The Athfield House and Office is located in Wellington’s Amritsar Street, where it cascades down a steep hillside to Onslow Road. For nearly 50 years from 1968 it was the home of the architect Sir Ian Charles Athfield (1940-2015), his family and a wider community. For much of this time it has also been Athfield Architects’ practice office. Ian Athfield was one of New Zealand’s most outstanding and celebrated architects of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, gaining both a national and international profile and contributing much to the shaping of Wellington and other centres. The place is highly important in the history of New Zealand domestic architecture, signalling a transition from post-1945 Modernism to the Colonial Revival architecture of the 1970s. Its special nature is enhanced by it being a successful social experiment in communal city living, of which there are very few enduring New Zealand examples. Athfield viewed it as his most important work. Before colonisation the site was a forested hillside between Kaiwharawhara and Ngāūranga pā. During the nineteenth century settlers cleared the forest and farmed the district. After 1945 the area was developed for suburban housing. Ian and Clare Athfield bought the site in 1965. With its sweeping views Athfield saw the site’s potential to advertise his architectural services. He therefore designed a house the public would notice. Taking the form of a mini city or village, the Athfield House and Office combines living, recreational and working spaces. The first building, under construction by 1966 and which was the main family home, is distinguished by its round look-out tower with porthole windows, white cement-plaster finishes over concrete block, mesh and timber framing, and rounded edges. The high-ceilinged living room is complemented by a collection of smaller inglenooks and dens. Later additions are linked by a path and several flights of stairs, connecting courtyard spaces and Amritsar Street to Onslow Road. The stylistic evolution of the complex, including later post-modern elements, demonstrates its use as a place where architectural theories were tested in practice. During the 1970s Ian and Clare began an experiment in communal living in their home, building new quarters that could accommodate extended family and friends, and buying and converting neighbouring houses. The experiment is ongoing. From this time too Athfield campaigned to be allowed to work from home, his tenacity in pursuing this aim eventually wearing regulators down, paving the way for others to follow in his wake. In 2017 the complex housed 20-25 people living in nine separate dwellings and around 40 people working in seven offices. At the heart of Athfield’s architecture was a humanist desire to create spaces that brought people together rather than keeping them apart. Few New Zealand architects have realised this ambition so well.
Location
List Entry Information
Overview
Detailed List Entry
Status
Listed
List Entry Status
Historic Place Category 1
Access
Private/No Public Access
List Number
9662
Date Entered
12th December 2017
Date of Effect
1st January 2018
City/District Council
Wellington City
Region
Wellington Region
Extent of List Entry
Extent includes part of the land described as Lot 1A DP 384046 (RT 335967), part of Lot 2 DP 384046 (RT 335968), part of Lot 7 DP 20053 (RT WN865/23), and the land described as Lot 3 DP 309460 (RT 37106), Lot 3 DP 384046 (RT 335969), Wellington Land District, and the buildings known as Athfield House and Office thereon. (Refer to map in Appendix 1 of the List entry report for further information).
Legal description
Lot 1A DP 384046 (RT 335967), Lot 2 DP 384046 (RT 335968), Lot 3 DP 384046 (RT 335969), Lot 7 DP 20053 (RT WN865/23), Lot 3 DP 309460 (RT 37106), Wellington Land District
Status
Listed
List Entry Status
Historic Place Category 1
Access
Private/No Public Access
List Number
9662
Date Entered
12th December 2017
Date of Effect
1st January 2018
City/District Council
Wellington City
Region
Wellington Region
Extent of List Entry
Extent includes part of the land described as Lot 1A DP 384046 (RT 335967), part of Lot 2 DP 384046 (RT 335968), part of Lot 7 DP 20053 (RT WN865/23), and the land described as Lot 3 DP 309460 (RT 37106), Lot 3 DP 384046 (RT 335969), Wellington Land District, and the buildings known as Athfield House and Office thereon. (Refer to map in Appendix 1 of the List entry report for further information).
Legal description
Lot 1A DP 384046 (RT 335967), Lot 2 DP 384046 (RT 335968), Lot 3 DP 384046 (RT 335969), Lot 7 DP 20053 (RT WN865/23), Lot 3 DP 309460 (RT 37106), Wellington Land District
Cultural Significance
Cultural Significance or Value The Athfield House and Office has high cultural value in expressing the beliefs, values and behaviours of a particular social group. This group has for over 40 years comprised Athfield family members, friends and colleagues who have sought to pursue a communal mode of living and working in a suburban environment where privatised family life is the norm. Although there have been other examples of social groups pursuing shared living arrangements in cities, what marks this place out from others is the high degree to which built form is employed to foster social relations and encourage communal behaviours. Private apartments open onto thoroughfares that wind through the numerous buildings and lead to public spaces – terraces, paths, and rooms – where residents, staff and visitors can gather to work, socialise and share their lives. That new spaces continue to be created within the complex to further promote the communal ideal demonstrates the buildings’ ongoing success in expressing the group’s values and beliefs. Social Significance or Value The house is the materialisation of Ian and Clare Athfield’s desire to create a multi-generational community that challenged prevailing suburban norms about living arrangements. The house combines living, working and recreational spaces aimed at facilitating sociability while also protecting individual needs for privacy. The complex brings together a community of family members, friends and workers who live and/or work in the complex and share a communitarian lifestyle. That the community has existed and grown over 40 years demonstrates that users value the place very highly. This claim is further supported by plans to grow the community through the provision of new private apartments and public spaces. The complex is also socially significant for Wellington’s architectural and design community, as a gathering place for architectural meetings and other events that foster social bonding. This community has valued the place very highly and continues to do so.
Historic Significance
Historical Significance or Value The Athfield House and Office has very high historical value as a prototype of the Colonial Revival movement in New Zealand domestic architecture. This broke the mould of post-1945 New Zealand domestic architecture by moving away from the strictures of Modernism and shaping a new character that was rooted in New Zealand’s colonial past. The gabled and rectilinear forms of the complex are modern takes on the colonial cottage. The complex also references the compact urbanism of colonial cities: its rambling and multidimensional spaces are evocative of Thorndon’s Glenbervie Terrace. Accordingly, it forms a tangible link between colonial and late-twentieth century New Zealand urbanism that is rarely seen elsewhere. The complex has further importance for being a workshop for Athfield Architects’ architecture and experimentation with forms and materials for over 50 years. It is an outstanding documentary record of their work, sprung from the genesis of Ian Athfield’s vision and developed with the creative collaboration and labours of staff, family and friends.
Physical Significance
Aesthetic Significance or Value The Athfield House and Office has outstanding aesthetic values for the diverse and tumultuous way in which the buildings are assembled, cascading, to create a living and working community. The buildings and spaces have aesthetic values for the creation of a sense of place at every corner that invites understanding, and yet the complexity and intricacies defy an easy grasp. It has aesthetic values for an evolving complex requiring the viewer, from near or far, to engage in its multiplicity, while also picking up on individual components. Its throng of shapes, spaces and directions, both vertical and horizontal, evoke a sense of the old inner residential Wellington. The sharp whiteness of the plastered buildings and the idea of a hillside community, above the sea, suggests the Mediterranean. The ongoing construction has aesthetic values for showing the continuing development of the Athfield House and Office complex as an idea made real. Architectural Significance or Value The Athfield House and Office has special significance and value for its pivotal role in a major change of direction for New Zealand architecture and ways of living. It is the work of an outstanding New Zealand architect of international renown who has made an extraordinary contribution to New Zealand architecture. The buildings, spaces and pedestrian ways are a response to the relationship of people within their built environment that Ian Athfield believed in. The house and office have significance for the developing nature of the complex. Athfield’s early use of the domestic character of Colonial Revival housing, as an alternative to the limitations of the singular Modernist house, and his further postmodern buildings and beyond, were aimed at creating a community through the built environment. The complex has architectural significance for the evolving design and construction of a street of dwellings and workplaces, using the typically steep Wellington hillside to showcase architectural ideas.
Detail Of Assessed Criteria
(a) The extent to which the place reflects important or representative aspects of New Zealand history The building represents an important stylistic transition in New Zealand domestic architecture, from post-1945 Modernism to the Colonial Revival of the 1960s and 1970s. The direction emerged during a period of strong cultural nationalism, with architects reworking colonial forms and spaces in novel ways, creating a modern New Zealand architecture that was rooted in the past. Many of Athfield’s early houses have this character, but his own house is the most outstanding example of it – Athfield saw it as his most important work. The building is also a valuable emblem of the 1970s counter culture movement. This sought to encourage alternative ways of living that stressed communalism and shared lives. The Athfield House and Office is designed around fostering this aspiration. There are few enduring examples of this type of community in city environments, increasing the complex’s historical significance and uniqueness. (b) The association of the place with events, persons, or ideas of importance in New Zealand history The house is of special significance for its association with Ian Athfield. Ian Athfield is recognised as one of New Zealand’s most outstanding and provocative architects of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, with both a national and international profile. He was responsible for some of New Zealand’s foremost domestic, public and commercial buildings, and was an important urban reformer; railing against rules he believed dehumanised cities. His refusal to work away from his home helped to overturn regulations preventing this. He has also been a pivotal figure in urban design, guiding projects like Wellington’s popular Civic Square. That his work both engaged and enraged people marked him out as a figure of special public influence like few other New Zealand architects. The complex is also important for its place within a tradition of utopian thought that seeks to recreate the social relations of village life in a city environment. The Athfield community - Ian and Clare Athfield, their family and a succession of employees and residents -is unusual in living out this idea for over four decades, all contributing to the realisation of Athfield’s vision. There is no other architect’s home in New Zealand that has been so closely linked to important events, ideas and people. (e) The community association with, or public esteem for the place The Khandallah community have had an association with the place since its inception in 1965 and some locals use the complex to traverse between the suburb and the Hutt Road. Views within the Khandallah community about the place have been mixed over the years, with some neighbours openly hostile and others supportive of the complex. Nonetheless, the Dominion Post was correct in 2015 in calling it ‘an unmistakeable landmark in Wellington’s northern suburbs’. The building is perhaps held in highest esteem within Wellington’s creative community. Since the 1960s it has been an especially important meeting place for the city’s architects, artists, designers, bohemians and academics. Athfield’s parties and gatherings gained a legendary status within this community. (f) The potential of the place for public education The building already provides knowledge about the evolution of domestic architecture and insights into the 1970s counter-cultural movement, and reveals much about the beliefs and values of one of New Zealand’s foremost architects. It also has great potential to reveal new knowledge as the questions historians and other researchers ask about New Zealanders and New Zealand’s past change and evolve. It has been used as a learning site for architecture students in the past and there is potential for this to be picked up again in the future. (g) The technical accomplishment, value, or design of the place The Athfield House and Office is an outstanding and complex collection of buildings, with a strong residential architectural vocabulary, designed to exemplify a community. The construction is significant for its plethora of spaces, changing directions, interleaved and overlaid spaces and variety of materials, constructed intensively down a hilly site. In his use of plastered-moulded surfaces, Athfield was one of few architects heralding a new architectural expression in combining the domestic scale with the oversized. His pipe turrets and portholes combine historical references with an entirely new way of incorporating them into residentially located architecture. His designs for interior and exterior spaces allow for fluidity of residences and offices and multi-use spaces. They enable chance fascination with the views that show a respect for the site and exploration of possibilities, with an obvious liveliness in space, form and materials. New Zealand’s architectural community holds the Athfield House and Office in very high esteem, with Sir Miles Warren calling the place a ‘game changer’ in New Zealand domestic architecture. (h) The symbolic or commemorative value of the place The complex is symbolic of Ian Athfield’s idiosyncratic journey as an architect, each section of the house representing partly or fully realised ideas. Since his death the place has taken on more commemorative significance for this embodiment. Its attention-seeking forms and the way it works with Wellington’s topography and not against it also makes it a symbol of Khandallah and arguably the wider city. It also symbolises Colonial Revival architecture. This took forms and motifs from New Zealand’s colonial architecture and imaginatively reworked them in modern ways. Athfield was a leader in this movement. Finally, it is a symbolic statement against the privatised spaces of suburbia. Its mix of public and private spaces offered a more mutual, counter-suburban, vision of how New Zealand’s cities could develop. (j) The importance of identifying rare types of historic places The Athfield House and Office is unique. There is no other place in New Zealand to which a truly credible comparison can be made. There are other places that mirror its architecture (Buck House); there are other places where communal living is the norm (Lower Moutere’s Riverside community), and there are other places that were the home and even office of an influential architect (Miles Warren’s Cambridge Terrace house and office), but nowhere do all three components come so successfully together in the one place. It is exceptional and unlikely to be repeated. Summary of Significance or Values The Athfield House and Office was the home and workplace of Sir Ian Charles Athfield, one of New Zealand’s most outstanding architects of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and a leading urban reformer. Few New Zealand architects have been held in such high public esteem as Athfield, and as the practice office of his firm for nearly fifty years the place continues to provide an environment for the creativity that has seen Athfield Architects develop into leaders in contemporary architecture and urban design. The place holds very high value in representing a very important transition in the history of New Zealand domestic architecture from post-1945 Modernism to the Colonial Revival of the 1970s. It is also special as an enduring experiment in communal city living and as a gathering point for social groups or communities. The place has been described as Athfield’s diary, with each part revealing individual insights at particular moments. What is remarkable is how these parts come together in a pleasing sum; the ensemble offering a vision of how future New Zealand cities might work. What is most outstanding about the place is its uniqueness. There is nowhere else quite like it: an exceptional place from an exceptional architect.
Construction Professional
Biography
Ian Athfield was born in Christchurch in 1940. He knew from a young age that he wanted to be an architect. After leaving school in 1958 he commenced a Diploma of Architecture, which entailed academic courses and an apprenticeship with Christchurch architectural practice Griffiths, Moffat & Partners. He also did summer work with Warren & Mahoney. Athfield finished his studies at the University of Auckland and it was there that he became interested in Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe of Germany and the Netherlands’ Aldo van Eyck, all of whose work and philosophies influenced his practice. Van Eyck’s ideas about the social value of housing and neighbourhoods, in particular the notion that a house was akin to village or city, with communal rather than individualist values prioritised, were particularly influential. Following his 1962 marriage to Clare Cookson and graduation the following year, Athfield briefly worked for Stephenson & Turner in Auckland before moving to Structon Group in Wellington. There he gained experience in designing high-rise buildings and knowledge of the latest building technologies. He was made a partner in 1965 but was sacked by senior partners in 1968 when he suggested a retirement policy as a way of making space for younger staff and fresh ideas. Undeterred, he founded Athfield Architects the next day, taking some of Structon’s clients with him.
Name
Athfield, Ian
Type
Architect
Biography
Ian Athfield was born in Christchurch in 1940. He knew from a young age that he wanted to be an architect. After leaving school in 1958 he commenced a Diploma of Architecture, which entailed academic courses and an apprenticeship with Christchurch architectural practice Griffiths, Moffat & Partners. He also did summer work with Warren & Mahoney. Athfield finished his studies at the University of Auckland and it was there that he became interested in Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe of Germany and the Netherlands’ Aldo van Eyck, all of whose work and philosophies influenced his practice. Van Eyck’s ideas about the social value of housing and neighbourhoods, in particular the notion that a house was akin to village or city, with communal rather than individualist values prioritised, were particularly influential. Following his 1962 marriage to Clare Cookson and graduation the following year, Athfield briefly worked for Stephenson & Turner in Auckland before moving to Structon Group in Wellington. There he gained experience in designing high-rise buildings and knowledge of the latest building technologies. He was made a partner in 1965 but was sacked by senior partners in 1968 when he suggested a retirement policy as a way of making space for younger staff and fresh ideas. Undeterred, he founded Athfield Architects the next day, taking some of Structon’s clients with him.
Name
Athfield, Ian
Type
Builder
Biography
No biography is currently available for this construction professional
Name
Athfield Architects
Type
Builder
Biography
No biography is currently available for this construction professional
Name
Athfield Architects
Type
Architectural Partnership
Construction Details
Description
Construction of initial house begins
Start Year
1966
Type
Original Construction
Description
Alterations and additions
Period
1965 - present
Start Year
1965
Type
Modification
Construction Materials
Concrete, concrete blocks, timber, plaster, steel, glass
Early History The Athfield House and Office is situated in the Wellington suburb of Khandallah. Before colonisation the ridge-top site was covered in native conifer-broadleaf forest and was located between two pā: Kaiwharawhara and Ngāūranga. These were home to Ngāti Tama and Ngāti Mutunga communities. When these tribes left Te Whanganui-a-Tara in 1835 they passed the mana whenua of their lands to their Te Āti Awa relations, the prominent Te Āti Awa chief Te Wharepouri making Ngāūranga pā his home. After the 1840 founding of Wellington the Khandallah area developed as a farming district, but with the construction of the Wellington to Manawatu railway in the early 1880s it was settled by wealthy merchants and professionals. The area experienced renewed growth following the introduction of a commuter rail service from Wellington to Johnsonville in 1938. The suburb spread from the valley floor to its eastern flanks over-looking Wellington harbour. Among the new streets was Amritsar Street. Biography of Ian Athfield Ian Charles Athfield was born in Christchurch on 15 July 1940. Len and Ella Athfield adopted him and his brother Tony and the family lived in suburban Spreydon. When he was a boy, the family’s boarder suggested that Athfield’s mathematical and artistic skills were well suited to architecture and becoming an architect became Ian’s goal. After attending Christchurch Boys’ High School (1954-58) he enrolled in a Diploma of Architecture. This necessitated two years of part-time study at Christchurch Technical College and Ilam Art School, work experience in an architectural practice (Athfield worked at Griffiths, Moffat and Partners), and three years of full-time study at Auckland University. As part of the Christchurch Atelier, Athfield met Miles Warren and Peter Beaven, formative figures in the emerging Christchurch School of Brutalist architecture. In 1960 he moved to complete his studies in Auckland. There he was exposed to the work of Vernon Brown and the Group, who pioneered a vernacular Modernist architectural style. But Athfield was more inspired by the sculptural and playful work of Antoni Gaudi and the reductive planning of Mies van der Rohe. The Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck was another influence, particularly his concept of the house as a mini city and the importance of in-between spaces, the gaps between public and private space. In 1962 Athfield married Clare Cookson, and as biographer Julia Gatley notes, ‘From the outset her creativity complemented his and this has underpinned their long relationship.’ After graduating in 1963 he briefly worked for Stephenson and Turner before being lured to the Wellington-based Structon Group. In 1965 the couple bought the precipitous Amritsar Street section for their house. In the same year Athfield became a partner at Structon, but was dismissed on 15 July 1968 for promoting a retirement policy, alienating senior partners. The following day he formed Athfield Architects at his home. With work from ex-Structon and new clients he was able to employ people like Ron Wright, Ian Dickson and Graeme Boucher. The firm quickly gained a local and then national reputation for its innovative houses. The 1960s and 1970s was a period of strong cultural nationalism, where scholars and other creative people tried to define what made New Zealand society and culture distinctive. Some architects turned to the country’s colonial history for answers, reworking colonial forms and spaces in novel ways, shaping a modern New Zealand architecture that was rooted in the past. It was New Zealand’s first revivalist movement and Athfield was a leading advocate. Athfield dispensed with the open floor plan of Modernist housing and reintroduced the small spaces typical of the colonial cottage. He believed the Modernist house did not pay respect to the earlier houses New Zealanders were used to living in. His houses comprised a succession of rooms with individual architectural expression, often with steeply-pitched gabled or lean-to roofs and decorative colonial-inspired finials. Taking advantage of steep Wellington sites the houses featured multiple levels and strong vertical elements like towers. Restricting the use of materials – mainly plastered concrete, recycled brick and wood – unified the contrasting shapes and forms. His houses were applauded for their playfulness and were sometimes referred to as ‘Noddy houses’. Fellow Wellington architect Roger Walker was building houses in a similar vein, leading to national recognition of a Wellington style or school, rooted in nineteenth century Romanticism. Some critics were unimpressed. In 1978 Miles Warren stated there was ‘a limit to the number of parts into which a small building can be dismembered and reassembled.’ He thought the wit had worn thin. Athfield was not to be defined by one approach, however, and from the 1980s he charted innovative new directions in post-modern and neo-modern idioms. Yet it was his firm’s earlier houses that most forged new directions in New Zealand domestic architecture. Clare Athfield opened an interiors office in the house and became a regular contributor to Athfield Architects’ projects, designing furniture, ceramic elements, colour schemes and interiors. By the 1980s the firm had grown to around thirteen or fourteen staff and their collaborative work method was well established. As Athfield’s business grew, so did his house. Whereas in the colonial city work and living spaces were often combined, the rise of urban land use zoning in the mid-twentieth century turned suburbs into dormitory environments. Athfield rebelled against this. He saw work and home as intrinsically linked and central to his ambition to make suburbia more liveable. His insistence on working from home led to disputes with the Wellington City Council, who regularly demanded he desist from the practice. In 1973 he bought a house at the bottom of his section for an office, remodelled it and named it the Onslow Alms. It was, he said, ‘a statement against planning regulations’. But continued legal conflict with the council led him to move his office to Thorndon in the late 1980s, returning to Khandallah in the 1990s after the council became more tolerant of his aims. His stance against officious regulation in this and other areas helped to cement Athfield’s reputation as a reformer. This is also seen in his early promotion of inner city apartment living. From the 1980s he converted former Wellington office space into apartments, including the Dominion Building (1996), and the Hannah’s Head Office (1988) and Factory (1998), and also designed new apartment blocks such as Chews Lane Precinct (2009). By this time the firm had gained a strong reputation in commercial and public architecture. Among the firm’s best-known works are Telecom House (1991) and the Wellington Public Library (1991). Urban design has been another of Ian’s interests. He was part of a consortium that designed Wellington’s Civic Square in 1987-1992. Following the 2011 Canterbury earthquake he was appointed the city’s Architectural Ambassador, an oversight role for Christchurch’s rebuilding. Philosophical differences with city leaders led him to step aside at the end of 2012. His strong views about heritage were also divisive. His belief that buildings should continually change with the times met fierce public resistance with his early 2000s plan to radically modify Benjamin Mountford’s Gothic-revival Canterbury Museum in Christchurch. The Environment Court scuttled his proposal, an outcome Athfield viewed as a lost opportunity. His 2009 appointment to the Board of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust (now Heritage New Zealand) was therefore contentious. Nonetheless, his firm’s sensitive restoration of Government House (2011) showed a fresh appreciation of conservation values. Athfield was also a member of Heritage New Zealand’s Māori Heritage Council for six years, and his engaged and insightful contribution to both of these bodies – as well as his irreverent sense of humour and idiosyncratic mode of attire – was greatly valued. Ian Athfield was an architectural practitioner for over 50 years. His originality, creativity and zeal saw him awarded multiple prizes and awards., including first prize in an international competition for low-cost housing in Manila; a triumph that catapulted him into the international architecture scene in 1976. In 1996 he was made Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit; in 2001 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Literature from Victoria University of Wellington; in 2004 he received the New Zealand Institute of Architects’ (NZIA) Gold Medal; in 2013 he was made an icon of the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, and in 2014 he was named Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to architecture. In the words of his peers: ‘he has exhibited mastery on all fronts on which New Zealand architects operate.’ He was among the few New Zealand architects with an international profile, having received his first inclusion in an international architecture encyclopaedia in 1980. He was also one of only a handful to be a subject of a biography. The 2012 publication by Julia Gatley about Athfield and his practice was accompanied by an exhibition at Wellington’s City Gallery. The book and exhibition showed the ways his ideas and projects had stimulated, marvelled and sometimes offended the public. Athfield died on 16 January 2015 from cancer. His death was widely mourned in Wellington and around New Zealand. The media carried reports and obituaries that highlighted his considerable contribution to New Zealand architecture and urbanism and the high status/mana he had held within architectural and other communities. A tangi was held at his house and office; a public memorial service followed at Civic Square. Sir Miles Warren paid the following tribute: ‘Ian Athfield is New Zealand’s most distinguished and most creative architect. He has enriched and enhanced New Zealand, more than any other visual artist, architect, artist or sculptor.’ The Athfield House and Office The house and office is situated at the bottom of Amritsar Street, where the slope falls steeply to the railway line and over to the harbour edge. Ian and Clare Athfield chose the site in 1965 so their house might attract attention and clients. Ian began building it himself and then alongside a succession of builders (often including friends and family, and Athfield Architects’ staff). Defying the orthodoxy that Wellington’s earthquake hazard made wood the best house-building material, Athfield chose permanent materials for his dwelling, mainly concrete and concrete blocks overlaid with white plaster. The limited range of materials unified the diverse and contrasting forms of the building. Athfield did not want to pre-determine the house’s form and started with few plans. As he said in 1984: ‘I didn’t really define the plan. I didn’t define the uses in any specific way. I just built one big space like this one [the living room] because I’d never had a big space at home and a series of smaller spaces which we could probably change and use as we liked.’ Changing spatial arrangements have been a defining attribute of the building, with some bedrooms and apartments becoming offices as required. Athfield conceded some changes have been retrograde, but he believed buildings should grow and change intuitively with their occupants. Another defining attribute of the place is its unfinished state. It continues to expand down its slope ‘as lava leaks from a volcano.’ The building has many spaces that are semi-completed or in the process of renewal; Clare famously put up with a half-completed kitchen for many years. Athfield acknowledged some people find incompletion unsettling but he was fascinated by it. He was uncertain the place would ever be finished and in 2014 had plans to extend it further into Amritsar Street and build new apartments on its northern side. The Athfield family and Athfield Architects remain committed to the site and its evolution will no doubt continue. The house has not always been welcomed within its neighbourhood. At first the Athfields’ neighbours were friendly to them, but the growing house and the Athfields’ unconventional lifestyle alienated some of them. When Athfield painted ‘Keep New Zealand Nuclear Free’ on the back of the tower in the 1970s, shots were fired at it. Things deteriorated further when Jack their sheep ate a neighbour’s cabbages; one morning the Athfields awoke to find all their free-range chickens had been shot. As Ian reflected in 1977: ‘I think if you build something different in an existing neighbourhood … you invite reactions and that reaction can vary from mild criticism to praise to violent aggression. In this house we’ve had everything.’ Hostile neighbours eventually moved on or were bought out by the Athfields. Morphology Athfield took to heart van Eyck’s dictum that a house was a mini city or village. The Athfield House combines living, recreational and working spaces. In 2017 it had 20-25 people living in nine separate dwellings and around 40 people working in seven offices. These arrangements were designed to break down the division between living and working space in cities and challenge the traditional suburban morphology of individual houses on their own sections. Athfield sought an alternative to suburbia where dwelling densities were greater and the spatial arrangements encouraged sociability. At the same time he acknowledged the need for private spaces. The house therefore comprises private apartments where people can retreat from others, office and other communal space, and several outside courtyards where people gather or chance upon one another – van Eyck’s in-between space. A path and several flights of stairs connect the courtyard spaces and Amritsar Street to Onslow Road. This takes on the function of a street: some of the apartments open onto it and strangers use it as a shortcut from Khandallah to the Hutt Road. The complex has been compared to a Mediterranean hilltop village, a description its gleaming white plaster coating encourages. But there are also local influences. These include the Glenbervie Terrace precinct in Thorndon, where colonial cottages of various forms and heights hug the hillside and each other. The street begins as a lane but narrows to a footpath that wends its way past front doors. Athfield worked in the area while at Structon. He liked the relationships between the houses and the thoroughfare that were created by the ‘inability to move a hill’ and the non-reliance on vehicular transport. His house can be viewed as an attempt to recreate the spatial relationships of Glenbervie Terrace despite modern planning regulations proscribing them. The important difference between the two places is Glenbervie Terrace is a mixture of publicly owned and privately owned space whereas Athfield’s is private space only. Social Structure The house started as a family home for Ian, Clare and their two sons Jesse and Zac, but during the 1970s the Athfields decided to open it up for others as well, seeking an inter-generational community where people looked out for each other. His main inspiration for the social experiment came from visiting cities in the Phillipines and observing the working of inter-generational communities there. Another influence was the counter culture movement of the early 1970s, which saw many young people form communes in rural areas like the Coromandel. Athfield’s community differed in being city-based and ‘counter suburbia’. He and Clare wanted to provide an alternative to the individualism and social isolation of suburbia by providing an environment where people could share their lives. The Athfield community comprised extended family members, friends and employees who were attracted to the way of life. Residents live in their own apartments and come together regularly to socialise with each other and the on-site workers. Since 2000 these ‘fundamental beliefs in the value of community, collaboration and teamwork’ have also been reflected in the democratic structure of Athfield Architects’ system of directors, associates and shareholders. The place has been a meeting point for Wellington’s architectural, design and bohemian community since the 1970s - Athfield’s parties gained a legendary status within these communities. Architecture students have also been regular visitors. Athfield admitted that it helps if people have like-minds; it doesn’t work for everyone and some leave. Athfield also created a holiday community for several families at Awaroa in Tasman Bay in 1972. It comprised a mixture of private pavilions and common spaces designed to facilitate sociability. Ideas of creating village-like urban communities in New Zealand pre-date Athfield’s own experiment. Antecedents can be found in the Wakefield settlements of the 1840s and the first Labour government’s state housing programme. At this time there was a widespread sense that city life was socially alienating and that by designing communities to facilitate the close-knit social and working relations of village life this deficit could be overcome. State housing suburbs like Naenae in Lower Hutt were built with this aim in mind, but proved less successful in realising it than their designers had envisaged. Athfield’s community can be placed within this utopian tradition. He saw it as a model for the reform of suburbia. The more intensive use of space and the way it is arranged to provide for working, social and private space offers, he believed, a compelling model for the future urban development. That others have not so far picked up his model suggests it has limited wider appeal. Athfield built his house on its spectacular site to advertise his services and since the 1970s its distinctive forms have drawn the eye like few other Wellington buildings. Sir Miles Warren has labelled the place a ‘game changer’ in New Zealand domestic architecture and Athfield viewed it as his most important work. Yet he conceded that no client asked him to repeat his house elsewhere. Even so, the materials, forms and spaces of the house are clearly recognisable in other Athfield designs, including the Sampson House (1973) in Lower Hutt, Buck House (1981) in Havelock North, and the Sarginson House (1987) in Governor’s Bay, among others. Whereas these houses showcase Athfield’s architectural style at particular moments, his own house and office showcases its evolution over decades: the complex’s older elements are clearly discernible from newer ones. This process of change continues, and has been carefully documented from the beginning in an extensive archive of drawings, models and photographs. In 2014 new ideas included opening the house more to the wider community, with proposals for a café in the Titanic room, a boutique hotel in the old house, and a bar in the Onslow Alms. If this happens and semi-public space becomes public space it will more closely resemble the urban village its spatial arrangements suggest it is. Since 1971 the house’s bulbous white tower and cascade of rooms have made the Athfield House and Office a conspicuous presence on the Wellington landscape. It joins the likes of St Gerard’s monastery and the Beehive as a conspicuous and celebrated Wellington building; a symbol not only of Ian and Clare Athfield’s identities but that of the city as well. As the Dominion Post noted in 2015, the place is an ‘unmistakable landmark in Wellington’s northern suburbs.’ The lookout tower in particular has been used symbolically: a replica of it was created to draw attention to the City Gallery exhibition from its station outside in Civic Square, and the original featured prominently at Athfield’s tangi. Lindsay Johnston’s eloquent obituary in Architecture AU quoted Peter Davey, then-editor of The Architectural Review, who wrote in 2000 after a visit to the Amritsar Street complex: ‘The whole thing is a labyrinthine village: the story of the life of Ian and Clare, their parents, children and their enterprises. In its multiplicity of uses and spaces it makes an extraordinary critical comment on the surrounding stereotyped villas. It is a powerful, passionate, witty argument for gentleness, humanity and a deep understanding of place and nature.’ Johnston’s biographical reference is apt as the place records Athfield’s ‘idiosyncratic architectural journey’. Each part of the house gives expression to Athfield’s mind at particular moments, with some ideas completed and others left in the making. Yet the sum of the parts still conveys his overarching vision of a community that challenges the prevailing suburban pattern of New Zealand cities. The historical importance of the house therefore partly lies in the realm of ideas and utopian strains of thought. Its significance also lies in its uniqueness. Rather than being an exemplar of a particular building type, the house is unlike any other in New Zealand, so increasing its historical value. This is further enhanced by it being the home of one of New Zealand’s outstanding and celebrated architects of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
Current Description Hills surround the open expanse of Wellington Harbour. Houses dot the slopes, facing towards the harbour at vantage points all around – over ridges, in valleys. The tall buildings of Wellington city are clustered at the harbour’s western shore. At the north-eastern end, the Hutt Valley extends into the distance. To one side of the harbour, on the northern hills above the Hutt Road and at the edge of suburban Khandallah, the Athfield House is settled down onto a spur, almost cascading, standing out strikingly in white against the dark green of its surrounds and the more general singularity of neighbouring dwellings. The white cement-plastered shapes of the roofs, forms and a cylindrical tower stand out in the townscape, from a car below, from planes above, and from sea craft. The white massing of shapes and roofs mix, without pattern. Square blocks, rectangular forms, circles, cylinders, and pyramids and triangles appear to jostle together. There is a sense of clinging to the spur, locking onto the topography, following the shape of the hill beneath; then launching outward, as buildings, or parts of buildings, project upwards or over the gully. Down the end of the winding tightness of Amritsar Street, the full extent and experience of the Athfield House is not yet visible. A house, altered by the Athfields in 1985, forms a junction with the suburb proper. The visual feast of unanticipated routes and forms begins beyond the garages, first seen with their gabled roofs, portholes, roof stairs and crocket finials. The bulbous form of the lookout tower is tantalisingly glimpsed beyond. To the left, The Street - the steps which wind through the complex and lead eventually to Onslow Road - begins its descent. At this upper level there are two connected dwellings. The first house on the site, under construction by 1966, has been the main family home. The materials of its construction, continued in later building, are the smoothed-over roughness of white-painted cement plaster on concrete block. It forms the walls, outside and in. It smooths over the Riblath cladding of the timber framing of roofs and tower. Junctions, ends and corners are squared off with soft rounds, simple, clean. Porthole skylights, rectangular windows and doors perforate the cleanness. Striking and special features distinguish the house: the round lookout tower (added in 1971) with porthole windows directed out and up from its circular room; the high-roofed living area with its fireplace and its overlooking library gallery, and view through to mezzanine dining room; the smaller inglenooks and dens; the borrowed-light portholes; and the opportunities taken for views and connections through the diversity of windows and doors. Over its two main levels, roof heights change, and stairs lead up and down. A breakfast area has been more recently glazed floor to ceiling; floors are timber or tiled; and continuing change is evident. Each room can be sensed to contribute to the complexity of visible forms of the exterior. To its south, around the spur and slightly more elevated, is an apartment started in 1986. Built on two levels, interconnection between dwellings is through a glazed gallery. Plastered walls and roofs, tiled floors and double-height spaces continue. Rooms look out past the gallery over courtyards towards city views. The office reception is reached after travelling downhill further - down around stairways, and past the pool and a table on a terrace, across a courtyard with large trees. Its window and doorway proclaim its purpose and it leads on up and down to drawing offices and work rooms. Ahead is the central congregating spot for workday refreshment: the Titanic Tearoom. Here, the ceiling opens up to a long high room, connected up and down to further work areas, a kitchen. Views take in the harbour and city across a balcony at one end. A long table takes the centre, and models and framed work are displayed. Beyond, is Cliffside, an apartment of three levels (built from 1990) with upright sharpness in plastered concrete block. Here, the block work of the offices of the Lower Petanque is augmented by newer features, such as a metal stairway. The building curves around with the hill and across the inner courtyard the Banana Rooms are seen. The two wings of this colonnaded two storey office building, separated by a stairway, face east across the harbour. Further below again is a small separate gabled apartment. Back at Amritsar Street and across The Street from the Athfield House, other buildings have been absorbed - constructed or altered. They are more conventional as suburban houses, more ‘stand alone’. Timber construction plays a greater part in their appearance, and the neighbourly separation allows for opportunities to use space between. Yet there is close proximity to The Street, even bordering the steps, and there is a participation in the community of the Athfield House as it extends the settlement around the hill. Here, the two working floors of the Upper Petanque are directly off The Street and an overhead connection across the stepway provides an underneath passage for the pedestrian. Workshops, storage and constructions in progress show change and development. Construction over time has brought about stylistic changes of direction; sometimes subtle, sometimes stronger. Future constructions are planned: a garage and drive to this level around the hill across The Street from the Banana Rooms; more building around to the north; a cable car is planned alongside The Street as it descends down in formed paths and steps, to exit onto Onslow Road beneath. At this lower altitude are two houses, valley-dwelling, one being the small home developed into the Onslow Alms. The Street anchors the senses. It meanders around trees, widens and opens out onto courtyard spaces; travels down through tighter passes; alongside a house, an apartment, an office, another apartment and another office, and on. Roof upon roof, room beyond room, and wall next to wall, the Athfield House provides potential for degrees of interaction, from the privacy of seclusion to collaboration in work or home. Everywhere, the labyrinth of buildings surprises and excites. There is great ability to feel (not lost but) a loss of direction within the many pathways, buildings, walls and directions. There is a diversity, even a haphazardness, in response to the geography of the hillside. The Athfield House is a collection of homes and work places connected by open spaces, walls, steps and courtyards. The hillside prompts, and possibly compels, unique solutions at a turn. Buildings establish themselves boldly; taking the best seats; or fitting into crevices, between other buildings, over precipices and around slopes; bringing to mind closely fitted places in other towns and streets, in Wellington and around the world.
Completion Date
10th October 2017
Report Written By
Dr Ben Schrader, Alison Dangerfield and Blyss Wagstaff
Information Sources
Gatley, 2012
Gatley, Julia, 'Athfield Architects', Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2012
Devitt, 2012
Devitt, Simon, 'Portrait of a House', Balasoglou Books, 2012
Melling, 1980
Melling, Gerald, Joyful Architecture: The Genius of New Zealand’s Ian Athfield, Caveman Press, Dunedin, 1980
Neill, 1977
Neill, Sam, Architect Athfield, documentary, 1977, clip 3, http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/architect-athfield-1977
Schrader, 2014
Schrader, Ben. ‘Notes from Ian Athfield Interview, held at 105 Amritsar Street, 8 Oct 2014’, copy on Heritage New Zealand file 12013-1863.
Report Written By
A fully referenced New Zealand Heritage List report is available on request from the Central Region Office of Heritage New Zealand. Please note that entry on the New Zealand Heritage List/Rārangi Kōrero identifies only the heritage values of the property concerned, and should not be construed as advice on the state of the property, or as a comment of its soundness or safety, including in regard to earthquake risk, safety in the event of fire, or insanitary conditions.
Current Usages
Uses: Accommodation
Specific Usage: House
Uses: Cultural Landscape
Specific Usage: Cultural Landscape - other
Uses: Trade
Specific Usage: Office building/Offices
Themes
Modern Movement