Finding beauty in quotodian Wellington architecture

Ex-pat Peter Campbell, LRB art critic, returns home to report on all things architectural: “Painters have not made much of Wellington houses, but in Rita Angus’s picture of Thorndon, the part of the city she lived in, the verandah-fringed houses and cottages, clustering under the pine-covered cliff of the fault scarp, give some idea of the logic behind the random scramble of building – a geometry in which buildings look for light and a view of the hills or the sea in much the same way that a field of sunflowers turns to the sun.”