Built-in stories

A three-part series looks at how Maori culture is making its mark on architecture in Aotearoa.

- RUSSELL BROWN

THE DRAWING BOARD, Whakaata Māori, Monday February 27, 7.30pm

Architecture was open to Māori cultural concepts before most other professional practices in New Zealand. The houses and churches designed by John Scott (Taranaki, Te Arawa) from the 1950s onwards incorporated both the modernist ideas of contemporaries such as Group Architects and the key principles of traditional Māori buildings. There is a modern heritage to be seen.

In The Drawing Board, Derek Kawiti, professor in Māori designed environments at Wellington School of Architecture, is less concerned with that heritage than with what is happening now, when the idea of what can be a Māori building has expanded – and when, crucially, Māori are more likely to be clients.

It’s a three-episode snapshot of what Kawiti describes as “the new vanguard of Māori clients and architects challenging the status quo”. We are, he believes, at a “pivotal turning point” in the country’s built environment.