In this extract from Herbst: Architecture in context, John Walsh unwraps the values behind an architectural duo whose distinctive timber buildings are invested in the essence of Aotearoa.
Lance and Nicola Herbst came to New Zealand as well-taught architects, but migration made them autodidacts. Of course they were familiar with architecture’s universal principles, but they didn’t know about the local particulars. They weren’t steeped in the precedents of what architect and critic David Mitchell called New Zealand architecture’s ‘carpenter tradition’. The upside?
“We had no baggage,” Nicola says. “We weren’t constrained by preconceptions of how things should and shouldn’t be done.”
In their early baches, the Herbsts proceeded to piece things together, determined to let the timber do the talking. This commitment to material fidelity — integral but not exclusive to modernism — was allied to a compulsive interest in the details of building assembly. The resulting architecture was as much an exercise in control as a controlled experiment. “We were trying to develop a timber construction language,” Lance says, “one that expressed honesty, rigour and order.”
A meta language, in other words: the Herbsts were designing buildings about buildings.
The Herbsts’ architectural temperament distanced them from the late-20th-century course taken by many architects in the city to which they had moved. In Auckland, examples of post-modern idiosyncrasy were easy to find, although a stricter regime was beginning to be introduced. Patrick Clifford’s own Auckland home, the Clifford-Forsyth House (1995), for example, was an elegant realisation, in timber and concrete block, of coherent intent — a palate cleanser after an architectural binge session. The wider Antipodean context — and the Herbsts, since coming to New Zealand, have observed the confident progress of Australian architecture — evidenced the presence of kindred spirits. For example, what the Herbsts were doing with their bach on Aotea was similar to what Sydney architect Peter Stutchbury was doing with houses at Pittwater and Shoalhaven on the New South Wales coast: crafting, with as sensitive a touch as possible, structures that combined sufficiency and seclusion, protection and permeability.
At first glance, the Herbsts’ very disciplined approach to bach design seems to be a counter-intuitive response to a very casual type. But the architects have always under-stood that if a building is resolved, in its proportions, its inter-spatial connections and its details, it will be restful. And with their baches, from the earliest iterations onwards, the Herbsts have been careful not to construe clarity as austerity. Across a wide range of budgets, the baches have a richness, thanks to the exposition of their timber composition, and a depth, derived from the layered arrangement of decks, screens and shutters. The point, too, about Herbst baches, is that for all their composure, they exist in a relationship that demands deference. Nature makes the rules in the places where the Herbsts design their baches.
“We came from a very easy climate to a more difficult one,” Nicola says, “but we still really wanted to spend our time outdoors.” So did their bach clients, although perhaps not quite to the extent the architects preferred. (In the Herbsts’ early baches, minor inconveniences, such as a dash in the rain to an outside loo, were programmed in as features distinguishing holiday homes from city residences.) “We learned very quickly that in New Zealand, you don’t hide from the sun, you chase it,” Lance says. “Then there’s the frequent rain and constant wind.” To reconcile climate reality, as it applies in even the warmer regions of Auckland and Northland, with their design ideals and their clients’ tolerance, Nicola says, “the buildings just had to work harder”.
That doesn’t mean these buildings’ inhabitants were off the hook. Herbst baches have quite a lot of moveable parts; owners must be prepared to be operators.
In designing their early baches, and their successor holiday houses, the Herbsts sought to establish the ‘porous connection to nature’ that they believe is fundamental to the bach experience. Their strategy involves a number of tactics: the veiling with slatted timber to provide a rain screen; the incising of many apertures, all requiring some cover; the deployment of alternative deck areas to accommodate wind shifts; the adaptation of the lanai, the Hawaiian roofed patio or veranda, as a sheltered exterior space. The latter element, especially, became endemic to the Herbsts’ architecture; the adaptable room’s many advantages include its programmatic utility. At their Awana Beach House, for example, the lanai is the means of handling the transition between front and rear levels on
a sloped site.
“We don’t want a blatant separation of inside and out, a sense of severing,” Nicola says. At the same time, she says, “we like to give substance to a threshold”. The inspiration the architects acknowledge here is the engawa, in traditional Japanese architecture the covered corridor running along a building’s exterior. Like the lanai, the engawa is an in-between zone, providing shelter but accessible
to the elements.
Herbst: Architecture in context by John Walsh, Massey University Press.