"simply another thing to keep clean": New Zealand Architecture in the 1990s

Abstract

When Douglas lloyd Jenkins wrote, in 2005, of the contrasting views of the deconstructivist stream that "literally flowed through the house between dining and living spaces" in Noel Lane's AB Gibbs House, he characteristically inflicted doses of reality and wit with his portrayal of the public's understanding of contemporary architecture as being: "simply another thing to keep clean." This conference, dangerously close, given the involvement of too many of its participants in the era under examination, proposes to examine New Zealand's architecture in the 1990s - a decade, which began with the fervour of a sesqui-centennial and a major economic recession (1991-92), and ended with the unrequited fear of Ken the Cockroach, New Zealand's face of the millennium bug.