The Whare in the Bush,” for a comprehensive debunking of this myth of national architectural origins. 108 Francis Pound, The Construction of New Zealand: Art and National Identity, 1930‐1970 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2009), 35. 109 Ruskin, The Poetry of Architecture, 38. 60
Gatherings were often held amongst the early residents of the cave baches, including in January
1914 when Alfred Osborn, the second to build a cave dwelling, was honored for the last 20 years he had spent constructing a four kilometer communal path using only a hand trowel. This rutted path was picturesque in its irregularity and unevenness, meandering along the edge of the cliffs between Taylors Mistake and Boulder Bay. The cave dwelling known as the Hermitage was “something of a great hostel,” attracting many visitors from Christchurch and abroad, entertained by tramping, card games and singalongs around the grand piano.110 Taylors Mistake, then, was a social environment. This is in keeping with the English romanticised notion of landscape, in which the human complements the natural.
Based on this history, the origins of the settlement of Taylors Mistake and the cultural trope of the bach lie in British landscape romanticism and the picturesque. In this way, Taylors Mistake represents the colonising edge of the new civilisation; the natural environment was transformed, appropriated and manipulated based on an aesthetic convention imported from the motherland.
However, a cultural shift in the bach building tradition following World War One is evident and has been noticed by Peter Wood.111 At this point, Taylors Mistake and other exurban areas around the country grew considerably in popularity, but no longer did English gentlemen in dress suits frequent ‘cave mansions’ for formal dinners and singalongs.
110 Ray Cairns and Barry Turpin, Guardians of the Mistake, 15. 111 See Wood, “The Bach.” 61
A Coming of Age
On the 25th of April 1915, after the cave‐dwelling community of Taylors Mistake had established itself, New Zealand troops, along with those of several other allied countries, stormed the shores of the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey. Forty thousand Turkish soldiers awaited them in dug‐ out fortifications in the over‐looking hills. What ensued over the next eight months was a ghastly campaign that had no significant bearing on the war but greatly affected national consciousness. The New Zealand army, fighting as part of the ANZAC (Australian and New
Zealand Army Corps) sustained massive loses; of the roughly 8,500 who served over the course of the campaign, around a third were killed. This represents the highest percentage of fatalities of any campaign from World War One in which New Zealanders were involved.
This military disaster commenced New Zealand’s coming of age. Those troops who left the shores of New Zealand to sail to the other side of the world as part of the British Empire returned home distinctly New Zealanders.112 Those several months of sustained and horrendous trench warfare and the impact they had on those at home “severed, at least partially, the umbilical cord that tied New Zealand to the Motherland of Britain, but at a terrible cost.”113 The experience of war and the effort to establish a new national identity may be interpreted in the change that occurred at Taylors Mistake following the return of New Zealand’s servicemen.
Peter Wood has already noted that “the shift at Taylors Mistake from ‘cave‐mansions’ to the more rudimentary accommodations for which it is known” could be attributed to this sense of
112 As observed by commentators including Maurice Shadbolt. See Wood, “The Bach,” 48. 113 Wood, “The Bach,” 48. 62 nationhood following the experience of Gallipoli.114 Inherited traditions were reinterpreted and appropriated and the bach took on greater significance.
Although not anticipating intimate conflict within trenches only metres apart, the New Zealand soldiers in Gallipoli were resourceful and quick to improvise. The “bush tinkering” and
“antipodean ingenuity” learnt in the colonisation of the country and warfare with the indigenous Maori tribes made the New Zealander infamous, capable of converting everyday objects into tools of war; periscopes, for instance, were fashioned from shaving mirrors and old ammunition boxes.115 The periscope converted the battlefield into a picture, a grotesque parallel of the Claude glass. This abstraction and interiorisation of an external space reflects, too, the picture frame and window as mentioned earlier.
Peter Wood notes the change in the interpretation of the environment based on the complexities of the trench. Amongst the mayhem, hidden danger and distorted visual field, communication shifted to more aural forms, namely the telephone and radio. As stated by
Martin Jay, “The invisibility of the enemy put a premium upon auditory signals and seemed to make the experience peculiarly subjective and intangible.”116 The subterranean environment saturated the senses; the intense tactile, olfactory and gustatory sensations also powerfully defined the experience.
114 “The Bach: The Cultural History of a Local Typology” by Peter Wood details this shift in detail. This discussion draws greatly from this work, for which I am indebted. 115 Wood, “The Bach,” 49. 116 Martin Jay, as quoted in Wood, The Bach, 49. 63
Through the translation of domestic tradition, the trench became the grotesque cave‐house.
Within these dug‐outs, cups of tea were shared, letters from home read, biscuit tins turned into pieces of furniture.117 The uncanniness of domestic ritual carried out within such a dangerous and absurd setting and the transgressions between interior and exterior reflect an approach inherited from the colonisers of New Zealand who domesticated the wild bush and is something that continued to be reflected after both world wars; the two great periods of bach building in
New Zealand from 1920‐1930 and 1945‐1955, corresponding with the return of servicemen.118
Soldiers and journalists conveyed familiar yet bizarre descriptions of the conditions of inhabitation in Gallipoli. One referred to a camp “of a very different nature to that which any artist has seen or imagined. It might be likened to a hillside of cave dwellings... These cave dwellings looked down on to the blue waters of the gulf.”119 This description alludes to an uncanny tradition in which the foreign fields of war were made comprehensible and domesticated through their comparison with a familiar and safe environment.120 This practice may have influenced the translation of wartime experience into the landscape of New Zealand and Taylors Mistake. As contended by Peter Wood, “Taylors Mistake might be said to exhibit a version of domestic living that mimics the digging, cave dwelling, and improvisation of living explicit at Gallipoli.”121
117 Wood, “The Bach,” 50‐52. 118 By the end of the 1950s there were around 25,000 baches in New Zealand. See Foster, “Baches in the Landscape and their Contested Recognition as Heritage,” 28; Thompson, The Bach. 119 “Anzac Cone,” Mount Ida Chronicle, 24 September 1915, p. 1, accessed December 14, 2013, http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi‐ bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=search&d=MIC19150924.2.6&srpos=2&e=‐12‐1914‐‐ 01‐1916‐‐10‐‐1‐‐‐‐0cave+dwellings‐‐ 120 Wood, “The Bach,” 51‐52. 121 Wood, “The Bach,” 53. 64
Bach culture now took on a more phenomenological dimension; the bach became a refuge, a place to escape and mediate between the self and a sometimes brutal world.122 At Taylors
Mistake, domestic practice became yet less refined, the interiors reflecting the decrepit state of the exteriors and the inhabitants more reliant on the salvation offered by the land. The fine
Victorian interior furnishings and extravagances of the early baches including camera obscuras and pianos gave way to more simple and utilitarian furnishings, such as beds made from “four stakes and a strip of canvas” and “armchairs that’ll give you a backache within a day.”123 Rather than privileged weekend aesthetes who maintained professional employment in the city, many bach dwellers were displaced and disillusioned, seeking peace and respite in a life lived in greater harmony with nature.124
Learning how to Dwell
The end of World War Two saw servicemen return to a great housing shortage. As remarked by the president of the Auckland Returned Services Association in 1946, “men who had been
122 Peter Wood, in addressing the baches of Taylors Mistake, has stated “The bach in these examples would be the embodiment of the war brought back and sanitised, then shared with families as a collective experience of peace rather than war, and which could act as a social mediator to allow some unspoken transfer between parties to address damage, the ‘building’ of a national identity.” Robin Skinner, too, has noted that “Many veterans of the second world war…had experienced the brutality of conflict, and sought to integrate design with life and to find an alliance with nature.” Paul Thompson understands this condition as integral to the bach, becoming ingrained in the tradition. He describes the retreat from civilization to “a more primitive existence… the protagonists must travel away from their normal homes and habits to rediscover nature and themselves at the bach.” This is interpreted by Christine McCarthy as “intrinsic to a process of self identity and perpetrates New Zealand’s reliance on constructions of nature as essential to its identification.” See Wood, “The Bach,” 54; Skinner, Whare in the Bush, 61; Thompson, The Bach, 6; McCarthy, “The Bach,” 3. 123 See Cairns and Turpin, Guardians of the Mistake, 75; McCarthy, “A Summer Place,” 16, quoting Dave Cull in Milligan (dir.), A Summer Place. 124 As put by Cairns and Turpin, “The war changed and claimed millions of lives, and with the benefit of hindsight, it could be said to have changed the nature of Taylor’s Mistake, and the characters who inhabited the place.” Cairns and Turpin, Guardians of the Mistake, 71. 65 decorated by the King were living in backyard hovels.”125 Many returned soldiers took to building baches and digging ‘dug‐outs’ on the beach, where men would gather around a central fire, talk and drink. This tradition was practiced at Taylors Mistake and was observed only from a respectful distance by the uninitiated.126 It was at this time that most of the rough dwellings on ‘Rotten Row,’ a paper road behind Taylors Mistake beach, were constructed.
Despite the housing shortage, the returned soldiers were able to improvise and construct their own habitats. This was at the time Heidegger was writing Building Dwelling Thinking in which he contends:
On all sides we hear talk about the housing shortage…However hard and bitter, however hampering and threatening the lack of houses remains, the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses. The real plight of dwelling is indeed older than the world wars with their destruction, older also than the increase of the earth's population and the condition of the industrial workers. The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.127
In Building Dwelling Thinking, Heidegger examines the relationship between these intertwined activities and what it means to dwell in the land. In contrast to the violence of domesticity, he argues here that dwelling is in fact a peaceful act. This is first explained through an etymological analysis of the word dwelling, Heidegger concluding that “To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. The
125 Jane Thomson, “The Policy of Land Sales Control: Sharing the Sacrifice”, in The New Zealand Journal of History, 25:1 (April 1991): 17. As quoted in McCarthy, “Partial Architectures,” 33. 126 Wood, “The Bach,” 54. Here Wood recounts the experiences of architect Paul Goldsmith who was conceived in and inhabited a cave bach for many years in Taylors Mistake. 127 Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971), 158. I do not posit here that the return servicemen cave dwellers in fact read and were influenced directly by Heidegger, who never resolutely renounced the Nazi party and his connections to it. Rather, this quote articulated a universally felt condition regarding disengagement and alienation. 66 fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving.”128 Heidegger describes
‘sparing’ as in fact a positive term associated with freeing and conserving. He elaborates, “To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from spoliation.”129 Instead, one must build and dwell harmoniously within the surroundings, with respect and admiration for the land, the seasons and the forces of nature.
At Taylors Mistake, the land is interiorised in much the same way as Heidegger argues one dwells on earth by preserving earth and sky in their presencing. The baches are positioned in an environment in which the rocks, cliffs and sea define an enclosure beneath the sky, vaulting sun and ceiling of stars, one further immersed by the changing weather and seasons. The experience of this embeddedness is made manifest through the senses: the smell and taste of the salty air; the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks, bouncing off the cliffs and echoing within the caves; the rough and irregular feel of the rocky floor beneath one’s foot combine with the visual interpretation of the composition to interiorise the place. This cognition of an interior environment in which one dwells establishes an emotional connection and sensitivity to place which adds depth and meaning to a mere aesthetic appreciation.130
128 Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 147. 129 Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 148. See also Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in The Question Concerning Technology, and other Essays (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1977). 130 For more on the interiorizing and exteriorising of the environment and their relationship with the senses, see Michael Benedikt, “Environmental Stoicism and Place Machismo,” in Harvard Design Magazine, 2002; Gaston Bachelard, “The Dialectics of Outside and Inside” in The Poetics of Space, Trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 211‐231; Relph, Place and Placelessness, 1976. 67
The construction of the bach by the dweller themselves, too, created a closer relationship with the land. Baches were generally built over a long period of time, maintenance and additions coming as further resources became available. As Heidegger has recognised, “to build is in itself already to dwell,” the hut builders had to imagine their lives in the land and engage directly with their chosen sites as they constructed their homes.131 After World War One, the do‐it‐yourself spirit became associated with nationalism, writer Ranginui Walker arguing that baches “are quintessentially the expression of being a self‐made Kiwi,” displaying the innovation and independence celebrated within the culture.132 Return servicemen exercised the practical skills they had learned during wartime, rendering the constantly unfinished and bach “the hobby you inhabit.”133
Richard Sennett has written of the positive psychological effects of craftsmanship and DIY practice and insists that “people can learn about themselves through the things they make.”134
Sennett quotes Plato in stating “craftsman are all poets,” reflecting creative expression through the physical process of making.135 Heidegger echoes this sentiment, referring to the Greek word for making, poiesis and connecting this more directly to building and dwelling.136 Ruskin, too, endorsed craftsmanship and, along with William Morris, established craft communities throughout England. For Ruskin, craft offered an escape from the constructs and mechanised
131 Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 144. 132 Writer and academic Ranginui Walker, quoted in Milligan (dir.), A Summer Place. 133 Austin Mitchell, The Half‐Gallon Quarter‐Acre Pavalova Paradise, Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1972, 110. Quoted in McCarthy, “Partial Architectures,” 48. 134 Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), Kindle edition. See also Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), Kindle edition. 135 Sennett, The Craftsman. 136 Martin Heidegger, “Poetically Man Dwells” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971), 214; Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 10. 68 existence which followed the industrial revolution.137 Though rudimentary in their construction detailing, the bach dwellers experienced direct, concrete interaction with the land and their materials. In this way, the settlement became the site of engaged, dignified sociability and understanding of nature.138
Heidegger wrote some of his most famous texts on phenomenology and humankinds place in the world whilst living in his cabin at Todtnauberg in the Black Forest Mountains of Southern
Germany.139 As contended by Adam Sharr, “While he considered familiar rural surroundings to be prompt for thinking, it was particularly in cycles of nature that he claimed sustenance for intellectual exploration.”140 Heidegger’s routines within his own hut are significant, as he thought of his life here as representative of his philosophy.
In his hut, Heidegger sought a simple existence in harmony with nature. Adam Sharr describes this hut as “a refuge against – but simultaneously with – the elements.”141 This is a poignant paradox. Heidegger speaks romantically about the rhythms of nature, in an article entitled “Why
Do I stay in the Provinces?” claiming:
137 Sennett, The Craftsman. 138 Ruskin has recognized the importance of local materials, forms and construction techniques derived from an understanding of the natural context in the fostering of place. As he states, “the material which Nature furnishes, in any country, and the form which she suggests, will always be the most beautiful, because the most appropriate.” Ruskin, The Poetry of Architecture, 48. 139 A disparity exists here, too, between the romanticised remoteness of Heidegger’s hut as documented in many texts and its actual connection to neighbouring properties. The hut was in fact only one kilometre from the village centre and one hundred metres higher. Our universal social natures and desire for comfort seem often at odds with these myths of solitude and self reliance across cultures. See Adam Sharr, Heidegger’s Hut (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006), 11. 140 Sharr, Heidegger’s Hut, 54. 141 Sharr, Heidegger’s Hut, 65. 69
I myself never observe the landscape. I experience its hourly changes, day and night, in the great comings and goings of the seasons. The gravity of the mountains and the hardness of their primeval rock, the slow and deliberate growth of the fir‐trees, the brilliant, simple splendour of the meadows in bloom, the rush of the mountain brook in the long autumn night, the stern simplicity of the flatlands covered with snow – all of this moves and flows through and penetrates daily existence up there.142
Whilst potentially a romanticised description, this type of engagement with nature mirrors that many experienced at the bach:
Death, the cycles that life has turned through in this place rarely enters so tangibly into my city existence. And the mating cries of birds, the arrival of their eggs, the gradual feathering of the fledglings are also cycles we have time to watch. The cycles of sun and moon, the emergence of the stars, the rise and fall of tides, the morning and evening breezes. It’s not even that we focus on these things, but we take them in, just part of the fresh air we’re breathing.143
This rejection of the visual for a more sensually encompassing experience speaks of the immersion and rootedness of dwelling. Whilst sight can disembody our relationship with nature, our faculties of taste and smell are integral to lived experience and memory. Heidegger argued that it is through this dwelling that place is brought into being.
The Genius Loci
The Latin term ‘genius loci’ was in fact translated into the English landscape lexicon in the eighteenth century as the sense or genius of place.144 The experience of the landscape,
142 Heidegger was not, however, as eloquent in detailing the electrical wiring and phone line installations in his hut. The domestic conveniences he allowed betray this simple oneness with the earth, especially in light of the ecological problems we face today and what we understand of our impact on the land, no matter how well intentioned. In this respect, living in a modest inner‐city apartment connected to a tight grid of services may be interpreted as more ecologically responsible than living in a rural context which requires the clearing and levelling of land, construction of infrastructure and the running of services. Heidegger quoted in Sharr, Heidegger’s Hut, 64. 143 One bach dwellers experience, as recorded in Cox, “At the Bach,” 47. 144 Gunila Jive’n and Peter J. Larkham, “Sense of Place, Authenticity and Character: A Commentary,” In Journal of Urban Design, 8:1 (2003): 68. 70 however, was seen as fitting a more general pattern and political ideology rather than reflecting a particular and personal interpretation. Rather than a subjective experience of the environment, the genius loci here was understood as objective and relied on educated taste for its correct interpretation.
Inscriptions displayed within gardens were used throughout the eighteenth century to commemorate feelings for nature and to express a sense of place. Here the poet was delegated as spokesman or translator of the environment. As privileged interpreter of the genius loci, the educated, articulate and sensitive soul “nurs’d by genius,” was bestowed with the ability to reveal the inherent meaning of nature.145 This helped establish a hierarchy in aesthetic appreciation, artists and poets informing the upper‐class aesthetes, whose fine taste in being able to interpret the landscape and art justified their position of power in society over those not educated in its proper perception.
Although referring to the innate qualities of nature within a specific context, this concept did not sanctify the wilderness as an untamed, undesigned ideal, or prevent intervention and manipulation. It was used as a guide to ensure the appropriateness of the garden and to encourage a response to its immediate natural context and climate. This required judgement on the part of the landscape gardener and entailed some license, Price stating:
If an improver happens to be placed in a level country, should he not even there consult the genius loci? Without doubt, and therefore he will not attempt hanging rocks and
145 Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth, 42. As Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed in Nature in 1836, “There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, the poet. This is the best part of all these men’s farms, yet to this their land‐deeds give them no title.” As quoted in Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 14. 71
precipices; but he may surely be allowed to steal from the better genius of some other scene, a few circumstances of beauty and variety that will not be incompatible with his own.146
Price believed that it was the role of the landscape gardener to cultivate this sense of place and design an idealised state of nature by employing all the means at ones disposal, embellishing existing picturesque effects and introducing new ones. These could include cutting a winding path through a grove of trees, constructing false ruins or positioning landscape elements to frame a view.
There was a distinct relationship between the particular qualities of a place and the general within the picturesque. This is related to taste and represents one manner in which the picturesque encouraged class distinctions and the interpretation of nature as subject to be dominated. John Barrell argues that “correct taste, here especially for landscape and landscape art, was used in this period as a means of legitimating political authority,” important in a time of agricultural reform and dissidence in England.147 This was exercised by those who could think generally and abstract ideas from particular experience. It was believed that this ability relied not only on a good education, but also on a position within the social order which allowed a general interest in all things, rather than a specialty. The ability to ‘read’ the genius loci of the picturesque landscape was a test of taste which normally excluded women and the working class, helping cement the place of the privileged male elite. This generalising rationality allowed
146 Price, An essay on the picturesque, 348. 147 John Barrell, “The public prospect and the private view: the politics of taste in eighteenth‐century Britain,” in Reading Landscape: Country – City – Capital, ed. Simon Pugh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 19. See also Giselle Byrnes, “As far as the eye can reach: reading landscapes,” in Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and the Colonisation of New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2001). 72 the specificity of a place to be absorbed within a wider understanding of the landscape, the process leading to the land being understood as a commodity for consumption.
The genius loci has been reinterpreted by architectural phenomenologist’s including Christian
Norberg‐Shultz, who read Heidegger’s position on place and dwelling as instructive for the practice of architecture.148 In Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, Norberg‐
Schulz states that “Architecture means to visualise the genius loci, and the task of the architect is to create meaningful places, whereby he helps man to dwell.149 Norberg‐Schulz advocates a figurative approach to architecture to realise concrete places in contrast to the abstract space of modernism. 150 His works helped (re)institutionalise in the architectural profession the importance of the body and the personal experience of place.
The early understanding of the genius loci of the landscape, then, reflected the power mechanisms operating in the picturesque and how the experience of place became more personal and subjective outside of class structures. Rather than particular experience following a wider, general ideology in which sovereignty over the land and wider society was naturalised, the experience of nature became less fixed and rational. This follows the societal change from the Victorian era to life post World War One, as British colonies such as New Zealand took on greater independence and a new egalitarianism became manifest. The horrors of war exposed
148 Christian Norberg‐Schulz, “Heidegger’s Thinking on Architecture,” in Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 20 (1983): 61‐68; Christian Norberg‐Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980). 149 Norberg‐Schulz, Genius Loci, 5. 150 Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999), 19. 73 the absurdity of subservience to a constructed hierarchy and social narrative, leading to a greater emphasis on concrete personal experience.
The Hut goes Full Circle
Ann Cline has recognised the resurgence of hut building and dwelling following World War One and World War Two. As she explains:
“Arguably, while the French revolution and the Napoleonic Wars scattered and confused the rationalists, only the two world wars of this [twentieth] century halted their momentum. With these wars, practical hut dwellers reemerged. At first, like Lao Tzu, some sought survival in troubled times, but later some others, like Kamo no Chomei, sought existential closure.”151
Cline, too, points to the intimacy of physical contact with the earth and sky experienced during intimate warfare and the alienation from home as the motivating factors for the resurgence in hut building by return servicemen. This tradition of refuge within simple self‐built structures she traces to the painter and poet recluses of China, the first on record being Po‐i and Shu‐ch’i who retreated into the mountains around 1000 B.C.152 Parallel traditions have existed elsewhere, but it was from China that this custom was translated into the picturesque. The aesthetics of the picturesque landscape and their theoretical and political origins have been detailed earlier in this study; this will now be developed with the influence of the Chinese garden and the recluse hut in the tracing of the traditions turn full circle in terms of representation and meaning.
151 Ann Cline, A Hut of One’s Own: Life Outside the Circle of Architecture (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997), 17. 152 Po‐i and Shu‐ch’i withdrew from civilisation to escape the reign of Emperor Wu Wang, surviving on ferns and dew until starving to death. Their legend has been passed down through a surviving poem in which they condemn the state of society under Wu Wang. See Cline, A Hut of One’s Own, 3. 74
In the sixteenth century, porcelain became a popular artefact of import from China into Europe.
The western upper classes were fascinated by this ceramic advancement and the painted ornamental depictions of irregular natural mountain settings, craggy huts and their ambling inhabitants staring at the vista from winding paths.153 In 1685, Sir William Temple described the disorderly nature of the Chinese garden and how its irregular naturalness signified a higher taste seemingly free of rigid doctrine, making it superior to formal European arrangements.154 Temple was a much respected statesman and essayist, and whilst he warned against imitation, the translation of the Chinese garden aesthetic into England soon became evident.155 While the genealogy of the picturesque is complex and its early development reveals much about British culture and nationalism, the impact of the Chinese landscape remains significant.
Cline uses the influence of decoratively painted Chinese porcelain to account for the British eighteenth century practice of ornamental cottage building and hermit acquisition by estate owners. As she astutely contends, “these hermits became surrogates for gentlemanly escape...Behaving as if the secrets of this mysterious porcelain culture lay in imagery, not experience, they [the British upper class] understood reclusion as a visual artifice.”156 The
153 Cline, A Hut of One’s Own, 12. 154 Macarthur, The Picturesque, 4. 155 W.J.T. Mitchell maintains that this translation remains political, recognising that the Chinese garden “flourished most notably at the height of Chinese power and began to decline in the eighteenth century as China became itself the object of English fascination and appropriation at the moment when England was beginning to experience itself as an imperial power...we need to explore the possibility that the representation of landscape is not only a matter of internal politics and national or class ideology but also an international, global phenomenon, intimately bound up with the discourses of imperialism.” By referencing the article “landscape painting” in the Oxford Companion to Art, he does, however, recognise the difference in meaning bestowed on the landscape, quoting that the Chinese landscape painting “is closely bound up with an almost mystic reverence for the powers of nature,” contrasted with the European painting tradition, in which “nature is depicted as unified scene and enjoyed for its own sake.” See Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 9. 156 Cline, A Hut of One’s Own, 12. 75 anarchic recluse seeking solace in nature and ritual was interpreted as the scraggy ornamental hermit, picturesque in his aged and dishevelled appearance.
By taking on a more phenomenological role as existential bastions for the alienated dweller within nature, the baches of Taylors Mistake bring the hut building tradition full circle. With roots in ancient civilisations, the recluse hut built into the land was endowed with meaning. It found translation in the British picturesque through mimicry and removed aesthetic appreciation. It then became manifest as the cottage retreat of well‐to‐do aesthetes before returning to its position of existential significance following the social upheaval and alienation brought about by the experience of war.
In this way, the bach becomes a manifestation of universal human themes relating to the phenomenological and existential conditions of life on earth. Laugier’s primitive hut is commonly referenced in scholarly discussion of the bach, relating it to primal instincts,
“sophisticated naivety and nostalgia.”157 This analogy is all the more complex, given the occupation of the cave by the bach in Taylors Mistake, the original dwelling place of humankind before the primitive hut was constructed. This appeal to notions of origins is even more forceful given the occupation of the bach in an earthly Eden, the natural environment cultivated into a garden that looks like nature. 158 The picturesque landscape of New Zealand has been consistently marketed as a virgin paradise, Charles Hursthouse, for example, referring to New
Zealand as “the Eden of the World” in his influential guide for immigrants New Zealand, or,
157 McCarthy, “The Bach,” 1. See also Skinner, “Whare in the bush.” 158 Or in the very least, framed and appreciated through a cultural lens. 76
Zealandia, the Britain of the South of 1857.159 In this respect, the same narrative is being reflected at Taylors Mistake as in the city; the ‘garden state’ sought by Henry Sewell and the
Canterbury Association manifest in different but equally ideological ways.
The Development of the Bach
In the 1960s, second home ownership became part of the ‘New Zealand dream,’ echoing the prosperous social and economic conditions experienced by the baby boomer generation. This new affluence and removal from the experiences of war allowed the bach to become a family retreat for enjoyment by the sea. Peter Ward has noticed this same convenient attraction to
‘roughing it’ despite affluence in Canada:
Year after year cottagers have happily passed their summers in crowded, ill‐lit, and badly furnished dwellings, using sanitary facilities gladly rejected by their grandparents, and eating food ill cooked on wood stoves that only a tiny minority know how to use, let alone do so safely... for more than a century tens of thousands of Canadians have chosen to spend a significant part of each year living in what otherwise be labelled substandard housing. What sets them apart from the chronically ill housed is the fact that they’ve had the choice.160
The bach thus once again became privileged territory. The occasional experience of a compromised domestic environment is often recounted with pride, sourced to justify more permanent inhabitation of the urban environment and a more ambivalent relationship with the environment.161 In reference to these rough and basic living situations, Paul Thompson has
159 Charles Hursthouse, New Zealand, or, Zealandia, the Britain of the South (London: Edward Stanford, 1857), 99. 160 Peter Ward, A History of Domestic Space: Privacy and the Canadian Home (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999), 78‐81. 161 Rather than some hidden, insidious evil, it is this ambivalence which is at the root of much exploitation and destruction. See Benedikt, “Environmental Stoicism and Place Machismo.” 77 remarked that, "Rather than being regarded as inconveniences, these conditions were actually pluses, and gave the experience of being at the bach its flavour."162
By this stage the bach had worked its way into national consciousness and its experience became one of nostalgia. Early baches became inherited and their inhabitation continued to be mythologised. As one dweller recounted:
One of the advantages of owning a bach [second home] is the way it provides a bolthole. This is where we’ll come... to lick our wounds, if the sharemarket collapses, if she leaves me, if they drop the bomb, if I go mad. Here I’ll be able to survive, I’ll live off the land, take my cues from the natural world, and become sane again.163
As urban residents grew up spending their summer holidays as the bach, its significance grew with memory, becoming ingrained in the imagination as a bastion against the tensions and anxieties experienced in everyday life in the city.164
For several reasons, however, the novelty of simple living and the desire for the experience of a displaced domestic arrangement has lessened in New Zealand. As Barbara Anderson recalled in
1994, “When I was growing up, people had baches, and these then became cottages, and now they are beach‐houses – sort of gentrification.” 165 This transition to larger and more comfortable residences has been contributed to by the rising price of seaside property and its acquisition by international investors. Local authorities long ago cracked down on bach building
162 Thompson, The Bach, 6. 163 Nigel Cox, “At the Bach,” in New Zealand Geographic 025 (Jan‐Mar 1995), 43. 164 Many bach owners have conveyed a greater connection to their baches than to their homes in the city; a longer history and happier, more numerous memories spent with family throughout one’s life. Nik Luka has recognised this same feeling of attachment and belonging in cottage owners in Ontario. See Foster, “Baches in the Landscape and their Contested Recognition as Heritage,” 40‐46; Luka, “Sojourning in Nature.” 165 Barbara Anderson quoted in Antonella Sarti, Spiritcarvers: Interviews with Eighteen Writers from New Zealand (Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998), 9. 78 on public land and have ordered mass demolitions on Rangitoto Island, as well as in Taylors
Mistake.166 Building codes have become more stringent and ordinances implemented to prevent such transgressions as the use of fibrolite cladding.167 ‘Beach subdivisions’ with manicured verges and runways for private planes have taken the place of bach settlements in places such as Pauanui, catering to the elite.
In many ways this can be interpreted as a ‘natural’ progression. As has been explained throughout this study, the bach is implicated in a much wider tradition of landscape romanticism, appropriation and colonisation. Although gaining meaning as a way to experience the natural environment in a more phenomenological manner, this has also served to mythologise the bach and protect its legacy. Its gradual disappearance from the shorelines of the country has in fact seen it remembered with even more fondness and pride. As Barbara
Anderson elaborates, “People get nostalgic for baches and all they represent, just when they are disappearing… We are struggling all the time for something we don’t have any more, and so we admire it.”168
At Taylors Mistake, tendered gardens and otherwise demarcated sites now enclose the baches of ‘Rotten Row,’ this being the main group of 19 out of 36 to survive the council ordered
166 Bach building on Rangitoto Island, where a substantial bach community had formed after World War One, was banned in 1937 and during the 1960s and 1970s, sixty percent of the existing baches were demolished. See Foster, “Baches in the Landscape and their Contested Recognition as Heritage,” 2 and Robin Kearns and Damian Collins, “’On the rocks’: New Zealand’s coastal bach landscape and the case of Rangitoto Island,” in New Zealand Geographer 62 (2006), 231‐234. For an ethnographic study of the Rangitoto Island community, see Susan E. Yoffe, “Holiday Communities on Rangitoto Island New Zealand,” in Research in Anthropology & Linguistics 4 (Auckland: Department of Anthropology, The University of Auckland, 2000). 167 Nigel Cox, “At the Bach,” in New Zealand Geographic 025 (Jan‐Mar 1995), 34. 168 Barbara Anderson quoted in Antonella Sarti, Spiritcarvers: Interviews with Eighteen Writers from New Zealand (Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998), 10. 79 demolitions of the 1980’s. Amenities have been updated and modern conveniences added, TV satellites now sprouting from many roofs. New Zealand architect Nigel Cook noticed this trend decades ago of “suburbia sidling in,” the newer baches “assert themselves in a way the earlier one did not.”169 The bach may be seen, then, as a precursor to the holiday home, rather than its antithesis.170
With more fully furnished baches have come better roads and services and integration with the surrounding suburbs. To the north of Taylors Mistake, the neighbouring suburb of Scarborough has grown and spread from the hill down into old bach territory. This has seen Taylors Mistake become a dormitory suburb of the city, reflecting its gradual colonisation of the environment.171
This represents an inevitable evolution of the exurban environment as bach owners escaped the city only to find comfort in a level of community that was bound to grow as friends built nearby, families grew with subsequent generations and general populations expanded. Whilst maintaining an air of exclusivity and attempting to maintain a degree of independence and self‐
169 Nigel Cook quoted in Foster, “Baches in the Landscape and their Contested Recognition as Heritage,” 31. 170 Some commentators have argued that “the traditional Kiwi beachside bach is not dead: it is mutating, changing into something which is as quintessentially New Zealand as its forbear. After all, bach owners are still driven by the same imperatives to escape temporarily from the pressures of work and urban life to be soothed by the seas proximity in a house where informality rules.” The comparison of the bach to the holiday house is, however, regarded by others, including Nigel Cook, as “nonsense; the houses bear little relationship to baches except they are often holiday homes.” See Graeme Lay and Nigel Cox quoted in Foster, “Baches in the Landscape and their Contested Recognition as Heritage,” 58. 171 Nik Luka has observed in Ontario that cottages, analogous to the bach, “collectively constitute a form of urban settlement, for they are often clustered densely enough as well as being functionally connected to core metropolitan areas.” This sees cottage country become “an urbanizing edge and a suburban frontier of sorts.” See Nik Luka, “Finding Opportunities for Urban Sustainability in Cottage Life,” in Urban Sustainability: Reconnecting Space and Place, ed. Ann Dale et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 175, 181. See also Luka, “Sojourning in Nature.” 80 governance through members’ clubs and residents’ associations, ultimately the exurban is absorbed within the suburban.172
Changing environmental paradigms have also contributed to the demise of the traditional bach in New Zealand and reveal some interesting paradoxes. Up until the 1960s, unbridled frontier economics remained the dominant system which defined the relationship between human development and environmental management in New Zealand, as in most of the western world.173 As has been demonstrated, landscape romanticism and aesthetics have been complicit in the creation, subjugation and exploitation of the landscape and the human exercise of ecological sovereignty. In the creation of landscape, the earth is organised, as put by Heidegger, as ‘standing‐reserve,’ “ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.”174 Heidegger argues, for example, that the
Rhine is only a river in the landscape insomuch as it is “an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry.”175
172 Some, including Stephen Barnett and Richard Wolfe, have even referred to the bach as the ‘vanguard of suburbanization,’ citing the Hibiscus Coast in Auckland, Raumati in Wellington and New Brighton in Christchurch as coastal suburbs first colonised by baches. See Kearns and Collins, “On the rocks,” 230. This trend has been noticed elsewhere in the western world where a similar culture of holiday cottage inhabitation exists, such as in Ontario, where the Toronto lakefront area known as the Beach transitioned from a cottage community to a suburb to a downtown neighbourhood. See Luka, “Sojourning in Nature,” 148‐149. Others have noted the trend in bach demolition for the construction of larger holiday homes and permanent homes, seeing the gradual creation of new suburbs. See Christine Cheyne and Claire Freeman, “A rising tide lifts all boats? A preliminary investigation into the impact of rising New Zealand coastal property prices on small communities,” in Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences 1:2 (2010): 116. 173 The development of environmental paradigms from the 1950s are covered in Michael E. Colby, “Environmental management in development: the evolution of paradigms,” in Ecological Economics, 3 (1991): 193 and Aidan Davison, Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). 174 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 17. 175 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 16. 81
Ignorant of inherent contradictions, calls for the return of New Zealand to a seemingly pristine, untouched natural state began to be propagated by environmentalists around fifty years ago.
This followed on from the conservation movement emanated from the United States, where a hundred years earlier, Henry David Thoreau championed the mystical qualities of the wilderness.176 Thoreau himself spent two years living in a small cabin next to Walden Pond in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts, seeking spiritual transcendence.177 He also spent much time travelling around New England, musing about the unspoilt natural environment and the importance of its preservation. Others such as John Muir and Frederick Jackson Turner later took up the mantle, mythologising the American wilderness which led to the creation of
National Parks throughout the later nineteenth and twentieth century, beginning with
Yellowstone in 1872.178
176 J.B. Jackson has noted the cultural constructs of landscape and the North American conception of the term as natural scenery contrasted with the union of the human and natural in English landscape history. Jackson was convinced, as Ruskin had earlier argued, that human presence is essential in revealing the beauty of the landscape. See John Brinckerhoff Jackson, “The Vernacular Landscape,” in Landscape Meanings and Values, ed. Edmund C. Penny‐Rowsell and David Lowenthal (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986); John Brinckerhoff Jackson, “The Future of the Vernacular,” in Understanding Ordinary Landscapes, ed. Paul Groth and Todd W. Bressi (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Edwards Brothers, Inc., 1997). 177 Here he wrote about life lived simply amongst nature within woodland owned by then mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. There exists a familiar contradiction here, too, between Thoreau’s mythologised isolation and his actual connectedness to civilisation. From first‐hand experience, the centre of the town of Conchord is easily accessible from Walden Pond, a mere thirty minute walk away. Thoreau enjoyed socialising, frequently dining with the Emerson family and receiving guests in his cabin. See Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, 1910; originally published 1854). 178 Anne Whiston Spirm comprehensively documents the rise and development of the picturesque and national parks in North America. Landscape architect and social reformist Frederick Law Olmstead used the aesthetic in public parks such as Central Park in New York, the Emerald Necklace of Boston, Niagra Falls and Yosemite to teach the working classes the subtleties of an educated taste. He believed that exposure to such scenery would not only improve health, but the morality of the lower classes, exposing the continued social prejudices of the period. See Anne Whiston Spirn, “Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmstead,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995). 82
The removal of the human from the natural world has set up a problematic binary distinction.
The effort to restore landscapes to a virgin state is a denial of history and humanities place in the world. As William Cronon explains:
There is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny. Indeed, one of the most striking proofs of the cultural invention of wilderness is its thoroughgoing erasure of the history from which it sprang. In virtually all of its manifestations, wilderness represents a flight from history. Seen as the original garden, it is a place outside of time, from which human beings had to be ejected before the fallen world of history could properly begin.179
This represents the ideological thinking that saw the bach become a foreign intruder in the landscape around the 1960s in New Zealand, as conservationism and resource management became the dominant environmental paradigm. Interpreted in isolation, the bach offended the sensibilities of the modern environmentalist; as opposed to animating the scene and reflecting the character of the natural environment, the bach stood on its own as a dilapidated eyesore.180
Newspaper and magazine articles began to refer to the bach as “a blot on the landscape,” that can “uglify coasts and hillsides,” leading to “sacrifice of natural beauty.”181 In 1969, speaking at the Institute of Surveyors Coastal Development conference, the Minister of Lands and Forest,
Duncan Macintyre, made the position of the government on the issue clear: “Hidden in the forest a lone corrugated‐iron hut with outside pit toilet may be alright. On an open beach it is an
179 Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 79. 180 Disgust has always been a part of the picturesque and traditionally appealed to the aesthete seeking visual stimulation in transgressive objects; high taste was signalled by the ability to recognise values of light and shade, irregularity and variation in the lowly. As elaborated by John Macarthur, “Cottages remain a paradigm of the picturesque, not just because of their association with Englishness and the history of the concept, but also because, from an aesthetic point of view, there is not a lot of space between a prohibitory disgust at the cottage as weeping sore, and a satiatory disgust at its cloying Bo Peep sweetness.” See Macarthur, The Picturesque, 116; John Macarthur, “The Butcher's Shop: Disgust in Picturesque Aesthetics and Architecture,” in Assemblage, No. 30 (August 1996). 181 Foster, “Baches in the Landscape and their Contested Recognition as Heritage,” 58‐59; Kearns and Collins, “On the rocks”, 231. 83 eyesore. And if there are many of them a naturally beautiful area can degenerate into a shantytown.”182
As opposed to aesthetics, it was health concerns that finally swayed public opinion and marked the end for many of the baches at Taylors Mistake. Inadequate sewerage disposal saw 19 baches without electricity and electric toilets demolished by council order on the November 27,
1979, including the original cave dwelling of Thomas Archbold. Concern about public access to the shoreline has also sparked contention, Public Access New Zealand (PANZ) labelling the on‐ going affair “a classic case of a battle over the commons, of conflict between public and private interest,” paralleling the disputed eighteenth century enclosure of the commons in England, in which the mechanisms of the picturesque were complicit.183
Short term leases followed by the complete demolition of the bach settlement by the mid 1980s had been proposed by the Christchurch City Council in 1976, following the recommendations of a sub‐committee. However, after strong opposition and descent from bach owners, the council became more receptive to mediation. In October 1995, the 19 baches constituting ‘Rotten Row’ were registered as ‘historic areas’ by the New Zealand Historic Places Trust. Although in a sense legitimising the baches, this does not guarantee their protection. Ironically, others were not
182 At this point, the baches on Rangitoto Island had already been demolished by government order. Duncan Macintyre, quoted in Foster, “Baches in the Landscape and their Contested Recognition as Heritage,” 64. 183 Quote from a 1994 PANZ pamphlet, referenced in Foster, “Baches in the Landscape and their Contested Recognition as Heritage,” 72. As discussed earlier in this report, power structures are implicit in the picturesque landscape. As an ideological system, wealthy land owners employed the structures of the picturesque in the transformation and appropriation of the landscape, disenfranchising the working class whilst at the same time, appealing to nationalism to subdue conflict. See Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740‐1860 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986); Barrell, “The public prospect and the private view” and Macarthur, The Picturesque. 84 considered eligible for conservation because of the on‐going nature of bach construction, additions and alterations seen as compromising the sanctity of the original dwelling.
Frustratingly for the bach owners, this has included the addition of modern plumbing and electricity enforced by council order. The remaining 36 baches in and around Taylors Mistake face an uncertain future as land rights and appeals to heritage continue to be contested.184
Contemporary Environmental Discourse
William Cronon has pointed out the problematic dualism established by separating where we live and the idealised nature we construct. This practice enables unsustainable practices in the separate environments in which we live and a view of nature as nothing more than aesthetic.185
Raymond Williams, too, has drawn attention to the social injustice of denying the labour put into the countryside and the environmental exploitation and degradation enabled by a view of humankind as other to nature. He argues that the industrial revolution saw nature abstracted from humanity and interpreted “quite clearly and even coldly as a set of objects, on which man could operate.”186 This occurred at the same time as the landscape was romanticised, Williams
184 Prominent architects including Ian Athfield, Jeremy Salmond, Jeremy Treadwell and Nigel Cook have argued for the retention of the baches as functioning holiday dwellings. For a detailed account of the history of land contestation at Taylors Mistake, see David Hill, Living on the Queens Chain (Wellington: research report, Victoria University, 1988); Foster, “Baches in the Landscape and their Contested Recognition as Heritage.” 185 Although Cronon provides a distilled and influential critique, the polarization of civilization and nature and the problems that arise from these imagined distinctions have been a part of scholarly discourse for some time. In his tracing of conceptions of nature and its history of abstraction with humankind, Raymond Williams quotes Edmund Burke, one of the pioneering theorists of aesthetics: “In a state of rude nature there is no such thing as a people.” See Cronon, “The trouble with wilderness”; Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, ed. Raymond Williams (London: Verso, 1980). 186 Willaims, “Ideas of Nature,” 77. 85 recognising a bitter irony in the enjoyment of nature by those who were its greatest exploiters.187 As he states:
As the exploitation of nature continued, on a vast scale, and especially in the new extractive and industrial processes, the people who drew most profit from it went back, where they could find it (and they were very ingenious) to an unspoilt nature, to the purchased estates and the country retreats. And since that time there has always been this ambiguity in the defence of what is called nature, and in its associated ideas of conservation, in the weak sense, and the nature reserve.188
Williams links the enjoyment of landscape scenery to the consumption of nature through industrialised processes, echoing Heidegger’s modern characterisation of nature as ‘standing reserve.’ He argues that the separation of man and nature reflects the disparate relationship between economy and ecology and that these constructs need reuniting as a single discipline if we are to develop responsibly and sustainably.189
Timothy Morton is more radical in his critique, calling for an ecology separate to our cultural conception of nature.190 Within the picturesque landscape he recognises power structures and an ecological sovereignty which need to be fundamentally readdressed if we are to confront the environmental problems we are now faced with. “Only now,” he argues, “when contemporary
187 Williams took aim here at Constable and Wordsworth and claims this contradiction is what drove John Clare to madness. See Willaims, “Ideas of Nature,” 80. 188 As Williams qualifies and elaborates, “Some people in this defence are those who understand nature best, and who insist on making very full connections and relationships. But a significant number of others are in the plainest sense hypocrites. Established at powerful points in the very process which is creating the disorder; they change their clothes at week‐ends, or when they can get down to the country; join appeals and campaigns to keep one last bit of England green and unspoilt; and then go back, spiritually refreshed, to invest in the smoke and the spoil.” Cronon recognises the same contradictory practice of exploiting the landscape and then seeking solace within it in North American culture. As he records, “frontier nostalgia became an important vehicle for expressing a peculiarly bourgeois form of antimodernism. The very men who most benefited from the urban‐industrial capitalism were among those who believed they must escape its debilitating effects.” Enormous estates, camps and cattle ranches hosted elite tourists, or “well‐to‐do city folks,” who consumed the constructed frontier experience. See Willaims, “Ideas of Nature,” 80‐81; Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 78‐79. 189 Willaims, “Ideas of Nature,” 84. 190 See Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2010). 86 capitalism and consumerism cover the entire Earth and reach deeply into its life forms, is it possible, ironically at last, to let go of this nonexistent ghost.”191 The form of sustainability he endorses is rational and objective, devoid of the romanticism and aesthetic prejudices that have infiltrated ecology.
Morton sees the aestheticisation of nature as a barrier to ecology, the desire to preserve the picturesque view often preventing sustainable practice. He gives the examples of a planned solar array in a park in Lakewood, Colorado and a wind farm in Scotland, both opposed by neighbouring residents in 2008 as they would “spoil the view” and didn’t look “natural.”192
These reflect common perceptions of appearance as reality and allude to the danger of ‘green‐ washing,’ a manipulation to present superficial qualities as beneficial to or in fact constituent of the environment. The picturesque excludes more of the ecosystem than it preserves, the most rich and diverse environments most often excluded based on a lack of necessary visual interest to sustain. This reflects a coercion of ecology by romanticism and a persistent belief in natural balances of which humans can only disrupt.193
This is why a lived experience of nature is important. By engaging beyond the aesthetic, place is fostered and the relationship between humankind and nature made meaningful. Through the practice of dwelling at Taylors Mistake, the inhabitants found refuge through a more intimate connection with their surroundings. Though the picturesque has historically embodied
191 Morton, The Ecological Thought, 5. 192 Morton, The Ecological Thought, 9. 193 “…ecologists and environmentalists need to give up the illusion of nature ‘out there,’ better off without people, and balanced in perpetuity.” See Aaron Ellison, “The suffocating embrace of landscape and the picturesque conditioning of ecology,” in Landscape Journal 32:1 (2013), 94. 87 constructs which have lead to the subjugation and exploitation of the landscape, the genius loci has developed as a concept to reflect more personal, subjective experiences outside of class and taste. This has seen the bach in this context become more of a personal bastion and the site in which it is embedded a natural refuge.
Guardians of the Mistake?
The sparing and preserving of one’s surroundings, requisite to dwell in peace, is reflected at
Taylors Mistake, not only through the careful consideration of the site and the harmonious interventions by the bach inhabitants, but also through the care shown to maintain the environment responsibly. In his defence of the Taylors Mistake bach settlement, renowned architect Ian Athfield considered what may become of the environment without the baches, recounting his experiences of Makara before and after the destruction of the baches there:
I could not believe the difference in abuse to the environment. The extent of broken glass and rubbish compared with the previous relationship between boats, dinghies, cottages and water...I see the two conditions of buildings and landscape as inseparable where the occupier becomes the custodian of the open space rather than the possessor of it. Title as a prerequisite of building detaches the occupier from both his or her neighbour and the land. It is settlements such as Taylors Mistake, which we should build our future around rather than condemn.194
It has been noted that in periods of inhabitation, Taylors Mistake has suffered greater pollution and vandalism. During World War Two, the military occupied Taylors Mistake for its strategic defensive position. Inhabitation of the baches was prohibited which saw a wave of destruction
194 Ian Athfield’s submission to the hearing on the future of the baches at Taylors Mistake, quoted in Foster, “Baches in the Landscape and their Contested Recognition as Heritage,” 85. 88 and defacement, vandals destroying several baches beyond repair.195 Only the more dedicated and permanent residents were able to maintain their baches and the wider environment.
Nik Luka has recognised the relationship between connection to place and the exercise of sustainable practices in cottage country, Ontario. Although perpetuating the mythology of nature whilst acting as the colonising edge of urban development, more responsible attitudes to dwelling and the environment are present here. In fact, the very act of constructing one’s own dwelling and maintaining it is an important aspect of ecological design, engaging cottage inhabitants more closely with the land, encouraging custodianship and the adaptation of more appropriate approaches to living.196 The summer cottage is normally a place of diverse and complex ecological systems; in sparing and preserving the habitat of a multitude of animals, birds and insects, the dweller becomes more aware of his or her personal impact and understanding of environmental sensitivities.197
The cottage and the bach are not normally viewed as saleable commodities to their owners, who have often invested much time and effort in their on‐going construction. The inhabitants are clearly more embedded in place in this context than in their suburban residences and are more interested in long‐term commitment; the health of specific ecosystems and the
195 Cairns and Turpin, Guardians of the Mistake, 217‐219. 196 See Luka, “Finding Opportunities for Urban Sustainability in Cottage Life”; Luka, “Sojourning in Nature.” 197 For a first‐hand account of the ecological diversity of a cottage in Maine, see Vincent G. Dethier, “The Ecology of a Summer House” (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1984). The sparing, engagement and ‘letting be’ requisite to dwell authentically exhibits an awareness, non‐anthropocentrism and commitment to self‐actualisation which would influence the deep ecology movement. See Michael E. Zimmerman, “Rethinking the Heidegger – Deep Ecology Relationship,” in Environmental Ethics 15 (1993), 195. 89 distinctiveness of the cultural landscape are of much higher concern in this context.198
Ascension from a merely aesthetic and symbolic relationship with nature and real commitment to ecological harmony is necessary rather than the uncritical and convenient playing out of romanticised roles by weekend warriors. As argued by Kirstin Valentine Cadieux:
Contrasting sharply with the alienation of the aestheticized landscape, a philosophy of enablement by engagement seems well suited to providing an outlet for the good intentions of rural in‐migrants. It provides a connection between the abstracted environment (towards which everyone seems to have good intentions) and the mundane everyday behaviours which so affect this environment.199
In general, residents of second homes have been found to exhibit more caution in day to day activities; limiting energy, water and chemical use, and are more open to knowledge and guidance which can lead to investment in action and intervention to prevent development detrimental to the environment.200
An uncritical engagement with the environment can, however, lead to feelings of entitlement.
Exercising “self‐congratulatory ecological restraint” and self‐appointed stewardship by those who consume rather than produce anything from the land can result in greater contestation of
198 The survey research conducted by Luka in cottage country Ontario revealed that “use value exceeded exchange value for just over half (56.5 per cent) of owner‐occupiers in terms of wanting to keep the cottage within the family by passing it down to children or other relatives.” This trend has been noted with the bach in New Zealand also, and although I have not come across a definitive survey of attitudes, enough ethnographic research exists to speculate that the traditional, rudimentary bach represents still less of a commodity for resale. Indeed, during the debate over the existence of the baches of Taylors Mistake in the 1970s, some disillusioned owners merely abandoned their dwellings which were subsequently destroyed by vandals. The Hermitage, Pilgrim’s Rest and Te Nui Ana were three such original cave dwellings to meet this fate. Cecil Champ, then in his late 80s and a cave dweller at Taylors Mistake since 1905, destroyed his own bach in frustration, as had been done by Cecil Hughes some years earlier. On the rare occasion that bach ownership changed hands, it was on an informal basis, Paul Goldsmith selling his cave dwelling to Malcolm McClurg in 1977 for a dozen bottles of beer. The following year, this bach met the same fate as manner others, destroyed by violent seas. See See Luka, “Finding Opportunities for Urban Sustainability in Cottage Life,” 185; Cairns and Turpin, Guardians of the Mistake, 219‐221. 199 Kirsten Valentine Cadieux, “Engaging with the land: redemption of the rural residence fantasy?” in Rural Change and Sustainability: Agriculture, the Environment and Communities, ed. Stephen Essex et al. (Cambridge: CAB International, 2005), 221. 200 Luka, “Finding Opportunities for Urban Sustainability in Cottage Life,” 191‐194. 90 the environment, tense rural relations and NIMBYism.201 Whilst commitment to place and custodianship represent genuine ways in which to engage with the landscape, this can quickly be replaced by self‐interested reaction to perceived threat of change as instigated by others.
This issue is at the heart of the land contestation debate in Taylors Mistake and is the most damning argument levelled against Norberg‐Schulz, Heidegger and the concept of dwelling.
Hilde Heynen sees dwelling as depedent on tradition and place based custom, requiring adherence to specific practices and conformity to common interpretations. She elaborates on its relationship to the homeland, nationalism and the contestation it can encourage:
Norberg‐Schulz interprets Heidegger in a fairly simplistic and instrumental way, by which the Spirit of Place and the organic relationship between man and house takes on a mythical character. Rootedness and authenticity are presented as being superior to mobility and the experience of rootlessness. What is more, he seems to be completely unaware of the violence that is implicit in concepts like this: it is no coincidence these words are part of the basic vocabulary of Nazi ideology. Levinas pointed out that the eulogizing of place, of the village and the landscape, in Heidegger's work, and the scorn he expresses for the metropolis and technology, provided fertile soil for racism and anti‐ Semitism. The same tendency can be found in every theory of architecture that postulates the ideals of rootedness and connectedness.202
Heynen explains that connectedness with the landscape is not always an option available to everyone, including foreigners, refugees and immigrants of a different culture. Not everyone’s homeland, either, is an arable, safe and climatically suitable place to dwell. Cadieux, too, condemns the bourgeois idealists who imagine place as a convenient escape from the alienating city context. These people “tend to try to make places into what they imagine them to be, rather than to explore what places are,” supposedly disrupting and destabilising the genius
201 Cadieux, “Engaging with the land,” 218. ‘NIMBYism’ represents a heavy and stubborn knee‐jerk reaction to a perceived threat to one’s home environment. See Luka, “Finding Opportunities for Urban Sustainability in Cottage Life,” 192. 202 Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, 23. 91 loci.203 To Heidegger, however, place is only manifest when space is endowed with meaning as established through the practice of dwelling, it does not exist separate to the inhabitation of the land.204 Rather, Cadieux’s point may be to problematise the binary distinction of urban homelessness and rural embeddedness.205 The practice of escaping the city in order to dwell and experience place in the countryside requires further exploration.
Dwelling in the Modern City
Dwelling is often interpreted as diametrically opposed to modernity. According to Massimo
Cacciari, “Non‐dwelling is the essential characteristic of life in the metropolis.”206 Others such as
Theodor Adorno echo such sentiments. Adorno sees dwelling as impossible given the social injustices in which we are all complicit. As he emphatically states: "it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home...Wrong life cannot be lived rightly."207 For Adorno, meaning and connectedness can only come through ethics and a reinterpretation of life lived together.
The loss of tradition in the embrace of modernity can also be seen to render true dwelling a difficult prospect. It could be argued that modernism is such a pervasive construct in the
203 This reflects, too, the tensions between the active insider and the passive outsider as theorized by Relph. See Cadieux, “Engaging with the land: redemption of the rural residence fantasy?” 222‐223 and Relph, Place and Placelessness. 204 As explained by Hilde Heynen, “In the case of Heidegger, dwelling is not a harmonious expression of a relationship to a place that can be assumed in advance; on the contrary, it is that which makes a place a place. Dwelling is therefore a process of establishing meaning.” See Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, 142; Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking.” 205 Hadden and Barton provide a compelling record of the fear, distrust and distain of the city in contrast to the romantic associations of the countryside. See Jeffrey K. Hadden and Josef J. Barton, “An Image that will not die: Thoughts on the History of Anti‐Urban Ideology,” in New Towns and the Suburban Dream: Ideology and Utopia in Planning and Development, ed. Irving Lewis Allen (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press Corp., 1977). 206 Massimo Cacciari, as quoted in Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, 17. 207 Theodor Adorno, as quoted in Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, 17. 92 metropolis that any attempt to cling to dwelling and place represents a naïve romanticising of the past. Some theorists argue that the rootlessness and disconnection of modernity are required for a democratic and inclusive society, their rejection threatening a regression to times of exploitation and exclusion; one such theorist being Walter Benjamin.208 Benjamin sees here a false humanism, presenting a barrier to the classless society promised by modernity. As opposed to the security and reclusion offered in dwelling, modern society requires openness and transparency.209
Benjamin does not, however, dismiss dwelling within modernity; rather, he attempts to reconfigure and abstract it. Dwelling for Benjamin becomes associated with the experience of light, air and permeability. One dwells not literally in the land, but in the conditions of modernity, in constructs relating to anonymity and freedom, manifest to suit our modern age.210 For Benjamin, the modern city dweller is at home in porosity and rootlessness, adaptability and transparency; belonging is found in the transitory.
Heynen contents that modern dwelling “means the permanent quest for an ever‐new enclosure, because no dwelling can be more than momentary at present: dwelling is continuously permeated by its opposite.”211 She continues on to compare the pursuit of self‐actualisation and identity within modernity to the enclosing of oneself in dwelling, concluding insightfully:
208 Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, 17. 209 Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, 110‐113. 210 See Heynen, Architecture and Modernity and Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). 211 Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, 223. 93
Modernity has to be continually redefined and rewritten in the light of the contradictions and dissonances that are inherent to it. In the same way dwelling is neither simple nor static, but has to be permanently appropriated anew. That means that modernity and dwelling are not to be considered as polar opposites, as is suggested by authors such as Heidegger or Norberg‐Schulz. By investigating the multifarious layers and ambivalences of both these concepts, I hope to have made it clear that modernity and dwelling are interrelated in complex ways. If architecture indeed should see it as its task to come to terms with the experience of modernity and with the desire for dwelling, the first thing to pay attention to is the intricate intertwining that exists between both of these.212
It is through the play of ambiguities and contradictions inherent in modernity and dwelling that a dialogue can be created with a specific context and people may find belonging in the city.
Anthony Vidler, among others, sees the referencing of the longing for connection and embeddedness in place in response to the sometimes alienating rootlessness of modernity as a means to confront our current condition.213 To such theorists, the uncanny allusion to the presence of the absence of dwelling is the only genuine way to confront the tensions of life in the modern city.214
The interpretation of the picturesque in modern architecture provides a means of negotiating these complexities. As has already been mentioned, Pugin’s ‘picturesque utility’ and Ruskin’s
‘high’ picturesque influenced the development of modernism at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Both were extremely influential in the British Arts and
Crafts movement, which was to find translation in the Deutsch Werkbund initiated in 1907 by
Hermann Muthesius, which itself helped give rise to the modern movement. The picturesque
212 Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, 223. 213 Anthony Vidler, “Theorizing the Unhomely” in Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: an Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965‐1995, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 576. 214 Vidler, “Theorizing the Unhomely.” Heynen quotes Jean‐Francois Lyotard in questioning: “Baudelaire, Benjamin, Adorno. How to inhabit the megalopolis? By bearing witness to the impossible work, by citing the lost domus,” See Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, 222. 94 was reinterpreted by Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, passed on to his student Sigfried
Giedion and absorbed within modernism he helped theorise. Through this channel, the picturesque became associated with the concrete experience of space through movement.215
This is reflected in Le Corbusier’s experiments with space and the choreography of experience in his ‘promenade architecturale,’ as in the Villa Savoye, where a ceremonial ramp and stairs reveal a series of sculptured spaces.
The picturesque control of movement and the view in architecture maintain meaning to
Benjamin and appeal to the bodily experience of space. According to Benjamin, “architecture is not primarily ‘seen,’ but rather is imagined as an objective entity [Bestand] and is sensed by those who approach or even enter it as a surrounding space [Umraum].”216 The enveloping of the body is experienced through sensory cognition which places one in the world. The light and space created by the steel and glass edifices of modern architecture appeal to Benjamin precisely because they allow one to dwell in the condition of openness and transparency through the projection of the body. A familiarity with one’s environment is brought about as the visual becomes tactile and experience of the world becomes more embodied.217 In this sense, the phenomenological experience of place is conserved, though abstracted, in the modern.
215 Macarthur, The Picturesque, 15‐16. 216 Walter Benjamin, quoted in Macarthur, The Picturesque, 256. 217 John Macarthur interprets Benjamin and explains the superiority of the lived, embodied experience which comes through familiarity and belonging in stating: “a tourist’s rapt contemplation of a famous building is a lesser thing than its apprehension by a local person whose visual perception is founded on a day‐to‐day habitual or tactile experience of the building in its context.” This corresponds exactly with Edward Relph’s conception of existential insideness in place, Relph characteristing this as the quality “in which a place is experienced without deliberate and selfconscious reflection yet is full with significances. It is the insideness that most people experience when they are at home and in their own town or region, when they know the place and its people and are known and accepted there.” See Macarthur, The Picturesque, 254; Relph, Place and Placelessness, 55. 95
How, then, can dwelling and place be interpreted in current conditions to influence future development in Christchurch?
It’s Our Fault: Considerations for the Rebuilding of Christchurch
The play of ambiguities, complexities and allusions to the uncanny can also be found in the work and ideas of Lebbeus Woods. As opposed to the control exercised over the environment in normal architectural and domestic practice, Woods advocates an architecture in tension. The uncertainty and change he praises is reflected in the precariousness of the baches of Taylors
Mistake and their compromise at the hands of nature. This is consistent with the nature of dwelling as a letting be and ‘sparing’ of the environment, allowing for risk and transgression.218
Wood’s approach to architecture engages with nature in the city, discarding the traditional dualism established through environmental paradigms and an ecological thought that opposes the human and natural. As Woods argues:
An architecture in tension suggests a struggling architecture and a humanity with limited control of the forces of nature, and of itself. The forces in such an architecture are activated, not pacified. For the moment, they seem to be held in check, at least to the extent they can be measured. Still, they are straining against the materials holding them. Experience teaches that architecture does not create entirely stable or predictable situations. Change is inevitable, as the materials age or tire, or as they are affected by disturbances within or around them. The forces are, in effect, at war with the materials; they want to overcome them; they want to be free of materiality, to flow into the world’s vast oceans of energy, from which they will be reborn again and again in continuous cycles of transformation. Such an understanding of architecture conditions our outlook on the world and leads to the construction of a knowledge‐system based on concepts of process and transience.219
218 As Lebbeus Woods states, “The traditional role of architecture has been one of reassuring us that things are under our control, that is, stable and static. But it is quite another thing to think of all architecture ‘in tension.’” See Lebbeus Woods, The Storm and the Fall (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 47. 219 Woods, The Storm and the Fall, 47‐48. 96
Such an approach reflects the ephemerality and adaptability of the modern. So, too, are parallels with the bach and the settlement of Taylors Mistake evident here. The weathering and damage caused by storms, seas and rock falls reflect an engagement with the forces of nature that allow for the unpredictable and threatening. Woods proposes a translation of this approach in the city; rather than resisting change, an architecture that embraces and celebrates it is necessary. The city should grow and transform, mutated by natural forces and responding creatively to threat and natural phenomena. This approach exhibits the fragility and disorder of the city, delighting in its flexibility and responsiveness.
Citing natural and artificial crises as sources of energy and change, as Woods suggests, can reflect the architectural legacy of historic events. This draws an immediate parallel between the response of bach building following New Zealander’s experience of war and the potential of
Christchurch now to respond creatively to its recent disaster:
In the present context, it must serve to say that different kinds of thinking result in seeing the same spaces differently. They may result from the idiosyncrasies of individuals or from the exposure of people who share a common culture of thinking to a crisis disturbing the normality of the culture, like war, earthquakes, or economic collapse. Crisis is in itself a type of tension field, one that amplifies active forces across the whole field by redistributing them in a non‐hierarchical way.220
Just as the bach presented a means of dealing with trauma and the appropriation of the war experience for the returning servicemen, so too can an architectural, urban response appropriate the post‐quake environment of Christchurch for its residents. For the returning servicemen, baches in the landscape allowed for the exercise of skills they had learned and domestic rituals to which they had grown accustomed. The landscape reflected the openness of
220 Woods, The Storm and the Fall, 58. 97 the battlefield and the same rough, rocky and muddy conditions, reinterpreted and appropriated as a place of refuge. A reinterpretation of our relationship with nature and its place in the city could allow for a similar mediation in Christchurch.
The correlation of ground and building must be addressed holistically, in the same manner in which the baches of Taylors Mistake were integrated within the landscape in order to elaborate the overall coastal composition, animate the scene and reflect the natural character of the place. Even where landscape architecture has traditionally played a role in the shaping of the city, a perceived dichotomy still dominates between the ‘natural’ and ‘artificial.’221 As the ambiguities, complexities and myths regarding these constructs have been detailed, a more encompassing approach to urbanism is now required.
Since the mid 1990s, Landscape Urbanism and Ecological Urbanism have developed as new approaches to city design and management that integrate natural and artificial infrastructures more inclusively. Kathy Poole argues that “the significant relationships of the city are in the interactions between human and natural systems – reciprocating relationships that act in both cooperative and competitive ways in a continuous, vital evolution.”222 The city must remain, however, compact and sustainable; a tendency toward a lower density being one of the main
221 As Steven Bourassa contends, “Unfortunately, it is often the case that landscape architecture does not involve buildings in the sense of exercising some discipline over the aesthetic objects of architecture. Instead, all too often, landscape architecture takes up where architecture leaves off,” there being little coherency in their relationship. See Bourassa, The Aesthetics of Landscape, 17‐18. 222 Kathy Poole, “Civitas Oecologie: Infrastructure in the Ecological City,” in Harvard Architecture Review (1998), 127. 98 criticisms leveled against landscape urbanism.223 Even in a densely built context, we must recognise and cherish the poetic natural environment and the complex ecological systems operating around us and dwell with them in mind.224 As stated by Luke Engleback in reference to the Christchurch rebuild, “A twenty‐first century garden city will need to densify, while still serving as a biodiverse, biophilic and productive urban landscape.”225
The land in Christchurch can now only be consciously interacted with, its power and volatile nature requiring careful consideration and an appropriate response. Just as architect Glenn
Murcutt developed his approach of touching the ground lightly, in Christchurch, too, a responsible, innovative and meaningful way to interact and engage with the ground beneath our feet must be found. The potential exists to address this relationship through the architectural embrace of developing technologies: the expressive integration of base isolation, for instance, could articulate the inherent tension in the moment a building meets the earth in a poetic and meaningful way.
223 See, for instance, Doug Kelbaugh, “Landscape Urbanism, New Urbanism and the Environmental Paradox of Cities,” in Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents, ed. Andres Duany and Emily Talen (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2013). 224 William Cronon encourages us to “abandon the dualism that sees the tree in the garden as artificial – completely fallen and unnatural – and the tree in the wilderness as natural – completely pristine and wild. Both trees in some ultimate sense are wild; both in a practical sense now depend on our management and care.” Geoff Park, too, recognises that “the whole world of landscape imagination can be revealed in our backyard if we give it our proper attention.” See Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 88‐89; Park, Theatre Country. The Chinese and Japanese city dwellers adapted to dense living conditions by reinterpreting and appropriating the rituals of the mountain recluse, finding meaning in the most modest of natural phenomena. As questioned in Yuan‐yeh, a Chinese threatise on gardening with an emphasis on architecture from 1631, “If one can find stillness in the midst of the city turmoil, why should one forego such as accessible spot and seek a more distant one?” Quoted in Cline, A Hut of One’s Own, 10. 225 Luke Englewood, “What should a Garden City in the twenty‐first century look like?” in Once in a Lifetime: City‐building after disaster in Christchurch, ed. Barnaby Bennett et al. (Christchurch: Free Range Press, 2014), 247. 99
The natural wetland environment of Christchurch and its intricate ecology must find integration in the city. The water table is generally only one to two metres below ground level throughout
Christchurch, though these conditions have traditionally been ignored. The city’s settlers converted the original swampland into an arable plain through an arduous drainage endeavour and despite the risk of seismic rupture, built the city in a conventional manner using traditional construction techniques. Much damage was caused as prolific liquefaction occurred during the major earthquakes. If instead the wetland is recognised as an interesting and particular aspect of the city and more appropriate forms of construction are adapted to, a stronger sense of place could develop. An ethical aesthetics of the local has already been developing in the face of globalisation and homogeneity; if let be and celebrated rather than actively resisted, such naturally occurring conditions appropriate to the climate could develop meaning in the city, their embrace and preservation enabling authentic dwelling.226
Some wetland pockets have already been restored since the 1990s, including the Estuary margins, Travis Wetland and the Styx basin, in order to attract birdlife and protect plants.227 The
Avon River which meanders through the city is also in the process of restoration; within the
Christchurch Central Recovery Plan, the river is given more prominence in the city and its banks replanted with native species. Whilst enhancing this natural feature as an armature in the city,
226 Again learning from the transition of the Chinese mountain dweller to the city, Ann Cline argues “The distance sought by the actual wilderness recluse is regained by his or her urban counterpart in a careful theatricality of place and performance.” Cline, A Hut of One’s Own, 13. 227 Native wetland plant species include Manuka, Koromiko, Toetoe and Raupo. Native birdlife is abundant and includes the Pukeko, Tui, Bellbird and Kereku. Native fish, reptiles and invertebrate, too, inhabit wetland environments. Pawson, “Confronting Nature,” 60‐84. 100 the thirty metre wide park zoning on either side of its banks will ensure mere passive use and aesthetic appreciation.228
Having said this, the introduced and developed bird, plant and insect ecologies that have adapted to the conditions of the city and added to its diversity and richness must also be acknowledged and continue to be preserved and integrated. To romanticise the original ‘garden state’ would be to repeat the errors of the aforementioned misguided environmental ideologies. The developed complexity of natural and artificial systems must be preserved in such a manner as to encourage their mutual flourishing in the new city.
By harnessing the energy and disruption caused by the earthquakes, new models of dwelling in nature and the unpredictability and change that this implies may prosper. This necessitates a new urban framework that allows for adaptability, appropriation, the unpredictable and transgressive.229 The city needs to be understood as a complex system in which people relate to
228 Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA), Christchurch Central Development Unit, Christchurch City Council, Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, Christchurch Central Recovery Plan (Christchurch: Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, 2012), 53‐56. 229 “Premeditation is the enemy of tension. Predictability is the enemy of seeing. Design as a prescriptive method diminishes the tension between ourselves and the objects of our perception, and thus our ability to see them for ourselves. More critically, it diminishes our capacity to perceive what is there but not seen, exemplified by our perception of space itself.” Following the San Francisco earthquake of 1989 and the Los Angeles earthquakes of the 1990s, Woods sought to engage the complex geomechanical forces operating in areas of active seismic activity in diverse ways, culminating in the exhibition “Inhabiting the Quake” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. An early note for the exhibition reads: “EARTHQUAKE ARCHITECTURE. Is it the architecture that A) Resists the quake? B) Inhabits the quake? C) Needs the quaked? D) Uses the quake? E) Causes the quake? If A), then (most often) it resists lateral forces; B) exists only in the timeframe of the quake; C) Is created, expanded, or completed by the quake; D) sets off small quakes diffusing ‘the big one.’ Perhaps the SF project is a COMPENDIUM of these possibilities. THE FAULT IS OURS.” This inverses the perception that nature is to blame for the catastrophe and indicates that we are responsible for how we inhabit the land. It also opens up new ways of interpreting and harnessing the earthquake and its fallout and conveys the idea that by learning new ways to live with nature, the situation and the city can be appropriated. See Woods, The Storm and the Fall, 59‐61; Justin Paton, 101 their environment and each other and find meaning. This requires the flexibility to develop openly and the ability for everyone to engage and contribute to the built form and the shaping of the landscape. Christchurch has already seen innovative grass‐roots organisations such as
Gap Filler emerge to celebrate life in the city and appropriate vacant space. This participation in the city needs to be fostered and encouraged, not interpreted as a temporary solution until the rebuild is completed.230 The Christchurch City Council needs to understand that the energy and ingenuity required to establish a vibrant city life will only come from its residents and their ability to engage and draw meaning from their relationship with the environment.
The current Christchurch Central Recovery Plan is topheavy and does not acknowledge the power and influence of the people themselves to shape the city. Rather than encouraging participation in the process, the plan is too prescriptive and deterministic. Aside from more participation at the planning level, any master‐planning framework needs to allow for a level of freedom, personal expression and self‐organisation to encourage responsibility and social involvement amongst city residents.231 The people of Christchurch have already demonstrated their ability to engage with nature in a more meaningful manner than the dominant paradigms
“The Fault is Ours: Joseph Becker on Lebbeus Woods” (Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetu, 4 December 2013). 230 Gap Filler describe themselves as “a creative urban regeneration initiative that temporarily activates vacant sites within Christchurch with cool and creative projects, to make for a more interesting and vibrant city.” It is community focused and collaborative in nature, responsible for many of the innovative interventions around Christchurch, including the Pallet Pavilion and the RAD bike workshop. Such groups reflect the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the bach dweller and the responsiveness and flexibility advocated by Lebbeus Woods. The governing bodies of the Christchurch rebuild have made it clear, however, that they support organisations such as Gap Filler and Life in Vacant Spaces only as providers of short‐term solutions to revitalise the central city as the transition into a traditional fixed and permanent state takes place. See “Gap Filler: About,” Gap Filler, accessed on August 20 at http://www.gapfiller.org.nz/about/; See CERA, Christchurch Central Recovery Plan, 97‐98. 231 Although an initial ‘share an idea’ call‐out from the council did attract more than 100,000 entries, meaningful public participation has been lacking. CERA, Christchurch Central Recovery Plan, 19‐24. 102 have allowed. Although perhaps beginning as a weekend retreat for aesthetes educated in taste and discernment, the inhabitants of Taylors Mistake soon became ‘insiders’ of the landscape and found meaning through dwelling. A more substantive relationship may again be forged in the city by allowing personal relationships with the environment to develop based on understanding, engagement and participation. As willed by Maggie Barry, “we may lose the bach, [but] we must never lose the bach state of mind.”232
An inclusive and meaningful approach to building is relevant not only to Christchurch but to different contexts around the world; widespread ecological imperatives necessitate a more holistic and nuanced interpretation of the environment and our place within it. Whilst the picturesque has left a legacy marred by the reduction of the environment to image, the aesthetic interpretation of nature has developed through the concepts of place and the genius loci to inform a more embodied experience of the land. This more substantive and encompassing manner of understanding nature enables dwelling with a greater awareness and respect for the complex ecological systems operating around us. In contrast to the positivist, rational current of contemporary dialogue concerning sustainability, more phenomenological and meaningful aspects need to influence perception and lead to a renewed ethics regarding how we live our lives in nature. Only by changing how we interpret the environment will we be able to dwell responsibly within it.
232 Maggie Barry in A Summer Place, quoted in McCarthy, “A Summer Place.” 103
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