Guest Contributor Holly Beals illuminates the elegance of daily life in City Gallery Wellington's retrospective of Wellington Architect, Bill Toomath.

The catalogue of City Gallery Wellington’s exhibition, 'Architect Bill Toomath: Liberating Everyday Life', written by Wellington architect, Sam Kebbell is challengingly titled ‘Architecture in the House of Art’.  Kebbell raises important questions, “How do we look at architecture as an art form? Is it pretentious to even try?” 

Further to this, how do we visit architecture in an art gallery, which is spatially posing as the interior of an existing house? This act may immediately position the notion of the domestic NZ house in a higher cultural realm than we are normally asked to see it, but this investigation of the elegance of daily life, is just one of the intentions apparent in Toomath’s work.

The spatial arrangement of the exhibit mimics that of the living room of the Toomath Senior House (1949) programmatically implying the same logic and dimensions. Initially this curatorial move appears as a bit of a one-liner, or an obvious attempt at positioning the viewer inside the architecture, but as we walk amongst the brown tape framed windows and doors, the scrawled notations and between the ordered line work we are inside an architect’s passing thought or a working drawing.

The route through the space exhibits traces of Toomath’s processes, rigorous diagramming and programmatic analysis. As they are collected together, the architecture of the exhibit becomes a coherent, cartographic work, mapped with meticulous indian ink lines, and textural moments of collage, film and nostalgic card-mounted photographic prints.




Within this room, contained by a subtle time-line of process and progress, are architectural moments with an awareness of the temporal nature of culture and modernity, as well as some with a firm grip on the discrete and timeless considerations of good architecture. One of Toomath’s most curious investigations of timeless spatial and proportional moves is his ‘Toomath House Study Extension [2005]’ where a scene from Antonello de Messina’s 15th century painting, St Jerome in his Study is replicated in his Roseneath house. Here functionality and the mediation of light and space were resolved in negotiation with the existing architecture.

It becomes clear within the mind-map-like retrospective, that the apparent hard edges of Toomath’s modernist architecture are not rigid after all, but offer a spatial continuity that bleeds from room to room, exterior to interior, in a beautiful cross-over of logical relationships.

Here is a self-conscious vision for Modernism, one that does not declare an inflexible policy. Toomath’s approach considers people in space, responsive to their inward and outward looking vantage points, it is an approach with confidence in form, but also reserved and socially challenging in the way we inhabit place. Where Architecture is invited into the house of art, we are offered an opportunity to grasp how Bill Toomath diffuses complexity in the everyday, to understand elegance in our daily lives.