INTRODUCTION
In 2000, we moved as a family into Bruce Rickard’s Marshall House (1967) in Sydney’s Clontarf. For me, it kickstarted an interest in residential Australian architecture from the 1950s onwards, which resulted in two books – 50/60/70 Iconic Australian Houses, published in 2007, and its follow-up, 70/80/90 Iconic Australian Houses in 2011. The 1970s features twice, as I managed to get two of the most influential houses of the period for the second book, the Kempsey House by Glenn Murcutt and the Palm House by Richard Leplastrier. The books formed the core content for a Sydney Living Museums exhibition which, for four years, travelled Australia-wide, and included not only images and text, plus video interviews with the architects and home owners, and selected models of the houses.
It is time to revisit these two volumes, to draw them into one book, redesign them in a new format and add one that got away the first time – the Jackson House, by Daryl Jackson in Victoria.
Part of the interest in these houses is the architectural lessons they provide: often modest in scale, they are inventive with site, materials and floor plan. The relationship to the outdoors starts tentatively, but gradually opens up to fully integrate gardens, courtyards and verandahs. This response to place, which began in the 1950s, is different to the 1940s where the model was British, with important rooms to the street front and a lack of connection to the back garden.
In the 10 years after World War II, more than 1.5 million migrants arrived in Australia; combine that with the numbers of returned servicemen, and there was a desperate need for housing. Building materials were scarce, and houses were subject to strict guidelines in terms of expenditure and size. The drive was often for quantity over quality, and aesthetics tended to give way to economics as the state controlled the process; architects, engineers, designers and town planners all fell under one bureaucratic umbrella.
To solve the housing crisis, the government looked to local as well as overseas companies, in Sweden and Great Britain, for quick-to-assemble housing. Set out in quarter-acre blocks, these houses had few of the refinements of previous decades – the plan consisted of boxy rooms with little thought given to the relationship between them, or to the link between indoor and outdoor space. Orientation was a given – the house faced the street regardless of sun or site.
While this was true of the broad sweep of development, it was also a time where young architects attempted to build a better world. There were plans by some, working within the restrictions, to maximise the sense of space by losing corridors and opening up kitchens and dining rooms. Notable is the Beaufort House, designed by Arthur Baldwinson in conjunction with the Beaufort Division of the Department of Aircraft Production, which was shown in prototype to the public in 1946. Using technology developed for aircraft manufacture, this steel-framed house was an innovative attempt to contribute to solving the housing problem.
THE SPIRIT OF THE FIFTIES
The arrival of the Fifties, with its economic prosperity, brought optimism and a strong consumer drive. Putting the war years behind them, Australians wanted the latest in mod cons and a style of home that reflected the spirit of the times. Magazines such as Australian Home Beautiful and House & Garden drove trends and influenced opinion. For a society that had made do, the desire for this new, ordered suburban life was irresistible. It is understandable that the state-of the-art kitchen at the Rose Seidler House, with its cutting-edge appliances, caused as much excitement as the radical building itself.
The Age RVIA Small Homes Service in Melbourne, launched in 1947, with Robin Boyd as director, showcased 40 architect-designed plans for homes that could be bought for £5. By 1951, they were providing plans for 10 percent of all new housing in Victoria. From 1957, plans were also available at the Home Plan Service Bureau at the Myer Emporium, Melbourne, and in 1962, Lend Lease’s Carlingford Homes Fair in Sydney proved popular to the tune of two million visitors eager to see the latest in architect-designed project homes. This later morphed into Pettit & Sevitt, a company that, by 1963, was selling more than 200 houses per year. House plans were even published alongside knitting patterns in The Australian Women’s Weekly.
A CRADLE OF MODERNITY
Postwar was a period of staggering creativity in Melbourne. Young architects were experimenting with shape and materials – Peter McIntyre, for instance, built his own house, an A-frame steel structure, with infill panels of Stramit, a compacted straw sheet material. A shortage of materials had seen the introduction of lightweight steel frames and, as in Kevin Borland’s Rice House, a series of thin concrete-sprayed shells. Cantilevered balconies and window walls; cable supports and plywood ceilings; colour and form; playfulness and theatre – experimentation knew no bounds.
A newly found affluence resulted in an interest in the holiday house. At one end of the spectrum was the commission from John and Sunday Reed for architects McGlashan and Everist to design a house right on the sand at Aspendale, a suburb outside Melbourne. At the opposite end, advertisements incorporating plans appealed to home builders to buy sheeting material and construct beach shacks themselves.
Another prominent architect designing beach houses (as well as country properties and city residences) in the Fifties for wealthy Melbourne clients was Guilford Bell, who had trained in London in the 1930s where he worked on a house restoration project for author Agatha Christie.
Melbourne’s virtuoso performance was, however, short-lived. As Peter McIntyre admitted, it is hard to make a living out of radical thinking but, for a time, it was, as Robin Boyd said, Australia’s ‘cradle of modernity’.
TESTING POPULAR TASTE
In Sydney, an early pioneer of modernism was Sydney Ancher. He had spent time in Europe in the Thirties and returned to Australia filled with enthusiasm for the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In 1937, he designed what is considered one of Sydney’s most important prewar buildings, the Prevost House, for his architectural partner Reginald Prevost. Ancher’s experiences with local councils reveal something of the attitudes towards the new thinking in architecture. The 1945 design for his own house, Poyntzfield, in Killara, Sydney, was only approved after he altered the plan for a steel-framed building to a more traditional brick construction with a pitched roof. It still won the Sulman Medal in 1946.
INTERNATIONAL STYLE VS ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE
In Sydney in 1950, Harry Seidler, who had trained under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, had completed the Rose Seidler House. Ancher’s interpretation of International Style was tempered to suit local conditions and tastes; Seidler’s house, in contrast, was in absolute adherence to its principles – so much so that it has been described by architectural writer Elizabeth Farrelly as ‘built manifesto’.
Around the same time, there was another mood afoot, which drew inspiration from the work of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), best known for the house Fallingwater (1935). For him, the relationship of the building to its site was of paramount importance, and his houses tended to be low, horizontal structures in natural materials. The influence of his Usonian houses, designed from 1936, can be seen in the work of Peter Muller, Neville Gruzman and Bruce Rickard, the latter commenting on their ‘scale, the use of space, the warmth and mellow look from natural materials’.
In his book Australia’s Home, Robin Boyd compares these two schools of thought, and expresses with clarity what they have in common. ‘...Both believed simplicity to be the omnipotent law of all design. Both rejected the idea of composing the façades of a building to preconceived rules. Both accepted spatial composition as the expressive field of architecture. Both believed that the building’s function was the only basis for planning and that it should (and would automatically if permitted) be expressed in the building’s form. Both believed that no material should be twisted into unnatural forms or asked to perform an unsuitable task.’
Despite these philosophical similarities, the resulting buildings could not have been more different. Seidler pulled no punches. ‘Does not this [organic] architecture seem rather weak, subservient and not very proud of itself?’ he said. Battle lines were drawn, particularly in Sydney, with architects such as Neville Gruzman rising repeatedly to the debate.
In an email exchange with Peter Muller, I asked him if he was aware of Seidler’s quote at the time. Although he did not recall it, it didn’t surprise him, and he clarified his view on the matter. ‘Seidler was pushing for International architecture which abnegated all concerns to preserve local diversity. The climatic, the geographic, cultural and spiritual integrity, and deeper meanings for ornament were regarded as some kind of superstition. So-called organic architecture was regarded as “romantic” and intuitive rather than intelligent, and no match for what the Brave New World had to offer with its high-tech, machine-driven materials. Today, of course, with concerns for global warming, fossil fuels and so on, emphasis shifts once again, and the use of natural and sustainable materials in an intelligent and sensible way to reduce energy overloads is considered admirable and strong minded. Pride comes before a fall, subservience to Truth is a blessing, and the weak shall inherit the earth.’
From the early Fifties, there was a movement in Sydney (a collection of individual architects, but sometimes called a ‘school’ because of like-minded attributes) towards houses that embraced the Wrightian principles. These were often built on difficult sites, predominantly in bushland settings on Sydney’s North Shore. Architectural historian Jennifer Taylor makes the point that there was an ‘intentional understatement’. The goal was to integrate the building with the site with as little disruption as possible. In 1955, Peter Muller built a house for himself at Whale Beach that accommodated existing trees and rocks, and his palette of building materials reflected the colours of the landscape. In an era where the English country garden was still popular, it was considered ‘alternative’ to appreciate native plants and bushland settings.
Taking the bush setting to the ultimate of integration is the Glass House (1957) by Ruth and Bill Lucas, in Sydney’s Castlecrag. This glass pavilion illustrates the idea of ‘barely there’ structures, and shows how Bill Lucas felt the frame was of crucial importance and ‘everything that goes on after that destroys the original structure’. Built for his family, and constructed with economy in mind, the house utilises standardised sections of steel, timber and glass.
OUTSIDE INFLUENCES
Travel was crucial for this generation of architects. Often their degrees were practical, with little emphasis on contemporary buildings and current ideas. Exposure to other cultures and significant buildings in Europe and the United States was influential, as were the architectural journals of the day. George Henderson, who worked for ‘regional modernists’ Hayes and Scott, in Brisbane, and later for Seidler, recalls the copies of international magazines coming into the office. Pages were torn out and filed under the various architects of interest: Alvar Aalto, Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe and so on, each with their own file to be pored over.
Also significant was the role of émigrés as teachers and architects. Hayes and Scott, for example, were influenced by Dr Karl Langer, from Vienna, whose 1944 booklet, Sub-tropical Housing, advocated, among other things, long, shallow floor plans which allowed maximum penetration of natural light. Langer also developed the first sun chart for Brisbane, a copy of which every architectural practice had, and which was continually used at Hayes and Scott in their quest for optimum orientation.
Architects themselves brought a European sensibility to Australia. 1957, for instance, was the year that Danish architect Jørn Utzon’s design for the Sydney Opera House was picked, the story goes, from a pile of rejected entries by the American architect Eero Saarinen. Among local architects, Seidler’s philosophy was shaped by the direct teachings of Gropius and Breuer; Taglietti came from postwar Italy, where he was taught by Carlo Mollino and Pier Luigi Nervi; Iwanoff came from Bulgaria, and Buhrich from Germany via Holland and London.
Architects who travelled were often able to find an inspirational source that resonated with their natural inclination. For Neville Gruzman, some of whose houses were inspired by Wright, the major influence was Japanese architecture. Many attributes of the aesthetic and building techniques have been adopted for use in Australian domestic architecture: the tradition of post and beam construction; extensive use of wood and the exposure of the structural elements; sliding screens for flexible floor plans; changes in internal levels; framed garden views and the linking of internal and external space.
THE LEGACY OF THE PERIOD
From the Fifties onwards, the kitchen slowly infiltrated the dining and living space. Often small yet ingeniously fitted out, it could be tucked behind partial walls or banks of storage cabinets, as in the Buhrich House. The open-plan kitchen/living/dining room (with access to a courtyard or ‘outdoor room’) that every house renovation aspires to today can find its antecedents in the relaxing of divisions pioneered by the forward-thinking architects featured in these pages.
Few architects (except perhaps Neville Gruzman and Guilford Bell, who both had a penchant for the glamorous effect of multiple mirrors) prefigured the rise of the bathroom as such an important room, or rooms, in the house.
What has altered drastically is the scale of homes. While the postwar restriction of 134 m2 was undeniably small, the average new house is now around 230 m2 with 600 m2 not unheard-of. Design-wise, few domestic buildings in this present culture share the Sydney School’s desire for modesty and lack of pretension. As Neil Clerehan pointed out, ‘We never imagined there would be a trend for Neo-Historicism. We thought we were forging a brand new way forward.’
THE NEW RURAL
Like many great works of art, the Sydney Opera House was ahead of its time, and while Utzon’s personality inspired a number of Australian architects, the built form did not produce a corresponding aesthetic. For Richard Leplastrier, it was Utzon’s lack of prejudice, his sensitivity to nature and his openness to new ideas that he appreciated. By the time the Sydney Opera House opened in 1973, Leplastrier and Glenn Murcutt were beginning work on their ground-breaking projects – the Palm House on Sydney’s Northern Beaches and the Kempsey House, in rural New South Wales. A little later, Daryl Jackson was developing a very different type of vernacular for his homestead, the Jackson House in Shoreham, Victoria.
SOCIAL PROGRESS
Victorian architect Kevin Borland was defined by his social conscience. ‘Borland always understood the basic premise of design is about social exchange. He had a very strong socialist mindset,’ says Daryl Jackson, who collaborated with him on the award-winning Harold Holt Swimming Centre (1969). His philosophy brought Borland a particular genre of work, from houses to larger scale projects such as Clyde Cameron College, Wodonga (1975–77), a union training facility for tradespeople. Bernard Brown explains in Doug Evans’ Kevin Borland, Architecture from the Heart, how Bob Hawke, then union leader, persuaded prime minister Gough Whitlam to green light the project with the words, ‘I’ve got a mate who’s an architect and he is just the bloke for this little job.’ Architect Norman Day describes it as representing ‘a vision of an Australian architecture – the rural, the working-class, self-sufficient Aussie…There are other Borlands – suburban, urbane, refined and tailored – but this building is the best architectural measure of a rough, likeable mateship that he built.’ Architect Kai Chen notes, ‘He was talking about community long before it was fashionable.’
Also in Melbourne, Graeme Gunn (2011 Australian Institute of Architects AIA Gold Medal winner) was designing public buildings, such as the Plumbers and Gasfitters Union Building (1970), in the Brutalist style, but also experimenting with cluster housing, most notably in Winter Park, Doncaster (1970–75). Seeking to emulate the success of Sydney’s Pettit & Sevitt in the project home market, Gunn developed, for Victorian company Merchant Builders, five different house types, clustering them around courtyards, with the whole site integrated with landscaping and parklands. In Sydney, in a more urban context, Ancher Mortlock Murray and Woolley developed town houses in Cremorne with planning devices such as shared garaging and a swimming pool to foster community spirit.
SUBURBIA CELEBRATED
A contrast to Glenn Murcutt’s rural modernism was the philosophy of Victorian architectural practice Edmond & Corrigan, established in the Seventies, with Maggie Edmond and Peter Corrigan as its principals. Corrigan made clear his views. ‘I have always been an unabashed fan of the suburbs…I see them as a source of fabulous energy’, and of greater cultural importance than the bush, in which he felt uncomfortable. Their 1988–89 Athan House in Monbulk is archetypal, showcasing their preoccupation with colour, abstraction and fractured form, with bridges, balconies and decks imparting a whimsical spirit.
A CULTURE OF LEARNING
As a longstanding professor at RMIT, Corrigan’s teaching influenced students from the Seventies, including such players and practices as Ashton Raggatt McDougall, Lyons, Norman Day, Wood Marsh and Ivan Rijavec. This passing on of architectural philosophies to the next generation is strong in Australia, and examples abound in this book. Leplastrier, taught by Lloyd Rees and influenced by Utzon, inspired Peter Stutchbury who now, along with Murcutt, Brit Andresen and Leplastrier, gives masterclasses to students. Gabriel Poole learnt from the great Queensland modernist Robin Gibson and, in time, Poole was mentor to Kerry and Lindsay Clare. Brit Andresen, at the University of Queensland, taught Brian Donovan and Timothy Hill, and Kai Chen sought out Kevin Borland as a mentor, while Kerstin Thompson worked in the offices of Robinson Chen before setting up on her own.
CONCRETE FORMS
Parallel to the theatrical inventiveness of Edmond & Corrigan ran another genre in which sculptural form took precedence. Concrete was used in innovative ways by Harry Seidler, whose early concrete buildings were geometric in form, becoming increasingly curvaceous (the Berman House, 1996–99) as concrete technology improved. The material began to find full expression with the dramatic abstractions of the Canberra-based Enrico Taglietti. His McKeown House (1965) began to push the boundaries of the material; 30 years later, his award-winning Sea Residence (1996) in Lilli Pilli, NSW, shows his passion for the plasticity of form had not waned.
Three significant houses featured in this book are Barrie Marshall’s Phillip Island House (1983–90), Robinson Chen’s Hildebrand House (1988–90) and Wood Marsh’s Gottlieb House (1990–94), which all exploit monumentality and mass with very different results.
THE LIGHT FANTASTIC
These sculpturally dense houses are a far cry from the increasingly lightweight, open buildings being designed in Queensland to accommodate the subtropical climate and embrace the land. In 1951, Robin Boyd commented of the Mornington Peninsula that, ‘this was holiday land, it was holiday time for architecture. The overanxious architect has been left in the city. Here the plans were simple and free. Buildings were able to discard their clothes, they went naked and unashamed and seemed to enjoy the sunshine.’
This, remarks Peter Hyatt in his book Local Heroes, could also be said of the Sunshine Coast. His book examines the work of three architectural firms – John Mainwaring, Kerry and Lindsay Clare and Gabriel Poole – all committed to a sensitive response to the land and climate, a desire to avoid the gratuitously fashionable, and to work with local trades and craftspeople. New technologies were found and exploited to advantage with Poole’s quadropod system, allowing building to take place on steep sites formerly considered unworkable.
INNER-CITY REVIVAL
To date, the projects outlined here have been rural, coastal and suburban. In the Seventies, the sensibility around inner-city living began to change as conservation movements within residential areas, and within the profession, began to spring up. During the Sixties building boom, little regard had been given to the value of nineteenth-century buildings, many of which were lost in the wave of enthusiasm for the new.
As gentrification took place in inner-city suburbs, the requirement for architectural services grew. The Osborne House in Melbourne’s South Yarra was a fine example of the maintenance of a nineteenth-century façade while architect Neil Clerehan created a modernist clean sweep of the interior, skilfully incorporating an art gallery and living space. Peter Stronach’s work for Allen Jack + Cottier on the Victoria Street Apartments in Sydney’s Potts Point showcases how 1897 terraces could maintain their exterior character while concealing open-plan living with white walls. ‘The main work on the terraces was completed in 1980 and the absence of a rigid, conservationist approach denotes changes in the attitude towards the intrusion of new work in old buildings,’ wrote Jennifer Taylor. This has become the solution for many to inner-city family living. The ‘opening up’ of the terrace and the semi has probably brought more work to architects and builders than the individual house in recent years.
Elegant white spaces such as those by Engelen Moore defined much of what it was to be cutting-edge in Nineties Sydney. Their Price O’Reilly House (1995) in Redfern was engineered to be as much photo studio as it was a home, with the modernist aesthetic married with the functionality of a full-height stacking door system allowing easy access for equipment and furniture.
The notion of New York–style loft living and of adapting commercial spaces for domestic use started to gain currency, and with it came a change in the social make-up of the inner city. Daniel Droga (owner of Durbach Block’s Droga Apartment) moved into Sydney’s Surry Hills in the early Nineties and recalls not even being able to buy a carton of milk locally at the time.
WHEN A HOUSE FITS
This book deals with residential projects and, as such, only tells part of the story of Australian architecture. Many architects featured have produced office blocks, university buildings, cultural centres, churches, embassies, hotels and government buildings. Yet, there is merit in the exploration of the house, as it distils architectural concepts into something we can all relate to. Richard Leplastrier talks of the ‘fit’ of a house with its client, and describes a house as an ‘outer garment for their lives’. What strikes me about all these houses is that the fit is exceptional. Of course, it is not so unusual when the architects are their own client, as in a number of houses here, and can drive their own agenda unimpeded.
What guarantees a great architectural house? Gabriel Poole said that ‘good clients get good houses’. I met and interviewed the clients and, although all very different people, they shared certain traits – a generosity of spirit, open-mindedness and a trust in the architect and process. While this book celebrates the work of the architects, it also pays tribute to the role of the enlightened client, without whom the outcomes would have been very different.
There is much to be learnt from looking back and, hopefully, the examples contained in this book, and others like them, will be around to inspire and inform new generations of architects. Sadly, as Professor Philip Goad pointed out, many of the light-structured Fifties buildings on valuable sites have already been demolished.
In Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories, he describes the demolition of his alma mater, Leeds Modern School. It reminds him of what Brendan Gill from The New Yorker called the ‘Gordon Curve’, after architect Douglas Gordon.
‘This posits that building is at its maximum moment of approbation when it is brand new, that it goes steadily downhill and at 70 reaches its nadir. If you can get a building past that sticky moment, then the curve begins to go up again very rapidly until at 100 it is back where it was in year one. A 100-year-old building is much more likely to be saved than a 70-year-old one.’
Many of these houses are approaching the dangerous age. Let’s hope, with the help of sympathetic owners and bodies such as Sydney Living Museums, Docomomo and the Robin Boyd Foundation, they make it to their centenary.