In the leafy Auckland suburb of Kohimarama, where pitch-roofed clapboard homes line well-kept streets, a striking grey ziggurat rises from the subtropical foliage. It looks like a defensive fortification, greeting the road with a monolithic, windowless facade. Narrow arrow-slit openings puncture the sides of its blank, blocky bulk, as if keeping a lookout for bands of marauding neighbours. “I know people hate my house,” wrote Rewi Thompson, the architect of this arresting home, which he built for his family in 1986. “I guess it’s too different from people’s idea of a house in Kohimarama, or too defensive or challenging, or pure cultural shock!”
Thompson, who lived here until his death in 2016, was one of the boldest, most influential Māori architects in Aotearoa, or New Zealand. Through building, drawing, writing and teaching, he pushed his conviction that architecture had the power to reinforce Māori cultural identity, and restore a sense of agency to a people forcibly estranged from their land. As a new generation of young urban Māori architects and students embrace their Indigenous tribal heritage as never before, Thompson’s work has been compiled in Rewi, a landmark book that provides a wealth of inspiration through his built and unbuilt projects, brought to life with a colourful collection of interviews with clients, colleagues and students.
