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From issue: Spring 2004

The Importance of Being Ernst

By Gregory O'Brien

Architect Ernst Plischke's New Zealand work is being honoured in his own country and with an exhibition here.

Ernst Plishcke

You can imagine the furrow on the brow of émigré architect Ernst Plischke in 1953, when he set to designing and overseeing the construction of the Sutch House in the Wellington suburb of Brooklyn.The dwelling was to be sited only a short distance up the hill from Plischke's own house, so he was going to have to live with his creation, perhaps moreso than if he had been living inside it.

Plischke's largest and most radical house design in this country, the Sutch House might be described as a piece of architectural idealism rather than pragmatism. Architect Alistair Luke (who worked on the recent award-winning refurbishment of the building) points out that Plischke was fixated on the concept and the beauty of the detailing, rather than the ability of the construction to survive Wellington conditions. The first building firm enlisted for the project walked off the job, claiming they could not cope with the architect's obsessiveness.

Sutch House, Brooklyn, Wellington. Photo: Paul McCredie

Argued about in the news media, the house was hailed in print by the painter Peter McIntyre, then derided as elitist on the Dominion correspondence pages. It continues to be the subject of passionate debate among architects.

The Sutch House is one of the handful of iconic residences in New Zealand. It epitomises modernist design and the Austrian "Neues Bauen" (New Construction) movement, of which Plischke had been a part in the 1930s."I consider the aim to be to achieve a synthesis of the conception of space and sculptural quality," he wrote in 1969. "Each of these two components must be evolved out of the function and the construction of a building." The Sutch House is indisputably a high note in the career of a remarkable architect.

Born in Vienna in 1903, Ernst Plischke arrived here as a refugee from Nazism in 1939, accompanied by his Jewish wife, Anna. He had studied with Peter Behrens and subsequently garnered a substantial reputation in his home country.The going was never going to be easy for a man whose nationality was listed by New Zealand authorities as German, and who was, by all accounts, obstinate and, as the Sutch House demonstrates, uncompromising.

Plischke was never able to register as an architect in this country because he refused to sit the Royal Institute of British Architects examinations.Working in partnership with registered architects Cedric Firth and later Bob Fantl enabled him to get around this impediment.

Shortly after his arrival in Wellington, Plischke began working for the Department of Housing Construction and contributed to projects such as the Kupe Sreet multi-unit development in Orakei, Auckland (1939-41), and the Dixon Street Flats,Wellington (1940- 42). Outside office hours, he designed private houses, notably the Frankl House in Christchurch (his first commission in New Zealand) and the Kahn House (1940-41) in Ngaio,Wellington.

Until his return to Vienna in 1963 to take up a chair in architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts, he worked feverishly on many housing projects, town-planning concepts - notably a town square for Naenae (1943-47), though his design was severely compromised in the execution - and larger scale projects, including the glass-curtained Massey House (1951-57) on Lambton Quay, which was Wellington's first modern skyscraper. Among the community halls and churches he designed are St Martin's (1953-6) in Christchurch and the remarkable St Mary's in Taihape (1951-2).

Since Plischke's death in 1992, his reputation has continued to grow in Austria.Of his early European designs, the Attersee House (1933) is now a house-museum, and an Employment Office in Vienna (1931) is upheld as a landmark modernist public building (during the Nazi regime the building was deemed "Bolshevik" in design and boarded up).

Last year the German publisher Prestel produced a 400-page monograph on his work (an English-language version is released this September).The book lists 211 major projects. Half date from his time in New Zealand.

"Plischke had all the strengths of a European background, a depth of culture and a knowledge of architectural history," says architect Bill Toomath, who met him in the late 1940s at the Architecture Centre. "He was steeped in European culture and it never left him." The question of Plischke's influence on New Zealand architecture is cause for some speculation. A lecturer, educationalist and, architecturally speaking, an evangelist, Plischke was also an eloquent writer and in 1947 published Design and Living, which promulgated a holistic approach to architecture, bringing furniture design, interior design, neighbourhood- and town-planning into the discussion.

While Plischke did not, as Toomarh notes, prioritise indigenous aspects of architecture, he was aware of cultural concerns and, in 1940, designed a state house for Maori which incorporated a large kitchen/living area. "Like a whare whanau it would open at one end into a deep, covered porch," Janet Paul observed."At that time state houses had a small functional kitchen, closed off from a minimal space for meals, and another for sitting."

Prime Minister Peter Fraser decided against Plischke's proposed concept, maintaining that a differentiated design might suggest that Maori were being offered second-rate dwellings.

"During and after the war, modernism came to New Zealand from many directions,"Toomath recalls, stressing that Plischke was only one of a number of émigré architects. Local practitioners and students had been avidly following the advances of modernism through books and magazines since the 1930s."Most architects in New Zealand were concerned with aligning modernism with the indigenous - something Plischke was not particularly interested in."

Arguably, then, Ernst Plischke's buildings might best be described as remarkable "European" buildings sited in the Antipodes. Not only are they a part of the modernist legacy in New Zealand architecture, they are a monument to a singleminded and very particular genius.

ERNST PLISCHKE, by Eva B. Ottillinger and August Sarnitz, Prestel (Germany), rrp approx. $130.
ERNST PLISCHKE - ARCHITECT, City Gallery, Wellington, 5 September-28 November 2004.