NZ Visual Diary - entry 224
Along Ponsonby Road
This entry continues my exploration of commercial buildings with histories from the late 19th or early 20th centuries in the greater Auckland area.
As I have noted in several previous posts, commercial properties of age often exhibit predictable functional and visual disparities between their ground and upper floors. Ground floors valorise commerce, both in pace and appearance. They welcome pedestrian traffic and attract the same with the visual language of commercial allure and exchange. They speak using the vocabularies of modernity, an admixture of elegance and banality.
If they are contained within buildings of considerable age, upper floors often retain their provincial architectural signatures. Whether neglected or restored and maintained, the upper floors of commercial buildings typically celebrate the ornamental distinctions of a particular architectural styles, the fashion of a moment in time. They speak with the pronounced alien accents of other eras.
The cacophony of ‘visual sound’ between upstairs and downstairs, like that pictured in the 218 Ponsonby Road image — the elegance of brick and stylised cement ornamentation trimmed with corrugated metal apron — can make for a jarring experience.
Nonetheless, I always look up.