Q1: You have been looking at Claude Megson houses and thinking about him for many years. Why the interest?
Megson taught generations architecture at University of Auckland, and I took various mandatory papers with him in my first student years. His lectures on design were truly monumental and, in contrast to most of the staff there at the time, when critical theory was at its peak, he could back up his positions with a significant body of built work. However, although he used his own houses to illustrate his philosophy, he was extremely guarded about how he created his extraordinary forms. So, immediately, there were these paradoxes within his oeuvre which, if one could get past the initial frustrations, made it remarkably interesting. The main frustration was that it proved difficult then to see the work itself with any independence of mind, because of his huge, domineering public persona, which flattened any sort of critical perspective that was not aligned with his own. The first house I visited was Claude’s own in St Heliers, tailgating a tour of students from one of his design studios at a time when he was becoming ill with cancer. So clearly, I had acquired some curiosity to see his work in the flesh. A year after his death, which I still remember being this shocking event, I was a final year student at the University of Auckland School of Architecture and looking for a major thesis subject. The truth was that among my peers, and especially among the staff, Megson was an incredibly unfashionable subject. He had bruised a lot of people. Thankfully, Professor Peter Bartlett, a person of huge intellect, whom I really respected, took me aside and said, ‘why don’t you look at Claude, not the man, but the work.’ As I think most people who have visited one of his houses will attest to, his architecture can be particularly affecting, and his own house had obviously left a mark on me. It is that line from Le Corbusier, that ‘the business of architecture is to establish emotional relationships by means of raw materials.’ Trying to pin down ‘how’ he did that was the basis of my student thesis. Even now, I am still trying to figure it out. His work, for any number of reasons, is both rewarding and far from easy.
Q2: You write that his star shone as brightly as any New Zealand architect’s in the 1970s and yet to many people he is an unknown name these days. What drove that fall into relative obscurity?
The reality of most people’s careers is that, due to a combination of luck, ambition and talent, one might attain a degree of recognition, or better still, relevance in one’s own life. However often that moment in the spotlight is fleeting. It is not unusual for artists and architects to fall into relative or even total obscurity after they die and then gradually attract a revival of interest a generation later, which is around two decades. This is precisely what happened with Megson. He died in 1994 and the revival of interest starts in the mid-2010s. However, the mechanism for his fall into obscurity starts at least a decade before his death, in the 1980s. Megson’s peers at the school embraced postmodernism with enthusiasm, from today’s viewpoint, with a little too much enthusiasm and he did not. His professed antipathy to postmodernism contributed to a huge drop off of interest in his work during that period — it simply was no longer where the gravitational pull was. Yet, I also came to see, in authoring this book, that Megson’s response to postmodernism was more nuanced than I had first understood. During the 1980s his desire to remain part of the active conversation comes up against his modernist convictions and also against his classical training as a young man employed at Gummer and Ford. This results in some intriguing and wildly ambitious schemes, most of which, however, sadly remained on the drawing board.
Q3: This book has been a detective hunt. When you started out, how many houses did you know about and how did you locate the rest?
The second Megson house I visited after his own, or rather the first when I began the process of actively trying to track them down, was the Todd House, Ramarama, south of Auckland. It had the most stunning landscaping around this rambling set of farm buildings, cottages really, and was a very romantic introduction to Megson. The Todds were close friends of Claude, and they told me about other houses I should visit, although they did not have too many contact details. So, I headed off to the Auckland Public Library and searched through the electoral roll to find what I hoped would prove to be the right addresses. I would write and wait for a response. And universally, the owners wrote back and said, ‘no one has visited for decades, come on over.’ That owner might know the possible whereabouts of another house and on the journey went, eventually leading me to meet clients, relatives, friends, employees and even contractors. That concentrated study of Megson stopped around the mid-1970s. This was a purely arbitrary point in time which I needed to make for the sake of my thesis, or I would never have submitted anything on time. But I have always known there was a sizeable gap in my knowledge of his later career, which meant that when starting this book I needed to conduct a huge amount of new research to complete an overview. The major issue was I needed to figure out how to do that now from the other side of the world. In this I was incredibly fortunate, as a friend, Chad McMan, agreed to go into the Architecture Archive in 2017 and photograph every single Megson drawing, of which there are well over a thousand. The process took him months. That meant I could work with his entire archive and study it in depth. The book could never have happened without his efforts. The other, earlier key element of good fortune was finding Jackie Meiring. We produced a small book on five Megson houses in 2016, and I came back to New Zealand and worked with her on the photo shoots. A key aim was to show people that the work was exciting, edgy, sculptural, that Megson was never some dowdy subject from a black and white era but remained contemporary, and at the risk of sounding superficial, that he made really cool work. I had thought that small book would be it and would satisfy my urge to get people looking at Megson again, but then I would find out about another house and say to Jackie, ‘could you go take a look?’ So, for around the next eight years or so, we started to build this large photographic archive on his architecture, growing to thousands of photos. It genuinely seemed we had no end goal in sight. It just felt like a good thing to do, it was enjoyable, and in the back of my mind I was thinking, ‘well, these owners and maybe even these houses, won’t be around forever.’ Eventually, a way to bring this all together started to take shape in my mind. I came back to New Zealand early 2024, made a pitch to Nicola, Massey University Press said ‘yes’, and the research and photography sped up from there.
Q4: If you could only have ten words to describe a typical Megson house, what would they be?
If I could have summarised it in ten words, I might not have needed to write forty thousand in this book! However, Peter Bartlet’s phrase ‘a sublime amplified modernism’ is one I like and often return to.
Q5: His houses often drove their owners mad and yet they adored living in them. Can you explain?
Sometimes, straight out beauty overrides practicality. That may not prove a great formula for professional success and risks disregarding other obligations an architect should have. However, it is also true, and certainly true of Megson’s hero architect, Frank Lloyd Wright; one thinks of his hanging paintings on inclined walls on a ramp at the Guggenheim. As a way to view art it is questionable, but as an architectural experience it is totally memorable. There are moments when one stands in a Megson house and is rendered dumbstruck by the sculptural imagination, the level of control, the way that these complex forms snap into serenity. One just marvels at the sheer beauty of the forms he created, forms which can at first appear awkward and ungainly, and wonder about the imagination behind them.
Q6: What, in your view, is his greatest house?
That is a tough question, as he explored different artistic goals in different houses. The house I most wish existed today, and his most ambitious in terms of construction, was the house he designed for Michael and Christine Hill in Whangarei before it burnt down in 1977. The surviving drawing set is one of the highlights of his archive. One of the book’s aims is to open this archive up to the reader. Massey’s book on Rewi Thompson lead the way, in a sense, showing that you can put a lot of architectural drawings in front of a wider audience without them coming across as arcane, or suitable for specialists only. That’s fundamentally because the creativity, passion, as well as intellect, springs from the sheet. Hopefully, this book builds on that earlier publication, though I also wanted it to have a quite different feel and voice.
Q7: In recent times, when his houses come up for sale real estate agents are keen to attach the Megson name to their marketing plans. Is a reassessment underway?
A reassessment among architects has been underway for around a decade, and that has filtered into the wider public psyche. I once felt that having real estate agents notice his name was a good thing that might aid protection of his work. Now, I am less certain. For instance, Megson’s incredible Wong House, Remuera was advertised as a knock down development opportunity in 2018 and saved despite the house’s marketing. His Jopling House, St Heliers, received better publicity when put up for sale in 2021, but that did not stop the new owner demolishing it immediately. In Auckland, the land and the view it offers are the assets. The house is more like a tenant on that land. It might be naive to think that real estate interest might offer long term hope of preservation. That is one reason to have authored this book. New Zealanders have this fantastic architectural history, and it is good to reaffirm that regularly in different forums, especially forums that can reach a lot of people.
Q8: He was driven and uncompromising — usually, it would seem, to a fault. But what was the end result of that conviction?
Well, as a profession, architecture attracts a fair few who are in little mood for compromise, so that alone might not be sufficient to distinguish Megson. It meant he built less than his peers but then again, to my mind, from the perspective of someone practicing in England, I would say he built a lot. In any case, measuring any career by volume alone is a poor judge of quality. If a great architectural career might have only six standout buildings, then using that yardstick, Megson’s was exceptional. What he did build was of an exceedingly high design standard, extremely innovative, uncompromising as you say and sometimes shockingly different, almost indifferent to its suburban setting. I would argue he suffered professionally over the longer term by not being part of the professional club. As I write in the book he was too competitive to be collegiate. He did not play the game well. Beyond the bombast, he was a very private and possibly insecure man. Architects benefit from mutual support, they give awards to each other, and the public looks on and takes note. But most of Megson’s close friends came from outside of the profession, which I think, barring notable exceptions, did not do all that much to support him when his career suffered a downturn in the 1980s. It still seems a huge lacuna, one could even suggest a deliberate slight, that Megson has never been awarded an NZIA Gold Medal. That is something one hopes the profession finds a way to put right one day soon.
Q9: If you could live in one of his houses, which would it be and why?
It is tricky for me to single out one building. However, I have always thought that the Norris House from the mid-1970s to be one of his most liveable houses. The room sizes are more relaxed, spread out and generous than found in many of his interiors. The flow through the house is so well organised, theatrical, yet seemingly effortless. It stands as the culmination of an especially strong body of work during the earlier part of that decade. That is one of the most interesting things about Claude Megson. He could have reached a level of attainment such as the Norris House, decided to throttle back and churn out variations on it for the rest of his career. If you look at many architects, that appears something of an ideal — the effort, followed by the payout. Yet Megson never took the easy path. No sooner had he reached some milestone he was off again, pushing himself ever onwards. Simultaneously, there is this tremendous consistency to the work in terms of core philosophy, aims and design process. It is that duality, between integrity and searching right to the end which makes him such a significant figure.
Q10: What do you hope this book will achieve?
I hope the book will encourage people to have a greater understanding of his whole career. To date, the latter half of his career has remained near invisible. Yet there are amazing stories in that period like Lifegate Trust, which I admit to knowing little about until recently. I discovered it had been part-built by searching Hunua from Google Earth and trying to relate the landforms to his site drawings. The 80s and 90s was the period where I had to undertake the greatest amount of new research, and that was good motivation. As with any writing or research project, what you hope for is to make new discoveries, and sometimes you hit gold. I want the book to be something that can be read in a linear fashion about a career arc, so there’s a narrative aspect to it, but also one can dip into it at any point, dwell with a photo or drawing, and hopefully gain a personal insight from a few minutes of concentration. That was another reason to go back and document as much as possible anew with Jackie. Contemporary images speak more powerfully than words ever can. Added to which are his extraordinary drawings. My intention is that image, drawing and text combine to bounce ideas off one another. While I want the book to demystify aspects of his work and provide useful tools for approaching it, my big hope that it is not viewed as the last word on Megson but instead encourages other, particularly younger, readers to look more closely at him and perhaps come up with completely different ideas about him. His architecture will only live on into the future if it survives as something living and relevant to the present day.
