I've been asked to write on gallery architecture to mark the redesign and rehang of Christchurch Art Gallery's collection galleries. Having lived in the North Island all my life, the Gallery's collection remains fairly much a mystery to me, but I long to see more. Not least because, having always been fascinated with the modern movement, a personal interest in pre-modern art and architecture is a relatively recent development.

My retreat from a fascination with modernism is, in part, a reaction to the overwhelming sense of tedium I experience in the face of the repackaging of mid-twentieth century modernism that is so frequently delivered as a stand-in for contemporary thinking in architecture. I have developed a longing for the ordered mind of a Georgian or the decorative complexities of a good Victorian.

Contemporary architecture has been repackaged as a consumer lifestyle choice. So, too, has contemporary art. We no longer talk much about the specifics of painting and sculpture; we now talk of images and congratulate ourselves on the development of portable processes that allow them to be reshaped to fit our own personal contexts. The architectural package in which art comes to us (the viewers) has also changed. In the desire for mass appeal and media notability, gallery buildings have somehow become less conceptually unique-one type of architecture must now suit all artistic periods, and the key word in gallery planning is flexibility.