Design Review: Volume 1, Issue 2 (July 1948)

Te Aro Re-Planned — A Study in Teamwork

Te Aro Re-Planned
A Study in Teamwork

What sort of people?

What sort of people?

Last summer sixty architectural and town-planning students gave up part of their vacation to re-plan the heart of Wellington. They analyzed its land usage and its traffic lines. They considered where it would be sunny and quiet for the people to live, where it would be convenient and safe for them to shop, where it would be most pleasant for them to stroll, go to the pictures and catch the homeward bus.

The result of 12 weeks slogging but most enjoyable work was the Te Aro Plan, which, visualized in popular wall charts and models, was put on show and pulled in 20,000 visitors. The summer school was the biggest thing the Architectural Centre has ever done, and the exhibition was the most popular show the Wellington Library has ever put on. Why was this? What facts were demonstrated and what hopes were fired?

In the first place, to take the achievement on its most negative level, the Te Aro Plan indicated a line of escape from the impasse in which Wellington finds itself. That some of the older cities of the world should choke themselves by too great a concentration of activity in a purely accidental centre we take for granted. But it seems absurd that completely new aggregations of humanity such as Auckland and Wellington should go the same way to frustration and paralysis.

The great cliché uttered by every visitor to New York is that it is a marvellous place for a holiday but that he couldn't bear to live in it. And the perfect platitude for Wellington is that it looks as magnificent from its hills as it is mean and pinched in its streets and the placing of its

A safer, quicker, healthier, more beautiful city is also economical. Photo: Brian Brake

A safer, quicker, healthier, more beautiful city is also economical. Photo: Brian Brake

public buildings. Suprema a situ—yes. Its physical situation between the green hills and that majestic sheet of water is beautiful indeed, but the situation in which the capital finds itself is getting on for desperate.

Wellington is a city in which a large proportion of the inhabitants live in acute discomfort because they are crowded into buildings never intended to hold them. It has no shopping ‘centre’; its shops are strung out in a long straggling line from the beginning of Lambton Quay to the end of Courtenay Place. The middle of this line is a bottle-neck chasm in which traffic movement is reduced to a crawl, and dangerous at that.

The city has no moment of grandeur, for the seats of Law, Government, Art and Religion are all stumbled upon without preparation, and at no point does the city take cognisance of its incomparable waterfront. Wellington cannot spread out in some new district and there re-create itself. There is no room for expansion. If the city is to be saved as a working and living unit, it must be saved at the centre. It must be rebuilt where it stands now.

That was the meaning of this exhibition, which proved up to the hilt that it can be done. The Te Aro Plan of the architectural students offered certain clearly envisaged solutions. Shops are grouped round courts with wide pavements but no traffic. Another district is set aside for light industry, each factory block having its own road access apart from the main traffic arteries. The offices of commerce and government have a third area to themselves. The waterfront is opened up with gardens, through which hotels and cinemas are reached, and behind them are the bus stations.

On the fringe of all this, dotting the slopes of Wellington's girdle of hills, stand blocks of flats, freely disposed in open parkland—the only form of housing which should be tolerated in the heart of a modern city.

The question is not whether this kind of city will work, but whether the kind we have now will work much longer. The test of a city, as of a philosophy or a political system is this—what kind of people does it tend to produce? The Te Aro project is based, not on what makes a pretty plan, nor even on what public opinion is thought to want, but on what people really need for their own full, free functioning. Its aim is to chart the direction in which development must go if we are to have less exasperated, less lonely, less tired, less tubercular, less injured people, and more men, women and children living in close community but with their full share of privacy, not flurried by traffic nor shut off from sun and air, able to work and play and walk upright in a city where beauty constantly meets the eye.

That encouraging remark of La Corbusier's comes to mind: “What gives our dreams their daring is that they can be realized.”

—H. W.