Castles in the Air

David Eggleton
Ōtepoti Dunedin Architecture: A walking guide by John Walsh and Patrick Reynolds (Massey University Press, 2026), 359pp, $40; Health Design in New Zealand | Te Whaihangao Ngā Whare Hauora o Aotearoa by Chris Thom (Massey University Press, 2025), 416pp, $75; and Claude Megson: Architect by Giles Reid and Jackie Meiring (Massey University Press, 2026), 424pp, $75

Don’t look at buildings; watch them, the eminent Victorian critic John Ruskin advised, for they radiate the glow of their purpose while day and night move around them. Every extant building tells us something about the age in which it was made and embodies its values. But buildings themselves also gradually change, whether modified, renovated, repainted or left to fade and weather into near-invisibility. In his elegantly written and handy Ōtepoti Dunedin Architecture: A walking guide, John Walsh, ably backed by colour photographs taken by Patrick Reynolds, makes the invisible city of Ōtepoti Dunedin visible and legible once again, displaying the eclectic sensibility of a connoisseur, trusting his eye and ever alert to the contemporary urban fabric, with old buildings celebrating architectural legacy—and collective public memory—and newish buildings asserting their place within a coherent townscape. Regulated and well designed, good buildings enhance civic pride and confer dignity and honour on the community.

Writing as a populariser, albeit a subtle and erudite one, Walsh is persuasive enough to buttonhole passers-by and get them to stop in their tracks and gaze with the scales dropped from their eyes. He allots just one or two succinct but defining pages to each in a parade of 135 buildings, even trailing out to Kōpūtai Port Chalmers and traipsing to Dunedin’s two Victorian castles along the Peninsula. There’s Cargill’s Castle, now a ruin but originally designed by ‘Lord Concrete’, Francis Petre, and Larnach Castle, a going concern and touristic lodestone, designed by Robert Lawson.

Walsh dusts off the inner city as a treasure box of late Victorian and Edwardian buildings, a pre-World War I efflorescence that culminates in architect Gingerbread George Troup’s ‘Flemish Renaissance’ Railway Station, completed in 1906 and described as ‘the culmination of four decades of Victorian building activity’. Walsh confirms Dunedin as not only containing New Zealand’s richest repository of nineteenth-century ecclesiastical architecture but also as ‘New Zealand’s stoniest city’: ‘churches bristling with Gothic intent, banks aspiring to Classical gravitas’. And unlike other major New Zealand towns, hammered by the modernist claim that ‘ornament is a crime’, many Dunedin buildings preserve their original ornamental ‘gestures’, with a wealth of ‘arches and columns, pediments and pilasters, keystones and cornices, quoins and corbels’. In Moray Place, there are ‘chain-chewing lions’ heads’; in Stuart Street, entablatures of ‘architrave, cornice and parapet’: a feast of architectural glories, a monumentality of small details ‘that all feel accessible’.

Walsh convinces you that there is not only great satisfaction to be had in understanding the built environment but a particular visceral thrill in exploring the essentially lush poetics of the city’s architectural matrix, the edifices of signature buildings rising around the Octagon offering ‘a heavy helping of late Victorian and Edwardian classicism’ that helped signify a boomtown flaunting its wealth. After the gold rush years, when Dunedin was not only the most prosperous settlement but also heavily invested with a sense of moral rectitude as a result of its Calvinist origins, it attracted ambitious architects and city planners who sought to express civic order and social stability by constructing a ‘traditional’ town where the architectural hierarchy was self-evident, with religious and public buildings placed as the most prominent, followed by shops, offices and houses.

Walsh points to the former Bank of New Zealand (1882), at 205 Princes Street, as ‘the best building by one of colonial New Zealand’s best architects’, William Barnett Armson, designed ‘convincingly’ in the style of an Italian palazzo. Walsh also argues that the five-storey Security Buildings (in fact one building), built in 1918 on the corner of lower Stuart Street and Moray Place, was designed by the young architect Francis Hood, who shortly thereafter moved to Sydney, where his ‘draughtsmanship’ would be acclaimed as ‘second to none in Australia and possibly without rival in the world’.

Walsh also acknowledges Dunedin’s ‘worst act of civic vandalism’: the demolition in 1969 of the sumptuous ‘Italianate’ Exchange Building at the foot of High Street, designed by William Mason and once recognised as one of the wonders of colonial architecture. But then much of inner-city Dunedin and its environs was once encrusted with a regalia of battlements, columns, turrets and finials expressive of the beaux-arts bloom that linked colonial cities across Australasia and the world in an imperial continuum.

John Walsh is only the latest in a long line of architectural historians to specifically celebrate the Edinburgh of the South’s storied panoply of building styles. Effusive paeans and critical assessments have been delivered in recent decades by commentators ranging from Ted McCoy and Gary Blackman to Lois Galer and Shona McFarlane, from Charles Croot and Peter Entwisle to Norman Ledgerwood and Michael Findlay. And who, having seen him, can forget in his heyday the tall figure of Hardwicke Knight marching along Princes Street, head tilted upwards, revelling in the skyline? The cover painting of Buildings of Dunedin: An Illustrated Architectural Guide to New Zealand’s Victorian City, by Hardwicke Knight and Niel Wales and published in 1988, is by the early-settlement artist George O’Brien and titled ‘Designs of R.A. Lawson’. It displays a fantastic Puginesque cornucopia of buildings fit to stand with any agglomeration of architectural designs in the world at that time. Many are in place today, including the First Church of Otago, Knox Church, the former Union Bank of Australia, the Municipal Chambers and Otago Boys’ High School.

If it sometimes seems that Dunedin is a city left behind, one that has become just a heritage attraction—or a backwater of mothballed and semi-derelict buildings—there’s actually a wealth of new architectural detail around town to catch the eye, Walsh informs us. These range from various brutalist additions (which actually exhibit great purity and clarity) by the twentieth-century modernist architect Ted McCoy, to the new Toitū museum with the great wing of its roof, to the ‘disruptive’ slanted-glass walls of the Centre for Innovation building (2002), designed by Mason and Wales, which help serve as a gateway to the University of Otago.

Some buildings have survived through inertia—the lack of money to pull them down and put up replacements—notably in the former warehouse precinct adjacent to the railway station and wharf area, which has now been gentrified and repurposed for apartments, legal firms and cafes. This warehouse district is a product of Dunedin’s ‘Golden Age’, when the city was the commercial capital of the country, and consists of buildings that once housed stock and station agencies, insurance companies, manufacturers, importers and a steamship company. What’s notable here is that this is top-down regeneration led by property developers rather than grassroots revitalisation led by young artisans and artists with studios, music venues and bars in low-rent properties. In fact, this was the case two or three decades ago, but now the scruffy edge of bohemia with all its vitality has been largely driven out and struggles to survive in pockets elsewhere. What gave birth to the Dunedin sound and much other artistic flourishing is endangered or hanging on by its fingertips.

In the introduction to Health Design in New Zealand | Te Whaihangao Ngā Whare Hauora o Aotearoa, Chris Thom writes: ‘Hospitals are among the largest public buildings in our communities and require a significant investment of society’s resources in their creation and operation’. His chronological account provides a sweeping survey of medical buildings in Aotearoa New Zealand, from the establishment of general hospitals and the first mental health facilities to specialised buildings for elderly and infant care, the growth of private hospitals and the contemporary hospital as a managed system of infrastructure, personnel (human capital) and therapeutic practices—with a design emphasis on various efficiencies, including energy efficiency and sustainable buildings.

This book, then, with its encyclopedic approach, covers much territory—too much, in a way, to do more than inventorise and photographically illustrate the numerous facilities constructed across the land over the past century and a half to help heal the sick. If in part intended as a catechistic lesson in hospital naming and remembering, the book also affirms a continuity of healthcare in these islands, provided by a variety of agencies and latterly guided by enlightened government policies. As an institution represented through its architecture, the hospital—or healthcare facility—has become a vast, complicated entity, not easily graspable except perhaps as sets of constantly evolving buildings in both big- and small-town New Zealand, where pragmatism is prized.

The book confirms that hospitals are a sociological phenomenon as much as they are a matter of bricks and mortar. They are subject to cultural shifts, ideological pressures and entrenched interests, which Thom occasionally sketches out, as in his consideration of why it took decades to establish a new base hospital in South Auckland in the late twentieth century, despite dramatic population growth. ‘The Auckland Hospital Board,’ he observes, ‘had several conflicting priorities’. Unlike base hospitals in other cities, the hospitals in Auckland had each developed not only to serve sections of the Auckland region but also to provide specialist units for the whole country that required extensive funding. ‘With their national and international recognition these hospitals became rather like little empires and their “Emperors” had ambitions to further develop their specialist domains, rather than considering the more basic and mundane health needs of the Auckland district.’

Thom begins his chronicle with a consideration of the holistic and community-based healthcare practised by traditional Māori, and he states that in the early nineteenth century the average life expectancy for Māori was similar to that in Britain. The first rudimentary hospitals in New Zealand were set up at Christian missionary stations in Northland in the early 1800s, while possibly the first substantial hospital in the country was established by French settlers at Akaroa in 1840. Other hospital buildings soon followed. Frederick Thatcher, Superintendent of Public Works (and also an ordained priest), designed the 1847 Auckland Hospital, established next to the Domain on the same site it still occupies.

We learn that, at first, ‘homes for the aged needy’ were run by district charitable aid boards and that church groups—including Catholic religious orders such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, along with Presbyterian Social Services and the Salvation Army—were crucial in providing healthcare of all kinds. However, in the twenty-first century, many care facilities have been privatised or taken over by community trusts.

Thom also outlines how, between 1891 and 1912 under Premier Richard Seddon, the Liberal government laid the foundations for the welfare state, which the Labour Party, beginning in the 1930s under Michael Joseph Savage, built on. Victorian-era asylums, placed under the control of the government’s Mental Hospitals Department, were far bigger than any public hospital at the time and, established in extensive estates on the outskirts of towns, developed into ‘virtually self-contained townships’.

Thom’s chapters advance, though not in a particularly insightful way, through the building and consequent demolition or alteration of assorted nurses’ homes, children’s dental clinics, geriatric units, maternity homes and the like, and likewise itemise in a dry and dutiful tone the steady rationalisation of services in different districts and provinces over the years, along with brief accounts of redevelopments, conversions, consolidations, rebuilds and refits. Throughout, New Zealand learns from the British experience and, to a lesser extent, from European and Australian best practice, although in 2006, with the assistance of Māori architect Rewi Thompson, the pioneering Māori Mental Health Unit, distinctively incorporating tikanga Māori, is created. And we learn that in recent times leading architectural firms involved with healthcare building design have included Warren and Mahoney in Christchurch and Dunedin, Jasmax nationally and Chris Thom’s own architectural firm, Chow, nationally.

Healthcare involves an industrial form of architecture whose product is the healed human body (and mind). Hospital architecture, as this book shows, emphasises reassuring design for buildings that seek to express the promise of betterment. In a way, as any child who has had reason to stay in one knows, hospitals seem to possess a kind of magical power. While Victorian hospitals could seem stern and forbidding with their lack of windows, close confinements and dank corridors, by the end of the nineteenth century the notion of the hospital as architectural pavilion allowing fresh air to circulate had become central. Modernist architecture added notions of streamlined and hygienic surfaces, spread-out buildings to minimise disease transmission and regular exposure to sunlight through the use of large windows. The building itself became a medical instrument.

Now, as the design for the new Dunedin Public Hospital attests, shell spaces, modular room types, dedicated service lifts and corridors and digital diagnostic systems are all significant elements in the creation of hospital layouts. Chris Thom’s book is supplemented by extensive endnotes, allowing those interested to trace something of the twists and turns of the inevitable bureaucratic fits and starts associated with such monumental architecture. And this book also includes a cluster of brief biographies of architects who have been involved with building and developing our nation’s healthcare facilities.

In Claude Megson: Architect—a tub of a book with a cover the colour of stained cedar—Giles Reid resurrects, champions and rehabilitates ‘the forgotten radical architect’ Claude Megson (1936—94). In 1972 Megson was considered an emergent modernist architect significant enough to be showcased alongside John Scott, Ian Athfield, Roger Walker and Peter Beaven as one of the so-called New Romantics in an architectural exhibition at the Dowse Art Gallery. Creating this book, Reid tells us, has in many ways been a detective hunt, for immediately after Megson’s sudden death in 1994, most of the photographs of his work disappeared, removed from his office in the School of Architecture at the University of Auckland, probably by students or colleagues casually sifting through them—for it seems the eccentric and somewhat dogmatic Megson was a polarising figure.

London-based architect Giles Reid, a former student of Megson and a long-time fan of his uncompromising architectural projects, fortunately had access to the University of Auckland Archive holdings of Megson’s own drawings, which have been photographed by Chad McMan and form the basis of this monograph. There are 150 in the book, including concept sketches, technical plans, perspectives and drawings done in thick pencil, heavy ink or pastel crayon. These illustrations are supplemented by a small number of archival and other period photographs, but mainly by contemporary colour photographs taken by South African émigré photographer Jackie Meiring, who brings an acute but sympathetic scrutiny and a panoptic approach to bear on Megson’s actual buildings in situ, their whereabouts having been obtained by further detective work. Altogether, some 34 projects are photographed and discussed in depth.

According to Reid, Megson’s drawings were not dated, nor do they provide project addresses, and only rarely do they give even the clients’ first names. They do not show neighbouring buildings and almost never have a north arrow to establish orientation.

But to contemplate these images is to get an inkling of a visionary at work, one who practised architecture with the messianic fervour of twentieth-century Modernism’s high priests. Megson himself would admit only to an unconditional admiration for Frank Lloyd Wright and, guardedly, to an admiration for Louis Kahn. Megson, like Athfield and Walker, sought to reinvent the form of the house, but as the uncanny precision of his drawings attests, there was never allowance for ad-hockery or on-the-fly adjustment. Though there’s a sense of him building castles in the air, or leading his followers through the secret recesses of a labyrinthine lair, in the end all his measurements and materials were just so—as he prescribed them in the first instance.

To examine the Megson House project plans (1971—72) for himself and his wife Cher is to witness a proliferation of distinctive spaces growing from a central core in a many-branched unity. But ultimately this house was never built. Turning to the Cocker Townhouses (1973—77), highly visible even today in Wood Street off Ponsonby Road, one sees one of Megson’s best-realised works—Reid calls it ‘compelling’—and indeed, in its recognition of its surroundings, the clambering hillside assortment of weatherboard villas and cottages, his townhouse complex asserts a relationship with New Zealand’s colonial architecture, but a busy, hive-like one, absorbing while also rejecting, where the geometric interplay of roof, balustrade, window and weatherboards has been tightened until they almost twang in unison. There’s also something marine-like or yacht-like about this jaunty assemblage of white-painted forms, the rooms mostly blind to the street and facing an internal courtyard.

Megson also put forward a design in the competition for the Alan and Jenny Gibbs house in Parnell, which was won by David Mitchell, a colleague but also an intense rival of Megson and his way of doing things at the School of Architecture—a reminder, perhaps, that the collective noun for the profession is an argument of architects.

Claude Megson’s design for the Gibbs House Competition (1981—83) is extraordinary in that it brings to mind Giovanni Battista Piranesi and his enclosing, almost claustrophobic Byzantine spaces—ones that afford a transcendent, sensuous experience but also leave you with a feeling of trepidation, as if you are in the grip of a sorcerer or wizard. Megson’s works remind me of secluded chapels or grottos blessed by light, but light that filters almost grudgingly through small windows, and where to look out you must crank up a periscope as if in a submersible sunk into the great New Zealand hillside, itself always seeming in holistic sympathy not just with earth rhythms but with planet waves.

Megson’s tactile, sharply defined rooms, with their curious details—a smuggler’s hatch, a snug, a ship’s ladder, a twisting stairwell, a lack of corridors, intimations of the cage, the cocoon, the hive—are charged, as if with static electricity. They are hermetic, dug-in spaces, focused gardenwards, towards nature, for relief from the pressure of being in them. Certainly, with his fussy precisionism, his exacting eye, his refined spatial awareness—that of a troglodyte, really—he is an exceptional architect and a powerfully memorable artist who caught the zeitgeist of his age by the tail and swung it round.

---

DAVID EGGLETON is a writer and poet and the current editor of The Landfall Tauraka Review.