Rethinking the interviews

Rethinking the interviews I conducted in Christchurch with those who own the sites I am designing on. In particular, I am trying to work out how they fit into my thesis thought and structure. 


1 The City
The City as Containing Memory                                                                                              
(Theories of Kevin Lynch, Umberto Eco, Iain Borden)
Historic Cities
(walls in the medieval city, ground in the city)
Christchurch as Site
(the city’s history, the critical event(s))

2 Memorial Culture and Language
Memorial Culture
(Introduction)
Memorial Culture in New Zealand
House:
I might build something on it, but it wont be a replica. I could build something that was reasonably similar but I just don’t think it will work in modern materials, it just wont be the same as it was. 

But you just can’t have that back, so it becomes difficult then as to what you then do with the site. Its an unusual site, and it was fine when the house was on it, but as soon as the house comes off its like ‘oh what do you do with this?’

the council said ‘look, to stop you from building this (a replica of the old building) we will negotiate with you on something that breaks the rules, but not quite as badly. I’ve still got another four years on this (resource consent approval) so you never know, it might get built.

Caxton Press:

Very sad. It was very symmetrical. So what Peter Beaven was going to do… it was going to be steel I-beams, painted black. We will do something similar, but it will be on the whole site. With that sort of look.

When they put the red sticker on my door my eyes got a bit red. It was a moment where it said ‘gone’ you know. That was after September. Yeah, I had a bit of a weepy moment. Because I knew that was it. But it gives us an opportunity to build something new on it. Which wont be a glass box, we wont be putting a glass box here.

Memorial Language
(discussion and analysis of precedents)

3 Experience and Memory
Theory of the Haptic in Architecture
(Theories of Pallasmaa, Leatherbarrow, Phenomenology, Semiotics)
Archetypes as Memory Device
(Aldo Rossi)
House:
When the building was original you came in the porch and then the stairs went up here. So that was the original front door, where it still was. So I would have changed it back around.

You could see because it was brick, and downstairs it was just plastered over. So you could see in the plaster where the steps had gone.

There was a massive fireplace. It had never been taken out, just filled in. So it went all the way up. It was huge. It had been taken out upstairs in one part, but not downstairs.

I’ve still got all the interior doors, I’m going to put them into my house one day. They were really heavy, really great doors… beautiful doors. So I decided I wanted to keep them.

Caxton Press:

Yeah, we always had it like that. With the front windows to the street view of course. And there were a lot of big windows in the reception as well, straight out onto the street. It was more like a shop front as you walked into reception.

Specific memories though… I do remember we used to have a staircase that was like a ships stairwell. You know in a ship? That steep. That used to be, until we built this building here… it used to go up here (draws)… there was a stairwell up into here. So this stairwell, literally, was like a ships staircase. It was that steep. The reception and accounts ladies were fearful of that staircase. Because it was really was steep. In the end, Bruce and I were like a couple of navy guys up and down the stairs. We could zoom up and down so quick. But for anybody who wasn’t used to it, they were precarious stairs. It was quite surprising how steep they were. But they disappeared when we built this place. 

But it was recessed, the door was. What I really liked about some of the windows was that some of the glass was original. It wasn’t perfect, the glass. Nowadays you see through a window and everything’s fantastic, you just see through it. But this glass wasn’t perfect. You’d look through it and it’d shimmer almost. Its hard to describe. It had a bit of a wave-iness to it. So you’d look through it and there’d be a change of angle. I used to really like that, those old windows. Because they just weren’t perfect. 

something I’ll always remember. Those windows. The glass would’ve been 100 years old. Every time, it was just so nice to see something like that. The glass I think actually was clearer if you got a spot. It seemed clearer than today’s glass in some parts. I don’t know why, but it was like there was more light coming through it. It was just these areas that had imperfections in it.

Church:

Did they save the stained glass windows?

A: Yeah they did, they got them out after the September quake, before the February one

Immediately as you walked through the door, it was a big heavy door, wooden, black. It is somewhere actually…

A: Oh ok, I was going to ask you if there’s anything you’ve saved. So the door you saved?

P: Yes the door is somewhere. Yes so this nice, heavy door. Brass handle and everything. And you’d immediately be spotted by whoever was sitting at the desk. 

A: Did you save any other parts of the building?

B: Just the door. It was wood paneled. Oh and we have a bit of Matai timber from the window sill out the back, my wife’s going to make a coffee table out of it. And about three bricks, and some wallpaper. 

The Framed View

House:
From the front you could see the hills. The back window also had quite a good view over things. You could sit in that window and look out, and that was nice.

Caxton Press:
Oh, these windows were great. You could see down onto the traffic. The whole frontage was good. It was always a working office downstairs. It was people on display almost. In the morning, in equinox it would get very hot in there so we had to have a verandah. 
(Writing of Lyndon Donlyn, paintings of Franco Magnani)


4 Collective Memory
Theory of Collective Memory
(Maurice Halbwachs, Piere Nora, and Peter Carrier)
(Case studies, Dresden, Munich)
Surface and Mass 
(Rachel Whiteread, Aldo Rossi)
Collective Ground
(In Christchurch, the scuptures of Alice Aycock)

Caxton Press:

Yeah. But it was sort of part of who we are. It was synonymous with the Caxton Press. People knew us because of that building... But you’d be able to say to people you worked at the Caxton Press, and they’d go ‘oh yeah, the old building on Victoria St’. You kinda miss that. We will be moving, and it’s a shame that wherever we move or whatever we get we’re not going to get that reputation of having a nice old building fronting us.

What happened was Dennis Glover went to war, he was in the navy. And Leo Benson kept the business going, because he was an objector. And then some of his arty left-wing ACDC friends kept it all going. And then in the 1940s a guy called Charles Brash, who was a wealthy man form Dunedin, started to fund Land Falls (a magazine they used to publish) and about that time, in the late 40’s, early 50’s, Glover went on one of his binges, didn’t pay the wages for two or three weeks… total disaster. So Dennie Donavor came down. He was one of the shareholders and lived in Havelock North. He came down and booted Glover out. A lot of acrimony. So Dennie Donavor stayed on as co-director with Leo Benson right until 1978. They both retired, and sold the company to the Bascand family, myself and my family…. It didn’t include the building though at that stage. That was owned by a family trust. And in the early 1980s we bought the building. Which was basically just the historical building, and a little lean-to. 

A: So the building was tied up with your identity

B: Oh yeah, a lot

B: Oh yes. Well there was an archeologist present at the time of demolition. We had a look at anything interesting… we didn’t find a hidden bottle or anything. There was a tin, a cigarette tin. It’ll be around somewhere. It wasn’t significant though, but it that way.

A: I guess it shows the history of the place, though

B: Yeah. Well we found a hidden window too, up there in the corner. I knew it was there. The building was just bricks and mortar, no steel involved… it just fell to pieces.

A: You said the foundations were only a brick down?

B: About two bricks down, yeah

Church:

I knew Paul Dunlop too, who was killed in there. He was a lovely man, an organist. He was going to go in on the Wednesday, but he decided to take an extra day off and go in there earlier… and… no structural integrity. That’s the problem. That’s the problem with all the buildings really.

5 Individual Memory
Theory of Individual Memory 
(Gaston Barchelard, Proustian theory and Frances Yates)

House:
The only thing with that was most of the sun was upstairs, so it was quite dark downstairs. The other thing was this little extension bit out the back. What we used to do from the kitchen was… there was a door here and we used to go out onto the roof. That would have been good to change it to some kind of outside deck because it got a tremendous amount of sun. It was really good there. I used to go out there and smoke cigarettes and stuff… because there was a bit of a parapet there, the top of the wall that you could sit on… just chuck your butts over to the neighbour on the other side. 

Some people owned it for about 20 years. They just used it when they were in town, so they hadn’t really taken much care of it. So it also hadn’t been used that much. There were about 20 cats in the back yard when I got it. We had to get the cat protection league in to get them all out. You’d go out there and the whole back yard would move… it was all the cats sitting there watching you. As soon as you’d move they’d move.

Caxton Press:
it wasn’t flash upstairs there was old furniture, old desks. The smell of whisky and cigarettes.

When we did the alterations, it had had a fire. There was an oven or something in the back that was all charred. Its obviously been a residence and a shop. At some stage it was a bakery, for a while a guy called Charlie Rich had it. He was an antiques stealer, so it was an antiques shop. He would’ve been there until the 50’s. When he retired he had a shed down the back. At some stage the Caxton Press took it over, and I’m not sure when…

The old fireplace was there. We left the cavity… there was a window in here that used to look West… 

Church:

It was musty. Timber floor. And up the big steep stairs at the back… they had a choir assembled. I remember floral services there. When I was a little kid I remember the Salvation Army came in with big banners,

Stratification and the Cut as Device
(Gordon Matta-Clark, Carlo Scarpa, the Colloseum)

6 Design
Site analysis and relationship
(description of each lost building with interview excepts)
The way the section is aligned, the way Sherborne street is aligned, the sun was in the front in the morning, down the side during the say and in the back at night. I used to live in the upstairs flat. I wasn’t living there at the time of the earthquake thank goodness, but I rented the downstairs to my brother and I had lots of different people at different times. And it was really just so fantastic up there because it had all of its old features. It had a beautiful Kauri floor and massively high ceilings. It was really warm because it was triple brick, and it got all day sun as well so it was a really, really nice place to live. 
Mnemonics and Methodology
Design and descriptions
Presentation layout