Building Yesterday's Schools
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BUILDING YESTERDAY’S SCHOOLS An analysis of educational architectural design as practised by the Building Department of the Canterbury Education Board from 1916-1989. Murray Noel Williams A thesis summited in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Art History. Department of Art History and Theory, the University of Canterbury. 2014 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………………………. i Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………………………… iii Abbreviations …………………………………………………………………………………………………. iv Notes on illustrations ……………………………………………………………………………………… v List of illustrations…………………………………………………………………………………………… vi Notes on currency and measurement changes………………………………………………… x Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter One: Victorian and Edwardian footprints ……………………………………….. 11 Chapter Two: Adaptation …………………………………………………………………………… 26 Chapter Three: The open-air revolution ……………………………………………………… 46 Chapter Four: Making do and holding the fort: depression and war…………….. 75 Chapter Five: The Canterbury Plan ……………………………………………………………… 86 Chapter Six: Building for the Baby Boomers ……………………………………………… 104 Chapter Seven: The CEBUS solution ………………………………………………………… 134 Chapter Eight: New Directions ………………………………………………………………… 150 Chapter Nine: The post-war intermediates ………………………………………………… 169 Chapter Ten: Building on the West Coast. …………………………………………………… 190 Chapter Eleven: Termination ……………………………………………………………………… 208 Chapter Twelve: Retrospective …………………………………………………………………… 219 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 229 Illustrations: Volume Two ………………………………………………………………………….. 247 Acknowledgements. First, sincere thanks to my supervisors, Ian Lochhead and John Freeman-Moir, for their scholarship, expertise, patience and encouragement in guiding me through this process. From my point of view their presence was both stimulating and reassuring. Much of my research time was spent in various archives in Christchurch and Wellington and I grew to appreciate the skill and knowledge of the professional archivists who taught and helped me so much. I would like to offer my sincere thanks to Jill Durney, Erin Kimber and the staff at the Macmillan Brown Library at the University of Canterbury. The archivists and librarians at the National Library, the Alexander Turnbull Library and Archives New Zealand, all located in Wellington, were always willing to help and I appreciated their advice and knowledge. However my major research was focussed on the CEB files held at the Christchurch branch of Archives New Zealand where my presence became something of a fixture over four years. My appreciation of the professionalism and understanding exhibited by Chris Adam’s team is profound. I would like to offer my special thanks to three highly skilled archivists, Katherine Doig, Rosie Ballantyne, Caroline Etherington and Archivist Support Person, Vicki Hawes, who despite having to cope with life in a building compromised by earthquake damage, worked serenely through aftershocks to maintain an exceptionally high level of service. I would like to acknowledge Colin McGeorge for his willingness to share his knowledge of nineteenth and twentieth-century pedagogy and his expertise in educational history in general. John Wilson was most generous in permitting me to use images from his photograph collection while Peter Penlington provided me with the fruit of his research about the life of his grandfather, George Penlington. I was fortunate in being able to interview several of those involved in the administration of the Canterbury Education Board as well as several professional employees of the Building Department. I thank them all for their candid observations that did so much to enliven my study of CEB correspondence and memos. Special acknowledgment is due to Len Stone whose clarity of recall did much to explain the way in which the Building Department operated, and Peter Greening, who, despite facing severe and on-going personal problems caused by the Canterbury earthquakes, was always prepared to help in deepening my understanding of issues that were not always apparent from my study of archival information. It was a privilege for me to interview George Dryden shortly before his death; his acute i observations were a real highlight of my research. Thanks are also due to Douglas Horrell who provided me with some enlightenment about the arcane world of formatting. This thesis is dedicated to my wife, Sheryl Williams, not only for her proof reading skills but for her general support and her ability in helping me maintain a sense of perspective throughout what has been a long journey! ii Abstract. This thesis considers the nature of primary, intermediate and district high school buildings designed by the Building Department of the Canterbury Education Board from its consolidation in 1916 until its termination in 1989. Before 1916, the influence of British models on the CEB’s predecessors had been dominant, while after that date, Board architects were more likely to attempt vernacular solutions that were relevant to the geographic situation of the Canterbury district, the secular nature of New Zealand education and changing ideas of the relative importance of the key architectural drivers of design i.e. function and form. One development, unique to Canterbury, was that for a short period, from 1924-29, a local pressure group, the Open Air Schools’ League became so powerful that it virtually dictated the CEB’s design policy until the Board architects George Penlington and John Alexander Bigg reassumed control by inflecting the open-air model into the much acclaimed veranda block. The extent to which Board architects had the freedom to express themselves within a framework of funding control exercised by the Department of Education was further circumscribed by successive building codes that, at their most directive, required national standardisation under the 1951 Dominion Basic Plan and to a slightly lesser extent under the1956 code and associated White Lines regime. Following World War 2, the use of prefabricated structures had prompted the recognition that better designed relocatable rooms could hold the key to a more flexible and effective allocation of resources in an environment increasingly subject to rapid demographic change. By the end of the period, the exploitation of new construction technologies and modern materials led to the dominance of the relocatable CEBUS buildings in Canterbury schoolyards. A concurrent development was the response of architects A. Frederick (Fred) McCook and John Sinclair Arthur to the Department’s call to design more flexible spaces, i.e. open planning, to facilitate a change in pedagogical method. Other issues raised in this study are the CEB’s solutions to the challenges of building on the West Coast, and the recurring need to ensure structural integrity in a region where there was a continuous risk of seismic activity. Canterbury Education Board Department of Education George Penlington John Alexander Bigg Albert Frederick (Fred) McCook John Sinclair Arthur Building Codes: 1921, 1951, 1956, 1970, 1971. Open-air classrooms, Veranda Block, Dominion Basic Plan, White Lines, Open Plan Schools, Prefabs, Unit rooms, CEBUS relocatables iii Abbreviations. AG Ashburton Guardian. AJHR Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives. ANZC Archives New Zealand, Christchurch. ANZW Archives New Zealand, Wellington. ARIBA Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects. CCL Christchurch City Libraries. CEB. Canterbury Education Board. CEB Minutes. Canterbury Education Board Minutes and Reports of Committees. CEBUS Canterbury Education Board Unit System. CM Canterbury Museum. DBP Dominion Basic Plan. DSISDAC/DISDAC District Senior Inspector’s Schools Development Advisory Committee. EBA. [New Zealand] Education Boards’ Association. EP Evening Post. LT Lyttelton Times. MB. Macmillan Brown Library. NCEB North Canterbury Education Board. NZCER New Zealand Council for Educational Research National Education The Journal of the New Zealand Educational Institute. NZEI The New Zealand Educational Institute. NZIA The New Zealand Institute of Architects. NZOYB New Zealand Official Year Book. NZPD New Zealand Parliamentary Debates. OASL The Open Air Schools’ League. PPTA The Post Primary Teachers’ Association. iv Note on Illustrations. The majority of illustrations are derived from contemporary sources: architectural designs produced by the CEB Building staff and photographs taken to record the construction process and the completed buildings. Plans and drawings available were often site copies and at best were creased from continual folding or at worst were also torn and tea-stained. After use, these records had been stored at the various CEB premises where conditions were far from optimal, hence the damage apparently caused by dampness. Some drawings were affixed into files by the use of a split pins that have degraded so much that separation of these documents was judged too dangerous. Photographing such records often proved extremely challenging: the most obvious problem has been the impossibility of aligning some of these images squarely. Many of the Building Department photographs are by amateurs rather than professional photographers and the results are often blurred and poorly focussed, a problem compounded when the resulting images were affixed, (usually glued) into ledgers or onto foolscap-sized sheets of light card. In most cases horizontal or vertical