"Nothing to be ashamed of in a good nail": New Zealand architecture in the 1910s

Abstract

Gerald Jones' assertion, on the need for honesty and nails, characterises the inherent tension of a country striving for independence and identity while dominated by influences from elsewhere. The lineage of a pioneering number eight wire mentality could easily slide into the rhetoric of honesty and authenticity that underpinned the intellectualism fast footing modernism, but change and contradiction can always be amplified in any history, particularly when one senses cadences of that decade in sync with the current one, 100 years later.