A dissection of a New Zealand state house constructs a split screen on the site of Freyberg Place. Dis placed in the urban, an act of violence enacts a cleavage and a cutting of domesticity.

This cleavage effects a cut, the mark of violation and the destructive and yet simultaneously the act of cleavage is necessarily constructive - it is an architectural act of splitting which creates rather than destroys. But cleavage too is a site of voyeurism, it is the split of breasts which attracts the male gaze.

This cleavage distracts the gaze constructed by Freyberg's statue as he stands elevated astride, perpendicular to Melville Hall. His gaze constructs Ellen Melville within the domestic. The screen, an outsize domesticity, entraps his look; the domestic blind perverting and reconstructing the urban gaze. A domestic blind, it perverts the gaze rather than effecting the complete obliteration of his sight lines. It allows his contact with Melville, the filtering of her gaze and his body.

His body, larger than life, provides the scale for the urban domestic screen. It is the vehicle which enables the domestic to be sited in the city and in turn insists on his domestication. Melville, entangled in constructions of the domestic - small scale, pastel shaded, complete with suburban garden - and the organic, stands embodied within the curvilinear at the entrance to her hall. Her sculpture, an abstraction and construction of femininity, is dissected by the horizontal slicing of the venetian.

Similarly the blind is not unaffected by its siting within the urbane context. Reinscribed, the city grid constructs and compromises joists and bearers. The orthogonal lines of the city and the domestic reconfigure the curvilinear site. The two perimeters of the site which construct the screen cleave. They split and in doing so construct the architectural.