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Mainstreet '64

A. Goodfellow

We may not be affluent as the world measures affluence, but to us SuperMac's slogan has the ring of genuine coin. Thanks to forces beyond our control, and such arcana as revolving and continuous credit the majority are enjoying the use if not the actual ownership, of the Good Things of Life. All the graphs are sloping up and "smirk along With Keith" is the odds-on favourite for the next campaign.

While the floodwaters of prosperity pour over us, leaving the beaches and gutters laden with yesterday's goodies, the architectural fans join the rest of the gang in scouting the tide-line for mementoes of the occasion. Specialists in the portable artifacts of the culture of customer appeal and planned obsolescence are sure of finds if they persevere, whether it be the object itself, the package or just the announcement. If the bulk of the stuff sampled is pretty nasty, the proportion of items worth popping into the collection is high enough to keep hope alive, if anaemic. But turning to those biggest most costly and longest lasting of products, the multi-story buildings on the main drag, we are offered a starvation diet. Those whose hobby is the appreciation of buildings are remarkable in this part of the town by their glazed eyes and ulcerated tongues. The diagnosis is scurvy for there is enough bulk in the diet but no vitamins. Only by turning back to the assured vulgarity of Edwardian Baroque and the stylistic swipings of the Victorians is the vital spark kept going.

Nearly all these latter-day offerings have their moments, parts, sometimes quite substantial chunks, that achieve the combination of qualities which makes the viewer cheer. Sometimes the graph paper facades can pick up the sun and chuck it around on aluminium, glass and polished stone to produce a really exciting show. Or at night the pattern of late workers and cleansing operatives yields an unexpected ideogram on the darkened screen. But these are grace notes and cannot cancel the debt run up during the rest of the week when the special effects man is off duty and we are too pressed for time to be able to pick our viewpoint.

With one honourable exception in Christchurch, there is no big job in any of our central business districts which one can say with confidence will grow' old gracefully and hold a place in our affections. Rarity and novelty may temporarily buttress a few and for want of rivals they may hang on for a time. But the sort of fluffs that have been made are of the type that continually cry aloud and age does not wither their powers of irritation.

Once architecture was called the handmaiden of the arts, but today it is quite clearly the housemaid of commerce and is expected to wear the livery. But to wear uniform with aplomb requires practice, and this is the very thing that is lacking. The modern architect is required to employ and to co-ordinate a wider range of techniques than any other professional, and the investing client quite naturally and properly wants the lot bought to bear on his job. Freely translated as "Commercial buildings are machines for yielding dividends" Corbusier's mot of the twenties goes slap into the bulls-eye of the sixties. As the generic name indicates such buildings have always had the profit motive behind them. The shift in emphasis is in the mechanics.

Compare an office building of 1908 with one of 1938: they are patently of the same family. The youngster may be clean shaven, but still a chip off the old block. Turn to the recent chunks of commercial enterprise and take a gander at the machinery backstage as well as at what you are meant to see: the first impression of family resemblance takes a knock. Whatever the accuracy of the computations, the intention to calculate the effect of every penny spent is clear (including the return on the inhabitants' wages). "Controlled environments for optimum output" is the battle cry and "what can't be measured can't be justified" is the thesis.

Gone is that council of despair, the light well, together with those curiously ungainly metal windows and ever misplaced light fittings (an unholy alliance which marked the twenties and thirties as the nadir of man's struggle for light and air). Today's model provides windows for sunlight and view as and only if required, over head stretches the bland surface of the suspended ceiling system, which bathes the occupants in fresh air, light and musak in the prescribed quantities and discreetly mops up the overflow from confidential conversations. Behind this geometrical surface writhe and twist a mass of high and low voltage wires, fresh and foul air ducts, water pipes at all temperatures and assorted bits of structure. Up top the mechanical and electrical engineers hold court behind an artful architectural screen and can render the whole job uninhabitable with the puff of a blown fuse. Keeping pace with all this the walls aren't walls any more but environmental barriers with carefully adjusted acoustical, thermal and maintenance characteristics.

All this has happened in the last thirty years, most of it since the war but based on developments and experience during the war together with an awareness of the coming crisis in building which victory would reveal. In New Zealand there was scarcely time for a slump-stunned population or nervous business community to realise that business-as-usual was possible before this war was on top of them. The generation which served in the forces seems to have included an undue proportion of the young men who were about to become architects and so the financial catastrophe at the beginning of the Second Machine Age was compounded and this country lost the first 20 years of experience in the new techniques and the training that should have evolved with it.

Only in the last 10 years has the city-suited pastoralist surrounded with the products of affluence, gained sufficient confidence to invest on main street. Deprived of experience, designers have been caught off balance by the displays of technical wizardry expected of them and the consequent explosion of their spheres of responsibility. That the profession is aware of this situation is shown by the spate of reports and surveys of office organisation carried in the journals.

For similar reasons the building industry struggles, barely successfully to cope with the new era but for both designer and builder their best efforts are frequently vitiated by the high mobility of their staff. In the ladder climbing game the fun is fast and furious and everyone is playing his qualifications to the limit, if not a bit beyond. The result is a critical undersupply of the skilled doers of dirty work: craftsmanship, like thrift, would appear to be a virtue of necessity. Thus the planners and executants of the country's biggest industry have hardly left the go-line as the years of our boomlet run on, and out.

But this Jeremiad is aimed at the multi-storey work in main street, elsewhere there are rich, though scattered, pickings: a steadily growing body of houses, flats, factories and medium size commercial jobs together with some big industrial stuff which is the genuine, unadulterated oil. Here the honours are not restricted to private practitioners, for, despite the ghastly bequest of the Housing Division, the authorities still rate an Oscar through the services of the Hydro Design Office. Ohakuri gets full marks for a big job boldly handled, keeping the situation under control from the heroic plumbing of the penstocks, through the heavy industry of the turbine hall and on down the scale without a falter to the administrative offices and their furniture.

But it looks like being a long time yet before the enthusiasts are going to have a ball in the centre of the city. Whatever efforts the designers make the results are scarcely likely to score a home run while the six-figure clients fail to demand more than built balance sheets. If you ask for marble cake, it is not surprising if that is what you get.