Ko te Awa te mātāpuna o te ora. The river is the source of spiritual and physical sustenance. Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery Te Pātaka o Tā Te Atawhai Archie John Taiaroa celebrates provision for the Arts as a type of spiritual kai. The Sarjeant Gallery story is already epic, infusing Aotearoa New Zealand cultural and architectural history with generosity, quality and intrigue. Important to this story were the 1916 Samuel Hurst Seager consultation on the Queen’s Park Civic Precinct planning, the top side lighting of museums and galleries, and the original open architectural competition.

The outstanding neoclassical design submitted under the auspices of Edmund Anscombe was attributed to his articled pupil Donald Hosie. Since 1919, the white Ōamaru Stone gallery has overlooked the awa from its Pukenamu Queen’s Park site, glistening and reflecting the light: a pure architectural object in the landscape. A dome softens the silhouette and beautifully proportioned exterior niches carve out hollow space for the visual and sculptural arts. The interior is as strong, with an interconnected series of sublime, naturally backlit gallery spaces, culminating in a central dome gallery, the focal point of the design and the setting for many a great story.¹

In an echo through history, in 1995, my practice consulted to Whanganui District Council, recommending that a cultural heritage study of the existing building and an addition to the gallery occur, and that an open architectural competition be undertaken as the means to realise the project.² The competition took place in 1999 and was won by Steve McCracken of Warren and Mahoney (WAM), in a design described by the jury as deceptively simple and understated. Influenced by the existing gallery and the Whanganui War Memorial Hall’s formal language, the winning submission was an outstanding contextual, minimalist design that did a lot with a little, exhibiting a rare architectural humility and deference to the original work. This tactic, and the negative space between the existing and the new, created important space for dialogue that remained critical throughout the project’s long development.

There was a 25-year gestation period before the competition design was realised. Over this time, the project passed through 55 sets of hands at WAM, with a similar level of turnover within the client groups and stakeholders.³ A low moment occurred in 2004, when mayor Michael Laws canned the project and long-standing gallery director Bill Milbank left soon after. Laws seemed to take delight in baiting the local arts community but time shows he was more astute than his approach suggested, correctly identifying that there was no funding allocated to strengthen the existing building. In 2014, the gallery building was closed to the public after being assessed at 5 per cent of current earthquake codes. It was not until 2020 that the gallery strengthening, reconstruction and new building project commenced on site, and it reopened in late 2024.

The complexity and difficulty of regenerating the original building took around half of the $70-million-dollar project cost. Today, the gallery remains as beautiful and stunning as it has always been, inside and out. The exterior surfaces are cleaned of detritus, and a clunky access ramp to the building front and concrete plant room addition to the north-west have been erased. This is fantastic from the new gallery processional western approach. Less great for the existing building and its relationship to its landscape is the accommodation of the very extensive services. They occupy the whole original basement area and a large new plant room addition on the east of the original gallery. From the interior, you have to look hard to find how strengthening and servicing have occurred. Modernist-era floating exhibition gallery wall layers are retained within the classical shell and these hide a great deal. The planning is cleaned up, with no trace of a makeshift stair that once terminated the western gallery. The original entrance and the two galleries at the southern side are restored. The petite, beautifully lit Miniature Gallery spaces remain with an Arts Library function but, sadly, now with limited public access and crammed full of dexion library shelving. Hopefully, this might change over time, particularly with the extent of new storage space created in the contemporary Pātaka Gallery addition.

The rare clarity of the competition design thinking guided the new works as change was needed: “The design should be very simple and follow the order of the original building, and it must look to the Awa and Maunga.”⁴ Aotearoa New Zealand in the 21st century is different from the way it was in 1999 and very different from that of 1916. “There is no Māori tradition represented in this house of art, not even among the minor orders. Within the decoration of the Sarjeant, we find union jacks and oak leaves.”⁵ Today, WAM has an in-house cultural design team but the new gallery project predated this, creating a challenge: “How do we influence the building, even though it’s under construction?”⁶ This was answered by an extended co-design process with Whanganui River iwi, represented by a group of artists appointed by Te Rūnanga o Tūpoho, a collective of hapū from the lower reaches of the Whanganui River and led by artist Cecelia Kumeroa under the guidance of kaumātua Uncle John Maihi. The desire to advance a significant local expression and problems with the Ōamaru Stone supply converged, creating opportunity to reconceive a new gallery narrative. This reinforced the value of the axial planning and of the creation of ‘a crack in the façade’, and a culminating moment on the spatial progression: a suspended glass box opening the gallery and extending views to the Whanganui awa and its source, Ruapehu maunga. The unique visual languages of the river, such as kānapanapa – the shifting light reflecting off the waters – became a key new concept. The blackness of Whanganui carving and pakohe, a rare, local black greenstone, are among the other layered narratives.

These ideas find beautiful expression in the stunning reflective black stone façade, highlighted by tioata inserts: splashes of steel that abstract the effect of light shimmering on the water. The narratives also informed the design of tiling for floors, the entry mahau and the waka bridge. An ethereal reflective underside of the entry mahau is a particularly sublime moment, as a new river of people flows under and into the gallery. The original competition design parti informs the planning and cross-section. A huge basement level with very contemporary collection storage and servicing areas is buried below a glazed, visually open ground level, with main entry, reception, shop and café, function and lecture rooms, and staff and meeting rooms. This is topped with an upper level, clad in reflective black stone, raised on piloti and largely separated from the external environment. It contains contemporary rectangular exhibition spaces of different scales, and education spaces. These neutral-volume, super-flexible, well-serviced gallery spaces are already a delight to curator Andrew Clifford and artists exhibiting.

Refreshingly simple axial circulation connects the levels of the new gallery and extends the original city and Sarjeant north/south axis via a black waka bridge over the entry space between new and old. The axis visually links the old and new interior spaces through the original galleries and the central dome, over the entry negative space, through new central upper galleries, and out to the glass box and landscape beyond. Brilliant! The structural and services integration struggle is handled well for the most part but is visible from the entrance space between new and old.

The Gallery is an object in the round within Pukenamu Queen’s Park, with a now-disrupted landscape context on some sides and a well-integrated new landscape from the west, framed beautifully by an existing avenue of Phoenix palms. Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery Te Pātaka o Tā Te Atawhai Archie John Taiaroa has come of age. This starts with the more inclusive bicultural identity. The duality also reflects the architectural expression of the new-old hybrid gallery: a place of dialogue reflecting its people and stories, and belonging to its place.

References

^{1 Martin Edmond, Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery: A Whanganui Biography, Massey University Press, 2024, has an excellent early history of the gallery and its key stories.}

^{2 Architects Southcombe McClean and Co and McGregor Consulting Group, The Queens Park Accommodation Study, September 1995, p. 52 and p. 76, and Strategic Landscape Plan.}

^{3 Ralph Roberts, kōrero between Ralph Roberts, Cecelia Kumeroa, Andrew Clifford and Mark Southcombe, Sarjeant Gallery, 27 January 2025.}

^{4 Ralph Roberts, kōrero between Ralph Roberts, Cecelia Kumeroa, Andrew Clifford and Mark Southcombe, Sarjeant Gallery, 27 January 2025.} 

^{5 Mark Southcombe, ‘The Wrestler’s Ball’, Art New Zealand 72, Spring 1994, pp. 54–56.}

^{6 ‘Sensitive Simplicity’, Architecture NZ, March/April 2000, pp. 72–81.}