The importance of commerce was advertised with classically designed buildings with porticos and columns, out of concrete or stone and sometimes with timber imitations.
The message was to suggest reliable and timeless purpose, which if you were a bank was good advertising.
These were power and influence statements in architecture. The columned Public Trust in Napier, an Earthquake survivor, is an excellent example.
New Parliament Buildings were meant to showcase our democracy in a similar classical style when we became a Dominion, but we built only the central bit and the right-hand wing minus domes.
A visiting British architect much later sketched 'The Beehive' on a paper napkin, a dysfunctional design that we then tacked on to the finished half, creating a national architectural embarrassment.
Our architectural immaturity was on full show because we forgot the role of message and design integrity that great buildings should have. We developed muddle, not mission.
Time, expedience and cost got in the road, in a way that would not have happened in war-devastated Europe's approach to their monuments of pride.
Even if they had to be rebuilt from the ground up, they did it, and cost wasn't the issue. The spirit, message, and history were. Feelings!
The French restoration of fire-gutted Notre-Dame will be a new inspiration.
We are changing. The demand to restore and strengthen our own ruined Christchurch Cathedral has been irresistible and heartening.
Yes, there is architecture of heritage and meaning worth both preserving and creating, and yes it costs, but some things are an indelible part of our spiritual landscape of history, memory, and the shoulders of ancestors we stand on today.
The fate of Napier's much-loved original War Memorial sits accusingly astride these changes at this local level.
In the 1950s an enthusiastic city of 22,000 built its iconic War Memorial on the beachfront in the shape of that marine symbol of proportional perfection, the Nautilus shell.
With its panoramic views, it quickly became a much-loved and used community memorial to over 600 lost in WWII, as much and more a part of the Marine Parade as fountain and Sound Shell. But as memorial it was much more.
Its tasteless alteration to a purely commercial structure and cancellation to the purpose of memory in 2016 caused an eruption in Napier that still awaits a putting right to the purpose of memory, three long years on.
The people of Napier have fought against the ethical vandalism that has occurred.
A real growth of understanding of the importance of memory to a community has taken place, which is a positive, but the restoration of the whole complex to memory is still being resisted by a very reluctant city governance.
Restoration, of course, will involve a significant architectural and artistic makeover to visibly restore memory and spirit onto a site enlarged without any of that in mind, and that is restoration's final challenge.
Restored it will now commemorate over 1000 of our lost, and with a city population currently over 60.000, appropriate restorative and beautiful reflagging of the memorial should be something enthusiastically sought and embraced with city-wide vision, pride, and determination, as the French will be with their spiritual landmark of Notre-Dame.
Nothing less here in spirit. Let's make sure of it this time.
*Alan Rhodes is a Napier JP who has lectured in sociology and political studies and has a strong interest in architecture.
