253ven_THERE IS NO COMPRESSION IN NZ

WHAT_architecture 01-Apr-2015
Category: 000off_WHAT_people | 000off_WHAT_process | 072hin_Hinemihi
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072hin_THE FIRST MAORI ‘ARCHITECT’

In Sam Jacob’s recent ‘Opinion’ on Dezeen regarding the long intertwined relationship between that of the picturesque and that of the ruin, he called the reader to “Think of the famous illustration by Gustave Doré where Macaulay’s Mäori New Zealander sits on the remains of London Bridge sketching the ruins of St Paul’s, contemplating a lost civilisation.” As an architect who is Maori I had never heard of this illustration and wondered why? TBC…

WHAT_architecture 26-Dec-2014
Category: 072hin_Hinemihi | WHAT_projects
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072hin_A GOTHIC MAORI ENGLISH ROSE WINDOW

Regan O’Callaghan has produced this ‘picture window’ which incorporates Hinemihi. Having been recently over-awed by Mark Burry’s ‘inventive restoration’ work at the Sagrada Familia (with its ‘kitsch’ gothic windows that ask: “what is kitsch when viewed over a 1,000 years?”), I wondered what if Regan’s window could actually become Hinemihi’s window in the future? A Gothic Maori English Rose window? As witnessed in many Gothic churches. After all, a Maori meeting house has church-like characteristics in that it permits both light to enter and the darkness of death to pass out. In Maori meeting houses, the living enter through the door and the dead are passed out through the window…

WHAT_architecture 13-Dec-2014
Category: 072hin_Hinemihi | WHAT_projects
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179prs_I AM AN ARCHITEKT

Recent discussions here on blablablarchitecture about the empire call to mind the colonisation of the architectural profession. This is a game of architectural registration regulated by EU rules. In order to practice in the UK as an Architect (a protected word under ARB regulations) one must transfer acceptable qualifications to Britain (RIBA Parts 1-3). This transference however merely exposes the divergence between EU Member states whereby in some EU countries, TBC, an academic qualification simultaneously confers professional registration whereas in other EU countries, say Poland, one has to undertake 3y of professional experience in order to merely sit the registration examination. EU laws attempt to regulate thereby make equal but some countries are more equal than others in the registration of an Architect. Or Architekt. WHAT_architecture thus operates a performance based metric in the determination of qualification. You aren’t what you say you are, you are what you demonstrate.

WHAT_architecture 17-Nov-2014
Category: 000off_WHAT_process | 072hin_Hinemihi | 179prs_practice based research | WHAT_projects
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048per_BOOK RELEASE AS FILM TRAILER

Peter Walker is a writer and his book The Fox Boy tells the story of Ngataua Omahuru, a Maori child remade as a mini-English 19th Century gentlemen. Emily Perkins in her review of The Fox Boy for The Guardian wrote: “The title suggests one of those books about a feral child abandoned by its parents and raised by surprisingly tender beasts: a fairy-tale mix of the salacious and anthropological that strikes a chord as far back as Romulus and Remus. Peter Walker’s book tells a different version of this story: not of abandonment but of abduction, not of survival despite the forces of wilderness but survival despite the forces of “civilisation”. His story is that of the child taken as hostage of war, as trophy and potential slave – with the British-empire spin of improving it through exposure to an allegedly superior culture.” I, personally, have always interpreted artist Lisa Reihana’s Dandy (from her Digital Marae series) in the mould of Walker’s Fox Boy. Bloomsbury Publishing now presents Peter Walker’s Some Here Among Us. In doing so, the publisher presents us with a book release as a film trailer! We start to wonder if with the imminent inauguration of 048per_ in Auckland in January 2015, an architectural opening could be transformed away from the cutting of ribbons towards the animated story of ‘how a building come into being’.