The familiar unknown

MARK CLEVERLEY: DESIGNER

by Jonty Valentine

David Bateman, 143 pp., August 2014, $60.00, 978 1 869 53869 9

Writing to a would-be British migrant to New Zealand in January 1961, Henry Holden, an economist at the Department of Industries and Commerce, observed that while 'New Zealand manufacturers are becoming increasingly aware of the merits of industrial design [...] it would seem that this interest has not yet developed to the point where full-time consultants have been established [...] Normal design services are rendered by Advertising Agencies and in some instances architects and publishers.' <Archives New Zealand, IC W1926 57/1/6 vol 1, letter from H C Holden to G King, 25 January 1961>. Holden was in a position to know about how design functioned and was perceived in New Zealand; he was a member of the industrial design study team established in May 1959 by Dr W B Sutch, permanent secretary of the Department of Industries and Commerce, to investigate the role of industrial design in New Zealand manufacturing with a view to establishing a design promotion body modelled on the British Council of Industrial Design (CoID).

In January 1961 Mark Cleverley was working as a draughtsman in the architectural department of the New Zealand Dairy Company Ltd in Hamilton; it was, as he recalls in the series of interviews with Jonty Valentine that form the core of this book, 'all a great buzz'. Like Sutch, Cleverley had ambitions for design in New Zealand and shortly after, as Sherry Blankenship recounts in her introductory biographical essay, moved with his wife and family to Christchurch where, as a recipient of one of the first Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council Scholarships, he enrolled as a student at the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury.  Cleverley was precisely the sort of person Sutch saw as a lynchpin of his vision of an intelligence-led economy, one characterised by 'brains and skills' not the production of raw material for conversion elsewhere.

In many respects, Cleverley's choice of Ilam, rather than, say Elam or the Wellington School of Design – soon to be incorporated into Wellington Polytechnic – was serendipitous notwithstanding the fact that the competing institutions were in the process of establishing industrial design courses. When Cleverly started his studies, the design component of the Ilam diploma course was taught by Florence Akins (1906-2012), who, as he observes 'was quite old-fashioned [...] virtually just craft'; Akins, the first Ilam student to be awarded a Diploma in Fine Art had been appointed to the staff in 1936. Things changed the following year when the new head of school, the English silversmith John Simpson, recruited his fellow countryman the designer Maurice Askew (1921 - ) to teach graphic design. Askew's approach to the subject was rooted in interwar European modernism and marked an abrupt shift in the school's teaching of not only two dimensional design but also three dimensional form.

Unidentified photographer, Queen Street 18 June 1964. The design of Robert Kerridge's 246 Queen Street development (Rigby-Mullan, 1959) embodied an alternative, commercial American-inspired, modernism, to that practiced by Cleverley
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A918)

As Cleverley studied, so New Zealand attitudes toward design and its role in manufacturing underwent significant shifts. In Christchurch the recently founded Design Association of New Zealand (DANZ) attempted to establish a 'design centre', based on the CoID's eponymous London shopfront. There was a difference though, proposed Christchurch design centre was to be more shop and less front, more a sales outlet than an impartial design promotion agency, even if DANZ anticipated that it would be publicly funded. The Auckland cinema chain entrepreneur Robert Kerridge was more brazen, but equally unsuccessful, in seeking government support for the formation of a similar retail front as part of his 246 Queen Street retail development.

It's evident that the idea of a government-sponsored design promotion body was as misunderstood in New Zealand as it was elsewhere: designer practitioners argued these bodies should be all about their practice; retailers, importers and advertisers saw them as a profit-making opportunities; manufacturers and primary producer organisations identified them as a source of funding that could enable niche market penetration. At various times all three sectors expressed opposition to their formation and all three contributed to the demise of the New Zealand Industrial Design Council (NZIDC), the institutional outcome of Sutch's investigation, which was finally realised in November 1967 when an Order in Council brought into force the provisions of the Industrial Design Act 1966.

Confusion as to what design councils were conceived to do carries over in this book with Valentine thanking a practitioner body, the Designers Institute of New Zealand (DINZ) for permission to reproduce articles from Designscape, the influential magazine produced by the NZIDC from 1969 until 1984. In fact DINZ, which was formed in 1991, has no claim to ownership of the magazine. The NZIDC was  a government agency created by an Act of Parliament and the Act abolishing the council in 1988 transferred the Crown's residual ownership of the assets of the NZIDC, including copyright, to Telarc, a Crown Entity involved with quality control that had been established in 1972 by the dairy industry.

This sense of uncertainty about the ownership of design prompts a discussion of Cleverley's 1972 application to join the British design practitioner body, the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers. Now called the Chartered Society of Designers it formally coalesced in 1930 as the Society of Industrial Artists; a number of New Zealanders were early members including Len Lye, Eric Lee-Johnston and James Boswell. It had no formal connection with either the Council for Art and Industry, the first British design promotion body that operated from 1934 until 1939, or its successor body the CoID, established in 1944 and now called the Design Council. To the contrary, those responsible for appointing the first CoID deliberately sought industrialists and avoided practising designers. As the design writer John Gloag observed approvingly, it consisted 'almost entirely of specialists, moreover who know what they are talking about. There is not likely to be any "uplift" or "art blah" emitted from the deliberations of this body.' <National Archives BT/64/5173, letter from J Gloat to F Meynell, 21 December 1944>. By 'specialists' Gloag meant manufacturers; the 'art blah' came later.

Milner Gray (1899-1997) for the British Council of Industrial Design, Royal arms of England (c 1946).  Gray redesigned the arms for use as the council's logo. This version emphasised the council's role as a state body while conveying a somewhat whimsical sense of modernity

It's worth remembering that the CoID was established as a grant-aided body primarily 'to promote by all practicable means the improvement of design in the products of British industry'. Michael Farr, quoting from the Council's first annual report, defined the CoID's understanding of industrial design as 'not simply the plan of a particular product. It is a unity in the industrial process, a governing idea that owes something to creative design, something to the machine, something to the consumer, and links them all together.' <M Farr, Design in British industry: a mid-century survey (Cambridge: University Press, 1955), p. 209>. Design promotion bodies were primarily intended as policy tools for changing industrial mindsets, not for promoting the practice of design or protecting its practitioners.

The changing perception of design by New Zealand businesses is encapsulated in a letter sent by T E Clark, managing director of Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd, to Sutch in July 1960 inviting him to 'favour us with your presence, and with a short address, at the presentation of prizes in Our Crown Lynn Design Contest for 1960.' Asserting that the design competition was 'second only to the Kelliher Prize' for painting, Clark noted that 'In this way [...] we are taking the first steps towards making the New Zealand pottery industry a 100% New Zealand industry, and opening a new field or the creative abilities of New Zealand designers' <Alexander Turnbull Library, Sutch Papers, 2002-012-22/7, letter from T E Clark to W B Sutch, 19 July 1960>. That the Crown Lynn design competition was viewed as second only to the Kelliher says more about the poverty of artistic patronage in New Zealand than it does about Crown Lynn's competition, which had earlier been criticised as unethical by the Association of New Zealand Art Societies. The competition however, raised the company's public profile and partly expunged its reputation for producing shoddy, ill-designed and dubiously labelled wares.

Cleverley won the first of his Crown Lynn design awards in 1961, but being a prizewinner in such a competition didn't seem to auger a career in New Zealand's under-capitalised and erratically managed ceramics industry. After having subsidised his university study by working at for the architectural practice Warren & Mahoney, Cleverley found employment as a graphic designer in Christchurch, with an advertising agency in Auckland and then, between 1966 and 1968, with the entrepreneurial packaging firm UEB Packaging Ltd.

Unidentified designer/UEB Packaging Ltd, Detail of packaging for British Wax candles (c 1974) showing the UEB logo.

UEB was a New Zealand firm that embraced the concept of good design with an almost evangelical fervour. during the late 1960s and 70s UEB's squared scroll logo was ubiquitous on an extraordinary range of consumer products. UEB had been established in 1947 by James Doig (1913-1984), a former Glaswegian merchant marine officer to manufacture cartons and boxes by the mid 1960s, the company had become one of the largest companies in the country and had expanded into fields such as carpet manufacturing. Aside from his entrepreneurial drive, Doig had a strong interest in design, recognised by his appointment as deputy chairman of the inaugural governing body of the NZIDC in 1966; he retired in 1973.

Mark Cleverley (1934?-)/Crown Lynn Potteries Limited,  Palm Springs styled by Dorothy L Thorpe earthenware plate (1967-1972). One of Cleverley's early challenges at Crown Lynn was to develop the American decorator Dorothy Thorpe's sketches into feasible production designs.
Portage Ceramics Trust (2008.1.626)

Cleverley though is best-known as a designer of Crown Lynn ceramics and he was finally recruited by the company as a development designer in 1967. This is where the informal interview format that forms the heart of the book shines. Valentine introduces a text Cleverley wrote for the NZIDC's magazine that prompts the latter into an extended and informative account of his work for the company <M Cleverley, 'Stacks of crockery', Designscape, no 58 (May 1974), pp. 5-7>. This liberty of expression enables a sense of how design functions; its interactive process as the designer both as a form maker intimately involved in the mechanics of production and as a mediator between the institutional power formations of the enterprise.

Notwithstanding the fact that much of his output for Crown Lynn has hitherto been either ignored or misattributed in the literature, Cleverley's work at Crown Lynn was technically innovative, visually exploratory, intellectually informed and of a quality and sophistication rarely seen in New Zealand manufactured goods. Unfortunately he was sidelined when the company's board initiated a series of what might best be euphemistically described as corporate blunders: it changed its name, acquired unrelated manufacturing interests, restructured its ceramics production while failing to support these changes with associated investment, dropped the design competition and employed a Royal College of the Arts graduate and former technical college lecturer, Tom Arnold, as design director. Arnold stayed less than three years before lasting less than a year running down the NZIDC as its penultimate director. The 1980s were not good years either for design or its promotion.

Mark Cleverley (1934?-) for New Zealand Post Office / Harrison & Sons, 10 cent definitive stamp (1969) with unidentified designer for New Zealand Post Office, commemorative envelope (1970)

But notwithstanding his impressive – if largely unrecognised – career as a designer of ceramics, it was in the esoteric field of stamp design that Cleverly made his most distinctive mark, as one of a small group of designers commissioned by the Post Office to invent a new image for New Zealand stamps between 1969 and 1974. This decision produced some of the best-designed stamps to be found anywhere in the world. Presumably in order to mollify conservative critics, the Post Office continued its tradition of simultaneously producing some of the more conservatively designed stamps to be issued anywhere.

Mark Cleverley (1934?) for New Zealand Post Office/Japanese Government Printing Bureau, Expo'70 stamps (1969) with [Mark Cleverley (1934?-) for New Zealand Post Office] commemorative envelope (1970)

The Post Office's decision to respond to criticism of its low design standards by improving the quality of its definitive stamps prompted the establishment of a design advisory committee in 1968, which included John Simpson of Ilam and Gil Docking of the Auckland City Art Gallery (as it was), along with 'all the old guard from the Post Office'. The committee ultimately invited a number of designers to submit proposals that resulted in a series of commissions for a new definitive range; Cleverley designed the 10c, 15c, 25c, 30c $1 and $2 issues; Maurice Askew, one of his lecturers at Ilam, designed the 28c and 50c stamps.

The resulting designs were the subject of a short, critical, assessment in the NZIDC's Designscape (no. 8 (October 1969), probably written by its director, Geoff Nees, which is reproduced – in all its glorious Letraset layout – in the book. While noting that 'the general standard is far superior to most previously produced [...] the new stamps represent a landmark in the history of the New Zealand Post Office', Nees cautioned that all was not good and compromises had been made. The English-born artist and designer Eileen Mayo's six stamps were derided as 'stodgy and ill-considered', a view that considering her long career as a stamp designer, was both damning and provocative. Cleverley's modernist designs were, however, the 'best of the lot'.

New Zealand Post Office after Mark Cleverley (1934?-)/Harrison & Sons, 1974 Commonwealth Games commemorative issue with PD/Colin Simon (logo) commemorative envelope (1974). Cleverley disclaimed responsibility for the final stamp designs

These reductive, asymmetric designs challenged the Post Office's traditional approach to more than just the design of its stamps. For the 10 cent definitive he attempted to render the New Zealand armorial bearings in a more contemporary idiom, in much the way Milner Gray had updated the British arms for the CoID some two decades earlier. As Cleverley recounts, the proposal was rejected, as was his hopes of embossing the armorial. These designs perturbed the deeply conservative culture at the Post Office and Cleverley's last designs for it were for the 1974 Commonwealth Games.  However, as Blankenship recounts, his design requirements were too much for the then Postmaster General, the Labour party's Roger Douglas – who would later gain notoriety for his neoliberal reforms of the state apparatus, including the abolition of the NZIDC – and subsequent changes imposed by the Post Office prompted Cleverley to disavow his role as designer of the issue.

Blankenship fails to either identify Douglas as the obstructor or recognise that the Postmaster General was a political position – it was a Cabinet post – and thus that his intervention had a political dimension over and beyond the bureaucratic. This avoidance of social and political contexts denies an understanding of the impact Cleverley's designs for both Crown Lynn and the Post Office had on New Zealand in the 1970s. In an economically modest, conservative and homogenous society, suspicious of both the arts and innovation, modernist design – with the notable exception of motor vehicles – seems to have been regarded as a pathway to a sort of material perdition. In his modest way, Cleverley's designs of the nation's crockery and stamps made a significant if subtle contribution to the country's changing perception of the modern during the 1970s.

After leaving Crown Lynn in 1980, Cleverly took to teaching, initially at Ilam then at Wellington Polytechnic, retiring in 1996. Crown Lynn, by then a small part of the Ceramco Corporation Ltd, was shut down in 1989 by the asset-stripping, entrepreneurial businessmen who now controlled the company. The Post Office was split up and privatised and the NZIDC abolished. The society that over the 1970s had against its own inclinations developed a nascent manufacturing sector and a concurrent sense of design was now focussed on unbridled consumerism of products manufactured elsewhere and devoid of local design input.

Detail of the stamped mark on Crown Lynn Potteries Limited's Palm Springs wares. Mark Cleverley is acknowledged as the designer although his name is misspelt as 'Cleverly'

Valentine provides a reflective conclusion that acts as a terminal bookend to his interviews with Cleverley. In it he contextualises and critiques the forgoing conversation, locating it within the surprising normality of the designed product in 1970s New Zealand: the stamps, the Colin Simon logo, the Crown Lynn 'Apollo' dinner service along with the Lego building blocks and other international manifestations of the designed product that were available here. As he notes:

A lot of Mark's work will be familiar to many New Zealanders and will likely provoke similar personal memories and associations. But unlike literature or artworks that are viewed in galleries, hung on walls with labels to name the artist and explain what they are, most of these artefacts have not been attributed to an individual designer and certainly have not been explained, historicised or contextualised as such. The paradox of most designed objects is that while they are familiar and most likely encountered every day in our homes they cease to be consciously 'attended to' soon after purchase. And the result of this is that the makers of the objects, the designers, are completely forgotten. Actually, were most often never known by name.

This perceived need for identity is a problematic that teeters on the brink of a now discredited form of design history that has been identified by Tony Fry as a sort of canonisation: the 'great white men of modernist history' narrative. The suspicion that this text falls into the 'great white men' category of historical exegesis is somewhat reinforced by the series title 'Objectspace Masters of Craft', a designation that ultimately sits uncomfortably with the book's subject and content. A canonic history is one that 'is generative of design heroes and movements as the primary agents of the evolution of design; and a history which takes the canon as given knowledge and the foundation upon which to elaborate or criticise.' <T Fry, Design history Australia (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1988), p. 27>. Fry dismisses the validity of this premise, posing the fundamental query: 'what of all the other designed objects, the vast majority, which evolve and are used but are excluded from such a history?'.

Anonymous history – the phrase was coined by the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion in  his historical account of the industrialisation of commodities, Mechanization takes command: a contribution to anonymous history (1948) – raises another set of problematics. As Fry observes, much that Giedion discussed wasn't anonymous, 'all the objects which populate this history have the stamp of commodities; all have been named in the market-place.' Moreover, he effectively ignored the social relations of production by separating them into discrete economic and cultural spheres rather than seeing mechanisation as 'a function which acts on a specific society'. Fry asserts that 'while there were changes at the industrial point of production, which recast the social relations of production, these changes equally reconfigured the domestic, as re-ordered use and space.' <Fry, pp. 32-33.>. A similar prognosis might well be applied to Valentine's text, but in this case it would be redundant. His specificity is quite deliberate. Recognising the formal modernist demarcations, the 'need to differentiate between spheres of design', Valentine proffers the rationale

that when I play the role of a graphic-design writer I am conscious that my job is always to try to present an authentically design-based narrative, and part of doing that is to constantly question my own discipline's use of language and mythologies.

Imposing parameters on this history of design in New Zealand has not detracted from the power of the text nor the importance of its content. Unlike much of what passes for the written history of design in New Zealand, this is an intelligent, rigorous and perceptive recounting of a practice; a significant and important contribution to the archive. Rather than a 'revised New Zealand history from the perspective of a graphic designer', the entertaining anecdotes of a critic, or the well-rehearsed opinions of a practitioner, this is a key text in the nascent history of design in New Zealand.

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.