Source: Radio New Zealand
New Zealand architect Claude Megson designed a series of experimental, individual, geometrically complex homes in Auckland in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
New Zealand born, and now London-based architect Giles Reid was taught by Megson at AUT, he told RNZ’s Nine to Noon .
While less well known than New Zealand architectural greats Ian Athfield, Peter Beavan and Roger Walker, Reid says his teacher left an extraordinary body of work, which he’s documented in a new book.
Claude Megson in the late 1980s.
Colleen Cooper
. And some of those divisions still exist to this day,” Reid says.
Reid has vivid memories of Megson’s lectures.
“I remember as a student sitting in this darkened lecture theatre, and this was very much the fashion of the day, you’d have these two carousels of slides and they would be going simultaneously, this incredible orchestration of how you present material. Often there was opera music playing in the background.”
Claude Megson Architect by Reid and Jackie Meiring revisits the career of the architect who died aged 57 in 1994.
Model for the Barr House, Meadowbank, Auckland.
Hayley Abbott
The research he did alongside collaborators architect Chad McMahon and Meiring revealed a prodigious body of work, says Reid.
“The speed with which he attacked problems, the material flowing out of him. He would get a commission from a client, or maybe half a commission, or just the chance, and suddenly he’d be just producing voluminous amounts of information.”
Sarah Cox, at the Auckland School of Architecture, made its collection of Megson’s drawings available, he says, all 1500 of them laboriously photographed by McMahon.
Rees Townhouses, Remuera 1974.
Colleen Cooper
“At some level, I still find it almost incomprehensible he could design some of these spaces.
“There’s a building such as the Barr House, which is a wonderful house in Meadowbank, quite Frank Lloyd Wright-ian, and it has vaguely hexagonal geometry over about seven levels and how that is controlled to the millimetre, it’s just the most extraordinary thing to walk through, to experience.”
Wong House, Remuera, 1963
Massey University Press
The geometrical complexity of Megson’s design brought with them problems, he says – primarily watertightness.
“There are arguments that he pushed the technology too far. There’s also arguments that some of his detailing didn’t catch up with the complexity of the shapes and forms he created.”
Megson produced “outstanding, outlandish, avant-garde, maverick houses”, Reid says.
“I think, there’s a huge place for that in the architecture profession. Not everything has to be safe and tidy.”
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
