Dorset St Flats
Christchurch, New Zealand

Miles Warren, Michael Weston, Simon Wood and Michael Davis 1956-1957
Warren & Mahoney

Young Architects 2021

Styling • Kate Arnold

Artwork • Clem Arnold

The Dorset Street Flats in Christchurch were designed and built between 1956 and 1957 and are amongst the most important domestic buildings built in New Zealand in the second half of the twentieth century. Miles Warren (b. 1929, later Sir Miles Warren) designed them as a young architect and with these flats he launched an architectural vocabulary that would come to distinguish the ‘Christchurch School’ of post-war architecture and also helped to shape modernist architectural design nationally for over two decades.

The Dorset Street Flats is one of Miles Warren’s earliest architectural projects and is a key work within his oeuvre. Warren has been recognised nationally and internationally as one of the most important New Zealand architects of the second half of the twentieth century. The Dorset Street Flats set new architectural, social and aesthetic standards for domestic buildings in New Zealand and are recognised as one of the most important Modern Movement buildings constructed in this country.

Source heritage.org.nz