NZ visual diary - entry 96

Smith & Caughey Building - Elliott Street facade

Smith & Caughey is a high-end fashion department store with locations on Queen Street and in the Auckland suburb of Newmarket. The Queen Street store is the oldest operating department store in Auckland's city centre.

The store's website reverently recalls Smith & Caughey's origins: "In 1880, showing great courage and enterprise for the time, Marianne Smith (nee Caughey) established her own drapers and millinery." The entrepreneurial success of Smith and her successors should be told. My interest, however, is in the building's architecture and its architect Roy Alstan Lippincott.

American born architect Roy Alstan Lippincott had a large presence in Auckland as a practitioner of the Art Nouveau style. Art Nouveau as a distinct architectural expression emerges out of the Arts & Craft style, which was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is an extension and triumph of the decorative arts emphasis in architectural ornamentation that is a hallmark of the Arts & Crafts and Beaux-Arts styles.

Among Lippincott's numerous commercial and residential projects in Auckland, two stand-out for me: the Smith & Caughey Building and the Clock Tower at the University of Auckland. The Clock Tower is a grand statement of Art Nouveau architecture. I suspect that Smith & Caughey executives were not amenable to embracing that style for their commercial building, and the Queen Street edifice is likely representative of the Beaux-Arts style. A legitimate architecture historian, for I am surely not, would need to confirm the building's typology.

As is often the case with the rear-facing side of commercial buildings, the Elliott Street facade of the Smith & Caughey building has been neglected. It desperately needs a thorough cleaning. That said, the grime cannot hide the building's elegance. Walls and windows alike are suffused with intricately rendered decorative elements, notably organic shapes inspired by natural forms (for example, flower petals, stalks and clam shells can be found in this building's decorative vocabulary).

To my eye, the organic shapes of the decorative ornamentation provide a very pleasing counterpoint to the rectilineal dominance of the building's outlines.