Archived New Zealand Design Review Digitised

Published by the Wellington Architectural Centre between 1948 and 1954, the Design Review was a refreshingly ambitious and broad-spectrum journal, now made available in full by Victoria University's Electronic Text Centre.

The Architectural Centre was formed only a couple of years earlier, in 1946, by a group of students, teachers and architects, who offered a fertile site for dialogue, critique and education in the Wellington architectural scene.

The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre makes a great introduction:

"The Wellington Architectural Centre began the two-monthly publication of Design Review in 1948. The Wellington Architectural Centre was founded in 1946, and began the first architectural school in Wellington (1947) and the first town planning school in New Zealand (1949). The Centre was unique at the time of its founding in that it invited members interested in a broad range of design and the arts, rather than restricting membership to professional architects and architectural students. Internationally it is one of the oldest organisations of its type." -NZETC

The very first issue even had some column inches dedicated to Wellington's new students of architecture, who the Centre had essentially created a school for (twenty-five years before Victoria University got around to it), they colourfully explain:

"There are now nearly sixty architectural students in Wellington City. Rightly or wrongly they are all aiming to qualify for entry into the governing professional body, the New Zealand Institute of Architects. Since the only School of Architecture in the country is attached to Auckland University despondent students in the capital have long voiced the need for organised direction in their studies. Their road to qualification is inevitably painful and often ultimately crushing." Design Journal Vol.1, no.1, 1948

Great stuff to peruse, both graphically and textually. And the richness of subjects is incredible. In my browsing, I was hooked by Design Review Vol.2, no.3, edited by E. C. Simpson, with art edited by E. Mervyn Taylor. It is prefaced by an editorial titled "a plea for ornament", which combined with Felix Schwimmer's feature piece "The Industrial Fashion Designer" (which offered the cover image, pictured below) makes for a remarkable allusion to Adolf Loos's two-time journal Das Andere ("The Other", a proto-fashion & architecture journal, sparked by Loos's fascination for Western fashion having just returned from America, which he loved) which featured a similar cover image, displaying the fashion of Goldman & Salatsch (who would soon after commission Loos to design their flagship store in Vienna, a significant project for Loos). The connection is delicate of course, given E. C. Simpson's colourful plea for a more invigorating deployment of ornament, and Loos's pared-back exteriors, with their overtly Freudian interior complexity.

Cover Image of Design Review Vol.2, no.3.

Loos's Das Andere No.1, 1903.

Simpson is resigned, "The third characteristic modern style [of ornament] is 100% sober. The utmost indulgence by way of ornament is a mild flirtation with some elemental figures which have strayed out of a geometry book. But the more drab our workaday lives, the more kick do we need. There remains the same kind of difference as between a whisky when you feel like it, and a continuous state of dipsomania. A style that is bare, austere and completely sterilised feels stale, insipid and anæmic."

The psychology of Loos's work could in fact be exactly the remedy for Simpson's thirst, although I suspect Simpson would categorise some of Loos's tendencies in the second of his unfavoured types, the "Jazzy" modern: the "ornate cinema chandelier... so violent as to become unbearable", but I'm probably saturating some of Loos's interior scenes with my impressionable memory.

Nontheless, Schwimmer's article is a fascinating read, and clear example of the Centre's broad and inclusive contributors, readers, and objectives. This is precisely what continues to make them my favourite architectural institution in New Zealand.