Living in the past and future

He might have retired about four years ago, but architect David Sheppard still finds himself, at 81, at the office regularly. He’s been taking stock of a life’s work. By Philip

Retirement is not like flicking a switch that says you’re working one day and not working the next, or at least it shouldn’t be. You have to ease from a state of work into a state of nonwork. You have to transition.

That is how Christchurch architect David Sheppard explains why it is that, while he retired about four years ago from the firm he co-founded, Sheppard & Rout, he still finds himself, at the age of 81, at the office on a Tuesday morning.

He usually comes in once or twice a week as a consultant and has a few other projects on the go.

“I don’t know what the word retirement means,” he says and laughs. “I don’t think I’ve become a nuisance here. I try not to be.”

That would be hard to imagine. Sheppard is a bright, friendly figure and besides, his surname is still on the door, next to that of his friend and the firm’s co-founder, Jonty Rout.

Rout died in 2003 but his name comes up often and fondly during our conversation. That’s not surprising, as some of Sheppard’s current projects involve him looking back over the decades and taking stock of a life’s work.

But before we get to those, what else has Sheppard been doing in his so-called retirement?

He has been designing houses in Christchurch and Wānaka for friends – he has a holiday home in Wānaka himself. And he has been working with the Department of Conservation on a memorial for the Pike River mining disaster.

This one sounds mysterious. He explains that work has stopped and started over about four years, pausing whenever bodies are found in the mine. But while the project has its frustrations, Sheppard talks movingly about the stunning beauty of the site and the need for the memorial to do more than just list names on a plaque – “The era of the obelisk is over,” he says – while finding a way to express something powerful about the dysfunction of the mining company and its communication problems.

And it must also connect with the Paparoa Track.

Other projects seem more straightforward. One of them is on the table in front of us. A hardback book titled Sheppard & Rout Architects Vol 1, 1982-2021 is fresh from the printer. As the title says, it charts four decades of work since he and Rout joined forces in 1982.

The book has about 180 projects in it, selected from a possible 2500. That explains the teasing “volume 1” subtitle. As for the contents, there are many stunning and probably expensive houses, alongside commercial and public buildings, including schools, a hospital, a church, an embassy and an airport.

Sheppard had hoped the firm might be able to help him put the book together but Covid-19 made it more of a solo project than he expected.

Or was there something deeper at work? You could speculate that the project was about the past and that maybe architects prefer to live in the present or even the future.

“I think it’s the nature of the job,” he agrees. “With every client, you’re telling them how nice this will be, or what you could do with your site. So we are actually living in the future all the time.”

Documenting previous work can be a drag, whereas “you get a charge out of the new job”.

When he put all this together, did certain qualities seem to have persisted over the years? He opts for defining it as “simplicity and crispness”. It is a Christchurch look that outsiders identify straight away, and it evolved out of the modern style made famous by the firm of Warren and Mahoney in the 1950s.

Neither Sheppard nor Rout were South Islanders themselves but Rout had worked “directly for the master”, as Sheppard puts it. He means that Rout had worked for Sir Miles Warren and had been identified as a future star of the firm before he defected to work with Sheppard in their much smaller operation.

Sheppard studied in Auckland and was in the same generation as Ian Athfield, with whom he felt a kind of rivalry. He did postgraduate work in the United States and joined a firm that specialised in large urban housing projects.

New forms of housing became a lasting interest in both a practical and academic sense. He then made a highly unlikely move.

He went from Washington DC to Rolleston, then a tiny satellite town near Christchurch. The Labour government under Norman Kirk had greenlit a Ministry of Works project to create a prototype of a “new town”, not unlike Milton Keynes and other postwar developments in the United Kingdom.

It was supposed to be the town of the future but it was also highly political. While in opposition, National leader Robert Muldoon made it clear the project would be scrapped as soon as he won the 1975 election. And when that happened, Sheppard was immediately told to put down his pencil and the Ministry of Works sold the land.

The highly planned Rolleston of the 1970s bears almost no resemblance to the sprawling Rolleston that has taken off since the earthquakes, Sheppard points out.

The project that really launched Sheppard & Rout was another example of a new way of living. The company converted the empty Normal School building on the north side of Cranmer Square into 32 apartments, creating new homes in the spectacular gothic structure.

“Cranmer Court established us,” he says. “That was the story of adaptability. Taking an old building and doing it up.”

Its controversial demolition was one of the great regrets of the post-earthquake period for Sheppard, and for many heritage enthusiasts in the city. The Press editorial in 2012 lamented that the city would be a lesser place without the building and said “such negligence would be inconceivable in Europe, but New Zealand has never much

esteemed its built heritage”.

Loss and renewal

At one point in our conversation, Sheppard catches himself. He says “since the war” when he means to say “since the earthquakes”. But it’s fitting, both for the sense of shared trauma and the scale of urban destruction.

The new book has a few pages of thumbnail images of buildings, mainly homes around Christchurch. It is a memorial of sorts because “a significant number” of them were lost in the earthquakes.

But there were paradoxical moments. When the grand old Salisbury St villa that the two architects bought as an office in the early days of the firm needed serious work after the quakes, it was restored with a stunning new extension to house a growing number of employees, as Christchurch’s recovery period was an architectural boom time.

Sheppard also took on a role as one of the architects on the panel that helped to draw up the Christchurch Central Recovery Plan, better known as the blueprint.

He was very involved in developing a competition to create an urban housing area known as Breathe Village, and was disappointed when it failed to pan out.

He says he is “quite pleased” at how the city is beginning to look, although he admits he could be a little biased. But he has reservations about some parts of the blueprint, particularly Te Pae Christchurch Convention Centre.

“It could have been good but it’s an old concept,” he says. “The large convention centres are almost a thing of the past.”

One of their design principles was “active edges”, and in that sense Te Pae is a failure. There is nothing active on the Colombo St side, where Te Pae has created a wall that blocks Gloucester

St. People sitting around the corner in Victoria Square now have a view of a loading dock and a glass wall.

He doesn’t think the new stadium will suffer in quite the same way, “but it’s important to generate good activities around it”. The Parakiore Recreation and Sport Centre, when it’s eventually finished, will improve what was an empty, “sterile” area.

His old firm has been very involved in one of the success stories of the rebuild, which is the east frame urban living project. The reason it works, he explains, is that developers building townhouses in suburbs like St Albans are limited by section sizes, so they create random pockets of different styles and densities, leading to a lack of uniformity and consistency.

But the idea of the “superlot”, meaning the larger parcels of land opened up by the east frame, allows for better designs.

“The good thing about the superlot idea is you don’t start with a subdivision,” he says. “You design good housing, good spaces, you save the trees if there are any, and then put down the boundary lines of every unit once you’ve done a good design.”

He is not a big fan of many of the medium-density homes going into the inner suburbs. In the book, his son Jonathan Kennedy, an associate director at the firm, goes further and bemoans the “high numbers of poor quality, medium density houses being built by a select group of developers after a ‘quick buck’ ”.

In the shadow of Miles

Sheppard’s other plans include producing a monograph solely about Rout’s work. He also intends to travel next year, to look at the embassies his firm designed after its work on the New Zealand Embassy in Tokyo in 1995.

That is Sheppard in reflective mode, living in the past as much as the future. This new book is inspiring reflections as well.

There is an impossible question: what are the best buildings in the book? He mentions Cranmer Court, the redevelopment of Burwood Hospital and the Dark Sky Project at Tekapo. In the introduction, architectural historian Ian Lochhead picks the Majestic Church in Durham St as a skilful blend of existing industrial structures and new spaces.

The creation of the new Marian College inside an old warehouse is technically outside the timeframe but is in the book as another good example of reuse.

There are other key post-quake buildings such as the Stranges and Glendenning Hill Building, the BNZ Centre and the Spark Building.

Sheppard pauses for a moment and thinks. “Architecture is a competitive business,” he says. “We’ve been fortunate to get the range of work we have. The pride I’ve got is the diversity of work.”

The firm developed a successful ongoing relationship with Christchurch Airport in the 1990s and a lot of work has followed. “For a small practice, that’s pretty good.” And then there are the larger-than-life personalities that dominate the field. As noted, Sheppard felt a rivalry with Athfield, of whom he says “his character is greater than his actual buildings”. That view was reinforced by a recent trip to Wellington.

Miles Warren’s great rival was Peter Beaven, a more eccentric and perhaps more original architect who found it harder to succeed. “He was a bit too forthright,” Sheppard says. “He stood up for his principles. He was a lovely person, an open and spirited person. Miles was more underground. He networked.

“We, along with most architects, have had to live in the shadow of Miles. He really had business acumen.”

Christchurch was and still is a small town with only a certain amount of work. Warren and Mahoney had good timing and good connections – who you know matters in this business.

“Don Donnithorne and other good architects didn’t have the same access,” Sheppard says. “You had to really work hard to get the jobs. Miles didn’t like us getting the airport. It was his town.”

He concludes, “You’ve just got to put your head down in some ways and do what you can.”