This essay was highly commended in the Open category of The Warren Trust Awards for Architectural Writing 2023.
1.
In the world of architecture, there is something to be said about a home. Physically, it tends to be spaces and surfaces and spaces divided by surfaces. Spiritually, it is something else altogether. The space within and without. Stor(e)y’s moulded into the shapes that frame us. Architecture is home and home is architecture.
2.
The light will get in.
The floorboards creak the timbers timbre.
Aware of my own presence, I am heavy and solid and breathing.
Malleable to a fault, a fault line runs through the spine, the ribs cracked – delineating, the lines on
the faces of those that came before.
This Home is not my own.
It never was.
3.
When I think about how architecture has shaped my world, I think less about the concrete and glass and asphalt and windows and lintels and gables and rows upon rows of the concrete-glass-asphaltwindows- lintels-gables; and more about the spirit, if you will, of what we call architecture. Not the four-walls-and-a-roof type of architecture but more the goings-on kind. I think about what a home really is; about family and memories; about knee-scrapes and giggles and tantrums and oh-that-cloudlooks- like-a-fish; the throwing of rocks in the ocean and the 9 different streets I once called home only to move and call that new place home. I think about all my homes inside the home, about each room a world unto its own, created in form and in memory. About these rooms inside a home called a house and about this house inside a home called Aotearoa. My world shaped in the world around me.
Aotearoa. This country which I call home, but of which is only my home because we took it from the last people who called it Home.
They still do.
4.
The iris, windows of the soul, opens at the close.
The pupils dilate and the pupils listen – the story is shown, and the story is told:
Tūrangawaewae1 – The foundation and the beginning. Here I stand.
I walk in the House that is not my own. The mud is trodden, my feet are covered. Kōkō2 do not sing
for me. Yet they still sing. This House is built on the backs of the ribs that have been cracked.
There is pain here.
The light reflects, refracts, collects the dust, and the memories.
5.
I was in my second year of architecture school when I wrote about the Mātaatua3 Wharenui4. The house that came home. Te Whare i Hoki Mai. Stolen away on the banks of the Whakatāne River. Stolen away from Ngāti Awa5 at the dusk of the 19th century. The wharenui, which once stood as a symbol of Ngāti Awa’s unity and strength following raupatu6, was gone.
Stolen.
Taken.
The wharenui travelled the world at the hands of the invaders, shown off like an animal in a zoo at world fairs and exhibitions, mistreated, before being left and forgotten in storage for the remainder of the following century.
6.
Standing at the centre of the house it is too dark to look back.
In presence and in present, the light catches, snatches.
This House was once perfect but is no longer.
The guests have left a mess. They have taken what does not belong to them.
There is pain here.
7.
This recollected in me a tremor; a stir outside of my own small world that may have been, in a Vonnegutian sense, a slippage in time. A memory of a moment within the town I called home for the majority of my life – Whakatāne. I was 12 or 13 years old. After almost 150 years the wharenui had finally been returned. The town was alive. It was home. It was happening. It was finally home. Cocooned inside the blissful ignorance of my youth, I was unaware of the true significance of this, but to tangata whenua7, it was unspeakable. Over a century of longing and pain for Ngāti Awa had finally led to this. Looking back in no small bout of solipsism, this memory is the way in which I had attached myself to this event. This was perhaps the first instance in which I was suddenly aware of my place in the world, and that it was so much bigger than me. I was sent spilling out of the rye of my youth over a cliff. Everything that I thought I knew about architecture (home) was wrong. It wasn’t so singular; it didn’t lay in brick and mortar; it could not be objectified nor quantified as material.
That was the mistake that our pakeha8 ancestors had made: to merely see this great wharenui as a token representation of an indigenous and primitive architecture. To Ngāti Awa and the mokopuna9 of Mātaatua, it is a part of their whakapapa10. It is tūrangawaewae. It is inexpressible to anyone other than those that it belongs to; soulfully and spiritually.
8.
The House takes a breath. The door is closed.
The darkness left outside, toothless, yet remains.
It will take time to heal.
But it will heal.
The House is strong.
Bent but not bowed, those who remain, those who came, and those who will come.
9.
Another Vonnegutian slip in time and architecture school is coming to an end. My own personal journey has continued; my world a kaleidoscope of learning and teaching, all in the name of architecture. I feel as though I have learnt so much and yet nothing at all. Yet this memory remains. Slip again, and I find myself writing this. Thinking about where I live, what I live in, how I live, how others live, how I have lived, how it could have been all so different; both for myself and for others. This memory remains.
10.
I uncover my feet. Light of foot, it is time tread lightly.
The House takes a breath. The light is getting in.
The path lays ahead, Ao11 holds out a hand.
It is Ao.
It is light.
11.
In the end, the memory of Mātaatua Wharenui is microcosmic of how architecture has shaped my world. I write this not to appropriate the struggles that Māori have had to endure for centuries, but to highlight that it is not simply the built form of architecture that has shaped my world. Whilst the memory lies in the moment for me, it lies in the whakapapa of tangata whenua. It is the memory, feeling, and history of this home and its people. A home built on poor foundations, but a home, nonetheless. Those who were here first will tell you just as much. This is the history of Aotearoa. This is what has shaped us. My world shaped in the world shaped by others. Growing, and growing aware of the different forms the lives others take and have taken. As much as we have learned, there is still much more to learn. As much as my world has been shaped, there is still more shaping to be done. For me. For us.
12.
Nestled upon the land, the House bathes in the light.
It is radiant.
The way ahead is clear. The mud has returned to fern. Grief subsides to hope.
The House returns to Home.
1. Tūrangawaewae: a place to stand. Places where Māori feel especially empowered and connected.
2. Kōkō: (noun) a Tūī.
3. Mātaatua: descendants of the Mātaatua waka whose territories lie in Northland and the Bay of Plenty.
4. Wharenui: a meeting house.
5. Ngāti Awa: a tribe of the Whakatāne and Te Teko areas.
6. Raupatu: conquest, confiscation.
7. Tangata whenua: local people, hosts, indigenous people – people born of the whenua, i.e. of the placenta and of the land where the people’s ancestors have lived and where their placenta are buried.
8. Pakeha: New Zealander of European descent.
9. Mokopuna: grandchildren, descendant.
10. Whakapapa: genealogy, descent.
11. Ao: Māori deity – the personification of light.
Image: Collage uses photos by Manh Nghiem from Unsplash (sea) and Te Whare Taonga ō Taketake, Whakatāne Museum Collections and Research (Mātaatua Wharenui)