Content area
Full Text
Background
Auckland is a city of over a million people that covers more ground per head of population than anywhere else in the world. The city lies on an isthmus with harbours to the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean, and the whole city is punctuated by over 40 extinct volcanoes. Point England, the location of the imported houses that are the subject of this article, is part of the eastern suburb of Tamaki. The area was once the scene of an exercise in garden suburb and neighbourhood planning ideals and has a legacy of state houses, these being house designed by the government's own Housing Division for rent. When these house were first designed prior to WoId War ? they were better than anything available in the private sector.
The 500 timber single storey frame houses that form the subject of this article (Fig. 1), however, did not originate in New Zealand but were imported in kitset form from the UK in 1953. The houses had simple rectangular plan, and were timber framed, clad with horizontal painted weatherboarding, with a shallow pitched gable ended roof covered with painted corrugated steel roofing, and with double hung timber windows. In the living room these windows reached down to floor level, and part of each living room was projected forward from the main body of the house. The angle between the main house and this projection formed the main point of entry, up three or four steps from ground level. Each living room also had a masonry chimney with an open fire. Most houses had circulation through the living room to an internal corridor. This gave access to two or three bedrooms depending on house type, a dining kitchen, separate laundry with its own rear porch and steps to the backyard, bathroom with washbasin and bath, and separate toilet. Such a plan type and construction was far more typical of New Zealand than the UK at that time.
At a time when the UK was itself short of houses at the end of the war because of destruction, lack of building and the deterioration of the housing stock,1 and with the Conservative party being elected in 1951 on the promise to return the country to the...