'Mis-shapen Mediocrity’ and Evangelical Missions

At the inaugural Architectural Centre AGM in 1947 architect and city councillor George Porter suggested:
“To use a rather hackneyed and somewhat evangelical expression, we have a 'mission'… There must be full integration of all the senses, and a full understanding of cultural values and relations. Such a training is a continual process and the elementary groundwork for all higher forms of education. When it is achieved, lessons in art appreciation will not be necessary. Until such time, our everyday life will continue to be set in a background of mis-shapen mediocrity.”

In this talk architectural scholar Kate Linzey will explore Porter’s sentiment, asking such questions as: Is this 'mission' evident in the architecture of the Karori Teachers’ Training College campus designed by the firm Toomath and Wilson?; Can we still see it in the pottery of Doreen Blumhardt and Roy Cowan? All were active in the Architectural Centre and, as Linzey describes, all apparently concerned by the 'mis-shapen mediocrity' of their everyday urban lives in Wellington.

Linzey posits that when progress demanded the Karori Teachers’ College Campus be redacted in 2017 it may have been assumed that the memory of the place, and what it stood for, would be similarly rendered invisible. However, in citing the whakataukī, 'Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua' - I walk backward into the future with my eyes fixed on the past – Linzey puts in check a western fantasy that history is a singular narrative of progress enforced by collective forgetting.

According to Linzey, seventy-seven years after the Centre's first AGM we have much in common with that era, Wellington is still 'mis-shapen' and, as in the decades after World War Two, we again face radical change - to our economy, lifestyles, environment. As a current member of the Architectural Centre, with one eye to her ancestors (Toomath, Wilson, Blumhardt and Cowan) and the other to her son and her students, Linzey suggests how raw concrete and blobby clay were answers to Porter’s mission for a "full integration of all the senses", and offers up the present-day ‘prayer’ that, once again, it might get us out of a mess.

Free, all welcome, no booking required.

Kate Linzey is an independent scholar of architecture and art, with a PhD from the University of Queensland on the architecturally scaled kinetic proposals of Len Lye (1901-1980). She has been a member of the Architectural Centre since moving to Wellington in 2002. At times she teaches in the College of Creative Arts, Massey University Wellington, and at others, the School of Architecture, University of Auckland. In recent years Kate has also assisted Dr Bronwyn Holloway-Smith and Sue Elliott on the Public Art Heritage Aotearoa project.

Image: Doreen Blumhardt in collaboration with students, Uku-paka (detail), 1992, Glazed ceramic tiles and glass. On loan from Wellington Teachers’ College Ceramic Collection, now part of the Faculty of Education, Te Whānau o Ako Pai, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Installation view The buildings notice me, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2024. Photo: Ted Whitaker.