Outside the Crazy House, New Zealand Centennial Exhibition, Wellington

Abstract

Writing on public buildings for the war time publication series Making New Zealand, Paul Pascoe described the Centennial Exhibition at Rongotai, Wellington, as displaying the degree of modernity that was then generally accepted and approved of by New Zealanders. An accompanying photograph (in all probability selected for inclusion by Pascoe's brother, John) shows Edmund Anscombe's Moderne tower building, and it is noted in the caption that the exhibition drew favourable comment from overseas visitors. At a moment in New Zealandʹs history when the heat of World War was once more accelerating, Anscombeʹs restrained stream‐lined modernism was met with approval. But not excitement. That reaction was reserved for Playland, the collection of amusement park attractions operating on the periphery of the exhibition grounds, and which, for many, offered the most compelling argument for attending. Of the varied offerings in Playland, the most popular attraction was The Crazy House where visitors were promised to encounter ‐ without warning! – innumerable diversions and never‐ending sources of mirth‐making. The Crazy House, like all elements of the Centennial Exhibition, was temporary, but unlike the latter, very little documentary of it remains. The few photographs of it present a modest façade with little hint of mirth, and of the interior of we have no descriptions at all. With reference to historic developments in entertainment attractions, this paper assembles what little information we have of The Crazy House to make a case for its significance as a defining development in New Zealand architecture. Just as the academic assurances of the Exhibition buildings would become a swansong to architectural stylism, The Crazy House would signal the appearance of demands on architecture that it now compete in an emergent field of international architecture called "popular entertainment.ʺ