Page:Ian Charlton.ogg/16



Reload page to restart the player. (You mentioned Graeme Theidke at Conrad and Gargett) Yes. Actually when I say Conrad and Gargett, Conrad and Gargett over the years have changed so many times, Conrad and Gargett, Conrad and Gargett and Partners, Conrad and Gargett and blah blah etc .. Conrad and Gargett is a general term. Yeah. (I worked with Graeme when I first went there) Right. (I worked there for 2 and a half years) What years were they? ([19]64, 65, 66 ) Right. (and Graeme was the one I worked with under Lou Hayley) Right. (and I thought he had a lot of skill, certainly he could produce a very convincing perspective of some building) Right. (Quickly and .. ) Right. (and that formed the basis of the design that we could come and develop.) Right. (So you worked with him for .. on any projects? You mentioned one, the Council Administration and you worked on .. ) I forget whether he was on that or not. I think he was. He was mainly the National Mutual Centre (Oh sorry, I messed up) and that's where we, he was in on that right from the beginning and he came up with the idea that he wanted to get verticality into and he didn't want to have sharp corners and his got the rounded corners which we had to do a lot of talking to talk the client into that because the corners of office buildings (You lose all that share space) (laughter) have a .. well apart from the fact that thats where the managers like having their offices and they look out the window instead of having a blank wall so anyway but he, when I was working with him, he'd been working in Mexico for a while and he came back and with a .. I don't know whether he had a quirky approach if you like in your day, he had a very original sort of outlook on design I don't think you can call some of them gimmicks or anything. One of the buildings he did subsequently I think, in his own practice or with Bill Heller was the, at All Hallows there's the gym building up on the thing which has got (He discovered post mordernism) Yeah. Yes, well that's what I say, I don't want to call them gimmicks or not but he could put these things togther you know, on the stairs there, which the stairs are like this, which he got the arch underneath which is a bit mixing in, if you would like to use your imagination and all the rest of it but he produced buildings that had a bit of character about them I think.

(Well before he travelled overseas was when I worked with him and we did that little chapel for the Arch Bishop up in Hamilton) Right. Well that's a lovely little building (Thats a very Frank Lloyd Wright.) Yeah. (And you see, he'd never seen a Frank Lloyd Wright building but he was pretty in tune with what its about). I've never seen it in action, in fact I have seen photographs and you could say its Frank Lloyd Wright. Yeah. (So you didn't have to travel to actually pick these things up but Graeme sort of picked up things from many sources and was able to put them together quickly.) Yeah. Yes. (But then Keith Frost was in the office, was he there when you were there?) Yes he was. Yes. (and he saw himself as the kind of design guru of part of the office and then there was always a sort of competition between what he thought of what a building should be and what Graeme thought of what a building should be and I can remember them .. ) Or Lou. It's like they would have a (Well Lou, Lou kind of deferred, I think to Graeme but I can remember them doing the schemes as a competition in the house competition for the SGIO building.) Right. Oh that would have been early days. Yeah. (and Graeme's had this twisting tower and not the sort of things ..) Yes that would have stood out a bit. (that would have been a nightmare to build.) Yeah. (Twisting Lift. I don't know.) Yeah well no I think you know that's when you sort of have to step in and put your foot down a bit. (Laughter). For example on the Commonwealth Bank I didn't like sort of interferring too much with Sipen, but the first design she came up with was sort of with philister type columns worked in and there were more ledges and Jim Kennedy who was on the Commonwealth Board was just took one look at it and said the birds are going to have a great time in that and we had to turn round, which I felt happier with because it took away a bit of the post-modern sort of look and cleaned up the lines a bit. These things are very dangerous interferring with them isn't it? That's why I, in Graeme's case, went along with what he wanted to do or what and what Sipen wanted to do. Yeah.

(well, in the case of the SGIO, well Keith won the day and he came in with a version of the Pan-American building in New York) Oh right. (And just pushed it down a bit.) Right. That kind of won the day.