It is a great and unexpected honour to receive the Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects Gold Medal. It places me within a whakapapa of architects whom I have always greatly admired and provides a platform from which to communicate architecture’s importance. It also prompts one to reflect on one’s own contribution to architecture. The kaupapa of this essay is to discuss my work as a journey through architecture.
I only ever wanted to be an architect when I was growing up, which was an unusual ambition for a Ngāpuhi/Ngāti Kahu girl from West Auckland. My timing was appalling. I entered the University of Auckland School of Architecture in 1989, 18 months after the stock market crash, with little prospect of finding employment as an architect after graduation. But, by then, I had found something that would influence the rest of my career: Māori architecture. I stayed at the School, completing a post-professional master’s thesis under Sarah Treadwell’s supervision and a PhD with Mike Linzey and Mike Austin. My doctoral thesis argued that Māori buildings and their designers have a whakapapa: a lineage of concepts, practices and values passed between generations of makers who adapt them to suit the uniquely Māori needs of the communities they
