Architectural Centre

Group Architects – Towards a New Zealand Architecture

“We New Zealanders live in a chaos of unplanned speculative building under an unthinking, self-seeking system of land sub-division. Our suburbias spread their tentacles along all the city traffic routes; our children cross streets to get to school; our wives buy in inadequate and too-distant shops lining the main roadways; our hospitals are over-crowded; our transport system is overloaded; our homes are ill-planned, graceless and monotonous in their petty variety.
We know there is another way of living…”

Sound familiar? This could have been written in 2010, but was actually written in 1948 in New Zealand as part of the Manifesto of “the Group”, the almost mythical assembly of New Zealand modernists responsible for a mid-century wave of simple, thoughtful, mainly Auckland houses. Arising from a post-war interest in clean, open, modernist principles, the Group was a collection of students and the occasional staff member at Auckland University, pretty much concurrent with our very own Architectural Centre. Indeed, some of the founders were members of both the Group and the Centre – the sharp-witted octogenarian William S Toomath was around at the start of both these movements, and is still going strong today, as are some other members of the Group such as Alan Wild.

The Group (both Architects and Builders) is long overdue for extensive (more…)