Migration and Modern Architecture

Abstract

The history of modern architecture in New Zealand is written around a conception of cultural diffusion from Europe to antipodes, countered at mid-century by the emergence of local resistance to international modernism. By considering aspects of the careers of architects Amyas Connell and Basil Ward, Ernst Plischke, and Miles Warren, this paper complicates this narrative of diffusion and resistance. As architects moved between New Zealand and Europe, and vice versa, they acted not as agents of cultural diffusion from centre to periphery; rather they participated in more complex interactions. Both in Europe and in New Zealand, the reception of European modernism by New Zealand architects was inflected by the country's own circumstances, but even early in the twentieth century these local circumstances were in turn conditioned by international networks of technology and culture in which New Zealand was already embedded.