Argument swirls about its future. Should it be demolished, as the bishop and many of her congregation prefer, and replaced by quake-proof modernity? Should it be repaired, as a vocal group of citizens demand, for this building is not just a church for the faithful, but a civic icon? Should it be built to its original design, as a prominent city architect has suggested, which was not for a church of stone, but for a church of Gothic design rendered in timber, as were many churches in this forested country? To stand in a New Zealand church is most often to be surrounded not by masonry but by the amber gleam of totara. The churches feel flyaway, they creak and shimmy in high winds and when you look up into the rafters it is like looking up into an upturned boat, clinker built. And like a boat, in a quake they ride the wave. They are suited to this country.
The argument over the cathedral has been brutal, culminating in an appeal to the High Court challenging the Anglican Church’s right to demolish and to use an insurance payout to construct a temporary cathedral.
That structure has been built a couple of blocks to the east. It’s the work of Shigeru Ban, the Japanese architect who has designed such notable buildings as the Pompidou Centre in Metz. I’ve never visited this, but in the photographs it looks amazing: a curvilinear profile modelled on a mandarin’s hat, its major feature an hypnotic, honeycombed timber ceiling.
Ban has also made something of a specialty of designing temporary, lightweight structures in recyclable materials for areas afflicted by disaster: paper-log houses in Kobe, with beer crate foundations and tented roofs, shelters of locally available compressed earth block in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, a paper concert hall in Italy’s musical and artistic city of L’Aquila.
For Christchurch, Ban designed, pro bono, a cardboard cathedral, using eight of the shipping containers that have become a signature of the post-quake city, recycled as pop-up shops, offices, protective walls stacked three deep before teetering façades, forming a barrier along the foot of a crumbling cliff face, their functional metal covered with art in a bid to lift the spirits.
They make an apt basis for a temporary cathedral, coupled with laminated timber, concrete and 320 cardboard tubes to create a steeply pitched A-frame space. Seven hundred people can be accommodated seated in rows of simple, stackable chairs fashioned to Ban’s own L-unit design.
In the event, the cardboard tubes proved more ornament than function, for it was not possible to source tubes of sufficient size locally. But they are threaded over timber and steel beams to form a ribbed vault. Light filters through the gaps from a polycarbonate roof overhead and there is a cardboard tube cross above the altar and the whole effect is lightweight and airy, like a tent. In fact, in profile, it looks remarkably like Sydney Scroggs’s raupo and canvas whare, which once stood on the riverbank not far away.
So perhaps Ban has caught something of the spirit of this place, with our knock-down, move-along style, and that I suppose is what cathedrals are designed to do: to act as metaphors. They are great lanterns, like Ely glowing above the rushes and reeds of the swamps that first surrounded it. Or ships, or arks, or realisations in stone of celestial harmony.
Even in ruin, they have the power to express some truth, as in that poem we studied at school: the one where the poet is seated on a hillside looking over the remains of a great monastic foundation. For four centuries it had dominated this region until that beefy pragmatist, Henry VIII, handed it to one of his mates, the Earl of Worcester, a thug, indifferent to beauty, who saw simply profit. He tore off the roof for its lead and left it to rot, and centuries later, Wordsworth comes along and sees in the ruins something that prompts him to consider sensations
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart …
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.
Seated above destruction he thinks about human existence and how it swiftly passes, until with
… an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
There is poetry in ruins, sometimes a greater poetry than a building ever possessed in life. There’s that building at the centre of the Hiroshima Peace Park, for example, that began life as a prefectural trade hall in 1915 designed to display the city’s products: armaments, as it happened, that same weaponry that killed and maimed in Manchuria and Burma and Guadalcanal. In its ruined state, twisted among the flowerbeds, that hall takes on a greater nobility.
Whole and untouched, the cathedral in the Square, the old cathedral, spoke of beauty and the transcendent, but also of racial dispossession, spiritual colonisation, sectarianism and petty provincial snobberies and a whole raft of human shortcomings. In its ruined state, however, it rises above all this. It speaks of Earth’s power and our insecure place in the great scheme of things. A flensed whale, it anchors the centre of the city effortlessly, delivering a sermon in stones.
I would leave it just as it is, as a memorial. Build a new cathedral next door, for there is plenty of room for two in this bare, cleared space. In the meantime, a few hundred metres away to the east, Ban’s structure fills its role blending religious and public function, the buzz of visitors, the click of cameras, the organist trying out something complicated on a temporary keyboard. Not beautiful, exactly — there is something unappealing in those beige drapes over industrial containers, a whiff of the crematorium curtains drawn over the flare of the furnace — but serviceable.
The structure borrows some of its emotional and spiritual power from its proximity to a bare site across the road where 115 people died in circumstances that can barely be contemplated. Their deaths in the collapse of the CTV building render this place tapu. Just as the expanse of bare moorland at Culloden is hallowed ground, or those pitted fields in northern France, the site requires no signage or elaborate explanation to establish that it is separate from the surrounding landscape. Singled out by virtue of the suffering endured there. Instinctively, we know that such places demand reverence.
The CTV site was cleared of rubble, and then for three years, it was abandoned. The blueprint makes no mention whatever of a memorial. CERA has no time for the past, only the glittery future. The site remained a scrubby, untended wasteland of puddled gravel roughly fenced off behind wire cordons. People visited nevertheless. They made their way there, through the ruined city, as soon as it was possible to do so and hung flowers on the wires. They pinned on poems and messages on pieces of torn paper. But the site stayed desolate through two anniversaries, until Lianne Dalziel’s new council was able to persuade Mr Brownlee that something better was required. Under pressure, just before the third anniversary of the February quake, he conceded that ‘visitors might find it disrespectful’ and permitted a tidy-up. Turf was rolled over the gravel, planter boxes placed about the perimeter and the wire cordons removed.
On another bare site across the road stand 185 white chairs lined up in rows — office chairs, kitchen chairs, lounge chairs, a wheelchair, a baby stroller, each seat a memory of someone who died in the city. It’s an installation by a local artist, Peter Majendie, also intended to be temporary when it was installed in 2012, but still here, facing the rear wall of the cathedral and the altar, like an unseen congregation in the open air of the city. The traffic grinds by, heading north on Madras Street. The chairs stay in place, despite occasional vandalism, because we have a collective memory and it demands a focus. In this shifting and temporary universe, we have an urge to pay our respects.
In time, there will be a memorial. CERA plans to erect one, but not here by the site of the CTV building. It will be on the other side of the city, in the Riverbank Precinct, and will remember all those who died throughout the city as well as acknowledging those who took part in the rescue operation. This will happen, but not yet, and while we wait, this area, with its brave marigolds in planters and its te
mporary cathedral and its chairs, is the quiet centre of a city dedicated to action. For in this revised version of Christchurch, cathedrals, whether temporary or permanent, are not a primary focus. The buildings that will overwhelm them utterly, signalling supremacy in their sheer bulk, are buildings dedicated to other faiths: a convention centre devoted to that cargo cult, tourism, and a stadium for the sacred rituals of rugby.
ON CERA’S PLAN FOR THE CITY the site of Ban’s temporary cathedral is no more than a tiny nick in the north-western corner of a vast rectangle. That rectangle is to be the new rugby stadium, ‘showpiece’ of the entire blueprint, replacement for the stadium that, cracked and quake damaged, had occupied a site on the light-industrial periphery since it began life as a cricket ground, Lancaster Park, in 1881.
Its successor, a temporary stadium across the city in Addington, was the first public building to go up following the February 2011 quake: the priority for recovery, driven on at furious pace, workers toiling night and day in another of those 100-day dashes, in order to provide a venue for the Super Rugby kick-off in 2012.
Using materials recycled from around the country, it took shape while the aftershocks were still rattling through. Turf and AV screens came from the old stadium, temporary seating from Auckland’s Eden Park, lighting towers from Dunedin’s redundant Carisbrook. The budget blew out, despite the economies, to $30 million rather than the original $20 million. Central government gave $28 million, the city council $1 million, plus the land in Addington, and the remainder came from a $5 million loan drawn from the donations of the public to the Canterbury Earthquake Appeal Trust. The dollars stuffed in collecting boxes, the gifts from expats overseas, the moneys gifted to the city by wellwishers around the country, like my daughter in Wellington, who assumed the fund would be going to buy hotties and warm clothing for kids in damaged, damp houses.
The grand and permanent showpiece is to be co-funded by the government, who have promised $37 million from the country’s taxpayers, and by the city council, who have promised $253 million, drawn from insurance payouts, rates and perhaps, as central government repeatedly suggests, from the sale of its assets: the city’s airport, public transport and waste treatment operations, activities best handled, in the government’s opinion, by private enterprise. Leaked estimates put the eventual price of the stadium at more than $509 million.
Its walls will tower over the temporary cathedral and the site of the CTV building. Its lighting towers will flare in the night sky above leafy Latimer Square, now transformed from Victorian open space to contemporary ‘fan zone’. To the south, on Madras Street, stands one of the city’s few undamaged Edwardian buildings, the property of one of New Zealand’s leading fashion designers. It is to be demolished to make way for the stadium, or perhaps it might be incorporated into the façade as a funky entrance to the arena.
There could be no more perfect metaphor for the quiet, unstated conflict that divides this country in two: the one we learned about in the school playground, where the tough kids ganged up to enforce their way and the arty kids had to find smart ways of surviving. It’s the divide that ripped into the open in 1981, when my tribe were wearing motorcycle helmets because the cops went for your head and we were marching around New Zealand cities chanting, ‘One, two, three, four, we don’t want your racist tour!’ and we all knew exactly which side we were on. I’ve asked my daughter, who was eight at the time, if she remembers the Springbok Tour, and she says yes: she remembers ‘those guys outside the RSA spitting at us’. Of such things are lifelong political allegiances made.
A rugby stadium in New Zealand is not neutral. It is a long way from some Platonic ideal of a simple track of 600 running feet. It retains instead some of the political gloss those canny Roman emperors spotted in the potential of the stadium to divert the populace from the facts of their actual disempowerment, until Christian rulers consigned diversion to the suburbs and placed God in his cathedral at the centre. Where they stayed until the stadium returned to entertain the restive masses in grim industrial towns. Now, worldwide, they are huge: North Korea has one that seats 150,000, Salt Lake City, 120,000. And they are expensive. The MetLife in New York opened in 2008 and cost $1.6 billion. Wembley was refitted in 2007 at a cost of $1.25 billion.
New Zealand is a smaller place, but relative to the size of the population we do our best to keep up. In Dunedin, a small cabal has managed to leave its mark on the landscape with a stadium. Built to replace historic Carisbrook, it’s the first thing you notice as you enter the city from the north, rising like a white bubble on the foreshore, larger than the buildings of the university nearby, the hospital, the commercial centre. Its construction made no sense economically; the budget blew out almost immediately from $198 to $224.4 million, and it has registered a loss every year — $4.31 million, for example, in 2012 — starving other civic projects of funding and saddling ratepayers with forty years of debt. And for what? A handful of rugby matches and an Elton John concert for which the city actually footed the bill.
But like its bigger brothers elsewhere, Dunedin’s stadium fills its role perfectly as the architectural demonstration of the power of corporatised sport, that contemporary ‘industry’ where teams are highly paid entertainers wearing uniforms sponsored by multi-national companies with greater turnover than nation states, playing in structures whose names change as rapidly as their owners can trade them.
I don’t trust stadiums. Too big. Too overtly designed to foster tribalism and the loss of any sensation of individual identity. Too perfectly calibrated for howl and roar. They are male places, ideal for marshalling men in a simple substitute for war, win/lose. And readily adapted, as Speer’s Olympic stadium was adapted, for the real thing, those vast rallies where men roared as one before the incantatory oratory of fatherland and blood.
It’s a long stretch from Berlin to Christchurch, but I can’t help feeling that this current enthusiasm for the stadium is not simply because such structures are enormously profitable for their builders and a great means of siphoning money from the public purse. I stand on Madras Street looking at the wide stretch of gravel and wild flowers that is set aside for the city’s new stadium and it seems to me that this is the zeitgeist. This is the expression of the age, where millions of young men worldwide are unemployed, disenfranchised, restless. That is a lot of energy to contain and one way, as the Romans understood so well, is the tribal roar of the stadium.
But perhaps I am being too elaborate here. Perhaps this is no more than the pleasure of the game, the sound from furthest childhood where we half woke in the dead of night to the crowd roaring somewhere very far away, in South Africa or England and Winston McCarthy’s voice is rising to fever pitch and ‘Listen … it’s a goal!’
Perhaps it is no more than that.
CITIES ARE PLANNED AND DEVELOPED in accordance with a vision, and in this city, the vision, as articulated by Mr Brownlee, is that Christchurch is to become ‘the city of sport’.
The rugby stadium is not the only sporting venue to receive funding from the Canterbury Earthquake Appeal Trust. Canterbury Cricket also received $3 million towards the $9 million they required to build a pavilion, embankment and lighting towers in the city’s public park. The Hagley Oval was proposed as a ‘world-leading venue’ for cricket with a capacity for 20,000 spectators, to be built in time to host fixtures for the 2015 Cricket World Cup. In promoting the scheme, the CCDU promised that this ‘iconic facility … set in idyllic Hagley Park’ would be ‘a boost for business’.
Those opposing the scheme argued that the plan would create massive traffic congestion when those 20,000 spectators turned up to watch a cricket match just across the road from the city’s principal hospital at one of Christchurch’s busiest intersections. They said those lighting towers would intrude on a green and open space. But their principal objection was that this proposal was not the sweet village green described by its supporters, some genteel olde worlde vision of gentlemen at play, but a land grab: pub
lic space was being seized for private profit.
Other venues were suggested, but the international organisers of the Cup made it clear that they would stage fixtures in the city only if they could be held at Hagley. The other venues required too much work, or they had ‘poor broadcast appeal’. The Hagley Oval, with its rim of oaks and elms, would simply look better on the telly.
The council gave its consent. The Canterbury Earthquake Appeal Trust handed over the money as a loan to be waived in five years, so long as Canterbury Cricket agreed to make some free seats available ‘to people adversely affected by the quakes’. A giant cricket ball popped up on the pop-up mall.
We were ready. We were building it, and they would come.
A block away from the cricket oval is the site of the blueprint’s Metro Sports Facility, also promised, in the language of the overblown 80s, to be ‘world-class and a centre of excellence’. It will include eight indoor courts and a high-performance centre for coaching and a recreation centre and an aquatic centre with a competition pool, dive and leisure pools. It will cost $217 million. And it all sounds good.
And then you talk to a friend who spent months trying to retain a small central city public swimming pool. The Centennial Pool was open-air, buzzy with families at weekends, office workers at lunchtime, kids after school. It had a little gym, the busiest for its size in the country.
In 2011, the pool was damaged and closed till it could be repaired. The cost, it was estimated, would be $9.5 million. But in 2012, it found itself in the way of the Green Frame. Its insurance payout of $7.5 million was redirected by CERA to the Metro Sports Facility and the Centennial Pool was zoned for demolition. Simone was spokesperson for a small group that formed to try to save it, as small groups were forming elsewhere in the city: arguing with planning decisions, writing blogs and letters to the paper, making submissions, trying to influence the shape and style of the city in which they and their families were going to live.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 10
