The Architecture Electric

With contributions by: Guy Marriage Gerald Melling Pip Cheshire

The Architecture Electric

Substations of central Wellington

Jared Kennard Tyson Schmidt Nathan Horne


Electricity is the most wonderful invention that enhances our lives in ways that we now take to-

tally for granted. Unseen, unheard, unthanked: without a second thought we throw a switch and boil

a kettle, or turn on a light to illuminate our reading. We seldom think how that current comes to

be there, waiting patiently inside a socket, ready to be unleashed on an unsuspecting appliance.

Electricity comes to us, not direct from the giant wind turbines at Makara, but through fat hum-

ming wires across mountain valleys and a series of voltage drops, ultimately converted in small

substations scattered amongst our communities.

The book you hold in your hands is a repository of rare memories, a depiction of the everyday ar-

chitecture that surrounds you – one that you’ve possibly never really noticed. Architecture Elec-

tric is a product for a niche market for sure, yet it is also a celebration of curious geekdom,

the search for the beauty of the mundane and the everyday. The authors of this book are on a

quest. In this photographic foray into the gritty industrial architecture of 320 electrical sub-

stations found in central Wellington, they are seeking to uncover some of the visual truth in the

raw industrial architecture that houses this quiet source of power.

Ever since Nikola Tesla succeeded in vanquishing Thomas Edison, with the triumph of safe AC power

over the more deadly DC power, there has been a need for these small buildings: stepping down the

electrical voltages that power our modern lives. The photographs you see before you depict the

passing attitudes towards the wonder of electricity, with the old substations designed as mini

temples, complete with quietly proud columned facades. The Wellington City Council Electricity De-

partment’s initials proudly displayed across the shallow pediment, a large number of these small

temples still exist, such as the almost classical form of 264 Thorndon Quay, or the late-Edwardian

simplicity of the low-Fi temples in Tory St, Parkvale Rd, and Ira St. Their craft in design, once

proudly displayed, is now downplayed in the extreme. Many of these are now painted to try and hide

quietly in the busy urban streetscape: their architecture almost unnoticed. By contrast, many of

the modern substations are purposefully undistinguished, hiding below staircases, or in left over

crevices in building facades, even adopting camouflage to pass themselves off as more background.

The gritty urban industrial nature of the city substation makes way for a more reticent demeanor

in the suburbs, where it attempts to be passed off as domestic: witness the apologetic obsequious-

ness of small substations in Ohiro Bay Parade, and the forelorn and unloved efforts in Breaker

Bay. Only a small lightning bolt plaque gives away their silent warning: Caution! Danger of Death!

Occasionally, the suburban substation is proudly defiant, such as that in Mornington, positioned

at the edge of the cliff overlooking the city. Captured in a cunning plan to look more residen-

tial, the Havelock St substation wears a jaunty peaked roof to disguise the industrial purpose

within, its blank walls oblivious to the stunning view laid out in front. Other substations subtly

betray the era of the architecture they were born into. At 125 Taranaki St, the streamlined green

sleekness of the enclosure hints at a late Deco design time, whereas the Modern green crispness of

40 Mansfield St quite clearly and proudly displays a 50s Modern design rationale. There is still

nothing else however to rival the pink and checkered postmodernist frontage in Lorne St – at once

both vibrant and firmly dated to the 80s.

To design a building for a substation is a remarkably standard exercise – on the inside. Minimum

dimensions are given, a lease is procured, thick fireproof walls enclose the heavy weight of the

oil-cooled apparatus that resides within. A substation would make a well-behaved neighbour: no

noise is ever emitted, except for a quiet hum. There are no photos of interiors in this book – no

one is allowed inside. The box remains sealed and unexplored: like Schrodinger’s Cat, the contents

remain unknown.

While requirements inside are strict, the outside requirements are much less rigid. It is here

that the architect can exercise their imagination: and yet so few of them do so. Ruggedly strong

doors are needed, opening out onto a space that can be approached 24 hours a day. The design of

these modern mini temples tries to remain faithful to their context. Sizes and proportions are

sometimes coordinated seamlessly with the surrounding building, at other times tragically failing

in an accident of unintended disjunction, such as the ungainly doorway at 138 Wakefield St. Their

facades lie mostly blank, with just a grilled surface to let the air cool the humming transformers

inside, while paint is periodically splashed on the facades to rejuvenate and refresh. The outlook

in the future is for even more anonymous blandness.

The authors, Nathan Horne, Jared Kennard, and Tyson Schmidt, have carefully scrutinized the build-

ing facades, picking out the quirky and the unexpected. Graffiti is scrawled on some surfaces, but

surprisingly little when you consider that the doors are rarely if ever opened. If you look care-

fully at the mindless graffiti of the station in Salamanca Rd in Kelburn, you will note that

amongst all that tagging, a carefully coloured chimney has been painted on the façade – a quiet

joke amongst our city’s growing paste-up community.

My favourite amongst all these images gives me strong hope for the future of our city’s design.

The twin peaked splendidness of the Kaiwharawhara substation is a superb piece of background urban

infrastructure, which combines not just an Electrical substation and a Waterworks, but has care-

fully separated these with an opportunely sited bus shelter. It is that sort of joined-up thinking

that we need in our modern cities: utility buildings providing useful support to those that live

amongst them.

This collection of crisply taken pictures will act as a marker in history, celebrating this key

role of the quiet power within our communities. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Guy Marriage, Architect

Wellington 2010.

Subsist Press

31 Fairview Ave

Feilding

http://architectureelectric.wordpress.com/

First published 2011

© 2011 Subsist Press

Contributions are copyright of the

individual authors

ISBN 978-0-473-18941-9

All rights reserved. No part

of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system or transmitted,

in any form or by any means,

electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording

or otherwise, without the

written permission of

Subsist Press and/or the

individual authors.

A CIP catalogue record for

this book is available from

the National Library

Printed by The Copy Press

Nelson, New Zealand

www.copypress.co.nz

The Architecture Electric | Jared Kennard | Tyson Schmidt | Nathan Horne

Contents

Introduction

Supremos

Doors

Grafitti

Details

Zones

Index

Afterword

8

11

59

71

85

99

111

133


Along with the internal combustion engine, public sewage, and Stephenson’s Rocket, electricity is a funda-

mental strand in the infrastructural root of modernism. From the considerable distance of the early 21st cen-

tury, however, it is difficult to imagine the profound impact of power distribution into the life of the hitherto

gas-lit and coal-fired community. And the Lord said, let there be light!

On his 1968 album Safe as Milk, Don Van Vliet’s voice is a surge of power - dark and guttural, yet pulsatingly

incandescent. The wild instrumentalism in the music may well be an historical homage to the electrification

of the guitar, but the suggestion - in the lyrics of the song Electricity - that the secrets of darkness are exposed

by the ‘night kisses’ of ‘high-voltage man’ illuminates a curious architectural paradox.

For the most part, those buildings charged with hosting such electric idealism suffer serious architectural

voltage drop, their lights hidden under batteries of bushels. The deed of brightness seeks its own shadow, it

seems, and the night is kissed by a tentative peck on the cheek.

As a nomenclature, The Architecture Electric is an appropriate buzz. It invokes the humming of overhead wires

in a soft rainfall, the primal screech of feedback from giant amplifiers, and the incandescent, white-hot flicker

of urban neon. It excites.

The electricity sub-station, however, is steadfastly shockproof. A storage facility and switch room

(a sub-ordination of power, for local supply), it is located at the consumer end of that snaky conduit from the

mighty powerhouse, its source. And in stark contrast to the latter’s more bombastic intrusion into landscape,

the sub-station is either coyly concealed or morphologically disguised within the relevant built fabric - sub-

urban, mostly - of its location.

Ranging from the cute to the quietly well-mannered, the beacon for this cultural transformer - rather than

flutter its innate oscillations - blinks modestly in the dim twilight of civic obedience. Like any other servant of

a local-authority, it is stoically and unapologetically there, approachable only at election time, when it becomes

plastered in the promise of political candidature. Light, at the end of a tunnel...

Sub-sidiary it may be, but the sub-station is not sub-terranean. Nor is it - except, perhaps, when wearing the

alternative colours of an intelligent graffiti - in any way sub-versive.

p.8

Eeee-eee-lec-tri-ci-teeeeeee!

High-voltage man / kisses night / to bring to light /

those who need / to hide their shadow-deed.

Eeee-eee-lec-tri-ci-teeeeeee!From Safe as Milk, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band

p.9Foreword

Those people most interested in the sub-station are likely to be architects. The prospect of functional sub-sti-

tution of its capricious site by a more personal occupation is palpable, and even the most cynical purveyor of

environmental chaos indulges this curious delinquency, as if attracted by unthreatening behaviour. The sub-

station is an uninhabited building, and - in that critical sense - has no attributable client. Like a frustrated por-

trait artist harrassed by the sitter, the architect dreams of a client-free life as a cultural sub-limation.

And yet the designs of these potentially sub-jective lighthouses are rarely attributed to any particular archi-

tect. A peremptory overseeing by a registered eminence is no doubt present, but the shoulder peered over is

more usually that of a draughtsman - a harmless sub-junction to a sub-ordinated self-expression.

Sub-station camouflage is a comedy of cuckoo’s nests. The early 20th century opted for a sepulchral Antique

Classicism as an appropriate cloak for its modern technology, as if to enshrine it in the mystery of the charnel

house, or Ramses’ smelly tomb. In the 1930’s, Art Deco’s machine-age hieroglyphics offered pallid contextual

relativity to notions of the new and futuristic, but thereafter architecture - with a capital A, that is - meekly

surrendered to a prosaic vernacular.

By mid-century, the sub-station had colonised the suburban house, quietly coddling its luminous egg behind

the brick-veneer walls and sash windows of Builders Executive, the drawn lace curtains of Neo-Georgian, and

the stucco-and-tile of Spanish Mission. Unenergised by such deceit, it ultimately re-emerged as a mock Colonial

shopfront or a hip-roofed Arts-and-Crafts pavilion, until - more latterly - consolidating into an unadorned, flat-

roofed, concrete ‘Modernist’ box.

This gradual capitulation to minimal efficiency is echoed by the ‘contemporary’ urban sub-station, an em-

phatically sub-standard accommodation usually found lurking behind a metal-grilled door in the bowels of a

large commercial building, alongside overflowing Wheely Bins, fire hydrants, and the gloomy orifice of a base-

ment car-park.

Lighthouse beacon straight ahead / straight ahead across black seas / to bring eeee-lec-tri-ci-teeeee!

So much for Captain Beefheart’s seductive dance - music trips the light fantastic far more deftly than the

leaden feet of architecture, and whilst there is much to enjoy in the quaint idiosyncrasy of the stumpy little

sub-station, as a celebrant of its function it’s but a candle in the wind.

Gerald Melling

Supremos

Doors

Grafitti

Details

Zones

Index

p.12 The Architecture Electric

21 Edward Street, Te Aro

p.13Supremos

14 Pringle Avenue, Te Aro


Moa Point Road, Rongotai

p.15Supremos

52 Ira Street, Miramar


Humber Street, Island Bay

p.17Supremos

Everton Terrace, Kelburn


132 The Terrace, Central City

p.19Supremos

299 Evans Bay Parade, Evans Bay


21 Tory Street, Te Aro

p.21Supremos

Hankey Street, Mount Cook


13 Gilmer Terrace, Central City

p.23Supremos

138 Wakefield Street, Te Aro


Houghton Bay Road, Houghton Bay

p.25Supremos

33 Kelburn Terrace, Kelburn


9 Pringle Avenue, Te Aro

p.27Supremos

66 Salamanca Road, Kelburn


Roseneath Terrace, Roseneath

p.29Supremos

123 Wexford Road, Miramar


Havelock Street, Mornington

p.31Supremos

9 Parkvale Road, Karori West


Norna Crescent, Kelburn

p.33Supremos

68 Ellice Street, Mount Victoria


100 Breaker Bay Road, Breaker Bay

p.35Supremos

264 Thorndon Quay, Thorndon


Warwick Street, Wilton

p.37Supremos

Lorne Street, Te Aro


Nairn Street, Mount Cook

p.39Supremos

6 Kaiwharawhara Road, Kaiwharawhara


Ohiro Bay Parade, Ohiro Bay

p.41Supremos

Agra Street, Khandallah


125 Taranaki Street, Te Aro

p.43Supremos

Stone Street, Miramar


Herald Street, Berhampore

p.45Supremos

Mansfield Street, Newtown


Weka Street, Miramar

p.47Supremos

Taurima Street, Hataitai


Cornwell Street, Pipitea

p.49Supremos

Container B, Pipitea


Shelly Bay, Maupuia

p.51Supremos

68 Dixon Street, Te Aro


70 Dixon Street, Te Aro

p.53Supremos

Flagstaff Hill, Te Aro


Roseneath, Roseneath

p.55Supremos

Rosina Fell Lane, Central City

1 Mt Pleasant Road, Aro Valley

The Architecture Electricp.56

Supremos p.57

Supremos

Doors

Grafitti

Details

Zones

Index


King Street, Mount Cook

p.61Doors

4 Torrens Terrace, Mount Cook



p.63Doors

6 Taranaki Street, Te Aro


31 Bowen Street, Central City

p.65Doors

34 Torrens Terrace, Mount Cook



p.67Doors



178 Wakefield Street, Te Aro

p.69Doors

Supremos

Doors

Grafitti

Details

Zones

Index


12 Lukes Lane, Te Aro

p.73Graffiti

69 Miramar Avenue, Miramar


9 Duncan Terrace, Kilbirnie

p.75Graffiti

Epuni Street, Aro Valley


46 Hania Street, Mount Victoria

p.77Graffiti

Military Road, Northland


Norna Crescent, Kelburn

p.79Graffiti

Waru Street, Khandallah


Mairangi Road, Wadestown

62 Hataitai Road, Hataitai


2 View Road, Houghton Bay

p.81Graffiti

88 Hutt Road, Kaiwharawhara

Camperdown Road, Miramar

Constable Street, Newtown

St John Street, Aro Valley


Hataitai Zone substation

Wha Street, Lyall Bay

70 Adelaide Road, Newtown

Hatton Street, Karori

p.83Graffiti

Henry Street, Kilbirnie

Manchester Terrace, Melrose

Herald Street, Berhampore

Mein Street, Newtown

Supremos

Doors

Grafitti

Details

Zones

Index


Lawrence Street, Newtown

Warwick Street, Wilton

Kaiwharawhara Zone, Kaiwharawhara

Nottingham Street, Karori

p.87Details

Athens Street, Miramar

Moa Point, Rongotai

Frederick Street Zone, Te Aro

Riddiford Street, Newtown


Duncan Terrace, Kilbirnie

University Zone, Kelburn

Evans Bay Zone, Rongotai

47 Hamilton Road, Hataitai

p.89Details

8 Ira Street Zone, Miramar

Moeller Street, Mount Victoria

Roseneath, Roseneath

46 Hania Street, Mount Victoria


9 Parkvale Road, Karori

Macdonald Crescent, Te Aro

59 Upland Road, Kelburn

Taurima Street, Hataitai

p.91Details

Elizabeth Street, Mount Victoria

56 Rongotai Road, Kilbirnie

Waikowhai Zone, Ngaio

98 Monorgan Road, Strathmore


Hector Street, Seatoun

Roseneath Terrace, Roseneath

100 Breaker Bay Road, Breaker Bay

117 Hamilton Road, Hataitai

p.93Details


131 Molesworth Street, Thorndon


Moore Street Zone, Pipitea


66 Salamanca Road

52 Ira Street

66 Ellice Street

59 Upland Road

9 Duncan Terrace

Flagstaff Hill

p.95Details

210 Houghton Bay Road

Springfield Terrace

Norna Crescent

13 Allington Terrace

Harrison Street

2 Volga Street


33 Ludlam Street

Herald Street

52 Ira Street

Helen Street

Station Road

Versailles Street

p.97Details

Supremos

Doors

Grafitti

Details

Zones

Index


Waikowhai Zone, Ngaio

p.101Zones




p.103Zones

Frederick Street Zone, Te Aro


Central Park Zone, Brooklyn

p.105Zones

Hataitai Zone, Hataitai


Moore Street Zone, Pipitea

p.107Zones

Palm Grove Zone, Berhampore


Evans Bay Zone, Rongotai

p.109Zones

University Zone, Kelburn

Supremos

Doors

Grafitti

Details

Zones

Index


blah blha alhb

Substations

Abel Smith Street - Awa Road

Adams Tce

29 Agra Cres

Arthur St

Avon St

3 Abel Smith St

70 Adelaide Rd

Allington Rd

7 Athol Cres

58 Adelaide Rd

3 Aitken St

Athens St

2 Awa Rd

72 Abel Smith St

312 Adelaide Rd

Aotea Quay

9 Athol Cres

p.113Index

blah hlab halb

Substations

Awa Road - Brougham Street

Ballantrae Pl

22 Boulcott St

31 Bowen St

39 Brooklyn Rd

48 Awa Rd

2 Bolton St

88 Boulcott St

Broadway

4 Barker St

79 Boulcott St

100 Breaker Bay Rd

Brougham St

55 Ballance St

Bombay St

93 Boulcott St

33 Brooklyn Rd


Substations

Burnham Wharf - Colway Street

Cardall St

8 Church St

Cobar Cres

1 Collingwood St

Burnham Wharf

Central Park Zone

Civic Centre

2 College St

Cashmere Ave

11 Church St

187 Cockayne Rd

Colway St

Camperdown Rd

Chaytor St

Clark St

Collier Ave

p.115Index

Substations

Connaught Terrace - Dixon Street

Container B

Container H

Crawford Green

Danube St

54 Connaught Tce

Container D

Cornwell St

10 Customhouse Quay

Container C

Cornford St

Creswick Tce

36 Dixon St

116 Constable St

Container F

94 Coutts St

38 Customhouse Quay


Substations

Dixon Street - Evans Bay Parade

71 Dixon St

9 Edward St

3 Ellers Ave

Eva St

68 Dixon St

9 Duncan Tce

11 Egmont St

Elphinstone St

23 Drummond St

21 Edward St

68 Ellice St

299 Evans Bay Pde

70 Dixon St

7 Edward St

Elizabeth St

Epuni St

p.117Index

Substations

Evans Bay - Gilmer Terrace

1 Featherston St

31 Fox St

Freyburg Building

Ghuznee St

Evans Bay Zone

Flagstaff Hill

Frandi St

Furness Lane

Feltex Lane

Francis Pl

Friend St

3 Gilmer Tce

Everton Tce

Fortification Rd

Frederick St Zone

15 George Bolt St


Substations

Gilmer Terrace - Harrison Street

14 Gilmer Tce

Grass St

117 Hamilton Rd

Harriet St

8 Gilmer Tce

16 Gloucester St

Halifax St

Hankey St

Gipps St

48 Haining St

46 Hania St

Harrison St

13 Gilmer Tce

Grant Rd

47 Hamilton Rd

80 Hanson St

p.119Index

Substations

Hataitai Road - Houghton Bay Road

Hatton St

Henry St

28 Hill St

60 Hopper St

62 Hataitai Rd

Hector St

22 Herd St

1 Homewood Cres

Havelock St

Herald St

Hinemoa St

210 Houghton Bay Rd

Hataitai Zone

Helen St

Herd St

23 Hopper St


Substations

Humber Street - Kaiwharawhara Road

24 Hunter St

209 Hutt Rd

3 Jervois Quay

Jubilee Rd Ripple Plant

Humber St

Hutt Rd

8 Ira St Zone

Jeypore St

27 Hunter St

52 Ira St

28 Jervois Quay

6 Kaiwharawhara Rd

Hungerford Rd

100 Hutt Rd

Jean Batten St

32 Johnston St

p.121Index

Substations

Kaiwharawhara Road - Little Pipitea Street

Kano St

2 Kelvin Grove

Kio Rd

20 Lennel Rd

46 Kaiwharawhara Rd

Kedah St

King St

Lawrence St

Kate Sheppard (unused)

89 Kilbirnie Cres

2 Lambton Quay

12 Little Pipitea St

Kaiwharawhara Zone

33 Kelburn Pde

52 Kingsford Smith St

1 Lennel Rd


Substations

Lombard Street - Manuka Street

Lucknow Tce

MacDonald Cres

Mairangi Rd

Mansfield St

Lombard St

12 Lukes Lane

Mahora St

Manchester Tce

33 Ludlam St

5 Maginnity St

8 Majoribanks St

9 Manuka St

Lorne St

15 Lukes Lane

Maida Vale Rd

Mandalay Tce

p.123Index

Substations

Marewa Road - Monorgan Road

32 Marion St

Mersey St

69 Miramar Ave

131 Molesworth St

9 Marewa Rd

McColl St

Michael Fowler Centre

Moa Pt

Masons Lane

Messines Rd

36 Mitchell St

98 Monorgan Rd

63 Marewa Rd

25 Mein St

Military Rd

Moeller St


Substations

Moore Street - Park Road

Nairn St

Nottingham St

308 Oriental Pde

The Parade

Moore St Zone

Naughton Tce

Ohiro Bay Pde

Palm Grove Zone

Napier St

Oban St

13 Palm Grove

106 Park Rd

1 Mt Pleasant Rd

Norna Cres

354 Oriental Bay

3 Panama St

p.125Index

Substations

Parkvale Road - Rimu Road

Plimmer Steps

Puketiro Ave

Queens Wharf East

Riddiford St

Parkvale Rd

9 Pringle Ave

Queens Dr (Regal Gardens)

Rata Rd

3 Pringle Ave

17 Quebec St

Queens Wharf North

Rimu Rd

57 Pipitea St

14 Pringle Ave

189 Queens Dr

Ribble St


Substations

Rintoul Street - Stadium

56 Rongotai Rd

66 Salamanca Rd

Show Buildings

St John St

361 Rintoul St

Roseneath Tce

Sefton St

Springfield Tce

Roseneath

San Sebastion Rd

52 Southampton Rd

Stadium East

Robertson St SW/House

Rosina Fell Lane

Shelly Bay

St Pauls Square

p.127Index

Substations

Stadium - The Terrace

Standen St

Tanera Cres

125 Taranaki St

The Terrace

Stadium North

Stone St

55 Taranaki St

46 Tauhinu Rd

Station Rd

6 Taranaki St

50 Tasman St

Terrace Zone

Stadium West

16 Tacy St

79 Taranaki St

Taurima St


Substations

The Terrace - Tirangi Road

132 The Terrace

302 The Terrace

220 Thorndon Quay

Tio Tio Rd

44 The Terrace

141 The Terrace

139 Thorndon Quay

Thorndon Quay (unused)

139 The Terrace

47Thorndon Quay

264 Thorndon Quay

124 Tirangi Rd

113 The Terrace

215 The Terrace

161 Thorndon Quay

Tinakori Rd

p.129Index

Substations

Tirangi Road - Victoria Street

34 Torrens Tce

40 Tory St

University Zone

37 Victoria St

125 Tirangi Rd

5 Tory St

133 Tory St

Versailles St

Torwood Rd

49 Tory St

59 Upland Rd

39 Victoria St

4 Torrens Tce

21 Tory St

Trelissick Cres

2 Victoria St


Substations

Victoria Street - Washington Avenue

174 Victoria St

2 Volga St

138 Wakefield St

56 Warwick St

42 Victoria St

27 Vivian St

Wadestown

281 Wakefield St

2 View Rd

Wade St

176 Wakefield St

92 Washington Ave

86 Victoria St

164 Vivian St

Waikowhai Zone

Waru St

p.131Index

Substations

Waterloo Quay - York Street

Wayside West

Wha St

254 Willis St

York St

28 Waterloo Quay

Weka St

36 Wigan St

Woodward St

15 Webb St

24 Wigan St

Wilton Zone (Chartwell)

66 Waterloo Quay

123 Wexford Rd

154 Willis St

Wrights Hill Rd

Afterword


Ahhh, the unseen hand, lurking in interstitial spaces, wires from here to there, ending with, as the metaphor

goes, a spark of life. An arcing leap of electrons to raise, Frankenstein from the table, the Xbox into action,

and a light to read by. It’s such a trivial end, those wires silently snaking their way through the walls, for a

process that began with the thunderous rush of water-powered turbines deep within our national pride. The

moving of mountains, the damming of rivers, capping of geysers, diggers, huge trucks and scrapers, concrete

batch plants, hard hats and construction towns whose names are a rollcall of mid twentieth century optimism

– Roxbrough, Otematata, Wairakei, Benmore and Tongariro.

These are not projects circumscribed by the RMA, not measured and weighed in the courts, but wrought in-

stead by gelignite and sweat labour, building the turbine halls to light up a newly industrialising and urbanising

country. From those deep subterranean halls the grids and armatures set out city-bound, cable-carrying pylons

stretched across the remotest valley, branding the land as barbed wire did a generation earlier.

At the city edge aluminium frames, threaded with glass and porcelain insulators, tame cross country voltages

in readiness for city streets. From there a string of cables, boxes and transformers step down voltages and

make ready the electron’s final dash through wires, fuse boxes, cable trays and walls. Though more visible

than the subterranean world of water and gas-carrying pipes and tubes, the very presence of this clutter sug-

gests a knowable system, traceable from lake to switch. Yet what of those boxes with their lightning bolt in-

junctions against entry, their seemingly clandestine placement; a terminus for cables, a junction for voltages

and the birthplace of wires?

The generation of electricity once involved heroic acts of engineering that cleaved the land within the unilateral

certainty of land acquisition for the public good, the state that gave us free milk had the unassailable right to

flood valleys. Just as the land wore the state’s imprimatur so the end of that distribution system, the substa-

tion, invariably wore the colours of the local supply authority in a neighbourhood manifestation of the state’s

paternalism. Though many still proudly wear these colours despite falling prey to market zealots, others are

placed with seemly clandestine reticence in the shadows, or are so nondescript as to be invisible within a clut-

tered streetscape.

The Age of Optimism

p.135Afterword

Where once rivers were tamed by the bravado and confidence of a singular vision of industrialised modernity,

it is now the hard hat engineers who have been tamed by the pluralities of a contemporary society in which

resource use is arbitrated and the ownership of generation, distribution and dissemination have been broken

up and privatised. Those once noble little structures humming away in service of our welfare state have be-

come commodities, bits of infrastructural kit to be squeezed in where they can.

I know how these things find a place, no longer in the public realm, not strung up a post like those little round

American tanks that hang off city lamp posts, but on the end user’s land, bundled together with mimic panels

and sprinkler pumps hitching up buildings at the end of the infrastructural line, Manapouri’s final resting place.

I have struggled to accommodate their imperious requirements for access and clearance within buildings that

are always too tight. I have drawn easements and battled with signage, trying to hide those little lightning

strikes. The boxes are, alas, prone to explosion and fire and need containment, masonry fire walls and a bund

to gather up the toxic stuff within should that escape, and so they remain cowering at the edge of vision and

we are not easily able to polish their fins or spotlight the control panels in public view.

It is the sad demise of a nation’s optimistic breaking of the land, that the end of the line should be locked

away unheralded. In doing so, substations join other visible instruments of nation building down on their

luck - the once mighty post office with coat of arms and flag flying offering connections across the globe -

now a post shop panhandling for small change down the back of a mall. Or how about the mighty Ministry of

Works, the progenitor of all that cutting, slicing, flooding and tunnelling, where are those serried ranks of en-

gineers and draftsmen now? Cut and diced, sold off along with railway, airline and bank, the ministry’s very

name an echo of Stalinist centralism.

Let us give a wistful nod to those fading remnants of an age of optimism and collective ownership, and wonder

whether the new owners will be as proud of their gear as those elected citizens who manned the nation’s

power boards and whose works still, in some dark corner, hum along.

Pip Cheshire


Danube Street, Island Bay

Subsist Press

ISBN 978-0-473-18941-9

Front Cover_Layout 1 9/08/2011 8:25 p.m. Page 1

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The Architecture Electric