Plischke and the architecture of suspicion.
Natalie Guy’s new body of work explores the enduring relationship between modernist architecture, surveillance, and the uneasy act of looking. Centred on the Khan House (1941) in Pōneke, Wellington—a modernist home once caught up in wartime accusations of espionage—the exhibition examines how architecture can become a site of suspicion, voyeurism, and projection, where buildings themselves are implicated in stories of secrecy and distrust.
Natalie Guy, Plischke and the architecture of suspicion.
by Dr Linda Tyler
Modern architecture wasn’t always groovy and desirable. Aotearoa was suspicious of the émigré European architects with their “glass and concrete shoeboxes”. Films showed modernist architecture as cold and threatening: a glass curtain wall might hurt you, as it does Monsieur Hulot in the Jacques Tati films. Natalie Guy is intrigued by how this fear was conjured by an architecture which sought to liberate people from tradition. Her materials – bronze, powder-coated steel, glass – evoke the textures of modernist architectural construction but strip them of an architect’s utopian intent, interrogating the forms for signs of malevolence.
Her inspiration here is iconic designs by Austrian émigré architect Ernst Plischke, who was based in Wellington from 1939 until 1963. In his autobiography he recalls how the reception from locals was hostile. Classification as an “enemy alien” entailed daily reporting to the Police, and innocent activities often led to accusations of espionage. He was told “Your wife is not jewish [sic], she is a decoy of yours and the boys are not your sons”.
In December 1940, he was commissioned by Bavarian-born Gertrud and Joachim Kahn to design them a new house in Ngaio. It had extensive views, and occasioned a poem by Allen Curnow, “At Joachim Kahn’s”, first published in 1944. The neighbours were alarmed by this insertion of high culture in their midst: its large windows had obviously been designed to facilitate observation of shipping in Tory Channel. A decade or so later, film directors Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Luc Godard created an atmosphere of surveillance and emotional alienation in films such as North by Northwest (1959) and Contempt (1963) by strategically deploying modernist architecture. Guy riffs off wartime paranoia, and the inferences of popular culture, dissecting the Kahn house, searching for complicity in its minimalist interior.
Plischke was a prime candidate for being spied upon: he was reported for discussing shipping in the English Channel with another of the German-speaking refugee architects in the Housing Department in 1942. The following year, Howard Elliott, prominent Orangeman, sectarian agitator and editor of the Financial Times newspaper, insinuated to Police that Plischke was transmitting messages to the enemy. A lady friend of Elliott’s had observed steel tubes being delivered to Plischke’s Brooklyn house and concealed herself in the shrubbery where she claimed to have heard noises like a transmitting set being operated. Questioned by Police, Plischke showed how the material could be used to make modernist furniture, producing a photograph of cantilevered chairs made from tubular steel. A thorough search of the property found that the only devices capable of making the sounds described were a paint sprayer and an electric sweeper.
Exploring how designs can become symbols shaped by the collective imagination and be both visionary and unsettling simultaneously, is Guy’s preoccupation. Moving deftly between a homage and critique of modernism, she estranges fragments of Plischke which survive in our cultural memory, encouraging viewers to consider why this architectural style still evokes feelings of unease.
