Eating humble pie: Warren and Mahoney, Brownlee and the Christchurch Town Hall

Saturday, 27 April 2024

Maurice & I_ celebrates the life and work of Sir Miles Warren and Maurice Mahoney. The ageing architects are front and centre in their own film, but one building and one cameo steal the show. MICHAEL WRIGHT reports._

Sir Miles Warren liked a bit of the theatrical. There’s a moment in the middle of Maurice & I - a new documentary about Warren and Maurice Mahoney, the celebrated architectural double act - he would have appreciated.

An hour in, the story reaches February 22, 2011, when an earthquake devastated Christchurch and with it much of Warren & Mahoney’s legacy.

The pair had opened their practice in their home town in 1958 and the city housed the bulk of their work. Several minutes of raw footage, unnarrated, depicts the immediate aftermath of the shaking: chaos, death, visceral fear. The sequence is finally punctured by a familiar voice: Gerry Brownlee.

It’s a cute pivot. Brownlee, the forthright former Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Minister, arch pragmatist and angel of death for hundreds of quake-damaged Christchurch buildings, in a documentary about architecture. It’s soon clear why.

Maurice & I is the story of two men, but its plot centres on saving one of their buildings. The film opens on the two of them about to address a Christchurch City Council meeting on the matter of “The Christchurch Town Hall conservation”, before panning back to their childhoods.

So Brownlee’s entrance an hour later is Chekhov’s gun going off. The immovable object encountering the unstoppable force. The immovability of the town hall, though, is the question. After the ground underneath it emphatically did move that day in 2011, Brownlee and his ministry wanted to demolish it - as they did more than 1000 other damaged buildings in the central city - rather than repair it.

Now the story starts. Maurice & I began life as a project about the Christchurch Town Hall - a monument to new brutalism and probably the apogee of the Warren & Mahoney aesthetic. It was lauded for its acoustics and vast yet intimate auditorium. Both architects later said it was their best building. Co-producer/director Rick Harvie sat on the idea for years until a chance meeting with Warren in 2010. “He kept referring to ‘Maurice and I’… ‘Maurice and I did this and we did that’ and I realised the partnership was the story.”

Soon after, Harvie met Jane Mahoney, daughter of the titular Maurice, through her work for the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (Brownlee’s ministry; Warren probably enjoyed that, too).

They sat on the idea some more until Maurice Mahoney was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2018 and given months to live. Within a week, they were interviewing both men, separately and then together, and a feature film was in the works.

The pandemic intervened, of course, and it wasn’t until last year that they were able to make a final push for funding and secure some final footage and interviews, including Brownlee.

“It was great to get Gerry,” Jane Mahoney said. “We thought he'd probably say no [but] we didn't want it to end up being a Gerry-bashing exercise… All the decisions that were being made, all the pressures and all the priorities - it was a complex situation and we needed to get that across.”

Brownlee accepts his role as antagonist. “I had an opinion,” he says in the film, “And I don’t back off that opinion…It was a severely compromised building.”

It’s a sorely-needed role. Duality runs through Maurice & I and without Brownlee the town hall story - the “spine of the film”, as Harvie calls it - would feel lopsided.

Warren and Mahoney themselves were a study in contrast. “Each of us supplied what the other lacked”, Warren once said.

Warren, shorter, swarthy, was the creative force - exuberant to the point of exaggeration. Mahoney, a matinee idol by comparison, was the details man - quiet and unerringly precise. Warren was Christchurch blue blood; Mahoney was working class. Even the syllables of their names counterweighted to a perfect cadence: Warren & Mahoney. They were ideal opposites and together they unleashed brutalist architecture on New Zealand.

It wasn’t to everyone’s taste. Warren cut his teeth in London during the post-war building boom and returned to New Zealand a committed modernist. The brutalist aesthetic held that buildings should develop out of what took place inside them - “form follows function,” as Warren said in the film - and this meant the composite parts should be visible.

In short, lots of exposed concrete and straight lines everywhere.

Maurice & I navigates all this comprehensively, but never dourly. Even when explaining the finer points of the novel acoustic design of the Town Hall, it never strays into lecture (conversely, acoustician Sir Harold Marshall is the breakout star of the film). The building is their magnum opus, so dwelling on it and its fate never feels laboured.

“That's probably why Christchurch people will love it,” Harvie said. “Specificity is important when telling a story… But it will have a national and hopefully international appeal.”

The celebrity roll call in the archival footage helps: Billy T James, the Dalai Lama, Leonard Bernstein, The Ramones, The Clash, Tom Petty, The B-52’s, Carlos Santana, Graham May and his faceplant and what looked like a stonking great show by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition.

But of course it’s really the story of two men, what they did and what it meant. And how those things, ultimately, were what made the Christchurch Town Hall worth saving.

“It’s about the power of creative partnerships,” Jane Mahoney said. “But also hopefully it'll make people think about the value of public spaces and how buildings like that gain a sort of new value by the experiences lived in them and actually that stands for something.”

Sir Harold Marshall - the brain behind that sparkling town hall sound - captured it best. “When I’m talking to architects I’m talking about music. I’m talking about the spiritual dimension of what we do. The sense of presence can only be engineered to some degree… To me the sense of presence is a gift. In my book it’s of the same family as grace and love. None of those can be engineered.”

Gerry Brownlee begged to differ. Even as the Town Hall was being restored he wondered aloud about the project budget and whether any amount would be enough to give him the confidence to go back inside.

In Maurice & I he confirms that he since has. Twice.

“Humble pie’s a wonderful thing,” he said. “It doesn’t taste too bad.”

Maurice & I premieres at the Christchurch Town Hall on May 1 and features in the Architecture and Design Film Festival in May and June. A wider cinematic release may follow.