In 2011, the charitable belief that had been established in 2003 to save lots of John Scott’s Futuna Chapel at Karori, Wellington, initiated a lecture collection to lift funds for the constructing’s conservation and promote consciousness of its architectural significance. The chapel, which was commissioned by the Catholic non secular order, the Society of Mary (the Marists) and accomplished in 1961, was bought, as part of its wider website, to a developer in 2001; the Pals of Futuna Charitable Belief purchased the chapel from him in 2006. Over the previous dozen years, the Belief’s Futuna Lecture, yearly offered in Wellington, Auckland, and Christchurch, has developed into a major architectural event. The occasion’s organiser, Wellington architect Nick Bevin, has proved to be a grasp of the humanities of persuasion, attracting robust sponsor assist and luring celebrated worldwide architects to Aotearoa.
The lecture collection received off to a powerful begin. The primary speaker was Australian Institute of Architects’ Gold Medallist Rick Leplastrier; the subsequent, in 2012, was Rick Pleasure, the American architect peaking in reputation for his rammed-earth-and-steel buildings within the Arizona desert. In one other life, Nick Bevin would have achieved effectively as a horse-racing tipster. His presenter picks in 2014 and 2015 had been particularly prescient: London-based Irish architect Níall McLaughlin, who went on to win the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stirling Prize for finest UK constructing (in 2022, for Magdalene School Library, Cambridge), and Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, who was to obtain the Pritzker Prize, worldwide structure’s main private award, in 2016, the identical 12 months he was curator of the Venice Structure Biennale. Conscious issues had been getting imbalanced, gender-wise, Bevin invited the Danish architect Lene Tranberg to ship the Futuna Lecture in 2016 and the Australian-based, New Zealand multi-disciplinary practitioner Sarah Kenderdine – design tutorial/maritime archeologist/exhibition producer – to be the 2017 presenter. The 2019 Futuna lecturer was the Norwegian architect, author, and critic Ingerid Helsing Almaass.
The Covid-19 pandemic pressured a pause within the lecture collection after which a pivot away from worldwide audio system. In 2021 the Futuna Lecture was given by Wellington architect Hugh Tennent; in 2022, the presenter was Auckland architect Michael O’Sullivan. The native focus continued this 12 months, when, for the primary time, the lecture was a double-act, delivered by Hawkes Bay-based designers Jacob Scott and Karl Wixon.
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The selection of this 12 months’s audio system was absolutely acceptable. Who higher to present a chat named for essentially the most well-known constructing of essentially the most acclaimed later-20th century Māori architect than John Scott’s son, Jacob (Ngāti Raukawa, Te Arawa, Ngāti Kahungunu, Te Ātiawa), and Jacob’s frequent design companion, Karl Wixon (Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Moriori)? And the place higher to listen to the discuss than Futuna Chapel? (The lecture was additionally staged at St Andrew’s School Centennial Chapel, Christchurch and St Matthew-in-the-Metropolis, Auckland.)
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Scott and Wixon titled their discuss “Designing higher futures for Aotearoa New Zealand: He tirohanga Māori/A Māori perspective.” Bevin wasn’t to know when he despatched his invite to this 12 months’s audio system – though, given his aforementioned foresight, he might have had an inkling – that the subject can be so well timed. The 2023 Futuna Lecture was given shortly after the publication of an enormous ebook (Rewi, by Jade Kake and Jeremy Hansen, Massey College Press), accompanied by an Auckland exhibition, about one other important Māori architect, Rewi Thompson. The lecture collection occurred, additionally, within the fast wake of an election marketing campaign that featured dog-whistle messaging and a few overt rabble-rousing in regards to the place of tangata whenua within the nation’s polity and tradition.
One other backdrop to the lecture collection is the evolving Māori involvement in architectural initiatives, particularly public or institutional initiatives of any scale. This growth is mirrored within the constructions of structure practices. Massive companies, similar to Jasmax and Warren and Mahoney, have established Māori design models, a transfer that’s, no less than partly, a supply-side response to shopper demand. It will likely be attention-grabbing to see how the tempo of this progress is affected over the subsequent few years, with a rightwing coalition authorities in workplace.
“He tirohanga Māori/A Māori perspective” on design: once more, there can’t be many extra becoming locations to debate this topic than Futuna Chapel. The lecture given by Scott and Wixon was not a primer in Māori structure or design. Nor did it pore over one of many hardy perennials of the nation’s architectural historiography: the ‘Māoriness’ of Futuna Chapel. Sitting in a Futuna pew, although, whereas listening to Jacob Scott, who was clearly deeply moved to be on the lectern in his father’s fantastic constructing, it was unimaginable to not ponder the subject. The design of Futuna Chapel has been variously interpreted through the years. Russell Walden, the Victoria College tutorial who within the Nineteen Eighties set himself up as an professional on the constructing, noticed it as a fusion of Māori and European structure. Architect and author David Mitchell didn’t go that far however discerned some Māori/European crossover. Historian and critic Invoice McKay regards the chapel as ‘assimilationist’ quite than bicultural. Futuna Chapel’s cultural essence might be a query with no definitive reply. Nonetheless, I believe we’ve reached the stage the place Pākehā writers, like this reviewer, are finest to bow to Wittgenstein’s adamantine logic: ‘Whereof one can not communicate, thereof one should be silent.’
There have been, nonetheless, different issues to consider because the lecture in Futuna Chapel proceeded. (That’s what occurs whenever you maintain a chat in a murals.) Particularly, the contributions of John Scott’s collaborator, the sculptor Jim Allen: the Stations of the Cross; the sunshine modulators above the doorway; the colored Perspex home windows; and the extraordinary mahogany crucifix. Futuna Chapel is not a sacred house however Allen’s determine of Christ on the cross is such a strong, super-scaled presence that it makes the constructing’s deconsecration a moot level. The Marists have moved on, however is God nonetheless within the constructing? (For a dialogue of decommissioned Futuna Chapel’s location on the sacred-profane scale see the late Anglican bishop Jim White’s article “A Grave Concern” in Structure NZ, November-December, 2019.)
Paul McCredie
Close to the beginning of the lecture Jacob Scott put down a marker for the following dialogue by citing an article his father had written nearly 60 years in the past. The piece is instantly notable for the very fact of its existence: I’m undecided how a lot John Scott (1924–1992) wrote about his work, or structure usually. (He did, although, depart an archive of seven,000 drawings that his whānau has gifted to the Alexander Turnbull Library.) And the supply of the article can also be hanging: The New Zealand Herald. Accustomed as we’ve grow to be to the Herald, and different New Zealand media, treating structure as an adjunct of the true property ‘business’, it’s stunning to come back throughout an article, revealed on 23 September 1964, dedicated to the connection, as expressed within the nation’s structure, of Māori and settler design cultures. (Again problems with The New Zealand Herald are held on the Alexander Turnbull Library and Auckland Central Library.)
In his article, from all these years in the past, John Scott lamented what he considered the devolution of Māori arts and crafts to ‘utilized ornament.’ The decline started, Scott appears to say, within the later nineteenth century after an ancient times – when the stability of energy between Māori and settlers was extra equal – of interplay that portended ‘an indigenous New Zealand structure.’ (This place could possibly be characterised as ‘assimilationist’, if such a retrospective reckon is in any respect useful.)
In his Herald article, Scott pressed the claims of structure with an ex-cathedra certitude that equalled Frank Lloyd Wright’s pronouncement that ‘the mom artwork is structure.’ Scott wrote that structure is ‘a whole artwork, embracing features of all the humanities in a standard finish when it comes to man.’ In Māori custom, that’s, structure and artwork are complementary and inter-dependent. (In his Futuna collaboration with Jim Allen, Scott actually practised what he preached.) ‘Māori artwork… was in keeping with a lifestyle and the fabric used,’ Scott wrote. Observe the previous tense; for Scott, writing in 1964, ‘the place of Māori artwork now has been obscured by sentiment and the vacationer commerce.’ Craft had grow to be perverted as ‘curio’, and Māori making traditions had been co-opted in the reason for offering Pākehā New Zealand with some sense of nationwide identification. In these circumstances, Scott wrote, the ‘copied motifs’ of Māori artwork are ‘unrelated to [architecture’s] goal and intention.’
Scott didn’t finish his 1964 article on a pessimistic observe. He left open the prospect of a significant collaboration between artists ‘who perceive the medium of Māori artwork and who recognise its significance’ and ‘sympathetic’ architects with appropriate intentions. For all that, Scott’s piece was an indictment of each the connection of Māori artwork and design with structure and the up to date situation of New Zealand structure itself – ‘buildings are nonetheless pretentious; [architects] don’t discover the particular potentialities; individuals are machines.’
‘So, what has modified?’ Jacob Scott requested within the Futuna Lecture. ‘Not a lot,’ he stated. However some issues, maybe. For instance, Scott referred to his personal contribution to the design of Te Ara Hihiko, the School of Inventive Arts on Massey College’s Wellington campus. From the challenge’s early levels, Scott labored alongside Athfield Architects, designing carved inside and exterior panels for the constructing, which was accomplished in 2012. This was a chance to inform a narrative in a constructing, Scott stated, a start-from-scratch train with out the ‘have to koru.’ (Within the a long time across the flip of this century, the illustration of an unfurling silver fern frond on a constructing or paved courtyard was a positive signal of a field being ticked in a lazy wave to indigeneity.)
John Scott’s 1964 article was an attraction for Māori artwork to be pushed deeper into the nation’s structure initiatives. Of their lecture, Jacob Scott and Karl Wixon had been advocating for Māori design ideas to be constructed into initiatives from the bottom up. Scott and Wixon are outstanding members of Ngā Aho, the Māori designers’ organisation, which was arrange in 2006, and had been carefully concerned within the formulation of the Te Aranga Māori Design ideas. (The ideas had been named for a gathering at Te Aranga Marae close to Hastings, not removed from The Grange, the home at Haumoana the place John Scott was raised, and which has been a Scott whānau dwelling for over a century.) Wixon, too, has been carefully concerned with architectural initiatives which sought to understand Māori design ideas or, to make use of Jacob Scott’s phrase, ‘inform a narrative.’ The broad scope of his work ranges from Te Ao Māhina, the Wellington Zoo Nocturnal Home, on which he was design lead, to his contribution to the muse of Otautahi Christchurch cultural consultancy the Matapopore Belief.
A decade and a half on from the event of the Te Aranga ideas, Wixon within the Futuna Lecture stated the time has come for ‘model 2.0.’ His name for a reboot is no surprise. Because the early 2000s, rising consideration, right here as all over the world, has been paid to the problem of decolonisation. This now means not a lot the deaccessioning of imperial ‘possessions’ as the method of coping with the residue of colonisation inside former imperial powers and their settler offshoots. Authorities companies, cultural establishments {and professional} our bodies have all been urged to deal with the legacy of colonialism of their constructions and practices. (This territory guarantees to be closely contested over the subsequent few years.)
The present swirl of concepts about decolonisation knowledgeable Wixon’s a part of the Futuna Lecture. If the discuss was a web, it might have captured a hefty conceptual catch. Many concepts had been organically linked within the dialogue of ‘Nature’s system logic’ and its alignment with the layers of Māori story telling. Wixon’s design philosophy, as expressed in his lecture, is holistic, as is his prescription for observe. He evoked the determine of the tohunga, not a lot as priest however as professional, the repository of conventional design and making information, the one who held the skeins of collective initiatives collectively. This sounds, superficially, like some Western architects of olden occasions, designers like Wright or Walter Gropius or Mies van der Rohe, each visionaries and masters of all the main points. However, as Wixon later remarked, one key distinction between modernism’s hero-architects and the tohunga, these broad-spectrum information holders, is that the previous imposed their structure on society and communities, whereas the latter had been instantly accountable to, and for, the folks amongst whom they lived.
It does appear that modernist structure, which has effectively and really been despatched to historical past’s dogbox for the abandonment of its social democratic ideas and the dystopian fulfilment of its utopian promise, is about to be additional chastened for its collusion with colonisation. It’s true, the Bauhaus College ended up producing the producers of worldwide capitalism’s colonising Worldwide Type. In 1964, John Scott was claiming, in his New Zealand Herald article, that so far as New Zealand’s deracinated structure went, the “rot had set in.” However in its wilder Weimar days the Bauhaus was animated by a free-spirited dedication to dismantle the limitations between artwork, craft, and structure. John Scott might need permitted of that endeavour, which was, maybe, appropriate with the characterisation of the indigenous design of Aotearoa he shared with readers of The Herald 60 years in the past: ‘Mix any of the visible arts with structure, the place every enhances the opposite and every depends upon the opposite as a complete, that that’s the custom of Māori artwork.’
The Pals of Futuna Charitable Belief needs to thank the next sponsors for his or her assist of the Futuna Lecture Sequence: Dulux NZ, Metalcraft Roofing, Plytech, APL, The Warren Belief and the Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington branches of the NZIA.
