“Our approach to modernism was through new forms of structure,” architect John Griffiths once told me. “We didn’t succumb to modernist clichés, and we never pursued the modernist aesthetic for its own sake. Doug Angus would never design a round window just because the client asked for one.”

St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Morrinsville was built in 1964 to a design by Hamilton architects Angus and Flood (later to become Angus, Flood and Griffiths). I met John Griffiths perhaps half a dozen times as part of a research project. The last time I spoke with him was in March 2014. By the end of
that month, St Joseph’s Church had been demolished, and by May of that year, John had passed away.

Once rumours spread that demolition was imminent, the church leaders refused to comment to the media on the fate of the building or on what it might be replaced with. The 2-metre-high chain link fence that went up around the church in March 2014 confirmed everyone’s fears. Nobody protested at the church’s demolition; nobody chained themselves to iron railings. There was a resigned acceptance that the outcome was inevitable.

The real tragedy, though, is that through the reluctance of the church to acknowledge the building’s importance and have it recorded or assessed, there is very little evidence it existed at all. St Joseph’s was unpublished in architectural magazines and doesn’t appear in any surveys of New Zealand architecture. When the building was demolished, it disappeared from all view.

St Joseph’s was impressive. My son called it the upside-down bathtub – an accurate, if not very flattering, description. The building’s shape was derived from its structure: huge parabolic ribs of steel-reinforced concrete, which supported a concrete outer skin. Unlike medieval churches where buttressing was thrown outward, this church’s structural support was expressed internally. Expressed too much, it would later turn out. To occupy the church was to inhabit the cavernous interior of an enormous whale. The structure contained nine pairs of concrete ribs in all. They commenced at the flat wall facing the
street and moved towards the curved wall at the front of the church, where they culminated in a keystone placed 12 metres above the alter. The masterful engineer was Thomas Flood, a former Fulbright Scholar.

Newspapers at the time called St Joseph’s ‘striking’ and ‘unusual’. The concrete ribs that supported the outer shell stopped short about 3 metres above the ground. From there, the buttressing, true to its Gothic inspiration, flew free then anchored to the ground. Despite the ribs’ weighty proportions,
people feared they would snap in an earthquake.

The congregation, for the most part, disliked the building. It failed terribly to provide suitable acoustic performance, thermal comfort or weather tightness. However, it was its radical structural form that led eventually to its demise; the building couldn’t meet modern earthquake expectations. The external appearance of St Joseph’s Church was similar to a traditional Samoan fale. If you wanted to, you could argue that this was an early Pacific approach to ecclesiastic architecture, but you would be wrong. Doug Angus designed St Joseph’s as a strictly modern church. He was a modern architect in the same way that Rita Angus, his sister, was a modern painter. They were both more interested in their personal artistic identities than finding a national style or subscribing to one. “We were supposed to be in awe of The Group Architects,” John told me, but I had the distinct impression that he and his practice really weren’t.

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