Variations On A Town Hall

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31111, 14 July 1966, Page 8

Variations On A Town Hall

Don’t shoot die architects—they are dancing to your tune. And most of them dance in a similar pattern as you may see for yourself if you read the drawings on view in the Durham Street Art Gallery. Fifty-eight architects, plus their consulting engineers, services consultants, acoustics specialists and quantity surveyors, devoted their talents to solutions of the Town Hall and Civic Centre problem. It is an attractive problem for any architect and to provide an acceptable design carries with it a measure of prestige, the prize-money and an impressive professional fee. They must have given of their best In this complex of functions, to achieve a satisfactory plan and formal relationship is manifestly difficult Although each area—concert chamber, council chamber,

etc.—may be capable of an ideal solution, each must be drawn into an impressive unity at once personal yet having significance for the community. Where some of the entries came close to success this was evident in confident presentations clearly descriptive of each synthesis. Some appeared to to be limned by very junior draughtsmen. Most designs fall conveniently into the acceptable categories of Robin Boyd, in “The Australian Ugliness." A design not wholly mediocre is featurist work with a gimmick to distract us. There is, for example, an unidentified flying object quite unrelated to its more static associates. New Zealand still awaits its Nervi.

Then there is a segmented dome to intrigue the airborne, but which offers to the earthbound majority only a peek at its pious apex feature. The sweeping curved

roof of another entry sweeps too far over the developed curve of its plan to threaten the neighbouring “Star” office. And if a design lacks a first stage feature its hopes are pinned on novelty in the tower block placed monotonously, on the north-west corner of the site. Entries by space-enclosure technicians (c.f. Robin Boyd) are few, but one cool glazed box by Lawry and Sellers could be exciting architecture for a city that has nothing to hide. The perspective drawing in this entry does not convey the monumental scale its authors surely intended. WINNING DESIGN The artist-architects display an understanding of the problem and produce syntheses innocent of strain and pretentiousness. The winning design is apparently simple, yet with its near-classical plan it has a free association

of forms given unity more because they toe the axis line and because the surface pattern is consistent than because of any formal idom. A squint at the model from a calculated pedestrian eyelevel reveals a skyline much in conformity with the familiar one of urban Christchurch. However, it is goodmannered, decently reticent, clean cut and from good stock—very much as Christchurch itself would like to be. In contrast the bold design from Sydney by Newland and Ding is confident in the handling of large elements in a dynamic composition set on a rhomboid plan. It is as if the international set had come to town. The site has induced most designers to give an introspective character to their plans, that is, looking back to the Square and Centre: the river becomes part moat to what are now castles in the air. What a pity they could not have leapt the stream. The alternative solution lies at hand in the Provincial Council Buildings. Beaven, in his submission, employs this very well to provide intimate court enclosures as well as spacious areas to show off a most successful formal complex having a recognisable Christchurch flavour. Moreover, if Warren and Mahoney have reiterated the urban skyline, Beaven has his eyes on the mountains—that roof! Two results of this competition other than its primary one have been to demonstrate how few architects could rise to its challenge and to increase the public concern for good architecture. —FLAGPOLE.