Published 2008 by Tāhuhu Kōrero Toi Art History, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
48 pages
190 x 150mm, softcover, black and white
Edited by Christina Barton
ISSN 1176-5887

Revisiting Rangiatea is a fascinating reconsideration by leading architectural historian and theorist Sarah Treadwell of the historic Maori church built at Otaki between 1848 and 1851 by local iwi, Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa, Te Ati Awa. Through a careful re-reading of the evolving history of the structure (including its reconstruction after it was destroyed by fire in 1995) and its various visual and textual representations, Treadwell explores how the building has gained its meaning within a history of colonial and postcolonial cultural production.

Her argument models a new way of thinking about architectural heritage, in which the physical preservation of an actual building matters no more than its survival and reinvention across the entire field of representation, to convey a refreshing new vision of architecture as multiple, sequential and renewable. For Treadwell, Rangiatea exists in built form, but also in prints, drawings, photographs, and written accounts, as a space where the principles of western architecture are both invoked and undone. In this her text serves as an exemplary postcolonial re-reading that aptly fits the format of the annual Gordon H. Brown Lecture.

Sarah Treadwell is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Auckland’s School of Architecture and Planning, whose work entails the examination of visual representations as the basis for her study of colonial architecture in New Zealand and the Pacific.