As happens, there were moments of self-reflection and I thought about my relationship with him, the projects I joined him in, particularly those that involved Auckland Council.

For reasons that no one at the celebration could determine, our friend had a profound antipathy to ‘city hall’. This is not an unfamiliar attitude to those of us required to deal with the Byzantine machinations involved in consenting construction. For him, though, the relationship transcended the occasional skirmishes over consents and became a wonderful, multifaceted conflict of operatic proportions. His opposition ranged from splendid acts of civil disobedience, including the wiping of parking wardens’ chalk marks off car tyres encountered on his morning stroll down Jervois Road, to epic battles waged over the future of the city’s swimming pools.

Auckland and other cities are the fortunate recipients of his understanding that tanks of water alone will not generate enough money to show positive returns in council balance sheets. His reconfiguration of Auckland’s Tepid Baths, surrounding them with cash-positive facilities; spas, a health food café, gymnasia, sales of sports equipment and so on, is a model copied by many to ensure other pools’ survival. The fights over the pools, some of which he had long-term leases over, seemed more ideological collisions than commercial transactions, given the inventive stratagems he employed. Amid one such contretemps over a possible council lease foreclosure, he threatened to bottle and sell ‘Teps Water’ on the basis that he had bought and paid for it during his tenure. The public reaction to the threatened sale swiftly ended Council’s plotting.

I welcomed his phone calls, promising, as they did, insights into the day’s political intrigue and lively literary hot tips, but there was always a moment of misgiving as he outlined yet another scheme for preserving a pool. My disquiet arose from knowing that I would be cast into the role of council stooge, charged with reconciling his schemes with the myriad constraints of planning and building codes. I would also have to negotiate the process with council gatekeepers, many of whom bore the scars of previous battles. As I metaphorically wrung my hands and enumerated the many bureaucratic rapids that we would need to navigate, I knew my mana was being inexorably eroded. This was made very clear when a site visit revealed a beam that he had decided was the result of my unnecessary, pedantic adherence to irrelevant codes and was, thus, deleted, laid on the floor and labelled “Pip’s beam”, still shrink-wrapped and ready for me to take off site.

The discomfort of my reflection on these experiences brought into sharp relief the extent of our profession’s complicity in the quenching of ambitious dreams. I don’t want to sound like yet another old curmudgeon yet neither do I want to be silent in the face of the madness we have made of things. When I say ‘we’, I do not include only the wastrels of my generation, who I freely acknowledge have treated our fragile planetary spaceship with careless disdain. No, I gather up all in our trade who work in contemporary Aotearoa: the woke, the well meaning, the self-obsessed, the ideologues, those down rabbit holes, the influencers, even planners and, yes, we architects too. All of us have, in our own often bizarre way, some glimpse of a better life, yet even our smallest efforts to improve the lot of our fellow citizens seem inevitably to add to the miasma.

This is a strange paradox, that, though we may all be in the gutter, some of us fancying we can see the stars, our very efforts to reach them seem to cast us further into the quagmire.

We in the studio have been slugging away trying to make a community on the edge of the city. In the course of our work, we have been attempting to bring to bear the best of design, planning, ownership and community-building as we can determine from exemplars across the world. We debate the implications of future technologies, working, living and transport arrangements not yet established or even discovered. We attempt to reconcile these prognostications with the immediate demands of those laying out the pipes and tubes that will service the future occupants. This is an interesting process where all the decision-makers are in one room and, generally speaking, sharing a common goal. It is made immeasurably more complex where the project has to fit within the fluid geopolitics of a rapidly growing city and a country having to spend every spare cent undoing the deleterious effects of a couple of hundred years of colonisation and preparing for a possible nuclear war or, perhaps more likely, the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Shelf.

In what appear to have been gentler times, maybe only at the end of last century, one might codify things, spelling out the way of things in district and town plans, confident that the best of all possible worlds would be delivered by a sufficient number of policies, strategies and rules. We are, as a result, the recipients of a vast haystack of regulations founded on the Resource Management Act (RMA) and within which the needle of a well-ordered life is to be found. Though the Act started out as a robust legal construct within which competing land use demands might be reconciled, the plethora of missives from central government suggests that national political imperatives now trump the machinery of the courts. The national policy statements on wetlands, soils and the seemingly careless supplanting of well-researched and negotiated city plans by the government’s urban design missives are an unnerving dispatch of hard-won plans in favour of political expediency.

I feel ambivalent about this turn of events. On the one hand, the framework of the RMA, though much abused by the development strategy of ‘death by a thousand applications’, offers a known framework for mediating conflicts of development. On the other hand, planning by government fiat opens the door to the possibility of a bit of immediate action, free from interfering neighbours, greenies, commercial competitors et al. While I might have some sympathy with the present lot in the Beehive, planning by government fiat is a dangerous Pandora’s box to open. The government’s wetland policy statement for example, launched with the laudable aim of protecting the habitats of the slithering and web-footed, has had significant unintended consequence, as projects up and down the country are stopped in their tracks wherever some small patch of boggy ground is spotted within the theodolite’s scope.

It’s hard to know whether this is just business as normal, the management of the well-ordered society always having been tricky, contested and bureaucratic, or whether the rapidly evolving demands of an ecology and society seemingly hell-bent on self-destruction have finally broken the camel’s back and a new age of autocratic control lies ahead. Either way, I am emboldened by the wonderful disregard my late mate had for the mechanisms of city hall as he proved time and again the wonderful power of an idea, passionately promoted with a smile, and an upraised middle finger to those who sought to derail him.

Pip Cheshire is an architect and writer, recipient of the NZIA Gold Medal and Past President of the New Zealand Institute of Architects.