There is something inherently melancholic about a derelict building.
Left standing, the structure becomes a testament to past occupation, and obscured by absence our imagination works to inhabit the space, our minds taking ownership as we hypothesise on what the building was, and visualise what it could be. While there is a romance in this, sadness permeates the very fabric of abandoned buildings – a sorrow only remedied by human occupation.
You don’t see many abandoned buildings in Kohimarama. Homes in this part of Auckland have a subtext: restricted area, significant wealth required. This makes the Thompson House all the more fascinating. Designed by the late Rewi Thompson and completed in 1988, the building piques interest at the very first glance. I discovered the building, which was almost entirely obscured by trees, in 2014, piecing together its form through a series of short glimpses as though looking through a flick book. The materiality of the building was fascinating, the simple plywood exterior so unusual in the Eastern Bays, and so impermanent. Could it be concrete formwork masquerading as timber? Shrouded by nature, the place was unknowable, and the nature of its habitation was also indecipherable.
Several years later, in 2018, the Thompson House was listed for sale, and a revelation occurred. The trees that had so engulfed the house were finally tamed, revealing an utterly distinctive ziggurat-like form. It was exciting to discover something so different in an area of relatively conformist architecture.
The house sits close to the street front: assertive, an undeniable presence. The foundations are cut into the sloping terrain, with concrete block retaining walls left raw and visible. The glass frontage of the ground level connects to a heavy steel roller door, an ambiguous combination that makes the building’s function hard to read. Is it commercial or residential? Steel framework highlighted in earthy red paint forms a division, above which the distinctive plywood-clad walls climb two levels without any hint of delineation.
Aside from the glass wall which reveals a floating staircase and little else, there are no windows on the street-front façade. This leaves a visitor with the distinct impression that the house has turned its back on its neighbours, quite disinterested in the local gossip it must have fuelled back in 1988 when it challenged the very notion of what a suburban dwelling should look like.
A windowless façade is often confronting, that is not to say offensive, but again our imaginations will seek to fill in the gaps. Could we have imagined the interior of Tadao Ando’s Azuma House (Osaka, 1976), another provocative house designed by an architect for himself? Living in that house, a concrete rectangle with an open inner courtyard, entails a daily commute through the elements on the journey from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom and back.
This is design as a challenge to experience nature. What was Rewi Thompson’s intention for his house? Thompson was one of the few indigenous New Zealand architects practising through the 1980s and 1990s. Guided by a different understanding of the world, Thompson brought an entirely new approach to the practice of architecture in New Zealand. The Thompson House, a fearless and individualist design, became one of its architect’s most renowned works. Drawing on his cultural heritage, Thompson developed a progressive architectural ideology; he was attuned to regenerative design before the concept was even articulated. To quote from an obituary for Thompson by Professor Deidre Brown: “Good architecture could, in Rewi’s words, improve the land through responding to its rhythms, forms, scale, stories and needs.” [1]
Thompson strongly believed architecture was about the land and its people, and he advocated for a reciprocal rather than exploitative relationship with both. We are, after all, custodians of the land, not parasites. In a profile of his work in the Block series of architectural itineraries, Thompson stated “Sustainability is not just about buildings; it’s all about people issues as well... If you look at the old papakāinga developments, that was a whole system of family support – from identity, closeness to resources, strategy, safety, and so on. There has to be an appreciation of what that means longer term – in terms of education, health, cultural focus, recreation, and so on. It’s complex.” [2]
