The architecture book writer Claire McCall couldn’t put down.
If you’re a Claude Megson fan, as I am, you’ll turn off all notifications and head for a secret hideaway to deep dive into the information and images in this monograph that explores his life and work — carefully researched over 30 years. I’ve been fortunate to step inside three Megson-designed houses in my time. All are documented here in delicious detail by author Giles Reid (himself an architect) and artfully photographed by Jackie Meiring, a long-time homestyle contributor.
My abiding memory of a visit to the Mrkusich Townhouses on Remuera’s Hapua Street (built in 1968), is of the gentle light quality and incredible sense of crafted-ness that flowed through the (by today’s standards) tiny spaces. It was no different (just on a larger scale) when I caught up with abstract artist Roy Good and his wife Sue in their Oratia property that Megson designed in 1969. However, as the author points out, this was a more aspirational adventure where, “A chess-piece accumulation of boxy shapes was replaced by dramatic roof forms, ever more dynamic sections and ambitious spatial sequences.” On the North Shore, exploring the Phillips House, which Reid describes as “a birdcage suspended from a tree”, was an incredible journey of ups and downs, twists and turns into intimate spaces drenched in the bush.
Apart from drinking in the images of 33 projects (some built, others not, and often accompanied by the architect’s exacting original drawings), there are intriguing facts about the man and his thinking to be learned. That he spent his childhood in Northland including, when the family fell on hard times, a stint living in a railway hut in Ōkaihau, north of Kaikohe. That he was an asthmatic which ruined him for sports, and suffered a speech impediment for which he had therapy. Instead, we can be thankful that Megson loved gardening and drawing, and building fantastical sandcastles on the beach.
As an adult, Whangārei-born Megson was reluctant to admit inspiration from fellow architects — but he made an exception for Frank Lloyd Wright (as the book tells us, at one stage he took to wearing a cape-like overcoat earning him the nickname Frank Claude Wright). Stained-glass windows with square details, hexagonal geometry and an entry sequence that was akin to an ‘initiation rite’ are just some examples of this influence. Similarly, Megson’s scope on a residential commission was holistic, stretching to the design of the interiors and landscape as well as furniture, fabrics, crafts and fine arts.
Over the course of his career designing houses and lecturing students (at times for hours at a stretch in a darkened lecture theatre at the School of Architecture, University of Auckland), he has variously been described as domineering and dogmatic, but he was clearly loved by his clients and others who knew him well. Upon his death in 1994, the “outpouring of emotion from colleagues was pronounced”.
A complicated figure then and, in some ways, ahead of his time. It’s heartening to see that Megson’s legacy is now becoming more widely appreciated. As an architect at the forefront of New Zealand townhouse development, we could do with more of his humancentred philosophies in shaping our ever-denser suburbs. That so many examples of his work have been recently demolished (including the Jopling House in St Heliers, featured in the book) is a sad indictment of what we value as a society.
Words Claire McCall
