Tirau’s most ambitious iron building; the Wool Gallery
Tirau is a small town in New Zealand’s Waikato area, an ideal point to stop and have a coffee break in a long journey on the main highway. Some time in recent history somebody made a sculpture out of corrugated iron, a material that’s hardly considered in old Europe but which is at the heart of construction in New Zealand. Ever since it was invented, galvanized corrugated iron has formed the walls and roofs of most local buildings – rectangular sheets of it, hundreds of square metres of it, painted or plain, practical, unimaginative, ordinary.
But that somebody who decided to bend the iron not only opened up a whole new world of possibilities, he (she?) also lifted Tirau out of an undifferentiated rut and turned it into the corrugated iron capital of New Zealand – maybe even the world!
Local church sculpture; ‘the Good Shepherd’
Tirau Primary School
© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz.
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