Strangers Arrive by Leonard Bell

Author:Leonard Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, History
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Naomi Bell, mural at Parnell Baths, Auckland, 2017.

T. K. Donner, City Architect, Pumping Station for Mt Eden District, Auckland, Year Book of the Arts, 6, 1950, p. 31.

Between 1930 and 1939, about 180 open-air pools were built in Britain, adding to about 50 built earlier in the 1920s. They were popular after World War II, too, offering relief from an otherwise austere existence. Few British pools were modernist in style.119 Indeed, Brighton’s Saltdean Lido (1938), elegant and not too big or grandiose, as some pools were, was the only really modernist example. Just along the coast at Bexhill stood its inspiration: the De La Warr Pavilion, with its reinforced concrete, ‘striking blend of horizontals and curves, glazed walls, cantilevered balconies and flat roof terraces’, was ‘arguably the first truly modernist building in Britain’.120 Indeed, the pavilion was one of the most influential, and beautiful, modernist buildings in Britain and beyond, ‘its sensuous elegance rarely surpassed’.121 The Saltdean Lido has a similar projecting, curved central feature, like the bridge of an ocean liner. And, like the Parnell Baths, it is more Central European modernist in design and look than British.

Frank Hofmann’s photographs of the Parnell Baths (see p. 164) exemplify the same modernist ethos, and not surprisingly connect to interwar Czech open-air swimming pools, which he had also photographed. Other celebrated Czech modernist pools include Bohuslav Fuchs’ Municipal Baths in Brno (c. 1931), the Barrandov open-air pool in Prague (1929–32) and the Zelená Žaba pool in Trensčiaske Teplice (c. 1936). The latter’s pavilion-like structure and pilotis, its two and three levels accented horizontally, find their echo in the Parnell Baths.122 As a man-made space, the baths provided a haven, a structured refuge from the potential dangers of the shifting ocean. Earl De La Warr, who commissioned the eponymous pavilion, believed that modernist recreational architecture would be a significant force in national regeneration after war and economic crises.123 Extend his vision to the Parnell Baths in a postwar Auckland, also recovering from serious polio epidemics in 1948 and the early 1950s, and the baths – a site for swimming, diving, sunbathing, healthy physicality and classlessness – embodied, at least theoretically, the promise of better lives. The modern Parnell Baths are still extraordinarily popular and, to risk a touch of sentimentality, much loved, a space where people of all ages feel free.

Qualifications are necessary. For many refugees the quest for a new home free from anxieties and feelings of alienation remained an unattainable aspiration. Exiled in New York during the war, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno reflected, ‘It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.’124

Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphorism ‘We children of the future, how could we be at home in this today?’125 took on greater urgency after the horrors of war, a ‘journey to hell and back’,126 followed by the cold war and nuclear threats. It wasn’t a straightforward matter of making a new home and living happily ever after. Often continuing unease extended into the New Zealand-born generation.

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