Hopes and regrets in the postquake city
A new annual festival that will see 46 Christchurch buildings opened to the public next weekend aims to help members of the public rediscover the city. Philip Matthews reports.
Does Jessica Halliday have a favourite postearthquake Christchurch building? No, that’s impossible. But she can offer up a shortlist.
Halliday is the director of Te Pu¯ tahi Centre for Architecture & City Making in Christchurch. Her office is a lively shared workspace in the so-called SALT District, which was formerly known as the Innovation Precinct and will soon be in the shadow of a gigantic urban stadium.
You could argue that she is therefore up close and personal with the extremes of the Christchurch rebuild.
Nine years ago, Halliday directed Festa, a festival that emerged from and celebrated the transitional era in Christchurch, and the energy that sprung up after earthquakes cleared the city. Festa brought people back into town for a big Labour Weekend in 2012. But that moment has passed.
She is now the director of a new annual festival, Open Christchurch. Forty-six Christchurch buildings will be opened up to the public over a weekend, along with two guided walks. The idea is for the public to rediscover the city by paying closer, informed attention to the structures and spaces around us. The past of the city will be apparent; so too will be the future.
Halliday was inspired to do this after volunteering years ago with Open House London, a festival that has spawned a worldwide network from Athens to Zurich. But this festival is not officially part of that network.
In Christchurch, the 10-year timeframe seems symbolic, as a clear dividing line between the transitional and the permanent, perhaps marking a new and more positive post-quake era in the city. Is that accurate?
‘‘In a sense,’’ she says. ‘‘I’ve been wanting to do this event for nearly
20 years, but it was always about timing. There had to be a certain buoyancy in the city.
‘‘One of the things I love about it is that it’s a really positive way to look at the city. I hope that we’ve begun to explore whether there is something for everyone to enjoy in the city’s architecture and what it tells us about this place and the people who’ve lived here over time.
‘‘I don’t think it’s about denying the grief and sorrow that happened with the earthquakes, but recognising how far we’ve come. And even me, who’s been very vocal about disagreeing with so many things that have happened in the city, [can see] there’s still plenty here to celebrate.
‘‘For people like me, who have lived here most of their lives, there’s still a lot of joy to be had. We’re attached to this place.’’
This is refreshing and, as Halliday says, you don’t have to switch into Pollyanna mode to recognise that not everything since
2011 has been a mistake, despite the problems, delays and wrong turns in the rebuild process that we could relitigate until kingdom come.
Post-quake buildings in the Open Christchurch weekend include the Botanic Gardens Visitor Centre, the Tu¯ ranga Central Library, the CSO Centre at the Christchurch Town Hall, Lane Neave, the Lyttelton Studio Monastery, the Stranges & Glendenning Hill building, the St Andrew’s College Centennial Chapel, the Christchurch Boys’ High Caddick Classroom Block, the Ernest Rutherford Building at the University of Canterbury, the Transitional Cathedral, the Oxford Terrace Baptist Church and four residential buildings.
That’s more than a quarter of the 46 and it’s a fairly diverse range. The Hine-Pa¯ ka Christchurch Bus Interchange, a high-quality building that ‘‘recognises the dignity of every single person who walks in there to use public transport’’, is another post-quake success story that’s not in the festival.
A library, a chapel, a grand home
So, back to Halliday’s shortlist of favourites.
She is a big fan of Te Hononga Christchurch Civic Building, or the old, monolithic NZ Post building that was opened up by Athfield Architects and became Christchurch City Council headquarters. That was actually pre-quake, but the emphasis on sustainability and the Nga¯ i Tahu partnership showed a way forward.
‘‘I remember one young Nga¯ i Tahu architect remarking that the timing of the earthquake was good in a way for them, because they were ready,’’ she says. ‘‘They’d had a good 10 years to start investing in their people so that they had people who could step into the roles that Matapopore has created for architects and artists in particular.’’
Matapopore has been described as ‘‘the iwi voice in the Christchurch rebuild’’.
Two things about that building. Have you noticed that the Nga¯ i Tahu art is on the outside and the Pa¯ keha¯ art is inside? And that Athfield designed a public street through the middle of the building to say something important about democracy and access?
It’s hard to go past Tu¯ ranga ‘‘for its success as a public place and the collaboration across all the parties involved’’. There is a lesson in this: ‘‘The librarians really were the major client. The people who know the services and the uses best were involved.’’
The collaboration extended to Matapopore, working with Danish library specialists Schmidt Hammer Lassen and local firm Architectus.
‘‘Here is a building that literally is for everybody. You can go to it without needing to justify your presence there.’’
And on purely architectural terms, ‘‘there’s something about the St Andrews College Centennial Chapel, another Architectus building, that I really deeply admire,’’ Halliday says. ‘‘It’s a very contemporary building, but it incorporated heritage elements from the demolished chapel that was on the site, and they’ve done that in a really elegant way.’’
As for commercial buildings, the wavy Deloitte building on Cambridge Tce is not on the list, but Lane Neave next door, also designed by the firm Jasmax, is there. Halliday is impressed by its two generous atria, ‘‘unusual these days when most office buildings are designed to maximise lettable floor space’’.
You might be able to talk your way into a school or a law firm on other days of the year, but private homes are another story. Homes in the festival require bookings and access to the Green Family Home in Cass Bay, apparently inspired by a Mayan temple and featured on TV’s Grand Designs, was snapped up quickly.
But there should be no shortage of spectacular or innovative homes in future festivals. As architecture writer John Walsh put it in his recent book Christchurch Architecture: A Walking Guide, ‘‘if you wanted to see good new architecture in the millenniumending decades, you headed to the suburbs to look at houses’’.
As the central city slumped before the earthquakes, people focused on their homes.
It would not be Christchurch without old favourites: the Isaac Theatre Royal, six buildings in the Arts Centre and three at Christ’s College, including Big School, said to be the oldest educational building still in use in New Zealand.
Is there a public appetite for this? They did a trial run with three school buildings – Cathedral
Grammar, Christ’s College and Ao Tawhiti – in 2019 and drew between
500 and 900 to each in six hours. Halliday hopes to see 10,000 to
12,000 total attendances over the weekend, but she wonders too if that’s optimistic the first time round.
Regrets? We have a few
If you live in Christchurch, and you care about buildings, you also live with a sense of regret. This is what Halliday means when she says on her Twitter bio that she is ‘‘blessed (& cursed) by love of architecture & O¯ tautahi/Christchurch’’.
She was part of the group that campaigned to save the Miles Warren and Maurice Mahoneydesigned Christchurch Town Hall from oblivion, and she is thrilled to hear that a younger generation, who never set foot in it before its reopening in 2019, recognise its magnificence.
But of course there are things she misses. She ‘‘desperately misses’’ Peter Beaven’s Lyttelton Road Tunnel Administration building, which Beaven designed as a metaphor, ‘‘an idea about creating a fifth ship for those of us who didn’t arrive on the first four. It was ship-like and kind of anchored to the road via the toll booths, which looked like little gondolas. He was influenced by Japanese modernism, but also put his own inflection on it, that was always Peter.’’
Warren and Beaven were like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in modernist Christchurch. And Halliday says she misses the conversations that took place between their buildings, or going further back, between the Old Government Buildings and The Press building on Cathedral Square, which was about classicism versus the Gothic revival.
‘‘You could read all these exchanges and developments across the city if you were alive to them. I miss those.’’
But even the architecturally untrained have buildings they miss. Regrets? In my own case, I remember walking or driving past the Catholic Cathedral in the carefree times before the quakes and thinking I would pop in some day and have a look. That day never came.
Open Christchurch does feature another Catholic building I’ve wondered about, which is Our Lady of Victories, a very 1960s church in Sockburn. This is the moment, Halliday agrees: ‘‘There is not a building like that in the whole country.’’
Open Christchurch 2021 is on May 15 and 16. Go to openchch.nz for timetables and further information.