Fine-tuning a few elements

Practice in Profile

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I HAVE TO ADMIT MY DESIGN PRACTICE has probably been unduly influenced by the shoebox and I wonder if this has its genesis in the all-encompassing authority with which the ‘Wellington school’ strode the land when I was at architecture school. There seemed, at every award and competition, to be a series of assemblies: those wonderfully coloured collisions of cubes, tubes and cones tumbling down the impossibly steep hillsides. It was alien territory for a student from the flatlands of the South Island and even Peter Beaven’s flamboyant reworking of Christchurch’s heritage of colonial gothic seemed restrained in comparison.

Despite my reservations, the eclectic energy of early 1980s’ Ponsonby had me working at full tilt and the Vernon townhouses were a solid work-out in leveraging the shoebox proportions of a single living room within a highly decorated stacking of plaster boxes. The outside carries all the marks of its postmodern age: the tiled chimney detail, the decorative pipework and a host of incidental elements. For all that, the double-height living space inside the front unit revealed the richness of experience possible within a fairly stiff rectilinear form, despite my undisciplined insertion of a piano-curved mezzanine and Mondrian-inspired sideboard and kitchen storage. I fancied, at the time, that the living volume received something from Le Corbusier’s Ozenfant studio, the double-height space with a stair crawling up one end, though, of course, both would have been appalled were they to have set foot in that