Where’s New Zealand’s ‘Grundy’s Wonders’?

John Grundy is from the north-east of England, not far from that monstrously polluted Durham coastline familiar from the Michael Caine film, Get Carter. He lectures at South Tyneside College in South Shields and lives in Gosforth, a suburb of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in Northumberland; as far from England’s “fair land” as it’s possible to get; although that part of the country does have a raw beauty all of its own.

So, why my parallel with New Zealand, why do I think Auckland would benefit from a local equivalent of Grundy’s Wonders and why should Auckland’s planners be watching this show?

It’s no coincidence that there’s a totalitarian look to much of Auckland’s new architecture. It panders only to the dictatorial whim of commerce. As just one example, a new tower block has erupted between Air New Zealand, the Pricewaterhouse building and Vero (that’s the one with the half-raised toilet seat on its roof) that would not have been out of place in a grim Mike Leigh drama set in the 1960s ghettos of Salford. Its windows are so small that I can only assume it will be another redundant apartment block; no business or hotel owner would put up with such user-unfriendly workplace design. Everywhere I look in the city, there are buildings that have clearly been pushed through planning committees, public meetings and resource consents with only the brute force of commerce to defend the decisions made.

When, a few years ago, I had a forty-minute phone conversation with the property developer responsible for the three hideous Scene buildings on the site of the former Oriental Markets Building, on the corner of Beach Road, Tangihua Street and Quay Street, after being horrified by the proposed designs in the brochure, he was nonplussed by my objections. The ‘artist’s impressions’ in the brochure were bad enough, but try taking a stroll past these three monstrosities today and tell me with a straight face that they aren’t three of the worst examples of urban architecture you’ve ever seen.

I’m not an architect, have never studied architecture. But you don’t need to be an architect to see that there is no sense of scale, no respect for the surrounding buildings. Scene looks cheap (although I know it wasn’t), clunky and prefabricated. And the three blocks have belittled and devalued the Four Seasons Plaza building at the bottom of Anzac Avenue. The developer of Scene seems to pride itself on its “commitment to excellence in construction and customer satisfaction”, but who are its satisfied customers? No Aucklanders I’ve met. One can only laugh bitterly, for example, at this misguided comment from Hayball Leonard Stent, the Melbourne interior designers responsible for Scene:

“Urban New Zealand is changing in dramatic fashion, demanding a diverse range of housing solutions. A shift in living and work habits have created a new and growing market for efficient, private yet luxurious apartments which is expected to continue for some time.” [My italics.]

So where, exactly, is that diversity? Upon which research did they base their assertion that Auckland needs more apartments? And who is dictating the market? Architects, interior designers and investors, or the Aucklanders who live and work in the city?

The Scene developer was adamant that his buildings would be designed by “prizewinning” architects and refused to acknowledge my objections and those of local residents about the loss of harbour views from all the buildings on Anzac Avenue and beyond; the creation of a wind tunnel along Beach Road; and the indisputably dated, arch-retro look of his proposed designs. The Scene brochure trampled roughshod over our protestations:

“The architecture is referenced to the significant structures of le Corbusier (France) and Niemeyer (Brazil) with the creation of strong but simple forms overlaid in its detail using rhythm, balance, material and colour.”

Rhythm! Richard Priest of Hames Sharley (the architect) should hang his head in shame at such pomposity and pretentiousness.

New Zealand’s property developers, architects and town planners have been creating and approving developments that are aimed at investors, not residents; and so parts of Auckland city centre have taken on the look of the ghettos of communist Hungary or East Germany. But there’s no public good here, no eye for scale or decency, no redeeming social value. Which is why New Zealand (or, at least, Auckland) is crying out for a John Grundy.

He sounds like a “grumpy old git”, grumbles about litter and graffiti (“Everybody hates it, except presumably the toe-rags who do it…”), but he’s as engaging and ardent about his subject matter as Rick Stein is about seafood, as John Peel was about punk. He bemoans the demolition of “nice old buildings” to make way for “bog-standard blocks of new apartments”. He mourns the loss of open spaces and the mess caused by traffic. But he doesn’t only moan. He suggests — and here I make no excuses for the first correct use of the word in this post — solutions. Most importantly, he asks BIG QUESTIONS about architecture that architects (too busy kowtowing to the likes of Niemeyer and le Corbusier to waste time worrying about what city-dwellers want) fail to answer:

“The first BIG QUESTION is, does it matter? Does it matter if things are nice or nasty? Does it make a difference in people’s lives… You can’t get away from it, some people have to spend their lives in ugly places, places that were built at the cheapest possible rate, without any considerations of beauty or quality of environment. Pit villages, for example, were built for economics, pure and simple.”

Grundy doesn’t presume to speak for the people who live in pit villages, but his answer to the above question is a resounding “YES! It matters”. Auckland isn’t a northern mining town, but if Grundy were to film a special here, his assessment would be based on his opinion of the city as a whole. Based on my estimation of his likes and dislikes, I doubt he’d approve of Scene One, Two or Three, upon which his “Great Boot of History” might well fall in a resounding triplet. I certainly doubt he’d pronounce it one of his “Grundy’s Wonders”. He’d more likely make some constructive suggestions about what Auckland City Council’s planners could do to prevent the centre being ruined any further by the “knock it down and start again approach” — which is what happened in Newcastle, in the aftermath of its 1963 development plan.

“That could never happen here!” you may say. Well, don’t be so sure: they wanted to turn Newcastle into a Brasilia of the north, a modern, international, space-age city, and so they brought in some of the supposedly greatest architects in Britain… and turned the city into a wasteland of porridgy concrete. Does that sound in any way familiar? What happened in Newcastle was a disaster, but at least it was a planned disaster. I’m not convinced Auckland’s town planners and politicians are capable of planning something of that magnitude — central Auckland’s new hideousness is a hideousness caused by greed, not by design.

Professionals, the media and politicians do get things drastically wrong, as they did in Newcastle. The city ran out of money for its grandiose plan; but at least it was a plan. It’s all very well letting your city spring up according to the whim of “market demands”. What happens when the bubble bursts, the money runs out and people decide they don’t actually want to live in faceless, corridor apartments and do their shopping in identikit malls, in cities where pedestrians are second-class citizens?

It’s happened in Europe and even in the States. Auckland’s planners merely mimicked the US and European trend, but they don’t appear to have noticed the backlash against it: the hostility towards new buildings that aggressively disregard the scale of the older ones around them, the reprise of small, specialist shops, the rejection of bleak and lonely pedestrian areas.

When professors of architecture get lyrical about new buildings, calling them worthy successors to the ancient, classical style, John Grundy isn’t afraid to disagree with them: “It’s not! It isn’t! It’s a scabby wall. It’s a dull, boring, bland and tragically unnecessary successor to the genuine architecture that it replaced.”

And while for the most part Grundy could be said to favour the old over the new (“Cleanies-uppies, but not pullies-downies”), he’s no preservationist for preservation’s sake:

“Obviously, sometimes, old buildings have to be knocked down, but there’s no point in doing so unless a) you really need to for some good reason, and b) you’re going to put up something as good or better in its place.

“We’ve discovered, thank goodness, that old buildings matter. Thirty years ago it was a surprise if a building was saved and restored, but nowadays there’s a sense of shock and outrage if one is lost...”

Remember the fate of His Majesty’s Theatre in Auckland?

If you get a chance, try to catch Grundy’s Wonders, if only to see whether any of ‘Grundy’s Nine Town Improvement Commandments’ resonate with you. They do with me:

1. If you’ve got the will to do it, no problem is too big to tackle
2. Improvements should get rid of the bad, not replace the good
3. New buildings should respect the history and the character of the place they’re in
4. New buildings should be good
5. Pedestrians matter
6. The quality of materials and finish should be as high as possible
7. Small is beautiful
8. Towns are meant to be enjoyed
9. Old is good.

John Grundy is an urban poet for the northern hemisphere, and New Zealand has enough poets of its own. But where are they when it comes to commenting on and criticising our towns, cities and urban environment? We need people who are confident enough about our architectural heritage to shout about what works and what doesn’t, to stand up and be opinionated about their likes and dislikes. Nowadays, Britons are proud when their building is named a “Grundy’s Wonder”. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a local equivalent for people to post on their websites? And wouldn’t it be nice if there were a more publicly viable way of “putting the boot in” than suffering the bureaucracy of council meetings and grumbling impotently to property developers? There isn’t enough grassroots debate about architecture in New Zealand, and not enough people willing to speak their mind.