Book review: Rewi | Architecture Now

Rewi, the brand new e book on the architect Rewi Thompson (Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Porou; 1953–2016), edited by Jeremy Hansen and Jade Kake, demonstrates that an vital contribution to structure just isn’t essentially evidenced by a big physique of great buildings recognised by way of awards and publications. It may also be a legacy of conceptual shifts in pondering that result in a change in observe and/or the fostering of a brand new era of practitioners in design and training. Rewi reveals this impression by way of biography, interviews, drawings and artistic responses.

Since Thompson didn’t depart many buildings or writings, an account of him as a practitioner as a substitute emerges by way of a sequence of interviews with round 30 purchasers, colleagues and college students, in addition to his daughter, Lucy Thompson.

The interviews comply with a free chronological construction that tracks his observe’s evolution: houses, multi-unit housing, civic and public realms, well being and correctional amenities, training buildings, exhibitions, and speculative and unbuilt tasks.

Thompson is regularly described as a humble, hard-working and gifted particular person of excessive private integrity who valued and nurtured his private {and professional} relationships and located inspiration in te ao Māori (the Māori world/world view) and the whenua (land). Key tasks are referenced throughout the interviews: Thompson’s own residence in Kohimārama, the Wishart Home in Hokianga, and the unsuccessful bid, with Frank Gehry and Ian Athfield, for the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa fee (what we actually missed out on was an epic ‘Rewi constructing’, not a ‘Gehry constructing’).

Thompson was clearly a gifted architect who may have adopted a trajectory to ‘hero architect’ standing, however pulled again. Some interviewees talk about the impression of the 1987 inventory market crash, private loss and sickness on Thompson’s profession. Nonetheless, others establish the discharge of the 1988 Mason Report as a turning level for Thompson who, as a advisor architect, embedded tikanga Māori into the design of healthcare and correctional amenities, permitting them to develop into locations of whānau assist, therapeutic and reconnection with the panorama.

In 2002, he was appointed to an adjunct place on the College of Auckland Faculty of Structure and Planning, which was lately renamed ‘Te Pare’ after Thompson’s instructional philosophy. Any dismay that Thompson was not capable of full extra constructed work is offset, by the top of the e book, with the realisation that his genius has straight influenced the lives of a whole bunch (if not 1000’s) of constructing customers, purchasers, college students, practitioners and lecturers.

Rewi additionally showcases his prodigious drawing expertise, publishing many drawings that at the moment are within the College of Auckland Structure Archive. There’s a extremely advanced working methodology at play, significantly (as famous in some interviews) a capability to traverse essentially the most tough second of designing: turning an summary idea right into a buildable entity. The e book doesn’t fully unpack what this course of was or the way it developed; that might in all probability require a selected research of the archive.

A recurring query in Rewi is whether or not or not Thompson noticed himself as a ‘Māori architect’; he actively distanced himself from this definition earlier in his profession. Within the late twentieth century, self-identifying may need additionally been very professionally confining, as alluded to within the e book. In his interview, good friend and colleague Mike Barns offers essentially the most candid account of Thompson’s taha Māori (Māori id), noting that “we’re all at our personal place on our Māori journey”. Historical past bestows these designations on people, nevertheless, and historical past will keep in mind Thompson as a Māori architect inside an ever-evolving story of structure made by Māori.

The ultimate sections of the e book are gems. In a single, enigmatic drawings present in Thompson’s archive inside a folder labelled ‘KOHA’ have been despatched by the editors to the writers Samuel Te Kani and Gina Cole, and to the poet essa could ranapiri, “to inhabit Rewi’s worlds and report again in writing”. The outcomes are stunning. Thompson’s personal explanations of his design philosophy as revealed within the journal New Zealand Architect and the e book Now See Hear! are reprinted in one other part.

The e book closes with 65 pages of chosen sketches: a wealthy visible portfolio from which we will draw our personal conclusions. It is a becoming finish to an inspiring e book about an vital architect with a narrative that’s instructed in an imaginative means.