“Designed Upon the Most Modern Lines”: Purpose-Built Apartment Buildings in 1920s New Zealand

By the 1920s, the detached house and garden was well-established as the desired housing norm for Pākehā New Zealanders. Developers had also started building purpose-built apartment buildings in the 1910s, and, in the 1920s, in response to population growth, urbanisation, an ongoing housing shortage, and increased opportunities for women, such buildings were built in increased numbers. The Great Depression provided a bookend because it curtailed the construction of the larger apartment buildings. This article analyses the 1920s apartment buildings collectively and, utilising historical geographer Richard Dennis’ writing on modernity, explores the ways in which the buildings can be considered modern. The article finds modernisation and the new in construction and other technologies, the standardisation and repetition of plans through vertical stacking, the introduction of new building by-laws, overt American influences, the changing place of women in society, and the increasing sale of stocks and shares as means to fund the speculative development of what were comparatively large buildings.