Tuesday 27th February 2007. National Park to Napier.

Up and off and we head by bus to Napier, the Art Deco Capital of the World.

Our journey takes us along the shores of Lake Taupo where you can judge the power of the Taupo eruption by the size of the lake. This is the largest body of fresh water in Australasia and covers an area the size of Singapore. Sitting at the heart of a dual world heritage site that includes Tongariro National Park and the volcanoes of Mt Tongariro, Mt Ruapehu and Mt Ngauruhoe (which was Mt Doom in the movie of The Lord of the Rings); the volcanic blast that created this lake is said to have been so huge it cast a haze over China.

In Napier we are staying at the Masonic Hotel which is a wonderful building with quite a history.

The original Masonic Hotel was established on the site on September 14th 1861 only to suffer its first mishap some 35 years later when it was destroyed by fire on May 23rd 1896. The hotel was subsequently re-built in an even grander fashion and in 1897 it became Hawke’s Bay’s leading hotel. Yet it was to be destroyed again in the earthquake and fire that destroyed the city of Napier on February 3rd 1931.

That Hawke’s Bay earthquake remains even today the greatest natural disaster to befall New Zealand and it led directly to the New Napier which was the art deco city of the southern hemisphere in the 1930’s. There were two main quakes some thirty seconds apart with the largest measuring some 7.9 on the Richter scale.

The bulk of the hotel’s devastation was caused not by the quake but by the fire that rampaged through the city for days after the earthquake…a story all too familiar across this city.

The 1932 Masonic was designed in the new Modernist style by the Wellington architect W.J Prouse as a simple symmetrical concrete structure that was enlivened only by its’ elaborate upper storey wooden pergola facing out to the sea and its’ conspicuous “MASONIC” in deco capitals of red leadlight in the canopy of the hotel entrance.

The exterior of the hotel remains today basically unchanged with the style that the Masonic reflects making it a favourite tourist attraction for visitors worldwide. One such visitor was HM The Queen who stayed at the hotel on her Coronation Tour when she visited the city. Today the Masonic is one of the most photographed buildings in New Zealand.

Napier’s fascinating townscape of the 1930’s has been described as being “born of earthquake, fire and courage”.

It was 10.46am and 46 seconds when the devastating earthquake that would see Napier rise like a Phoenix from the ashes struck. The fires that broke out soon afterwards destroyed most of the buildings that had survived the tremors and in all 162 people died. Yet by 1933 in a period of just under two years almost all of Napier had been rebuilt in the Modernist style we know today as Art Deco.

Napier was then the world’s newest and most modern city. What is unique about Napier is not just its huge collection of Art Deco treasures but the fact that all this construction happened at the height of the Great Depression when the construction industry worldwide had effectively closed down.

Since most of the buildings that survived the quake had been built in the preceding ten years Napier offers a unique window on early twentieth century design. There is Art Nouveau; Spanish Mission Style; the influence of the Chicago and Prairie Schools; Beaux Arts; Stripped Classical (take a chainsaw down a classical building and this is what you get. You still have the impression of strength and might but at a far lower cost); and the influence of New Zealand’s Maori history alongside Art Deco with the spirit that epitomises the Jazz Age.

This Jazz Age in itself is an interesting study of human behaviour in a period when we had had the war that would end all war’s and when there was a new optimism about the future. It was the age of the machine and man’s ingenuity to fly, to drive, to go faster and further than ever before…and yet a whole generation were damned never to share in this hedonistic time which was again to come crashing back to the horrors of reality first with the Great Depression and then in the bloodbath that was World War II.

Art Deco is quite simply the name given to the decorative style that began gestating around 1905 and burst onto the world scene as a result of the International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925.

Scientific and technological developments meant speed, with this power conveyed in the lightening flashes symbolic of Art Deco. Growing independence for women and the working classes brought an optimism symbolised by dancing figurines and most famously the rising sun. Art Deco focused on the overthrow of old conventions from the leaping deer and greyhounds that reflected the power of the machine to the overall use of geometric pattern and shape.

In New Zealand, as elsewhere, there is extensive use of ancient cultural symbolism such as Mayan and Aztec designs. Egyptian motifs are the most prevalent (remember it was in 1922 that Tutankahmen’s tomb was discovered). That said some architects did make use of Maori designs for ornamentation.

Today I learn a lot more about Ziggurat, that stepped silhouette associated with the skyscrapers of New York that allowed for sunlight to reach the streets below. In fact so concerned were authorities in New York City with the growing numbers of skyscrapers that in 1916 the city passed a bye-law enforcing Ziggurat in construction design. Buildings were getting too close and drowning out light and air in the streets below. Yes you could build up but only so far and then you had to move in and go up again and so on.

You could spend forever describing the wonders of Napier and so I will be concentrating on only a few buildings. As a group we take a self-guided walking tour of the Central Business District and stop for lunch at the Cri.

We begin our tour at The Soundshell which remains a focus for outdoor entertainment here on Marine Parade (with its stately Norfolk pines). Across the road in-front of our hotel stands a very interesting memorial. Originally erected in 1906 the British-South African War Memorial was relocated here in 1947 after the soldier’s head, which had been blown off in the earthquake, was rediscovered (1938) and reinstated.

Nearby you also find a Cannon that was cast at the Carron Foundry in Scotland in 1813. Stationed in India until 1840 these cannons were brought to New Zealand and placed with other guns in ports that had volunteer reserves (as a Royal Naval Reserve Officer such history fascinates me). This cannon arrived in Napier around 1890.

Buildings here have a real sense of history. I discovered for example that the Municipal Theatre, which had the largest stage in Australasia, had played hosts to such greats as Sir Harry Lauder.

The redevelopment of the town was highly inventive. A great deal of death had arisen with the collapse of verandahs. The verandah is a common feature in Australia and New Zealand and they were used on shop fronts basically to protect merchandise from the sun. The New Napier would be built low with the desire being to prevent the devastation that dense and high rise building collapse can cause.

As a result Napier was ahead of the rest of the world with its underground services. All power and telephone lines were buried, a practice common from the 1970’s that was almost unheard of at this time. Street names were set into concrete slabs set in the footpath. The opportunity was taken to improve road safety with wider streets and splayed buildings allowing for greater visibility for car drivers; service lanes were also created in the centre of blocks to allow businesses to be serviced from the rear.

In the late afternoon Corinna, Judy and I head off on a vintage car journey around Napier in a 1934 Red Buick. The drive took in Marine Parade driving around Napier Hill (the original main residential district until the earthquake raised the land and filled in the inland lakes that were once characteristic of the city) passing the port to historic Ahuriri and a stop at the stunning National Tobacco Company building.

Presently owned by British American Tobacco, this building was constructed by Harry Faulknor and designed by that advocate of Frank Lloyd Wright, J.A Louis Hay. This is the building that was known from 1954 until 2001 as the Rothmans Building.

The history of the company is as fascinating as the history of the building. The founder Gerhard Husheer was a German immigrant who worked in the tobacco industry from age 16 and emigrated to New Zealand from South Africa with his family in 1911. His initial experimentation with the industry was at Paki Paki south of Hastings but he found the area around Nelson to be better suited to tobacco production. Preferring to live in Napier he established his factory there. The New Zealand Tobacco Company was formed in Napier in 1913 but as a result of World War I (the war that changed the face of the world for ever) control was wrestled from him by his fellow directors due to his German roots.

He started again in 1920 at Riverhead, near Auckland and founded the National Tobacco Company in 1923. Within a three-year period he had bought out New Zealand Tobacco and moved back to Napier. The company was bought out by Rothmans of Pall Mall in 1954 and again in 1999 when Rothmans merged with British American Tobacco.

J A Louis Hay was arguably the most influential architect in the New Napier. A fascinating character he left New Zealand only once in his life when he made a short trip to Australia. Born in 1881 in Akaroa he moved to Napier as a young boy and it was in the city that he worked for his entire career.

Despite this isolation he was heavily influenced by some of the greatest architects of all time. He is best known as a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, but he also drew from the Greene Brothers and the English arts and crafts movement, the Scot Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Italian Raimondo D’Aronco.

Husheer was a patron of Hay and retained him in a number of projects including the remodelling of his four houses. In 1926 Hay designed the National Tobacco Company’s factory buildings in the horizontally banded brickwork used by Frank Lloyd Wright in buildings such as the Martin House (1902-4) the Robie House (1908) and the Johnson Wax Building (1936-9)…all of which I have investigated in my American hobby of touring Frank Lloyd Wright masterpieces. In the earthquake the brick outer walls of the factory collapsed but the internal structure remained intact and so the factory continued in production with little disruption.

During the Depression the National Tobacco Company was little affected. It did not produce cigarettes but rather pipe and cigarette tobacco and during the slump people would rather roll their own than quit. Husheer thus was able to spend lavishly on the post earthquake administration building and so he sent back Hay’s original sketches for a domestic style building with the request to make things more extravagant. With the result this is Napier’s most sumptuous building. No expense was spared. For example, some of the stucco was sculpted by hand in contrast to the practise of cement casting.

Roses, sometimes combined with fruit are a theme of the building on spandrel panels, exterior lamps, the internal dome, the arch and the column capitals. Fruit even appeared across the street on one of the bond stores that is seen by everyone leaving the administration building. The elaborate Art Deco wooden doors were the work of Hastings craftsman Walter Marquand and cost £600, a huge sum at the height of the depression. The foyer dado is made of marble and there was extensive use of leadlighting.

The actual form of the building is simple in stark contrast to its elaborate ornamentation. The ‘arch in a square’ form is a technique frequently used by Louis Sullivan and here we see an Art Deco sunburst with Art Nouveau tendrils tipped with roses.

Despite the fact that Hay often borrowed forms and decorative motifs from the Chicago architects, on the Tobacco Company Building he departed quite deliberately from Wright’s formalised philosophy opting for very naturalistic ornamentation with its grapevines and roses.

Our tour then takes in the suburban splendour of Marewa, but the highlight was the Edwardian Hawke’s Bay Club which even today remains a true gentleman’s club.

I loved the Spirit of Napier statue which commemorates the revitalisation and spirit of the city as well as the role of women…Napier destroyed by earthquake and fire 1931, rebuilt with vision!!

Back to the Masonic for cocktails on the terrace and then next stop is the Century Cinema to see Little Miss Sunshine with Judy, Corinna, Trish, Laura and Maureen. This film had many messages but possibly the most important was the illustration that no-one in this busy family had taken enough time to find out either about their daughter or more disturbingly what she was getting up too.

Dinner is at Breakers before we head into Rosie O’Grady’s where my pre-birthday party gets into full swing. I do enjoy a wonderful massage from Wendy and my birthday drink is something called a Devil’s Handshake.