Carolyn Joy Hill & Bill McKay. (2018). Binding Significance: Reflections on the Demolition of the Aniwaniwa Visitor Centre, Te Urewera. Fabrications, 28:2, 235-255, DOI: 10.1080/10331867.2018.1459355
This paper, co-authored with Bill McKay, reflects on the demolition of the Aniwaniwa Visitor Centre in Te Urewera. In it we suggest that other possibilities exist for buildings beyond “safeguarding” and “preservation” or demolition in a post-Treaty settlement milieu.
Figure source: © Jim Simmons, June 2011. Used with permission.
In September 2016, following years of political controversy and uncertainty, the Aniwaniwa Visitor Centre at Lake Waikaremoana in Te Urewera was demolished. Designed by the renowned Māori architect John Scott and commissioned by Te Urewera National Park Board, the building was opened in 1976 as the park’s headquarters. The building elicited a range of responses from its outset, from being considered a highly significant work of bicultural architecture to being seen as a symbol of cultural imperialism in Te Urewera.
This paper seeks to reflect on the loss of the Aniwaniwa Visitor Centre in light of the socio-political history of the iwi (tribal group) Ngāi Tūhoe, with whom Te Urewera is inseparably tied. It explores several earlier incidents in Te Urewera that can be seen as framing the context of the demolition, including the “theft” and subsequent return of the artist Colin McCahon’s mural from the visitor centre in 1997 and the police raid on the town of Ruatoki in 2007.
We argue that attempts to save the visitor centre through architectural discussion alone were unsuccessful due to the Eurocentric boundaries placed on the building’s significance. Rather, we suggest that its redemption was only ever possible through non-Tūhoe people actively acknowledging and engaging with utu and ritena, the tikanga Māori (customary) requirements for balance between people and place. The building, like McCahon’s mural, held the possibility of entering the “third space,” the contested and continually renewing interface of Māori–Pākehā culture. This space of in-between invites new explorations of architectural significance that enmesh multiple and contradictory meanings and may require new malleability in conservation. Rather than “safeguarding” our heritage we need to look to genuine bicultural partnership, a process that is never finished and behind us but a living reality that is contestable and able to be re-scribed.
The full paper can be found here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/h4yRMyJB3yw6XQaHpD6y/full
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