George Grey's drawing room

Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881), [Sir George Grey and his niece and adopted daughter
Annie Matthews in the drawing room, Mansion House, Kawau Island, about 1871].
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A3034)

Due to the long exposure time required to achieve a successful image, few photographs of inhabited nineteenth century New Zealand interiors survive. Probably the best-known is that taken by the Port Chalmers-based photographer Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881) depicting the erstwhile governor of New Zealand Sir George Grey (1812-1898) with his niece Annie Matthews (later Thorne George) in the drawing room of Mansion House, Kawau. The photograph is remarkable for a number of reasons not least for its documentation of some of the objects Grey collected for his temporary retreat from the disputatious world of colonial politics. It appears to be summer: the French doors are open onto the adjacent verandah; the timber-slatted Venetian blinds are drawn up; and the sun shines on the floor of this north facing room; the chairs are concealed by seasonal slip covers. With its stained and polished Kauri panelling and restrained decoration, it's a functional space, seemingly untroubled by the concerns of fashion but housing objects of a quality rarely seen in New Zealand.

The photograph depicts a small part of what was described by one visitor to Kawau as 'a peculiarly-shaped room, something like a carpenter's square, and the ceiling is supported by six pillars' <'The governor's tour', Supplement to the New Zealand Public Opinion (22 January 1881), p. 1, cited in D Kerr, Amassing treasures for all times: Sir George Grey, colonial bookman and collector (New Castle, Del; Dunedin: Oak Knoll; Otago University Press, 2006), p. 201>. Possibly for aesthetic reasons, Mundy has excised some details of the room, including its board and batten ceiling, but the configuration of the room seems uncontrived. Following Grey's departure, the house was materially altered to accommodate a range of functions – in its penultimate iteration the drawing room was converted into a bar – before it came under public control in 1977, when it was renovated in an attempt to reinstate its notional appearance under Grey's ownership. The room's current appearance, while superficially mimicking how it might have been seen by visitors during Grey's residence, intimates little of the significance of what it originally contained.

Grey's collections of books and manuscripts, notably those he gave to the South African Library in Capetown and the Auckland Free Public Library, have been exhaustively researched and documented and the paintings he collected and subsequently donated to what is now the Auckland Art Gallery/Toi o Tāmaki are well documented but very little attention has been paid to the other objects he surrounded himself with. His furniture, ceramics, carpets, clocks, silver and the like have been both dispersed and, if identified, poorly documented. Some of this material was given to the Auckland City Council and later transferred to the Auckland Institute and Museum (now the Auckland War Memorial Museum), much of the rest was inherited by his niece, part of which was subsequently either given or loaned to the Department of Conservation for display in the house following the 1977 renovation.

Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881), [Mansion House, Kawau Island, about 1871]. The drawing room
occupies the bow window-fronted ground floor of the rear wing of the building.
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A3085)

Grey purchased the 2000 hectare Kawau island in 1862 and between 1865 and 1868 employed the architect Frederick Thatcher (1814-1890) to renovate and extend the original mine manager's two-storey brick house (1845) into what became Mansion House. Having been somewhat peremptorily removed from his vice-regal post by a Conservative administration, Grey returned to England in September 1868. He evidently intended being away for some time as he leased the newly extended house for five years, but he returned to Kawau in October 1870, broke the lease and lived there until 1885 when he moved with his niece and her husband to St Stephen's Avenue in Parnell. The books and the 53 paintings he gave to the Auckland Free Public Library were removed from the house from November 1886 and it was sold in 1888.

Mundy's conversation piece of the Mansion House drawing room offers a tantalising glimpse of Grey's taste soon after his return from England in October 1870. As Mundy was advertising an Auckland exhibition of his landscape photographs in the Southern Cross in February 1871, it is probable that he visited Kawau around the same time. While there appear to be no other images of Grey's drawing room it was described by many of his visitors, both personal and members of the public. The Auckland correspondent of the Otago Witness asserted in 1875 that Grey was 'in the habit of throwing open [...] his fine library and drawing room, and in fact the greater part of the entire house' to passing visitors, where there were 'choice books, and curiosities of all kind lying about, rare and valuable pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds (sic) and other great painters, with many of less value, but still worth studying, adorn the walls.'

The British historian James Anthony Froude who visited Kawau for a week in 1884 described it as 'a spacious and fine drawing-room, panelled and vaulted with Kauri pine [...] Some good oil pictures hung on the walls, excellent old engravings, with Maori axes, Caffre shields and assegais, all prettily arranged.' After comparing its atmosphere to that of a reading room at the Athenaeum Club in London (Gray, like Froude, was a member), Froude further observes that 'The furniture was plain and solid, most of it home-made by Sir George's own workmen, Kauri pine chiefly providing the material.' <J Froude, Oceana: or England and her colonies (London: Longmans, Green, 1886), p. 264>. Other, less discerning, visitors were equally entranced, commenting that the rooms were 'large, lofty and cheerful, admirably furnished, and the walls hung with paintings of great antiquity.' <J Grey, His island home (Wellington: Lyon & Blair, 1879), p. 4.>. The observation that most of the furniture was mostly new reflected not only the peripatetic nature of Grey's career but also unfortunate incidents such as the disastrous fire at Government House in Auckland in 1848 which consumed his collections of specimens, manuscripts, wine, 'all [his] plate, linen, furniture of bedrooms, numerous books, [and] valuables of all kind.' <Grey to G Gairdner, 14 July 1848, cited in Kerr, Amassing treasures, pp. 61-62>.

The 'good oil pictures' shown in Mundy's photograph can be provisionally identified from those gifted to the Art Gallery. The oval painting on the left of the photograph is one of two Bacchanals by Jacopo Amigoni (1682-1752); the painting over the door is William Ewart's 1862 portrait of Hami Hone Ropiha (also known as John Hobbs), Grey's orderly during the Northern War of 1845-46. Over the fireplace is an Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691) river scene with a ferry boat; hung next to the French door is one of the two paintings of saints, probably that of St Protase, from the altarpiece painted for the Congregation of St Ambrose in the church of St Francesco in Vercelli between 1527 and 1535, by Gerolamo Giovenone (c. 1490-1553), then attributed to Giorgiacomo Fara known as Macrino d'Alba and latter misattributed to Bernadino Lanino. Other than the portrait of Ropiha, these paintings were among those acquired by Grey in London at Christie's on 13 February 1869 where he purchased thirty-five paintings for a total sum of £259 19s – an income value of £226,500 or NZD526,100 in today's terms – including the Amigonis (lot 21), the Cuyp (lot 45) and the Giovenones (lot 36) <M Kisler, Angels & aristocrats: early European art in New Zealand public collections (Auckland: Godwit, 2010), p. 19f>.

Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881), [Māori artifacts (sic) in Grey's museum on Kawau, about 1871].
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A14074)

Other than the two Korowai cloaks employed as seat covers, the Māori and African artefacts mentioned by Froude are excluded from Mundy's photograph although they do feature in another of Mundy's photographs of the interiors of Mansion House. Gray's most recent biographer, Donald Kerr, suggests that the greater part of Grey's collection of Māori artefacts was exhibited in the entrance hall and in his library <Kerr, Amassing treasures, p. 195>. Ethnographical displays were par for the course amongst more intellectual colonists during the nineteenth century: Anna Petersen reproduces an 1881 photograph of the Rev Dr John Kinder's study at St John's College in Auckland that shows a large collection of Melanesian artefacts mixed up with Indian brass work, stone adzes, specimen of coral and religious prints <A Petersen, New Zealanders at home: a cultural history of domestic interiors, 1814-1914 (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2001), pp. 78-79>. A posthumous photograph of the library of Donald McLean, chief land commissioner during the 1850s and 60s, depicts a similar, if less discriminating, assemblage of Māori artefacts. Petersen suggests that while this interest in indigenous arts represented an interest and involvement in the cultures of its makers it was also an assertion of economic and social power.

Unidentified photographer, [An interior photograph of the library at Sir Donald McLean's home on Napier Terrace, in Napier, Hawkes Bay, about 1890].
MTG Hawkes Bay (m2004/19, 7512 b, Album 39, 78722)

The furniture seen in Mundy's photograph of Grey's drawing room comprises a double half-height open bookcase, an upholstered footstool, two spoon-backed armchairs (covered by the Korowai cloaks), a pair of balloon-backed chairs that appear to be upholstered under the slip cover. Matthews and Grey appear to be seated on spoon-backed easy or parlour chairs that are also concealed by slip covers. A circular library table is covered with a bordered baize cloth and there are three occasional tables of different styles. In the bay window is a piece of furniture with what appears to be a carved gallery. This half-concealed object would appear to be a neo-jacobean davenport, which Froude observed 'had a large Bible on it, from which he read daily prayers to his household.' The davenport – a type of desk first made in the late 1810s – appears to have been fabricated from older components and is currently displayed in the renovated drawing room, presumably on loan from the descendants of Grey's niece. It is a rare example in New Zealand of furniture found in its original nineteenth century location.

It's difficult to accurately attribute a date or place of origin for furniture on the basis of a photograph but in the absence of the originals some tentative attributions may still be made in respect of the more visible pieces. The open bookcase, for example, appears to be of mahogany veneer and is unlikely to be of colonial manufacture. The same might be said for the occasional table positioned against the fireplace; its carved and turned tripod feet suggest a metropolitan, rather than provincial, origin. By contrast, the other two occasional tables and the upholstered footstool seem to fit with Froude's description of 'plain and solid' 'home-made' Kauri furniture: the vertical elements are turned and the supports sawn and chamfered. It seems likely that the furniture is a combination of pieces acquired by Grey subsequent to the incineration of his furniture in 1848 and utilitarian pieces either recently brought from England or made locally; there's little about it that suggests either Grey's gentry background or his former gubernatorial status.

There are four carpets visible in the photographs. Given Grey's social circumstances, they are, in all likelihood, Axminster or Brussels carpets – machine woven carpets from Kidderminster – rather than more exotic pieces. Seventy three Brussels carpets were listed as being installed at Government House in Auckland in an 1841 inventory of furnishings conducted by Felton Mathew. A notice for the sale of the recently assembled contents of the Coromandel gold prospector George Clarkson's Charleville House in Remuera in January 1871 lists eight Brussels carpets. At the time of Grey's return from England, new and carefully selected Brussels carpets were advertised for sale in Auckland by importers such as LD Nathan.

There are a significant number of ceramics adorning the room that include two porcelain garnitures de cheminée – on the bookcase and on the mantelpiece – that appear to be of Chinese manufacture. On the bookshelf the three quadriform inverted baluster-shaped vases are interspersed with what appear to be four brush pots, presumably also of Chinese origin. On the mantelpiece, the five vases are backed by two octagonal plates flanking two obscured objects that might be circular dishes; the mouths of the four flanking vases appear to be stopped by small bulbous bottles, presumably also of porcelain. Any decoration is indistinct. There are five more, large, vases, also apparently of Chinese origin scattered around the room on tables and brackets. Petersen quotes an 1881 visitor observing that all around the room 'was a sort of shelf or ledge, covered with curios of every description, peculiar chinaware, little deities of different metals, Maori curios, etc.' <Petersen, New Zealanders at home, p. 77>. Grey's drawing room was evidently a dynamic space, with pieces being added and, presumably, removed as his collection of things developed. What is evident is that the ceramics are not displayed primarily for the purpose of decoration. Like the paintings and the books, they're there to make a point: this is serious collecting.

Unidentified photographer, Captain [Roderick] Dew and the officers of HMS Encounter ([1862]).
Otto Herschan Getty

It's unclear what prompted Grey's interest in Chinese porcelain but Kerr records that 'while still in New Zealand [in 1865] Grey somehow learnt that a large Chinese enamel vase was being sold for £60 at a private sale organised by some navy agents in Westminster. Described as booty taken by a Captain Dew of the Royal Navy, 'it was a specimen of very curious art' that he was 'very anxious to get' because it would then be the only one in Australasia.'<Kerr, Amassing treasures, p.196>. That Grey was prepared to spend the equivalent income value today of £53,000 (NZD110,000) on an object he had not seen seems remarkable, but as with his books, collecting unseen was a condition of colonial life. In fact, Grey would have been well aware of Roderick Dew's actions as captain of HMS Encounter. Even though subject to criticism, Dew's actions at Ningbo during the millenarian Taiping rebellion against Qing rule in May 1862 were widely reported in the New Zealand press; it was an eerie foretaste of Grey's own position as commander in chief in and over the British colony of New Zealand during the settler-initiated land wars of 1863. From the brief description, it's possible that the vase positioned on the hearth of the unused fireplace may be that acquired from Dew's prize agent.

Detail of the vase located on the hearth in Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881), [Sir George Grey and his niece and adopted daughter
Annie Thorne George in the drawing room, Mansion House, Kawau Island, about 1871].
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A3034)

Grey's collection of Chinese porcelain as depicted in Mundy's photograph seems to have been unique in the colony both for its origin as well as its size – at least twenty-three pieces are visible. While Chinese ceramics were imported privately into the colony, surviving records suggest such material was not abundant; Between 1865 and 1875 there are a mere four auctions listing Chinese vases in Auckland newspapers including the sale in September 1872 of the stock of Japanese and Chinese goods of Mrs Johnstone of Shortland Street. It's unlikely that any of the pieces would have sold for £60.The September 1858 auction of the household furniture and effects of Colonel Robert Wynyard of the 58th Regiment, acting governor after Grey's first term, lists an extensive range of useful and ornamental ceramics, all of which appear to have been of European origin. Moreover, commercial imports of non-British ceramics attracted punitive duties and tariffs which would have deterred all but the most determined – or privileged – collector.

Detail of the garniture de cheminée on the mantlepiece in Daniel Louis Mundy (1826-1881), [Sir George Grey and his niece and adopted daughter
Annie Thorne George in the drawing room, Mansion House, Kawau Island, about 1871].
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (7-A3034)

Grey's friendships in London encompassed notable collectors such as the art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) and, more pertinently in respect of his ceramics, Augustus Wollaston Franks (1826-1897). Franks was keeper of British and medieval antiquities and ethnography at the British Museum and a voracious, knowledgeable and well-connected collector in his own right. He was also a fellow member of the Athenaeum club. Grey seems to have met up with Franks in November 1869 – he probably knew him from earlier visits to London – and during the remainder of his stay encountered him socially at regular intervals. Franks not only introduced Grey to other collectors but would have been well-positioned to advise him both on the paintings he acquired at Christie's and on the purchase of Chinese ceramics; he gave over three thousand examples of Chinese porcelain to the British Museum and his Catalogue of a collection of oriental porcelain and pottery, a documentation of his private collection that formed the basis of the gift (1876), is still highly regarded as an example of meticulous scholarship and exacting research.

Jessica Harrison-Hall opines the timing of Franks' interest in Chinese ceramics 'is significant and coincides with the commencement of long British involvement in East China during the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) and the Second Opium War (1856-60)', and notes that these military actions 'brought a flood of high quality Ming (1348-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) ceramics onto the European art market.' <J Harrison-Hall, 'Oriental pottery and porcelain' in A W Franks: nineteenth century collecting and the British Museum, ed by M Caygill and J Cherry (London: British Museum Press, 1997), 220-229, p. 222>. Like Grey with his 'large vase', Franks is known to have acquired Chinese ceramics directly from military sources but, as Harrison-Hall observes, 'his main mode of collecting was very pedestrian. Literally. He walked along the Strand and shopped for most of his pieces at his London dealers'<Harrison-Hall, p. 225>, which may have been how Grey acquired many of his pieces.

As keeper of ethnography at the British Museum Franks was implicated in Grey's 1854 gift of over a hundred Māori objects and he evidently sought Grey's ethnographic advice during his time in London <D Starzecka, R Neich and M Prendegast, Taonga Māori in the British Museum (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2010), p. 15>. In a note dated 17 May 1870 Franks informs Grey that he 'would be glad of an opportunity of looking at your pear-shaped implement from the Cape if not giving you too much trouble.'<A Franks to Grey, 17 May 1870, Auckland Libraries, GL F30.2>. Grey, in turn, was certainly not averse to taking expert advice and although the surviving correspondence between the two men in the Grey Collection at Auckland Libraries does not reveal if advice was sought from and given by Franks, it does encourage the possibility that it was.

As a collector, Grey's principal focus was on his books and manuscripts. His remarkable collection of paintings came, largely, from a single source. His carpets and furniture and other household goods seem to have been acquired by him primarily for functional purposes. His collection of Chinese ceramics, now dispersed and apparently unrecognised, has hitherto been ignored in assessments of Grey's connoisseurship. However it not only seems to have been acquired in the same pedagogical spirit as his paintings but also, like them, it's entirely possible that it was a collection of a particularly outstanding quality.

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.

Pirates of the South Pacific: a Crown Lynn story

[David Jenkin (1919-2002?), modeller?] for Ambrico Ltd, 'Paris' earthenware bowl, [about 1948]. Based on a British wartime Utility design,
 the bowl was produced using a second-hand press moulding machine imported from England in 1947.

Crown Lynn, the brand name adopted in 1948 by the industrial porcelain (sic) department of the Auckland brick and tile manufacturer Ambrico Ltd has, in recent years, become synonymous with an idea that New Zealanders, when pushed, can turn themselves to producing anything. In this meme Crown Lynn is envisaged as a 'New Zealand icon'; it's a manifestation of a 'number eight wire' mentality; an example of how a plucky New Zealand entrepreneur can build a 'world class' business from scratch, notwithstanding the interference of – usually socialist – governments; and it was compelled to close due to a combination the abolition of the protective tariff and action of bloody-minded unions, unwilling to accept change. More than anything though, it's products are perceived as embodying 'Kiwiana', a term defined by the sociologist Claudia Bell for 'New Zealand locally-produced objects from the post-war period: everyday objects, once prosaic, [which] are now the stuff of wilful nostalgia.' <C Bell, 'Not really beautiful but iconic: New Zealand's Crown Lynn ceramics', Journal of Design History, 25:4 (2012), 414-426, p. 414> It's a compelling myth, all the more so for being a significant distortion of the history of the pottery. It is a carefully confected narrative fostered by the company and, since its demise, by collectors of the factory's wares.

At the beginning of May 2015 Te Toi Uku, the Portage Ceramics Trust, launched a small, entrance-by-appointment 'museum', Te Toi Uku Clayworks, in premises located on land that had previously formed a part of the Ambrico Ltd site. More a display storage facility with a limited on-line access handle than a museum, it's based around a collection formed by the late Richard Quinn (1946-2009) who, following the closure of the pottery in 1989, retrieved a vast array of material from the abandoned works. Although untrained and lacking in any institutional support, Quinn's collecting was of critical significance in terms of a future understanding of when, how and what the factory produced. His work in preserving not only the shards, moulds and other relics of the factory but also its associated documentation was remarkably similar in intent to the actions of the Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences in Sydney in the early 1980s to collect and preserve what was left of the productions of the architectural fittings manufacturer, Wunderlich Ltd, at its Redfern factory.

Opening of Te Toi Uku Clayworks display storage facility in New Lynn, 2 May 2015.
David Cunliffe MP, Facebook

The difference between the two recovery operations is that the Wunderlich rescue was undertaken by trained professionals, received financial assistance from the factory's owner, CSR Building Products,  and was, ultimately, stored under climate-controlled conditions. By contrast Quinn's activities, although condoned by the company owning the closed works, were unfunded, unsystematic and initially at least stored in what was a tin shed. In 1993, the Waitakere City Council employed heavy-handed techniques to exclude Quinn from the site and effectively confiscated his collection on dubious legal grounds. After seven years of legal tussling the council grudgingly paid Quinn $130,000 for the collection that forms the basis of Te Toi Uku.

A selection of Crown Lynn ceramics on display in the New Lynn Library building, May 2015. Lighting is not optimal

Having no dedicated premises in which to either store or display the material, the city council installed a small selection of wares in the newly constructed New Lynn library - in a corridor leading to the public toilets. Following the demise of the Waitakere City Council with the advent of the Auckland unitary council, ownership of the collection was transferred to the Portage Ceramics Trust.

Milton Pottery, Press-moulded earthenware ewer decorated with 'Sailing Boats' transfer prints, [about 1880].
The pottery also made tableware decorated with the English-designed transfer prints.
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (CG001651)

Despite the ready availability of the raw materials, the production of ceramics in New Zealand has always been a risk. Historically, the local market was small and, being far removed from the flow of new patterns and fashions, was deeply conservative in its buying habits. As in most colonial economies, consumers were satisfied by a steady stream of English-made wares entering the country under preferential tariffs. There were attempts to establish a ceramics industry, following a traditional provincial British pattern, which saw brick and tile works expand their production to include 'fancies' such as crudely modelled vases and figures before moving into the production of more sophisticated ornamental and useful wares and, in a few instances, tablewares. The Milton Pottery, which operated in South Otago between 1873 and 1915 seems to have produced transfer-printed tableware from 1877 <G Henry, New Zealand pottery. 2nd ed. (Auckland: Reed, 1999),  p. 35>. While the quality of the wares produced at Milton may have been comparable with the low-end productions of Staffordshire, they were unable to compete in a market that not only favoured British productions but was also rigged by British manufacturers to ensure their continued dominance.

Given that it was not subject to competition from overseas manufacturers, brick making was in most instances a profitable industry: both raw materials and labour were relatively cheap and available and while the majority of the country's domestic building stock was of timber construction there was a growing demand for bricks for commercial buildings. During the 1920s a number of Auckland potteries were consolidated by the Clark family into a single concern the Amalgamated Brick and Pipe Company Ltd (Ambrico) giving them what amounted to a monopoly over brick and pipe production in the Auckland region. The company suffered during the Great Depression with the collapse of the building industry but the election of a Labour party government in 1935 prompted a turnaround in its fortunes. Labour's state housing programme not only launched a massive building spree but it also specified that the 3500 new homes intended to be built annually should be constructed of New Zealand materials. For Ambrico this meant an increase in the production of bricks and pipes and the cash-flow generated by expanded business enabled the company to diversify its output in 1938 into the production of dry-pressed tiles and electrical fittings. Responsibility for the concern was given to Thomas Edwin Clark (1917-2005), the 21 year old son of the managing director.

Ambrico's decision to expand its manufacturing base reflected the intent of legislation introduced into Parliament in 1936 by the new Labour administration. The Industrial Efficiency Act was intended 'to promote the economic welfare of New Zealand by providing for the promotion of new industries in the most economic form and by so regulating the general organisation, development and operation of industries that a greater measure of industrial efficiency will be secured.' Significantly, the Act also enabled government to provide monetary incentives to manufacturers. A further incentive for local manufacture came in 1938 when, due in part to capital flight and a consequent run on New Zealand overseas funds, the government introduced an import licensing scheme that sought to limit excessive imports of commodities whilst encouraging local industry. This remarkable shift in government policy attracted the ire not only of the British manufacturers and government but also local importers and the conservative opposition but it formed a solid foundation for Ambrico's later success.

Amalgamated Brick and Pipe Company, partially vitrified earthenware bowl produced for the United States Joint Purchasing Board
for use by United States service personnel in New Zealand, [about 1942-44].
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (CG002430)

World War I had closed the rarely profitable Milton Pottery; World War II was the making of what became Crown Lynn. New Zealand's reliance on British ceramic manufacturers had significant repercussions when the supply was interrupted not only by the destruction of British plants and the enemy's control of shipping lanes but also by the repurposing of industry. Ornamental 'china' imports dropped from a value of £80,000 in 1938 to a mere £9,000 in 1941. Worse hit were the institutional users of 'hotel ware', the utilitarian tableware used in hotels, schools, the railways and the military. The situation was exacerbated in 1942 with the arrival in New Zealand of elements of the United States armed forces.  In order to deal with this unanticipated demand the National Supply Council, which had been established in 1936, realised that it would have to kick start local production and instructed the Department of Industries and Commerce to locate a suitable concern. In conjunction with the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Clark investigated the availability of suitable clay bodies and began production of crude but serviceable substitutes for the imported wares. Further state assistance came when the concern was declared an Essential Industrial Undertaking, enabling it to obtain labour and essential imported raw materials and to construct a new, semi automated factory.

With a captive, almost competition-free, market and a new, government-subsidised, plant, Ambrico expanded its production to include domestic tablewares, imitating the form, if not the quality of British Utility wares, with their 'reduction of form to a bare ascetic minimum with the total elimination of any colouration', to employ Graham McLaren's evocative description of the type <G McLaren, 'Utility forgot: shaping the future of the British pottery industry 1941-45', in J Attfield, ed. Utility reassessed: the role of ethics in the practice of design (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 157-170, p. 157>. They were not popular with local consumers more comfortable with the gaudier effusions of the British pre-war pottery industry. Moreover there were quality issues with the New Zealand version. Wholesalers complained that Ambrico wares 'had proved so unsatisfactory to handle, that by common consent of all the firm, the Directors and the travellers, we all preferred to do without it.'<G Jackson, in New Zealand Board of Trade, Public tariff inquiry. Tariff items 214 & 215, china ware, etc. Transcript of proceedings (1952). Archives New Zealand, IC/10/ACC W2537>.

Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd, 'Crown Lynn' earthenware plate, [about 1950]. The central transfer print was sourced in England and the delicate painting of the rim was undertaken by staff recruited in Staffordshire.
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (CG002482)

The end of the war saw the gradual dismantling of the restrictions and opportunities of the command economy and the resumption of ceramic imports from Britain. Nonetheless Ambrico was in a strong competitive position. British manufacturers were directing their output primarily to non Sterling bloc economies and import licensing combined with high tariffs on non-British production meant that other overseas manufacturers such as those in Europe and the United States were actively discriminated against by government fiat. Moreover a decision to devalue the New Zealand pound meant Ambrico was in a position to contemplate exporting its wares into the Australian market. In 1947 Clark accompanied by an Ambrico board member Len Stevens (1890-1973) travelled to the United Kingdom where, with the agreement of government, they acquired a number of second-hand machines, observed new patterns and shapes and recruited specialist workers amongst those dissatisfied with the grim conditions prevailing in post-war Britain. The inclusion of Stevens, an Auckland lawyer, chairman of the Dominion Breweries and a key confidant of the construction magnate James Fletcher, suggests Ambrico had been embraced by the Auckland business community.  In what would be recognised today as a blatant instance of intellectual piracy, Ambrico began producing imitations of British lines, more often than not ambiguously branded as being of 'British' origin and with names – such as 'Fancy Fayre', 'Regal Potteries' and 'Crown Lynn' – more redolent of the pot banks of Staffordshire than the industrial periphery of Auckland.

Keith Murray (1892-1981), designer, for  Josiah Wedgwood & Sons Ltd, earthenware vase shape no. 3765 (about 1930).
Shapiro Auctioneers, Sydney

Ernest Shufflebotham (1908-1994) for Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd, earthenware vase (about 1950).
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, The Walter C Cook Decorative Art Collection, gift of Walter Cook, 1992 (CG001939)

Probably the most blatant example of piracy by the newly-formed Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd was its imitation of a series of vases produced by Josiah Wedgwood & Sons Ltd after designs by the architect of its Barlaston premises, Keith Murray. Murray's designs – he was not a potter – were popular amongst New Zealand consumers not least for Murray's tenuous connection with the country (he was born and spent his first fourteen years here) but they were expensive and scarce. Among the fifteen English staff recruited by Clark in 1947 was a former employee of the Wedgwood concern, Ernest Shufflebotham who, on his arrival at New Lynn in 1948 was set to producing imitations of the wares he had thrown and turned in England. Rather than exhibiting the finely-honed quality of the originals, Shufflebotham's reproductions while competently produced were crudely mechanical and dipped in thick white matt glazes that obscured the turned bands. In 1953, in an effort to further expand the company's consumer base, Clark employed a Dutch ceramic designer Frank Carpay to produce a range of modernistic hand painted wares under the self-consciously exotic 'Handwerk' label that captured the spirit if not the quality of some of the Scandinavian and Italian ceramics being imported in small quantities to satisfy a niche market for well-designed products. Clark declared that he was using Carpay's 'fine china' in a 'campaign to educate the public away from imported china of the "pretty rosebud" variety' <'No "museum pieces": new venture in the manufacture of china', New Zealand Manufacturer (15 December 1953), p. 35>.

Paul Champion, Queen Elizabeth II visiting Crown Lynn, 1963.
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries (1055-1)

Crown Lynn's dependence on pirated designs suggests design was a problematic for the company and its management; an unresolved hiatus in the process of making, mediating and consuming the wares it produced. Clark's recruitment of English pottery workers along with the acquisition of relatively new machinery indicates an awareness of the problem. Moreover, Clark was an enthusiastic publicist and, from the start, Crown Lynn was prominently featured in the local press as well as being involved in trade fairs, retail displays and tours by the monarch, politicians and other celebrities. Clark seems to have gauged the local mass market well. By producing wares that imitated those of Staffordshire Crown Lynn responded to a consumer demand that, over decades, had been carefully groomed by import agents and retailers to appreciate the more traditional productions of English manufacturers.

These strategies were reactive and failed to address fundamental problems such as production quality which, compared with imported wares, remained crude. The English-recruited staff were all of relatively low status; craftsmen, not educated professionals. The machinery acquired in 1947 was technologically redundant even before it was installed: a British manufacturer observed that he was:

Staggered by some of the most basic principles employed [at Crown Lynn], which I cannot for the life of me imagine were put-in in 1947. If they had been put-in in 1897, I should have thought it would have been more reasonable [...] I mean some of this things there – take the casting: tub and bucket. Well it is going back to the days of bows and arrows <R Bloore, in New Zealand Board of Trade, Public tariff inquiry. Tariff items 214 & 215, china ware, etc. Transcript of proceedings (1952). Archives New Zealand, IC/10/ACC W2537>.

Worse still, the Labour administration's revaluation of the New Zealand pound in 1948 eliminated what had been a 25 per cent subsidy of the company's exports and the election of a National party administration in 1949 on a promise of ending import licensing seemed set to usher in a collapse of the hard-won domestic market but the company continued to expand. Notwithstanding Clark's claim that labour costs were high 'due to New Zealand's higher standard of living' it transpired that they were half those prevailing in England – largely due to a predominantly female workforce – and  could have been lower had production been more efficient. For its first twenty years Crown Lynn seems to have epitomised that quintessentially colonial mentality of 'cobbling things together on the cheap'.

Sparrow Industrial Pictures Ltd, [Women moulding handles for cups at Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd, (about 1955)].
Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira

By 1956 it was apparent that Crown Lynn was struggling to survive. Following a disastrous fire the company's banker, the British-owned National Bank of New Zealand Ltd instructed Clark to lay off staff: along with tens of production staff, Carpay was 'let go' and Shufflebotham returned to Wedgwood. Production was scaled back to those basic lines that were guaranteed to sell. This gloomy state of affairs seemed set to continue (Clark took to motor racing) when, at the general election of November 1957, a Labour government was returned with a slim majority. The new administration not only advocated an expansion of manufacturing but was also compelled to re-impose import licensing in an attempt to stabilise New Zealand's volatile currency. Moreover, in July 1960, it introduced tariff protection on a number of commodities produced by what were described as 'one-unit' industries; these included Crown Lynn.

Labour's industrial policy ensured Crown Lynn's survival, most notably its strategy of encouraging good design not only in the production of commodities but also in terms of educating retailers and consumers. In its annual report for 1959 the Department of Industries and Commerce asserted that 'In an age when technical skill is of such importance, the function of good design in unifying the qualities of utility, durability, harmony and balance is an important factor in [industrial] development.'<'Report of the Department of Industries and Commerce for the year ending 31 March 1959', AJHR, 4 (1959), H44, p. 19>. This officially-promoted focus on design did more than anything to change not only the appearance of Crown Lynn's products and how they were marketed but also the way the company's management understood that design was more than a concern for appearance but had an impact on every aspect of its activities.

Barry Woods, [Window display by Allan Smith at the Milne & Choyce department store, Palmerston North, about 1963]. Crown Lynn's changed attitude to design during the 1960s extended to controlling its retail image even in provincial New Zealand
Palmerston North City Library

Ambrico/Crown Lynn resorted to design piracy during the late 1940s and 50s because not only was it expedient but also, located at the end of the colonial supply chain, it could get away with it. What might have appeared to be a good business move – getting something for nothing and making a profit on it – in practice turned out to be a disaster. For all its publicity-driven bluster, Crown Lynn management's failure to recognise design as a process concealed a range of critical issues that it consistently failed to address. Its products were derivative, not 'iconic'; it's reliance on 'number eight wire' technology resulted in low production standards; its export 'success' was dependent on a cheap, largely female, labour force, tariff protection and an undervalued currency; its existence and continued survival was brokered on the initiatives of and the support provided by two Labour party administrations. Its heyday during the 1960s and 70s resulted from its adoption of a design led strategy of growth that was predicated on the financial and logistical support of the state.  Crown Lynn Potteries Ltd – renamed Ceramco Ltd in 1974 and the Ceramco Corporation in 1987 – collapsed when the fourth Labour government's attempts to remedy the macroeconomic ills bequeathed by its National party predecessors unleashed the demons of neoliberalism. The production of ceramics was by now a minor part of the Ceramco Corporation's activities and the board, disinterested in the product, unfettered by regulation, devoid of social responsibility and obsessed with the chimera of profit, curtailed investment, asset-stripped the company, laid off staff and in May 1989 finally closed it down.

Dislocating the Powerhouse

Powerhouse Museum, April 1988. The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences' Powerhouse Museum venue shortly after its opening.
Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (00219141)

On 26 November 2014, following months of rumour and speculation, the premier of New South Wales, Mike Baird, announced that Sydney's Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) was to be relocated from its current Ultimo venue, the Powerhouse Museum, to Parramatta, a suburban centre some 23 kilometres west of Sydney's CBD, where it would become part of an 'arts precinct' based around the somewhat grim, architecturally undistinguished, former premises of the King's School, dating from 1834. Baird was quoted as stating that moving the state's museum of design and technology from an inner city locale to a suburban hinterland was ‘an amazing opportunity and I think it shows we need to, think well beyond the CBD of Sydney; we need to spread these opportunities across the city.' The current site of the museum, the listed former Ultimo Power Station will be sold to developers and the proceeds used to part-fund an un-costed move of the museum's collection and a new building.

Old King's School – Parramatta, NSW (2012). Ambrose Hallen's original two-storeyed building of 1834 was significantly modified over the 130 years
it served as a private Anglican boys' school. Following its acquisition in 1968 by the the Askin coalition administration it was
repurposed as the Marsden Rehabilitation Centre for intellectually handicapped children.
Flickr

In the lead-up to the March state election the Baird administration revealed further details of the planned shift and stated that all the funds gained from the sale of the museum site, envisaged in the region of $150-200 million, would be returned to the museum and that it would allocate $10 million 'to develop a business case for the Museum's relocation to ensure it remains the interactive and vibrant place enjoyed by children and families.' The announcement was greeted with enthusiasm by News Corp Australia newspapers with its populist Sydney tabloid the Daily Telegraph enthusing that it was 'Fair go for the West'. A grateful lord mayor of Parramatta declared the move 'visionary' and opined it would 'be a huge boost to local tourism and further cement the City's growing reputation as a major arts and cultural centre'. 

There are a number of reasons behind this proposal, not least the fact that the current conservative coalition state government's majority in the NSW Legislative Assembly was dependent on it winning a number of key western Sydney electorates. But the proposal is more than a cynical 'bread and circuses' move; it's also about the perceived failure of the Powerhouse Museum, a project sponsored by an Australian Labor Party administration that opened in the former Ultimo Power Station in March 1988. In the 27 years since the museum – recently re-branded with its official title – re-opened it has been presided over by five directors (Dr Lindsay Sharp, Terence Measham, Dr Kevin Fewster, Dawn Casey and Rose Hiscock), funding has diminished and visitor numbers have collapsed significantly. In the financial year 1988-1989, the year after it opened, the Powerhouse received state government funding of $24 million ($98 million in 2014 terms) and in the 2013-2013 financial year $28 million, a decrease of around 252%. In 1989-90, its first full year of operation, the Powerhouse attracted 2,112,001 visitors; in the 2013-2014 financial year only 381,582 visitors were recorded. On an annualised basis this represents a drop of some 82% since the museum opened. 

Charles Bayliss (1850-1897), The International Exhibition, from Lady Macquarie's Chair, [1879-1880].
State Library of NSW (SPF/265)

MAAS is one of the two institutional legacies of the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879-1880; the other was the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW). Conceived by the progressive administration of Henry Parkes in late 1878 and opening in September 1879 in the colonial architect James Barnet's  gargantuan wooden Garden Palace located in Sydney's Royal Botanic Garden, the exhibition was undoubtedly the city's single most spectacular event during the nineteenth century. Following its closure seven months later, the trustees of the Australian Museum  – which had been established in 1827 'with the aim of 'collecting many rare and curious specimens of natural history' – agreed to establish a branch museum within the Garden Palace based around a collection formed initially from a selection of the manufactured commodities shown at the exhibition. The institution was known as the Technological, Industrial and Sanitary Museum and its formation mirrored the establishment of similar museums around the world from the London-based Museum of Manufactures, which evolved into the Victoria and Albert and Science Museums (Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations,1851) to Kunstindustrimuseet, now Designmuseum Danmark (Den Nordiske Industri-, Landsbrugs- og Kunstudstilling, 1888). In the first of many setbacks that would befall the museum it was destroyed before it opened to the public when the Garden Palace was consumed in a spectacular conflagration in September 1882.

The Sydney museum finally opened to the public – in the former Agricultural Hall in the Domain – in 1889 before moving in 1893 to a modest purpose-built venue in Ultimo, designed by the architect William Kemp, where it was associated with the Sydney Technical College. The museum's title was contracted to the Technological Museum and its governance transferred from the trustees of the Australian Museum to the Minister of Public Instruction. The museum’s links with the college endowed it with a distinctly pedagogical role not only in respect of technology but also the applied arts. Together with the National Art Gallery of NSW, the museum was a repository for the objects used by graduates of the British National Art Training Scheme (the South Kensington Scheme) in teaching the college’s art and design education programmes.

Star Photo Co, Technological College, Sydney [about 1900]. The Technological Museum occupied the building to the left from 1893 to 1993.

State Library of NSW (PXE 711/252)

Ultimo was not an ideal location for the museum: it was separated from the city centre by the Darling Harbour railway goods yards; the site was physically constrained meaning that the institution was unable to accommodate its growing collections on site; and, unlike its original site in the Botanic Gardens, it was a heavily polluted environment, plagued not only by the smuts and smells of local industry and the goods yard but also those emanating from the Ultimo Power House, which was erected some 500 metres away in 1899 to provide electricity for Sydney's tram network. Despite the dogged efforts of a succession of curators, the museum sank into underfunded obscurity, collecting what it could with scant resources and attempting not only to entertain generations of Sydney school children but also undertake research in those areas in which the museum collected, most notably in the fields of economic botany and chemistry.

NSW Government Printing Office, [Fictile ivory, ceramic and glass displays in the Technological Museum], 1906.
Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MRS 295/4/2)

There were stymied attempts to upgrade the museum in the aftermath of the Great Depression: in 1939 the curator, Arthur Penfold, went on a fact-finding tour of Europe (he was reputedly impressed by recent political developments in Germany); plans were drawn up for a new venue; and the museum's governance was restructured and formalised through The Museum of Technology and Applied Sciences Act 1945, which established a board of trustees to oversee its activities. Collecting became increasingly professionalised in the early 1970s with the appointment of specialist curators in fields such as applied arts, technology and transport and professional educators were recruited to articulate the museum's exhibitions to visiting schoolchildren.  

Deutsches Gesundheits-Museum, Köln, Anatomical model (1950-53). The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences obtained the model from Germany in 1954 ostensibly to further its mission 'to shape model citizens'; the scandal caused by its importation marked one of the few moments of newsworthiness in the museum's pre-Powerhouse history.
Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (H5789)

It was not until April 1978, when Joseph Glascott, an environmental reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald, published a series of in-depth articles  about the museum Sydney had forgotten, that things began to stir. While elected officials on both the political left and right during the 1970s and 80s viewed cultural grands projets as the ultimate political accolade, it was Glascott's revelatory articles that catalysed a remarkable shift in the attitude of the newly-elected Wran ALP administration toward the museum. In the 1977 state budget the museum's annual grant was a mere $770,000 whereas its sister institutions the Australian Museum and the AGNSW received $2.33 million and $1.3 million, respectively. By 1979 the situation was reversed when Neville Wran announced that, in anticipation of the bicentennial of European settlement in Australia, MAAS would move into new premises, a refurbished Ultimo Power House; the project was estimated to cost $35 million, an economic cost value of approximately $450 million in 2015 terms.

Notwithstanding a general perception, museums are more than exhibition venues. They're institutions with very specific remits based around collections, which they form, document, study, conserve, interpret and communicate to the wider public who, in most instances, ‘own’ them. Exhibitions are a vital part of a museum’s communication brief but – particularly in this increasingly virtual world – they’re not a core function. In the case of MAAS its collection was immense, of enormous scope and, in 1978, housed in appalling conditions and significantly under-researched. Quoted in Glascott's articles, the then director, Jack Willis, estimated that the museum's collection might comprise some 650,000 objects. But as many of these had not been seen for generations – much of the collection was stored in a filthy former wool store in Alexandria – and documentation was significantly deficient, this reckoning was more guesswork than established fact.

Museum staff do not spring fully-formed from the ether and, from 1980, the museum was required not only to recruit new staff and establish new professional disciplines, such as registration and conservation, but also to establish a new managerial framework that would react efficiently and effectively to the pressures exerted on the institution by a project of this immense scale. The result was a highly centralised, hierarchical management system, one that rewarded conformity, minimised challenges and sought to mimic the power differentials of the private sector while diluting the influence of those trained in museum disciplines; enthusiasm was stifled under a regime of micro-management and over-zealous bureaucracy.

The south wing of the first iteration of Sydney Hospital (1815) was redeveloped by the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in 1983 to show a small collection of Australian-themed decorative arts and in 1990 as a commercially-driven display of gold and mining. It was transferred to the Historic Houses Trust in 1997.
 J Bar at the English language Wikipedia 

The museum's building, collection and exhibition development programmes during the 1980s were, by any reckoning, extraordinary. The newly-appointed staff not only had to deal with developing and preparing a collection suitable for exhibition in the new facility but they were also tasked with redeveloping a new temporary exhibition space in Ultimo, Stage I (1981), a museum train (1984), which toured the state with a display of 'objects, pictures and ideas', and three historical venues including, in 1982, the former Sydney branch of the Royal Mint  in the south wing of the so-called Rum Hospital (John O'Hearen,1815), in 1984 the  Hyde Park Barracks (Francis Greenway, 1818) and in 1987 the Sydney Observatory (Mortimer Lewis, 1858). These projects all involved significant capital works to their buildings, both to conserve their fabric and to convert them into working museums.

Conversion of the shell of the Ultimo Power House was entrusted to the Government Architect's Branch of the Department of Public Works. Working with museum management, the Government Architect's project architect, Lionel Glendenning, developed a design that, in the fashionable post-modernist language of the time, made passing reference through a barrel-vaulted semi-glazed core to Joseph Paxton's 1851 Crystal Palace. It was an in-joke that had the unfortunate effect of highlighting the design's major problematic: that of responding to the exigencies of the site, flanked as it was by a major arterial road to the west and, on the city-side, a double-track freight railway, as well as being topped and tailed by semi-derelict depots and warehouses. 

Internally, the design struggled to meet the functional requirements of the museum, not only in terms of visitor circulation – a key consideration in the design of such public venues – but also in its provision of spaces for the semi-permanent exhibitions envisaged by the museum’s curatorial staff. In an attempt to overcome these limitations, management employed a number of external design consultants to complement a large team of in-house designers and a project director was brought in to ensure the museum's redevelopment adhered to its politically-driven timetable. Dame Margaret Weston, director of the London Science Museum, was conscripted to review the overall design. As a consequence of this ‘imperial’ intervention the architect Richard Johnson was recruited from the private sector in an attempt to provide visitors with a more seamless experience of the venue but the basic configuration was already established and little could be changed.  

Powerhouse Museum 'Style' exhibition, 1988. External design consultancies were deployed in an attempt to resolve
the venue's spatial deficiencies and to obscure 'gaps' in the museum's collection.
Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences

By the time the Powerhouse opened, Neville Wran was no longer premier and the ceremony was performed by an ALP premier, Barrie Unsworth, on the brink of losing a state election. Notwithstanding the political shenanigans associated with the project, the museum attracted enormous crowds. On the first Saturday some 36,000 visitors squeezed through the doors to inspect 25 semi-permanent thematic exhibitions that spanned the range of the museum's collection, showing objects that ranged from a steam-driven 1784 Boulton & Watt horizontal beam engine and a Consolidated PBY Catalina flying boat to Sèvres vases shown at the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition and Ettore Sottsass’ 1981 post-modern ‘Carlton’ room divider produced under the Italian Memphis brand. 

The exhibitions were broadly integrated around an overall theme of creativity and design. Moreover, in an effort to address the venue's chaotic internal plan and to deal with the hiatuses that had emerged once the museum's collection had been re-housed and more accurately documented and assessed (there had been many misattributions), project management decided to use exhibition design as the primary way of organising the space. Prioritising the design of exhibitions over their content saw the curatorial voice diminished, form dominate substance and interpretation subsumed to entertainment.

To some observers, the new displays evinced a lack of both a critical dimension and a coherent intellectual framework. As the Deakin University academics, Wade Chambers and Rachel Faggetter observed 'The rhetoric that accompanied the museum's opening led the serious visitor to expect a full delineation of the nature and role of creativity, design, invention and innovation in the Australian context.' but, they commented, 'success in this undertaking has so far proved elusive'. <W Chambers and R Faggetter, 'Australia's museum powerhouse', Technology and Culture, 33:3 (1992), 548-559, p. 552>. Assessing the design-focussed exhibitions, Tony Fry argued that the museum aimed merely at being a provincial simulacrum of the London-based Science and Design Museums and New York's Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Discussing the museum's exhibitions he noted that: 'These conventionalist approaches create and induct Australian design history into the great men, great object, great stories syndrome, which not only obscures a more accurate history but also lays foundations for study in fictions and a cultural cringe fall-out.' <T Fry, Design history Australia (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1988), p. 42>. In a very real sense it was these intellectual deficiencies, this subscription to a fictional sense of Australia's material cultural history, which defined the renewed museum. Nonetheless, the visiting public evidently enjoyed the museum; it attracted over a million visitors in its first six months and garnered an impressive range of tourist awards. Scholarly recognition remained elusive.

'Kings, queens and soup tureens', a loan exhibition of 18th century objects from the Campbell Museum collection installed at the Hyde Park Barracks in 1990. Prioritising exhibition design over content resulted in an out of scale, assertively kitsch display that
distorted the historical narrative of the space and overwhelmed the objects

In the aftermath of the museum's re-opening, it became increasingly evident that the political energy channelled to develop the museum's new venues was a double-edged sword. A newly-elected Coalition administration, perceiving the museum as a creature of the former administration, sought to rein in what it judged to be political folly and extravagance. Rather than addressing the institutional deficiencies revealed by the project, consolidating the museum's achievements and developing strategic links with adjacent tertiary education institutions, management reacted to these political and ideological critiques by focussing on the museum as a brand and by developing strategies and implementing policies that, in the fashionable management jargon of the period, were responsive rather than pro-active. Rather than being collection-focussed in its activities the museum began to be seen by the public as a venue for highly-priced, externally-generated commercial exhibitions such as 'Audrey Hepburn, the woman, the style' and 'Star Wars: the magic of myth'. These interactive, often child-focussed, revenue generators had the unfortunate side effect of detracting from other, less well-promoted, exhibitions.

Design – in a travesty of its meaning as a process of production, mediation and consumption – became the museum's defining quality. In a somewhat simplistic reading of the process by the institution's management, design came increasingly to be understood as branding, as a sort of aestheticising; in truth it was, more ominously, a strategically-placed fig leaf for the gradual corporatisation of the museum’s culture. Under its guise the museum was radically de-intellectualised, allowing it to be perceived by dominant power formations as a site of mass culture, a distraction, and a counterbalance to the elitist preoccupations of, for example, the AGNSW or the National Trust of Australia (NSW branch).

Left: Emery Vincent (designers), Powerhouse Museum logo (1988). Centre: Unidentified designers, Powerhouse Museum logo (2000). Right Boccalatte (designers), Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences logo (2014)

As with many of the museums created on the cusp of the neo-liberal political ascendancy, the museum had argued that its success lay in the politically dangerous metric of visitor numbers. The new conservative Coalition state government, seeing visitor numbers as a potential income stream, immediately imposed an entrance charge of $5.00 (now $15.00); perhaps not enough to deter tourists and enthusiasts but more than enough to alienate casual visitors. The state government then began stripping the museum of its off-campus venues. The Hyde Park Barracks, which had ill-advisedly been used as a prestigiously-located temporary exhibition venue, was transferred to the more appropriate custodianship of the Historic Houses Trust of NSW, which had been formed in 1980 specifically to manage government-owned historic properties. Then, following an abortive attempt to transform it from under-visited museum of Australian decorative arts into a fully commercial gold and coining enterprise, the Mint followed suit. In an attempt to broaden its appeal, the museum re-purposed its Castle Hill store as a display storage facility known as the Powerhouse Discovery Centre in 2007. While its allure seems limited – it attracted 18,367 visitors in 2103-2014 – the museum has, in collaboration with the Australian Museum and Sydney Living Museums (the former HHT), decided to expand the facility. It's unclear what the impact of the move west will have on this development. 

Factors other than political and managerial were involved in the museum's perceived decline. From well before the start of the Powerhouse project to the present there have been calls for the museum's collection to be split. In an April 1978 letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, Leo Schofield, then a Sydney ‘tribal elder and gad about town’, argued that 'the time has clearly come to house and display the museum's science and decorative arts collections separately. Members of the public interested in steam engines, models of sailing ships and transparent plastic women are unlikely to be galvanised by a display of eighteenth century porcelain'<'Our dowdy technological museum', Sydney Morning Herald (24 April 1978), p.4>. Proponents of the split resurfaced in 2010 when the then director, Dawn Casey, dismantled ‘Inspired!’ a four year-old, semi-permanent decorative arts display. Responding to this perceived attack, Schofield again emerged on the letters page of the Herald arguing that ‘bit by bit, the applied and decorative arts are being de-emphasised and the program of exhibitions dumbed down’. Similar statements have been made more recently, albeit in not quite so condescending a manner.

It's an appealing conceit. Unlike many of its transport, technology and scientific exhibitions in the Powerhouse, the semi-permanent decorative arts and design exhibitions have proven more fugitive. Moving the decorative arts and design collections into a discrete space – preferably in the ‘cultural circuit’ around the Sydney Domain – while leaving the interactive geewhizzery, the machines and engines, the ‘popular stuff’, for the youthful masses would certainly make things far simpler for those proposing glamorous touring or collection-based exhibitions in keeping with the idea of a museum replicating, in a minor, provincial, way, the sophistry of the far better endowed V&A and Cooper Hewitt museums. This line of reasoning is both perniciously classist and fundamentally ahistorical, undermining MAAS’s abiding rationale as one of the world’s few museums of industrialisation – a veritable museum of manufactures – and leaving it open to the sort of disintegrative solution implied in the proposal to relocate the institution far from its roots.

The Baird administration has, for the wrong reasons, recognised that MAAS – one of the concealed glories of Sydney – is a problematic. It's located in a place that seems to operate against its foundation. Nor does it tie in comfortably to the nearby Darling Harbour public space with the Sydney Aquarium and the National Maritime Museum despite the pragmatic efforts of various directors to reorientate the museum's entrance so that it opens directly onto Darling Harbour. Outside the cultural circuit formed by the AGNSW, the Australian Museum and the various urban venues of Sydney Living Museums, it struggles to attract visitors, particularly tourists, anecdotally many of whom are unaware of its existence; in 2013-2014 only 11% of its surveyed visitors identified as being from overseas. The statistics are even more grim for the Museum's western outreach, the Powerhouse Discovery Centre where zero overseas visitors are recorded and only a statistically insignificant 2% are from outside Sydney.

For some twenty-five years the museum has struggled to demonstrate a sense of institutional coherence in terms of what it does, what its collection is about, what its audience is and how it communicates its mission and purpose. It is not unique in having to address the meta-question of what museums mean in an increasingly digitised age. Are they about education or entertainment; what are their audiences; do physical collections really matter; and are they a public resource available to all or a source of revenue and profit? In announcing the move Baird argued that the museum's relocation would ensure that it remained 'the interactive and vibrant place enjoyed by children and families'. It seems that the NSW government has formed a view that MAAS is pre-eminently a place of entertainment with a primary audience that is both domestic and young, rather than a place of education, knowledge and learning. This stance stands in marked contrast to the state government’s approach to the AGNSW, which not only remains in its Domain location but is currently contemplating yet another $450 million extension. Despite calls by western Sydney lobbyists for the AGNSW and the Australian Museum to follow MAAS west to the demographic centre of Sydney these have been rejected by the state government.

Screenshot of MAAS's webpage in April 2015 with a photograph of the repainted and rebranded Powerhouse Museum building. 

In July 2013 the MAAS trustees moved to address the museum's seemingly intractable systemic difficulties by appointing a new director and management team. The director, Rose Hiscock, has a background in strategic marketing and this seems to have informed many of her decisions including the somewhat prescient one of rebranding the museum by reverting to its official title and downgrading the Powerhouse Museum brand to venue status. Somewhat ingenuously declaring her overarching vision for the institution 'to be the world's leading museum of science and design' she asserted this could be realised through themes such as '"curiosity" for science and "creativity" for applied art', a – perhaps unwitting – reiteration of the generic themes of design and creativity that had informed the Powerhouse Museum's first exhibitions. As Hiscock recognises, the Powerhouse Museum is now located in 'a dynamic and rapidly changing educational and cultural precinct', making it possible for the museum to 'more effectively engage with the business, entertainment and residential life of these new communities.' Evidently this recognition of the museum's changing locale has not been sufficient to sway the NSW government from its purpose. Moreover, despite Hiscock's enthusiastic spin, fundamental problems remain: the collection is far from 'world class' and its acquisition budget is risible; a radically reduced expert staff has impacted on its ability to deliver the sort of exhibition and research programmes commonly associated with world-class museums; and the museum's political environment is, once again, distinctly uncertain.

Museums – certainly museums of art, design and technology – are urban phenomena. To function effectively they require the synergies only found in urban environments: a ready flow of visitors to attend exhibitions and freely access the collections and their attendant resources; good transport links; informed, committed and focussed staff; effective direction; and a commitment from all stakeholders involved in their governance. Setting aside the logistical nightmare involved in relocating a collection of some half a million objects, this proposed move will not resolve the dilemmas the museum currently faces, to the contrary. Relocating a museum developed in an urban context over 136 years to the cultural periphery of the Sydney metropolis, where transport links are limited and visitors are few, and unlikely to increase even with a relocated MAAS, would seem to be antithetical to ensuring its successful future. While Parramatta may be closer to the demographical centre of Sydney, it has neither the infrastructure nor the mass of population and potential connectivity required to support a cultural institution of the museum’s national and international significance. Neo-liberal governments, espousing the language of the corporate sector, are fond of identifying opportunities and this proposal would seem to embrace another corporate stratagem: risk. This proposed move may well turn out to be an, inadequately assessed, risk too far.


Thanks to John Wade for his comments and suggestions on a draft of this post. All opinions and errors are mine.