Dom Glamuzina Has Updated An Apartment In A Glamorous 1960s Building For His Father

Welton Becket is something of an outlier in American architecture.

- Simon Farrell

During his long career he designed thousands of buildings and established a practice that eventually numbered more than 500 people, with offices spread from New York to Los Angeles, and projects as varied as the Capitol Records building and Beverly Hilton in LA, and the Hotel Intercontinental Manila. He was known for buildings that were statements of prestige and power, and he was one of the first architects to create ‘total environments’, in which he and his studio designed everything from the light fittings to the furniture.

But he was also among the first of a group of ‘corporate’ architects, occasionally regarded with suspicion for a body of work that bore no single imprint but, rather, ranged from Moderne to the International style, yet was always loosely modern. He refused to discuss architectural theory. “A building,” he once allowed, “should reflect the client, not the architect.”

Quite how he came to design ‘The Pines’ – a white wedding-cake apartment tower on the slopes of Maungawhau/Mount Eden in Auckland – remains unclear. Designed in 1968, it was one of Becket’s last buildings (he died in 1969). Though he had previously designed a building in Auckland: the Intercontinental Hotel, which held sway for decades at the top of Waterloo Quadrant and hosted movie stars and musicians, along with locals seeking a fancy evening in its top-floor restaurant.