New Zealand Design Review, No.3

September 1948

Brasch Collection NA 1 N48

Wellington: Architectural Centre

Design Review was the country’s first journal of its type, which lasted for only six years, from 1948 to 1954. I first encountered it in the library of the Auckland Institute and Museum in the early 1980s where I was employed to work on an index of New Zealand designers and craftspeople. I learnt that the magazine was a project of the Architecture Centre, set up by Wellington students of the Auckland School of Architecture and various influential architects and artists including Ernst Plischke and E. Mervyn Thompson. Charles Brasch collected the Design Review; he had a good eye for such things. My PhD research focuses on the search for sophistication in architecture through travel between 1880 and 1950. Design Review is a window into the thinking of young design professionals of that time.
(Chosen by Michael Findlay, Professional Practice Fellow, Design, Division of Sciences, Otago)