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91

The Kirkland House and the
Sinclair and Shouler House

John D Dickson

The site disposition of these two houses seems to have less to do with nostalgia for
the nineteenth-century urban residential-streetscape, than with confident
placement upon upthrust-Iandform, and with full spatial participation in the
surrounding landscape and skyscape.

THE SINCLAIRAND SHOULER HOUSE

The tall, narrow west-end facade of the Sinclair and Shouler House, dramatised by
first-floor entry, has a theatrical air. A sense of dislocation of a town-house facade,
combined with the accoutrements of more spacious environs, notably a palm-tree
and open-light, give the sense that even in one's approach one is actually stationary
and it is the world that is moving, to any locale, to any height. One is dazzled by
this display of the world's virtuosity, and by the apparent weightlessness of
material such as a brass door-knocker, which in a London town-house context
would be redolent of solidity and permanence, these excited by its polished glint,
but here it is flashing through high-trapeze-space caught up in a Zabriskie Point
tour en l'air. Sinclair is clearly less interested in what things are than in what these
might become, and to enter this house is to be caught up in such a transformation.
Reassurances of New Zealand's staid building - concrete-block, timber, plywood,
corrugated-iron - here have a trompe-l' oeil quality, with building elements
balanced and counter-balanced in acrobatic display. One senses that space beyond
the door is of another kind. Meanwhile one is observed by the display itself, for
bemusedly levitating two floors above is a window-seat with swan-necked rafters.

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Through the door is indeed another world, a rectangular hall the length and width
of the house it seems, with a central line of posts. Is module here too intrusive? But
surely less so than in the work of New Zealand's modern rationalists such as the
Group Architects. The hall spills to ground-level at its east-end with rhythmic
alternation of vertical windows and wall on the north-side. A lean-to serves to the
south butting into the ridge. Here is one large room yet does one sense from the
module, partitions and corridors stacked away? Under the stairs perhaps? A light



touch of classical intention composes this room twinned beneath at ground-level. A
hall in plan but not in height. On this floor one again senses movement all around,
yet there is nowhere to go, except into a cupboard under the stair wherein access to
the lower-floor is found. Curiously confined as on a boat, one can pace length, and
there are lateral encounters with posts. And as if boats are moored alongside each
other, rhythmic intimation of buildings nearby direct one's attention back into the
room, where movement is stylised ingeniously, as in the lean-to kitchen where all
its appurtenances seem to be contained in bins-on-wheels or dramatically, as by the
stair crafted by Neil Kirkland, which descends from above like a thunder-bolt from
Zeus, or perhaps it is the lighter flash of Mercury's tripping. Despite these
disturbances the room undoubtedly alludes in plan to Sinclair's admiration for
monastic and vernacular buildings in the South of France and to later chateaux.
One senses this in details such as the proportion and placement of windows, and in
the room's simple outline and construction, but without the appearance of stone. Is
there here also, nostalgia for history's inter-tidal zone? For the library of Bishop
Selwyn at Parnell? Or for that by Lippincott at the University of Auckland, where
recently, partitions and corridors have been re-deployed? Life in this room is
meanwhile luxurious whatever the incoming-tide may bring.

This first-floor room is centered on its south-wall, on a side-board painted
Mediterranean blue-green, from which, colour accents spring out into the room;
lemon, orange perhaps, or blue ceramic. Whatever momentary still-life is here, each
frame gives way to colour dynamics in the larger space of the room and inevitably
toward red. One is aware that everything including the floor is painted, as if an old
building has been converted with pipes and wires cut through its joists. The room
recycles itself endlessly; cycles of matt and gloss texture construct a succession of
trompe-I'oeil scenarios in the large back-reaching room-space. Sinclair's command
of spatial-openness places him as the twentieth-century's child sprung from the
French ethos of fin de siecle painters such as Matisse, and with the colour-sense and
brightness of Le Corbusier's painted kouros, and accustomed to the liveliness of a
ballet-set by Picasso brilliantly renewed by David Hockney. Yet maybe, as one
glances at the Minoan-columned table, is there not a touch of necropolis in this
realm of super-colour so evocative for Ancient People of eternity's paradise?

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If we have accounted for the lightness and agility of Sinclair's cyclist temperament;
and we shall take as an axiom of Sinclair's design that architecture expresses the
person; this room in its polychromy suggests also a neo-classical bravura, a touch of
gravity and composure, expressive of Kirsten Shouler's Danish heritage perhaps; an
insistence on design and form in everything; a Scandinavian recognition of beauty;
and an irresistible attraction to the Southern-world of colour and warmth. An
alliance of architecture in New Zealand with a nineteenth-century neo-classical
world effected in timber, is re-stated here. Yet in this room in which joie de vivre
through colour dominates, we are seemingly untroubled by Scandinavian



-,

Hayward and Rowe House (1985)
North elevation

mythology, well away from the Danish and Manawatu lowlands.

If on the first-floor, colour is within a comfortable register of nostalgia, on the floor
above, the presence of colour takes over with excess. Images compound. References
to living-places previously enjoyed are intense; a window-seat at Robin Rockel's
Endymion apartments at Newmarket, and Courtville apartments' loggia. The
personal realm intensifies architectural detail. There is a neo-classical ambience; the
slender-waisted, wooden, Doric columns of the loggia, carved by Neil Kirkland to
Sinclair's design; the out-reaching cyma- recta profiles of the window-seat rafters;
the long runs of cornice and shelf mouldings. One detects an interest also in pop-art
and folk-art motifs; stencilled leaping dolphins in the bathroom, and in fret on its
wooden shutters. Although Sinclair's gift for rendering spatial-openness through
colour and pattern must be recognised, it raises the issue of largesse or spatial-
extravagance? Yet there seems to be no desire to impress. But who can judge in such
matters?

Externally this second-floor is clearly intended to express an admiration for the icon
of mansion so successful in Western architecture; a loggia between two towers -
Roman palace, Venetian palazzo, and Tuscan villa. The full impact of this facade is
blocked by the neighbouring Kirkland House. This second referen~e to frontality in
the Sin clair and Shouler House suggests an open space, undoubtedly water-space,
before it to command. However, the symmetries of these two frontal statements,
north and west, are cheerfully added to, in a New Zealand manner, by a lean-to, to
the south. Sinclair's symmetries cannot be taken as indicative of a serious belief in
classical composure as a committed stance. These symmetries exist as set-pieces with
iconographic intent.

We must consider the possibility of an ecclectic design-philosophy at work. An
informed dexterity undoubtedly, and this gives architectural vitality, and as we
have seen vivaciousness, moving across boundaries set by painting, stage-set, and
film, together with a recycling of Auckland's topos. But do we under-estimate
Sinclair's extensive reading of architecture and its critical theory? Can we detect
here a palimpsest of images, a shifting ground with articulate, momentary,
conjunctions betwixt architectural periods and places, and betwixt architecture's
internal and external spaces and forms? Can we detect here an architecture of
references and denials, or do we grace Sin clair with the conceits of others? At this
point, a wider assessment of Sinclair's design-work is called for beyond the scope of
this review. Suffice to note a range of approaches and dissimilar forms. How for
example, can we bring the concrete, barrel-vaulted Hayward and Rowe House,
(1985) at Anawhata, into meaningful relation to this Haslett Street house with its
more direct involvement with the New Zealand building-vernacular?



94

THE KIRKLANDHOUSE

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On approaching the Kirkland House one encounters at its south-west-end, a
concrete basement-workshop, over-sailed by a slight cantilever of the timbered
living-quarters above. Enclosed by concrete of precise and smooth surface-finish,
and with half its volume lodged in the earth of the sloping site, the basement makes
an emphatic statement of solidity. A steel-beam and posts, supporting lofty joists,
together with the concrete walls and floor, define a volume impressive in a domestic
milieu. Here, the place is fixed, whatever comes in or goes out. This scale is qualified
on the south-west facade by the only low-window, and at the sub-terranean north-
east-end, a mezzanine-alcove cut into the earth, provides a drawing-office above the
heavy-work ground-level. In recalling Antonello da Messina's painting of Saint
Jerome in his study, one nervously searches for Saint Jerome's lion. Light floods
down into the workshop from high, separately defined.windows, some qualified
with degrees of translucency. This is a cavernous in-world; an artisan's work and
storage-space up front, proudly manifest, yet capable of privacy and seclusion.
Somewhere within there is an inter-connecting stair, but this is played down. There
is no discernible applied finish to the architectural elements of concrete, wood, and
steel.

The concrete walls of the basement are qualified and geometrically organised by
means of bands of red aggregate incised with under-cut shadow, and with frieze-
rondels and a cavetto-cornice, and green-plugged tie-holes in regular patterns. Thus
the walls, in accounting for hydrostatic pressure and successive pours, make
reference also to mud-brick coursing and masonry, to Egyptian and Syrian ablaq
patterns, and to geological processes of sedimentation. This is not rough concrete-
work anticipating concealment, but construction of quality. Kirkland is clearly
interested in finding out what can be achieved, and what he with his own hands
can do. There is water here, outside at the door, and fire - a forge and anvil - one
pace within, beneath where springs above a corbelled, arcuated, qualification of the
concrete-wall at first floor level, derived bluntly from circles in a robust Roman
manner. But this basement-workshop, open to the south-west, seems a cold place, at
least in winter, and contrasts with the sun-dried timber-world above.

Intimation of the north-west orientation of the first-floor is discernible on the
south-west facade, where the symmetries are complex. A pair of parallel windows,
set in slightly protruding, plastered timber-work, express enclosure and confirm a
closed south-east flank to the house; whereas to the north-west, timber weather-
boards and plywood, framed by timber pilasters, plinth, and architrave, together
with a broader eave indicate a loggia, the full extent of which occupies the entire
north-west facade. The whole length of the house is thus framed rhythmically by
pilasters, architrave, and plinth, in the manner of the Palazzo della Cancelleria at
Rome. This long glazed-loggia is qualified at its ends by timber containment. On

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account of its colour and textural differentiations, this wall has the subtlety and
impact of a painting. Apprehending this at close-quarters, on rounding the corner
from the south-west, and then raised-up gradually by a stair to become level with
the centre of this painting toward the north-east-end, one at the moment of
penetration becomes Archangel to the loggia within. Yet, although one discerns
centrality and module with bays defining a rhythm closed by each end, the length
of the composition is sufficient to turn one's mind from Fra Angelico's
Annunciation, to Duccio's gold Majestas with its serried ranks of figures to each
side. By this flight of fancy I mean to convey that there is a breath-taking majesty, to
the discerning eye, on entering this house; in experiencing the composition of this
painterly facade with its sky-blue doors, red-gold boards, cream joinery, and below
this world of blue and gold, the earth-realm of red, grey, and green. If at this
moment, one was to step back into the landscape void, and view the house from a
distance as one might have done on approaching the place, the siting and
prominence of the form and shadows of eave and windows, would clearly reveal
the loggia, held from behind by the solid, plastered walled-enclosure. But close-to
one's attention is held by the glint and absorption of surface, by the fine, linear-
detailing of joinery and mouldings and incised relief, with its black crevices of
shadow, and by other concavities of glowing shade.

Stepping inside, under the hipped-roof of the house, is a moment to savour. A long
room the entire length of the house, and independent of its immediate environs at
ground-level, except at its north-east-end, is orientated toward the landscape, but
not frontally, for this direction is brutally blocked by the neighbouring house to the
north. Instead one sweeps out into the landscape progressively, along the depth of
the room; a direction reinforced by oblique walls and doorways. There is a sense of
belonging, and in-dwelling of the landscape through a linked succession of
especially broad double-hung windows with fine glazing-bars, all of which when
raised together, open the central, wider space, entirely. The room is as much an
Elizabethan gallery as it is a New Zealand verandah. Its chevroned and battened
timber-boarded ceiling, zigzagging along its entire length, makes the hieroglyph for
water, and thus suggests a water-space below reflecting up into the room. There is
also, in this pattern and texture, annunciation of Archangel wings, a beneficent
outline above, as from the fronds of the palms outside the windows. The room is
slightly contained and separated at each end. All the spaces of the house on this
floor open onto this long gallery, and two of these at either end of the house, are
conceived of as square rooms oversailing the concrete basement below. These are
closed to the south-east, provided with cupboards, bound internally with
mouldings, and open through shuttered windows onto the long gallery, as well as
opening directly to the morning or evening through inward-opening shuttered
windows. Symmetrical, self-contained, refined further in their linings and
mouldings, these rooms celebrate the intimacies and value of human shelter; one
room for necessity, and another for the other - whatever that might prove to be;



Mc Kenzie House(1990)
Perspective view from North

Maxwell House (1986)
Nor-west elevation

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the night, visitors, or whatever one chooses, or whatever may be forced upon the
household.

It is obvious that considerable thought has been given to sun-protection and sun-
penetration, to ventilation and insulation, to site orientation, and to the
complementary roles of room and gallery; to a simple gradation of inside, in-
between, and outside. All these considerations have been reconciled with a classical
approach to form and to use of a New Zealand vernacular. Furthermore, recognition
has been made of the similarity between the New Zealand vernacular and the
Ottoman vernacular. The Kirkland House, in its planning and construction,
expresses curiosity about this similarity. Both the New Zealand and Ottoman
vernaculars are committed to the external landscape, to a degree of open-living in
close association with others; both have been developed in temperate-zones using a
wood and masonry based technology; both are based on Mediterranean culture;
and both respond to European custom. The semblance of the Kirkland House to
Ottoman house-types, is not mere reference ethnically, or architecturally, nor is it
simply coincidental as part of a wider affinity with a classical approach, but it is
rather, an intended invigorating implant, implying that the New Zealand
vernacular can be even more richly aligned to an appreciation of material,
technology, and form. This seems to be a reasoned emotional choice. Cross-
fertilisation and the vigour of hybridisation is the goal. Yet there can be doubts.
There is perhaps a fine line between this path Kirkland is treading and romanticism.
Can this house be clearly seen as the outcome of one or the other? Its form is clear
enough, with its sofa (hall), and two sekiliks (raised seating alcoves) at either end,
and two oda (rooms) opening onto the sofa. More allusive tendencies are already
embodied in New Zealand's Victorian, and Orientalist-orientated Arts and Crafts
traditions, and their development in the context of the bungalows of the 1920s and
1930s. The Kirkland House is too frank in its use of Ottoman form to be considered
in these terms. Its curiosity about Ottoman architecture is too far-reaching; its re-
organisation of the New Zealand vernacular is too deep, too convincing, too
classically enacted to be solely a romantic interest. But is this nevertheless a
direction backwards?

The Kirkland House, by means of its detailed finesse and quality, and consideration
of environmental performance, indicates the considerable distance this design-
direction has already been advanced. A review of Kirkland's earlier design and
building-work is beyond the scope of this review. Suffice to note an assessment of
the Modern-Movement and its Ottoman susceptibility in the exquisite loggia for Sir
Alan and Lady Stewart, (1982) on the north and west-front of their cliff-top house at
Whakatane; also the carved Radiata posts in the Chisholm House, (1985) at Maxwell
Avenue, Grey Lynn; and the Maxwell House, (1986) at Army Bay, Whangaparaoa.
The Maxwell House has a cruciform hipped-roof of singular beauty with a central
sofa, glazed on its east-arm, and a porch with carved posts on its north-arm. The



97

implications of this form for weather-boarding, timber-framing, concrete-work,
corrugated-iron, and double-hung sashes are all convincingly essayed. In the
recently designed McKenzie House (1990) at Paekakariki, classical elements are
further closely adapted to a New Zealand life-style. Its symmetries and regularities
are balanced by the peculiarities of its situation. But of course that is exactly what
the Ottoman tradition, and any classical vernacular, is practised at. This house is
satisfyingly sited according to a New Zealander's expectation, no matter how much
one equates the Bosphorus with Cook Strait; up a hillside, overlooking the sea,
managing with its neighbours to maintain its own advantage of identity and
exhilaration; with a basic variety of internal spaces, and deploying New Zealand
vernacular elements in specific ways; with also a touch of Middle New Zealand
deja-vu.

In conclusion, whatever the independent failings, or thoughtful detail, of these two -
Haslett Street houses, they can be seen to share something of distinction which
closely identifies them with their own neighbourhood. I think it is their siting, their
larger response to the landscape, and their use of a familiar building-vernacular,
which fastens these two houses securely in place and which gives them local
identity. This is not distracted from by arbitrary style, but rather, their sense of
enlivened ordinariness might well cause the viewer to become aligned
sympathetically with them.