Architect John Scott was determined to develop an indigenous architecture.
He achieved much more.
John
Scott.
Architect John Scott's professional life was
unconventional, his unorthodox approach to architectural education and
practice often cited as the basis for his brilliance as
a designer. He was born in 1924 at Haumoana in the Hawkes Bay, and was
of Taranaki, Te Arawa and British heritage. He enrolled at the Auckland
University College School of Architecture in 1946, after training in the
Air Force in the last year of World War II. Before that he worked for
a short time as a shepherd. While he found inspiration and mentorship
in the company of staff such as Vernon Brown and Bill Wilson, university
life did not suit him, and he left the school a few papers short of completing
his diploma, eventually finding short-term employment with R. Pickmere
Architect, Structural Developments and the highly innovative Group Architects.
Hankering for the nurturing environment and intellectual freedoms of small-town
life, he returned to Haumoana in 1953 with his expanding family and started
his own practice.
Interior
of Our Lady of LOurdes, Havelock North.
Photo: Craig Martin
From the beginning, private residences dominated his work,
punctuated by some exceptional public commissions. The
architectural historian Russell Walden describes two early projects, the
Savage and the Falls houses (Havelock North 1952-3), as examples of a
nascent design philosophy that drew on the whare (Maori house) and woolshed
as vernacular design precedents.
From these concept generators come the hallmarks of Scott's residential
designs: porches, strong roof lines, “honest” materials, such
as exposed timber and unpainted concrete, and carefully placed glazing.
Chapel
of Futuna, Karori, Wellington.
Photo: Craig Martin
In a 1991 interview about the house he designed for his daughter, Ema,
and her husband on the family landholding, Scott explained that his convention
of arranging major sections of the house around the main entrance was
derived from the pare (door lintel) of a meeting house. In Maori architecture,
the pare is a ritual transition marker between the inside and outside
that also sets up a division of function down the house. The pare's carved
female form, usually Hinenuitepo - a deity who is the gatekeeper to the
realms of life and death - held a special significance for Scott, who
regarded entrances as important places of welcome and departure.
St
Canice, Westport.
Photo: Craig Martin
An early public triumph was St John's Chapel in Hastings (1954-6), which
attracted the offer of the project for which he is best remembered, the
Chapel of Futuna, Karori,Wellington (1958-61).Walden has described it
as a fusion of Maori and Christian architecture. Its ribbed rafters, central
“heart” column and low eaves are reminiscent of the anthropomorphic
structure of a Maori meeting house, while its overall form was clearly
influenced by Le Corbusier's celebrated Notre Dame du Haut, completed
in 1955 in Ronchamp, France.
Artist Jim Allen designed Futuna's stained-glass windows,
which are also reminiscent of those in Notre Dame du Haut and Henri Matisse's
1951 decoration of the Dominican Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, near,
Nice. Futuna's Maori references not only locate the building here, in
Polynesia, but also recall the Pacific Island of Futuna on which the missionary
Peter Chanel, to whom the project is dedicated, was martyred in 1841.
Futuna Chapel, as it is widely known, is generally regarded as one of
New Zealand's finest buildings, winning the New Zealand Institute of Architects
gold medal in 1968 and its 25-year Award in 1986.
The success of Futuna led to a number of other church commissions, each
of which developed forms and concepts from earlier projects.
For Our Lady of Lourdes, built in Havelock North in 1959, Scott extruded
their ends, and drawing up a tall pyramidal spire. As in Futuna, stained
glass is used to great effect, casting a kaleidoscope of colours and shadows
across the interior walls. At St Joseph the Worker, in Turangi, completed
in 1965, a different technique was applied to the gables, which were stepped
rather than angled back, with a matching stepped design used on the façade.These
patterns are most likely based on the poutama stitching design of tukutuku
(Maori lattice wall panels) that, suitably for a church building,
describe the ascent to heaven and enlightenment.
More dramatic stepped elements are a feature of St Canice, in Westport,
as they fan across the site and upward into the sky. While most of Scott's
formalism relied on geometric shapes, such as boxes and diagonals, in
St Mary's, Greenmeadows
(1975), he experiments with curvilinear koru planned forms, and in many
ways returns to the organic shapes of Notre Dame du Haut that he had chosen
to straighten up in Futuna Chapel. Thus, Scott's religious work comes
full circle, the fluidity of this final religious project expressing a
confidence of experience in church design and Catholicism, the religion
in which he was raised.
Craig Martin, who has researched Scott's work for a tribute
website (www.johnscott.net.nz), typifies these projects by claiming that
each was based on an essential form investigated through a process of
dissection and rearrangement: Futuna, a cube quartered and rearranged;
Our Lady of Lourdes, a collision of triangles; St Joseph's, a series of
ascending and descending boxes; St Canice, a spread-out fan; and St Mary's,
a segmented curve.
Other notable public projects include the Maori Battalion
Memorial Centre in Palmerston North (1958-63 and the Aniwaniwa Visitor
Centre and cabins (1974-6, 1984) in the
Urewera National Park, both projects exhibiting a controversial use of
art.
The Maori Battalion Centre featured Maori wood carvings on
its modernist façade.While these embellishments undermined the
anti-decorative principles of modernism, their inclusion could be interpreted
as an architectural expression of the Maori primitivism being pioneered
at the same time by Maori artists such as Arnold Wilson, Paratene Matchitt,
Cliff Whiting and Fred Graham. Colin McCahon's now infamous 1976 "Urewera
Mural” was commissioned for the Aniwaniwa Vistor Centre at Scott'ssuggestion.The
painting was subject to stinging critical attacks in the 1990s for its
appropriation of Maori words and concepts, and was stolen, as a political
protest, in 1997, only to be returned 15 months later.
Read in the context of their time, these architectural projects could
be described as having a bicultural purpose, in their precedents, conceptual
development and realisation, that fitted with a philosophy pioneered by
Scott and his artistic contemporaries that Maori and Pakeha cultures could
be brought together through art and design.
An acknowledgement of the Maori sense of community and communal living,
as represented by the marae and hui concepts, is apparent in the multi-purpose
living spaces in a number of Scott's designs. At the Ngamatea homestead,
completed in Hawke's Bay in 1981, the kitchen is a central entry and gathering
point.
Such functions are apparent in marae dining halls that are
often informal meeting places for locals and more formal spaces for the
breaking of bread with visitors. The kitchen table, and not the living
room, is also the main gathering space for Maori in family homes. Double
underfelt was laid on the mezzanine level, overlooking Ngamatea's kitchen,
so that extra guests in sleeping bags could find comfort here, marae-style.
It has been said that Scott's intention for the Urewera National Park
cabins was that visitors would sleep on mattresses as if in a meeting
house. He also considered Futuna Chapel to be the meeting house for its
neighbouring Marist Brothers Retreat House, which he conceived of as being
the marae of the complex.
Despite the influence of Maori concepts in his work, Scott appears to
have believed that the indigenous presence in New Zealand architecture
was largely absent and that Maori themselves had abandoned those design
solutions that were
specifically suited to their culture and environment. In 1989,
he told North and South magazine,“Maori have taken on these
things that have come from the most powerful influence, the
majority of people.There might be inflections that come out
of our background or landscape. But, if there is anything
distinctly New Zealand in world terms, I haven't seen it yet.”
From the 1970s, other cultural ideas also began to inform
Scott's work. In 1969, he had visited Japan, on a Winston
Churchill Fellowship, where he became interested in local
construction techniques and details, as can be seen in the
houses he designed on his return.
The Martin house (1971) at Bridge Pa, near Hastings, illustrates three
of these principles, with the use of post and
beam construction, the inclusion of covered walkways between function-specific
buildings and the provision of
negative detailing, where connecting or corner elements are
overlapped or rebated to cast a shadow over their join.
The ecological and aesthetic relationship between the natural and built
environments was another important aspect in Scott's work. His buildings
gently sat upon the landscape, their forms following the undulations of
hillsides or the flow of open space through bush. For example, the covered
walkway of the Waitangi Visitors Centre (1981) snakes through the
bush, guiding tourists to the centre and its remarkable gable roof, which
appears to float at the same level as the top of the bush canopy.The Ngamatea
homestead demonstrates another landform response, through the unification
of interconnecting spaces under one great roof line, which cloaks the
complex from the elements and follows the line of the tussock-covered
ridge on which it sits.
Respect for the environment is also evident in the Urewera Park cabins,
which appear less like permanent constructions and more like tents with
open door flaps through their use of hipped pyramidal roofs and simple
post-on-beam porches. Inside the small open-plan spaces, cabinetry rather
than walls efficiently provides the divisions between eating, cooking
and
sleeping functions, the expressed roof structure and inclusion of large
windows and ranch sliders emphasising the greater purpose of camping in
the bush.
Site histories could also act as inspiration. Scott's Pattison house
(1967) in Hawke's Bay, described by the architectural historians Douglas
Lloyd Jenkins and Bill McKay as one of the country's greatest 20th-century
homes, referenced local seismic activity in the slips and shears designed
into the house's plan and sections.
Aside from representing the ecological and geological histories
of the landscape, Scott wanted his buildings to be sympathetic to their
wider community. For him, a building was much more than a manifestation
of a client's wish list of desires. A building with a community role had
to respond to the needs of its users, who may not necessarily share the
same values as
the client. Furthermore, he also remarked on a number of
occasions that clients were only initial occupants, and that the
architect had a responsibility to create a building that would suit the
needs of subsequent owners and to make it compatible with its surroundings
for the enjoyment of the public.
The stories of Scott's professional methods are now part of architectural
folklore. He had an instinctive process of working that relied on his
trust in his clients and builders. Sometimes, only concept designs, illustrating
the intent and general layout of a building, were provided on paper, and
occasionally paper bags, or as verbal descriptions to the site
workers. Fred Graham, the sculptor, said of him, “He was a
brilliant brain. Trouble was, once he'd solved your problem in his head,
it was hell to persuade him to get the answer on paper.”
Another anecdote, collected by the writer Amanda Sye, has Scott ‘sketching
plans in the dirt - plans that were then covered with a sheet of corrugated
iron to preserve them during the building process’.
John Scott died in Auckland in 1992, his body returned to his beloved
Haumoana. His significant contribution to architecture was recognised
with the award of a posthumous gold medal by the Institute of Architects
in 1999. His most lasting legacy,
for the group of architects who were his colleagues and have since passed
on his knowledge to a new generation, was the search for a local vernacular
that could inform contemporary design. When asked about the significance
of the whare and woolshed in his work, Scott spoke of their simple-design
response to community needs, and summarised his own design philosophy
with the words: “Any building only becomes important when it complements
its purpose, lifts the person on to another plane, or complements that
person's purpose, or the purpose of this group of people. It only becomes
architecture when it does this sort of thing.”
Sources consulted for this article include:
Hunt, John “Ngamatea unexpected and special”, Architecture New
Zealand, Nov/Dec 1992.
Grover, Scott, “Of Woolshed, Houses and People”, Islands, Spring
1973.
Hayward, Jeff, “Houses: they’'re an art form”, North and
South, March 1989.
Lloyd-Jenkins, Douglas and Bill McKay, “50 Hottest Homes of the Century”,
Home and Entertaining.
“It was hell getting him to put it on paper”, Mana, Autumn 1997.
Mane-Wheoki, Jonathan, “Work of Maori Architects adds to our Heritage”,
Historic Places, December 1990.
Martin, Craig, “John Scott: Architect”, 2003-5, www.johnscott.net.nz.
Shanahan, Mary, “Whanau Forte”, Home and Building, Feb/March
1991.
“Give me Shelter Ngamatea”, Home and Building, Aug/Sept 1991.
“John Scott Architect of the Land”, Architecture New Zealand,
Mar/April 1988.
Shaw, Peter, “A Shared Aesthetic”, Home and Entertaining, Dec/Jan
2004.
Sye, Amanda, “Cabin Fever”, Home and Entertaining, Feb/March
2003.
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