“I came to architecture by good fortune when I shifted in with my then girlfriend who was living below Athfield Architects’ office in Wellington. I had tried a few jobs and been overseas but was at a loose end when Ath offered me a role as the odd-job person. He said he would get me onto a drawing board.”
Roger, who joined RTA Studio in 2012, retains the same enquiring excitement for drawing he had back in the early 80s. “I would pushbike to work, and sometimes I’d go through traffic lights and think, ‘Goodness, was that orange or red?’ my mind was so preoccupied with a detail I was struggling with.”
Fortunately, he survived such distracted commutes to reflect on how much he learnt from a man who made an indelible impression. Roger lived in one of Ath’s houses, part of the inventively sprawling village in concrete, built at the end of a street on a rocky spur of land thrusting itself toward Wellington Harbour. “We all walked up the steep, zig-zag track to Ath’s place to work from the carpark in the valley below.”
One of his first tasks was to look after two sheep that kept the grass down. “One was called Freestone, the other Flymo. I had to dive-tackle them to shear them,” says Roger, who remembers giving Flymo – “the psycho one” – a mohawk, just for fun.
In between hustling sheep, digging foundations for extensions to the house, painting and keeping the gardens tidy, he was training in the office. Developing the architectural drawings was a rugged process. After running the hand-drawn tracings through a printer, these prints then had to be developed. Roger rolled them up to place on a rack above a tray of ammonia with a lightbulb underneath. The vapour given off by the heated ammonia developed the prints. “I nearly passed out a few times from the fumes at the end of a long print run.”
When it came to drawing, “I would look and learn. Ath and his business partners, Dicky and Graham, all draughted beautifully”. Later, he found the transition from a Rotring pen to computer-aided draughting difficult. “I thought I needed some official qualification, but Ath and the other partners said, ‘You’ll be OK’. Still, I wanted to do it, so I studied for my NZCD at Polytech part time.”
In the building downturn of 1992, when Roger and other staff were laid off, he and his now-wife, Gaye, eventually gravitated north. They left the ‘Onslow Alms’, a mono-pitch box on the hillside that had been home for 13 years - “Ath had remodelled it to look like a wild west pub, and we used to get people bowling up to ask us what was on the menu” - and made their way to Auckland to be closer to extended family.
Having first met RTA Studio co-founder Richard Naish at Jasmax, Roger joined the practice just as the Tarawera High School project was kicking off. “It was a design that turned the idea of school buildings on its head. Here was a team putting roofs together to salute Māori thinking around communal space [the whare tapere].”
Roger was also charged with mentoring younger staff in technical drawing. “These days you can Google, but I learnt by looking over people’s shoulders plus having practical knowledge from being a builder’s labourer.” While he appreciates the 3D component of computer-aided design – “you can twirl a building to look at it from all angles whereas we used to have to imagine” – he believes that back then, draughts people needed to think more about what they were drawing. “I miss the hand-drawn textures you could convey through a Rotring pen and pencil with crosshatching and differing line weights.”
Next year Roger may be able to revert to his roots on a project that is very personal – building a home for his youngest daughter and her partner on the back of the family property. When he left the rocky hillsides of Wellington and discovered the beautiful black loam in Sandringham, he “went quite mad planting”. Now vegetables, avocados and all sorts of fruit trees are guaranteed to keep him pleasantly occupied. “Gardening in Auckland is really rewarding. It’s my happy place and building out back will be nice for my daughter.”
Apart from being fiercely proud of his 46-year marriage and all three of his girls, he feels fortunate to have been able to book-end his career at Athfield’s and RTA Studio. “I’ve been able to work on vibrant, challenging projects in a cross-section of typologies. And Rich has been a friend as well as an employer.”
We look forward to Roger popping back into the studio to share notes about the little house he is crafting in his back yard – in finely drawn detail of course.