The Old Napier, a port city built on a strip of land beside an island.
It was closely bounded by swamps and estuaries and a lagoon.
Reclamation was creating more space for houses and the town was a source of pride for its citizens.
It was a content little community until the 3rd of February 1931 when everything changed forever.
Insurance companies described it as God.
It was an earthquake of 7.9 on the Richter scale, New Zealand's greatest natural disaster.
Fire finished what the earthquake had begun, laying the city waste.
Immediate help was lent by the sailors of HMS Veronica, but none the less 162 people died in Napier.
By the end of the Great Convulsion, the sea floor had risen over 2 meters.
Areas that had been swamps or harbour were now dry land.
This would give Napier the room it needed to expand.
The government sent disaster relief to begin the rescue operations and to alleviate the suffering.
A temporary shopping area, Toontown, was built while the future of the town was considered.
After months of planning, the reconstruction of Napier began with street widening and the burying of services.
On the first building to arise, the architect ordered that rivets be used instead of the modern method of welding.
He wanted the noise to send a message of optimism to the people, telling them that their city was beginning to rise again.
Local architects were helped by progressive young graduates from Auckland, all filled with the design spirit of the times, a new style that came to be known as Art Deco.
And thanks to the activities of the Art Deco Trust, the special character of this city is recognised and esteemed by its people.
A former president of the British Museum Association has said that Napier represents one of the most complete and significant groups of Art Deco buildings in the world.
Every feature that the Art Deco style encompasses is richly represented in buildings ranging from the simplest to the elaborate.
From the inner city to the suburbs.
From office buildings to houses, theatres, banks, shops and fountains.
Zigzags, ziggurats, sunbursts. Here they all are.
Art Deco, or modernistic style as it was first called, was the first truly modern design movement of the 20th century.
It represents the first modernist break since the 19th century historical revival styles and the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements.
However, it was not always a complete break with the past. Often classical details were retained or abstracted into the new idiom.
In the early 20th century, new technology, new materials and new social codes demanded a new aesthetic.
Art Deco began to evolve from about 1904 and by the mid-1920s had taken over, emerging into the spotlight of the 1925 Paris Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts.
In essence, it was a style of progress, mechanisation and industrial activity.
It adopted images of power and the machine in a more austere style than its ornate Victorian predecessors.
Geometric designs and symbols of power, speed and freedom were its themes.
This was a style that was most decorative, but was comfortable with and indicative of business, mass production, energy, transport and communication.
Art Deco glorified progress.
Zigzags and other geometric shapes were seen everywhere, shapes created on the drawing board, not by the artist's hand.
But flowers were sometimes seen, stylised and elegant.
It was the time of the new woman, liberated, independent, active in work and play.
The ocean liner in the aeroplane bought the first age of mass travel.
The suntan, no longer the sign of a field worker, branded its wearer as someone who could afford to laze away winter days on some far away beach.
And the sun was also a symbol of the new age that was dawning, the 20th century.
As travel became a theme for the age, so the exotic became a feature of the Art Deco style.
Tutankhamun's tomb had been opened in 1922.
There was a fascination with ancient cultures.
Egyptian, Mayan, Inca and Aztec all had a role to play in the grand design.
It is interesting that a style that looked so much to the future could carry so many echoes of magic, romance and ancient civilisations.
A sense of the theatrical also developed with the emergence of Hollywood as the great cultural force of the time in its elaborate movie sets and in the great movie theatres.
Advances in the technology of lighting created drama and spectacle.
Internationally, the architecture of the time was practical and at the same time could be colossal.
So colossal that in New York a city ordinance required that buildings be stepped back as they reached higher to allow sunlight to reach street level.
And so the ziggurat motif became a symbol of modernism and a characteristic element of Art Deco design.
The massive size of American buildings like mountains over-awing and rich ornamentation were important to the commercial image of big businesses in the boom years of the 1920s.
Strongly dramatised entrances enhanced the corporate image.
But from 1930 on, with the world in the grip of the Great Depression, ostentation was discarded.
As a writer of the time said, aesthetics were out and politics were in.
Sensibility was replaced by social awareness.
It was the beginning of the age of speed.
Aerodynamic shapes began to infiltrate the style in the 1920s and with the discovery of streamlining around 1930 and slumping depression sales creating a need for more exciting products, curves and speed lines began to appear in almost every car, to vacuum cleaners, houses and hotels.
All these Art Deco design elements are found in profusion in Napier.
The ziggurat shape is repeated in stepped silhouettes and decorative details.
Zigzags are everywhere.
Sunbursts were especially meaningful in the city being built for a new tomorrow.
Fountains symbolised renewal.
There are Egyptian motifs
and Mayan designs.
Liberated women
flowers
speed lines and speed symbols
towering emblems of power
electric lighting
and natural light effects from lead light, skylights and windows.
There are streamlined shapes even though Napier was largely rebuilt by the mid 1930s.
Purely local features unique to our culture appear in the Maori motifs in a number of buildings.
And the other early 20th century developments are represented in this catalogue of styles.
The classical tradition is apparent.
The Spanish mission style was considered suitable to Napier's climate and character.
There are hints of Art Nouveau, the Arts and Crafts style, Charles Rennie McIntosh,
Louis Sullivan and the Chicago School, and Sullivan's pupil Frank Lloyd Wright,
and the Prairie style in the buildings of Louis Hay.
And the functional international style which arrived in Napier at the end of the 1930s is represented.
In fact, Napier's buildings create a tapestry in which all the threads of the modern movement are woven together.
Let us examine three buildings in more detail.
One that looks to the past,
one that uses local culture for its inspiration, and one that was at the state of the art in its time.
The first of these examples are Louis Hay design for the National Tobacco Company in 1932.
The building's main block is in the arch in a cube form, often used by Louis Sullivan,
but it steps back in three layers with lack of symmetry softening the design.
The decoration has the same effect. Rapa and roses frame the front entrance,
with roses and fruit in the carving at the head of the doors.
The sunburst at the base was a device which is echoed in the whole presentation of the entrance.
The building is an unusual mix of art deco with Art Nouveau,
which is seen in the fruit, flowers and tendrils around the entrance,
and the bass relief panels above and below the windows.
The outside lanterns are a perfect blend of the practical and the romantic.
Inside, the happy blend of Art Nouveau and art deco continues.
The building has a richness rare for an industrial structure.
The ASB Bank was erected in 1932 for the Bank of New Zealand, and is a classic of its kind.
Its architects were Crichton MacKay and Horton of Wellington.
The forbidding gateway entrance was originally supplemented by wrought iron defences,
but even today it's tall opening dwarfs customers.
High above, adding height to a really high ceiling,
the coffered skylights add illumination and grandeur to the interior.
Authentic Māori decoration is a strong feature of the Bank, both outside and in.
Above the entrance are two Māori designs.
It is said that the fern frond shape symbolises nature and new growth,
while the aramoana, or zigzags, represent sea waves.
The parapet design is an archaic carving pattern.
On either side of the window, a fern frond and a hammerhead shark.
The shark was both the caretaker and guide to one of the first Māori canoes to land here.
The mask from the head of a taiaha looks down from each corner of the ceiling panels.
The heads of the columns echo classical and art deco shapes, but are authentically Māori.
This is considered to be New Zealand's finest European-style building, using Māori art forms as decoration.
The Municipal Theatre was built in 1937, five years after Napier's first art deco buildings.
It incorporates aspects of the more streamlined late 30s art deco style.
In the fantasy tradition of the stage and the movies, it was appropriate that a theatre should make use of theatrical devices,
which are an integral part of art deco.
For example, the torches on the exterior, and the door hardware, which closes to form a characteristic zigzag.
On the side, the architect, J.T. Watson of Napier, made use of the newly developed indirect tubular and neon lighting,
reflecting the machine aesthetics of the period.
Chrome speed lines on the walls and on the front of the balcony create a streamlined effect.
The ziggurat was still being used, and the box office is veneered in geometric designs.
The central dome of the auditorium incorporates linear designs with geometrically shaped lights.
The colours are close to those originally used, and the original carpet had a cubist design.
Even the ventilators demonstrate that no modern necessity was too humble for the designer's attention.
Above the exit doors, large symmetrical panels are decorated with the figure of a naked leaping woman.
It is a famous, much reproduced pose which evokes a sense of the social and physical freedom developing between the wars.
The Art Deco tradition represented by these fine buildings continues to live in Napier.
Today's architects are rediscovering Art Deco's themes and incorporating them into modern buildings.
Many of these riches would have been lost without the efforts of the Art Deco Trust, which is now supported by the City of Napier.
Every year, thousands of visitors explore Napier's Art Deco quarter.
The Trust's effect on city policies has been the single most important influence in preserving and enhancing Napier's heritage in recent years,
and the vitality of the city centre is evidence of their success.
The Trust's year culminates in the Art Deco Weekend.
Hundreds of people attend many events, dressing up in Art Deco style to wine and dine and experience the heady spirit of the era.
It's barely a recognition of the past, but a celebration of the present.
Thank you.