Vale: John Haydn, Archangel | Architecture Now

Rising up on Auckland’s North Shore within the Fifties, he was surrounded by his mother and father’ artistic circle of artists, writers, musicians and designers. His mom Molly Macalister was a sculptor and his father George Haydn co-founded the development agency Haydn & Rollett.

After graduating from Elam Faculty of Advantageous Arts within the Seventies, John established a small lighting design and manufacturing enterprise, working from a house studio in Gray Lynn.

By 1986, his ideas have been turning to structure. When Briar Inexperienced, a future colleague, met him that 12 months at his studio, she remembers him declaring that ‘architects are the perfect designers’. He entered the College of Auckland Faculty of Structure two years later.

In 1992, John acquired a fee, with Chris Adams, to revamp the Auckland Artwork Gallery café. The venture was timed to coincide with ‘The 50’s Present’, an exhibition of Fifties’ New Zealand artwork and design curated by Alexa Johnston, and featured spun, anodised aluminium lights, with faux-rock benches on the terrace.

Shortly afterwards, pals Jane Waldegrave and Nigel Mark-Brown requested John to design their home in Westmere. He accomplished the drawings in 1993, additionally instructing drawing and design on the Faculty of Structure. The next 12 months, with building of the home underway, he teamed up with buddy and fellow-architect Malcolm Cheadle to design a brand new home, for Crimson Sizzling Chilli Peppers bassist Flea, dubbed the ‘Cuttlefish’ home.

That 12 months, he moved his follow to Archangels Architects Collective in Richmond Highway, Ponsonby, becoming a member of Stanish and Inexperienced, Chris Fox and Rick Pearson. He revamped the workplace and engineered an architectural tour of Los Angeles with Nick Stanish, Rick and David Mitchell. Nick’s Californian structure lecture notes supplied the inspiration and the itinerary. The journey indulged John’s love of post-war Americana – automobiles, music and design – and located architectural expression within the Lautnerian dynamism of the Cuttlefish home.

Though he idealised the free-wheeling expansiveness of Lautner, John’s architectural philosophy was extra aligned with the socialist-leaning, modestly scaled output of the Group, et al. His design course of was grounded in artwork follow and assemblage, with a proper method paying homage to Kazuo Shinohara and different Japanese architects within the Nineteen Eighties. Like Shinohara’s 1981 ‘Home Below Excessive-tension Energy Traces’, the define of the Mark-Brown/Waldegrave home actually traces the planning envelope.

In 1995, Alison Jones commissioned John to design her home in Westmere. The shape is an extended wedge, hugging the jap boundary. Coming into from the southern nook, a ramped hallway ground sweeps all the way down to the north, following the contour, whereas the roof tilts up. The translucent jap wall, clad with fibreglass, gently curves in plan and twists inwards because it grows in peak, to satisfy the straight fringe of the roof, conjuring poetry from strict adherence to the daylight recession airplane.

Blunt, formal expression belies interiors which can be intricate, sensitively deliberate, spatially acute, and finely attuned to their inhabitants. The compact type of the Mark-Brown/Waldegrave home enfolds a generosity of area that defies its tiny footprint, unfurling a pleasant sun-filled L-shaped residing space round a courtyard backyard and spiralling upwards by means of a double-height glazed void to an attic bed room. On the Jones’ home, following that sweeping vista from the entry, the spatial expertise turns into progressively granular, traversing a sequence of intertwined and intimate areas that open north and west into the backyard.

Lots of the fine-grained inside parts – joinery, cabinetry and furnishings – in John’s work resulted from his shut collaboration with good buddy Paul Cox, whose mathematical thoughts and Shaker sensibility performed an enormous half within the design and realisation of the initiatives.

With the Cuttlefish home below building, the Jones home on the board, and some alterations in progress, John launched into a three way partnership, with a realtor and the parish priest at St Joseph’s, to develop a block of 4 flats on a nook web site in Gray Lynn. Roberta Johnson, a latest architectural graduate, joined the follow, to help with the venture. At this zenith of dedication and stress, John bought a gold 1959 Buick, realising a lifelong obsession and occasioning many web site visits and different jaunts.

There have been a number of competitors entries. In 1998, a staff from the workplace, with Judy Cockeram, received a spot within the Gallipoli Peace Park competitors. John travelled to Turkey to just accept the prize. Every week later, he burst into workplace and, with a dramatic flourish, lobbed a wad of US {dollars} onto the assembly desk. He had smuggled the prize cash by means of customs in his coat pockets.

By the tip of the ’90s, with one other pair of homes accomplished, John departed Archangels for a 12 months in Rome and London. After returning to New Zealand within the early 2000s, he took on a task as exhibitions supervisor at Auckland Museum. After two years there, John returned briefly to follow at Archangels, and his broader involvement in structure continued by means of instructing, as a visiting critic on the College of Auckland and Auckland College of Know-how (AUT), and as a commentator and provocateur.

In 2012, he joined neighborhood motion in opposition to state housing redevelopment in Glen Innes and commenced documenting the protests, removals and relocation of some homes to a Papakāinga housing growth in Northland. He subsequently returned to review, gaining a Grasp of Visible Arts in pictures at Unitec. The Glen Innes venture fashioned the idea of his graduate exhibition. On this, as in every little thing he did, he was passionately dedicated.

That the 2 homes mentioned listed here are nonetheless lived in, and beloved, by their unique house owners is a testomony to John’s ability as an architect and his attentiveness to the issues that matter. He was brave and by no means shied away from the uncomfortable and troublesome path to structure. If architects are the perfect designers, the perfect structure, he believed, ought to by no means be simple.

Jane Waldegrave credit John with inspiring her to turn out to be an architect. He impressed us all, as a colleague, a combatant, a trainer, a buddy.