Transcolonisation: 1990–2020
THIS ARTICLE ALLOWS ME TO CALIBRATE my relationship to the architecture of Aotearoa New Zealand between 1990 and 2020 via flashbacks and ‘Fast Forwards’. Many architectural epochs don’t last 30 years (futurism 1909–1934, brutalism 1950–1978, metabolism 1959–1968,1 deconstructivism 1982–2008)2 and so this time in absentia is long enough to ‘sea change’. When I departed these shores, New Zealand was completing its sesquicentennial year commemorating 150 years since Te Tiriti’s signing and interest in things Māori was high. The term ‘bicultural’ had entered local architectural discourse, with Russell Withers first to deploy it in his 1986 column on Racism and Architecture.3 The second reference, in 1987, was by Rewi Thompson about his work reflecting the “balance between things Māori and Pākehā”.4 Cultural interactions were becoming more critical in institutional building designers’ work.5 By the time Jasmax won the international competition to design the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, that design “biculturally cleaved the building into tangata whenua and tangata tiriti (non-Māori) areas”.6 Let’s rewind a little further.
When I left Kawerau College for the University of Auckland in the mid-’80s, there was no such ‘thing’ as Māori architecture. The architecture routinely being taught in the university’s curriculum was a foreign variant. During my studies at the School of Architecture and, later, for two years at the School of Engineering (Civil), all my pedagogical references were European in their authorship (Tafuri, Foucault, Derrida…) or Western in their canon (modernism, regionalism, postmodernism…). The vocabulary heard in the studio was more palimpsest, less Papakāinga, more mimesis, less mātauranga, and more a, this learning was optional. There was no core allocation in the curriculum for any indigenous reading of architecture.
