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Hot M

odernism

Hot ModernismQueensland Architecture 1945 – 1975

edited byJohn MacarthurDeborah Van Der PlaatJanina GosseyeAndrew Wilson

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edited by John Macarthur, Deborah van der Plaat, Janina Gosseye, Andrew Wilson

Hot ModernismQueensland Architecture 1945 – 1975

4 Hot Modernism Healthy Minds in Healthy Bodies 5

Preface / Acknowledgements

Hot Modernism: Queensland Architecture 1945–1975 is one of three major outcomes of a large research project, funded by the Australian Research Council under the Linkage Project grant scheme, which set out to document Queensland’s post-war architecture by building an oral history archive. This research was conducted in the ATCH (Architecture Theory Criticism History) research centre at the University of Queensland between 2011 and 2014 and owes much to the fruitful conjunction of individual convictions and institutional commitments. The interdisciplinary team of researchers who led this project consisted of John Macarthur, Deborah van der Plaat, Janina Gosseye and Andrew Wilson, the editors of this book and all affiliates of the School of Architecture, who worked in close collaboration with Jane Hunter, Craig McNamara and Andrae Muys from the School of Information Technology and Gavin Bannerman from the State Library of Queensland. Together, this research team developed an interactive online database, the Digital Archive of Queensland Architecture (www.qldarch.net), which comprises all research material, efficiently organised and freely accessible for further enquiry. This database is a second significant outcome of the research project. The third outcome of the research project was a major exhibition, curated by Deborah van der Plaat, Janina Gosseye, Gavin Bannerman and Kevin Wilson, held at the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane. Between 10 July and 12 October, 2014 more than 18,000 people visited Hot Modernism: Building Modern Queensland 1945–1975 which — next to numerous scale models, digital models, original plans and films — featured a full-scale reproduction of

Hayes and Scott’s Jacobi House, one of Brisbane’s most iconic mid-century houses. The editors of this book would like to thank the various institutions and numerous individuals without whose support this publication would not have been possible. We would like to express our gratitude to the Australian Research Council, and the industry partners State Library of Queensland, BVN Donovan Hill, Conrad Gargett Riddel Ancher Mortlock Woolley and Wilson Architects for generously providing funding for the research project. Particular thanks are due to the principles of these firms, Janette Wright, Phil Tait, Bruce Wolfe, Robert Riddel and Hamilton Wilson, for confidently investing in this research. We would also like to thank the archival institutions The Fryer Library of the University of Queensland, Artspace Mackay, Brisbane City Council Archives, Gold Coast City Council Archives, National Archives of Australia and Queensland State Archives as well as photographer Richard Stringer for supplying digital reproductions of the numerous plans and photographs that adorn this book. Finally, we would like to express our immense thankfulness to the long list of individuals who have offered their support and insight at various stages of this endeavour and who have generously shared their knowledge and stories with us. A special thanks to Donald Watson and Robert Riddel, informants who became a vital and active part of the research team and also contributed to this volume.

John Macarthur, Deborah van der Plaat, Janina Gosseye and Andrew Wilson.

(previous pages) Post office at the Gold Coast, designed by Roman Pavlyshyn, 1959.

(opposite) Interior of the Plywood Exhibition House, designed by John Dalton and Peter Heathwood, 1957.

VISUAL ESSAYS(See references in main essays)

Climate and Regionalism

Lifestyle 200

Urbanisation 262

International Influences

Lifestyle

Urbanisation

PEOPLE, FIRMS AND NETWORKS 163

BUILDING PROGRAMMES 215

Architectural Practice in Post-War QueenslandJanina Gosseye and Donald Watson 165

Civic Visions for BrisbaneJohn Macarthur, Donald Watson and Robert Riddel 217

Healthy Minds in Healthy Bodies: Building Queensland’s Community, One Weatherboard at a TimeAlice Hampson and Janina Gosseye 237

‘Shabby’ Careers: Women Working in Architecture in Post-War QueenslandDeborah van der Plaat  183

Theme

Theme

Visual Essay

Visual Essay

Symbols

6

8

9

7

Image credits 290

Contributors 296

Bibliography 291

Index 296

Colophon 304

Con

tent

s

Climate and Regionalism 46

International Influences 134

Bringing Architecture to the People: Defining Architectural Practice and Culture in Post-War QueenslandDeborah van der Plaat and Andrew Wilson 15

Twentieth-Century (Sub) Tropical Housing: Framing Climate, Culture and Civilisation in Post-War QueenslandDeborah van der Plaat, Andrew Wilson and Elizabeth Musgrave 75

Introduction  11

Preface/Acknowledgements  7

FOUNDATIONS: MODERNISM AND ITS CRITIQUE 13

INFLUENCES 73

The Discovery of Queensland’s Architectural HistoryRobert Riddel 101

Angry Young Architects:Counterculture and the Critiqueof Modernism in Brisbane, 1967–1972Janina Gosseye andJohn Macarthur 31

International Influences in Post-War Queensland: Protagonists, Destinations and ModelsSilvia Micheli and Andrew Wilson 117

1

Theme

Theme

Visual Essay

Visual Essay

3

2

4

5

Introduction 11

First Church of Christ Scientist in Brisbane, designed by Bruce Lucas and Robert Cummings, 1939.

IntroductionAs International Modernism swept the world after the Second World War it confronted differing landscapes, climates, and building traditions. The tabula rasa planning, infrastructural and social engineering originally imagined for the rich northern hemisphere was actually possible in the global south where architecture applied itself to buildings and urban form as a continuous field of operation. The modernisation and urbanisation of large parts of Africa and Asia, implemented by colonial governments, was clearly recognisable in the built form to the extent that in these locales modernisation and Modernism became practically synonymous. In the laboratory of the “Colonial Modern”, Modernism was expected to develop into an increasingly powerful generalisation. The experimental data most anticipated was to test Modernism in hot climates — Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry’s work in Africa and India being an example of the design experimentation that accompanied building science in the programme for a bio-climatic design. Queensland, Australia’s northern state answered the criterion of heat, but few other expectations of a place of tropical torpor waiting for an injection of modernist rationalism. By 1900 British settlers had comprehensively dispossessed the indigenous populations of Australia and established a prosperous economy with a thriving urban culture. Advances in communication and mobility of the professional classes in the late nineteenth century meant that, although on the geographic periphery, Australian architectural culture closely followed and participated in the trends of British and North American architectural discourse. Relatively wealthy, with high labour costs and a good professional and trades skill base, Queensland’s need for, and ability to produce, a “Hot Modernism” was quite different to the situation that faced Le Corbusier at Chandigarh, or Michel Échochard at Casablanca. By 1945, Queensland’s architectural discourse was furthermore — contrary to many other emerging colonial realities — already strongly focused on climatic design. In the nineteenth century the need to adapt architectural forms to hot climates, began to distinguish Queensland’s architecture from that of the other British colonies to the south. As a result, Queensland came to be held as having produced the only authentically Australian architecture, both in built form and critical discourse. A strange

Introduction 13

Foundations: Modernism and its Critique

12 Hot Modernism

mixture of racial and geographic determinism, the state’s architecture was seen as a successful adaptation of ‘white men’ to the tropics. The ability of architecture to ameliorate the heat and humidity was held to assist a physiological adaption on the basis of which a new a vigorous culture would thrive. The grand civic buildings of nineteenth-century Brisbane with their various explorations of the classical idiom were shuttered and shaded, with narrow plans, tall rooms and convecting sash windows, and topped with elaborate roof vents drawing from open eaves. In their playing out of the various motifs of the classical orders and the arch, architects such as JJ Clark also produced sun control devices with deep colonnades. Timber villas became the vernacular domestic building type. Raised above the ground for ventilation, with steep venting roofs and deep verandas, these flimsy houses with their comfortably dark interiors and zero thermal mass that make the most of the cool evenings, are quite distinct from the more European houses of southern Australia. From this local tradition arts and crafts architects such as Robin Dods produced elegantly simplified forms that bear comparison with the houses of CFA Voysey. In the 1930s, Charles Fulton and Bruce Lucas, who had worked in London, and Robert Cummings who had studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture there, began to practice in a modern style and to teach modern architecture. They were joined shortly before the war by Viennese émigré Karl Langer. It is these architects and their students, the first university educated modernist architects that this book celebrates. They grasped international trends vigorously, exploring the forms and spatial arrangements of northern hemisphere Modernism, but unconstrained by cold bridging and need for insulation. And they did so in a culture where buildings were expected to be as open as possible and where a healthy life, private and civic, was to be lived outdoors. The Queensland heat that nineteenth-century architects thought it their task to ameliorate, was gradually revealed as not so terrible when dress and building fabric were not modelled so closely on the culture of higher latitudes. As the sun-belt population shift began in Australia towards the end of the 1960s, architects began to renegotiate a relation to tradition, a regionalism that was cultural as well as climatic. The nine essays included in Hot Modernism: Queensland Architecture 1945–1975 are grouped into four themes. “Foundations: Modernism and its Critique” recounts how architecture as a discipline

was institutionalised in Queensland in the early twentieth century, spurring the success of Modernism as a doctrine, until both the architectural education and the modernist dogmas that it proclaimed were increasingly criticised by "angry young architects" from the 1960s on. The second theme, “Influences”, examines the forces that have affected Queensland’s “hot Modernism”, from climate and local architectural history to international developments and foreign protagonists. “People, Firms and Networks” in turn pinpoints local key-players and influential firms, while throwing the gendered nature of post-war practice into sharp relief. The fourth and final theme focuses on the “Building Programmes” that were initiated in Brisbane and across Queensland to (quite literally) build a modern state. Each of these four textual themes is bracketed by visual essays that give rich (photo)graphic accounts of 64 key-projects in Queensland, from houses and schools to offices, carparks and swimming pools. Similarly to the textual themes, the visual essays have been given a thematic focus: “Climate and Regionalism”, “International Influences”, “Lifestyle” and “Urbanisation”. In presenting the book thematically, rather than attempting a comprehensive narrative particular to Queensland, we hope to suggest wider connections and comparisons with the global phenomenon of Modernism, and in particular that of the hotter regions. This decision is also made in light of our on-going research at the ATCH centre at the University of Queensland School of Architecture. The book Hot Modernism includes only a fraction of the materials we have collected and begun to analyse in an interactive database available at www.qldarch.net. While covering the canonical buildings and projects, we have also given some priority to less published projects and less well known images. In spite of inevitable constraints and difficult choices, Hot Modernism does shed a strong light on the idiosyncratic, inventive appropriation of post-war architectural culture in the north-eastern corner of Australia.

John Macarthur, Deborah van der Plaat, Janina Gosseye and Andrew Wilson