Creative architect left his mark in NZ and overseas
Maurice Tebbs, who has died aged 86, left his legacy in the bricks and mortar of downtown Wellington and around the world.
His architectural designs began in the form of standard 1960s houses and progressed to mammoth commercial projects. His stamp was planted firmly on the capital’s most public of spaces – Civic Square – in a joint project with two other architectural giants, Ian Athfield and Gordon Moller.
His work spanned decades. Even after retiring, he continued designing houses and residential development projects, maintaining an active interest in the profession he loved. And he always, despite the new computerised way of working, retained old-school techniques, using a drafting table and T-square.
Tebbs was born in Wellington in 1932 and moved to Nelson when he was three. It was an idyllic childhood with the beach, hills and forests of Nelson a veritable playground for him and his elder brother.
His father was a civil servant who died in the flu epidemic after World War II and his mother worked as a clerical assistant before leaving to raise her children.
Nelson College was a chore for Tebbs. Military cadetship was high on the agenda and, to his irritation, academic pursuits an afterthought. He was at a loss as to what to do after leaving school, so when his brother happened to see an advertisement for an architectural cadet, Maurice thought he’d take a punt.
Walking along the office corridor on his way to the interview he saw sketches of buildings hanging on the wall. The young and naive Tebbs asked why they had not just photographed the buildings, to which the interviewer replied: ‘‘We drew those before they were built.’’ That fascinated him and right then and there he decided this was the job for him.
He started as a general dogsbody at Pascoe and Hall Architecture in Christchurch and worked his way up, assisting principal architects Paul Pascoe and Humphrey Hall in designing mainly houses and a few commercial buildings.
It was a crash course in architecture using ink and linen as his tools. After a day’s work he studied in the evenings at the local atelier. They were heady days at the dawn of a new architectural age. ‘‘We felt we were going to be involved in creating a new society,’’ he said in a oral history interview in 1999. His career started with small domestic projects, with more than 50 completed in the early 1960s. In the mid-1960s he went to the UK with his first wife, Gill, whom he had met in 1955, and their three children. A fourth would be born later.
Tebbs was full of confidence but lacking a formal degree. He was somehow accepted into the office of Denys Lasdun, which usually employed only English graduates with a minimum of five years’ experience.
He had ‘‘colonial confidence’’ and didn’t see much point going to England to work for a second-rate practice when he could aim high and work for the best – in this case, Lasdun, a kind man with a ferocious temper, Tebbs later recalled in an interview. His first job with Lasdun was the library at the University of East Anglia. From there he hit the big time, moving on to the National Theatre on London’s Southbank. These legendary ‘‘brutalist’’ projects gave him a love of expressed concrete and a firmness of form that he carried through his career.
In 1966, on the family’s return from their OE, Tebbs joined Australian firm Stephenson & Turner (S&T) in its
Wellington office, becoming a principal after only four years at a time when S&T was the largest architecture practice in Australasia. He was a force in the firm. His reputation for great drawings preceded him, as did the rumours of a fabled blue crayon which would be used on the drawings he felt needed perfecting.
He left his mark on many cities, including Wellington, Dunedin and Taipei, with a series of buildings designed with the sensitivity he developed with Lasdun.
While he was the president of the NZ Institute of Architects he was also working on the largest of his projects, the Veterans General Hospital in Taipei. It was an enormous structure – about five times the size of Te Papa.
While working on this project Maurice, whose first marriage had ended, met his future second wife, Denise. Back in New Zealand, he was part of the large team that worked for nine years on the Dunedin Hospital Ward Block.
Tebbs’ legacy in Wellington includes a number of buildings designed to reveal the beauty of concrete, including Britannic House (the twin towers on Jervois Quay), Trusteebank House and Wool House.
Of these, Wool House was a particular favourite. He worked closely with the late John Hollings, whom he regarded as New Zealand’s most outstanding structural engineer. When the building was extended, losing its distinctive cross braces and with the concrete work covered over, his disappointment was stark. Tebbs, a former president of the Wellington Architectural Centre, worked alongside Athfield and Moller on Wellington’s Civic Square development. As a three-person team they thrashed out the plan for what was to become the civic campus as we know it today.
The Civic Administration Building was his swan-song project, as he retired from S&T in 1989.
Moller, who represented Craig Craig Moller at the time, says Tebbs was a joy to work with. ‘‘He was an enthusiastic and creative architect with a big voice. When he expressed his view on an issue, you knew about it.’’ – By Bess Manson
Sources: Tebbs family, Dennis Chippindale, Turnbull Library (NZ Institute of Architects oral history project – Jerome Cvitanovich), Peter Wood.
Tebbs left his mark on many cities, including Wellington, Dunedin and Taipei, with a series of buildings designed with the sensitivity he developed with Lasdun.