Sometime in the spring of 1960, Alec and Judy Pickard invited architect Ernst Plischke to design a house for them in Hamilton, New Zealand. The house he designed was eventually completed in 1964, on a different site, with a different floorplan, by a different architect, and yet it is still unmistakably the same house. This is the story of the events and relationships that led to the commission for the Pickard house - a story that begins in 1942 with an artistic partnership forged during the building of the Abel Tasman memorial at Tarakohe - and traverses another important project: the remodelling of Paul's Book Arcade into Australasia's first "modern" bookshop in 1947-48.



Previously untold, this story is important because the bookshop redesign was Plischke's first private commission in New Zealand after leaving government service and the Pickard house is among the last of his New Zealand projects before he returned to Vienna in 1963. Plischke's Hamilton work thus spans his entire private architectural career in New Zealand.



The book contains a document archive of the plans, sketches, doodles and correspondence generated by Plischke in the course of the project, as well as a review of critical assessments of Plischke's place in the evolution of a "New Zealand modern" architecture.