Veneers and Facades: A Re-evaluation of the Status and Meaning of Napier's Art Deco

Abstract

Abstract

Napier’s 1931 rebuild marks an explicit aesthetic mutation of the city’s surfaces. The period architecture is borne of the post-disaster context but the evolution of its character is heavily influenced by imported British and American identities. “Veneers and Facades” is an interdisciplinary examination of the perceived value and social content of Napier’s Art Deco architecture. Nested in the third wave of Art Deco literature, this research approaches Napier’s Art Deco as an abstract concept, removing the ‘style’ from the static confines of architectural history, to frame it as an ongoing visual-cultural production. I ask: who are we that this is Napier? Why does Napier look like this, now? Art Deco is reviewed in terms of its spatiotemporal agency, the associative mechanics of its iconography, and its metonymical/metaphorical role in the narrative of the earthquake recovery — each with a view to urging more nuanced, sustainable expressions of the city’s heritage. I argue that Art Deco in all its guises occupies a temporalized space decorated with the semiotics of desire. I ask what imagery and ways of knowing are being harnessed and concretised in the cultivation of an ‘Art Deco atmosphere’ while challenging the assumption that modernism is the only language through which we might know and value this inherently affective post-disaster architecture. The poetic spaces associated with Napier’s Art Deco mobilise a collective, vicariously acquired, highly mediated nostalgic fantasy. This fantasy is revealed to be conservative, gendered, middle-class, predominantly Pākehā and often metamodern. Napier’s Art Deco culture does not represent racial, economic, gender, or body diversity because the imagery is drawn from an era of prejudiced class privilege. Further, I contend that sites of heritage aspire to conjure the twin notions of historical sensation and historical presence while distributing historical knowledge. Where the past is excessively simulated, visitors are less likely to be moved by the historical sensation. Yet when historical objects and sites are presented in their primary form their evocations tend to be more innately compelling. In presenting heritage, we must therefore preserve the metonym (the temporal and contextual otherness of historic artefacts) while selling the metaphor (the mediated experience).