The pair were hugely influential, much imitated and, when all is said and done, unambiguously the best modern architects New Zealand has produced.

Maurice was known for his quiet, calm, determined demeanour, exceptional drawing ability, his Citroen DS, attention to detail, unfailing modesty and Shenandoah beard (not pictured). He was a family man, ceramicist, carpenter, designer and Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM). But above all he was an architect, responsible for producing many of New Zealand’s best 20th century buildings – a fact he would politely deflect, shrug his shoulders and change the subject.

Our sympathies to the Mahoney family, Maurice’s colleagues and to his friend, Sir Miles, who says in his autobiography, “Maurice was much better organised and practical than I – a born maker. I initiated most of the early designs, but Maurice led the making of them; the one process cannot be divided from the other. We were a true partnership.”

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Left: F. Miles Warren; Right: M E Mahoney

M E Mahoney House plans 1966

In 1959 I was having an evening meal at the Coffee Pot on New Regent Street with Miles. During the course of the meal I informed Miles that I had decided to build a small house on a section of my property at Halswell because I was ‘sick of living in a town flat without any area of garden’. His large eyebrows shot up to the top of his forehead and I was fixed with what can only described as a baleful stare. ‘Who, might I enquire, is designing this establishment for you?’ he enquired. When I produced with some reluctance a piece of graph paper on which I had inscribed my ideas, he contemplated it for a few seconds, folded it and put it in his pocket. ‘Gould’ he said, ‘I will not have you living in a builder’s bungalow and I will send you a drawing in a week’s time.’

The plan duly arrived a few days later, and it was so obviously superior in every respect that I could only agree to proceed. It differed from the normal small bungalows of those days with innovative features like insulated concrete-slab flooring, exposed beams supporting the roof, open areas of ceiling extending to kitchen via glass panelling, exposed concrete-block walls, and doors of vertical wooden strips. When built the effect was of a much larger and airier house than the small bungalow that was the reality.

The pleasure which I derived from living in it arose from a combination of practical and aesthetic features: the good insulation arising from the slab and the linings of the walls and roof; the validity of the structure and its materials, which were all visible; and the sheer practicality of the basic design of a minimalist house. Today all this appears quite normal and ordinary, but in 1957 it should be remembered that, due to the war and the Depression, virtually nothing had been built since about 1928, and most of the concepts, particularly relating to the use of concrete, were new.

When some years later my wife and I built a larger house on the adjoining site we incorporated the same basic ideas — perhaps the only major improvement being covered ceilings which I think give a more pleasing balance to the rooms.

Christchurch Art Gallery B.156

This direction was vigorously pursued, and the flowering of architectural invention in Christchurch in the 1960s became a high point in the history of New Zealand architecture. The “Christchurch School” involved a host of architects – Peter Beaven, Don Donnithorne, Charles Thomas, and Trengrove & Marshall were key figures, but the scene was dominated by Warren & Mahoney.

Miles Warren carried the seeds of W&M’s phenomenal growth back to his home town in 1954, returning from Britain with the ideas then percolating around the avant-garde New Brutalist movement. Joining forces with Maurice Mahoney, the pair found a point of intersection between the concern for truth-to-materials and structural expression that characterised Brutalism, and the low-key, Kiwi-fied commitment to straightforwardness that obsessed many young architects here in NZ. Side-stepping the lightweight, rationalized wooden structures that dominated the thinking of the Group, W&M developed a tectonic and material vocabulary that derived from New Brutalism but reflected the more solid architectural heritage of the Christchurch context. This vocabulary appeared seemingly fully-formed in Warren’s first building: the Dorset Street Flats. The astonishing skill behind W&M’s early work is demonstrated in the effortlessness with which they could adapt this domestic vocabulary to different building types – the perpendicular volume of the Christchurch College chapel and the spreading landscape of the Crematorium are each only one step removed from Dorset Street. With the addition of pre-cast concrete and more adventurous roof structures to the palette, W&M were able to create much more complex buildings, such as the Canterbury Student Union and Christchurch Town Hall.
W&M became a remarkable success story. They rode the wave of the post-war economic boom and quickly stepped up to large scale work. Winning the high-profile competition for the Christchurch Town Hall in 1966 cemented their position among NZ’s premier firms. In the same year – less than a decade after the firm was established – W&M also won the American Institute of Architects Pan Pacific Citation, an award also given to such luminaries as Kenzo Tange and Harry Seidler. By the time the Town Hall opened in 1973, much of W&M’s work was high-rise commercial buildings for developer clients. These changing briefs and the sense that Modernism was exhausted led W&M to shed their earlier approach and explore the postmodernist language that was rising in Europe and America, a shift that paralleled that of many of Warren’s international contemporaries, including fellow former Brutalists such as James Stirling.

Warren & Mahoney homes on Christchurch Modern

Text by Andrew Barrie