From Heritage New Zealand, Winter 2010

by Noel O'Hare

Some of Wellington’s most significant heritage buildings have been given new roles to play in housing the city’s creative arts

Few out-of-towners travelling past the National War Memorial and Carillon on Buckle Street will be aware that they are also passing one of Wellington’s most significant buildings, the former National Art Gallery and Dominion Museum. Unlike the Auckland War Memorial Museum with its sweeping vistas across the Domain, the building nestles behind trees, its grandeur muted.

Situated on the crest of Mount Cook the former museum, now occupied by Massey University’s College of Creative Arts, was once a notable landmark in the city.

In early photographs it overlooks the city like a latter-day Acropolis. Indeed, on its opening day, 1 August 1936, the Dominion journalist got carried away by the analogy. Conceding that while “Wellington’s Acropolis” was no “milk-white miracle of beauty”, he hoped that “its quiet dignity, its balance and its magnitude will be by day one of the sites and inspirations of Wellington; will tell something of what we achieved in the first hundred years of our life.  In some sense we hope it personifies, or will come to personify, a new civilisation at its best, just as the Acropolis personifies the spirit that was Greece”.

Vain hope. Sixty years later “Wellington’s Acropolis” had been abandoned and fallen into disrepair. In 1996 the museum closed its doors to the public and its treasures were transferred to its glitzy downtown replacement, Te Papa. Developers eyed its prime location with interest. Among the proposals floated for its re-use were conversion to a casino and a refit as upmarket apartments.

Fortunately, the site’s long history helped save it from commercial desecration. At the time of the New Zealand Wars in the mid-19th century the site had been occupied by the military. In the 1880s it was decided to replace the military barracks with a new prison. However, before the building could be completed, public opinion had turned so strongly against the use of such a prestigious site for a prison that it was never finished.

The land had been a traditional pa site. After the Parihaka land rebellion, imprisoned Taranaki Maori laboured on the site on their way to jail in Otago.

It was this strong Maori connection that played a part in the Wellington Tenths Trust decision to buy the Buckle Street site from the Crown in 1997. The Wellington Tenths Trust owns land and property on behalf of the mana whenua of Wellington and Hutt Valley and descendants of Taranaki tribes.

At the same time, in the Wellington Polytechnic immediately behind the museum, events were unfolding that would determine the future of the building. Throughout the 1990s the polytechnic had been edging closer and closer to a merger with either Victoria or Massey University. In 1999, the decision went Massey’s way.

A priority was to rehouse the School of Design, New Zealand’s oldest and most distinguished, established in 1886. As part of the Wellington Polytechnic, and closely associated with Victoria University, it operated in several locations around the city. Taking over the old National Art Gallery seemed an obvious choice; Massey University bought a half share in the land and buildings from the Tenths Trust and agreed to lease the rest. “To refurbish it and make it earthquake-proof was not going to be cheap and it wasn’t,” recalls Professor Tony Parker, Massey’s Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor. “It was in pretty poor condition.”

The $30 million refurbishment, a joint venture between Massey University and the Tenths Trust, was not without incident. Tony recalls turning up to work one day to see numerous fire engines outside and students milling around. The fire sprinklers had been set off and the building was flooded. “I went upstairs. The sprinklers were no longer firing water but they obviously had been because it was raining in the inside of the building. It was unbelievable.” The contractors who put in the sprinkler system had failed to liaise with the air-conditioning company and one of the boiler units had been installed right next to a sprinkler.

“In the early summer when it was warm nothing happened but as soon as it cooled down the computer system switched on the heating and the sprinkler system was activated,” says Tony. “Carpet had to be ripped up and the whole area refurbished again.”

The building might not have the majesty of its Auckland cousin but it is a major part of the city’s heritage and its refurbishment is money well spent.  Many Wellingtonians remember it fondly. For generations of parents the museum was a godsend on wet Sundays in the era before video games and multichannel TV. It was one of the few Wellington buildings that could be guaranteed to silence a fractious child.

As a visitor in 1936 put it: “The massive steps and the stone balustrades are so imposing that the most irreverent caller is impressed and consequently enters the portals in the right frame of mind, almost in spite of himself”.

The heavy revolving door, a novelty in itself, led to a space as grand as the exterior. In the entrance foyer, a stuffed, moth-eaten lion stood guard, the fur on its head and neck almost worn away with patting by generations of children.

Ahead lay the Maori Hall with its massive war canoe, store houses and Te Hau ki Turanga, the most contentious meeting house in Maoridom. In other rooms all the wonders of the natural world had been trapped, stuffed and mounted. As someone wrote, the National Museum was “the nation’s repository of all that crept and crawled and swam and flew”. No visit was complete without a look at the Egyptian mummy.

The museum was largely the achievement of the energetic Dr James Hector, a government scientist who in 1865 became director of the Colonial Museum housed in a wooden building behind Parliament. The building was supposed to be temporary but survived until 1936; preserving the past was not a priority in a young country still finding its identity.

After years of wrangling and bureaucratic delay, a plan was approved and a competition launched for the design of a new museum. Gummer and Ford, the Auckland architects who had designed the Auckland Railway Station, won the competition with a stripped classical-beaux art design, a style that became fashionable in Nazi Germany. It was, coincidentally, the war with the Nazis that was later to put a damper on the development of the museum. During World War II the building was requisitioned for defence and closed to the public for seven years. The military seemed to have little respect for the new building; more than 200 windows were broken and the mess they left behind meant the museum and art gallery did not reopen until 1949.

In 1987 the building was deemed to have outlived its usefulness. The new Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa was constructed on Wellington’s waterfront and in 1996 the National Art Gallery and Dominion Museum once again closed its doors to the public, this time for good.

Walking through the building now, it no longer feels like a dull and dated ex-museum but a place secure in its importance and historical  significance. The revolving door is still there, a fibreglass replica of the original. The Maori Hall is now the Great Hall, a vast awe-inspiring space filled with natural light from the restored windows that had previously been boarded up. Elegant new art deco staircases with stained glass panels entice visitors to the upper levels. There are lifts in the east and west sides where none existed before, but their installation has been so subtly and sympathetically done that they appear to be original features. Likewise great care has been taken to conceal the new air-conditioning and fire systems.

The upper levels that once were gallery spaces now house the College of Creative Arts studios. It is here that students learn and create... fashion, textiles, spatial design, graphics, typography, photography... the arts that could underpin a new creative economy. A building at the rear, which once housed the library of James Hector, is devoted to product and interior design.

“About 1700 students visit the [former museum] building and about half, say 900, spend a lot of their time here,” says Tony. “The building adds gravitas to a college that is fairly new,” says Sally Morgan, Pro Vice-Chancellor. “You can see the effect on the students. They’re impressed, slightly in awe and glad to be part of it.”

It also gives the college a ready-made Wellington profile. “I love the sense of place you get in this building,” says Sally. “It gives the university a really cool identity in Wellington, given that people think of Massey as being a Palmerston North set-up. That we’re in such a distinctive building was a really good move on the part of the Vice-Chancellor at that time.”

Tony is intrigued by the way things seem to have come full circle. “Going back a long time when this would have been a new and vibrant museum, art and design tertiary students would have been expected to come here to draw, observe and study.” He says the building works well for today’s students, providing many opportunities for the cross-pollination of ideas.

In term time a café for students and staff operates in the Great Hall. “Students sit around in groups. It’s a nice space where they can communicate.” When the university holds its annual BLOW Creative Arts Festival, the building, with its large exhibition spaces, really comes into its own, says Tony. “The festival often has attached to it important dinners for dignitaries, celebrations with alumni and public lectures. This is a good building for that.”

The old museum has a new life but retains its role as a city landmark and its links with past use. “A lot of it has to do with its physical fabric and the way that is used,” says Alison Dangerfield, NZHPT Architecture Heritage Advisor. “It’s desirable to recognise in the interior space the activities that have happened for a long time. Ideally, we would like buildings to continue in their same use but we recognise that over time sometimes that’s not possible. The important thing is that they can be used so they can be maintained and sustained into the future. The danger is that when they fall out of use they are not maintained.”

That danger seemed all too real for another historic building, Our Lady of the Star of the Sea convent chapel in the Wellington suburb of  Seatoun. The site has a rich history, both Maori and European. The area was occupied by Maori for centuries before the arrival of Europeans in the 1890s.

The Sisters of Mercy came to Seatoun in 1909 and set up a preparatory school for boys. The chapel with its striking stained glass windows overlooking the sea was built in 1922, the work of renowned architect Frederick de Jersey Clere who designed Wellington’s St Mary of the Angels church and several other notable city buildings.

In 1976 the school closed and the property was converted into the Stella Maris conference centre. However, in 2002 the Wellington City Council required that the buildings be earthquake strengthened. Unable to meet the estimated $900,000 cost of carrying out such work, the nuns had little option but to close the centre. In 2008 the sisters applied to have the property deregistered as a heritage site. Rumour had it that the buildings and chapel would be demolished to make way for a 50-townhouse development valued at up to $10 million.

Local residents protested vigorously although concern for the loss of the chapel seemed to be mixed with anxiety about the potential traffic bottlenecks that would be caused by the housing development. To everyone’s relief, in 2008 local residents Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh stepped in and bought the property. “Our aim is to preserve the chapel and the school building in their current setting. At this stage the goal is to strengthen the chapel and use the surrounding buildings for low-key work such as film editing and computer effects.” Restoration work has yet to begin.

With costs to restore large historic buildings so high, preservation is far from certain. What if the merger between Massey and the Wellington Polytechnic had not taken place at such a fortuitous time? What if Seatoun’s chapel on the hill had not had neighbours with such deep pockets? Wellingtonians can count themselves lucky.