ABSTRACT
In standard accounts of architecture in Australia and New Zealand, modernism arrives late, in the late 1930s with émigrés forced to leave Europe and with local architects returning home from the United Kingdom. But while the first ‘modernism’ in New Zealand is found in some houses built in 1938, this is predated by the first use of reinforced concrete in domestic architecture, which occurs at least twenty years previously. Reinforced concrete technology was adopted ‘early’ in New Zealand, not ‘late’; ‘modernism’ appears somewhat after ‘modernity’. This chapter adopts concepts about temporal compression from the political and social historian James Belich to examine this phenomenon. This had consequences at the imperial centre: in the 1930s in England, the firm of Connell, Ward and Lucas was able to realise modern houses based on the technical knowledge of concrete that Amyas Connell and Basil Ward developed first in New Zealand. But technology is not the only sphere in which disjunction occurs in New Zealand architecture. It is also a political and cultural matter. Again borrowing from Belich, the chapter examines this in relation to questions of nationality that became pressing when in 1907 New Zealand became a self-governing ‘dominion’ within the British Empire. By then, a tendency had emerged through which colonial settlers borrowed aspects of Māori culture in attempts to produce local identity. This is examined through New Zealand’s Parliament Buildings, constructed after the destruction of the colonial parliament in a fire. While the subsuming of the indigenous within the imperial indicates the subordination of Māori, it is also the start of a long journey – with many delays – through which New Zealand becomes in the contemporary moment Aotearoa New Zealand, a country moving from the singular modernity on which it was founded to one now officially with two cultures.
