1.
In the world of architecture, there is something to be said about a home. Physically, it tends to be spaces and surfaces and spaces divided by surfaces. Spiritually, it is something else altogether. The space within and without. Stor(e)y’s moulded into the shapes that frame us. Architecture is home and home is architecture.
2.
The light will get in.
The floorboards creak the timbers timbre.
Aware of my own presence, I am heavy and solid and breathing.
Malleable to a fault, a fault line runs through the spine, the ribs cracked – delineating, the lines on
the faces of those that came before.
This Home is not my own.
It never was.
3.
When I think about how architecture has shaped my world, I think less about the concrete and glass and asphalt and windows and lintels and gables and rows upon rows of the concrete-glass-asphaltwindows- lintels-gables; and more about the spirit, if you will, of what we call architecture. Not the four-walls-and-a-roof type of architecture but more the goings-on kind. I think about what a home really is; about family and memories; about knee-scrapes and giggles and tantrums and oh-that-cloudlooks- like-a-fish; the throwing of rocks in the ocean and the 9 different streets I once called home only to move and call that new place home. I think about all my homes inside the home, about each room a world unto its own, created in form and in memory. About these rooms inside a home called a house and about this house inside a home called Aotearoa. My world shaped in the world around me.
Aotearoa. This country which I call home, but of which is only my home because we took it from the last people who called it Home.
They still do.
4.
The iris, windows of the soul, opens at the close.
The pupils dilate and the pupils listen – the story is shown, and the story is told:
Tūrangawaewae1 – The foundation and the beginning. Here I stand.
I walk in the House that is not my own. The mud is trodden, my feet are covered. Kōkō2 do not sing
for me. Yet they still sing. This House is built on the backs of the ribs that have been cracked.
There is pain here.
The light reflects, refracts, collects the dust, and the memories.
5.
I was in my second year of architecture school when I wrote about the Mātaatua3 Wharenui4. The house that came home. Te Whare i Hoki Mai. Stolen away on the banks of the Whakatāne River. Stolen away from Ngāti Awa5 at the dusk of the 19th century. The wharenui, which once stood as a symbol of Ngāti Awa’s unity and strength following raupatu6, was gone.
Stolen.
Taken.
The wharenui travelled the world at the hands of the invaders, shown off like an animal in a zoo at world fairs and exhibitions, mistreated, before being left and forgotten in storage for the remainder of the following century.
6.
Standing at the centre of the house it is too dark to look back.
In presence and in present, the light catches, snatches.
This House was once perfect but is no longer.
The guests have left a mess. They have taken what does not belong to them.
There is pain here.
