A genius in pink jandals: Rewi Thompson, the Māori architect who shocked his neighbours

In the leafy Auckland suburb of Kohimarama, where pitch-roofed clapboard homes line well-kept streets, a striking grey ziggurat rises from the subtropical foliage. It looks like a defensive fortification, greeting the road with a monolithic, windowless facade. Narrow arrow-slit openings puncture the sides of its blank, blocky bulk, as if keeping a lookout for bands of marauding neighbours. “I know people hate my house,” wrote Rewi Thompson , the architect of this arresting home, which he built for his family in 1986. “I guess it’s too different from people’s idea of a house in Kohimarama, or too defensive or challenging, or pure cultural shock!”

Thompson, who lived here until his death in 2016, was one of the boldest, most influential Māori architects in Aotearoa, or New Zealand. Through building, drawing, writing and teaching, he pushed his conviction that architecture had the power to reinforce Māori cultural identity, and restore a sense of agency to a people forcibly estranged from their land. As a new generation of young urban Māori architects and students embrace their Indigenous tribal heritage as never before , Thompson’s work has been compiled in Rewi, a landmark book that provides a wealth of inspiration through his built and unbuilt projects, brought to life with a colourful collection of interviews with clients, colleagues and students.

My work is not about being accepted. I do what I have to do. Architecture can be a lonely business

The strident architect’s own home was a shocking arrival to the conventional suburban context when it poked up from the bushes in the 1980s. It was an act of defiance, standing as an apt reflection of a man who had to struggle against the odds to see his work realised, in the face of systematic prejudice. Not that he cared much what others thought. “It has never been our intention for our neighbours to understand the message expressed in the thinking behind the house,” he wrote. “My work is not about being accepted. I do what I have to do. Architecture can be a lonely business.”

Turning its back to the street, the house instead opens up to the land behind, where trees and shrubs tumble down a steep slope to meet a big picture window. Tough on the outside, it was conceived as a refuge on the inside – a metaphor for Māori survival in the face of colonial violence. “I’ve never seen the house as violent or aggressive, but it does refer to Auckland as a place of violence,” Thompson said. “Inwardly, the house is peaceful, as it reflects the whānau (family), aroha (affection), awhi (embrace) concepts.”

The exterior walls, which look like cast concrete from a distance, are in fact plywood, stained pale grey – a cheap, pragmatic solution that anticipated repair and replacement as part of the natural ageing process. “He didn’t aspire to permanence,” writes the book’s co-author, Jeremy Hansen. “Instead, he was comfortable with the idea of buildings assuming new lives or, more radically, eventually crumbling to dust.”

In traditional Māori culture, building timbers are often left to decompose and return to the soil from whence they came, to rejuvenate the mauri (life force) of the land. For years, that seemed to be the likely fate of Thompson’s house, as its walls became evermore encrusted with black mildew, making it look even more like a forgotten temple, unearthed from the jungle. After the architect’s death, the home was sold in 2017 , and has recently been undergoing restoration, with the plywood replaced and the sharply-hewn ziggurat – a form that nods to the Māori poutama, or stairway to heaven pattern – looking crisper than ever.

Born in 1953 and raised in Wellington, where his father worked as a bus driver, Thompson was one of the first generation of urban Māori who grew up in the city, away from their tribal roots. He trained as a civil and structural engineer at Wellington Polytechnic and worked as a structural draughtsman, before leaving to study architecture at the University of Auckland in 1980, where he was known for his jazzy Hawaiian shirts and shocking pink jandals, and always wielding a pack of highlighter pens. His work was just as eye-catching as his outfits.

“All the students tried to tone their buildings in with the bush, all except for Rewi,” recalled one former tutor . “He painted his bright pink and, boy, did it look good. It was a signal about the future.” Fittingly, his hand-scrawled name shines out from the book’s blue cloth cover in neon pink, ensuring it won’t go unnoticed on the shelves.

Thompson’s prize-winning graduation project imagined a futuristic marae (a sacred tribal meeting place), designed as a startling megastructure rising from the sea, like a supersized waka (traditional Māori canoe), beached on the slopes of Mount Victoria. It set the tone for a series of dreamy speculative projects and abstract visions that he continued to concoct throughout his career, compiled in a section of unrealised designs at the back of the book. They include a prismatic tower encasing a giant T-Rex, and clusters of totemic cantilevered platforms suspended from poles in the ocean, depicted in fantastical gnomic drawings that recall the work of Archigram and the Japanese metabolists . “Ominous and thrilling,” write the authors, commenting on the designs, “their purpose is unclear.”

The same radical, otherworldly sensibility infused Thompson’s built work, whether in papakāinga collective housing for the Māori community, his university and healthcare buildings, or the dramatic tent-like canopy and winged stage set he designed for a Papal visit in 1986. His social housing project in Wiri, South Auckland, was imagined as a “wilderness”, with rows of housing interspersed with native planting. It included one group of homes under an undulating roof, as well as erratically arranged houses hovering on poles, beneath curved mono-pitched roofs. In an article at the time, Thompson ominously commented: “All the houses have natural finishes, they will weather and perhaps decay in time.” Little trace of them remains.

His work on the Ngawha correctional facility in Northland was more robust. At a time when half of the country’s prison population was Māori (a figure that remains similar today) , Thompson was driven by a belief that architecture could heal the wairua (spirit) of people broken by their circumstances. He advocated for porches facing significant features in the landscape to enable inmates to reconnect with their ancestral places of belonging, and look ahead to life outside of prison.

“For Māoris,” he wrote, “the affiliation with the land is spiritual as opposed to an understanding that is commercial which pervades a western viewpoint. This leads to a different interpretation of architecture relative to the site.” The Department of Corrections had originally planned to bulldoze the hilly site to create a flat tabula rasa, but Thompson encouraged them to embrace the possibilities of the landscape, offered by the natural terraces and a stream, to create a village-like compound with a sense of openness, where curved buildings featured generous overhangs.

Similarly, in his work for the Mason forensic psychiatry clinic, he advocated for the inclusion of large, open foyers to accommodate pōwhiri (Māori welcoming rituals), kaumātua (elder) rooms and marae as a means to include whānau (extended family) for visits and stays. At a time when public institutions included token nods to Māori culture at best – in the form of artworks on the wall, or geometric patterns stuck on the facades – Thompson’s approach started with first principles, understanding the importance of family and cultural traditions in the process of rehabilitation.

“It was a breakthrough project when it came to institutional design,” architecture professor Deidre Brown tells co-author Jade Kake in an interview in the book. “He and other architects were pushing to raise the question, can you have a marae in a secure facility? These are difficult spaces, but he wasn’t shy of working in them.”

Brown taught with Thompson at the University of Auckland, where the department of architecture was recently renamed “Te Pare” (the threshold) after his educational philosophy. He may not have left behind a huge quantity of buildings, but his influence lives on in the hundreds, if not thousands, of people he taught and inspired. Karamia Müller studied under Thompson in the early 2000s, and later taught a design studio class with him. “We’re in a different time now, where Indigenous creative practices are being more recognised,” she says. “But at that time there weren’t many people there that I knew of who were brown, and were designing in a radical way that drew on Indigenous concepts.” He embodied a unique blend of utopian, transformative thinking and pragmatic, buildable know-how, enthusing students with a constant “bubbling up of ideas.” Thanks to Thompson, she adds, “we’ve got an archive, we have buildings, we have a pedagogy: a canon, in a way.”

The book bubbles with Thompson’s energy, optimism and wit. It’s a dazzling resource, ready for the next generation to pick up the mantle.

• Rewi: Āta haere, kia tere , by Jade Kake and Jeremy Hansen is available now, published by Massey University Press