(Image: Tina Tiller)

BooksNovember 28, 2023

The bold legacy of Rewi Thompson

Guest writer

(Image: Tina Tiller)

Matariki Williams reviews a new book about a visionary New Zealand architect.

“Rewi” scrawled in disco pink across the cover, so declaratory that I read it with an apostrophe it doesn’t have: “Rewi!” Judging this book by its cover, I assume I am in for a riot, a read that matches the bold legacy that architect Rewi Thompson (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Raukawa) left when he passed suddenly in 2016. However, the secondary title shared on the spine is a clue for readers: “Rewi: Āta haere, kia tere”. Rewi, proceed with caution and quickness, care and boldness, consideration and cheekiness.

Coming in at over 450 pages, editors Jade Kake (Ngāpuhi – Ngāti Hau me Te Parawhau, Te Whakatōhea, Te Arawa) and Jeremy Hansen draw upon Rewi’s archives to include the voices of the many people he worked with, taught and inspired. Crucially, the first interview in the book is with Rewi’s daughter Lucy, the editors stating the book would not have been made without Lucy’s support and endorsement. Grounding the book with this interview immediately humanises Rewi and his work. Yes, he was a visionary architect but he was also a loving father, and husband to his late wife Leona. This kōrero also provides the first insights into arguably Rewi’s most idiosyncratic building: their whānau home in Kohimarama.

Variously described as shaped like a ziggurat or a poutama, save for a small vertical slit of window in the middle and the entry foyer at ground level, their home presented an almost completely closed-off facade to the street. This exemplifies the bold care and considered cheekiness of Rewi’s practice: yes, the design will push the envelope and draw a lot of observation, but that observation will not penetrate, for this is a whānau home. From the archives, Rewi observes that the house is responding to the landscape and city it sits within while acknowledging that, “Auckland has a violent past both geologically and culturally.” Perhaps Rewi is hinting at the tīpuna maunga that mark the Tāmaki Makaurau landscape? The extinct or dormant volcanic cones, or in the case of Takararo and Takamaiwaho, no longer existing cones? As Rewi goes on, he mentions Rangitoto as one of the original landmarks of Tāmaki, a place taken over in others’ minds by the Sky Tower, thus is built heritage also responsible for the invisibilising of culture in Tāmaki Makaurau?

Left: Rewi Thompson’s home. A portrait of Rewi by Jane Ussher. Photos supplied.

Maybe this is the caution of the book’s subtitle? Careful, you might write a couple of hundred words pondering the meaning of a building you’ve never seen in person! Yet this is exactly how I have been describing this book to others: deeply researched and beautifully designed but very conscious that it is adding to Rewi’s legacy by being so manifestly inspired by his work. This inspiration is an implicit invitation to the reader to also become inspired. Included in the book are responses from writers Samuel Te Kani (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou), Gina Cole (Fijian, Pākehā), and essa may ranapiri (Ngaati Wehi Wehi, Ngaati Raukawa-ki-te-Tonga, Te Arawa, Ngaati Puukeko, Ngaati Takataapui, Clan Gunn) who were sent drawings from Rewi’s archive to create to.

Rewi’s drawings existed in a folder labelled “KOHA” but were otherwise without explanation, what did they mean? Creative practitioners are constantly inspired by others whether directly or indirectly, and by inviting these responses, Samuel, Gina and essa retrieve and elucidate new meanings. This approach resonates because of a constant whakaaro I have as a curator who has worked with museum collections that are largely unprovenanced: how do we learn about these taonga, how do we know about the makers, when the opportunity to inherit knowledge has passed? How do we do so when all we have left is the object, some scraps of kōrero if we’re lucky? These responses are what we do, we put those absences in the hands of creators who transform that loss. Aotearoa creatives are constantly adding to the palimpsest of our cultural heritage so I have to acknowledge that while these writers have done so by invitation from prescient editors, so too have the book designers from Extended Whānau. Rewi is a beautiful monolith informed with care and boldness.

This drawing from Rewi’s archives shows some of the conceptual anchors of the Te Papa proposal and its narrative links to te ao Māori. The longest element of the building connects to the city at its southern end, launching into the harbour at the other.

Now that I’ve talked about museums, allow me the most inelegant segue into some of the Rewi projects that really piqued my interest: Capital Discovery Place Te Aho a Māui (with Athfield Architects), City to Sea Bridge (with Athfield Architects, John Gray and Paratene Matchitt), and the national museum design competition entry (with Ian Athfield and Frank Gehry). Wellington was my home for 18 years, and my relationship with these civic spaces evolved over that time. As a mother desperately finding places to feed and entertain young children (and myself), I learned how to navigate the intermediary spaces between the library, City Gallery and Te Papa. As my babies grew to toddlers, they’d break free from their prams and clamber over the Para Matchitt-made structures and barrel down the split of what I’ve come to know as Rewi’s pyramid.

From the aerial photography shared, Rewi’s hand in the design is made visible to readers. A favourite detail being the pattern of the bricks he arranged to evoke the image of a kupenga spreading out from his pyramid. This calls to mind aerial shots of Te Aro Park and Shona Rapira Davies’ (Ngāti Wai ki Aotea) work, all of a sudden I saw what her work meant while being reminded that for seemingly esoteric mahi like this, the beauty isn’t always in the eye of the beholder – the mahi knows its worth all along.

Rewi’s pyramid also provided a window into a slide that was part of the experience at Capital Discovery Place, a dedicated children’s education centre for interactive learning that was housed below. I have no personal memories of this space, by the time I knew it existed it was already boarded up. However, my husband shared his childhood memories of the place being a little strange but fun, and a slightly harrowing anecdote of being followed through the mirror maze by an unknown man. I feel quite sad thinking that this centre which started with a hiss and a roar, a space created specifically for children that once existed below where my children had made their own fun, was no more.

An aerial photograph of the City to Sea Bridge designed by Rewi. Photo supplied.

Thinking about these three projects, I also can’t help but think that they’re indicative of this time, the late 80s / early 90s where social consciousness had been rising for the past couple of decades. There had been prominent and visible Māori protest movements, entrenched commitments to honouring te Tiriti by the Crown, and 1990 marking the sesquicentennial signing of te Tiriti with $21 million distributed by the Crown for over 6,000 community-based events. This was a time where the country’s burgeoning bicultural identity was deliberately included in civic projects. However, it was also a time where the initial injection of funding was not made to last. Reasons for the centre closing are shared by the founding director of Capital Discovery Place, Philip Tremewan, “The council decided not to support ongoing operational costs, there were engineering problems, and the whole thing became an earthquake risk.”

Having recently read that the City to Sea Bridge is at risk of being demolished due to repair costs, this would deal another blow to the precinct. Wellington is Wellington because of sites like the City to Sea bridge, not just the built aspect of it, but the whakaaro and kaupapa that underpin it. Wellington is the experience of holding onto your hair as you traverse that bridge in high winds, or rush across the black asphalted part of the bridge on hot days because the flooring is molten. Aside from the injection of funding that happened at this time, these projects were aided by principled Pākehā in leadership roles like Tremewan who had done the mahi to understand the importance of institutionalising biculturalism. Like the running out of money, very cynically I also wonder whether this dedicated allyship in advocacy and leadership has also dissipated in public sector leadership roles.

Turning to what Ken Davis, who was working for Athfield Architects during the creation of the City to Sea Bridge, called “…one of the most disappointing pieces of public architecture we’ve produced in a long, long time, a lost opportunity in lots of ways”, Te Papa and the museum it could have been. The most frustrating aspect of this kōrero, and what truly makes it scandalous, is that the proposal Rewi worked on with Athfield also included American architect, Frank Gehry. THE Frank Gehry, though as the book notes, he wasn’t yet THE Frank Gehry of Guggenheim Bilbao fame and whose design transformed the economy of the city it is based in, but that is what makes this lost opportunity all the more devastating.

Having been a curator in the Mātauranga Māori team at Te Papa for five years, not only am I very familiar with the building that won the tender (so many damned curved teal walls) but at one point, my team was working through what a refresh of Rongomaraeroa, the entire marae complex comprising of internal and external spaces, would entail. During our research, and thanks to librarian extraordinaire Martin Lewis, we viewed original plans for the complex and saw how the external aspects of Rongomaraeroa were intended to play with Tāwhirimātea through sculpture. In doing so, they would have a greater conversation with the harbour and address one of the major criticisms of Te Papa: that it has its back to the harbour. This relationship with the harbour was what appeared to explicitly inform the Thompson-Athfield-Gehry project which was arranged as a loose assemblage of buildings under a single transparent feather roof. As Athfield put it, the museum would be, “…dipping your feet in the harbour, rather than standing back from it.” There is some conjecture as to why the proposal didn’t even make the shortlist (yes, I feel your rage too!) like the harbour connection eschewing one of the requirements which was that the V8 racetrack (Who? What?) on the Wellington waterfront be maintained, and another that the feather ceiling was inappropriate from a tikanga perspective.

Design competition entry for The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa by Frank Gehry, Rewi Thomson and Ian Athfield. (Image: Supplied)

Though the final Te Papa design cops a lot of flak in the book as well as in the general public, the Thompson-Athfield-Gehry proposal also bears thinking about. The loose boxes it constitutes are divided via discipline, much like the exhibition spaces are in Te Papa, however their separation from each other could further ingrain discipline divides which is arguably not what an interdisciplinary museum in the 21st century should do. But that is the beauty and the pain of a museum, it is a working building with people and taonga always on the move so I would love to have seen what this seemingly flexible arrangement would have looked like if it ever had the chance to be lived in by our taonga.

There are so many more threads I want to pull from in this book (namely parallels between Rewi and Māori artists, e.g. how he contested being labelled a ‘Māori architect’ as Ralph Hotere did the same with being a “Māori artist”, the philosophy he had of buildings not having to live forever and John Bevan Ford sharing the same about whakairo) but the most compelling is how successfully it gets across the āhua of Rewi Thompson. Though some may lament that so few of his designs stand in built form, his impact and influence amongst colleagues and students is palpable. Multiple interviewees mention the way he opened their thinking, gently yet firmly. The intangibility of the gift he had to inspire creation has been made tangible with this book, mai i āna taonga, ka puta mai tēnei taonga. Rewi, thank you.

Rewi: Āta Haere, kia tere, by Jade Kake & Jeremy Hansen ($75, Massey University Press), can be purchased from Unity Books Wellington and Auckland.

Keep going!

The various covers of The Vintner’s Luck. Image by Tina Tiller.

BooksNovember 26, 2023

The enduring magic of The Vintner’s Luck

Claire Mabey

Books editor

Elizabeth Knox

Guest writer

The various covers of The Vintner’s Luck. Image by Tina Tiller.

Elizabeth Knox and The Spinoff books editor Claire Mabey reflect on what makes Knox’s novel The Vintner’s Luck – published 25 years ago this month – such a hit.

Imagine having a fever dream of an angel and then having the strength of faith to commit that vision to novel form. Not faith as in religion (though sometimes it’s hard to extricate creative vision from the religious kind) but faith as in the imagination. The Vintner’s Luck is one of the greatest works of imaginative faith in Aotearoa’s literary history. I first read it in my early 20s and for months afterward wrote terrible poetry about fallen angels, and strange, found feathers. I still daydream, regularly, of Knox’s Hell: a shadowy place piled with books and where Xas, the angel of the story, gardens darkly.

The Vintner’s Luck, Knox’s fourth novel, was published in New Zealand in 1998 by Victoria University Press (now, Te Herenga Waka University Press). By Christmas of that year, Fergus Barrowman (Knox’s publisher) recalls, they’d sold 16,000 copies (a huge figure in Aotearoa books), and then another 10,ooo by the time the novel won the Deutz Medal for Fiction at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 1999.

Vintner’s also became the first of Knox’s books to be published outside of New Zealand. “The first international rights sale by Elizabeth’s agent to dream US publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux had happened in October 1997,” says Barrowman, “(coincidentally while I was in Frankfurt, so I had the pleasure of meeting FSG Publisher Jonathan Galassi and the rest of the team, and being invited to the fabled FSG party,) and UK rights went to Chatto & Windus soon after.”

Since then, The Vintner’s Luck has been translated into many languages and has been reissued in a number of print editions, most recently as a VUP classic, and as an ebook. Cumulative sales in Aotearoa are now over a 60,000. There is a sequel, too, The Angel’s Cut, published in 2009, which follows the angel Xas in 1930s Hollywood. Fans have long awaited the third instalment (including poet, Bill Manhire: “Come on Elizabeth, where’s volume three?”), though Knox’s tour-de-force fantasy, The Absolute Book, has kept us company in the meantime.

Vintner’s is an unusual book. It’s a fantasy most realistic: it lingers in your mind as a place where angels happen and are, more importantly, explicable. Set in France, between 1808 and 1863, Vintner’s is the story of Sobran, a winemaker, and his friend-lover, the lowly angel Xas, who is well-read, who gardens, and who is branded with the sign of a treaty between Heaven and Hell, a mysterious experiment between Satan and God that enables Xas to travel and indulge his curiosity in people. It is a story of sex, love, failure, interest, uncertainty, and regeneration.

It is an intensely visceral, and sexy, tale. Knox builds detail from the gritty minutiae of nature both human and otherwise. Sobran’s life is punctuated by sexual exploration, youthful fumbling and experienced mastery; the complications of flesh and blood; various desires; births; murders; wines; existential panic; war; children and tragedy. Each chapter marks another year, another vintage, and another heady, sometimes dissatisfying, reunion between man and angel. The annual leaps are a bold marking of the inevitable passing of earthly time: Sobran’s existence is a blink in the eye of an eternal angel, though a rich one, and an education of sorts.

What astonishes me, on a re-read, is the beauty of Knox’s craft. The sentences are exhilarating: they feel like they are of Sobran and Xas’s world rather than designed to build it for them. Knox’s imagination is precise, mechanical, scientific. Take Xas’s wings: Knox makes them move, shows how they behave in three-dimensional space, and the shapes they make under sheets, in the air, the various ways that they propel the angel. Xas is animalistic as much as he is human at a slant, and magical in the way that the mystical Christian imagination allows for. At one point he rests on his wings so he can caress Sobran with both hands. On another he rubs a wing against a tree, “rubbing its feathers up the wrong way, so that they seemed to grip the trunk like flat fingers.”

Even more astonishing is the fabric of theology behind the story. Knox journey’s us into concepts of Heaven and Hell, Satan and God: an intellectual exercise that only an extremely skilled writer can pull off. When The Vintner’s Luck was released in the US, the New York Times said Xas was “one of the best angels since William Blake’s”. He still is.

‘Media is under threat. Help save The Spinoff with an ongoing commitment to support our work.’

Duncan Greive
— Founder

Elizabeth Knox

Over the years I’ve written and talked about how The Vintner’s Luck came to me, the dream, the transcription of the dream, the moment of thinking “what is inside this story that would make it a novel”, the French setting determined entirely by my decision to use wine terms as chapter titles. The whole Given, Considered, Haphazard of the novel’s origins.

Also I’ve been asked to talk about the novel’s reception, how it changed my life, sent me places, built our kitchen extension, all matters material and stories public.

What I haven’t talked about are the magical and, in the end, more consequential things.

I’d been working part-time in the Career Services, and otherwise spending my most of my days with my 3-to-4-year-old, and writing. Jack was very good entertaining himself and when I look back, or rather listen, my memory offers me a dual channel soundtrack of the voice in my head, the voice of the book – because that’s how it works for me – and Jack’s voice, his disputing dinosaurs or Maximals vs Predacons. I’d put down my pencil to go make lunch, or to watch Gargoyles with him. Or I’d to take him for a walk on the proviso that he was allowed to talk my ear off.

From left to right: Elizabeth and Jack, taken at the time Knox was finishing the novel; the original cover; Elizabeth and Jack on the holiday in Golden Bay.

At the end of 1996 I was offered the writer in residence at Victoria for the following year, and spent December and January trying to clear the decks for the work I meant to do during that residency. We were going on holiday in early February, to Golden Bay. It was my first time there in seven years (one of the few breaks in visiting a place I’ve returned to all my life). I was determined to have nothing left to do but be in Golden Bay, so decided to type up the whole handwritten manuscript of Vintner. My desk and computer were at the wrong height. I didn’t have a copy holder, my chair was unsuitable, and I ended up with a repetitive strain injury. Then I drove our car with its stick shift from Picton to Golden Bay and ended up in the little community hospital being buzzed with ultrasound and bound up in a soft foam sling. I have photos of us clamming in Wainui inlet at dusk, me in the sling, and Jack carrying the bucket for me.

This is where the magic in my experience of my novel – having written it – begins. Jack was four. He went to sleep early. The place we were staying was the big basement of a house near the end of Peninsula Road, Tata Beach (it is still for rent on Air B&B). It was all one big room. Fergus and I were in a king bed, Jack on the bottom of a bunk set draped in blankets, so that we could keep a light on while he went to sleep. I’d wanted to type up Vintner because Fergus had asked me to read it to him.

That’s what we did, me propped up in a complicated arrangement of pillows, the good reading lamp looking over my shoulder, Fergus with the one pillow I could spare, and his face in the dark. Because his face was in the dark I thought he’d fall asleep. But, as I read over several nights, I found I was reading longer. “Aren’t you sleepy?” I’d say and he’d say, “No. You can’t stop there!”

The house was back from the beach and next to the inlet. We’d hear oystercatcher calls and pūkeko squabbling out in the dark, and then, when it was getting light and I was still reading, the bubbling noise of the quail family making the most of the garden before the new kittens from the house above were let loose for the day.

This was the perfect time I had with the book that changed my life. A private time – but I’ve learned that those great private times are better than the skill or virtue of memory at tying together whole chapters of a life. So – the smell of the bread in the bread maker our hosts gave us to use. Clamming at dusk. Reading Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table. Watching Jack play with the kittens. A call from a friend to say that another friend was in hospital with pregnancy complications. Pain, and a sense of sunny imminence, with a whole year of writing ahead of me, and this book up my sleeve.

The Vintner’s Luck by Elizabeth Knox ($30, Te Herenga Waka University Press) can be purchased from Te Herenga Waka University Press, and from Unity Books Wellington and Auckland.