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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Stone House & Straw Houses  

September 1, 2022 Leave a Comment

Max Oettli

Ravenscar House: A Biography by Sally Blundell (Canterbury University Press, 2022), 224pp, $59.99; Road People of Aotearoa: House truck journeys 1978–1984 by Paul Gilbert (Rim Books, 2021), 184pp, $50    

While these two books have a common theme of shelter, their inhabitants are poles apart. We are looking, I suppose, at high culture with millions of bucks behind it and a kind of DIY counterculture, where one manages to make a picturesque home with few bits from the tip, cadging some car cases (carcasses?) from an importer and bolting the whole caboodle on the back of an old truck to take to the dusty road.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: architecture, art and photography, arts and culture, biography, history

The Beaut, the Orsum, the Fugly and the Blah

October 5, 2015 Leave a Comment

shigeru_ban_carboard_cathedralDavid Eggleton

Shigeru Ban: Cardboard Cathedral by Andrew Barrie, photographs by Bridgit Anderson and Stephen Goodenough (Auckland University Press, 2014), 252 pp., $59.99; Vertical Living: The architectural centre and the remaking of Wellington by Julia Gately and Paul Walker (Auckland University Press, 2014), 232 pp., $59.99; Bungalow: From heritage to contemporary edited by Nicole Stock, photographs by Patrick Reynolds (Godwit Random House, 2014), 284 pp., $80; Beyond the State: New Zealand state houses from modest to modern by Bill McKay and Andrea Stevens, photography by Simon Devitt (Penguin, 2014), 288 pp., $75; Down the long driveway, you’ll see it by Mary Gaudin and Matthew Arnold (Mary Gaudin), 336 pp., $65; Marae: Te tatau pounamu: A journey around New Zealand’s meeting houses by Muru Walters, Robin Walters and Sam Walters (Penguin Random House, 2014), 416 pp., $80.

It exists as a white peak, a pop-up monument, a kind of wharenui thrown up by earthquake weather. Shigeru Ban’s newly arisen Cardboard Cathedral is, as Auckland University architecture professor Andrew Barrie puts it, ‘one of the most architecturally significant buildings in the country’, a great New Zealand placemark, whose white soaring A-shape unmistakably echoes Samuel Butler’s description of the Southern Alps as resembling ‘a distant cathedral of pure white marble’. Ethereal and glimmering, it speaks to the myth of Christchurch as ‘the Shining City’. [Read more…]

Filed Under: architecture, art and photography, arts and culture

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