Peter Beaven: feisty architect turns 80

(The Press)

At 80, Peter Beaven is New Zealand's oldest practicing architect. As DAVID KILLICK discovered, he still has plenty to say - but are his views mellowing?

Peter Beaven gazes up at the neo-Gothic roofline of the Canterbury Provincial Council building. His mood is philosophical, contemplative. Designed by architect Benjamin Mountfort in the 1850s, this is one of Canterbury's finest buildings - possibly the finest, he believes, a triumph of artistic vision, a building on a human scale designed a century before the first computers.

It's this human dimension to architecture - what he calls "the other tradition" - that he fears we are in the process of losing.

Beaven's own offices are on the first floor, in a series of small rooms with coved ceilings, walls plastered with plans and sketches of buildings he has done. Thomas, an architectural graduate who arrived from Belgium earlier this year is assisting him.

Beaven is here most days. He bikes in from his historic inner-city cottage, which he shares with third wife Lesley. Or you can catch him striding through the streets, a shaggy figure in his blue wool jacket and light cotton trousers, and impressario's white mane.

When he needs to roam farther afield, he drives a diminutive Suzuki Alto.

No obvious trappings of wealth. The Beavens don't even own a television set. You don't make huge amounts of money from architecture, Beaven says. He remains concerned that something like 30 per cent of the city's population earn less than $30,000 a year - yet good design should be available for all, not just the elite.

What keeps him going? "I never felt better actually. It's a very fine country to be old in. The weather is absolutely marvelous, it changes all the time, and we have the most marvelous food here, I bicycle through the city, and walk on the hills every weekend - which every historic architect did, Cecil Wood, Mountfort, everybody walked on the Port Hills.

"What keeps me going is, it's a nervous word, but being creative. I'm actually more creative at the moment than I have ever felt, and there probably is a parallel in that in Frank Lloyd Wright.

"I'm an architect for people and places…I haven't got a style or a theory, I simply operate on what the site, what my clients want. You develop as it were what I call 'the other tradition'. I'm not a modernist. Modernism scythes through the quality of life and architecture in the last 70 or 80 years, completely demolished history, traditions, good streetscape, everything….In Mountfort we had one of the great colonial architects of all time, a man who understood here we are where we came from., and then made these brilliant buildings which people have not yet fully understood yet, totally. They are totally original, they are not like AK Grant once said, sort of dark shadows of our past, they are actually brilliant creative buildings.

"I haven't even got television at home. I don't want virtual reality. I don't want this simulated reality that the whole media's offering us at the moment, and I don't believe that the future lies in the future, the cybernet and all kinds of rediscovery of modernism. I believe the future is only everything we know up till now, this hour, and the future will then unfold. That's where I differ from all these modern architects.

"If I had a computer it will condense me into the frame of the computer…I'm not being derogatory at all, but what I'm saying is that most buildings there did come from a computer, and they felt like that."

The Centra hotel is an example, response to people, the site. "Architecture to me is not any kind of modern style...images, patterns of the past."

"Architecture developed from the very essential thing of a person going through a door, his hand at this height, the wind blowing on your forehead on a hot day through a window, the shadow patterns that fall from the sky where you're sitting and walking, and the touch of materials you build with the smell of the fresh air and the garden coming in the wind in the window in the summer months. That's humanist architecture, and it's the scale of the books you read, the music you listen to, the art you look at - it's humanist's scale that man can appreciate, understand and belong to straightaway."

Back in the 60s:

"There's a book on New Zealand architects' houses in the early '80s, before deregulation, before we lost New Zealand, in my opinion, and that book shows the astonishing creativity of New Zealand before the global nonsense or the computer. There are 80 houses in there which are sparkling in their originality - I could live in each one - and at that time, Christchruch in the 70s, 80s, there were a lot of good architects who were building with concrete block, exposed concerte beams, interesting roof shapes, because we had good timber then (we had rimu)…Hall and McKenzie, Trengrove and Marshall, Warren, me, Donnithorne…there were a lot of good architects and their work had a harmony, and there's not one historian in the school of architecture who even wants to know about that, they all want to look at cyberspace."

Learning from overseas, more exciting? "That's just media hype, that's all it is. The world of consumerism and commercialism, throwaway culture, the whole plastic bag ordinariness…the real issue is that most of us get our pleasures if you analyse them not from trawling through malls but we get them out of sitting in our garden, walking, being at the beach, you know there's still the old New Zealand values. Old New Zealand was, everyone I talk to who knew up till the 1980s, we had the weekends off, the whole weekend off, one person could sustain a family, the whole of New Zealand was ours, nobody else bought it - how can that be boring or dull? "

What's wrong with new subdivisions. "To put it very simply, everything. First of all, they broke the green belt which we'd all preserved. The real trouble with new subdivisions is they're all about cars, and that's not going to last.

"The second thing is they have no neighbourhood centres where people can feel part of the community. The third thing is to get from those spread suburbs into the city is increasingly expensive and difficult, so all those people who can afford cars and petrol and everything else, maybe it's fine for them, but a lot of people in this town can't, don't forget - there's about 60 per cent of people who are not wealthy."

"People want real neighbourhoods, real community centres, natural public access to the centre, not just endless motorcar nonsense, and I'm utterly against it. And until the City Council address these issues."

Referenda talking sense: "do we have a planned city or riotous commercial exploitation, and two-thirds said we want a planned city."

He is not a big fan of city council planners, or the City Plan. "It's self-referential they are talking to themselves about the rules they've made, but the rules haaven't changed in the nine years since the plan came in. There has not been public participation. It's locked up in law and the resource management act."

Centre city: "been given over to motorcars and complete commercialism. What no-one has realized is that every significant city in the world has had planning with proper public participation. The best old city anywhere in the world is Siena. The wealthy people of the city knew that to conserve the wealth of their city they had to make it beautiful."

Wealthy people in the city today are not saying anything dissimilar, just that "their investment is failing because there aren't enough people living in this city, not enough people walking.

"The best modern city is Copenhagen. And Copenhagen takes out one street a year and gives it to cars. Now that has made it the most successful modern city. We can do this here easily."

Like the Civic Trust in the 60s. "We should be sitting down with the council and the planners, there should be equal participation, and that's what happens in Denmark."

Worse over the last 10 years? "No question". "Firstly, most of the new architecture is no good, it buggers up the city, the streets, it doesn't look any good, secondly we're not using the old infrastructure properly."

Lower High Street, old buildings kept, Polytechnic, low rents is a good development. Empty shops. "Make the city full of people, more pedestrians. It's quite easy to take the cars out of the central city, some of them…

Radial city has absolutely axial transport…everything's waiting here, and everything's wrong with transport.

"You need to keep old buildings to keep that sense of history and fabric…and instead of these mad earthquake rules, which are putting up the cost so much, it will mean all the old buildings are going to be taken down. It's quite wrong."

Since '61, Civic Trust. "We were the professional voice beside the council, and that's the original civic trust idea from England and Europe, that you have informed people who are part of the planning process."

The Canterbury Museum: "They never consulted properly. They allowed Athfield and Sir Miles Warren to go ahead with working drawings for a $30 million project, and we had a public meeting and we stopped it, because it was insane, when they were breaking a number of absolutely number one heritage rules."

After two years, and Environment Court hearing. The museum can't cope with expansion on its present site. "They totally and irrevocably damage one of our iconic historic buildings. Now it's been altered, of course, but its our museum. The only way they can do it is to go up through the roof…put shapes in it that have nothing to do with that gothic centre which is one of the best in the world." The obvious alternative is a separate new Antarctic museum and discovery centre in a new building in the cultural precinct. It would cost less, and save on "four years of destruction" (to renovate the existing museum) how could anybody argue?

Over the years he has infuriated critics with his no-holds barred attacks on what he considers bad design. Forceful and fiery, or crotchety and cantankerous according to your point of view, he has been the master of colourful phrases: he lambasted the Christchurch Art Gallery as "a great alien". The Chalice in Cathedral Square looked like "the underground vent to a toilet".

He has some of his choicest phrases for modernist architecture which he criticizes as derivative and unoriginal:

Beaven is still critical, but is he mellowing? Does he regret some of those comments? The Bing Dawe sculpture is actually a fine work, he says, but he feels it is "out of scale" in its present site and would look better outside the Art Gallery - which he says faces the wrong way. The façade looks dramatic, but the gallery space and offices are tucked away in a dark concrete box.

"You could put that faced down anywhere in the world, and if you want something fashionable and mediocre, that's what it would be.

"It's just a bad plan. The staff are in a black box at the back, airconditioned, in this little city, and in front of that this windswept piazza with the buses roaring by."

Both he and archrival Sir Miles Warren reckoned the gallery should have fronted the boulevard.

Chalice: "It's out of scale with the other buildings in the square, it makes the cathedral looks less and it's irrelevant to what the square should be doing.

"Quite a lot of what's happening there now is better, we're slowly finding it…personally I would shift it, II mean I'm not against it, Neil Dawson is a very competent sculptor, I disagree with him that some compressed leaves down under the asphalt is what we ought to symbolize, I don't agree with that… but why not take it down, put it in the forecourt of the Art Gallery, obviously."

Modern houses: "I don't want to be unkind, because a lot of architects are driven by their clients… But I think if you drive down Carlton Mill Road you see most of the issues there. These include two of his own designs, some by architects Wlson and Hil which he likes. As for others?

"I think they are fashionable objects which come out of a computer, they will become out of date and out of fashion very quickly, because what makes eternal buildings is that they understand fully the cultural history they are built in, the time they are built in the materials available, in other words they are buildings of their time, and context, history, and they last.

"The ones which are built only out of fashion.

"Somebody said to me the other day, well that part of Carlton Mill Road looks like a container park, now, that's what people say to me. Now, there may be something in what they say, because things are not contextural."

Sumner apartments: "The building complies with the City Plan. Now, if you've got a developer who comes to you and says, I want you to build a building that bis sympathetic to Sumner and is good architecture, well it's good architecture, it got an award…I went into the Marine Hotel recently, thank God you did that building. It curves to the street, it's got courtyards behind out of the wind, which is successful. I have not heard one person be critical of that in years."

I think the building sits extremely well, the curve of it, the glass facades, the balconies looks like Dover or Brighton, one of the great historic seaside fronts."

St Mary's : concrete colditz. A lot of inner-city buildings. Close-knit housing, all got awards, no-one's done more or better than me, I suppose.

A special opportunity. "It's a hmanist building, everything feels good, the courtyard the trees, and the courtyard and the trees, and down below the car parks are completely removed…it's a model of city development, but when it was finished because we don't have a lot of experience in this country, everyone looked at thee concrete box, oh, Colditz, how dreadful. And the City Councillors who were confronted by the new city plan, took one look at it and said, oh we don't want any more of that. Now, I'm not being critical, I'm saying people don't have the experience. An architect like me can look further, because that's what we're trained to do.

Now it's utterly popular. There's a queue of people who want top live there, because it's got community, because it's enduring in its materials, its proportions are string and bold, I think it's a highly successful building."

Canterbury style village. "Of all my years of building I'm ore happy about that. It means that people can actually as it were buy into history and tradition without being pastiche or Disneyland. The buildings are designed exactly on our built form of the old Canterbury. All the shapes and forms of Canterbury are bas it were brought to play in that village and people can buy a unique house."

I didn't want to be part of fashionable London, I wanted to be an architect rising out of his roots. And I thank God that I did that because fashion sweeps the world. I think that architects like me in a local regional sense must be the future. We can't just have global architecture parachuting in with blobby shapes."

Eisenmann said: "I think we're going wrongs, I think we've got to return to or roots."

Cashmere subdivision: "The city council have this extraordinary idea that all the land down there has got to be swamp in case there's a hundred year front, and Ecan has said in case there's a 500 year flood…

"Community villages, and have the water flooding into the lakes like Capability Brown, so there are lakes and villages trees, and cycleways between all the villages, and it's simple, it's not difficult to achieve.

"Christchurch needs to use its best land to expand the city.

This is exactly what people want, community villages with proper centres, and for a mixture of incomes."

Bayview hotel, Timaru: five storey boutique hotel. " I'm really thrilled with that, it's a lovely building. Views over the mountains, over the sea, right up the coast, at the back of the hotel is glass .the back rooms look at mountains. The front you are looking at the vast sea view; at the back you are looking at Mount Cook and you get there from a glass lift and open walkways, so it's dramatic building."

Queenstown hotel: site that slopes down to the lake, wood and landscape with schist, natural wood, sit there for two or three days and pick up the colours of the landscape and the lake, and the outlines will be as close as possible to the sort of ridges and slopes of the hills round about, so the mountain outlines, the colours of the landscape. This is ort of the architecture and context, what I call the other tradition, not modernist, but it's far happier and richer. "

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