Albert L. Refiti, with exhibition design by Hannah Manning-Scott
Objectspace, Auckland
3 December 2022 – 26 February 2023
Mike Austin, known for his humility, would shrink from the title ‘Godfather of Pacific Architecture’, even if I use it in moderate jest. But there is truth in the ruse. Parsing the canon of Pacific architecture means, inevitably, encountering the work of Mike Austin. This is impressive; the region is defined by the watery body that flows over one third of the planet.
Austin is a practising architect and leading scholar in the field, and his photographs evidence a lifelong architectural photography practice. The displayed images have been selected from his personal archive, which documents his time travelling through Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Sāmoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Hawai’i and…