Ilam
Christchurch and the wider area have a long history of Māori occupation. The vast network of wetlands and plains of Kā Pakihi Whakatekateka o Waitaha (Canterbury Plains) is inherently important to the history of its early occupation. The area was rich in food from the forest and waterways. Major awa (river) such as the Rakahuri (Ashley), Waimakariri, Pūharakekenui (Styx) and Rakaia were supplied from the mountain fed aquifers of Kā Tiritiri o te Moana (Southern Alps). Other spring-fed waterways such as the Ōtakaro (Avon) that rises in proximity to Ilam, meandered throughout the landscape. The rivers teamed with tuna, kōkopu, kanakana and inaka; the wetlands were a good supply of wading birds and fibres for weaving, food and medicine; with the forest supplying kererū, kokopa, tui and other fauna as well as building materials. Ara tawhito (travelling routes) crossed over the landscape providing annual and seasonal pathways up and down and across the plains and in some cases skirting or traversing the swamps. Permanent pā sites and temporary kainga were located within and around the Plains as Ngāi Tahu established and used the mahinga kai sites where they gathered and utilised natural resources from the network of springs, waterways, wetlands, grasslands and lowland podocarp forests that abounded along the rivers and estuaries.
Most of the Canterbury region was purchased from Ngāi Tahu by the Crown in 1848. The Canterbury Association oversaw the systematic European settlement of Canterbury and surveyed the town of Christchurch and rural sections outside of the town boundary. The land where College House is situated was part of Rural Section 12, a 500 acre (200 hectare) block purchased by John Charles Watts Russell in 1855. Watts Russell and his wife Elizabeth established Ilam Farm and built their homestead at the site of the current Ilam Homestead (University of Canterbury Staff Club). Following Watts Russell’s death in 1875 Ilam estate was sold to his business partner Alfred Creyke. Ilam Homestead and the land between current Waimairi and Ilam Roads had been leased to Leonard Harper from 1872 and freehold ownership was transferred to him in 1883. The land passed through a series of owners until it was acquired by Edgar Stead in 1918. The original homestead burned down in 1910 and was rebuilt prior to Stead’s occupation. A keen horticulturalist, Stead developed the gardens at Ilam Homestead which is now renowned for its collection of rhododendrons and azaleas.
In 1950 Stead’s estate transferred Ilam Homestead and its remaining land to Canterbury University College. The university roll experienced a dramatic increase following the Second World War, placing considerable pressure on the city campus (now the Arts Centre of Christchurch, List No. 7301). Permanent additions to the university’s complex of buildings had not been made since the 1920s and opportunities for expansion were constrained on the city site. In 1949 the Canterbury University College council resolved to relocate to Ilam, with the main campus to be situated on land between Ilam and Clyde Roads. Stead’s property – and approximately 100 acres (40.47 hectares) of adjoining land – was a later acquisition approved by the government in July 1950.
Among the motivations for the university’s relocation to Ilam was to enable halls of residence to be built within the university campus. Following the Oxford and Cambridge model of university life, the Canterbury University College council emphasised the importance of an integrated campus experience for the student to consider ‘himself a member of the academic family to which he owes allegiance and from which, in turn, he may gain untold advantage through personal, social and academic contacts of many kinds which would otherwise be beyond his reach’. The site planning for the university land prepared by government Architect F. Gordon Wilson in 1951 allocated Stead’s property between Ilam and Waimairi Roads for student hostels. Halls of residences were established by churches of various denominations, with subsidies in funding from the government and the Church Halls of Residence Appeal, founded in 1965. The university built three halls in 1972, two funded by the university (with government subsidy) and one by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
History of College House
College House began with the very origins of European settlement in Canterbury as the upper collegiate of Christ’s College (formerly Christ Church College after Christ Church College, Oxford). In May 1850 the Canterbury Association announced their intention to establish Christ Church College, a college with two departments: a Grammar School for boys and an Upper Department (or collegiate) for young men. The Upper Department began with five divisions: Theology, Classics, Mathematics, Agriculture and Medicine. The Canterbury Association intended that: ‘The Collegiate Department was to be similar to the Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge both as regards constitution and discipline. Residence in the College was to be a necessity.’ Initially housed in Lyttelton, in 1855 the College was renamed Christ's College and two years later was permanently established in buildings on Rolleston Avenue. All the founding documents of the school considered the Upper Department as the primary activity of the College, with the Grammar School merely feeding into it. However, from the very beginning the Grammar School predominated, as with young men needed elsewhere in the fledgling colony it was largely those seeking ordination in the Church who saw reason to enrol in the Collegiate. Numbers were so small that students shared classrooms and teachers with the older Grammar School boys.
After the establishment of the University of New Zealand in 1870, the College formed the Collegiate Union with the Museum Trust (Canterbury Museum and the Library) and applied for and was granted affiliation with the university in 1872. This, however, was short-lived as the Collegiate Union appealed to the Provincial Government to establish Canterbury College, which was founded in 1873 and took over the Union's role as the local university affiliate the following year.
From 1874, the Upper Department of College House commenced its role as a residential college, with tutors, for students attending Canterbury College and was the first hall of residence for the College. As Canterbury did not have a chair or lectureship in theology, the Upper Department continued to offer a theological course, with its own professors, for those preparing for the Anglican ministry. To better fulfil its role as a residential college, in 1885 the Upper Department moved off the school site to a rented house on the corner of Rolleston Avenue and Cashel Street. The name 'The College House' first appeared in 1886, as the name of the place where the Upper Department lived, but it soon became widely adopted as a name for the Collegiate and was recorded in the minutes of Christ's College in 1891. College House expanded after the First World War and was for many years ‘the heart of student life at Canterbury College’. It acquired and constructed new buildings in the first half of the twentieth century, although it often suffered cramped and inadequate conditions.
On 5 September 1957 College House became fully independent of Christ's College and had two stated purposes: the provision of a university hall of residence for young men and a theological seminary of the Church of England. At this point it adopted the name its founders originally gave it in 1850: Christchurch College.
College House at Ilam
In 1950 it was noted that, with the prospect of the whole university moving to a greenfield site at Ilam, ‘it may well be that the next hundred years will see a College House in new and more spacious surroundings – a College House with all the characteristics of a College at Oxford or at Cambridge.’ Confirming the integral association of College House with the university, land was leased for the College early in the planned relocation to Ilam. In 1961 approximately four acres (1.7 hectares) was leased to Christchurch College Trust Board, subdivided out of Stead’s former Rural Section 12. The plan for this subdivision shows a ‘stable’ at the south-west corner of the subject land (Lot 1 DP 21465), which presumably served Ilam Farm and may have been erected prior to 1900.
The combined board of Christ’s College and Christchurch College, under Bishop Alwyn Warren as warden of the College, commissioned Christchurch architects Warren and Mahoney for the ‘redesign of Christchurch College’. Miles Warren (now Sir Miles Warren), then in his thirties, had no previous experience of designing on this scale and later described the commission as ‘one of the most important and exciting commissions we ever received’.
The earliest Warren and Mahoney concept drawings for College House date from 1959. Sketch plans were submitted to the University Council on 29 May 1961, although the design was still at the sketch plan stage in August 1962. Working drawings were under way by October 1963, after the approval of the sketch plans by the University Council and assisted by confirmation of a subsidy of £144,000 from the University Grants Committee. Working drawings were complete in 1964 and construction began in 1965.
College House was constructed in three stages: first the main block (entrance foyer, administration, common room, dining room, kitchen, staff rooms), accommodation ‘sets’, principal’s lodge and ancillary blocks (laundry, bike sheds) (1965-67); second the chapel (1966-67); lastly, the Arthur Sims Library and recreation building and also an addition to the main block (to the west of the south-west set named Stanford) that provided an additional four bedroom-studies (1968-70). Until the library building was completed, the library collection had temporarily been housed on the first floor of the administration block; this was subsequently adapted for use as a boardroom.
The contract for the first stage of the construction of College House was let to Charles Luney (Chas. S Luney Ltd) for £229,882 in February 1965. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Michael Ramsey blessed the site and unveiled a plaque on 6 March 1965, while on an extended tour of New Zealand, Australia, Fiji and the United States of America. Archbishop Ramsey acknowledged the importance of College House as a Church of England theological college and residential hall. Stage One of the College was opened and dedicated by Bishop Pyatt on 10 September 1966. At this point the College had cost £265,000, with a government contribution of £173,000 and £30,000 raised from appeal. The foundation stone of the Chapel was laid on 11 June 1966, a couple of months before construction was due to start as Bishop Warren was retiring. Bishop Pyatt consecrated ‘The Chapel of the Upper Room’ on 12 October 1967.
The Architecture of College House
Warren and Mahoney’s brief for College House was for ‘a college for 120 men’. Warren later described this as an ‘ideal brief for architects working in the brutalist phase of the modern movement’, whereby the form of the building was designed according to the function of the interior spaces. The architecture of College House was guided by the specific and unique functions of a hall of residence and theological college, requiring bedroom-studies, dining facilities, a chapel, library and social spaces. Warren was influenced by the spatial arrangement of the collegiate quadrangle in the Oxford and Cambridge tradition and the post-war modernist ideas and ideals of the New Brutalism. The design for College House continued Warren and Mahoney’s design aesthetic that distinguished the 'Christchurch School' of post-war architecture, first developed in their design for Dorset Street Flats in Christchurch (List No. 7804). College House was the firm’s ‘last and culminating design using the limited vocabulary of white concrete block and fair-face concrete beams exposed inside, all contrasted with complex timber roofs’.
Until the 1950s, the convention for student accommodation at New Zealand universities was a ‘large several-storied building, containing rows of students’ rooms along many corridors and with all the central rooms and facilities under one roof’. A study of halls of residences was published in 1953 by the New Zealand Council on Educational Research by Presbyterian minister and academic Harold W. Turner. Turner provided a survey of student accommodation in New Zealand and proposed a set of minimum standards for the planning and development of future halls of residence. While there is no evidence to confirm that Warren knew of Turner’s publication, both referred to similar international thinking on halls of residence, mainly derived from post-war developments in England, and shared a preference for a departure from the conventional organisation of spaces around a central corridor.
Warren approached his design for College House with a clear understanding of its ‘established character’. It had long been the aspiration of College House's founders and principals to emulate the structure and style of Oxbridge colleges. The Oxbridge model of collegiate planning was set by New College, Oxford, founded in 1379, which in turn drew on the well-established monastic tradition of organising a community's separate functions around a quadrangle. At New College this consisted of a hall, chapel, library and residential ‘sets’ accessed via staircases directly off the quadrangle.
The traditional form of the collegiate quadrangle is given fresh expression in the layout of College House. The main block encloses the quadrangle from the west, and presents the complex to the street and houses the entrance foyer, dining hall and administrative spaces. Students' accommodation was organised into eight ‘sets’, each with 15 bedroom-studies, with each ‘set’ given the same architectural form and the ‘sets’ strung out along the two long sides of the quadrangle: three ‘sets’ on the north side, five on the south. The library and recreation rooms were combined in one block to enclose the east end of the quadrangle. The tall, narrow volume of the chapel was inserted on the north side, between the administration block and the first ‘set’, and was pushed forward to encroach on the space of the quadrangle. Other functions were set outside the quadrangle proper: for reasons of privacy, the principal's lodge was located at the northwest corner of the site, and given its own separate entrance from the street; and the minor utilitarian functions of laundry, bicycle sheds and car-park were tucked out of sight south of the quadrangle.
Warren considered the study bedroom to be the most important element of a hall of residence and approached his design by prioritising the needs of that core unit: ‘Start from the study bedroom, design it most carefully, group them ingeniously into “sets” of houses. Organize these about one or more courts with a central block of communal services; take two years of hardwork [sic] and one begins to get a Hall of Residence’. In this, the traditional Oxbridge form was modified with Modernism’s emphasis of form following function. The Oxbridge model with bedroom-studies organised around a staircase with one to two bedroom-studies on each floor was found to be too costly, so Warren adapted this with each ‘set’ housing 15 students over three floors, with access via an external staircase directly off the quad. Accessing spaces from a stairwell, rather than a corridor presented Warren with a practical solution, as well as a traditional one, reducing noise from circulation and limiting corridor space. Each bedroom-study was positioned facing north to allow maximum natural light and heat from the sun, accessed via a short corridor on the south side. The eight original house names for the ‘sets’ are taken from the names of notable people in the history of College House, including some names carried over from its history on its two town sites: Rymer, Chichele and Watts-Russell on the north side of the quad; Warren, Parr, Wilford, Carrington and Stanford on the south.
Ablutions were given their own distinct architectural expression within the set in the form of a tower at the southeast corner, with the concrete water tank mounted on top of each tower. Setting apart these facilities in a separate block was a practical solution to isolate noise and limit the risk of flooded bathrooms affecting the rest of the building, based on his experience as a student in O’Rorke Hall at the University of Auckland. Warren was delighted to learn these facilities were praised at the time in the Royal Institute of British Architects’ journal as ‘the grandest loos in Christendom’.
The communal buildings also followed Modernist principles with the function of the spaces expressed in the design. The dining room, chapel and library were all given double-height volumes, reflecting the fact that they were to accommodate the whole college. Each had its own particular architectural expression, with complex timber roofs and copper cladding to contrast with the predominately flat roofs of the rest of the college. The use of elaborate, exposed timber work and the M-shaped roofs of the dining hall and chapel reference the gabled form of Gothic Revival architecture in Christchurch and the colonial period of architecture in New Zealand when practitioners were known as ‘carpenters’ for their skill in working with timber.
Despite these links to tradition, the overwhelming architectural language of College House is Modernist, with specific Brutalist treatment of structure and materials. This approach is consistent across all the original buildings on the site, from auxiliary buildings to principal's lodge to chapel. Not only did form have to follow function, materials and structure were also directly and honestly expressed. All concrete was left fair-faced, block was unplastered and painted white on the exterior and interior, timber trusses and rafters were exposed internally and copper roofs left to weather to develop a patina over time. During the 1960s this vocabulary was adopted as the local expression of Brutalism: 600 millimetre-deep exposed concrete beams from door head to floor level (beton brut) on load-bearing concrete block painted white, which ‘gave a unifying and domestic scale’.
Another Modernist principle in the design of College House is the total design philosophy applied to every element of a building. Every aspect of the college was given close consideration in its design. The architect’s total design concept extended to furniture and fittings for College House. As the New Zealand Institute of Architects (NZIA) Jury acknowledged when they awarded Warren and Mahoney a gold medal for College House in 1969: ‘Everything from the structural form down to the furniture and light fittings has been designed as an expression of the nature of the college. The planning of the buildings around a courtyard has continued this character from interior to exterior and ensured a unified concept.’
Context
The first halls of residence for tertiary institutions were provided by the theological colleges associated with the Anglican and Catholic churches. Church organisations became the natural provider of accommodation as the tertiary sector developed in the early twentieth century. Following the Second World War tertiary education experienced significant expansion through returned servicemen seeking higher education and the population boom. Many tertiary students were accommodated as boarders in private homes, but by the 1950s these were failing to meet the demand. College House was the first University of Canterbury Hall of Residence to have new buildings designed and constructed on the Ilam site; none of the other halls at Canterbury have the architectural clarity or sophistication of College House. In 1962 Warren stated that since the Second World War ‘only one new Hall of Residence in New Zealand has got any further than the sketch plan stage’. This was incorrect as Turner’s research in 1953 documented at least one new purpose-built hall of residence had been erected for each of New Zealand’s four main centres since 1945. The example cited by Warren was probably Ted McCoy’s design for Aquinas Hall, the Catholic male hall of residence for the University of Otago, designed in 1952 and built in 1952 to 1954.
Another notable contemporary example was International House at the University of Auckland designed by Ivan Mercep of JASMaD architects in 1965 and completed in 1971. Mercep’s design also followed the Oxbridge model with buildings arranged around a cloistered courtyard. McCoy was awarded the NZIA gold medal for Aquinas Hall in 1956 and Mercep’s design for International House was awarded the NZIA silver medal in 1971 and 25 year award in 1996. There are currently no student halls of residence from the post-war period entered on the New Zealand Heritage List.
College House is recognised as a leading example of Modernist architecture in New Zealand and received a 25 year Enduring Architecture award from the NZIA in 1999. It is included in all major texts on twentieth century architecture in New Zealand and surveys of New Zealand architecture. Even many years after their completion, the buildings at College House receive individual attention in articles in local and international publications. Architectural historian Bill McKay recently described the College House chapel as ‘one of the best modern churches in the country’.
Canterbury Earthquakes
From 4 September 2010 and the years following Canterbury suffered a series of major earthquakes. They caused considerable destruction and many historic buildings have been lost as a result. The buildings at College House sustained some damage, particularly the dining hall/kitchen and the chapel, and also the squash court. The chapel remains closed, awaiting repair, and the dining hall/kitchen was demolished and rebuilt in 2014. The architects, Wilkie and Bruce developed a design for the new building that retained the characteristics of Warren and Mahoney’s original design and they were recognised with a Heritage Award in the 2016 Canterbury Architecture Awards.
