An overriding enthusiasm for good design in all things

VERTICAL LIVING: THE ARCHITECTURAL CENTRE AND THE REMAKING OF WELLINGTON

by Julia Gatley and Paul Walker

Auckland University Press, $60.00, July 2014, 9781869408152

The Architectural Centre Inc, a Wellington-based association organised in 1946 by a diverse group of individuals who believed 'in the transformative potential of modern architecture' is an exemplary instance of the collaborative way people around the world sought to understand the modern movement in architecture and design. As Julia Gatley and Paul Walker note in the introduction to their book, the Architectural Centre wasn't the only such body formed at that time in New Zealand but it is the only one to survive. However, while citing the contemporaneous formation of the Auckland-based Architectural Group (1946-1957), they ignore the Auckland-based Design Guild (1948), the Dunedin-based Visual Arts Association (1951-1968) and the Christchurch-based Design Association of New Zealand (1960-1966?), presumably on the basis that their foci were not solely architectural. It's an odd distinction to make particularly since the Architectural Centre was one of the principal proponents in New Zealand of not only architecture but also the many other fields of modern design. Unlike the other local design promotion organisations that emerged during the 1940s and 50s, the Architectural Centre proselytised its aims to the public through a journal, the New Zealand Design Review. Indeed the editorial of the first issue of the Design Review asserted that their members' 'greatest claim to affiliation was an overriding enthusiasm for good design in all things.' <New Zealand Design Review, 1:1 (April 1948), p. 1>. Despite being either ignored or dismissed as a student initiative in many of the standard New Zealand architectural histories, the Centre had a more significant role in activating modern design in New Zealand than its name might suggest.

Separately Gatley and Walker have produced earlier histories that have reshaped our understanding of twentieth century architecture and design in New Zealand. In Looking for the local: architecture and the New Zealand modern (2000), Walker, with Justine Clark, was responsible for the first substantial analysis of mid-twentieth century New Zealand architecture and design to be framed within an international context. Looking for the local explored one of the Architectural Centre's failed initiatives, a book on local architecture intended to make New Zealand architecture available to a local and international audience, along the lines of those produced by the American architect G E Kidder Smith in association with the Museum of Modern Art. Likewise, Gatley's Long live the modern: New Zealand's new architecture, 1904-1984 (2008) was equally internationalist in its perspective on how modernism was manifest in New Zealand. Vertical living, by contrast, with its focus on the architecture and planning of Wellington, is distinctly parochial in its coverage.

It's difficult to convey the cultural radicalism implied in the formation of the Centre and the other design promotion bodies and it's something that Gatley and Walker and their co-authors largely avoid addressing. New Zealand in 1946 was a deeply conventional, provincial society; consumer taste was, on the whole, conservative and mediated by British interests. The country's socially orthodox Labour administration's continued commitment to a command economy was not only increasingly resented by the electorate but also exploited by the opposition National party who claimed to represent a future untrammelled by the bogey of 'socialism' while espousing equally conservative social values. While it's a truism, the mantra 'rugby, racing and beer', leavened by a little Hollywood and a bit of bone china for the ladies,  perfectly exemplified the gendered anti-intellectualism of mainstream New Zealand culture of the post-war period. Organisations promoting modernism such as the Centre, tiny as they were, represented a challenge to the prevailing cultural hegemony.

What differentiated the Architectural Centre from the design promotion bodies that failed to survive? Gatley and Walker, comparing the Centre to the Architectural Group, suggest the answer lies in focus; that while the former was concerned with 'the bigger but vaguer issue of the urban realm', the latter 'focused on the design and construction of the small, refined, architecturally designed house, the holy grail of New Zealand architecture'. In drawing this delineation Gatley and Walker clearly articulate the tensions between metropolitan and provincial views of design and architecture and the Centre's long championing of urbanity in the face of suburban hegemony. This is too narrow a reading of the Centre's rationale and it underplays the sense of collaborative governance that allowed it to flourish, while the other bodies devoted to the promotion of modernism – organised along more conventional lines – withered. Another significant point of demarcation was the Centre's periodic championing of progressive political views – notwithstanding its 1958 president standing as a Ratepayers' and Citizens' Association candidate in the 1959 local body elections  –  and its embrace of theory, notably through its summer schools held between 1946 and 1953. By a bizarre quirk of local politics, modernism as manifest in New Zealand was often associated with a reactionary right and the other New Zealand design organisations actively rejected any theoretical debate, presumably on ideological grounds.

A 1916 Deutschen Werkbundes advertisement of its current publications. Even under wartime conditions, the range and scope of Werkbund publications were impressive. The advertisement appears on the back cover of Englands Kunstindutrie und der deutsche Werkbund (1916),
a translation of the founding documents of the British Design & Industries Association

One of the most significant associations established to promulgate modern design was the Deutscher Werkbund, 'an alliance of laymen, dilettantes, scholars of art, art critics, and a very particular kind of younger architect'<Quoted in F Schwartz, The Werkbund: design theory and mass culture before the First World War (New Haven/London: Yale, 1996), p. 13>. Established in 1907, the Werkbund looked to the bigger picture and saw architecture and design as a reified object as they sought, as Schwarz observes, 'to discover the way form acts in, and reacts to, a market economy; and to redeploy form under these conditions as a utopian force, as a carrier of Culture'<Schwarz, p 17>. Gatley and Walker claim the Centre's origin is located amongst the body of modernist architectural organisations such as CIAM (1928) and its British wing, the MARS group (1933) but this assertion ignores the fact that the Centre was not exclusively architectural in either its membership or activities and minimises the experience of a number of key figures involved in its establishment. While identifying a group of European refugees as a vector for the 'radical ideas' of the inter-war period, they fail to acknowledge that this 'educated and cultured' group, a number of whom – most notably Ernst Plischke – had been involved with the Werkbund and brought with them a sense of intellectual engagement that was entirely alien to provincial New Zealand. The experience of the Werkbund with its wide-ranging debates and its embrace of a disparate range of intellectual disciplines and social classes was not something New Zealanders were familiar with, notwithstanding their ostensible egalitarian aspirations.

Design and Industries Association original notification of interest form (1915). Like the Architectural Centre in 1946,
its establishment was driven by architects and its membership was equally diverse

A British attempt to replicate the Werkbund, the Design and Industries Association (DIA), effectively foundered soon after its establishment not only on its failure to comprehend the German organisation's horizontally-structured governance but also on its inability to effectively reconcile the mediaevalist romanticism of the still prominent arts and crafts movement with modern industry. Where the Werkbund's influence grew after the war, the DIA, established in 1915, divided into traditionalist and progressive strains, with the former tendency prevailing. Unlike many other British institutional initiatives of the period that were manifest locally – such as the Royal Overseas League (1910) or Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society (1887), which prompted a number of arts and crafts societies in Whanganui, Christchurch and Auckland between 1901 and 1912 – the DIA found no adherents in New Zealand. A search of DIA membership rolls fails to reveal any member with an overt connection to the dominion. In part this reflects the absence of any substantial manufacturing industry but it also reflects a gendered attitude to design prevalent in New Zealand during the first half of the twentieth century that posited design – although not architecture, which was perceived as 'mathematical' and hence suitably masculine – as a domestic and manual concern. The formation of the Architectural Centre would, in part, redress that imbalance; Gatley and Walker note the 'tardiness with which the New Zealand architectural profession has welcomed women to its ranks', while noting blandly that its early women members – only one of whom, Marilyn Hart, worked as an architect – 'had an important impact on the organisation's activities'.

Despite this architectural bias, the authors allow that the Centre had a wider stakeholding. Like the Werkbund, and unlike the other New Zealand design promotion bodies, publishing was at the core of the Centre's activities. A chapter by Walker and Justine Clark – his co-author on Looking for the local – critically assesses the Centre's publishing of the Design Review from 1948 until 1954 comparing its high design and production values – notably those produced under the aegis of the 'illustrator' Melvyn Taylor – to those prevailing in the country's 'professional' architectural journals of the time: the Journal of the NZIA and Home and Building (which had a formal connection to the NZIA). The question as to why the NZIA associated journals were so dire graphically when compared with the Design Review is not addressed. Damian Skinner contributes a chapter on the Architectural Centre Gallery, which operated in leased spaces between 1953 and 1968 and, in effect, carried on the work of the pioneering Helen Hitchings dealer gallery, which operated between 1949 and 1951 (currently the subject of a disappointing exhibition at Te Papa). Like the Centre itself, the volunteer gallery's programme was distinctive in its internationalism. Skinner opines that it was 'remarkable that it organised and displayed so many international exhibitions' but then diminishes the observation by suggesting this was because 'it was '"in effect a civic gallery", presenting modernism to the Wellington public', rather than a vibrant arm of international modernism.

In its essence Vertical living comprises a series of stand-alone essays anchored around the Centre and organised chronologically. Through this unchallenging structure a number of key themes emerge about the organisation, its members, its challenges and the changing institutional nature of Wellington. It's a very personal narrative that emerges: the activities of the newly established centre are documented by informal snapshots of parties and architectural students en charette, interspersed by more formal photographs delineating the morphing urban profile of the city. Later chapters are not so personal; it's almost as if as Wellington 'modernised', the Centre became less personal and its agenda more institutional. The tone of writing about the Centre seems to shift from a compelling account of its early days to a description of contemporary Wellington that seems to spring from a Positively Wellington Tourism press release: 'the coolest little capital in the world' sort of thing. Its a transformation that's similar to that which occurred in the city's architecture: from the austere beauty of Plischke's Kahn House in Ngaio (1941) to the sprawling, horizontal, vulgarities of Jasmax's Te Papa Tongarewa building 'circuited by a car race track' (1992).

Cover of W B Sutch, New Zealand planning (1965)

Indeed, facilities for cars were – and continue to be – the real catalysts of Wellington's redevelopment, impinging on all aspects of the Centre's activities, from town planning to heritage and environmental protection. Indeed the development of Wellington's motorway network was a threshold moment in the Centre's history and marked its transformation from an organisation devoted to the promotion of design into an activist lobby group. It's odd then that there is little mention of the activities of one of the more articulate protagonists of the Centre as a lobbyist organisation, W B (Bill) Sutch. Permanent secretary of the Department of Industries and Commerce from 1958 until his enforced retirement in 1964, Sutch was involved with the Centre from when he returned to Wellington in 1951. In his chapter on the Centre's gallery, which opened in 1954, Damian Skinner acknowledges Sutch – 'by all accounts a charismatic man' – as 'spearheading' the gallery committee, noting that he also 'would coordinate the exhibitions, assigning individuals the responsibility of undertaking the necessary research and organisation.'

Although unacknowledged by Gatley and Walker, as well as effectively controlling the gallery, Sutch was involved in all aspects of the Centre's activities. He and his wife, the lawyer Shirley Smith, commissioned Plischke to design their house in Brooklyn (1953-56) and he was notably interested in planning issues. In a speech delivered in April 1965 to the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Geographical Society, Sutch summarised succinctly and in some detail the state of planning internationally and in New Zealand, noting that 'the extent and complexity of planning undertaken in New Zealand are much greater than most people realise.' <W Sutch, New Zealand planning (Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington Geography Department, 1965), p. 47>. His assessment not only articulated the Centre's stance in respect of Wellington's urban planning but  also located it in a wider context: planning was not just about the making of urban space; it was also, fundamentally, about the economic life of a country. 

[Geoff Nees (1923-1999)?], cover of W B Sutch, Wellington: a sick city ([1965])

That same year, Sutch published Wellington: a sick city in which he savaged the National Roads Boards proposal – partially based on plans developed by the Californian engineering firm de Leuw Cather – to insert a motorway to the west of the Wellington CBD. This heartfelt philippic, inspired by a close reading of Jane Jacob's Death and life of great American cities (1961), again mirrored the equally passionate opposition of the Centre to the scheme. While the Centre did not campaign as a group against the Roads Board proposal, two of its senior members, the architects Al Gabites and James Beard submitted an alternative proposal that reduced the impact of the motorway on the fabric of the city by relocating it to the CBD periphery, pedestrianised large sections of the central city and inserted an extended underground railway along the length of a pedestrianised Lambton Quay. Sutch proposed something more radical: the motorway should be postponed indefinitely, at least until Wellington had a town plan (which it did not get until 1968) and a 'high-speed electric train (probably underground)' should be installed from the existing railway station, which 'should eliminate the peak hour traffic jams, reduce the need for all day parking buildings, save space from motorway swathes and eliminate the necessity for a motorway planned for heavy peak loading' <Sutch, Wellington, p. 23>. Dr Sutch's diagnosis of Wellington's ills and his prescription for their cure have an uncanny resonance with the Centre's current campaign to save the Basin Reserve from the depredations of the New Zealand Transport Agency, the institutional successor of the National Roads Board. Unfortunately for Wellington, the issues he raised and the solutions he proffered were and continue to be ignored by those charged with the development of New Zealand's transport infrastructure.

In terms of the Centre's original remit to promote 'good design in all things', its most impressive but generally disregarded non-architectural achievement came in 1966 when a conservative National party government introduced a Bill into Parliament establishing the New Zealand Industrial Design Council (NZIDC), a state-funded, independent agency charged with promoting 'the appreciation, development, improvement, and use of industrial design in New Zealand with the object of improving the quality, efficiency, packaging, presentation and appearance of goods produced in New Zealand'<Industrial Design Act, 1966>.  The Council was Sutch's invention and its first director, Geoffrey Nees, a student foundation member of the Centre, was recruited by Sutch in 1960 to fill the specially created position of Industrial Design Officer at the Department of Industries and Commerce. The Centre was pivotal to the creation of the NZIDC; not only had Sutch drawn inspiration from the Centres publications and debates but he also recruited its members to boost his arguments for its existence. Where other design-related organisations, notably the Design Institute of New Zealand and the New Zealand Society of Industrial Designers (established in 1960) fought against the formation of the NZIDC on the specious grounds of state interference in the private sector, the Centre worked to support the initiative. For the 1963 Export Development Conference, in part organised by Sutch to obtain institutional endorsement of his design initiative, two key background papers were submitted by members of the Centre: an official one; and one submitted by Allan Wild, a former president of the Centre (1956-58), under the false flag of the Public Relations Committee of the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Institute of Architects. It's Wild's 1968 project, Jellicoe Towers – illustrated on the book's dust jacket – that is one of the buildings giving the book its title.

By concentrating on the modernist remaking of the urban fabric of Wellington, Vertical living avoids dealing with what was probably the central problematic of modernism in New Zealand: the nature and function of the metropolitan phenomenon of modernist design as it was manifest in a provincial society. Equally, by asserting the Centre as a predominantly practitioner agency, Gatley and Walker in a way narrow the significance not only of the non-architects who were involved in its activities but also the importance of architecture as a signifier in the wider urban context. It's strange too that the political dimension of the Centre's activities, while hinted at, is largely ignored. The internal tension between the left and right, between those Centre members – such as Sutch – who espoused progressive views seem to have begun in the 1960s. The marginalisation of the left seems to have prompted an increasingly conventional, less diverse, membership. George Porter, the Centre president elected in 1959 to the Wellington City Council on a right-leaning ticket was noted in 1960 as becoming 'concerned that the Centre's activities were antagonising council and hindering progress. He encouraged restraint from members'. This reactionary stance, articulated by a key member of the Centre at the start of another decade of conservative hegemony, remains unexplored in the narrative. It may be the key to understanding why, despite its seven decades of advocacy and activism, the Centre has ultimately had a limited impact on the urban form of Wellington.

Social design

Post-war British design propaganda: Richard Guyatt (1914-2007), cover for
Alan Jarvis, The things we see: indoors and out (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947)

Forming an organisation dedicated to the promotion of an idea, a cause or an interest, is one of the hallmarks of modern society. In one sense, these modern social bodies have, in our most recent history, shaped the way we perceive and understand how we order the world by creating a concept of human, educational, cultural and intellectual capital in lieu of one based almost entirely upon the control of land. Ranging from learned bodies such as the Royal Society of London (1660) to ‘professional’ bodies such as the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (1880) and, closer to home, the Designers’ Institute of New Zealand (1991) they are, in effect, one of the more tenuous manifestations of service capitalism.

In a 2012 lecture to the Friends of the Hocken Collections – another sort of social body – the photographer Gary Blackman referred to the Dunedin-based Visual Arts Association, an organisation established in 1951 ‘to encourage the appreciation of good design’, that he had chaired for a time (G Blackman, Aspiring to art; the William Mathew Hodgkins memorial lecture (Dunedin: Friends of the Hocken Collections, 2014), p. 26). The association's formation is telling evidence of the collective way many New Zealanders came to appreciate and understand design, a process that had been either marginalised or ignored in New Zealand's short history of Pākehā culture. Like much else in post-war New Zealand, the design debate was predominantly a British cultural import and it arrived in New Zealand through a variety of media including journals, books, lectures, newsreels and, not least, designed commodities.

The Visual Arts Association was not the the first locally organised body established in the face of national indifference to design matters. The earliest – and the sole survivor of the phenomenon – was the Wellington-domiciled Architectural Centre. Formed in 1946 with the utilitarian purpose of providing a support framework for Wellington-based students of the Auckland School of Architecture, the centre, almost incidentally, expanded its remit to promote and encourage a debate about how larger issues of design could be encouraged to flourish in a local context. Between 1948 and 1952 it sponsored the publication of Design Review, the first journal in the country to explore the concept of design in a critical fashion. With its focus on regional modernism and embrace of theory, the centre espoused a progressive ideology; a number of its key figures – Ernst Plischke springs to mind – were refugees from Nazism and they understood that design was political.

New Zealand Design Review, vol 1, no 1 (April 1948)., p 1
New Zealand Electronic Text Collection/Te Puhikōtuhi o Aotearoa

In Auckland, such concerns were regarded with a degree of distrust. In 1949, in the wake of a visit by the British industrial designer Milner Gray, a group of interested individuals with an interest in design issues associated with Cyril Knight (1891-1972), professor of architecture at the Auckland University College School of Architecture, formed the Auckland Design Guild, ‘an association providing for the exchange of ideas on the arts and sciences connected with design’ (‘Pledge to combat shoddiness’, New Zealand Free Lance (27 July 1949), p. 9). Knight, an Australian who had been appointed to the school in 1924, had conservative rather than modernist inclinations, a tendency reflected in the archaic designation of the body as a ‘guild’. The guild’s existence was fleeting; it failed to survive the year. One former, architectural, member later recalled it as ‘too theoretical’, explaining that ‘considerable time was devoted to ruling out any commercial exhibition of members’ work’ (P Parsons, ‘The postwar development of industrial design in New Zealand’, New Zealand Manufacturer, 18:1 (October 1965), p. 68). In fact, a surfeit of theory was probably the least cause of the guild's failure. It was more probable that, like many of his academic contemporaries in Britain, that Knight - no theoretician – objected to the guild being used to provide commercial enterprise with a veneer of objective respectability; it was too difficult to reconcile arts and crafts romanticism with the pragmatics of growing a business.

Unidentified photographer, 'Modern room setting at Dunedin Public Library, 1953'.
From G Blackman,  Aspiring to art: the William Mathew Hodgkins memorial lecture 2012
(Dunedin: Friends of the Hocken Collections, 2012)

The Visual Arts Association was formed as a consequence of two meetings convened by the Adult Education Department of the University of Otago and its first chair was Dr Edward Murphy, lecturer in design at the School of Home Science. Its first pamphlet declared aspirationally that ‘the terms of reference of the Visual Arts Association are very similar to those of the Council of Industrial Design (CoID) of Great Britain, even though the association is a voluntary body’. However, where the CoID was charged by Parliament ‘to promote by all practical means the improvement of design in the products of British industry’, the Dunedin association was restricted to embellishing the Lecture Hall of the Dunedin Public Library with, as Newman recalls, ‘a room setting furnished with a range of [imported] objects selected from local shops’.  The furniture, though, was New Zealand made although, looking at the photographic evidence, much of it it was based on designs pirated from Australian and United Kingdom prototypes (T Esplin, ‘Visual Arts Society’, The Press (15 May 1962), Supplement on design in industry, p. 4). As Blackman relates, the association's ambitions were not matched by the reality of it being a small, university-based, organisation and it 'soon broadened its concerns to include current visual arts and crafts and undertook a wide-ranging programme of lectures, panel discussions exhibitions and films. The association was wound up in 1968. 

Unidentified photographer, 'Exterior of the Design Centre, Haymarket, [London], 1958'.

Gordon Russell Design Museum

Probably the most ambitious of the mid-twentieth century New Zealand design promotion bodies was the Christchurch-based Design Association of New Zealand (DANZ). In July 1957 Roger Lascelles (1928-), a self-described Christchurch ‘foreign and intercolonial buying agent’ – recently returned from Britain and impressed by the CoID's recently opened London 'shop front', the Design Centre – had a letter published in Design, the house magazine of the CoID:

By December 1959, Lascelles – who was well-connected in Christchurch social circles – had begun organising for the creation of a similar facility in New Zealand, albeit on a smaller ­scale. Alerted to these moves and responding to enquiries received from the CoID concerning Lascelles’ status, the Department of Industries and Commerce (DoIC) interviewed him, reporting that:

Mr Lascelles is very keen about the subject of industrial design and appears to be well informed. He is full of enthusiasm and could, I think, do some useful work in making the subject more generally known in New Zealand, provided his group consists of responsible and more mature people who could guide him; perhaps they might even have to restrain him (Archives New Zealand IC W1926 57/1/6 vol 1 box 1797, Memorandum from H Larsen to W Sutch, 25 January 1960). 

Seemingly unaware that the DoIC had been investigating the idea of a local design council since the election of the second Labour administration in 1957, Lascelles, as ‘honorary secretary pro tem’ of the association began soliciting national interest in the setting up ‘a Design Organisation similar to, but on a more modest scale than the Council of Industrial Design in London’. The association claimed twenty 'founders': seven architects (including Peter Beaven, Miles Warren and Paul Pascoe); four 'designers' (including John Simpson, a British craft silversmith); three solicitors; two engineers and one printer (Leo Bensemann), an importer (Lascelles) and a journalist. By June 1960, although Lascelles had subsequently returned to London, a small committee under the guidance of Simpson, who was professor of fine art at the University of Canterbury, had developed the text for a pamphlet explaining the aspirational aims and ambitions of the society.

Title page of the prospectus for the Design Association of New Zealand (1960)
National Library of New Zealand/Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa

The association’s main object, it asserted, was ‘the encouragement of Good Design in every sphere of life’, positing that ‘Good Design is a matter of national importance and that it is imperative for New Zealand to have, now, its own properly constituted Design Association supported by public funds though independent of government direction’ (Archives New Zealand IC W1926 57/1/6 vol 1 box 1797, Letter from A Hearn to W Sutch, 24 June 1960). There was an undoubted spirit of enterprise driving the members of the association and by the end of 1961 they had contacted a number of like-minded individuals and organisations throughout the country and were in the throes of organising one of the earlier design exhibitions to be held in the country. Opening on 15 May 1962 and displayed in the less than salubrious Canterbury Society of Arts premises in Durham Street, Christchurch, the exhibition was launched with a speech from the associate minister of trade and industry and accompanied by a gracious address from the governor general who was not present (both texts were drafted by the DoIC). While no catalogue was produced, the Press printed a six page supplement, paid for by advertisers: the PDL Industries Ltd advertisement occupied the entirety of page one (‘The Press supplement on design in industry’, Press (15 May 1962). The exhibition attracted 8,700 visitors, a number that exceeded even the Association's best hopes, but it was a unique event and by 1965 it seems to have effectively dissolved, albeit after some of its office holders had led rancorous attacks on the DoIC in respect of its proposals to establish a design promotion body in New Zealand.

How to press the buttons of the electorate: 'A greater range and variety in consumer goods' and 'Board of Trade to advise on imports and industrial matters'.
Consumerism at the heart of National party 'non-design' advertising for the 1949 general election in the Otago Daily Times.
New Zealand Election Ads

The DANZ's vision of a private organisation undertaking similar design promotional activities as the CoID, funded by the taxpayer but ‘independent of government direction’, was a somewhat ingenuous reading of the situation, one that misunderstood not only the nature and function of the ostensible prototype and its relationship with government but also the changing economic order as Britain shifted its trade from its former empire to Europe. It’s tempting to think that the primarily aesthetic understanding of design espoused by the DANZ was more a consequence of residual Anglophilia in establishment Christchurch – a concern with the awfulness of popular taste was one of the hallmarks of the British modernist debate – but there seems to have been something more to the argument. Since its introduction in 1938, the import licensing regime adopted by the 1935-49 Labour administration had been subjected to prolonged attack from not only the opposition National party but also from retailers and architects who argued that it denied consumers access to well-designed British commodities. In fact the problem of restrictions on choice lay more with the cosy arrangements entered into between British manufacturers and those responsible for selecting what was imported into New Zealand under the licensing regime as well as with New Zealand's membership of the Sterling Area. Lascelles’ occupation as an indent agent - albeit one working primarily with sports equipment - and the argumentative 'government interference' tone adopted by the DANZ, which would become increasingly evident, suggests that one of the association's more tacit purposes was ideological. Moreover, its understanding of design seems to have been inclined toward the superficial with a focus on aesthetics and 'taste', rather than seeing it as a process encompassing production, mediation and consumption.

Unidentified designer, poster for a series of lectures by Colin Barrie, director of the Industrial Design Council of Australia (1962).
Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga, Wellington (IC W1926 Box 67 57/1/6 pt 2)

Lascelles wasn't the only individual to contact the CoID 'expressing enthusiasm for its aims and interest in establishing something similar in New Zealand.' (Archives New Zealand IC W1926 57/1/6 vol 1 box 1797, Letter from M Browne to W Sutch, 11 January 1960). Jolyon Saunders, a newly appointed lecturer in design at the Elam School of Fine Arts – which had come under the control of the Auckland University College in 1950 – had also been in touch with the CoID in his capacity as secretary of a new design group, the New Zealand Society of Industrial Designers (NZSID), being set up in Auckland. A colleague of Saunders at Elam, Robert Ellis, in his capacity as chair of the new society, had also contacted the DoIC indicating that the new body was in the process of obtaining legal status (Archives New Zealand IC W1926 57/1/6 vol 1 box 1797, Letter from R Ellis to W Sutch, 23 November 1959). The NZSID differed from the other design societies in being intended as a 'professional institute safeguarding design, designers and the public and compiling registers, etc.' Notwithstanding these ambitions, the new society foundered, only to be revived two years later when the British arts educator Paul Beadle (1917-1992) was appointed head of Elam in 1961 and, on his arrival in 1962, elected as the re-titled president of the hitherto quiescent NZSID. Prior to taking up his appointment in Auckland, Beadle had been head of art schools in Newcastle (NSW) and Adelaide (SA) in Australia and appears to have had dealings with the Industrial Design Council of Australia. In Auckland, Beadle - who had been admitted to membership of the British Society of Industrial Artists in 1947 – placed the revived NZSID – which had around twenty members – onto a war footing with a programme of lectures, an exhibition, 'Designed in New Zealand' (May 1963), talks with manufacturers including the New Zealand Manufacturers' Federation, and consumer organisations such as the Auckland District Consumer Committee. He also approached DANZ seeking not only financial support for his agenda of professionalising the practice of design but also backing for a forthcoming battle: Beadle had identified the DoIC generally and its permanent secretary Dr W B Sutch specifically as the enemy.

Rod Harvey, Setting designed by John Crichton for the NZSID's May 1963 exhibition 'Designed in New Zealand'.
From Home and Building (June 1963)

It's unclear what activated Beadle's animus, but it was uncharacteristic; Reynold Macpherson describes him as a 'gentle liberal humanist'. As has been observed previously on this blog, as early as 1958 the DoIC had formed a study team to investigate the workings of design councils around the world, with a focus on those that had been established in Britain, Australia, Canada and Denmark. Although the National party won the 1960 election and its ministers of trade and industry despised Sutch and sought his removal, they also sanctioned the DoIC's design council proposals to the point that subsequently they claimed credit for its invention. All this notwithstanding, in September 1963, in an effort to avoid departmental scrutiny of the exchange, the executive committee of the NZSID instructed Saunders, still its honorary secretary, to write privately to the parliamentary undersecretary for industries and commerce on behalf of 'the the only professional organisation of practicing designers in this country'. Saunders reiterated the society's vehement objections to 'a proposal to establish a Council of Industrial Design under direct departmental control'. Although there had been in fact no such proposal from the DoIC, Saunders asserted that while the society, along with the DANZ, supported the establishment of a design council, it must be 'autonomous', alleging, without supporting proof, that 'An autonomous Industrial Design Council was established in Australia recently on a very small budget, and has had a tremendous impact on Australian industry'. He then asserted a series of mistruths that 'no informed design organisation in the country supports the existing proposals for a Council of Industrial Design and the manufacturers themselves want nothing to do with them in their present form' (Archives New Zealand IC W1926 57/1/6 vol 3, Letter from J Saunders to L Adams-Schneider, 13 September 1963). Notwithstanding the heated rhetoric, support for the NZSID's position was far from the unanimity it claimed, even within the DANZ; its then president, Paul Pascoe, for example, seems to have considerable misgivings about the association's backing of the NZSID and contacted Sutch expressing his support for the DoIC proposals.

In fact both the NZSID and elements of the DANZ appear to have been confused as to the function of a design promotion body - such as the CoID or the IDCA, both of which had been developed within the appropriate ministries of trade: they were not formed to impose state regulation on design or designers or to determine an approved standard or type of design. In a briefing note to the minister, Sutch opined:

The successful operation of a design council would lead to a developing understanding of good design, but basically the objectives of establishing a design council are to ensure ways by which the best design practices may be encouraged in industry, and educational facilities improved as necessary, to provide industry with adequate numbers of suitably trained designers. In other words, the main justification for the work of a design council is economic, leading to a better use of the country's resources, a decreasing pressure for imported manufactured goods, and greater opportunities for export trade in such products 

As Sutch observed to the minister, design councils were not just about aesthetics. (Archives New Zealand IC W1926 57/1/6 vol 3, Memorandum from W Sutch to Minister of Industries and Commerce, 20 September 1963). As it was, Saunder's letter was the last shot in Beadle's war. In March 1964 Sutch briefed the parliamentary undersecretary for trade and industry noting that the DoIC had been in contact with 'Professor Beadle of Auckland who on various occasions expressed publicly his strong disagreement  with the [proposed council]. He has since privately told the department that he will not obstruct the establishment of the Institute (sic). Both Beadle and Saunders resigned from the executive of the NZSID, being replaced by Keith Mosheim and D J Haynes respectively, both practitioners working in the private sector. Mosheim wrote to the minister requesting that it should be represented on the proposed council but when the council was, finally, brought into being in 1968 no members of either the NZSID or the DANZ were appointed. The NZSID survived as a practitioner body until 1988 when its members voted on a change of constitution and name. In 1991 the re-jigged organisation merged with the New Zealand Association of Interior Designers, emerging as the Designers Institute of New Zealand.

New Zealand first became a part of the world economic system at some point near the end of the eighteenth century. Like most colonial constructs, it exported products that would be transformed elsewhere, usually in Britain and, employing Keith Sinclair's memorable expression, 'imported its standards of living'. Peter Gibbons, noting the endurance of this long-standing colonial relationship, has elaborated that 'Even when local production of goods has been promoted and encouraged, at times subsidized, such goods, based upon designs and technologies developed elsewhere in the world system, are seen as substitutes for the 'real thing'. [...] People want goods from elsewhere, preferably with designer labels, not what is homegrown' (P Gibbons, 'The far side of the search for identity: reconsidering New Zealand history', New Zealand Journal of History, 37:1 (2003), 38-47, p. 42). The post war design societies were a collective response in an attempt to deal with what can, in retrospect, be identified as a cultural concept imported from Britain. The way that the societies processed this newly translated notion of design varied: by adapting it to the local condition, as the Architectural Centre was to do; by ignoring it, as the short-lived Auckland Design Guild did; by using it to define a newly 'professionalised' occupation as the NZSID sought to do; or as the DANZ aspired to do, by using it in an attempt to reinforce a colonial status quo.

  

An incidental impetus?

Milner Gray (1899-1997), logo for the Society of Industrial Artists, about 1933

In April 1949 the New Zealand Listener published a short article by the poet, lecturer, textile printer, music critic and general gadfly A R D Fairburn entitled ‘Art and industry’. Seen from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the article has good claim to represent a bit of a threshold moment in the history of design in New Zealand as it was probably the first time the subject of industrial design was raised in a popular forum, rather than in specialist publications such as Home & Building, The Year Book of the Arts in New Zealand or the recently launched New Zealand Design Review.

Probably the first popular discussion of industrial design in New Zealand. A R D Fairburn, 'Art and industry',
New Zealand Listener, 20: 513 (22 April 1949), p. 8

Fairburn’s article discussed a visit to New Zealand by the British industrial designer Milner Gray, then president of the Society of Industrial Artists, a design practitioner body formed in 1930 'to advance and protect the interests of [designers] and to raise the standard of [design] in [Britain]'. Between 28 March and 10 April 1949, under the aegis of the British Council – the propaganda arm of the British government, Gray delivered a series of lectures on aspects of industrial design to audiences in Auckland and Wellington. Fairburn’s article, while the only critical commentary, wasn’t the only published record of Gray’s New Zealand expedition. His itinerary was tracked in the newspapers – in the women’s columns (‘Housewives helped by good design’, Auckland Star (29 March 1949), p. 3.) – and abridged versions of his lectures were subsequently published in the Wellington-based Design Review and some months later in Modern Manufacturing and the New Zealand Manufacturer as well as in The Australian Artist; Gray's tour also encompassed Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney.

E Mervyn Taylor (1906-1964), cover of Design Review, 2:2 (August-September 1949). Gray's visit coincided with the Architectural Centre's commissioning Taylor to re-package the New Zealand Design Review. Taylor's cover design incorporates one of Gray's pre-war designs; the issue contained an abridged transcript of Gray's lecture 'Package design in Great Britain' 

These reports and transcripts were for some time the only published records of Gray’s fortnight-long visit. Notwithstanding the singularity of the event, Gray's foray into the Antipodes has been excised from his biographies as being of no relevance to his role in creating design as an identifiable practice. From a New Zealand perspective, the visit subsequently became something of an embarrassment and the presence of one of the key figures in British design circles, was, until recently, air-brushed from the history of design in New Zealand, possibly because it was considered a diversion from the emerging national design discourse. In part, this reflected political reality. Some seven months after Gray left for Sydney, a conservative National party government was elected. The new administration had no interest in design matters and withdrew the scant funds that had been previously made available in the fields both of research and promotion on the grounds that subsidising such activities was inappropriate in a country whose primary function was to export the barely processed products of grass and to import the manufactured commodities of the ‘mother’ country.

Gray's lecture 'The industrial design profession in Great Britain'was published in the winter 1949 edition of The Australian Artist, edited by Richard  Haughton James, the first president of the Melbourne-based practitioner body, the Society of Designers for Industry. Reference to Gray's text is made on the upper left of the cover

The idea of sending someone to the Antipodes to talk about design generally and British design specifically seems to have occurred to British Council in early 1948. Design was not an unknown field to the council. The influential secretary of its Fine Arts Committee until late 1947, Alfred Appleby Longden, had been involved in a number of the British government’s design promotion initiatives since 1906; the committee's long-standing chairman was Eric McLagan, director of the Victoria & Albert Museum and, prior to the Second World War, a member of the Council for Art and Industry. However, the most notable exponent of design in the committee was the ubiquitous Kenneth Clark, formerly director of the National Gallery and an active member of the Board of Trade sub-committee that, in 1943, had recommended the formation of the Council of Industrial Design (CoID); the Council came into being in December 1944. Clark was, incidentally, from 1945-47, adviser to the Melbourne National Gallery of Victoria’s Felton Bequest and was a close friend of the recently appointed Herald Professor of Fine Art at the University of Melbourne, Joseph Burke – formerly private secretary to the British prime minister Clement Attlee – who had not only been involved in the formation of the CoID but was also acquainted with key members of a recently-established, design practitioner body, the Melbourne-based Society of Designers for Industry (SDI). 

In March 1948 Violet Merriman of the Lectures Department at the British Council, approached Cycill Tomrley, design advice officer at the CoID seeking advice as to who might be recruited as ‘a practical speaker with a knowledge of the distributive and selling side of consumer goods as well as the design side, so that he (sic) is equipped to inform and enlighten any sort of audience even the specialist trade audiences and students of design, rather than discuss the social and theoretical aspect of industrial design’ (University of Brighton Design Archives, 85/12, Memo from C Tomrley to M Hartland Thomas, 06 April 1948). After extended discussions with the CoID and having rejected a number of the proffered candidates – such as Bill Newman, editor of the retail trade journal Store – the British Council finally selected Gray.

Milner Gray (1899-1997) for A J Wilkinson Ltd, 'Bizarre for Clarice Cliff' earthenware plate, 1935.
Te Papa Tongarewa/National Museum of New Zealand. Gift of Walter Cook, 1992 (CG001946)
CC BY-NC-ND license

As a practicing designer, Gray was perhaps not the obvious candidate for a tour of the frontiers of what was still referred to as 'the Empire'. His urbanity and wit were qualities not usually held in high regarded in provincial circles, but he was an articulate speaker and an effective motivator. He had been the key figure not only in the establishment in the late 1920s of the Society of Industrial Artists (SIA), the most enduring design practitioner body in Britain but also in its post-war reconstruction. During the Second World War, Gray had been appointed head of the Exhibitions Branch and principal design adviser at the Ministry of Information. He also played a part in the formation of the CoID where he both acted as an advocate for design practitioners as well as contributing to the understanding of what design entailed amongst those directly responsible for its formation. In 1942, together with Misha Black, Marcus Brumwell and Herbert Read, he founded one of the most successful twentieth century British design consultancies, Design Research Unit.

Unidentified photographer, Meeting of the Design Research Unit's board of associated designers, March 1948. In what seems to be a parody of the iconography of the Christian 'last supper', Gray is seated third from the left
From M Cotton, Design Research Unit 1942-72 ([London]: Koenig Books, [2010]

British Council tours of the Antipodes – which began in 1946 following a change in government foreign policy – had hitherto focussed on exporting British cultural values: music, art, the theatre and literature. In 1947 the Old Vic Theatre Company, led by Lawrence Oliver and Vivien Leigh, and the Boyd Neel Orchestra toured Australia and New Zealand to considerable acclaim and profit. In 1948, the Council exhibited Henry Moore drawings and sculpture in the Australian state capitals – although not in New Zealand – again and surprisingly, to popular acclaim. This new proposal for a design-focussed tour with ‘a practical speaker’ was, as Merriman acknowledged ‘rather the opposite of what one would expect of the British Council’.  

The rationale behind the British Council's design tour is obscure but it is evident that it was not prompted by any specific recognition of an interest in design emanating from either Australia or New Zealand, notwithstanding the emergence of a modernist design discourse in both countries. While the British Council’s representative in Wellington, John Bostock, was undoubtedly aware of the activities of the Architectural Centre and its publication the New Zealand Design Review, this was not a factor in the Council’s decision. Moreover, the decision to add a New Zealand leg onto Gray's touring schedule seems to have resulted from concerns in the newly-established Wellington office of the British Council that New Zealand businesses and consumers were increasingly swayed by United States influences. In 1946 New Zealand negotiated a settlement of its Lend-Lease Agreement debts with the United States in a manner that ensured the acceded funds –  some USD4million –  remained in the country, being used to acquire property locally and to foster cultural initiatives such as the United States Foreign Information Service (later the United States Information Agency) and the Fulbright Programme. As in Europe and Japan, assimilation of United States technologies and management methods largely stemmed from local manufacturers, businessmen and, to a lesser extent, officials from government agencies.

While design had next to no profile in New Zealand at government level, the British post-war Labour government saw design as a critical component of the country's export-led economic recovery programme. As Stafford Cripps, president of the Board of Trade, declared in a speech to the SIA in December 1945 'The efficiency of our industries depends to a very great extent upon our combining the latest results of scientific and industrial research on the part of large and small firms alike with an attractive and suitable appearance and shape.' (S Cripps, 'The industrial designer', Democracy alive (London: Sedgwick & Jackson, 1946), p. 87). Cripps' vision did not sit well with British manufacturers who, rather than subscribing to this brave, new world, reverted to manufacturing the sort of thing they had produced prior to the war, employing the same outmoded processes in the expectation that their overseas markets were as conservative as their taste. In an effort to overcome this opposition to innovation, Cripps inaugurated a series of working parties formed of representatives from both employer and employee organisations. A part of their brief was to address the issue of design and its applicability to industry. In the case of the Pottery Working Party, this move failed to gain the support of both manufacturers and the unionised workforce; it was rejected out of hand. Designers, the Pottery Working Party argued, should, primarily, be industry-trained and, in any case, 'Creative designers are born, not made'. The government's industry-based Design Centre proposals were summarily dismissed as something that might be contemplated in the future. (Great Britain, Board of Trade, Working party reports: pottery (London: HMSO, 1946), p.23; p. 32.)

Reforming British industry or vindicating existing practices. Unidentified designer, cover of Great Britain, Board of Trade, Working party reports: pottery 
(London: HMSO, 1946) 

Charged with articulating the government line, the CoID responded to the snub. Writing in the trade journal British Industries, its newly appointed director Gordon Russell asserted 'The Council is most anxious to be of service to industry and there is little doubt that there are many firms whose design standards are not good enough to maintain sales in the face of real competition. I was told the other day of a case in New Zealand where a consignment of a certain British commodity was being jobbed off at about 50 per cent of the ceiling price because the standard of design was low.' (G Russell, 'Britain a pioneer in design', British Industries, 35:5 (May 1948), p. 135.) Just as the success of the British fine arts pavilion at the Christchurch New Zealand International Exhibition of 1906-07 had sparked a British government design initiative - the formation of the Exhibitions Branch of the Board of Trade, so reports of trading failures in New Zealand seem to have prompted the British Council into entering into the field of design promotion.

In the eyes of the British Council Gray's fortnight in New Zealand passed off satisfactorily, almost successfully. In the afterglow, Fairburn declared that Gray had 'done more, perhaps, than any other man to raise the profession of industrial designing to its present high status', an observation that suggests he had been speaking to someone with direct experience of Gray's activities in the SIA - possibly his friend Eric Lee-Johnson. In both Auckland and Wellington Gray delivered four carefully scripted lectures to audiences of between 150 and 200 persons in Auckland and around 100 in Wellington, as well as undertaking radio interviews in both cities. Throughout his lectures Gray sought to counteract the perception that British design was deficient although he allowed that 'The design of cheap mass-produced articles is still, with few exceptions, as unsatisfactory in Great Britain as in most countries.' The problem, Gray asserted, lay both with manufacturers and designers and he argued that 'the approach to industrial design must be a synthesis of the three ideals of form and function, sales appeal and economic production–fitness for purpose, design for selling, and design for making.' (M Gray, 'Design in everyday life', New Zealand Design Review, 2:1 (June-July 1949), p. 10).

E Mervyn Taylor (1906-1964), cover of New Zealand Design Review, 2:1 (June-July 1949). The most tangible record of Gray's visit was the 'Industrial Design Number' dedicated issue of the Design Review, which reproduced abridged transcripts of two of Gray's lectures.
New Zealand Electronic Text Collection 

But if the British Council was hoping that Gray's tour might prompt a resurgence of faith in British manufactured commodities they were sadly mistaken. Reporting on Gray's visit Bostock observed that 'owing to the pressure of other business, it was impossible for the Minister of Education and for the Minister of Industries and Commerce to meet Mr Gray'. Instead he was lunched by the governor general, Bernard Freyberg, attended 'a small cocktail party given by Mr Vernon Brown, architect and lecturer at the [Auckland] University [College], and attended by representatives of the University [...] and the Auckland Manufacturers' Association.' A meeting with members of the Manufacturers' Research Committee of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research led to a request for 'a small travelling Exhibition to illustrate good design'. Bostock speculated that Gray's tour might prompt the formation of a local 'Society of Industrial Artists, whose members would initially be drawn from the fields of Architecture and Art, there being no recognised Industrial Design Specialists as yet in this country.' Such a society, he opined, would probably 'reduce the "piracy" of designs which is at present widespread here.' (National Archives of the United Kingdom, BW83/9, Letter from J Bostock to Lectures Department, 12 April 1949).

Bostock's prognostication as to the incidental impetus Gray's visit might have on New Zealand design proved wrong. By the end of 1949 the Auckland Design Guild, 'an association providing for the exchange of ideas on the arts and sciences connected with design', which had been established in the July following Gray's visit had folded on unrecognised ideological grounds; the incoming government had withdrawn the small subsidy provided to the Architectural Centre for publication of the Design Review; and New Zealand manufacturing companies, notably the newly established Crown Lynn brand, continued to pirate imperfect imitations of British commodities. Moreover, the production standards of British manufactures continued to be criticised: in July 1952 a National party backbencher, T P Shand, was moved to comment in the House of Representatives about the quality of imported British goods, declaring that 'I say to the English manufacturer and his agent in New Zealand that they are doing a very bad turn when they put rubbish on the market [...] we have had some shocking rubbish by way of English crockery in the last three or four years [...] I think it fair to say the the New Zealand manufacturers of crockery got blamed for some of it' (NZPD, vol. 297, (June- August 1952), pp. 86-87). By identifying the connection between manufacturer and importer, Shand got it right. The problem with British manufactures wasn't the deficiency of British design, but rather a deficiency in what was despatched to this, the least critical of consumer markets; Gray's 'cheap mass-produced articles', invariably retailed in New Zealand at highly inflated prices. 

In his post-visit report to the British Council, Gray was somewhat less sanguine than Bostock in his opinions, observing that 'No Australasian style of design in mass-produced goods has yet evolved, and in most cases it is evident that little or no thought has been given to the subject. There are few competent designers practicing in either Australia or New Zealand, and the present tendency is for those of outstanding ability to emigrate to the UK or USA, where greater opportunities are offered.' (National Archives of the United Kingdom, BW83/9, Memorandum from M Gray to the British Council, 21 April 1949). The British Council heeded Gray's advice; industrial design was subsequently deemed a subject best ignored when considering tours of New Zealand. It would take the best part of a decade before steps were taken to invest design with an independent institutional profile in New Zealand.