Long Live the Modern

Image courtesy of Hawke's Bay Museum & Art Gallery, Napier.

Image acknowledgements: Cedric Firth - Monro State Building, Nelson 1966, photographer Geoffrey C. Wood Studio, 66217c courtesy of Nelson Provincial Museum

I LOVE books full stop; but I especially love the sketchbooks, notebooks, and journals of artists and designers. So I’m naturally wishing I could be in Napier later this week for the opening of “Long Live the Modern – New Zealand’s New Architecture 1904-1984,” an exhibition that brings together photographs, original drawings, period books and journals, as well as new architectural models and recent photographs of eleven key buildings from around New Zealand. In addition, it features a section focussing on the works of three key Hawke's Bay architects - John Scott, Guy Natusch and Len Hoogerbrug. Opening at Hawke’s Bay Museum & Art Gallery on Friday night, the show was initiated by the publication of a book by the same title, edited by Julia Gatley and published by Auckland University Press. Curated by Gatley and Bill McKay, from the University of Auckland School of Architecture and Planning, the exhibition focuses on the Post-World War II period, which saw enormous government expenditure on housing, public buildings and infrastructure projects, and a concurrent wave of private and commercial developments. Both the book and the exhibition, it should be noted, “use the word ‘modern’ in a very broad way, pursuing twentieth-century architectural initiatives concerned with the new – new technologies, new materials, new forms, new building types, new ways of living – initiatives embedded with the belief that the new would necessarily change lives in positive ways.” The exhibition is being toured by Gus Fisher Gallery and University of Auckland. www.hbmag.co.nz