Building One Library / Carrington Asylum Dining Hall

As part of Building One Library’s orientation initiative to welcome new and returning students to Unitec, we put together a display in front of the Building One Library to highlight the significance of the space that the Building One Library occupies.

Included in the display is information about what the library space once used to be and we also included work by Annie McIver. There is also a brief introduction to our staff at Building One Library and information about where research material for the display was sourced from and how to access this research from the library.

The Dining Hall and Kitchen, Carrington Asylum

Fig. 1 Ground Floor Plan, Auckland Lunatic Asylum as Erected, 1887

The Building One Library occupies a space that was once the dining and kitchen area of the Carrington Asylum, 1865-1992 (Fig 1).[1] Apart from Floor plans, it was difficult to find any images of the kitchen and dining hall during the time that Building One was an Asylum. We then directed our attention to any writings about the experiences recollections, stories or writings of past patients’ of Carrington Asylum and we came across the work titled Derelict, 2010 by Annie McIver. (Fig. 2)

 

Fig 2. Derelict, white earthenware, brass base, glass dome, 35x18x18 cm, Annie McIver, 2010

McIver is a practicing ceramicist and was a Masters student at Unitec (2012). Within the scope of McIver’s research she looked at the history of Building One and created work that referenced Building One’s history. McIver writes in her thesis that “The work ‘Direlect, 2010’ was a direct response to reading ‘Faces in the Water,’ ” by New Zealand's most distinguished writer Janet Frame[2]. Frame wrote about her incarceration in Seacliff Mental Hospital, Dunedin and Carrington Asylum, Auckland[3]. It was important to display the work Derelict, 2010 as an example of past students work and Building One’s history. The sculpture describes a time and the recollected spatial experience of Carrington Asylum’s incarcerated where Frame’s stories were referred to, culminating in the making of an object that conveys the desperate sense of confinement and loss experienced by Frame during her time spent in Building One. 

Fig 3. Building One Staff

Also in the display is a pop-up book art and comic strip that illustrates the staff at Building One Library and expresses our warmest wishes for a very successful 2015. (Fig 3.)

Introducing: 

Musarrat Begum –Customer Services Specialist (Building One, Northern Campus and Copyright)

Emma Chapman – Knowledge Specialist (B1). Subjects: Civil Engineering, Surveying, Computing and Information Technology, Architecture 
Susan Eady – Knowledge Specialist (B1) Subjects: Design & Photography, Performing Arts, Music, Landscape Architecture, Creative Enterprise, Creative Practice  
Myah Flynn - Customer Services Assistant (B1 Circulation)  
Jesse Quaid - Customer Services Assistant (B1 Collections)   
Juliana Satchell Deo - Customer Services Assistant (B1 Customers) 

Building One Library holds research material that document Building One’s history and other articles, theses that were inspired by this history. For further information on the history of Building One please ask our staff for assistance.

The display will be exhibited for the duration of Unitec’s Orientation celebrations and then we will make way for a new display thereafter. We hope that students come and look at the display to see that the space that Building One Library occupies was once a Kitchen and Dining Hall for the Carrington Asylum from 1865 to 1992.

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[1] ”Auckland Lunatic Asylum as erected”, Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives, H8. 1877.

[2] Annie McIver successfully completed her Masters (MDes) at Unitec in 2012. McIver’s thesis titled ‘Navigating the arteries of loss: a figurative ceramic exploration of the human condition in situations of loss’ is available on short loan at the Building One Library for your reference.

[3] Frame, Janet. Faces in the Water.  Christchurch: Pegasus Press, 1961.