Polynesian Influences in Architecture

MIKE AUSTIN UNITEC Institute of Technology

The islands ofAotearoa/New Zealand have two main populations - anthropophagy and the tendency by pakeha to cannibalise Maori Maori and Pakeha (non Maori). Maori arrived from Polynesia over one architecture and dace it in museums. Recent work on cannibalism thousand years ago and the Pakeha settlers (mostly from Europe) over focuses precisely on New Zealand and the question of just who the the last two hundred years. Maori now constitute nearly 15% of the cannibals were at the moment of intercultural exchange.' Cannibalism population of less than four million people. Maori buildmgs were called as the sign of the other, has become a sign of undecideability. The whare, and consisted of a single enclosed space with a small doorway, consumption and (mis)appropriation of Maori aesthetic production is at and were of gable or arched form constructed of timber and thatch. stake, and while this issue has been engaged with by artists in New The roof extended over the entrance to form a sheltered porch. Ths Zealand architectural discourse and practice have not been prepared to was the prototype for all Maori building. The influence of this grapple with the issue. lo architecture on that ofAotearoa/New Zealand is, we are regularly told Mitchell and Chaplin's book on New Zealand Architecture since very small. Hurst Seager writing around 1900 is usually taken to be the 1840, The Elegant Shed, mentions in passing that the architect Rewi first commentator on New Zealand architecture: "Here in New Zealand Thompson has Maori ancestors.'' The general dismissal of Maori the only hstorical examples of art we have are the works of the Maoris; influence in archtecture continues up to the present where just last and these, though excellent examples of savage art are scarcely suitable year Stewart writes: "There must also be a question over claims of as standards on which to found our national taste."' R4aori influence in an art form whch has a verv limited resource in i This relies on a clear and comfortable differentiation of the savage Maori tradition.""This comment is in the context of a dmussion about that was the focus of Loos' assertion that the tattoo was acceptable on Tohn Scott the architect of Futuna Cha~el.Theauthor of a book on the the primitive but not on the ci~ilized.~Civilization is further defined as chapel ,implies that Scott's ~Maoriancestry is no more important in the "British" fifty years later by Knight. design of the chapel than his Scottish and Irish origins, and ispossibly less significant than his Catholic upbringing.13 The building, which 'TheMaori race, dominant in some otherfields, had little architectural commemorates a martydom on the Polynesian Island of Futuna, is influence. They have it is true a native architecture interesting and however claimed by Walden to be an "architectural watershed in our valuablefrom a historical point of vierv, but it served a w?v of living indlgenous struggle to be ourselves as Pacific people."" entirelv opposed to the British civilization. Apartfrom some influence The word indigenous raises the issue of identity - just who is in detailed ornament it could hare little effect upon contemporay ind~genous?~In the nineteenth century a New Zealander was a Maori. design .'' The twentieth century saw the term refer to Pakeha as well. Indigenous Knight confines Maori influence to the traditional and decorative however has now returned to referring to Maori only. On most international arenas and occasions New Zealand a~~ealsto Maori identitv in much the way that the role of Maori in New Zealand public life has I I J been restricted to the entertainer.This consignment to the history and which is ignored or neglected at other times. Beaven and Stacpoole ornament categories has meant to the margins, but there is now an appeal to the international but evoke local and colonial descriptions of Maori when they say about Futuna: "Integrity, decoration, and mysterious increasing interest in both history and ornament - and the marginal. Accordmg to Knight, Maori architecture as well as being ornamental, is moods come together in this buildlng to create one of the finest concerned with detail, and a few years later the architects Pascoe and architectural experiences in New Zealand, and place the chapel in world Hall in a journal article say that: "Except for the typical carving on early ~lass."'~ Maori buildlngs, there is little in New Zealand archtecture that can be However it is not clear why the building is considered to be said to be hstinctive or indigenous."+ decorated. Presumably it refers to the artwork and the coloured perspex Pevsner on his 1958 visit to New Zealand declined to comment on glazing, whch happens to be the work of a Pakeha artist. Walden says Maori art and architecture because he said he was "not an expert."This that Futuna is a "faithful celebration of Maori and Pakeha" and that lack dld not however prevent hmfrom pointing out thatC'thecrafts of "...the marriage of Maori and Pakeha is legitimate."17 This anxiety the Maoris are gone."' Shaw perpetuates this nostalgia when he says in about the issue of paternity and the question of ownershp is raised but there is no clue of how this marria~ewas consummated other than "a a note at the beginning of New ZealandArchitecture: "Very little of the old n Maori architecture survives t~day."~Stacpoole and Beaven in their new synthesis" of Maori and Pakeha values. Nor were there any offspring. Walden makes references to European precedents, such as book New ZealandArchitecture 1820 - 1970 do not discuss pre-European archtecture at all.7 Stacpoole in Colonial Architecture in New Zealand, Ronchamp - with illustrations. There are no illustrations of Maori summed up the conventional wisdom that for the European there was ~recedents. "...no sipficant archtecture to be &ge~ted."~Thsis apecdar expression And there was a Maori precedent. Almost exactly a century earlier (as is Hurst Seager's 'national taste') given the association of Maori with there was a building with an uncanny resonance with Futuna.Ths is the so calledCMaoriChurch' Rangiatea which like Futuna was named after a Polynesian island and was remarkably similar to the later buildmg with that in early contacts between Maori and Pakeha ". . .the qualities of the its timber posts, exposed rafters, and branches of freestanding dagonal indgenes are the most profound influence on the kind of settler society struts. Ths buildmg was also described as 'decorated' although it was which is imposed upon them."30 From the beginning of European explicitly not carved, carving being the sign of the savage.The decoration settlement the immigrant was dependent upon Maori goodwill, trade here is confined to rafter patterns and tukutuku wall panelling. Walden and production - a history that has been f~rgotten.~'Thiswas also the does not mention Rangiatea as an influence on John Scott but it is very time of the flowering of a unique building - the store-house - when unlikely that Scott did not know the buildmg- or rather representations carving appeared on the surface of the building instead of being confined of it. There were &verse drawings of Rangiatea, sometimes implying to the interior.These buildings, along with war canoes, died and were that the budding is no longer in existence and perpetuating the nostalgia buried in museums. in relation to Maori- prophetically as it happened, as the buil&ng was In the ei~hteensixties Maori won the battles but lost the wars over 0 burnt down in 1995.18 Shaw begins Chapter 1 with an interior land and this led to a drastic decline in Maori population for the next photograph of Rangiatea (and Chapter 9 with Futuna) claiming that ths thirty years.32This period however produced a most extraordinary bulldmg was;"the first to blend Maori and European builhgtraditions."lg architectural response, which was to develop the architecture of the He does not say how this occurred and Treadwell has articulated in meeting house. Deriving from the whare this buildmg owes much to detail the ingredients and complexity of this 'blendmg' . Stacpoole and the church to which it is spatially similar but theoretically and Beaven insist that the initiation and the supervision of the structure was conceptually quite opposed. European elements such as doors, windows, by Europeans, which is again to simplify a matter of some complexity.20 fretwork, roofing iron and weatherboards were appropriated and Maori archtecture has not been taken seriously in these publications experimented with in the development of the house. This was an on New Zealand architecture. On the other hand scholarly endeavour assemblage rather than a 'synthesis' by Maori, where European elements in general in New Zealand has tended to focus on Maori issues, and this were collaged onto the whare form.The so called rebelTe Kooti was is also true in architecture, where there are theses and a number of the definer ofthe classic form ofthe meeting house which has been the papers dealing with Maori architect~re.~'There is a scholarly and model ever since. He built these significant houses while a fugitive thorough hstory of nineteenth century meeting houses by Roger Neich, from the British, was reviled until relatively recently in Pakeha history, and Alfred Gel1 uses the meeting house as his exemplar for a and the Ringatu religon that he founded was suppressed for over half a

comprehensive theory of art.22Thereis a possibility that the influence ~enturv.~'J of Maori architecture has been more significant than is acknowledged McKay argues that there has been a suppression of other in the same way as the Pacific has been influential inwestern thinking as architectural forms than the meeting-house and points out that there an unspoken fa~tor.'~Maori motifs were incorporated in building were many other both pre-European and post-European architectural ornament up until the nineteen fifties. Often Maori motifs were used forms. He argues that this stereotyping serves to limit understanding as part of the orders, which are the very authorisation of the buildmg as of Maori architecture and its substantial regional variations, On the architecture."There are well known examples incorporating Maori other hand the meeting house is an extraordinary achievement, and to motifs in the Art Deco decoration on the builmngs of a town rebuilt repeat its most remarkable aspect was that it achleved its classic form in - after it was destroyed by a devastating earthquake in the ninteen thirties. the 1870s and 1880s at the verv moment that the Maori 1population L Here the local is legitimised by the internationa1,'jThe ornamental is was in crisis from wars and disease and the European role was seen to the repressed side of modern architecture so that by being restricted to "soothe the pillow of the dying race."The house looked to the past the decorative, Maori archtecture became doubly dismissed. where the building is literally and in every detail the ancestor's body. McKay argues that fifties modernist architects, with nationalist The house also looked forward, providmg accommodation and hope for concerns, attempted to incorporate Maori forms in the architecture of a possible future that no Pakeha believed existed.3+ timber and pitched roofs that was the local version of m~dernism.'~ The Maori meeting house confounds the easy opposition between Shaw proposes that "the appropriation of Maori forms were symptomatic structure and decoration. In the house it is the structure that is decorated of the desire of many architects and artists to find a means of expression with carving, while the infill (tukutuku) panelling has its patterns created which could possibly be called a New Zealand vernacular style."" He by the process of constructing a structurally stable flat panel out of suggests that it was a motivating factor behind the work of the an reeds and fibre. These patterns are named, but derived from the influential group of postwar architects known as the 'Group'- especially fabrication process.With carving (as with the tattoo) the decoration is a house that was called the 'pakeha house'.28TWO churches not applied, but rather cut into, the surface ofthe material which might

refer to the meeting-house- but in these cases it was the form and not be seen to onenI unI and structurallvJ weaken the members. It was a the decoration (or for that matter the structure) of the whare that was destruction of the surface, whch Loos would argue was a dsfiguring. taken seriously.This of course was consistent with modernist views, but But the intention was quite the opposite.The carvings were all human it meant that Maori archtecture continued to be seen as dfferent to figures and they are seen to strengthen rather than weaken the mainstream New Zealand architecture. One way of ignoring Maori structure. Owen Jones (half a century before Loos talked about the architecture is to consign it to the traditional, so that as the other, it is Papuan paddle) spoke about the R4aori paddle, whch he c1aimed"would seen as vernacular or anthropological. rival the works of the highest civi1isation"and he noted: "He (the New On the other hand at the time of first European settlement there Zealander) desired not only that the paddle should be strong, but should was no question that what Maori built was archtecture. In 1840Angas appear so, and his ornament is so disposed as to give an appearance of said: addtional strength to what it would have had if the surface had remained ~ndecorated"~' "With a view to perpetuate the singular and beautiful architectural Today most meeting-houses are decorated and the architecture of remains of these people, I made carefulbjninied drawings on the these buildmgs is constituted by their decoration. John Scott said: "The spot ofall those most worthy ofrecord, and thus rescuedfrom certain Maori will not worrv about buildinps but he will worrv about those J 0 J and spec+ oblivion the works of art of a race of men who are particular kinds of thlngs he has around - the carvings and tukutuku undergoing a most rapid and estraordina~~hange.'"~ w~rk."~~Thosenostalgically committed to loss mourn the present day This comment initiates the nostalgia that characterized the absence of a structural role for the carvings, but the Maori view (that the ornament is the architecture) has viven to structure the role of subsequent discourse. It also assumes that the influence flows one way 0 h-om European to Maori. On the other hand it has often been suggested supporting and holding up the ornament. For example in the Auckland University meeting house the structure is a steel frame with timber infill to which the carvings are attached.The steel frame can be seen as and sources and anxities about ownership. Influence is in the end about subservient to the carvings producing the typical Semperian reversals power and it is not sufficient explanation of the complex interrelated that seem to occur around this topic.37 Carving is allowed (necessary formations and decisions that constitute a piece of architecture. even) on meeting houses but not on European buildings thereby reinforcing the difference.The meeting house is always associated with an open space onto which it opens, called the marae and it is now NOTES d&ult to believe that it was assumed thty years ago that thls institution IS. Hurst Seager, 'Architectural Art in New Zealand', RIBA Journal, (along with Maori language) would be limited to occasional and ritual Vol. VII, No 19, (29 Sept 1900): 490. use.38 Some claimed that only traditional sites and structures were '"The Papuan covers with tattoos his skin, his boat, his paddle, in allowable for the building.39However marae and meeting houses have short anything within his reach. He is not a delinquent but the now replaced churches as community buildings in New Zealand, being modern man who tattoos himself is a delinquent or a degenerate." built at almost every educational and community institution in the Adolph Loos, "Ornament and Crime", 1908 Trans. Michael country. Bullock, in Programs and Man$estos on 20th Centuv Architecture, Ulrich The marae was central to the design of the New Zealand National Conrads (ed) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1975): 20. 0 Museum (known asTe Papa) where instead of just being enclosed as in 'Cyril Knight, 1840 andAJter, (Auckland: Auckland Univcrs~tyCollege, 1940): 180-181. other museums the marae and meeting house gets lifted off the ground 'Paul Pascoe and Humphrey Hall, 'The Modern House', Landfall, Vol and interiorised.TheTe Papa meeting house seems to respond to ths 1, No 2, (June 1947)124. isolation where the decoration is wonderfully innovative and excessive, 'Nikolaus Pevsner, 'The Ingratiating Chaos', The Listener, (November crawling out over the bargeboard as if it has been held inside for far too 20, 1958): 825. long. However the decoration, and indeed, the marae never made it to 6Peter Shaw, New Zealand Architecture: From Po!,r.nesion Beginnings to the exterior of the building. Kawiti has pointed out that Te Papa is 1990, (Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991): 10. located on the beach - the site of arrival, departure and pleasure for the 'For which they were criticised at the time. Peter Sargisson, Eur~~ean.'~Thsmuseum owes more to Europe than to Polynesia and 'Architectural Truths', Islands, Vol 2, No 3, (Spring 1973): 303- it lost the opportunity to use the marae as approach and to ornament 304. The two buildings illustrated are Rangiatea Church at Otaki the exterior. and Major Fox's house, which has a small Gothic storehouse There is another bdhgby the architect John Scott, not mentioned alongside - and to which the text gives more significance. John Stacpoole and Peter Beaven, New Zealand Art: Architecture 1820- by Walden, where carving was used on the exterior as 'decorative' 1970, (: A.H. and A.W. Reed, 1972): 34. panels on the facade.Ths is the Maori Battalion building in Palmerston 'John Stacpoole, Colonial Architecture in New Zealand, (Wellington: North : AH and AW Reed, 1976): 8. gSpecifically over a crucial event that took place in Queen Charlotte "It initialb seems strange that this building is so unrecognised by the Sound. Gananath Obeyesekere, 'British Cannibals: Contemplation architectural profession In the manj retrospective articles in of an event in the death and resurrection of James Cook explorer'. Architecture New Zealand dedicated to Scott's work there is no Bq ond Te.md9, Asceticism and Violence in Anthropological Interpretation, mention of this building. In comparison Te Ao Hou: The Maori Gilles Bibeau and Ellen Corin, (eds), (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, Magazine dedicated afront cover and article to this work, shovering 1995): 145. the building with praise"" I0Vanya Steiner, '(Mis)appropriation in New Zealand Architecture; an incriminating cite," Interstices 4,Auckland University (CD ROM, In ths project Scott (mis)appropriated English New Brutalism and 1996). Lloyd Jenkins argues that Maori images were being used by decorated it with Maori carving.The carvings weave their way across designers before the turn of last century. Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, the glass faqade so that the "equivalent sized windows and carvings 'Avis Higgs and the Maori Motif Textile,' The Pumpkin Soup Papers, Research Papers in the School of Design UNITEC, (Auckland, become, in many ways, a reversal or negative of each other.'N2Steiner 1996). gives several readings of the impropriety of this faqade arguing that this "David Mitchell and Gillian Chaplin, The Elegant Shed: New Zealand is no easy harmonious mixing. On the other hand, Maori commentary Architecture since 1915,Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1984): said : "Here at last is a buildmg incorporating both Maori and European 93-94. Gerald Melling,/?~ful Architecture: The Genius of New Zealand's elements of architecture which are not only happily and harmoniously , (Duned~n:Caveman Press, 1980). Also Positire4 wedded, but whch show conclusively that it is possible for New Zealand Architecture: New Zealandi , (: Square One Press, to develop unique archtectural form^."^ Again the marriage metaphor 1985).The most recent publication on New Zealand architecture , Looking at the Local refers briefly to the whare.Justine Clark and and again, it seems, a union without issue - no one else has dared to do Paul Walker, Looking for the Local: Architecture and the New Zealand this - not even (or maybe especially) Maori architects. Interestingly Modern, (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2000): 31. Scott and some other Maori (such as the Maori prophetsTeWhiti, Rua "Keith Stewart, 'living through art,' Archltecture New Zealand, (July/ and Ratana) have never felt entirely comfortable with the meeting- August, 1999): 50. house in its conventional form . Some have worked hard to change the "Although it is admitted that: "His lifestyle owes much to Polynesian wooden aspects of Maori archtecture. Other archtects have resisted values" Russell Walden, Voices of Sllence: 58. an ethnic identification but these davs it leads to commissions.The issue J "Walden, Voices of Silence: 134 is one of identity and many architects claim a geographic, rather than a ''Walden describes John Scott as "a relaxed New Zealander." Walden, racial or cultural belonging, which sees architects claiming a Pacific Voms of Silence: 5 8. identity. Perhaps it is because Pacific bddmgs do not have the decorative '6Stacpoole and Beaven, New Zealand Art: Archltecture 1820-1970: 92. dilemmas of the carved house. Perha~sit is because the Pacific Islands "Walden, Voices of Silence: 147. voice lacks local power. The mention of the Pacific returns us to the "Sarah Treadwell, ' European Representations of the architecture of problematic title. Polynesian does not distinguish between the various Rangiatea', PhD Thesis, Auckland University School of Architecture and hfferent Pacific Island groups and between them and Maori.Talk Library, 1995. of influence is to perpetuate the New Zealand obsession with oripns I9Peter Shaw, New Zealand Archltecture: 22. 'o"Bishop Hadfield provided the inspiration for Rangiatea hut it was in the 1970s and 1980s1, Proceedings of Thresholds: the fourteenth built under the supervision of Samuel Williams." Stacpoole and annual conference ofthe Sociey ofArchitectura1 Historians ofAustralia and Beaven, New Zealand Arc: Architecture 1820-1 970: 16. New Zealand, Launceston, (September 1999): 302. "Recently McCarthy has drawn attention to the complex architectural L9George French Angas, Savage Lfe and Scenes in and New exchange in Dunedin's 'Maori House.'Christine McCarthy 'The Zealand, 1847 Vol 11, (London: Smith Elder and Co, 1847): 88-89 Maori House', 'Te Pa" and Captain Hankey's House": bicultural 3oDavid Pearson, A Dream Deferred:The Origins $Ethnic Conflict in New architecture in New Zealand at the turn of the century.' Fabrications, Zealand, (Wellington: Allen and Unwin, 1990): 39. Vol 11, Number 1, (July 2000): 62-78. ""It must be confessed that the huts built by them [Maori] were "Roger Neich, Painted Histories: Earl,r Maori Figuratlre Painting, much superior to those of our handywork." Henry William Petre, (Auckland, Auckland University Press, 1993). "The totality of An Account of the Settlement of the New Zealand Companj , (London: Maori meeting houses, therefore constitutes a particular genre of Smith Elder and Co, 1842): 1 1. art production, over a particular historical phase in the course of "James Belich, Making peoples: A histo9 of the from Maori history (in many ways a glorious period, which contemporary Poj,-nesian Settlement to the end of the nineteenth centuy, (Auckland: Maoris recall with pride), which can he considered 'coherant' in Allen Lane, 1996). the sense we require." Alfred Gell, Art and Ageng :An Anthropological Theov, (Oxford: Carendon Press, 1998): 251. "Mike Linzey, 'Te Kooti Architect,' Architecture &'en. Zealand, (Sept- Oct 1989): 90- 95. 23As documented by Bernard Smith Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pac$c, (New Haven: Yale University Press,1985). "The 'Anytime' conference which focussed on the temporal in The Polynesian words taboo and tattoo were discussed by Freud architecture, failed to look at this double architectural process and Laos respectively in significant modernist texts. Mike Austin, where buildings respond to the crisis of the present by constituting 'Tabboo and Tattoo: Freud Loos and South Pacific Practices,' protensions and pretensions. Cynthia Davidson (ed), Anytime, Double Frames: Proceedings of thejrst International Sj-mposium of the (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). Centre for Asian Environments, Maryam Gusheh, (ed) (Sydney: 350wenJones The Grammar of Ornament, London: B Quaritch, 1868, University of New South Wales, 2000): 33-42. 13 n. "Examples are the Auckland war Memorial Museum and the Wanganui 36JohnScott and Ming Ching-Fan, 'OfWoolsheds, Houses and People', Post Office. Shaw, New Zealand Architecture: 122. Islands, Vol 2 No 3. (Spring 1973): 291. "Peter Shaw and Peter Hallett, Art Deco Napier: s9les of the thirties, 37This building uses the colonial style which is identified with Maori (Nelson: Craig Potton Publishing, 1987): 46-48. Meeting houses much as Maori ritual life seems to operate with a 26Bill McKay, 'The Whare face of Modernism', FIRM(ness) commodi~~ nineteenth century missionary version of Christianity. DE-LIGHT: questioning the canons, Proceedings of the Fifteenth "Bruce Bigs, The Maori lanuage Past and Present", The Maori People Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, in the Nineteen Sixties, Eric Schwimmer (ed), (Auckland: Blackwood Australia and New Zealand (Melbourne, 1998) 262. and Janet Paul, 1968): 447- 454 "Shaw, New Zealand Architecture: 154. j9Hugh Kawharu, 'Urban lmmigrants and Tangata Whenua,' The Maori 28Paradoxicallythe Group's reverse reference to Maori was People in the Nineteen Si.~ties.:174 -186. commented on in two British Architectural JournalsArchitects '"Derek Kawiti, Unpublished Paper, (July 2000) Journal, March 195 1. Quoted by Bill McKay, 'The Whare face of i'Vanya Steiner, '(Mis)appropriation in New Zealand Architecture'. Modernism: 260, and 'New Zealand Vernacular,' The Architect and "Vanya Steiner, '(Mis)appropriation in New Zealand Architecture'. Building News (9 Jun 1950):585. quoted by Robin Skinner, '!Te Ao Ho: The Neri World (June 1964).32-34. 'Larrikins Abroad: International accounts of New Zealand architects