Abstract:
Since the beginning of the colonisation of New Zealand, the continual
need for shelter against the power of an unforgiving landscape has
led to an unrivalled proliferation of rudimentary back-country huts
throughout the country’s interior. In stark contrast to the coverage
received by New Zealand’s much vaunted bach, and the work of the
Group Architects, our comparatively infrequent encounters with backcountry
huts, and the issue of accessibility, have allowed the type to
slip under the radar of architectural discourse concerning the continued
search for an authentic architectural identity.
The Architecture of Nowhere looks at how the largely overlooked
example of the rudimentary back-country hut can be examined as an
historical source for the development of a national architectural identity
in New Zealand. Beginning with an historical overview of the idea of
the primitive hut read through the lens of Joseph Rykwert’s On Adam’s
House in Paradise and its oneiric significance in Gaston Bachelard’s
Poetics of Space, this research examines the hut as the site of the origin
of architecture, endemic to all cultures and at the intersection of the
natural-technological divide.
The thesis examines specific attempts at defining ‘New Zealand’
architecture with recourse to the idea of the primitive hut before
examining the utopian novel Erewhon by Samuel Butler as a framework
for understanding the role of the back-country hut as ‘the architecture
of nowhere’. The back-country hut is dissected in two ways. The first of
these is in terms of its important contribution as a site of production for
influential utopian literature in the case of Samuel Butler’s experience
in the Canterbury high country. Second, the hut is examined in relation
to Butler’s conception of mechanical evolution developed in Erewhon.
This provides a means to understand and place the significance of the
back-country hut within contemporary discourse surrounding national
architectural identity.
