Rangiatea revisited

Abstract

This essay, the revised text of a lecture by Sarah Treadwell, offers a thoughtful re-reading of Rangiatea, the Maori church built at Otaki between 1848 and 1851 by local iwi, Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa, Te Ati Awa, and rebuilt after the devastating fire of 1995. The subject of Treadwell's doctoral thesis, this church continues to preoccupy the author, who has used our invitation as the occasion to rethink how the building functions both as a physical architecture and as a meaning system that operates across the realms of built form and visual/textual representation. Her conclusions offer a refreshing new approach to our built heritage that sees architecture less in terms of the preservation of singular structures serving specific and fixed purposes than as a fluid process of reinvention and remaking.