Eating humble pie: Warren, Mahoney, Brownlee and Christchurch Town Hall
Maurice & I celebrates the life and work of Sir Miles Warren and Maurice Mahoney. The ageing architects are front and centre in their own film, but one building and one cameo steal the show.
Sir Miles Warren liked a bit of the theatrical. There’s a moment in the middle of Maurice & I – a new documentary about Warren and Maurice Mahoney, the celebrated architectural double act – he would have appreciated.
An hour in, the story reaches February 22, 2011, when an earthquake devastated Christchurch and with it much of Warren & Mahoney’s legacy.
The pair had opened their practice in their home town in 1958 and the city housed the bulk of their work. Several minutes of raw footage, unnarrated, depicts the immediate aftermath of the shaking: chaos, death, visceral fear. The sequence is finally punctured by a familiar voice: Gerry Brownlee.
It’s a cute pivot. Brownlee, the forthright former Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Minister, arch pragmatist and angel of death for hundreds of quake-damaged Christchurch buildings, in a documentary about architecture. It’s soon clear why.
Maurice & I is the story of two men, but its plot centres on saving one of their buildings. The film opens on the two of them about to address a Christchurch City Council meeting on the matter of “The Christchurch Town Hall conservation”, before panning back to their childhoods.
So Brownlee’s entrance an hour later is Chekhov’s gun going off. The immovable object encountering the unstoppable force. The immovability of the town hall, though, is the question. After the ground underneath it emphatically did move that day in 2011, Brownlee and his ministry wanted to demolish it – as they did more than 1000 other damaged buildings in the central city – rather than repair it.
Now the story starts. Maurice & I began life as a project about the Christchurch
Town Hall – a monument to new brutalism and probably the apogee of the Warren & Mahoney aesthetic. It was lauded for its acoustics and vast yet intimate auditorium. Both architects later said it was their best building. Co-producer/director Rick Harvie sat on the idea for years until a chance meeting with Warren in 2010. “He kept referring to ‘Maurice and I’... ‘Maurice and I did this and we did that’ and I realised the partnership was the story.”
Soon after, Harvie met Jane Mahoney, daughter of the titular Maurice, through her work for the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (Brownlee’s ministry; Warren probably enjoyed that, too).
They sat on the idea some more until Maurice Mahoney was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2018 and given months to live. Within a week, they were interviewing both men, separately and then together, and a feature film was in the works. The pandemic intervened, of course, and it wasn’t until last year that they were able to make a final push for funding and secure some final footage and interviews, including Brownlee.
“It was great to get Gerry,” Jane Mahoney said. “We thought he'd probably say no [but] we didn't want it to end up being a Gerry-bashing exercise… All the decisions that were being made, all the pressures and all the priorities - it was a complex situation and we needed to get that across.”
Brownlee accepts his role as antagonist. “I had an opinion,” he says in the film, “And I don’t back off that opinion…It was a severely compromised building.”
It’s a sorely-needed role. Duality runs through Maurice & I and without Brownlee the town hall story – the “spine of the film”, as Harvie calls it – would feel lopsided.
Warren and Mahoney themselves were a study in contrast. “Each of us supplied what the other lacked”, Warren once said.
Warren, shorter, swarthy, was the creative force – exuberant to the point of exaggeration. Mahoney, a matinee idol by comparison, was the details man – quiet and unerringly precise. Warren was Christchurch blue blood; Mahoney was working class. Even the syllables of their names counterweighted to a perfect cadence: Warren & Mahoney. They were ideal opposites and together they unleashed brutalist architecture on New Zealand.
It wasn’t to everyone’s taste. Warren cut his teeth in London during the post-war building boom and returned to New Zealand a committed modernist. The brutalist aesthetic held that buildings should develop out of what took place inside them – “form follows function,” as Warren said in the film – and this meant the composite parts should be visible.
In short, lots of exposed concrete and straight lines everywhere.
Maurice & I navigates all this comprehensively, but never dourly. Even when explaining the finer points of the novel acoustic design of the Town Hall, it never strays into lecture (conversely, acoustician Sir Harold Marshall is the breakout star of the film). The building is their magnum opus, so dwelling on it and its fate never feels laboured. “That’s probably why Christchurch people will love it,” Harvie said. “Specificity is important when telling a story… But it will have a national and hopefully international appeal.”
The celebrity roll call in the archival footage helps: Billy T James, the Dalai Lama, Leonard Bernstein, The Ramones, The Clash, Tom Petty, The B-52’s, Carlos Santana, Graham May and his faceplant and what looked like a stonking great show by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition.
But of course it’s really the story of two men, what they did and what it meant. And how those things, ultimately, were what made the Christchurch Town Hall worth saving.
“It’s about the power of creative partnerships,” Jane Mahoney said. “But also hopefully it'll make people think about the value of public spaces and how buildings like that gain a sort of new value by the experiences lived in them and actually that stands for something.”
Sir Harold Marshall – the brain behind that sparkling town hall sound – captured it best. “When I’m talking to architects I’m talking about music. I’m talking about the spiritual dimension of what we do. The sense of presence can only be engineered to some degree… To me the sense of presence is a gift. In my book it’s of the same family as grace and love. None of those can be engineered.”
Gerry Brownlee begged to differ. Even as the Town Hall was being restored he wondered aloud about the project budget and whether any amount would be enough to give him the confidence to go back inside. In Maurice & I, he confirms that he since has. Twice. “Humble pie’s a wonderful thing,” he said. “It doesn’t taste too bad.”
Maurice & I premieres at the Christchurch Town Hall on May 1 and features in the Architecture and Design Film Festival in May and June. A wider cinematic release may follow.
The bold and the beautiful: Carly Gooch
‘Do you like ‘ugly’ buildings,” Mike messagedme. It wasn’t a trick question. If something is considered to be ugly, it’s unattractive, unpleasant, or even repulsive according to the Oxford Dictionary, and who likes that?
Well, apparently Mike does – boring, concrete slabbed, brutalism style buildings and anything of that ilk.
I love buildings, the Flatiron in New York, the Pantheon, Isaac Theatre Royal in Christchurch and most old castles that look like they could be haunted. They’re great because you can find a new detail every time you look at them.
You won’t see gargoyles, lions’ heads or flowers carved into the exterior of these ugly buildings, far from it. Straight lines are really all you’ll get.
The lines and dull grey concrete of such buildings as the Christchurch Town Hall, the Beehive and Nelson’s City Council building don’t evoke wonder in me. They’re architectural constructions I’ll happily walk past without a second glance.
Living in Nelson for several years, I often walked past its council building, formerly the Nelson Post Office, and it’s a sight to behold – because it’s so displeasing to the eye. A local architect early on even labelled it “the ugliest building in the southern hemisphere”.
It’s a futuristic take on the elegant early 1900s clock tower building that once stood there, but even the Jetsons (that 1960s futuristic cartoon which undoubtedly predicted 2020 and beyond) would have done a nicer job.
A 10-year-old I mentored there, once asked me when the council building was going to be finished, mainly referring to the “scaffolding” on the clock tower. I explained it is indeed finished and has been since 1983.
I like simplicity, but come on, those buildings are like someone put their socks and undies on and forgot to do the rest.
Without being an architect, it’s difficult for me to articulate, so here’s my metaphor in something I can relate to.
To me, brutalism, modernism and ugly buildings are like chucking on a pair of jeans, shoes and a plain tee, and just brushing your hair. Sure you can get by, it’s efficient and it does the job.
Take that same outfit and with an extra five minutes and a bit of style, it can be turned around. Add some accessories – a watch, a couple of pendant necklaces, a chunky ring, buckle up a leather belt on the jeans and put some effort in those locks.
There, now we’ve gone from the brutalist Christchurch Town Hall to the Isaac Theatre Royal.
I stare in wonder at the heritage Old Government Building from my desk at The Press, taking in the Tuscan columns, red brick and rusticated stone (yes, I researched that) and there’s a beauty in it that will never fade – unlike the uglies Mike supports. But then, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
The bold and the brutal: Michael Wright
Look, you saw Carly’s message. I said “ugly”, not ugly. If you want ugly, look at the plethora of uninspiring buildings that have surfaced around Christchurch in the last decade. They have doors, walls, ceilings. Windows, I guess. They meet all the criteria of ‘a building’. Just not so that anyone would notice.
“Ugly” buildings get noticed. Maybe in a bad way, but at least that’s something. This is the way I used to notice them until, I don’t know, something in my brain changed. Now I think they look cool.
I’d explain myself further but … I know nothing about architecture. I always assumed that brutalism – the most famous of the “uglies”– was called that because anything built in its name looked a bit forbidding. Which it sort of is but only as an ironic twist. Turns out the term derives from a French word for concrete.
I recently had the pleasure of an advance viewing of a new documentary about the architects Sir Miles Warren and Maurice Mahoney – New Zealand’s pre-eminent brutalists. In the film, one of their disciples put it this way: “Brutalism is about truth. Truth of materials, the way in which they were put together, demonstrating their junctions and their connections.”
Modernism already embraced a sort of sleek functionality, but brutalism elevated it further. Function was the whole point. “Form follows function,” Warren says in the same film. “Forms of buildings should develop from what took place in the building.” I like that. I barely understand what he’s talking about, but I like it.
Lots of people would agree that modernist classics like the Stahl house or anything by Mies van der Rohe have a simple elegance, but how far can we take this? What if the Town Hall in Christchurch – probably the pinnacle of New Zealand brutalism – looked like an auditorium from the outside? Like someone had ripped all the curly bits off a 19th-century concert hall so you can see the moving parts? There you go. Now it’s a building that has something to say other than, “Isn’t this lovely?”.
Even the name over the door – the Christchurch Town Hall. The definite article at the front doubles down on function. This is where civic affairs happen.
It’s a bit like looking under the bonnet of a car. In fact, it’s exactly like that, because I have no idea how engines work either. But that doesn’t mean seeing a spark plug get a piston moving doesn’t look and feel vital Even if you had to google ‘how combustion engines start’ to double check that’s what happens.
I get it. It’s an acquired taste. And the communist dictatorships kind of ruined it when they built all their monuments to Stalinism that way.
But Christchurch was so good at these things they named a whole strain of modernist architecture after us. So next time you’re driving past the Town Hall, take a proper look. Or Peter Beaven’s old Canterbury Terminating Building Society building on Manchester St. So “ugly”, they’re beautiful.