Temples of Maori architecture

Maori art and architectural historian Dr Deidre Brown. Photo / Martin Sykes

The photo of the circular, two storey Hiona council house at Maungapohatu in the untamed Urewera country is arresting, not only because of the unusual form, but because the building seems so un-Maori. Shingle roof, vertical weatherboards and encircling windows decorated with bands of playing card symbols - a repeating sequence of yellow diamonds and blue clubs - combine to proclaim a distinctly European, albeit eclectic, heritage.

Yet there on the gangway and ungainly exterior staircase, leading to both the mezzanine level of the house and a precariously perched outdoor pulpit, are Tuhoe prophet Rua Kenana and some of his wives.

Less noticeable hints that matters Maori are in play here are the small kowhaiwhai (scroll) paintings either side of the door. Unusually, the upper level of the house, reserved for Rua and his family, is tapu - the elevated position considered by his followers to be symbolic of his divine status.

Built in 1907, Hiona is one of many challenging images in Deidre Brown's Maori Architecture.

Like the cover photo of the Ratana church at Raetihi, these are buildings that give the impression of Maori assimilated by colonisation and Christianity, not to mention being won over by Western building methods and materials. But, as Brown argues, nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, it's the other way around - Maori garnering Western forms to fortify their cultural identity.

"These buildings and settlements appropriated biblical ideas and colonial materials but were still founded on Maori concepts," Brown says in the book. "They did not represent the integration or assimilation of Maori into the larger Pakeha population, but were a reaction to the conflict, confiscations and loss associated with the New Zealand Wars."

Often the choice of architecture was quite arbitrary. Hiona, a transliteration of Zion, was most likely inspired by biblical descriptions of Solomon's Temple, and probably based on a lithograph of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock, another rotunda-style building, mistakenly identified as Solomon's Temple in some 19th century illustrated Bibles.

Similarly, Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana's 1000-seat Temepara (temple) is based on Romanesque cathedral buildings. The large, single-gable structure with two domed bell towers on either side of its front face, which provides the unmistakable form of subsequent Ratana churches, is thought to have been inspired by the Japanese Urakami Roman Catholic Cathedral that opened in 1925, a year after Ratana visited Japan.

What's going on here, says Brown, a senior lecturer at the Auckland School of Architecture, is a kind of architectural whakanoa - a practice she traces back to carved pataka (elevated storehouses) of the 1820s.

"By seizing enemy waka, and using their tapu carvings to decorate a food storehouse, Maori were performing whakanoa, or desecrating the tapu and mana of their foes."

A process of take and integrate.

Brown says stories of Maori building are almost always stories of struggle and overcoming challenges - finding innovative ways out of tricky situations.

"If you look at Ratana and other prophetic leaders from 1850 to 1950, they are doing that all the time - taking what was done before and to show that they have got mana they do something quite different. They're doing something that takes the tapu off." The result is a hybrid - inheriting the mana of what went before by showing it can survive its tapu."

The subversive complexities of whakanoa played out at Hiona after its invasion in 1916 by 70 armed police, who arrested Rua and killed his son. Following his trial for sedition, for which he was found not guilty, Rua returned to the Ureweras and wanted the place cleansed to remove the tapu of the events that had occurred. Eventually the desecrated building was dismantled, but parts of it were purposefully taken and built into other houses in the community.

"Hiona had an iconic role to demonstrate what was happening within the community and that was a path it had to take in terms of its dismantling and desecration," says Brown.

Her approach to the subject is to employ a whakapapa, a Maori genealogical tree for buildings - "the idea that one building influences another building and then they might diverge and you get different siblings with different styles and purposes".

She acknowledges that though there have been plenty of books about the meeting house, until now, there hasn't been a book that puts that iconic Maori building form together with other Maori building under the banner of architecture.

"The idea of a continued tradition of building, that you might even want to call that architecture, has been a bit radical until recent times."

The radical thought was first raised in academic circles in 1976 by Michael Austin in his doctorate thesis, which argued Maori buildings were architecture, not just shelter, and deserved to be recognised with the same level of respect as Western architecture.

In his foreword to Brown's book, Austin, now a professor at Unitec School of Architecture, says the idea has yet to be appreciated. "It would still be difficult to say that Maori architecture is acknowledged in Aotearoa New Zealand. Hopefully this book will give a wider understanding."

Brown's own path to architecture began very early. "I think you are born with spatial awareness. My first word after "Mum" and "Dad" was "house". I used to read the houses for sale section of the newspaper and try to imagine what these buildings were like. I'd get pieces of paper and cut them out and try and turn them into the houses, according to the stories."

The idea for the book was prompted 20 years ago when her mother Rosine suggested she investigate her family's connection to the Ratana church - a connection traced to her maternal great-grandfather Hapeta Renata, one of the church's first apotoro (apostles).

Brown has English heritage too - from her father, an industrial chemist who came here after the war in 1948.

Early in the book, Brown says: "Buildings [in the book] are documented for what they represent and are not subjected to critical interrogation of their aesthetic merits, since I would argue that such criticism is not the Maori way of understanding architecture."

Inside the meeting house at Auckland University's marae, I ask what is the Maori way. She answers with reference to Maori carving: "It speaks to you in a sense that it's got imbued Maori and wairua (spirit) - that feeling kind of exudes from it." Brown, who has also written books on Maori carving and art, agrees that carvings have aesthetic qualities. But she argues it's the abstracted ancestors and spiritual guardians, the figurative nature of carving and its expression, that are important.

"People get a sense of them from the ancestor that is within them."

Brown's research uncovers two divergent and irreconcilable strands in Maori architecture. One, advocated by Sir Apirana Ngata and Te Puea Herangi, based on the whare whakairo, (decorated house) requires specialist workers and a commitment to tribalism. The other, promoted by Ratana, Rua Kenana and other spiritual leaders, is based on biblical concepts and Western archetypes, and caters for pan-tribal Maori groups.

"Despite Ratana's pre-eminence as a spiritual and political leader, it is the Ngata-inspired meeting house that has become the dominant Maori architectural style." The meeting house wins, says Brown, largely because Ngata's movement - a rediscovery of carving and other Maori art forms - was educative.

"People were being trained with the knowledge that they would be passing it down."

It's an argument that's not entirely convincing because church movements also have a tradition of passing their knowledge on to the next generation. Perhaps more significant is that the church movements tended to repress or limit carvings, while the meeting house provided not just a location for carving but made it essential to its form.

But as always with Maori architecture, things are not as straightforward as they seem. While the Ratana movement discouraged carving and meeting-house architecture and encouraged its followers to relinquish tapu items as objects of superstition, carving is not entirely absent as seen in the carved and decorated "Whare Maori" at Ratana Pa.

The tension between the pan-tribal and the tribal gets its ultimate expression in Cliff Whiting's "polychromatic and multicultural whare" at Te Papa. "It was an an opportunity to create a multi-ethnic space and although it's described as a meeting house, it's probably more accurately a Maori meeting space," says Brown.

"It's a very controversial building within Maoridom, because it is so incredibly different. In terms of its function, it acts as a stage from time to time. In terms of its form, there are parts that just aren't [meeting house]. The blessing was a problem because parts that are normally blessed - like door lintels - are not there. For some, not many, they feel it is a very dangerous place, because that tapu hasn't been taken off it properly."

Brown says urbanisation remains the biggest challenge for Maori architecture to overcome.

She says the move to the cities, where Maori were confronted with state housing that had no separation of tapu and noa, was a significant turning point, both culturally and economically.

"Maori had no way of responding. The legislative environment was such that it had virtually taken the tools out of Maori hands. It would have been like moving to a completely alien environment."

But while an appropriate architectural response has yet to emerge, Brown says the signs from a new group of Maori architects are encouraging. There are also indications that traditional Maori building materials may play a part in sustainable architecture. She points to a group of Unitec students, who with the help of Maori elders, are recovering lost techniques of building from raupo and the work of Kepa Morgan in flax fibre-reinforced concrete, as examples.

So, is a new Maori architecture movement under way? "We're just at the early stages. This part of the story is still evolving."

* Maori Architecture by Deidre Brown, Penguin, $70.