We evaporate from our cities in summer, heading off for baches, beaches and campsites. Myself, I went up north for a look around. The wide-open and sunny north, first and last part of our land, where Maori first came ashore and from whence spirits and 747s depart. The North: where our cultures first collided, where our first capital was sited, where our first books were printed, where we really started as New Zealand. Big blue skies and long empty beaches still, though we've seen the end of the kauri forests, sawn down for boats and masts and, later, framing for Auckland's houses. On the way up tothe resonant north, I went to Omaha: I had heard there was a lot of architecture going on there.
The road north from Auckland retains something of the character of an ancient track, following along ridges and winding around the inland tidal stretch of Puhoi's creek. (This meander is about to be disciplined by a motorway reaching out from Auckland: a bored tunnel will go right through the rolling hills and the fern-and farmlands.) The last stretch to Omaha is over a causeway leading to a sandy island and the welcome of security cameras. Over the last 40 years, as the northern end of this spit became progressively occupyed by beach houses and baohes, the southern endremained a big coastal paddock. But now, as Auckland looms closer, a subdivision of a few hundred holiday homes has sprung up around newasphalt streets.
I was at Omaha (south-side, that is) on a weekday just before Christmas, which may explain the utter un-inhabitation of the place. The only souls around were rabbits and builders. Quite a few houses caught my interest, but the overwhelming impression was of the ghost town nature of the settlement itself. Being there, wandering among the buildings of an unpeopled place, was a near archaeological experience. It was a good ooportunity to press my nose to the glass and have a good peer at the architecture close up, but I wondered more about what produced this dormant little place. How could so much land and so much money be invested in so many structures that stand empty so much of the time? Perhaps, in the future, people will think thiswhen they discover our cars, and wonder how these people lived, what they thought, where they were going, what happened to them. Wandering around Omaha was like walking through middens, and then I found a midden. Indeed, Ngati Manuhiri have had over a hundred sites of their previous inhabitation preserved amidst this development; the signs of how people once lived at Omaha are scattered among the evidence of how we choose to live there now.
The subdivision is set well back from the beach and down behind the dunes. You can't see the beach from the streets— the development is not laid out like the ancient esplanade, or our old ragged line of baches along a beachfront road. That untidy deployment always had a kind of directness and democracy about it. Like a seesaw, the beachfront road held the man-made and the natural in balance. Concentrating all activity into one common path, it had a kind of social gravity, like the village street. But the swirling crescents at Omaha divide and rule; they bring the character of the suburb to the shorefront. What do we get’ Long aimless, curving cul-de-sacs ofasohalt, some landscaping and a few reserves, all serving to scatter houses around the paddock. No streets culminate in a view of the sea. On thoseprime soots sit the biggest and best houses, their backs turned to the land and to us.
All the houses have to stretch to get a view so most are two destroyed, many with living upstairs, kids downstairs. There is a kind of randomness to the layout of Omaha, but it s not a happy, beachfront informality. The (sub)urban ‘design’ dissipates social connection, without actually promoting any decent amount of privacy on individual sites. Your neighbour cranes over your shoulder — as the ‘for sale’ signs say, "Two back, with views ‘. I remember summer at the bach or campsite not so much as a revelling innature, but as a village-like communal experience of outside showers and dilapidated bunkrooms. Laziness and family anarchy: in the shambolic living conditions you d find yourself next door to someone you'd never otherwise meet This is an aspect of our culture that we are losing with the demise ofthe bach, the extinguishing of the campsite, and the suburbanisation of our shores into upmarket developments controlled by residents’ associationswith covenants on activily and design quality. Quality of design at Omaha doesn't have much, or anything, to do with innovation or ideas, or with an acknowledgement of heritage, or a concern with sustainability. It means “stylish” as the Omaha Beach Community Association describes this place. There is a remarkable similarity of style, or should I say styles, in the houses at Omaha. Within a design rubric that is mostly a crisp, contemporary, colour-less modernism, two orthodoxies prevail. If an Omaha house is designed by an architect it tends to be a competent box-on-a-box;cantilevering may be in evidence, cranked roofs fly in all directions, tin roofs salute the vernacular, perhapsthere's a little kink in the plan. If a house is a daughter''s or even a builder's design effort, expect CAD enabled quackery or do-it-coz-I-can artlessness. These latter constructions are often distinguished by a peculiar secondstorey. The attachment of these upper levels suggests the wilful whimsy of a toddler at her Duplo, but view capture is presumably the overriding design imperative.
Does the architecture (as opposed to the 'non architecture') of Omaha indicate a confidence as to what constitutes our national style in the early 21st century? Or is Omaha's ubiquitous architectural 'style' the result of a set of planning rules or a style covenant* It doesn‘t matter, it is the architectural consensus of the settlement. Perhaps it is because we are out of sight of the beach but there is little sense of seaside escaperepose, respite from the city. The place feels uptight, buttoned up rather than dressed down. At Omaha, architecture fatigue sets in after a while, you can't look at yet another big, glassy-eyed box whose primary concern is the aesthetic. There are some interesting individual houses here but on the whole the development disappoints, bringing the values of the suburb to the beach and pasteurising the sights, sounds, smells and textures of the country.
Some houses are of concrete or plaster, bUt most are timber boxes. Is this to express a kind of simplicity and immediacy to nature? Or is it, again, related to the current Jala Mod aesthetic* Forms are derived fromModernism but they are vacant of Its ideology Where Modernism once embraced the practical and the egalitarian, openness, simplicity and light —all those things you'd think would work at the New Zealand beach — many of these houses attempt to defy our climate. I would have thought in this marine environment a few more eaves and overhang would be a good idea. Or designers putting their faith in the invisible sheath of money?
A big stone and solid plaster place, which I think belongs to clothes designer Trelise Cooper, is a real apparition from Spain. It's like one of her models popping along to the barbecue all rouch’ed and tulle-ed up like a hussar in drag, but you have to admire MS Gooper's house for itsdivergence from the prevailing homogeneity. Ms Cooper's house is like her, like the way she dresses A lot of the other houses are just generic. Iwould have thought the beach house, with its informal living arrangements, would provide opportunities to play— to experiment with the house as aplatform for living. There are many New Zealand precedents for this: the beach house Gordon Moller designed at the Te Horo for his family, Nagel Cook's more radical hybrids; Mitchell and Stout's boat-and-crate inspired places; Stanish and Green's loggiaed courtyards There are some houses at Omaha I d like to get inside of, but the overwhelming sense of the place is one of lost opportunity — another parade of homes with one eye on the sea and the other fixed firmly on that lowest common denominator: resale value.
There is a self-consciousness about most Omaha architecture. The values of the city have been brought to the beach; no longer a place to disrobe and relax, rather it has become another spot to show off. I went back on New Years Day. Each house now had two cars outside and most had trailered boats, but there still wasn't much in the way of visible life. Front doors were shut, garage doors yawned open to show off smaller boats, bikes and Christmas's new toys —all our mod cons. Everything is so conspicuous. Who has the new car? the bigger boat? It reminds me of a beach I went to in Southern California I thought I'd get my toes in the sand, maybe have a paddle, but what I found on the sand was a parade of hunks and babes, with everything on show— tits, bums, abs, tans, silicone, collagen ... There was no more pleasure or simple delight in the beach; It had become another show ground.
I do like a lot of the new houses at Omaha but I don I like the sum of its parts. New Zealand was the last place settled by Europeans, far away from their world. We could have found new ways of doing things here, but since we hit these shores we have always been more bent on reshaping the landto acclimatise what we import. We have transplanted grass, pine trees, railways, towns, suburbs, motorways, and the house. Is New Zealand the place where ideas come to die? The settler cottages, pretty much all of our so-called vernacular, the verandah, the Victorian, the Garden Suburb, Modernism, Critical Regionalism, Post-Modernism, Retro or whatever you call where we are now — we bought the lot just when the world was giving them away. In recent years, too, we have become a conservative, risk averse culture that inhibits innovation, in architecture anyway. We seem too scared to experiment, or is it the case that we're not allowed to? We have no real belief in architecture anymore as a social and cultural force. Our houses have become commodities that serve the market and subsume themselves to the ideals of increasingly untenable lifestyles.
We need to stop lapping up the latest offerings from overseas and be a bit more assertive in generating our own ideas about how we can live here. This is not to argue for a regionalist architecture that supposedly responds to climate, culture, vernacular heritage and so on, but rather for an architecture that is open to possibilities in a relatively young country coming to grips with the reality of shafts in its landscape, its peoples and its place inthe world. Our shores are like our old kauri forests: we are sucking the life out of them, and for what? We have learned some respect for the environment, but keeping architecture a Queen's Chain from the high tide mark isn‘t enough. We need to develop a better understanding of how to live in the South Pacific, and open up the possibilities of new architectural forms. And we need to have fun at the beach again.
