An advocate of culturally appropriate housing, Gerhard Rosenberg was decades ahead of his time.
Like any office or institution, the University of Auckland’s faculty buildings have store rooms requiring a periodic sort-sift-clean out. One recent tidy-up in the School of Architecture and Planning fortuitously unearthed a box of papers that the facilities manager doing the sifting thought to pass on to architecture professor Deidre Brown.
“They sat on my desk for a while before I looked at them, I’m ashamed to say,” says Brown.
When the Māori architectural historian finally opened the file box, she discovered taonga: about 100 pages of notes and plans advocating solutions to Māori housing needs from the late 1950s to the 70s, the work of former university staff member Gerhard Rosenberg.
“He was astonishingly ahead of his time as an architect co-designing plans for housing with Māori communities,” says Brown, who is a director of MĀPIHI – Māori and Pacific Housing Research Centre – at the university.
“I’m so intrigued that someone was thinking about the cultural needs of Māori when it comes to housing 70 years ago in such a similar way to what we’re thinking now.”
The box contained Māori-inspired designs Rosenberg and architect Don McCrae drew up for a 1960s government scheme to provide housing to meet Māori needs. A letter from the Department of Māori Affairs informed Rosenberg that one of his house designs had been accepted. This would have allowed whānau to apply for a low-interest loan for a home in that style.
The department also said it would build a house designed by Rosenberg and McRae as a pilot project.
Another letter to Rosenberg, from Māori traditional literature expert Margaret Orbell, told him one of his houses had been built in Auckland: “There was some buyer resistance, doubtless because … it seemed to them a bit like a whare,” Orbell wrote.
Brown started investigating where this modernist, open-plan, four-bedroom house that could sleep eight people might have been built in the early 1960s. The search led her to Panama Rd in Mt Wellington, Auckland, where the whare-like home once stood, with its front deck opening out onto a marae ātea-like large front lawn where whānau events could be held.
Real estate agency photos of the groundbreaking house remain, but the home itself was demolished in 2022. Generations of the same whānau lived in the house until then.
The papers show Rosenberg presented his design to a Young Māori Leaders conference in 1959, and consulted closely with Māori communities around the North Island about their housing needs.
“When it comes to government-provided homes, there’s a sense, because of the costs, people should be grateful for whatever they get and just adapt to it,” says Brown.
“But what Rosenberg was picking up from Māori leaders is that the housing provided through the Department of Māori Affairs scheme was not suitable for Māori and was breaking down essential social structures.
“Extended families were broken up, there was a loss of ties between people living in rural areas and people who had moved to the city, and with that, language loss and culture loss.”
Many of the housing concerns Māori leaders raised with Rosenberg in the 1950s, such as crowding and its harmful effects on health and wellbeing, remain concerns today, Brown says.
In the 1930s, about 70% of Māori owned their own home. By 2023, that rate had plummeted to 27.5%, compared with a national home ownership rate of 66%.
In 2023, more than 20% of Māori lived in crowded homes and a third lived in homes that were sometimes or always damp.
“If the pilot house had been rolled out more widely, perhaps these problems could have been addressed earlier, and not compounded over generations,” says Brown. “65 years on, it’s not too late to pick up this important mahi. Housing that doesn’t fit Māori and Pacific people, that isn’t close to work and schools, means they can’t thrive in terms of health, education and work.”
Shared perspectives
Rosenberg was born in Berlin in 1912 and died in New Zealand in 1995. He was Jewish and suffered antisemitic persecution in Germany, including being required to leave architecture school in the early 1930s. He moved to England to complete his architectural education and started practising.
In 1940, he was detained as an enemy alien and deported to Canada, where he and other deportees were imprisoned with Nazi prisoners of war.
After the war, Rosenberg returned to the UK before emigrating to Aotearoa, where, in 1955, he became a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture at Auckland University College – the forerunner of the university.
“The plight of Māori, and especially urban Māori and migrant Pacific people, resonated with his own experiences of displacement and discrimination, and as someone who was wary of overbearing government,” says Brown, who has learned more about Rosenberg from his son, Julian.
“There was an internal diaspora of Māori leaving rural areas for cities in the 1950s and 60s, and Pacific families were moving from the islands to Auckland, in particular, in the 1960s and 70s.”
Cultural needs
The box of papers contained a list Rosenberg had compiled, with 41 points on what is needed in homes to meet the cultural needs of Māori, as well as for low-income and large families.
The list begins, “Home is mainly the place to eat and sleep, and not a status symbol.”
“It’s like Rosenberg is a voice from the past echoing what we might still say today,” says Brown.
“His list is extremely thoughtful, it includes using verandas for hui and breaking down the barriers between inside and outside. This was a radical idea in 1960s New Zealand but was based on centuries of Māori experience.”
Rosenberg suggested creating alcoves with bunks and curtains that could be transformed from storage areas into bedrooms when extended family visited.
His list includes a large sink for washing sacks of pipi separate from the laundry tub, to keep the noa kaimoana away from the tapu clothes.
He writes that the kitchen must be large enough for several women to work in and include a spot for someone to sit.
Although many items on the list foreshadow what MĀPIHI would include today, other aspects offer historical clues to cultural traditions that have faded over the years, says Brown.
Rosenberg notes many tangi were held in city homes in the 1950s and 1960s, so space was needed to house the dead and for a busload of mourners. Today, however, tangi are often held at urban marae.
Whakapapa and passing on knowledge is important in Māori culture, so discovering an academic forefather whose work stretches back to 1955 is inspiring, says Brown.
“Together with his PhD student, Mike Austin, Rosenberg pioneered the study of Māori architecture and planning in New Zealand universities, opening up the space for generations of Māori architectural designers, planners and scholars like me to follow.
“It’s validating to know we’re working in this whakapapa that has happened at the University of Auckland for so many decades.
“Rosenberg has passed down this idea that we have to get the design of the homes right if we want society to work and our people to thrive.” l
The newly unearthed files will join Gerhard Rosenberg’s other papers held in the University of Auckland’s special collections archive.