Anthony Hōete: The future of Māori architecture

Anthony Hōete spent nearly three decades on the other side of the world designing and building everything from a Lego primary school to affordable rental homes. But then he heard a karanga, a voice from home, calling him back. Now he’s a professor of architecture at the University of Auckland, where he’s helping to change the narrative of architecture in Aotearoa.

 

Tēnā koe, Anthony. Thank you very much for being a guest on E-Tangata where we celebrate Māori and Pasifika peoples. Can we talk about your names to start with?

Ko Anthony Hōete tōku ingoa. I’m a Hōete from Mōtītī Island, which is in the Bay of Plenty. My uncle and two aunts still live there. The population is, I guess, 20 full-time residents.

Mōtītī is a little lost in time, Dale. It’s been preserved pretty much unchanged over the decades. It doesn’t have any shops, doesn’t have any infrastructure in terms of water or sewerage, doesn’t have any reticulated electricity, and it’s the only occupied island in the country that’s outside the Resource Management Act. That’s because the islanders have fought for a long time to keep it independent from the administrative practices on the mainland.

While we’re speaking about the island, the environmental threat when the container ship went down near the island must’ve affected those who have whakapapa links to it. What sort of emotional impact did it have for you?

That was the Rena that ran aground on the Astrolabe Reef in 2011. It was Greek-owned, Liberian-flagged, and Phillippino-crewed — and it caused the worst-ever environmental disaster that Aotearoa has seen. I happened to be in London at the time. The Swedish Club were the underwriters. So, I was closer to the insurer than the ship.

The outcome wasn’t so great for the island. It could’ve been an opportunity to use the insurance payment ($27.6 million) to build infrastructure, windmills, and a waste system, but, unfortunately, the money didn’t return to the island.

But, yes, the island is linked to some pretty big maritime events. The biggest one might have been when Captain Cook journeyed past in 1769. He reported that Mōtītī had the most extensive complex of fortifications that he had yet seen. In his journals, he refers to it as the “Flat Island”.

While there are only 20 people who live there today, archaeological websites record nearly 40 pā sites, suggesting a much greater population hundreds of years ago. Māori would have been ferrying obsidian from nearby Mayor Island to all parts of the country. So, it would’ve looked a bit different from how it looks today.

Did you grow up on the island? And could you tell us a little bit about your folks or your whānau?

My father, Aubrey Hōete, was born on the 24th of April 1944, and his twin brother Graham was born two minutes later, on the other side of midnight, on the 25th. They’ve been inseparable. I’ve had a very close relationship with Aunty Kathy and Uncle Graham, as well as my aunties Lena and Gloria.

They grew up on the island and they all live on the whenua today. My father talks of finishing school at age 12. So it’s kind of ironic, given my father’s brief schooling, that I find myself a university professor today.

But it also makes you think about the mātauranga that Māori carry that isn’t measured by qualifications. My father taught himself many things, including how to sail. He grew up on that island, and it gave him an incredible humility. He’s moved to Rotorua mainly because of the access to healthcare. He’s 80 now.

He met my mother, Avril, in Tauranga. She came from England, and they eventually moved to Kawerau. That’s where I grew up in the 1980s, when “Uncle Tasman” was lucrative, and the internet hadn’t been invented, so people didn’t go online to look at newspapers — they bought them from the dairy. The mill was great, and I remember really enjoying my time at Kawerau College.

Kawerau is one of the few majority Māori towns we have. All our whānau went to the mill: my father, his twin brother Graham, uncles Ollie, Bill and Pat, and aunties Lena and Gloria. Whānau went together.

And they all retired together, more or less on the same day. My father retired at 50 and went back to Mōtītī. I was living in London and came back home for a spell, spending two years on the island and building Dad a house.

Building a house back then, Dale, as you probably know, didn’t involve hiring builders. We Māori have to do it ourselves. It was my father, me, my uncles and aunties, all doing the concrete, timber and plumbing work. And that’s a kind of local mātauranga they would’ve learned from being on the island. Whānau weren’t trained as architects or builders. That was just part of the natural skill set you acquired as an islander.

Not everything was great. I remember my father telling me that his koro gave up aspects of Māoritanga for the Bible. The rise of Christianity had a massive impact on our family. The Bible was given a privileged status and led us to the situation we have today with a deficit in the language. But those were different times.

One of the great things I’ve seen since I arrived back from England in 2020 is the rise of mātauranga, the rise of the language, and the centralisation of te ao Māori within mainstream society. This has been fantastic, and I guess E-Tangata is an important vehicle for that, expressing the values of our culture so that they’re accessible to everyone.

And here at the architecture school, it’s unbelievable. Sixty percent of my students would be Asian, predominantly of Chinese descent, but they have a willingness and an interest to learn about things Māori. As new arrivals in the country, they might find themselves to be peripheral. And yet they’re willing to approach te ao Māori with an open mind — maybe one that’s not burdened with the subconscious bias of older European generations. And so that’s been quite a refreshing thing, to see just how well things Māori are accepted by non-Māori.

Why architecture? How did that happen?

I left Aotearoa in the early 1990s and went to Italy for a year. That was great for life skills, but it was a bit of a hand-to-mouth existence. So I decided to go back to London to study, and I earned a master’s in architecture at University College London. There, I met the people who were to become my business partners at WHAT_architecture. W for Cordula Weisser, who was German. H for Hōete. A for Allan, who’s now the chief government architect in the UK and visiting Aotearoa as a Hood Fellow. And T is for Professor Robert Thum, who’s now working out of Germany.

We set up WHAT_architecture around 2002, initially doing work in schools. Our Rooftop Nursery won a national award for education. It was, surprisingly, a very Mōtītī-style building. I say that because the project aimed to get young mothers back into work. The nursery was in an area that was predominantly Afro-Caribbean. And what I knew from Mōtītī was that the cheapest means of construction was painted block. So that’s what we did. We built the nursery economically so that the fees for the mothers to enrol their kids were affordable.

Our next educational project was a primary school in Hillingdon, which was Boris Johnson’s electorate near Legoland. One day, driving with my son Māui to the site, I dropped in at Legoland and had the idea of using the Lego bricks as a design tool. That led us to think, instead of just designing a Lego school, why not make the school out of Lego? So we made this primary school building out of Lego, which won a Guinness Book record and some other fancy awards.

That set us up as a practice until the global financial crisis hit in 2007 — and then there was no money for PM Tony Blair’s “building schools of the future”. So, we pivoted towards housing.

But I realised after a while that because of the housing affordability crisis in London, much like here, developers could pretty much sell a shoe box as a house and still make a handsome profit. It wasn’t very good for architectural fees, and it wasn’t very good for quality housing outcomes.

So, we decided, in a classic Kiwi-Māori do-it-yourself moment, to become developers. I bought a former railway station, called Shoreditch Station, off Brick Lane, in London. It’s about a 10-minute walk from Liverpool Street Station. It’s a central, trendy area. I bought the station in an auction. I didn’t have access to cash, so I just maxed out the mortgage and some credit cards, and then spent the next four years trying to get a development gain.

I sold that project in 2014 and, a year later, bought another site. By this time, I’d decided that I wanted to do affordable build-to-rent housing. I tried to build with cross-laminated timber, which is like plywood, but instead of being 20-mm thick, it’s 250-mm thick. The advantage of this sort of mass timber panel system is that it can be cut by computer.

So, I started doing affordable housing as a developer and then renting them out. Then, about three or four years ago, I heard a karanga, a voice from home, saying: “Hey, e hoa, it’s all very well doing that over there, but if you can’t do it for your people, what’s the point?” And that pricked my conscience.

Since that time, I’ve been trying to work with Ngāti Awa, the rūnanga. The chief executive is Reuben Araroa. I’m really grateful for the support I’ve had from my own rūnanga, with their constant reminder to do more impactful work for iwi.

As I’ve always said, if you can fix the problem of Māori housing, you can fix the problem of housing for all New Zealanders. It just happens to be that Māori occupy the bottom rung of the property ladder now.

It’s been quite fulfilling mahi, working with hapū on the marae and seeing the marae as a kind of university, a whare wānanga. And also working with rangatira within Ngāti Awa such as Tā Moko Mead. It’s allowed me to transfer 30 years of experience from London and Europe back to our people, back towards things Māori — and it’s been great to do that in the field.

We’ve long lamented the lack of Māori input into the design of public buildings in our country. Still, before we discuss that, can we touch on the sophistication of Pasifika building techniques? I’m thinking of the building methods of pre-European Māori whare design. Was it sophisticated when you look at it through a 21st-century architectural eye?

Kia ora, Dale, for raising what I refer to as “mīmirū”, which is the binding or lashing together of structural elements (mimiro) and, through post-tensioning, achieving seismic resilience, or rū. We can reawaken the lost mātauranga of mīmiro in a contemporary seismic setting, as mīmirū.

Before the arrival of Europeans, there wouldn’t have been metal fixings in the country. So, Māori would have been creating their whare much like they would’ve been building their waka. They would’ve been lashed together with flax-based rope systems.

The design whakapapa comes from the Pacific. We see it in the fale, except that the lashing systems there are much more expressed in the interior. Nonetheless, it would manifest in ocean voyaging double-hulled waka and the trimming of sails. The technology from boats would’ve informed our first whare.

The other evening, I was fortunate to meet Sir Michael Fay, one of the two owners of Ahuahu (Great Mercury Island), which was one of the first sites in New Zealand where Māori lived. I said to Tā Michael: “The island you’re on is probably the site of one of the first whare, our first house.”

Obviously, the first house doesn’t exist today, but we can see, in the footprints and foundations revealed by archaeologists, evidence of what would have been our first buildings. Buildings that would have been tied together, like a tent, and pulled back into the ground. They would’ve passed a rope right over the top of the tāhuhu, the ridge beam, and then pulled and tensioned it. This would’ve kept all the compression elements together.

I’ve been fortunate since I’ve been back to be working with kaumātua Jeremy Treadwell, a Pākehā lecturer in architecture at the University of Auckland who has great respect for things Māori. We’re working to re-stand a Ngāti Ira house named Tānewhirinaki, which hasn’t stood since the 1931 Napier earthquake. We want to get those whakairo standing again — whakairo that were referred to by the scholar James Cowan as examples of the best-carved meeting houses in the country at the time.

I was shocked when I came back to Aotearoa to find that some of our Māori heritage lack the financial support to keep them standing. I mean, if this had been Hinemihi, which is in the possession of the UK National Trust, that whakairo would be in humidity-controlled secure chambers, under lock and key. Hinemihi is an example of how English heritage authorities have bestowed a value on things Māori, which hasn’t been picked up by the equivalent government agencies here.

Nonetheless, my recent time back home has been a great haerenga. Te Papa has reached out, and we’re collaborating on a “Rūaumoko roadshow” that takes the technology of mīmirū and makes it more accessible for children to understand. I’m hoping the roadshow gets to places like Ōpōtiki, which don’t often get this kind of travelling exhibition. And I hope it visits as many marae as possible, too.

This community engagement research lies outside the libraries and laboratories of the University of Auckland. It’s kaupapa Māori research that works with hapū on their marae. And I’m glad to see that the New Zealand Institute of Architects has recognised the work around this mātauranga — we’ve been shortlisted for a national award for our work with Ngāti Ira o Waioweka. It’s great to see this kind of recognition for small projects with big ideas.

And it’s not about me. I’m just a conduit for this Māori building knowledge.

We can dismantle and rebuild the history of architecture. For some, the story of building here begins in 1832 with the Stone Store in Kerikeri. But evidence of our first buildings lies on Ahuahu, with houses that were most probably made with the post-tensioning system of mīmiro.

So, we’re going to change the narrative to one that’s more Māori. I find that refreshing and exciting.

It certainly is. I can’t help but think of the way Paris displayed itself during the Olympics, with its buildings, architecture and history. Are there any lessons for modern architecture from the construction and design techniques of pre-European times?

There’s only a limited number of wharenui that will be built in the future. The potential of mīmirū doesn’t lie only within whare reconstruction. The future is more about how we can apply it to papakāinga. We could leverage our Māori position within the forestry world of planting, harvesting, and milling, and look towards building a new generation of papakāinga with much longer spans because of the technique of post-tensioning.

Māori, in the future, will design forms of housing that are groundbreaking. The future of Māori architecture shouldn’t aspire to being average. I see the future as one of internationally recognised Indigenous innovation. I’m saying this because the way Māori live and think, and what we value, offers much for non-Māori worldwide.

Our housing, for example, is more intergenerational, with closer relationships to social realms such as marae. This means the type of housing that Māori develop, design and build will be quite different from, say, the single-family dwelling where New Zealand architecture has traditionally resided. The design research I’m doing through teaching with Aunty Matilda Phillips and Michael Davis at the university is much more aligned towards the collective apartment. A “kō-housing” arrangement.

In the design studios, we start with things like terrace and town housing because we need to increase density to get better occupancy of the land. The idea of building a single three-bedroom house on a quarter-acre section is long gone. It’s just not efficient if we want to stop our cities from sprawling.

Also, a standalone house has four external walls, which makes it quite expensive to build. With terrace housing, the side walls are always internal. So, not only can you have a warmer, better-quality living environment, but it’s also cheaper.

Some of these models might be a little foreign to Māori to begin with. But Māori are traditionally fast adopters and adapters to technology and change. I think Māori are open to transformation as long as it’s aligned to cultural values. For Māori, the questions remain the same. What is this project going to do for Māori? Is it going to improve wellbeing and economic outcomes? If the architect can answer those questions, Māori are open to innovation.

My pānui is not just about building houses. It’s about building jobs. It’s about looking at our natural assets, such as forests, and seeing how we can leverage those for better outcomes. It’s not just about building housing but also about building communities.

The building standards, though designed to keep people safe, have really constrained our ability to build innovatively. Are you disappointed that all construction has to come under the government gaze, and that the building standards control our ability to build what’s appropriate for our whānau?

We’ve just concluded a research project called ModelDocs for the Building Research Association of New Zealand, which looked at transforming consenting behaviour for better housing in Aotearoa. There’s been strong interest from both central and local governments to look at how consenting can be reconfigured to suit Māori aspirations better.

New forms of Māori housing will require new forms of consenting compliance. The more Māori we have in this space, the louder our voice will become. Māori are in it for the long haul. We have a multigenerational appreciation of whenua which is rarely bought or sold. That’s why the design of kō-housing must include multigenerational occupancy.

We’re also seeing the rise of innovative kura as pā wānanga. I was at the fantastic Te Pā o Rākaihautu in Ōtautahi recently. They’re restoring culture, connection and identity as a foundation for educational success — reconnecting whānau with place, communities, whakapapa and stories. They’re reigniting a passion for learning and pushing the reset button on Māori educational achievement. The future looks amazingly bright.

I was going to ask about Māori architects. You suggested there are some really talented rangatahi coming through and also that many new arrivals from other countries are keen to incorporate Māori culture into their designs. It paints a picture of us changing as a nation architecturally, but in a positive way.

We want our buildings and our built environment to look Māori, but I don’t think that means this has to be done only through the application of toi arts. For me, what makes a building Māori is firstly the nature of the occupant, and secondly how they use the building. What makes a building Māori is its engagement with a Māori community.

Tāmaki will soon be our largest Māori city, purely by the number of Māori living here. There’s some kaitiakitanga that Māori can apply to the city, particularly to the edges of the coastline around the harbour. You’ve got things like the Tūpuna Maunga Authority. Those mountains, those ancestors, are now being returned. Cars today are off-limits. It’s fantastic to see Māori concepts of taiao and protection now being implemented in law for the protection of the environment.

I always ask at the end of an interview, what keeps you fresh?

I’m a bit unusual for a Māori, I think, in that I like football. I probably lived in Ingarangi for too long, but what I love about football is the crowd. When you go to a football crowd, it’s the sense of waiata and the singing and the chanting. Sixty-thousand people singing a waiata would be the best thing to spur those black jerseys on.

 

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

See also The Māori City, an extract from Urban Aotearoa: The future of our cities, published by Bridget Williams Books.

E-Tangata, 2024