Centre of controversy
It will be some time before the dust settles following DoC’s decision not to save the John Scott-designed Aniwaniwa Visitor Centre.
The dust will take time to settle following DoC’s decision not to save a John Scottdesigned visitor centre. by Sally Blundell
The danger tape went up, the roof came down. Forty years after the official opening of the Category I heritage-listed Aniwaniwa Visitor Centre, on the northeastern tip of Lake Waikaremoana in Te Urewera, the building has been demolished. The centre had been out of use, and largely out of sight, for more than half a decade, since the Wairoa District Council (WDC) pink-stickered it in 2010. But it was not out of mind.
A groundswell of opposition said the centre, designed by leading Maori architect John Scott, was unique in its expression of Maori cultural and spiritual traditions within a modernist form. As Heritage New Zealand’s report on the centre says, in its “carefully considered form and pathways” it honoured the beauty and wairua of the landscape as well as the philosophy, traditions and mana of Ngai Tuhoe.
“Scott’s work is very subtle, very deep, very broad,” says architect, urbanist and host of Grand Designs NZ Chris Moller. “He is a great spatial translator, a weaver of cultures, and this work binds deeply with the land. It is probably his greatest public building. It’s no different from [ Frank Lloyd Wright’s] Falling Water in the sense of creating a very deep connection with nature. It is deeply tragic to be doing this.”
Others say the building marked a dark chapter in our colonial history and a design process that marginalised Tuhoe. As Kirsti Luke, chief executive of Tuhoe’s post-settlement governance body Te Uru Taumatua (TUT), wrote earlier this year, the centre represented “a time in our history when we were denied our place on our own land. The building has been owned by the Crown, as opposed to Tuhoe, and Tuhoe will be happy to see the building removed from Te Urewera.”
In 1971, the centre was conceived as a national repository for Maori artefacts; its intention, wrote former Te Urewera National Park board chairman AE Turley, was to “make a significant contribution towards a greater understanding of Maori history and culture”.
As New Zealand Institute of Architects president Christina van Bohemen says, Scott – who died in 1992 – saw the building as a way to mediate between Pakeha and Maori culture. It was “a very considered building and we believe that story is very valid”.
The resulting design, says University of Auckland senior lecturer in architecture Bill McKay, was a far cry from the usual white box. Rather, a series of linked pavilions took you “on an architectural journey. In its engagement with the natural world, it really brought Maori values to the fore.”
It was also, he says, one of Scott’s few clearly bicultural buildings. “And we have bugger-all bicultural buildings.”
But for many Tuhoe it was a reminder of 150 years of war, forced land sales, confiscations and alienation. The gazetting of the national park in 1954 on historic Tuhoe land is recognised as a huge travesty of justice. Despite the stated goals of the visitor centre, and the endorsement at the time by some Tuhoe members, TUT chairman Tamati Kruger says Tuhoe were marginalised in the design process.
As he told the Gisborne Herald earlier this year, “Tuhoe was not at all in play in the design of the original visitor centre … We were not even invited to the opening. Tuhoe’s part was to supply the food.”
The building owner, the Department of Conservation, says the centre was a reflection of how the Crown acted under the old national park system. “They put it there without a hell of a lot of consultation with iwi,” says DoC director-general Lou Sanson.
“A time in our history when we were denied our place on our own land.”
“To remove one of Scott’s buildings when it is not necessary … is an act of vandalism by all parties.”
Although the centre was innovative at the time, he says, its location, close to the culturally significant Aniwaniwa waterfalls, as selected by Scott, was not ideal.
“It is a pretty damp, dark spot and consequently the building maintenance issues kept on going.”
CONDEMNED OR NOT?
Reports commissioned by DoC over the past decade identified numerous problems. In 2005, Salmond Reed Architects noted lack of insulation, inadequate heating and poor access. But none of these issues, says architect Jeremy Salmond, was insurmountable.
Further reports in 2007 and 2010 by Geoff Kell Consulting found structural weakness and weathertightness concerns and, in 2010, the district council slapped on a “pink sticker”, closing the centre to the public until the problems could be remedied..
Was it really that bad? This year, Geoff Kell said his company never said “the
building envelope exhibited conditions of such severity that could be considered as invoking closure of the building by the territorial authority”.
In 2011, DoC itself confirmed the weathertightness problem had been fixed, saying the building “no longer leaks rainwater into the framing cavity or rooms since the roof was replaced in 2002”.
A further investigation by Spencer Holmes Consulting that year, commissioned by the New Zealand Institute of Architects, attributed much of the deterioration to lack of maintenance and “poor-quality alteration work”.
“Problems were exacerbated by what [DoC] was doing to deal with the problems,” says Salmond. “It was cold and not well insulated so they were pumping in heat using gas heaters and generating a huge amount of moisture.”
There were areas of structural weakness, but the Spencer Holmes report found the overall strength of the building was “in excess of the earthquake-prone building requirements”. This was reiterated in a letter by Geoff Kell Consulting this year: the building, it said, “is not earthquake-prone”.
But the allegations continue. In the lead up to its demolition, a DoC spokesperson said the visitor centre had “always been difficult to maintain due to weathertightness issues and earthquake susceptibility”. In a more recent letter, Conservation Minister Maggie Barry said that, despite its best efforts, “DoC was unable to prevent this badly leaking building from being condemned by the Wairoa District Council, which closed it for health and safety reasons.”
But the building was never condemned. The pink-sticker process, says district council regulatory manager Helen Montgomery, “is like a notice to the owner, saying the building is either unsafe or unsanitary. In the case of the Aniwaniwa building, it was because the roof was leaking and mould was starting to form, which is unhealthy.”
And although no one responded directly to DoC’s call for expressions of interest in the building in 2011,
Ngati Ruapani, whose claim to Lake Waikaremoana has yet to be settled, had already written to the Crown requesting the building be kept aside for its Treaty settlement. As then chairman of the Ruapani ki Waikaremoana Collective Charitable Trust Des Renata wrote that year, “We wish to have this building retained, repaired and enjoyed by future generations. We see the building as a historic place at Lake Waikaremoana.”
“He had a vision for Aniwaniwa to be a centre for Ruapani activity and to breathe life back into it,” says his niece, Charmaine Clark.
As iwi member Tahurioterangi Trainor Tait (Ngati Ruapani ki Waikaremoana) told Maori TV earlier this year, “We are against the dismantling of this building because we believe that it is not right to do so.”
In an undated reply to Renata, released by DoC to the NZIA this year, Treaty Negotiations Minister Chris Finlayson said he had been advised that “although it will no longer be used as a visitor centre, there is no danger of it being demolished”. But the preservation of the building, he added, would depend on the “outcome of the Historic Places Trust’s assessment and also the position of the Department of Conservation”.
QUESTIONS OVER REPAIR COST
In 2010, however, DoC senior manager Glenn Mitchell wrote to the NZIA saying the department saw no value in committing what was then estimated at about $1.6 million to repair the centre: “Our preference is to discuss with iwi potential partnership models to jointly design a new building, possibly closer to the motor camp.”
Two years later, when the then Historic Places Trust, now Heritage New Zealand, made public its proposal to register the centre, of the 23 submissions, only one, from DoC, opposed the listing, citing location, maintenance issues, dampness, lack of a lake view and poor access. The department, wrote conser vator J an Hania, “has no wish to renovate and/or reoccupy the building it owns, not solely for the cost of repairs”.
Adding to the complexity of the Aniwaniwa story, even those costs have been queried. Whereas DoC’s original estimate of $1.6 million jumped to $3 million, another estimate quoted about $420,000. Says Salmond, “It’s a hell of a good building for half a million. I’ve built my business saving buildings in much worse condition than this.”
Critics say DoC failed to meet its stated goal to “care for and protect our historic heritage for today and future generations” and its statutory responsibilities to maintain and care for public heritage assets.
In a letter to Barry, Salmond described as “an abrogation of its own kaupapa and its statutory responsibility to the people of New Zealand that [DoC] is complicit in the loss of a major work of contemporary architecture, one which itself set out to form a bridge between some of the differing cultural interests which contribute to the richness of this country”.
Others see the new building, being built close to the lake by Tuhoe with a $2 million Crown investment, as another form of bridge building. As Sanson says, it is built “to their ethos and to their principles”.
“We do value John Scott. We do value heritage, but we really, really value our Treaty partner relationship with Tuhoe, probably above everything else.”
And Tuhoe made it clear in their settlement, he says, “they wanted no part of the old visitor centre”.
Earlier this year, DoC deputy directorgeneral Mervyn English assured Scott’s son, Jacob, that plans to recycle the ceiling timbers of the now-demolished centre for flooring in the new building would provide “some sort of continuance between the old and the new and recognise the work of your father”. The time has come, he said, “to write a new page in the history of Te Urewera”.
But that doesn’t make any sense, says Moller. “It’s the wrong kind of timber and the wrong size. It’s like saying we’ve got a Picasso, let’s rip the painting out and commission somebody to do a new painting and use the frame Picasso’s painting was in. [The original centre] is being used as a scapegoat and that is inexcusable.
“To remove one of Scott’s buildings when it is not necessary, regardless of what DoC did or didn’t do in terms of maintenance, is an act of vandalism by all parties – the
“We do value John Scott … but we really, really value our Treaty partner relationship with Tuhoe probably above everything else.”
ministers, DoC and iwi – for not stepping in.”
Tuhoe were reluctant to speak further for this article. As Luke says, “People have had 10 years to work on a solution. But there’s not been a solution.” Backers of retaining the building failed to come up with an alternative solution or resources to fix it, she says. And TUT has always been clear that a visitor experience is one where we can “host people where they can actually see the lake”.
WIPE THE SLATE CLEAN
In the meantime, Ngati Ruapani’s request that the building be transferred to them in anticipation of a Treaty settlement, was impractical, says DoC operations director Meirene Hardy-Birch, “given that the land has been settled”.
No one spoken to for this article disagrees with the importance of a new Tuhoe-designed building. And nobody wishes to be seen to be underestimating the grievances Tuhoe have suffered over the past 150 years. But there is concern over the demolition of a salvageable Category 1 listed building for apparently symbolic or political reasons.
“Society needs its public art and its public architecture,” says McKay. “You don’t have to wipe the slate clean every time. Things fall out of favour, but they’ve still got to be there. It is a difficult situation, but you can’t not comment on it. I’d hate to think this building was an example of ‘take that’.”
Buildings representing historic repression, agrees Heritage New Zealand policy manager Nicola Jackson, “are an important part of telling the story about that past. Often the buildings left can help mend that hurt rather than the knock-it-down mentality.”
There is a precedent of sorts in the 2013 application by the Universal College of Learning and Te Puna Matauranga o Whanganui to demolish the town’s Category 1 listed former Maori Land Court in order to build an iwi tertiary institute. Those calling for demolition said the building had negative connotations for Maori – it housed the Native Land Court from the 1860s to the 1920s, so facilitating the alienation of significant areas of land from Maori ownership.
The Environment Court declined the application because it did not meet Resource Management Act objectives to protect historic heritage from inappropriate development.
A private bid to stop the demolition of the Aniwaniwa Visitor Centre through the Environment Court, however, was withdrawn as only a minister, local authority or designated heritage-protection authority can seek a heritage order to protect a threatened building. And although Heritage New Zealand can advocate for the retention of historic buildings, it must be in a city or district plan to warrant protection under the law. In her letter, Barry claims the Wairoa District Council had “declined to protect it or even to list it on their district plan”, but the only reason the centre wasn’t on the district plan, says Montgomery, is that the council was using the 2005 document drawn up before the heritage classification. It was, she says, “a timing issue”.
There is an irony in the timing. A week before demolition began in early September, editors Nick Bevin and Gregory O’Brien launched their new book Futuna: Life of a Building, recounting the 11th-hour rescue of Scott’s Futuna Chapel in Wellington. But where Futuna is a familiar landmark in the suburb of Karori, Aniwaniwa, says O’Brien, is not an easy building to appreciate. Nestled in the bush, with the main doorway invisible from the road, the building “refuses to be picturesque”.
But architecture, says Moller, is not just an image. “You need to experience it – its acoustic quality, its visceral quality, its smells, its space woven into the deep bush.” Even if half the building could have been saved, that would have been extraordinary, he says. “To stop, reflect, recognise that this is one of the great significant works of our culture, our time.”
A significant architectural work now obliterated.