When injuries brought a premature end to his career, former Samoan rugby international Lama Tone changed tack and studied architecture.
He now teaches at Auckland University and has his own practice which approaches architecture from a Pacific perspective.
His rugby career was taking off, and he was playing professionally in France, when he was first injured, he tells Kathryn Ryan.
“The first injury occurred in 1997 and I didn’t know until later on that the surgeon said Polynesian people have a very narrow spinal canal.
“So, if you get a bump or a whiplash you’ll most likely rupture a disk that could possibly move or rub against the spinal cord which is exactly what happened in ’97.”
This injury required an operation and a lengthy recuperation, he says.
“I had to have an operation where they removed that disk and replaced it with a piece of bone from my hip and I had to wait a year for it to fuse before I was able to get back into rugby.”
His surgeons warned him that a return to the game was risky. But he was playing professionally again within a year.
“It wasn’t until 2001, three years later, that I had another rugby injury which left me paralysed on the field for few minutes.”
This injury was higher up, to a disc near his neck.
“The surgeon said you’d be quite stupid if you went back and played because maybe the third time you won’t be so lucky. So, I had to finish it there.”
Tone was enjoying his rugby and the life it gave him at the time, so it was shattering blow.
“It was my livelihood, nothing could beat the life of a professional rugby player, you train two or three times a week with the team and you show up on Saturday and the rest of the time was pretty much yours in a foreign country like France.”
After what he calls a period of “self-pity”, he made enquiries at Auckland University about studying architecture.
He was soon deeply involved in his studies, he says.
“I didn’t really miss rugby too much at that time once architecture started because you sort of had to take your mind away from the real-world stuff and really think outside the square.”
And signing on as a relatively mature student with life experiences helped him, he says.
“I’m so happy I did it as an adult student because if I’d done it as a student fresh out of high school I think I would have struggled a bit.”
When it came to writing his thesis, he drew on his own culture.
“At that time in my life I wanted to find out who I was, what my culture was, so I used a lot of those ideas and concepts throughout my undergrad.”
He then continued to explore Pacific concepts for his Masters.
“I just took it to the next level to find out how architects are using these concepts; whether it’s justified, or whether they’re misappropriated or whether they’re token gestures.”
Now with his own practice, New Pacific, he is putting his ideas into action, he says.
“It’s philosophical for me, I think the approach is very similar to how Maori view the land, sky and the moana. It’s very parallel to what I believe in.”
The way Pasifika people live underpins his work, he says.
“If you’re designing for a community, you’ve got to be right up close and personal with the community, find out what they want, find out how they live, how they relate to each other or relate through space or relate to the sea or the land and the mountains.”
A culture of communal living is embedded in his work.
“With Pacific people we have a heightened sense of relationships, we don’t so very well with walls and I know in a practical sense we need them.”
It is a balance of compartmentalisation of space versus openness of space, he says.
“Pacific people come from communal and open spaces whereas the antithesis is say of the European model where we’re looking at compartmentalisation of spaces or walls
“The modernist concept is openness and this is what we see in a lot of the modern homes in today’s architecture.”
He takes his students on field trips to the Pacific and is concerned about some of the cookie-cutter building he sees there.
“The thing that gets me a little bit iffy about it is the fact that they are designing these buildings half way across the world and bringing them across to the Pacific and then rubber-stamping them around our islands
“And a lot of these buildings, I hear from people in Samoa, is they are facing maintenance issues and this is only ten or fifteen years after they have been built.
“So, they obviously haven’t considered the climate, they haven’t considered the landscape or the people so these buildings are not only out of place, but they are facing huge maintenance issues.”
This is a turning point for the islands and a chance to get things right, he says.
“Samoa is probably where Hawaii was 30 years ago.”
Among his current projects is a social housing development in Auckland.
“I’m in consultation with Kāinga Ora for housing designs in Mangere, to try and offer another perspective on designing houses with a more Pasifika sense of space.
“So, we are able to celebrate difference in those houses but also share common values that we have living in Aotearoa in the 21st century.”
