Editorial

For many of us 2020 and 2021 involved a lot of time focusing on what was close at hand, especially the domestic and our local environments. While few would have chosen the constraints that led to this situation, the lockdowns, border closures and travel restrictions did remind us that it is easy to ignore the ground under our own feet and the building just around the corner. For settler colonial societies in the Antipodes this tendency to not look at, or to misrecognise, the local has been a deep cultural norm. There has instead been a tendency to focus on what Conrad Hamann recently described in the pages of this journal as the “misty metropolis” – the imagined centres of (architectural) culture, somewhere in the misty distance. The misty metropolis has typically been evoked to highlight the presumed immaturity or some other inadequacy of the local architectural scene. While we may no longer give credence to an absolute distinction between the local and the global, or the metropolitan and the provincial, the necessity of attending to what is nearby, has in many ways been salutary. Lockdown restrictions no doubt provided a moment for many to dream of distant destinations, but lots of us also welcomed the chance to walk nearby paths and more carefully tend our own gardens on balconies and in backyards. In one way or another, the peer reviewed papers included in this issue of Fabrications all attend to local buildings, places and architectural cultures in Australia and New Zealand. The work that went into these papers was in many cases well underway before anyone had even heard of Covid 19. In that sense, the papers are not a direct outcome of lockdowns. But their attentiveness to places, people and events that are local to the authors, many of the journal’s regular readers and contributors, means that they will resonate with this recent experience of localness. Davis, Gatley and Hochstein recount the fascinating story of the Middleton House (1960–61). Best known for its demonstrative use of traditional domestic details, especially its famous finial, the paper here tells a richer story of the building and its inhabitants. In particular, the authors explore the question how the relocation of the house affected its architectural and cultural value. Originally designed for an inner Auckland site, it was moved in 1968 to make way for a new expressway, and taken to Waiatarua at the city’s western suburban edge. But the authors do not FABRICATIONS 2021, VOL. 31, NO. 3, 303–305 https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2021.2019484