Long ago, when we were still allowed to have open fires in the city, I decided I would work only with a bricky with a good track record in fireplaces: structures that drew well, gave out good heat and didn’t smoke. I lucked upon Willie Colvin who, as a child, had worked with his father on the fireplaces in Mackintosh’s Windy Ridge house.

I was a bit too dim to understand the implication of the house’s name, that a windy ridge was likely to damn-near guarantee a successful draught up the chimney and a smoke-free fire, but I soaked up Willie’s advice, particularly his tip for dealing with dodgy customers. He would lay a sheet of glass halfway up the flue and, if a recalcitrant customer was tardy in paying and supported their reluctance to settle the account by pointing to the fireplace’s smoking, a deal would be struck in which payment would be received if the smoking problem could be solved. Willie would then climb onto the roof, drop a brick down the chimney breaking the glass, resolving both fireplace operation and payment.

I often wondered how those of us a bit removed from bricklaying might develop a similar strategy and, a few years later, working with a Singaporean practice, they revealed their way of preparing for a stoush over the final fees. They would complete the documentation, print a full and complete set, then guillotine it diagonally in half. One half would be presented to the client and the other would be delivered upon settlement of the fees. I loved the efficacy of the strategy and, though I have never had to use it, I still wonder how we might bifurcate a PDF.

This is a fairly long-winded introduction to the critical place anticipation and agency have in our trade. We spend most of our time making marks and orchestrating events with long gestations and repercussions well beyond our formal engagement. I think, as a consequence, we become somewhat measured in our responses to projects. It is reaction exacerbated by a shared common experience: that of nursing our hopes through the gauntlet of trials and tribulations arising from the massed phalanx of rogue clients, intrusive bankers, misguided project managers and enthusiastically creative contractors. Having survived this a few times, battered but endlessly optimistic about the undoubted success of the next project, most of us are prepared to cut our mates a bit of slack when something looks a bit iffy.

Patience and understanding are not necessarily attributes of laypeople and a friend who has vicariously experienced the highs and lows of architecture exhibits breathtaking acuity in architectural judgement when little more than the builder’s hut is visible. Of late, my friend has had open season on a house rising on a site pretty well in the middle of a previously picturesque vista. As the commentary becomes more barbed so I become more ambivalent, caught tongue-tied between a liberal’s forbearance of the owner/builder’s right to self-actualisation and a growing sense of outrage at the despoliation of a once-beautiful hillock.

While my fellow critic is happy to allude to the house’s apparently self-evident awfulness, I feel obliged to offer some more articulate commentary, if for no other reason than to forestall that fake truth that lurks close to any discussion of architecture, that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’.

I have always countered this with a robust description of architecture award judging, arguing that a group of learned souls will eventually come to a common understanding over what gets a gong and what doesn’t, especially if gingered up by an impending press deadline.

I have recently lost a project to a London architect, thanks to having shown no enthusiasm for, and certainly no track record in, the production of houses in the Georgian style. The matter of who might win the commission was apparently the subject of matrimonial debate within the client household in which the likelihood of a beautiful outcome was put on the scales: the certainty of the familiar historic assemblage set against an uncertain outcome I might deliver.

The decision was made before I hit my southern birthplace city, where the site was located, and precipitated a discussion in which I found myself grasping for good reasons why one should not build a Georgian house in the 21st century. I am afraid I failed badly, finding it difficult to gain traction arguing for beauty arising from anything other than the symmetrical arrangement of a façade based on the composition of elements proportioned according to the golden mean and having vaguely anthropomorphic qualities.

My arguments were hampered by the two days I had spent expounding to camera on some of that city’s finest: the work of Mountfort, Seager et al., in that wonderful collection known as The Arts Centre but which I still stubbornly refer to as ‘townsite’, in deference to my time spent within its cloisters and quadrangles. The sublime manipulations of form, scale and detail made the spirit soar in the cool, clear southern light, the background clatter of rebuilding the old faculty buildings reinforcing the regard with which those buildings are held.

It was all grist to my erstwhile client’s mill and, in a fit of wild hyperbole, I tried to argue the city’s post-earthquake buildings aspired to being a ‘masterly, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light’ and hence a riposte to the irresistible ‘correctness’ of the Georgian ancients. Alas, this line of reasoning was severely compromised as I turned into Gloucester Street and found the street blocked by a very wide building nearing completion.

Remembering my advice to my northern mate to withhold comment until the code compliance certificate is received, I bit my tongue as I searched in vain for evidence of the architects’ familiarity with the city’s august architectural heritage. Perhaps the structure sprawling across the street references the city’s underlying marshy archipelago, or some former inhabitant of it, rising up to devour the colonists’ urban grid but, either way, it shut the door on my argument for contemporary beauty.

Frankly, another faux-Georgian pile in that town is neither here nor there; its allusion to half of the city’s history is as good a fit as referencing mid-century California that too often seems the new default. I recalled a former partner lamenting the absence of commentator Charles Jencks’ navigation through the shoals of architectural styles influenced by the French philosophers dominating the discourse of the day. While those days of post-structuralism et al. were confusing and without direction, we are today adrift in a sea of competing imperatives, where even the idea of a dominant discourse is beyond imagining.

If ever proof were needed of the multiplicity of influences in play, the excellent Futuna Chapel talk by Hugh Tennent was a slam dunk. Showing only that part of his studio’s oeuvre involving tangata whenua projects, we saw work profoundly influenced by kaupapa Māori infused with a major engagement with the health of the planet and carried out with grace, commitment and professionalism. Here is an architecture born of the contemporary zeitgeist that I am sure would seem a hopeless mélange to my southern client’s thinking, yet, as we contemplate Aotearoa in the second quarter of the century, it may be a glimpse of a way of building more interesting and perhaps even more beautiful than the faux historicism in the south and, certainly, the despoliation of my mate’s view in the north.