"the need for beauty": New Zealand Interior and Landscape Architecture in the 1940s

Abstract

At the 1948 Arbor Day ceremony at Taita North School, Mr Polson "impressed upon the children the need for beauty in the world after the destruction and desolation of the recent war.ʺ As such he proposed that we could proactively make the world a better place. This decade in New Zealandʹs history of interior and landscape architectures was widely understood as a period of change and a desire to improve the world. Bill Toomath has described it as a time of "restrained transitional work,ʺ  while Philippa Mein Smith refers to "a sequence of symbolic moves [that] indicated that the Dominion had become a nation.ʺ