Organic growth.

The Athfield house is one of the strangest in the world, telling the story of its owners as they have grown with it. Now, it is an organic monument.

Nearly 20 years ago, I stayed with Ian Athfield and his wife Claire and woke to a marvellous sensation. A long thin horizontal window ran along the whole length of the bed so that, as I looked out, my body seemed to be floating in space over the ship-busy sunny waters of Wellington harbour, the huge sea inlet girded by mountains (and of course the city itself). The house tumbles forward over a very steep slope, wandering down the hillside as the mood seizes its architect and as office income fluctuates (whenever it makes a reasonable profit, a new bit of house is added).

I was lucky enough to stay there again not long ago, and I could scarcely find the original bedroom, which I suspect has been made part of the office (the whole place has changed so much that I couldn't tell). This time, I was in a room adjoining a tiny herb-scented, jewelled garden, an enclosed earthbound experience as intense as the hovering one. If I am lucky enough ever to be invited back, it will possibly be to a glass tent on the roof, or a shaft-lit cave under the hill.

It is not the sort of place for which definitive drawings can be produced, for it constantly changes -- if not in form or by extension, the functions alter. Athfield is irrepressible: a passionate energetic builder, constantly amending the place, sometimes to his own detriment. He recently wounded himself grievously by leaping into a trench and finding six inches of rusty reinforcing bar in his groin; amazingly he seems to have survived both intact and just as cheerful as ever.

When not tangling with the works, he has had quite a lot of nasty brushes with the authorities. At one point, they demanded that he should leave the place entirely (or give up the office at any rate). He somehow managed to get a licence for a cafe on the site, and curiously the office seems to operate under that rubric (it is certainly very jolly and full of coffee and wine). Later, the city came to the belated conclusion that the house is one of its best and most famous buildings -- the place has after all been published all over the world. So it was listed (protected by law). This caused nearly as much anguish as the threat of being driven out, because the house could no longer be altered, and Athfield has to build to live, like Bess of Hardwick. He brilliantly convinced the city that his place is an organic monument, and therefore, clearly, subject to constant change.

He is very much more than a constructor: strangely modest, he is a wild polemicist, a brilliant (if curious) lecturer and party giver, a most tenacious opponent, and someone who understands the essence of architecture. As Russell Walden said when the house was first published in the AR (May 1982), it has a multiplicity of imagery and spaces which show a deep concern for 'security, privacy and warmth ... much of his imagery springs from territorial instincts as well as hearth and womb'. It is built very simply of blocks and render, timber joists and so on, with things like precast concrete sewage pipes and standard plastic bubbles to make some of the earlier zoomorphic elements. Sometimes things are a bit sketchy: for instance there is an uncompleted grand staircase from top to bottom of the main complex; a whole wall of a court is still clad in insulation bats. A cable car from the bottom of the cliff is perhaps a possibility one day, but there is a path now, which is used by the sturdier members of the offi ce.

The whole thing is a labyrinthine village: the story of the life of Ian and Claire, their parents, children and their enterprises. In its multiplicity of uses and spaces it makes an extraordinary critical comment on the surrounding stereotyped villas (a couple of which have been absorbed into the complex). It is a powerful, passionate, witty argument for gentleness, humanity and a deep understanding of place and nature.

Athfield transforms his ancient Mediterranean palette into a language apt for New Zealand. It is one of the most wonderful houses of the twentieth century. And, as he continues to build downwards on increasingly precipitate slopes, it promises to be one for the twenty-first as well.