2. The Maori in Contemporary Building Art

Te Ao Hou, September 1959, Page 36

With something like reckless abandon the building of New Zealand homes, shops and offices have borrowed liberally from every nation, adapting and adopting a bit here and a bit there in the belief that building in this way is expressive of one of our most vaunted national characteristics—individuality. Perhaps, after all, it is—and perhaps our national style of building at one time really was a sort of architectural cross-word puzzle. That this is less likely to be so today than say 20 or 30 years ago, is due largely to there having arisen a new generation of architects who are prepared to take their interest seriously as an art. And as an art, architecture is a combination of the art of living, and the art of compromise. For when all is said and done, part of the raw materials with which an architect must work is the customer—the people whom he has to see in terms of being housed in his structure, and who, moreover, must be able to see themselves in that way, in that place. 2. The Maori in Contemporary Building Art