Experiments in Modern Living: Scientists and the National Capital Private House 1925-1970

Home , Alice Spigelman, Basser Library, Bunning and Madden, Charles Lane Poole, Charles Scrivener, Cora Wilding

EXPERIMENTS IN MODERN LIVING: SCIENTISTS AND THE NATIONAL CAPITAL PRIVATE HOUSE 1925-1970

Milton Provan Cameron

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Faculty of the Built Environment

December 2009

Abstract

“Experiments in Modern Living: Scientists and the National Capital Private House 1925-1970” examines how a group of scientists, brought to Canberra to take up leading roles in the establishment of national scientific institutions, commissioned private houses that rejected previous architectural styles and wholeheartedly embraced modernist ideologies and aesthetics. The dissertation compares the context in which these scientists commissioned their houses to the conditions identified by scientific writer Thomas Kuhn as being responsible for generating paradigm shifts in scientific theory.

It will be established that the scientists were in an ideal position to welcome paradigm change in domestic architecture. They were all relatively young when they came to Canberra. Confident and progressive in outlook, many had benefited from overseas experience and from recent exposure to new developments in architecture and the arts. Building new careers and new lives in a city that was still in its infancy, they were not overly committed to maintaining an existing worldview, and were ready to accept change in their living environments. Furthermore, they could see that existing houses in Canberra were technically and environmentally deficient, and that a new type of house was required. To address these shortcomings they provided their architects with detailed and specific briefs.

However the principal motivations that steered these clients towards modern architecture, and encouraged them to build the radical new houses that appeared on suburban Canberra sites in the post World War II years, were not pragmatic in origin. It was the presence of more subjective factors—the allure of the form, materials and colours of modern architecture, art and design, coupled with an attraction to abstract, conceptual thought— that seduced these scientist-clients into rejecting previous architectural styles and convinced them to embrace the cool aesthetic of modern architecture.

Throughout the dissertation the houses are considered as cultural artefacts: products of synergies between architects and clients who were all attempting to find the right forms and spaces to express their ideals and aspirations. The study will offer new insights into a number of aspects of mid-twentieth-century Australian domestic architecture: the dynamics that trigger shifts in attitude towards architectural design, the importance of clients to the design process, and the nexus between Australian architecture and science.

ii CONTENTS page

Illustrations ...... vi Acknowledgements ...... xii Abbreviations ...... xv Location Map ...... xvi Select Inventory ...... xvii

Introduction DOMESTIC VOYEURISM: ENTERING THE DISSERTATION . . . 1 CONSTRUCTING THE ARGUMENT ...... 5 MAPPING THE TERRAIN ...... 9 Scientific Discourse ...... 9 Canberra Discourse ...... 11 Australian Discourse ...... 13 International Discourse ...... 17 INTRODUCING THE CHAPTERS ...... 24

Chapter One ARTS AND CRAFTS ROOTS: DESBROWE-ANNEAR, THE LANE POOLES AND WESTRIDGE HOUSE ...... 30 Arts and Crafts Roots ...... 31 “More Than the Usual Public Servant’s Home” . . . . . 35 Publicity and Privacy ...... 44 An Atavistic Type? ...... 50

Chapter Two AGE OF THE MASTERS: ESTABLISHING A SCIENTIFIC AND INTELLECTUAL COMMUNITY IN CANBERRA 1945-1970 . . . 67 The Formation of the Australian National University . . . . 67 The Reformation of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research . . 87 Legacy ...... 95

Chapter Three PARADIGM SHIFT: BOYD AND THE FENNER HOUSE . . . 109 A New Type ...... 112 The Aesthetic Imperative ...... 118 Imitation of Life ...... 124

iii Riposte ...... 133

Chapter Four AGENTS OF CHANGE: SEIDLER AND THE ZWAR HOUSE . . . 146 Promoting the New Paradigm ...... 149 Point Piper Laboratory ...... 157 The Dilemma of the Universal Paradigm ...... 165 Counterpoint ...... 169 Economy ...... 174

Chapter Five FORM FOLLOWS FORMULA: GROUNDS, BOYD AND THE PHILIP HOUSE ...... 183 A Collaborative Ethos ...... 185 “Physics in the Home” ...... 196 Conflating the Paradigms ...... 206

Chapter Six WHERE SCIENCE MEETS ART: BISCHOFF AND THE GASCOIGNE HOUSE ...... 219 Residence 19, Commonwealth Solar Observatory . . . . . 222 “A Feeling of Space and Air” ...... 228 An Informed Brief ...... 234 Protégé ...... 236 “Entry into the Art World” ...... 245

Chapter Seven THE ORIGINS OF FORM: GROUNDS, BISCHOFF AND THE FRANKEL HOUSE ...... 260 The Origins of Form ...... 263 The Mathematics of [Re]Production ...... 271 An Artistic Gesture...... 283

Before and After Science ...... 296

Bibliography ...... 308

Appendix: Interviews ...... 326

iv Frank Fenner ...... 327 Ben Gascoigne ...... 339 Candida Griffiths ...... 358 John Zwar ...... 379 Colin Griffiths ...... 401

Illustrations page i Map of Canberra c 1962. Drawn by the author, November 2009. (Drawing influenced by map of Los Angeles in Elizabeth Smith, Case Study Houses: the Complete CSH Program 1945-1966) . . xvi ii J. P. Miller (illustrator), The Wonderful House . . . . xix iii Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Griffing House, Campbell, 1961 . 1 iv Robin Boyd, Verge House (“The Lantern”), Red Hill, 1964 . 1 v Robin Boyd, Fenner House, view from north-east, 1954 . . . 7 vi J. R. Conner, A Guide to Canberra Buildings, 1970, cover . . 12 vii Australian Home Beautiful, January 1947, cover . . . . 17 viii Arts and Architecture, selection of covers, 1943-1959 . . . 17 ix Esther McCoy, Modern California Houses: Case Study Houses 1945-1962, cover ...... 18 x Franklin Toker, Fallingwater Rising, Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America’s Most Extraordinary House, cover . . . 20 xi Ephemera related to design and construction of Miller House . . 20 xii Sylvia Lavin, Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture, cover . . . . . 23

1.1 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, Westridge House from north-east . . 30 1.2 Ruth Pollexfen, Blackbirds embroidered cushion cover . . . 32 1.3 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, Westerfield, Frankston . . . 33 1.4 Robert Hamilton, Pinehill, Frankston . . . . . 34 1.5 Federal Capital Commission, Proposed School of Forestry Site . 37 1.6 Henry Rolland, preliminary sketch plan, Principal’s Residence, 1925 . 37 1.7 FCC, Director’s Residence, Institute of Anatomy, Acton . . . 39 1.8 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, Westridge House, ground floor plan . 42 1.9 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, Westridge House, first floor plan . . 43 1.10 Advertisement for “Falco” Electric Cookers, Warburton Frank . . 46 1.11 Henry Rolland, Director’s Residence, Mount Stromlo, 1926-27 . . 49 1.12 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, Westridge House from south-east . . 52 1.13 Ruth Lane Poole, armchair, Governor-General’s drawing room . . 52 1.14 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, Broceliande, Toorak, 1916 . . . 54 1.15 Peter Behrens, Basset-Lowke House, c 1927 . . . . 56 1.16 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, Westridge House from north-east . . 56 1.17 Westridge House. Ground floor showing open plan living and dining

vi area. Sketch by the author, 2009 ...... 58 1.18 Ruth Lane Poole, “the right way to curtain a window” . . . 59

2.1 Coombs and Chifley in front of Great Palm House at Kew, London . 70 2.2 James Stirling, Florey Building, Queen’s College, Oxford . . 70 2.3 Oliphant, Hancock and Florey inspect the University site, Easter 1948 . 72 2.4 Brian Lewis, who was not invited ...... 72 2.5 Peto, the first Oliphant House, Barnt Green, Worcestershire . . 73 2.6 John Proctor, Dorset House ...... 73 2.7 Moir and Sutherland, Oliphant House, O’Connor . . . 74 2.8 Roy Grounds and Brian Lewis, ANU staff house ‘Type D’ . . 74 2.9 Collard and Clarke, site plan showing ANU staff houses . . 76 2.10 Brian Lewis, ANU “Type F” staff houses, Brian Lewis Crescent, Acton . 76 2.11 Brian Lewis (with Ken Oliphant), ANU Vice-Chancellor’s House 77 2.12 Collard and Clarke, ground floor plan, Hancock House, Acton . . 79 2.13 Collard and Clarke, Hancock House, view from north-east . 79 2.14 Brian Lewis, courtyard, University House, 1953 . . . . 80 2.15 Fred Ward, low table, Australian Academy of Science, c 1959 . . 80 2.16 Immigrant master-craftsmen admire chair by Oswald Paseka . . 81 2.17 Mockridge, Stahle and Mitchell, model, Coombs Building, c 1961 . 81 2.18 Eccles House, Red Hill. View from north, 1952 . . . . 83 2.19 Hocking, Warren and Associates (Bob Warren), Ennor House, 1955 . 83 2.20 The four medical professors study plans for JCSMR building . . 84 2.21 Robin Boyd, Manning Clark House, Forrest . . . . 85 2.22 Bunning and Madden (Noel Potter), Birch House, Yarralumla, 1968 . 87 2.23 Birch House, living room with view of Brindabella Ranges . . . 87 2.24 Bob Warren, model of unsuccessful proposal for AAS building . . 89 2.25 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, winning proposal for AAS building . 89 2.26 “Dr. Otto Frankel competing in the langlauf race” . . . . 90 2.27 “Margaret and Otto Honeymoon, 1940, Lake Wanaka, New Zealand” . 90 2.28 “Otto’s two wives”, Port Hills, Canterbury, New Zealand . . . 91 2.29 Bill Sutton, Homage to Frances Hodgkins . . . . . 91 2.30 Ernst Plischke, Vienna, c 1930 ...... 92 2.31 “Otto with his Ford Street House and Builder”, c 1939 . . . 92 2.32 Otto Plischke, Frankel House, Opawa, Christchurch, c 1940 . . 92 2.33 Otto Plischke, Frankel House, Opawa, Christchurch, c 1940 . . 92 2.34 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Phytotron, CSIRO, Black Mountain . 94 2.35 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Phytotron, interior . . . 94

vii 2.36 Enrico Taglietti, Paterson House, view from Juad Place, c 1968 . . 97 2.37 Alex Jelinek, Benjamin House, Deakin, 1957 . . . . 98 2.38 Alex Jelinek, Benjamin House, Deakin, 1957, interior . . . 98 2.39 Moir and Sutherland, Waterhouse House, Deakin, 1958 . . 99 2.40 Rudi Krastins, Slatyer and Stewart Houses, Hobbs Street, O’Connor . 100

3.1 Robin Boyd, Fenner House, view from north-east, 1956 . . . 109 3.2 Robin Boyd, Fenner House, view from west, 1954 . . . . 110 3.3 Robin Boyd, Fenner House, floor plan, 1953 . . . . 111 3.4 Viewing Canberra Medallion on wall of Fenner House, 1956 . . 112 3.5 Temporary JCSMR laboratories ...... 114 3.6 Temporary JCSMR laboratories ...... 114 3.7 Robin Boyd, working drawing, Manning Clark House, 1952 . . 117 3.8 Lindsay Pryor, landscape design, Fenner House, c 1954 . . . 118 3.9 Frank Fenner, sketch of table, New Jersey, 1953 . . . . 120 3.10 Frank Fenner, sketch detail of Lever House, New York, 1953 . . 120 3.11 Skidmore Owings and Merrill, Lever House, New York, 1950 . . 121 3.12 Eugenio Montuori, Booking Hall, Main Railway Station, Rome, 1950 . 122 3.13 Australian Home Beautiful, November 1956, cover . . . . 124 3.14 John Curtin School of Medical Research building, 1957 . . . 125 3.15 Marcel Breuer, “binuclear” house proposal, 1943 . . . 128 3.16 Robin Boyd, Fenner House, entrance terrace, 1956 . . . 130 3.17 Fenner House. Floor plan showing separation of functions Sketch by the author, 2009 ...... 134 3.18 Robin Boyd, Fenner House living room, 1956 . . . . 136 3.19 Robin Boyd, Fenner House living room, 1956 . . . . 137 3.20 Lindsay Pryor, Trees in Canberra, 1962, cover . . . . 139

4.1 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, 1955, view from south-east . . . 146 4.2 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, cantilevered deck detail . . . 146 4.3 Harry Seidler, Bowden House, Deakin, Canberra, 1950 . . . 147 4.4 “HHIGH PRIEST OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY” . . . 147 4.5 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, floor plan, 1955 . . . . 148 4.6 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, 1955, entrance court . . . . 149 4.7 Harry Seidler, Point Piper studio at night . . . . . 150 4.8 Harry Seidler, Point Piper studio ...... 151 4.9 John and Heather Zwar’s first Canberra house, 2 Todd Street . . 152 4.10 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, samples of colour and fabric, 1955 . . 154

viii 4.11 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, bedroom 1 curtain swatch, 1955 . . 154 4.12 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, colour code, 1955. . . . . 155 4.13 Harry Seidler, Rose Seidler House, Turramurra . . . . 156 4.14 Zwar House. Floor plan showing square format Sketch by the author, 2009 ...... 158 4.15 Zwar House. Section A-A Sketch by the author, 2009 ...... 159 4.16 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, floor plan, 1955 . . . . 160 4.17 Harry Seidler, Bland House, floor plan, 1958 . . . . 160 4.18 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, 1955 ...... 160 4.19 Harry Seidler, Bland House, 1958 ...... 160 4.20 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, elevation of triangular fireplace, 1955 . 167 4.21 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, view from north . . . . 169 4.22 Federal Capital Commission, CSIR Laboratory buildings . . 170 4.23 Decorative ceramic plaque with Scarab Beetle, Entomology Building . 170 4.24 “One of the suburbs said to be in search of a city” . . . . 171 4.25 Zwar’s local store ...... 172 4.26 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, view from south . . . . 173 4.27 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, view from north . . . . 173 4.28 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, interior . . . . . 174 4.29 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, interior . . . . . 174 4.30 Josef Albers, Co-ordinal, 1942 ...... 175 4.31 Harry Seidler, title block, Zwar House working drawings, 1955 . . 178

5.1 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Philip House from Vasey Crescent . 183 5.2 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Philip House floor plans . . 184 5.3 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Vasey Crescent Group, 1963 . . 185 5.4 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Australian Academy of Science . 187 5.5 Vasey Crescent Group, site plan. Sketch by the author, 2009 . . 189 5.6 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Philip House, looking north-west . 190 5.7 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Vasey Crescent Group, 1970 . . 191 5.8 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Philip House living room, 1963 . 195 5.9 Ancher, Mortlock and Woolley, F C Pye Laboratory, CSIRO . . 198 5.10 Philip House, reflected eaves plan. Sketch by the author, 2009 . . 205 5.11 Fay Philip, painting, Philip House from north, 1988 . . . 208 5.12 Richard Rouse, Rouse Hill House, Windsor Road, Rouse Hill, NSW . 209 5.13 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Philip House from west . . . 209 5.14 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Philip House from south-west . . 213

ix 5.15 Fay Philip, painting, Philip House and children, 1965 . . . 214

6.1 Theo Bischoff, Gascoigne House, view from north . . . 219 6.2 Rosalie Gascoigne, found objects on courtyard wall . . . 220 6.3 The Small Magellanic Cloud ...... 221 6.4 Federal Capital Commission, “Residence H”, Mt. Stromlo . . 224 6.5 Federal Capital Commission, cottages at CSO, c 1928 . . 225 6.6 View over Canberra from Mount Stromlo with pine trees, c 1920 . . 227 6.7 Rosalie Gascoigne, Monaro, (left hand panel of four),1989 . . 229 6.8 Rosalie Gascoigne with her “farm iron” in the back yard . . 232 6.9 Theo Bischoff, central courtyard, Pike House, c 1968 . . . 233 6.10 Theo Bischoff, Pike House, floor plan . . . . . 234 6.11 Theo Bischoff, Gascoigne House, isometric sketch, gutter overflow . 239 6.12 Theo Bischoff, George Clark House, 210 Dryandra Street, O’Connor . 240 6.13 Theo Bischoff, “Houses by T. B. 1960-66” (1958-1963 shown only) . 241 6.14 Theo Bischoff, Gascoigne House briefing notes, July 1967 . . 243 6.15 Theo Bischoff, Gascoigne House, floor plan, June 1968 . . . 245 6.16 Theo Bischoff, Gascoigne House, preliminary sketch of display shelf . 246 6.17 Theo Bischoff, Gascoigne House, cross section, June 1968 . . 247 6.18 Rosalie Gascoigne, works in progress, Gascoigne House, 1973 . 248 6.19 Rosalie Gascoigne, Joie De Mourire installation, Pearce, c 1972 . 249 6.20 Rosalie Gascoigne, Country Air, 1977 . . . . . 250 6.21 Rosalie Gascoigne, Parrot Country (right hand panel of four), 1983 . 251 6.22 Theo Bischoff, Gascoigne House, entrance porch . . . 251 6.23 Gascoigne House. Plan showing Rosalie’s principal work area Sketch by the author, 2009 ...... 252 6.24 Rosalie Gascoigne in her domain, 1975 . . . . . 253

7.1 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, view from Cobby Street . . . 260 7.2 Hans Sedlmayr, the five “genetic elements” of Borromini . . 264 7.3 Roy Grounds, site plan, Frankel House . . . . . 264 7.4 Snapdragon mutants, International Genetics Conference, Berlin, 1927 . 265 7.5 The Philips High Tension Generator for atom-smashing . . . 267 7.6 A Nazi aeroplane hangar ...... 267 7.7 Roy Grounds, Grounds House, Toorak, 1954 . . . . 269 7.8 Roy Grounds, Leyser House, Kew, 1951 . . . . . 269 7.9 Roy Grounds, Henty House, Frankston . . . . . 269 7.10 Eero Saarinen. Kresge Auditorium, MIT, Cambridge, 1955 . . 270

x 7.11 Map Campbell, c 1962 ...... 273 7.12 Roy Grounds, site plan, Frankel House . . . . . 273 7.13 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, preliminary floor plan, October 1969 . 274 7.14 Roy Grounds, Grounds House, Toorak, front entry . . . 274 7.15 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, Canberra, front entry . . . 275 7.16 Frankel House, alternative site plan. Sketch by the author, 2009 . . 276 7.17 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, revised plan, December 1969 . . 278 7.18 Roy Grounds, site plan, Frankel House . . . . . 280 7.19 Roy Grounds, floor plan, Frankel House . . . . . 281 7.20 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, eaves and fascia details . . . 281 7.21 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, eaves and fascia details . . . 281 7.22 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, west elevation . . . . 283 7.23 Ernst Plischke, perspective sketch, Frankel House, Christchurch . . 284 7.24 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, west elevation . . . . 285 7.25 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, west elevation . . . . 285 7.26 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, east elevation . . . . 286 7.27 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, “spy-holes” above kitchen bench . . 287 7.28 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, passage elevation . . . . 288 7.29 Colin McCahon, Crucifixion: the apple branch, oil on canvas, 1950 . 291

xi Acknowledgements

When I first began talking to people about this topic I was struck by the high level of interest that it generated. Many of those who I spoke to volunteered information and further contacts, and when I combined their recollections with my own primary research and oral history interviews, I felt like I was assembling a puzzle—a giant, mid- twentieth century puzzle of Canberra’s history, whose components were houses, clients, scientific institutions and dates. But it was the advice of one person who was not part of that puzzle—my supervisor at the University of New South Wales, Harry Margalit—that was most critical in keeping this dissertation on the right track. I am grateful for his understanding of what I was trying to do, and the timely, straightforward and honest advice that he gave in order that I might succeed. I am also grateful to my co-supervisor, Paul Hogben, for his considered and detailed comments.

The dissertation is indebted to the clients and the architects who commissioned and designed the houses discussed on the following pages. Clients Frank Fenner, John Zwar and Ben Gascoigne, and architect Colin Griffiths, were generous with their time and gave excellent first-hand accounts of those events—more than half a century ago—that shaped their houses. Without their enthusiasm, and willingness to answer my many questions, this study would not have been possible. The dissertation is further indebted to the many other clients and architects who have long departed, but whose voices can still be heard in the extensive personal correspondence and records that they left behind.

I would also like to thank many family members of those original protagonists. The Gascoigne family—Thomas (“Toss”), Hester and Martin—were most helpful in recalling details of the lives, and houses, of Ben and Rosalie. Toss and Hester deserve a special mention for their personal interest in my project, and for their generosity in offering information and contacts regarding other houses and other clients, and in facilitating the interviews with Ben. Candida Griffiths (nee Philip) gave a very detailed account of the history of the Philip House, along with related facts about the other houses in the Vasey Crescent Group. The fact that she is an architect herself made her contribution especially pertinent. Phoebe Bischoff was most helpful, and deserves credit for having the foresight to donate Theo Bischoff’s documents to the Australian Capital Territory Heritage Library for the ongoing benefit of researchers such as myself.

xii Where family members were not available, colleagues of the original clients—or people who worked in the same institutions—proved to be helpful. The many lunchtime conversations that Lloyd Evans conducted with Otto Frankel—all of which he recorded in note form and left in the Basser Library at the Australian Academy of Science —helped to fill in details of the Frankel Houses. Lloyd also assisted with further details regarding Otto and Margaret, while Peter Conroy, from the Mount Stromlo Observatory, provided useful information regarding Geoffrey Duffield and the Director’s Residence. Brendan Lepschi—a Commonwealth Scientific, Industrial and Research Organisation scientist, and another person who is interested in early modern houses—introduced me to John Zwar, permitted me to refer to his own research, and provided excellent photographs of the now-demolished Zwar House.

Canberra would not be what it is today—and neither would this dissertation—without the various national institutions that brought the principal protagonists to the city. Fortunately, many of these same institutions now house their records for posterity. From these I obtained a significant amount of primary research material. My thanks go to the many librarians and archivists who helped me in my searches. In particular I would like to thank Rosanne Walker from the Basser Library, who made available to me all of the Fellows’ files, and left me to sit at a long desk where I was watched over by portraits of Florey, Oliphant, Fenner, Philip, Gascoigne and Frankel. The staff of the Petherick Reading Room at the National Library of Australia, where most of this dissertation was written, were helpful at all times. I would like to thank Andrew Sergeant in particular for his personal attention. Antoinette Buchanan, of the Australian Capital Territory Heritage Library, assisted with locating files and documents from the Theo Bischoff Collection, Pennie Pemberton at the Australian National University Archives helped to locate information regarding University staff houses, archivists at the National Archives of Australia sourced a wide variety of information from their repository, while librarians at the Commonwealth Scientific, Industrial and Research Organisation provided information regarding Lane Poole and the Australian Forestry School. Sophie Clement from the Australian Capital Territory Chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects helped to confirm details of some houses.

A number of people from locations outside Canberra helped. Dirk Meinecke from Harry Seidler and Associates, Sydney, provided information and contacts regarding the Zwar House, Robert Woodley of the Pictures Collection, State Library of New South Wales, assisted me to access information from the Harry Seidler Archives, while staff at the Australian Manuscripts Collection of the State Library of Victoria provided files and drawings from the Grounds, Romberg and Boyd Records.

xiii

My former colleagues at the University of Canberra helped with early discussions when I was refining my topic. In particular I would like to thank Craig Bremner, Gevork Hartoonian, visiting academic Ranulph Glanville and Andrew Metcalf—who also provided information from his own records of Canberra architecture. Stephen Frith, current owner of the Frankel House, pointed out details of the house. Andrew Benjamin provided useful advice in my early days about researching and writing techniques. The many people who assisted by sharing their knowledge of Canberra people and Canberra houses include Roger Benjamin, Catherine Townsend, Bruce Townsend, Enrico Taglietti, Roger Pegrum, Deryk Wrigley, Peter Freeman, Geoff Ashley, Dennis Formiatti, Karina Harris, Neil Hobbs, Lyn Gascoigne, Pam McDonald, Joy Warren, Graham O’Loughlin, Lenore Coltheart, Barry Smith, Ann Moyal and Susan- Mary Withycombe. Other people I would like to thank include Paul McGrath, Atsuko Takeda, Rebecca Smith, Ted Cremean, Claire Toepfer, Rod MacIver, Tom Sutton and Sarah Evans.

Last, but certainly not the least, I would like to thank my own family. My mother and father, Marie and Murray, are long gone, but their influence lives on. Their passions for designing and building led to my career in architecture, but the most valuable lesson they taught me was to follow my own interests. My daughters, Venetia and Naomi, have grown up considerably since I first started thinking about Canberra houses, and now enjoy pointing out houses that their Dad might like. But above all others, I am indebted to my partner, Ann McGrath, for her patience, support and advice over the years. Without her there would be no Ph.D. An academic who discusses Ph.D.s in her day job, Ann had to endure many similar questions after she came home in the evenings. I promise not to discuss endnotes after 10 pm ever again.

xiv Abbreviations

AAS Australian Academy of Science AAT Anglo-Australian Telescope ACT Australian Capital Territory ACTHL Australian Capital Territory Heritage Library ANU Australian National University BOAC British Overseas Airways Corporation CEBS Commonwealth Experimental Building Station CIAM International Congress for Modern Architecture CSIR Council for Scientific and Industrial Research CSIRO Commonwealth Scientific, Industrial and Research Organisation CSO Commonwealth Solar Observatory CUC Canberra University College FCAC Federal Capital Advisory Committee FCC Federal Capital Commission IBP International Biological Programme JCSMR John Curtin School of Medical Research MARS Modern Architecture Research Society MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology MSO Mount Stromlo Observatory NAA National Archives of Australia NCDC National Capital Development Commission NCPDC National Capital Planning and Development Committee NLA National Library of Australia NSW New South Wales RAIA Royal Australian Institute of Architects RSTCA Register of Significant Twentieth Century Architecture SHS Small Homes Service SLV State Library of Victoria SOM Skidmore, Owings and Merrill TAA Trans Australia Airlines WRI Wheat Research Institute (New Zealand)

xvi

xvii

xviii ii Illustration from the author’s favourite book in 1954, the year that the Fenner House was built. Margaret Brown, The Wonderful House, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1950. Illustration by J. P. Miller.

xix Siting the Inquiry

DOMESTIC VOYEURISM: ENTERING THE DISSERTATION1

In 2003 I started looking for a house in Canberra. But this wasn’t a detective search for a missing house by Robin Boyd, Harry Seidler or Roy Grounds—an attempt to uncover a long lost masterpiece, and reveal it to the world. It was a much more prosaic investigation. I was trying to find a house for my family to live in. Like all those looking to buy a house in Australia’s capital city, I faithfully scanned the real estate section of The Canberra Times each Saturday morning and prepared a list of houses to visit. Over the next two years we visited many open houses in the inner northern suburbs of O’Connor, Ainslie and Campbell, and in Forrest, Deakin and Red Hill to the south. Some were further out—Aranda in the north, and Curtin and Pearce in the south. Many advertising brochures were collected, compared and filed away for future reference.

On the whole the houses were a mixed bunch, as one might expect. But every now and then a real gem showed up. Unfortunately, they were usually well out of our price range. A house attributed to Boyd, at 44 Vasey Crescent, Campbell, was one of these. So was another at 32 Holmes Crescent, Campbell, designed by Frederick Theodore (“Theo”) Bischoff—a former student of Boyd who had moved from Melbourne and established his own office in Canberra. Some time later another Boyd house—“The Lantern”, at 204 Monaro Crescent, Red Hill—was advertised. This one was more affordable, but quite impractical for our needs. A few other significant houses came onto the market, including one at 4 Yapunyah Street, O’Connor, attributed to Seidler.

iii Grounds, Romberg and Boyd , Griffing House, Campbell, 1961.2 iv Rob i n Boyd , Verge House (“The Lantern”), Red Hill, 1964.3

We inspected a number of houses that had not been designed by architects. Most were located in the same inner suburbs that, fifty years ago, had been settled by new residents arriving to take up positions in the burgeoning national capital. By the turn

1 of the twenty-first century, these suburbs were in a state of flux. The house sites that had once been on the fringes of Canberra were now set in prime, inner city locations, and were heavily in demand. Many of the original houses they contained—considered to be substandard by today’s standards—were being demolished to make way for much larger versions.4

These random intrusions into other people’s domestic spaces opened up an aperture through which it was possible to view certain aspects of Canberra’s social history that would otherwise have remained hidden from view. Walter Benjamin wrote that “to live is to leave traces”, and likened these to clues to evidence in a good detective story.5 While inspecting these Canberra houses it was impossible not to notice the traces of everyday life that their inhabitants had accumulated over decades of living and working—especially because they provided evidence of lives that had been particularly rich in artistic, intellectual and cultural experience. Modern sculptures sat in the gardens, and bookshelves were strewn with scholarly books. Hung on the walls of modest houses, virtually hidden from the street by Australian native gardens, were original modernist paintings and prints by some of Australia’s most celebrated artists. The owners of one house had obviously been friends with the painter Arthur Boyd: a photograph in amongst his paintings depicted a group of people standing alongside the artist. Many of these houses contained a study, on the walls of which were black and white photographs of graduation ceremonies, and people standing in front of university buildings in various international locations. Each of these traces reflected something of the lives and aspirations of their absent inhabitants: the books represented a concern with ideas, the modern art suggested that they had embraced the symbols and iconography of the modern world, and the photographs indicated their association with education, research and overseas travel.

It soon became apparent that a high proportion of the vendors of these houses were scientists or academics—often professors—who had retired from the Australian National University, or from the Commonwealth Scientific, Industrial and Research Organisation. To those who were interested in buying the houses, this fact was not as important as other details—such as the gross permissible building envelope, or best location for a swimming pool. But to me, the stories of those original inhabitants— how they came to live in Canberra, where they worked, and the circumstances under which they commissioned architects to design their houses—became an obsession. It appeared that this was one aspect of Canberra’s history—and of the nation’s history— that had been left out of the discourse. While Canberra’s demographic reputation has generally been that of a public service town, supplemented by periodic influxes of politicians, these houses contained, within their built structure and contents, evidence

2 of another form of settlement: that of a highly educated, cultured and well-travelled intelligentsia.

The occupants of these, and other Canberra houses, had been responsible for some truly remarkable achievements. These included founding Australia’s conservation and forestry policy, developing microwave technology for radar—the one weapon that Hitler conceded had prevented German victory in the Atlantic—working with J. Robert Oppenheimer on The Manhattan Project, leading world research in nuclear physics, winning a Nobel Prize for physiological research, making major contributions to galactic evolutionary theory, curing the world of smallpox, inventing a chemical process that allowed manufacture of the contraceptive pill, inventing insect repellent (later manufactured as “Aerogard”), calculating thermodynamics of water movement to maximize water efficiency in dry lands, founding the international conservation of genetic plant resources and writing what was once considered by many to be the definitive version of European history in Australia.6

But it was the connection between these clients and the houses in which they lived that was most important. My search for a house had taken a different turn—no longer looking for one, I was now looking for many. During the first two years of the study I compiled as much data as I could find about Canberra’s clients, architects and houses. I prepared an inventory of architect-designed houses that were built in Canberra during the 1950s and 1960s.7 From information obtained from the three guide-books and the Royal Australian Institute of Architects lists and guides that were then available I added more details from a variety of sources: articles from The Canberra Times, discussions with residents who had grown up in Canberra, and visual observation of houses from suburban streets. The Canberra Times articles, most of which had been written by Ann Whitelaw, were particularly helpful. In many of her descriptions of the houses she mentioned the occupations of the clients. I began to include a “client occupation” column on my inventory, and was able to correlate Whitelaw’s information with further details obtained from the Australian Capital Territory Electoral Roll, from which it was possible to confirm names, occupations, street addresses and dates of occupation. Publications on the establishment of the Australian National University and the Commonwealth Scientific, Industrial and Research Organisation—and other histories of the John Curtin School of Medical Research, The Australian Forestry School and the Mount Stromlo Observatory— provided more names to be matched to addresses, and to houses. Friends and acquaintances showed a keen interest in my project. Many had grown up in Canberra, and knew the people, and their houses. A number were themselves the sons or

3 daughters of the original clients who had built architect-designed houses in the 1950s and 1960s, and whose names appeared on my growing inventory.

It soon became clear that scientists had been responsible for commissioning the most highly acclaimed houses in Canberra. Of the eleven private houses by Grounds, Romberg and Boyd—considered to be Australia’s premier architectural firm during the 1950s and 1960s—that were listed on the Royal Australian Institute of Architects 2006 Tour Guide, six were commissioned by scientists, one by an academic and another by a medical researcher. In addition, at least eight private houses on the Institute’s Map of Significant Canberra Architecture had been built for scientists and their families.8

CONSTRUCTING THE ARGUMENT

The preliminary research raised a number of questions. The first question was why, in the post-World War II era, had so many members of Canberra’s scientific community commissioned modern houses—houses whose designs signalled such a radical departure from previous examples? The answer to this question, I suspected, would be located somewhere within a series of related inquiries. Where were the areas of overlap between architecture and science during the period of the study? What were the attitudes of the architects who had designed these houses towards science? And, conversely, what were the attitudes of their scientist-clients towards architecture? In what ways did the material form of the houses reflect the ideologies of their architects? And how did those same formal aspects reflect the beliefs, or aspirations, of the scientists?

The common ground shared by the above questions is located where the philosophy of architecture intersects with the philosophies of the sciences. A number of writers and commentators have explored this shared zone. Architectural writers and historians such as Philip Steadman, Peter Collins and Alan Colquhoun ventured into the realms of biological discourse to find analogies for architectural theory. Art historian George Hersey examined the historiography of connections between living organisms and physical structures. Scientific writer Conrad Waddington explored aesthetic links between science, art and architecture, and identified dissimilarities between scientific procedure and architectural practice.9

But for this dissertation the most useful theoretical insights were those developed by scientific writer Thomas Kuhn. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1922, Kuhn was of the same generation as many of the scientists whose houses are examined in the following chapters. Kuhn was not driven by a desire to discover any specific links between science, architecture or art, but was interested in establishing the reasons behind the changes in thinking that occurred throughout the history of science. He explored the concept of “scientific revolution”—a term used by previous analysts to explain sudden shifts in thinking—and developed the hypothesis that these changes were not isolated occurrences, but were manifestations of an ongoing condition. For Kuhn, the trajectory of scientific history was signposted by a series of radical “paradigm shifts”— universally accepted breakthroughs that, for a limited time, provided “model problems and solutions” to the scientific community. Developed over a number of years, and informed by studies of the psychology of perception—including those by Jean Piaget and the gestalt psychologists—Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shift was set

5 out in his seminal 1962 publication The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.10 Described as “one of the two or three most important contributions to twentieth-century history and philosophy of science”, this book became an important text for philosophical studies in scientific and other fields.11

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn established that, in order for a potential new paradigm to emerge, two fundamental pre-conditions must exist. The first condition was that the individuals who observed the potential for paradigm shift— those who began to see some aspect of science, or of their worldview, differently— must be receptive to the concept of change. Kuhn believed that scientists who were relatively young, or new to the field, fitted this description because they were less committed to maintaining an existing paradigm.12 The second condition—and the one that Kuhn considered to be the most compelling in scientific research—was the ability of the new paradigm to solve problems that had been identified with the existing model.13

Kuhn, along with Paul Feyerabend—his Berkeley friend and colleague—noted that the new theory, brought about by revolution, often did not operate within the same conceptual framework as the one that it replaced. In some cases the new theory discarded certain aspects of the old model, and invented new ones. In other situations, concepts of the old theory were retained, but with a different meaning, in the new version. Kuhn and Feyerabend agreed that the incompatibility between the two theories could not be explained rationally, which led them to question one of the long-held bastions of scientific philosophy: that science was based purely on logical analysis.14

The dilemma of incommensurability—of not being able to compare the advantages, or disadvantages, of either theory on an equal footing—led to Kuhn’s belief that the decision to adopt a new paradigm was often informed partly by subjective thought. This subjectivity related to the individual researcher’s personal sense of what was “appropriate”, or “aesthetic”. Kuhn noted that these subjective aspects of the decision-making process had been largely omitted from scientific discourse, but were often decisive when it came to gathering support for a new paradigm within the scientific community.15

If Kuhn’s theory of paradigm change is applied to a series of houses that were designed for scientists in Canberra between 1925 and 1970, it can be argued that a major shift in the accepted way of thinking about domestic design was heralded by the arrival of Boyd’s radically modern Fenner House. Designed for the Australian National

6 University Professor of Microbiology Frank Fenner, his wife Bobbie and their two children, the “binuclear”-planned Fenner House appeared on the lower slopes of Red Hill in 1954. It signified a radical departure in architectural style and concept from previous Canberra houses, most of which were based on historic styles, and attracted a lot of attention from neighbours: as Fenner recalled, some of them thought that it was “a farming shed or something like that”.16 The Fenner Houses was reported to have “contributed much to architectural thinking and contemporary design”, and was awarded the inaugural Australian Capital Territory Chapter Medallion from the Royal Australian Institute of Architects in 1956.17

v Rob i n Boyd , Fenner House, view from north-east, 1954.18

The shift in architectural taste towards modernism signposted by this house was not unique to Australia: numerous processes of modernisation were under way throughout the country, and throughout overseas locations, during the period of this study. But within the Australian context, Canberra was a unique situation. This was due mainly to the combination of rapid growth, Government sanctioning of the centring of science, and the massive influx of educated and informed scientist-clients who arrived in the capital city to find a critical lack of existing houses. It is this combination of factors that makes Canberra an excellent test case for research. By studying a specific and limited sample of clients who all shared a common occupation, time and place, information can be observed, evaluated and compared in an attempt to isolate and identify the key issues responsible for influencing their shifts in attitude towards the problem of designing a house.19

In this thesis I will explore whether this paradigm shift in Canberra domestic design took place because of the same pre-conditions that Kuhn had established were necessary for scientific revolution: that the individuals responsible for introducing the new way of thinking were receptive to change, and that the new paradigm grew from a critique of problems that they identified with the previous version. Did these factors contribute to the decision by Fenner, and the scientists who followed him, to commission modern, architect-designed houses in the national capital in the post- World War II years? And did the presence of the subjective factors identified by Kuhn—aesthetics, neatness or simplicity—have any bearing on their decision?

8 MAPPING THE TERRAIN

Scientific Discourse

The theories of paradigm shift espoused by Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—in particular his identification of the aesthetic, or subjective, motive as a catalyst for change—provide a philosophical bridge that spans between the disciplines of science and architecture, and create a form of intellectual armature whose threads are woven throughout the histories of the various clients, architects and houses. Paul Hoyningen-Huene’s essay on the relationship between Kuhn and his contemporary, Paul Feyerabend, contextualises the alternative histories of science promoted by Kuhn and Feyerabend within the broader context of scientific practice and discourse.20 Apart from Kuhn and Feyerabend, references to science—or to scientific theory—are limited to those publications that provide specific insight into concepts or ideologies that might have had some bearing on the design of the houses.

For instance, the writings of Steadman, Collins and Colquhoun are critical for an understanding of Boyd’s Fenner House. Steadman’s The Evolution of Designs, Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts, Collins’s essay on “The Biological Analogy” and Colquhoun’s article entitled “Typology and Design Method”, help to establish frames of reference through which it is possible to view potential links between architecture and biology, and to identify issues and motivations that might have driven Boyd and Fenner. These potential links between the disciplines included concepts of typological classification (both morphological and functional-based), ecology, Darwinian evolutionary theory, biotechnical determinism and morphology.21

George Hersey’s The Monumental Impulse: Architecture’s Biological Roots identifies a series of connections between architecture and genetics that were examined in relation to the house that Grounds designed for the geneticist Sir Otto Frankel. At the core of these links is the perception of architecture as a “gene-pool” of dominant or recessive building elements. In the same way that offspring in the natural world contained certain hereditary traits, it was argued that successive buildings could be “reproduced” from various combinations of repetitive elements.22

Waddington—a biologist who published prolifically on the nexus between science and the arts—is important because of the distinctions that he identified between the way in which science is practised, and the ways in which art and architecture are practised.

9 Waddington compares the communal, cooperative approach to knowledge transfer within the scientific community to the search for individual expression that motivates artists. This differentiation becomes particularly relevant to the chapters on Seidler’s Zwar House and the Grounds, Romberg and Boyd-designed Philip House. Waddington is given further prominence in relation to the Frankel House. This is not only because of his interest in links between science and the arts, but because he was a colleague and good friend of Frankel, and was therefore in a position to influence Frankel’s own thoughts about art and architecture.

Of equal importance to the attitude of the scientists to architecture is, of course, the reverse condition—that of the architects’ perceptions of science. The first edition of Architecture and Arts—Melbourne architect Peter Burns’ answer to John Entenza’s Californian journal Arts and Architecture—contains the transcript of a debate in which Grounds and Boyd both participated. References to science are frequent throughout. While Boyd cautiously welcomed the advantages offered by scientific progress, Grounds took the opposite view, arguing that science was not a source of opportunities as much as a potential controlling factor: “we are at the end of an era in which we have endeavoured to engage science as the master of architecture instead of the servant of mankind.”23

A series of letters and other correspondence between the architects and their scientist-clients form another link between the disciplines. These documents provide intimate insights into the day-to-day concerns of both parties during the briefing, design and construction phases, revealing the issues and aspirations that drove both architects and clients in their searches for an appropriate house. This type of primary research material was found within the personal papers of the clients at the National Library of Australia, the National Archives of Australia and the Adolph Basser Library at the Australian Academy of Science. The State Library of Victoria’s Grounds, Romberg & Boyd collection, and the Australian Capital Territory Heritage Library’s Bischoff Collection, provided similar documents from the architects’ archives.

If, in relation to the comparative positions of architecture and science, the dissertation is located on a metaphorical bridge spanning between the two, its position in Australian architecture can be likened to filling a critical gap in the discourse. This is the space left vacant by a paucity of surveys of post-World War II houses in Canberra. Barely noticed amidst ongoing debates about civic and public buildings, or about the appropriate way to implement the Griffins’ plan, are the private spaces in which many of those who conspired to construct this twentieth-century city incorporated their own aspirations.

10 Canberra Discourse

One exception to this rule is Paola Favaro’s Ph.D. dissertation “Drawn to Canberra: the Architectural Language of Enrico Taglietti”. Favaro examines the role of the Italian-born and trained architect who arrived in the capital city during the 1950s. Favaro focuses mainly on issues of cultural exchange and integration that are a corollary of the migratory process, but there are some parallels with this study. Like other architects who moved to the capital—such as Theo Bischoff—Taglietti saw greater professional opportunities for building an architectural practice in Canberra where there were few existing buildings. But for Taglietti, who came from Milan, the impression of tabula rasa was even more acute. Favaro acknowledges one of the cornerstones of this study: that during the 1950s and 1960s a number of “interesting” house clients in Canberra were academics who had moved to the city to work at the Australian National University. She notes that many of these worked in the scientific disciplines. One of these was the geophysicist Mervyn Paterson, who, with his wife Katalin, commissioned Taglietti to design a fortress-like house at 7 Juad Place, Aranda, which was completed in 1968. Favaro interviewed the Patersons and other Taglietti clients such as the McKeowns, recording details of their interaction with the architect. But as Favaro’s study covers all of Taglietti’s career and architecture, Canberra houses form a relatively small component.24

Taglietti’s own 1979 publication Enrico Taglietti: Architect in Australia provides drawings, photographs and text of some of his houses, as does The Contribution of Enrico Taglietti to Canberra’s Architecture by Ken Charlton, Bronwen Jones and Favaro.25

Some studies of pre-World War II Canberra houses are useful for contextualising Desbrowe-Annear’s Westridge House. One of these is Peter Freeman’s edited collection The Early Canberra House: Living in Canberra 1911-1933. Born and nurtured in the spaces of the National Archives of Australia—where Freeman began his search by attempting to confirm whether any of Griffin’s cottage designs had been built in the national capital—this book provides a broad overview of life in early Canberra. It contains chapters by various writers covering suburban planning, architecture, landscaping, temporary accommodation and sociological issues. The Early Canberra House tends to focus on houses designed by the Federal Capital Commission, most of which were standard designs for civil servants. Where it does discuss houses for individual clients, it emphasises those designed by architects who practiced in Canberra such as Oakley and Parkes and Ken Oliphant. As a result, there is little information on Westridge House, designed by Melbourne-based Harold Desbrowe-

11 Annear.26 Freeman’s Westridge House Precinct Yarralumla Conservation Management Plan 2001, however, cites a number of valuable primary sources for further investigations of that house.27

Federal Capital Architecture Canberra 1911-1939 by Ken Charlton, Rodney Garnett and Martin Fowler provides further information regarding early cottages by the Federal Capital Commission and Oakley and Parkes. Westridge House and the Director’s Residence at the Commonwealth Solar Observatory are also mentioned.28

A number of guides, lists and inventories provide starting points for more detailed investigations of post-war houses. The Australian Institute of Architects’ (AIA) Register of Significant Twentieth Century Architecture (RSTCA) contains a listing of significant houses in Canberra, as does the Institute’s Map of Significant Canberra Architecture. A Guide to Canberra Buildings, by J. R. Conner, the Institute’s Architectural Guide to Australia’s Capital, and Andrew Metcalf’s Canberra Architecture all include information on houses.29 Martin Miles’s Canberra House: Mid-Century Modernist Architecture website combines information compiled from the Institute’s Register together with his own research, interviews and photographs. Divided into sections that profile houses, architects and other issues, the website provides a useful introduction to modern residential architecture in the capital city.30

vi J. R. Conner, A Guide to Canberra Buildings, 1970, cover.

A number of publications provide information about Canberra, and about the Canberra institutions in which the clients worked. The history of the city is covered in two sequential volumes: Jim Gibbney’s Canberra 1913-1953 and Eric Sparke’s Canberra 1954-1980.31 Stephen Foster and Margaret Varghese’s The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96 provides a detailed picture of the establishment of that organisation, and of the professional context in which many of the clients operated. This is complemented by The John Curtin School of Medical

12 Research: the First Fifty Years, written by Frank Fenner and David Curtis. Boris Schedvin’s Shaping Science and Industry: a History of Australia’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 1926-49, and Brad Collis’s Fields of Discovery: Australia’s CSIRO, illuminate the work environments of clients who worked in that institution. Tom Frame and Don Faulkner’s Stromlo: An Australian Observatory explores the history of the Commonwealth Solar Observatory, from its foundation by Geoffrey Duffield through to the arrival of Ben Gascoigne and beyond. The Australian Academy of Science: the First Fifty Years, edited by Fenner, recounts the story of the Academy building and provides information on the Fellows, many of whom are key figures in this dissertation.32

Australian Discourse

Outside the Canberra context, a number of surveys of Australian architecture overlap with the dissertation. These include Harriet Edquist’s Harold Desbrowe-Annear: a Life in Architecture, Robin Boyd’s Australia’s Home: its Origins, Builders and Occupiers and Geoffrey Serle’s Robin Boyd: a Life. Two Ph.D. dissertations that provide valuable insights are Conrad Hamann’s “Modern Architecture in Melbourne: the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971” and, in particular—due to its similar chronology—Philip Goad’s “The Modern House in Melbourne 1945-1975”.33

In Harold Desbrowe-Annear: a Life in Architecture, Edquist discusses the architect’s friendship with the Westridge House clients, Charles and Ruth Lane Poole. She emphasises the facts that Charles and Ruth were neighbours of Desbrowe-Annear in Melbourne, that Harold and Ruth both contributed to Australian Home Beautiful, and that the Lane Pooles might have been influenced in their choice of architect—and in their preferred architectural style—by an earlier Desbrowe-Annear House: Westerfield, at Frankston in Victoria. Edquist’s biography of Desbrowe-Annear is useful for placing Westridge House within the context of the architect’s overall career and canon of domestic designs.34

Also of significance is Edquist’s identification of one of Desbrowe-Annear’s most important, but least understood, contributions to Australian domestic architecture: his nurturing of a select, and loyal, group of clients. Like other architects of his time, Desbrowe-Annear built up a portfolio of informed, well-connected clients of substantial means who were prepared to invest in architecture. Many family members of these original clients returned to the architect later in life for further commissions. Edquist believes that this model of architectural patronage became an accepted convention within Victorian society, and was inherited by following generations of

13 architects including Grounds, Boyd and Neil Clerehan.35 Clerehan’s debt to Desbrowe- Annear, and to other early twentieth-century Melbourne practitioners, is expanded by Edquist in her essay “Neil Clerehan: a Melbourne Practice”.36 Edquist’s much broader survey of the Arts and Crafts movement throughout Australia—Pioneers of Modernism: the Arts and Crafts Movement in Australia—covers a much wider terrain than the publications on Desbrowe-Annear and Clerehan, and, in terms of client profiling, is mainly limited to descriptions of occupations.37

Boyd, one of Desbrowe-Annear’s beneficiaries, researched and wrote Australia’s Home at the same time that he was designing the Fenner and Clark houses in Canberra. Australia’s Home: its Origins, Builders and Occupiers contains Boyd’s ambitious attempt to categorise the entirety of Australian houses according to formal typology. This book is useful as evidence of his thinking at the time, and of the impact that this might have had on his design for the Fenner House. Serle’s Robin Boyd: a Life is useful for placing the Fenner House and Vasey Crescent Group within the context of the architect’s life and career, and for providing information regarding the interactions between Boyd, Grounds and their clients.38

Hamann’s Ph.D. dissertation “Modern Architecture in Melbourne: the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971”, covers all architectural work by the Melbourne-based firm during the various phases of the partnership. His detailed inventory of the firm’s buildings provides an excellent starting point for any study of houses by the firm’s principal designers, Grounds and Boyd. Hamann analyses their houses and locates each within the context of their various stylistic approaches. His examination of the forms and materials used by Grounds and Boyd in the Vasey Crescent Group and the Frankel House is particularly useful for the chapters on the Philip and Frankel Houses. Hamann’s study identifies the type of domestic clients for whom Grounds and Boyd worked, and discusses the architects’ approaches to client consultations. A very broad study, Hamman’s thesis provides a solid platform upon which to build a more detailed investigation of specific buildings.39

Goad’s Ph.D. dissertation “The Modern House in Melbourne 1945-1975” is an ambitious study covering all architect-designed houses. These include ”one-off” examples for specific clients, plus competition entries, standard designs provided by government departments or private companies, prefabricated houses, project houses and demonstration houses. In spite of this expansive approach, Goad’s survey shares two important criteria with this dissertation: a focus on the single-family house as the principal site of inquiry, and a similar time period. For this reason his analysis of the developments that changed post-war suburban life—the dramatic rise in car

14 ownership, increased mechanisation, new household appliances, new materials and the arrival of television—is as relevant to Canberra as it is to Melbourne.40

For Goad, the house is an accumulation of signs and symbols whose total composition becomes a form of communication between architects, providing a basis upon which the house can be located within architectural discourse. That discourse is complex, relying on the borrowing of styles and forms from both national and international sources, and on their constant interpretation and reinterpretation to form individual house designs. Goad’s argument that pre-World War II Victorian architects were capable of designing houses in a variety of styles—of which modernism was just one option— provides a context in which the English Arts and Crafts-styled Westridge House can be examined. The broad nature of Goad’s approach does not allow detailed analysis of individual clients. Instead, they are characterised into more general groupings: “the upper echelons of Melbourne society”, “the fashionable client”, and “Melbourne socialites”.41

Publications on Australian domestic design that demonstrate sensitivity to the roles played by clients include Fine Houses of Sydney, by Robert Irving, John Kinstler and Max Dupain, Jan Roberts’s edited collection Avalon, Landscape and Harmony, Walter Burley Griffin, Alexander Stewart Jolly and Harry Ruskin Rowe, and the Andrew Wilson- edited Hayes and Scott: Post-War Houses.

In Fine Houses of Sydney, Irving and Kinstler analyse a sample of twenty houses built between the 1820s and 1980, and paint a comprehensive picture of the social and architectural contexts in which the houses were designed and built. This is an unusual publication in Australian architectural discourse because it places the clients on a similar footing to the architects in the creation of the houses.42 Avalon, Landscape and Harmony documents the settlement of Avalon in New South Wales. Ian Stephenson relates the history of Griffin’s James House, while Maisy Stapleton describes three houses designed by Jolly.43 In her essay “Eddie Hayes: Two Houses Built for Women”, in Hayes and Scott: Post-War Houses, Alice Hampson studies two houses—one a suburban house in Herston, and the other a beach house at Surfers Paradise—that Hayes renovated for the wealthy Brisbane hotelier Ethne Pfitzenmaier.44 In each of these publications the authors discuss details of the clients, including their occupations, position within society, interests, aspirations, family structure and specific needs. The houses are presented as cultural artefacts that were constructed— and often adapted over time—to accommodate their clients’ requirements.

15 Two other Australian publications that acknowledge the importance of clients include Guy Allenby’s Eight Great Houses and Karen McCartney’s 50/60/70, Iconic Australian Houses: Three Decades of Domestic Architecture. The scope of Eight Great Houses is broad, covering houses from the states of Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and the Northern Territory. With the exception of Desbrowe-Annear’s 1904 Chadwick House in Eaglemont, and Griffin’s 1929 Fishwick House in Castlecrag, the houses that Allenby discusses are from a later period than those covered by this study. Throughout Eight Great Houses the author considers the broader social contexts in which the houses were conceived, and provides information regarding both the original clients and the current residents. One of the latter, the architect Peter Crone, received a National Award for Heritage from the Australian Institute of Architects in 2008 for his restoration of the Chadwick House. Crone’s account of that process, featured in Architecture Australia, provides a valuable first-hand account of Desbrowe- Annear’s technical inventiveness.45

In a similar vein to Eight Great Houses, McCartney’s 50/60/70, Iconic Australian Houses: Three Decades of Domestic Architecture examines fifteen houses in various Australian locations, making a number of references to the original clients and to subsequent owners.46

While not specifically addressing architect-designed houses, Patrick Troy’s edited collection A History of European Housing in Australia contains essays by writers addressing a common theme: the history of houses built by white settlers since colonisation. Claimed to be the first systematic history of European housing in Australia in relation to “social, administrative, cultural and technical” criteria, this publication covers socio-spatial configuration, gardens, technology and house financing.47 In “Living in a Garden Suburb”, Robert Freestone cites evidence of a human counterpoint to the ordered geometry of Canberra—the archetypal planned city. The Canberra Stories Group recorded memories of everyday life in the national capital, including “kitchen smells, wood stoves, household chores, cubby houses, fruit trees, and chooks behind the garage”, hedges being trimmed by government gardeners, and prams being pushed across paddocks towards “distant planned shopping centres”.48

The popular monthly journal Australian Home Beautiful became a public forum in which some of the architects, designers and clients involved in building houses in Canberra set out their personal design philosophies. Desbrowe-Annear, Ruth Lane Poole and Fred and Elinor (“Puss”) Ward regularly contributed articles, providing a record of the shifting attitudes to house design in Australia. It was in the pages of that

16 well-illustrated journal that Ruth gave an account of life in the Federal City, and set out her interior decorating ideology using her own residence—Westridge House—as an example. Many more of the houses discussed in this dissertation—the Oliphant House, the Ennor House, the Fenner House and the Philip House—were featured in Australian Home Beautiful, where they were presented as vanguards of modernist design and sensibility.49

From the 1950s Architecture and Arts played a similar role to Australian Home Beautiful. Architecture and Arts, and its original California-based version, Arts and Architecture, became conceptual bookends to the Fenner House: Boyd, who borrowed the binuclear floor plan from the American-based architect Marcel Breuer, would most likely have seen Breuer’s plan for the first time in the American journal, while the completed Fenner House was eventually published in the Australian version.50

vii Australian Home Beautiful, cover, January 1947. viii Arts and Architecture, selection of covers, 1943-1959.51

International Discourse

During the last quarter of the twentieth century two new landscapes of inquiry into the house opened up in North American discourse: interdisciplinary-based, generic studies of houses in relation to changing conventions within society, and detailed “biographies” of single houses.52

Dolores Hayden and Gwendolyn Wright, exponents of the former type, published a number of books that explored women’s issues in the home.53 Kenneth Jackson, Clifford Clark Junior and Richard Bushman wrote social-science-based histories of North American suburban living patterns and houses.54 These surveys were broad- brushed approaches to the question of the single-family house, and did not focus specifically on architect-designed examples. But their interdisciplinary bias, and attempt to address the complex nature of the forces that created the patterns of twentieth-century North American suburbia, created a context in which it was possible for another type of history to emerge.

This alternative history was detailed and specific. Instead of attempting to cover the entire history of a particular house type, or of an architect’s complete oeuvre, art and architectural historians began to focus on one specific house, or on a small series of houses. The methodology that they used was more inclusive than that of most previous architectural surveys. These historians examined written and graphic archival records to determine the thoughts and aspirations of all parties who had been involved in the design and construction of the houses. Rather than presenting the house as a stepping-stone in an architect’s career, they considered it as the physical embodiment of a genuine interaction between architect and client. To the authors of these histories the house was a cultural artifact that embodied all aspects of this collaborative process—a physical representation of this negotiated, architect-client zone, with its equal shares of commonality, conflict and resolution.

Architectural writers such as Esther McCoy displayed a new awareness of the importance of the clients. In her first publication on the Case Study Houses—Modern California Houses of 1962—she made no reference to what kind of clients the houses were intended for.55 But by 1990, in her Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses, McCoy described the clients who were attracted to the Case Study Houses as “progressive” professionals who typically earned moderate incomes. In a statement that echoed Kuhn’s profile of scientists who were ready to accept change, McCoy postulated that shifts in the professional worlds of the Case Study House clients might have prepared them for the new paradigm in domestic design:

Perhaps because they saw the need for change in their own fields—education, law, medicine, politics, the arts—they were receptive to change in architecture.56

18 ix Esther McCoy, Modern California Houses: Case Study Houses 1945-1962, cover.

With a forensic eye for detail, architectural historians examined the original correspondence between the architects who designed the houses and the clients who commissioned them. They studied the drawings that the architects had presented to the clients, noting handwritten comments that might have been added at meetings, and charted the changes in design that were incorporated at various stages. Photographs, examples of trade literature left in files, correspondence with suppliers, and anything that might have contributed to the finished house were all pored over in a painstaking search for further evidence. Biographies, notebooks and diaries of the often-prominent clients were studied for further clues as to the forces that had shaped their personalities, and for the motivations that might have fuelled their architectural ambitions.

Two informative examples of this type of house “biography” are Leonard Eaton’s Two Chicago Architects and their Clients: Frank Lloyd Wright and Howard Van Doren Shaw, and Richard Longstreth’s edited collection The Charnley House, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of Chicago’s Gold Coast. Other well documented histories of houses designed by Wright were published by Donald Hallmark and Richard Taylor, Susan Bandes, Kathryn Smith, Donald Hoffman and Franklin Toker.57

Because many of these follow a chronological order rather than any thematic structure, they tend to read as narratives. Toker’s extremely detailed Fallingwater Rising, Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America’s Most Extraordinary House is a good example. Based on extensive research, Toker turned the story of Fallingwater’s instigation, design and construction into a dramatic account of the house, portrayed amidst the often-murky relationships that existed between Wright and his clients, Edgar Kaufmann Senior and Edgar Kaufmann Junior. Set in a mise-en-scène that extends from the vast shopping floors of Kaufmann’s Pittsburgh department store to

19 the house site under the shadows of the forest at Bear Run, the story of Fallingwater reads like a well-crafted novel.58

Studies of later houses include Frederic Schwartz’s edited collection on the house designed by Robert Venturi for his mother in Chestnut Hill, Suzanne Frank’s study of the clients’ response to Peter Eisenman’s “House VI”, and two books on houses designed by Richard Neutra: Dietrich Neumann’s edited collection on the Windshield House, and Stephen Leet’s survey of the Miller House.59 In an indication of the importance of primary material to these studies, Leet admitted that he only began his account of the 1937 Miller House—for socialite and exercise instructor Grace Lewis Miller, in Palm Springs, California—after he came across a box containing one hundred and fifty letters that had been exchanged between Neutra and Miller during the design and construction process.60

x Franklin Toker, Fallingwater Rising, Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America’s Most Extraordinary House, cover. xi Ephemera related to design and construction of Miller House, 1930-1940.61

There are limitations with this type of study. By analysing one house to a high level of detail, the authors provide substantial insight into the aspirations of one set of clients and one architect. But without the benefits of further comparisons and wider analysis,

20 the conclusions that emerge are generally relevant to the subject house and do not have a wider application.

Three seminal publications—one edited by Beatriz Colomina and the other two written by Alice Friedman and Sylvia Lavin—address the restrictions of the singular house biography format. Colomina’s Sexuality and Space, which contains essays contributed by a number of writers from different fields, examines architectural space in general, but contains important essays on domestic space. In Colomina’s own contribution, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism”, the author carefully analyses plans and photographs of interiors by Loos and Le Corbusier and imagines herself occupying the spaces. Colomina then speculates on the phenomenological aspects of these imagined experiences in regard to observation, and to the charged opposites of “public” versus “private”, and of “female” versus “male”.62

Following similar patterns of detailed research, Friedman’s Women and the Making of the Modern House: a Social and Architectural History, and Lavin’s Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture, cover a select group of houses, allowing a range of hypotheses to be tested by working with a larger sample.63 In order to explore the shifts in perception of family, gender and the role of women in the home that had occurred throughout the twentieth century, Friedman studied a series of six houses. Each was designed by a different architect, and each had a woman as the principal client. In addition to gender issues, Friedman explores the clients’ occupations and interests, and how these factors might have affected the outcome. American heiress Aline Barnsdall—who used a considerable inheritance from her father’s oil wealth to build Hollyhock House on Olive Hill in Los Angeles with Wright between 1919 and 1921—contributed her “quasi-spiritual love of nature”, and strong commitment to theatre, art and public education to the original vision for the house, which was intended to be at the centre of a new artistic community. Barnsdall’s feminist and non-conformist beliefs, Friedman argues, were key factors that influenced Wright’s design for Hollyhock House.64 This, she believes, was evident in two ways. First, there was the question of the brief. Barnsdall’s household was not the stereotypical family unit. A committed single woman, she rejected the institution of marriage and raised her daughter on her own. Second, there was the issue of the house as a cultural artefact. In the symbolic and artistic context, Barnsdall’s progressive politics, uninhibited lifestyle and artistic passion constituted a challenge to convention that Friedman believes infused Wright’s design for Hollyhock House with “brilliance and creative energy”.65

21 Friedman credits Truus Schröder, the single female client for the 1924 Schröder House in Utrecht, the Netherlands, as co-designer with Gerrit Rietveld. Schröder had previously trained as a pharmacist, but instead of practicing decided to concentrate on reading literature, philosophy, art and architecture. To Friedman, the house reflects the complex personalities of Rietveld and Schröder. Both saw the house as an opportunity to build a modern environment that broke free from “repressive traditions and rules—both social and architectural”. Schröder—a widow with three young children—wanted a house that would foster educational opportunities by allowing schoolwork activities and conversations to be carried out in an open environment.66 Constance Perkins, with whom Neutra collaborated on a house in Pasadena, California, between 1952 and 1955, was a professor of art at Occidental College. An independent thinker, she held strong convictions about art, design, and how she wanted to live, and was an active participant in the design process.67 Edith Farnsworth, however, appeared to have little understanding of what kind of house Mies van der Rohe was designing for her on the banks of the Fox River at Plano, Illinois, leading to her dissatisfaction with the end result and a vicious dispute that carried on for some years.68

That the clients discussed by Friedman were, in the main, extremely wealthy, were well connected and possessed strong personalities that matched those of their architects is not in question. Yet it is possible that this is the only common ground that they shared. The clients, linked only by gender, are so disparate in every other respect— geographical location, culture, background, occupation and interests—that the author does not attempt to track any common themes: in fact the book is structured as a series of separate essays with no conclusion. But Women and the Making of the Modern House: a Social and Architectural History is relevant to this dissertation because it is a prototype for a study of houses—designed by separate architects—that are united through some defining aspect of the clients. This book is also important because of the way in which Friedman brings the female clients to the fore, and often elevates their role in the collaborations to a status equal to that of the architects.

In Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture, Lavin examines a selection of Neutra’s buildings and presents a strong and coherent thesis. Writing well after Thomas Hines had published his definitive study of Neutra, she makes no attempt to provide a comprehensive view of the architect’s work.69 Nor does Lavin begin with the premise that previous studies of Neutra were deficient in some way. Instead, she weaves together a compelling account of how the architect—a friend of Freud’s architect-son, Ernst—found himself operating within a growing psychoanalytic culture in mid-twentieth-century America. Lavin couches her analysis in

22 the potential of Neutra’s architectural spaces to become affective, mood-inducing environments that charge the unconscious mind, leading to a subliminal state that implicated the architect, his clients (who were frequently female)—and the houses—in a complex web of psycho-analytic theory, eroticism and libido.70

Lavin is compelling, erudite and scholarly. Yet, in her own words, this work is largely speculative: a brave attempt to somehow escape the bounds of architectural historiography by reading psychoanalytic theory into almost everything that Neutra ever drew, built or recorded. As Lavin herself admitted—with an acknowledged debt to Reyner Banham—“I have attempted to explore the possible effects on the history of architecture of a particular Neutra, the Neutra who survived environmental design, a Neutra whom I have selectively organized into a ‘history by choice’”.71

In spite of the conjectural nature of Lavin’s work, the enthusiasm that she demonstrates for the topic, and the methods by which she goes about constructing her arguments, are both exemplary, and provided inspiration for my own approach to this study. Where Lavin presented Neutra’s houses within an apparent culture of psycho-analytic theory that existed in southern California, this dissertation attempts to introduce a series of modern houses in Canberra within a culture of science.

xii Sylvia Lavin, Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture, cover.

23 INTRODUCING THE CHAPTERS

In this dissertation I will examine six houses that were designed by various architects for scientists and their families in Canberra between 1925 and 1970. I will consider the houses as cultural artefacts that embody, within their fabric, physical evidence of the aspirations of those involved in their creation. Using original archival documents, together with material obtained from interviews and secondary sources, I will explore the reasons why, in the post-World War II years, these scientists commissioned houses that rejected historical-based architectural styles and embraced modernist ideologies and aesthetics.

The six houses that I have chosen to study were commissioned by scientists who worked in each of the major scientific institutions in Canberra: the Australian Forestry School, the Australian National University, the Commonwealth Scientific, Industrial and Research Organisation and the Mount Stromlo Observatory. Grounds and Boyd— who, along with Seidler, were the key figures in Australian architecture during the period of the study—were each involved in the design of two of the houses, while the remainder were all designed by different architects.

The houses will be examined in chronological order. The first—Westridge House—was completed in 1928, and was designed in a combination of historical styles. An examination of this house, in conjunction with the aspirations and ideals of the clients and architects who commissioned and built it, provides an understanding of a way of thinking about architecture, and about house design in particular, that existed in Canberra prior to World War II. The significant chronological gap that exists between the periods covered by this chapter and the following one is an accurate reflection of the situation in Canberra, where development was stalled because of the Depression and World War II.

Before introducing the remaining houses, I will examine the massive structural changes that occurred in Canberra during the middle of the twentieth century as a result of post-war reconstruction. I will track the key people—and key buildings—responsible for the establishment of an extraordinarily highly qualified scientific and intellectual community in Canberra. It was from this unique community that the five remaining houses—the Fenner House, the Zwar House, the Philip House, the Gascoigne House and the Frankel House—all emerged in the post-World War II years. The architects and clients responsible for these houses, caught up in building new lives and new careers in the Australian capital, rejected the ideologies and aesthetics of pre-war, style- based architectural design and enthusiastically embraced modernist concepts. It is

24 through a study of these houses, and the forces that shaped them, that the reasons for such a dramatic shift in thinking about architecture will be identified.

1 “Domestic Voyeurism” follows Beatriz Colomina’s essay on Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier entitled “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism”, in Beatriz Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 73-128. 2 Photo by Peter Blackshaw Real Estate, Canberra. Generally throughout the dissertation, if the photographer is known, then he or she is credited within the caption. Otherwise, the source of the photo is identified in the form of an endnote—as is the case here. 3 Photo by Richard Luton Properties, Canberra. The Verge House was commissioned by Will Graves Verge, the grand-son of prominent Sydney architect John Verge. 4 It is not intended to give the impression that all significant houses were facing the threat of demolition. The majority have been retained, and some are subject to heritage legislation. Some important houses, however—including Bob Warren’s Ennor House, Oscar Bayne’s first Frankel House and Seilder’s Zwar House—have been demolished. 5 Walter Benjamin, Edmund Jephcott, trans., “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”, in Reflections, Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Helen and Kurt Wolff, 1978), 155. 6 The scientists and their respective fields were Charles Lane Poole (forestry), Sir Mark Oliphant and Sir Ernest Titterton (nuclear physics), Sir John (“Jack”) Eccles (neurophysiology), Ben Gascoigne (astronomy), Frank Fenner (microbiology and virology), Sir Arthur Birch (chemistry), Doug Waterhouse (entomology), John Philip (environmental physics), and Sir Otto Frankel (genetics and plant breeding). The historian was Manning Clark. 7 The Select Inventory on pages xvii and xviii is an abbreviated version that covers the houses which are relevant to the dissertation. 8 The six scientists’ houses on the Tour Guide were those for plant physiologist Philip Trudinger at 144 Dryandra Street, O’Connor, population ecologist John Nicholson at 24 Cobby Street, Campbell, geneticist and plant breeder Otto Frankel at 4 Cobby Street, Campbell, environmental physicist John Philip at 42 Vasey Crescent, Campbell, geneticist Bruce Griffing at 44 Vasey Crescent, Cambell, and microbiologist and virologist Frank Fenner at 1 Torres Street (corner of Monaro Crescent), Red Hill. The academic’s house was for Manning Clark at 11 Tasmania Circle, Forrest, while the medical researcher’s house was for Dr. Hilary Roche at 4 Bedford Street, Deakin. Royal Australian Institute of Architects (ACT Chapter), Tour Guide to Significant Canberra Architecture, 2006. The scientists’ houses on the Institute’s Map of Significant Canberra Architecture included the Fenner, Frankel, Nicholson, Philip and Griffing Houses, plus those for research chemist Arthur Birch at 3 Arkana Street, Yarralumla, designed by Noel Potter of Bunning and Madden, for the Director of the Mount Stromlo Observatory, designed by Henry Rolland of the Architects Department, Federal Capital Commission, and for the principal of the Australian Forestry School at Banks Street, Yarralumla, (Westridge House), designed by Harold Desbrowe- Annear. 9 For details of their publications and specific connections to the chapters, see Mapping the Terrain, page 9. 10 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 11 Preston, Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: a Reader’s Guide, vi. 12 Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 144. 13 “Probably the single most prevalent claim advanced by the proponents of a new paradigm is that they can solve the problems that led the old one to a crisis. When it can legitimately be made, this claim is often the most effective one possible”. Ibid., 153-55. 14 Paul Hoyningen-Huene, “Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn”, in John Preston, Gonzalez Munévar and David Lamb, eds., The Worst Enemy of Science? Essays in Memory of Paul Feyerabend (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 104-06. 15 “Though they [aesthetic considerations] often attract only a few scientists to a new theory, it is upon those few that its ultimate triumph may depend. If they had not quickly taken it up for highly individual reasons, the new candidate for paradigm might never have been sufficiently developed to attract the allegiance of the scientific community as a whole.” Kuhn qualified the above by stating he was not suggesting that “new paradigms triumph ultimately through some mystical aesthetic. On the contrary, very few men desert a tradition for these reasons alone. Often those who do turn out to have been misled. But if a paradigm is ever to triumph it must gain some first supporters, men who will develop it to the point where hardheaded arguments can be produced and multiplied. And even those arguments, when they come, are not individually decisive …” Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 156-58. 16 Frank Fenner, interview by the author, 18 October 2007. 17 Canberra Times, November 1956.

26 18 “House at Red Hill, Canberra”, Architecture and Arts 13 (August, 1954). 19 The scientists’ houses in Canberra were scattered across a whole city, rather than being grouped in a distinct cluster, or enclave. All were the result of separate architectural commissions, and were not the outcome of any collaborative, or community-based, ethos. In this respect they differ from true enclaves of houses such as the artistic communities at Warrandyte (for the Heidelberg School artists, and later potters) and Eltham, and from the liberal intellectuals’ houses in the Griffins’ community plan at Castlecrag. A question that arises from all of this is whether the situation in Canberra was unique or not within an international context. While this condition was unusual within a global context, it is unlikely to have been unique. The most likely international counterparts are not the well-known enclaves of modernism such as the Gropius/Breuer Houses in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony or the Los Angeles houses designed for film stars or film directors. These examples date from earlier in the twentieth century. And, like the Australian examples noted above, the ideals and aspirations that drove these clients—and their architects—tell different stories to those concerning scientists’ houses. The nearest equivalent to the Canberra situation, within the international context, would be post-World War II residential communities associated with scientific institutions in North America. During the post-war years, the United States Government became the largest single supporter of basic and applied scientific research in the world. By the mid-1950s, research facilities in that country were second to none, and more and more scientists were brought in to work in their scientific institutions. These scientists relocated to institutions such as the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, (where Albert Einstein had arrived in 1933, and became the catalyst for a large proportion of Germany’s theoretical physics community to leave for the United States), to Columbia University, New York, to Stanford University, Palo Alto, and to the University of California in Berkeley. In these cities—particularly those located in California, where there was more new building work taking place than in established, urban settings like New York or New Jersey—there might have been situations comparable to Canberra, where the scientists who were sent there had little choice of existing houses, and as a result commissioned architects to design houses for themselves and their families. It is possible that, within the residential communities associated with these universities, there are similar stories to be told about scientist-clients, their architects, and the houses that they collaborated on. To determine whether any of these scientists built their own private, architect- designed houses in the cities that they settled in, and whether, as a group, these houses reflected any common aspirations or ideals, would require detailed studies within the archival records of those particular locations. Such studies might provide fertile ground for future research. 20 Hoyningen-Huene, “Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn”. 21 Philip Steadman, The Evolution of Designs, Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Peter Collins, “The Biological Analogy”, Architectural Review 126 (December 1959): 305; Alan Colquoun, “Typology and Design Method”, Perspecta 12 (1969): 72. 22 George Hersey, The Monumental Impulse, Architecture’s Biological Roots (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). 23 Architecture and Arts 1, no. 1 (July 1952): 10, 14. 24 Paola Favaro, “Drawn to Canberra: the Architectural Language of Enrico Taglietti” (Ph.D. diss., Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales, 2009). 25 Enrico Taglietti, EnrioTaglietti: Architect in Australia (Milan: 1979), and Charlton, Ken, Jones, Bronwen and Favaro, Paola, The Contribution of Enrico Taglietti to Canberra’s Architecture (Canberra: RAIA, ACT Chapter, Register of Significant Twentieth Century Architecture Committee, 2007). 26 Westrige House is mentioned because of its proximity to temporary student accommodation. Peter Freeman, The Early Canberra House: Living in Canberra 1911-1933 (Fyshwick: Federal Capital Federal Press of Australia, 1996), 47. 27 Peter Freeman, “Westridge House Precinct Yarralumla: Conservation Management Plan” (Canberra: 2001). 28 Ken Charlton, Rodney Garnett and Martin Fowler, Federal Capital Architecture Canberra 1911-1939 (ACT: National Trust of Australia, 1984), 14-21, 58. 29 Royal Australian Institute of Architects, Register of Significant Twentieth-Century Architecture (RSTCA); Royal Australian Institute of Architects, Map of Significant Canberra Architecture; J. R. Conner, A Guide to Canberra Buildings (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1970); Andrew Metcalf, Canberra Architecture (Sydney: Watermark Press, 2003). 30 Martin Miles, Canberra House: Mid-Century Modernist Architecture, Martin Miles and Canberra House, http://www.canberrahouse.com 31 Jim Gibbney, Canberra 1913-1953 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1986); Eric Sparke, Canberra 1954-1980 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1988).

27 32 Stephen Foster and Margaret Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96 (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1996); Frank Fenner and David Curtis, The John Curtin School of Medical Research, the First Fifty Years 1949-1998 (Gundaroo: Brolga Press, 2001); Boris Schedvin, Shaping Science and Industry, a History of Australia’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 1926-49 (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Brad Collis, Fields of Discovery, Australia’s CSIRO (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002); Tom Frame and Don Faulkner, Stromlo, An Australian Observatory (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2003); Frank Fenner, ed., The Australian Academy of Science, The First Fifty Years (Canberra: Australian Academy of Science, 2005). 33 Harriet Edquist, Harold Desbrowe-Annear: A Life in Architecture (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2004); Robin Boyd, Australia’s Home, Its Origins, Builders and Occupiers (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1952); Geoffrey Serle, Robin Boyd, a Life (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995); Conrad Hamann, “Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971” (Ph.D. diss., Visual Arts Department, Monash University, 1978); Philip Goad, “The Modern House in Melbourne 1945-1975” (Ph.D. diss., University of Melbourne, 1992). 34 Harriet Edquist, Harold Desbrowe-Annear: A Life in Architecture, 165-67. 35 Ibid., 254-55. 36 Harriet Edquist, “Neil Clerehan: a Melbourne Practice”, in Harriet Edquist and Richard Black, The Architecture of Neil Clerehan (Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2005), 59. 37 See, for instance, Edquist’s references to “pharmacist Rawson Francis”, “newspaper proprietor R. D. Elliot and his wife Hilda”, “lawyer Andrew Rutter Clarke”, “grazier William Weatherly” and “mining engineer Franz Wallach”. Harriet Edquist, Pioneers of Modernism: the Arts and Crafts Movement in Australia (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2008), 39-43. 38 Serle, Robin Boyd, a Life, Boyd, Australia’s Home, Its Origins, Builders and Occupiers. 39 Wherever possible, Hamann inspected the houses and interviewed their owners—who, because Hamann’s study was completed in 1978, were often still in occupation of the houses. Hamann makes a number of references to the clients for the Grounds and Boyd houses, often noting details such as their occupations, requirements and manner by which they met or engaged the architects. Conrad Hamann, “Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971”. For Grounds and his clients, see pp. 8-15, 48-53, for Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, see pp. 182-3, 186, 195- 200. 40 “The House and the Post-war Family”, in Goad, “The Modern House in Melbourne 1945-1975”, 4/1 – 4/8. 41 Ibid. In some cases the client’s occupation is described: for instance, the “Aspro King” (Alfred N. Nicholas). 42 For some of the houses discussed in this book, the architects were unknown to the authors. This allowed more emphasis to be placed on the role of the clients. Robert Irving, John Kinstler and Max Dupain, eds., Fine Houses of Sydney (Sydney: Methuen, 1982). 43 Jan Roberts, ed., Avalon, Landscape and Harmony, Walter Burley Griffin, Alexander Stewart Jolly and Harry Ruskin Rowe (Avalon Beach: Ruskin Rowe Press, 1999). 44 Alice Hampson, “Eddie Hayes: Two Houses Built for Women”, in Andrew Wilson, ed., Hayes and Scott: Post-War Houses (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2005), 54-73. 45 Guy Allenby, Patrick Bingham-Hall, Eight Great Houses (Balmain: Pesaro, 2002); “Chadwick House”, Architecture Australia 98, no. 3 (May/June 2009): 92-99. For the jury citation, see “National Award for Heritage, Harold Desbrowe-Annear’s Chadwick House, Stage 1, Peter Crone Architects”, Architecture Australia 97, no. 6 (November/December 2008): 90. 46 Karen McCartney, 50/60/70, Iconic Australian Houses: Three Decades of Domestic Architecture (Millers Point: Murdoch Books, 2007). 47 Patrick Troy, ed., A History of European Housing in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), liner notes. 48 Robert Freestone, “Living in a Garden Suburb”, Patrick Troy, A History of European Housing in Australia, 136. 49 Australian Home Beautiful. The editions referred to date from 1925 to 1963. 50 California Arts & Architecture (December 1943); “House at Red Hill, Canberra”, Architecture and Arts 13 (August 1954). Entenza later redesigned California Arts & Architecture, dropping “California” from the title. 51 Barbara Goldstein and Esther McCoy, eds., Arts and Architecture: the Entenza Years (Cambridge: MIT Press), 1990. 52 There are some European examples. These include Paul Overy’s edited collection The Rietveld Schröder House (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988). This included material obtained from interviews with Truus Schröder, who was elevated by some commentators to be architect of the house along with Rietveld. Other examples include two studies of Casa Malaparte, by Marida Talamona and Michael McDonough. Marida Talamona, Casa Malaparte (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), and Michael McDonough, Malaparte a House Like Me (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1999). Tim

28 Benton’s The Villas of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret 1920-1933 (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007) includes a very detailed account of the design, construction and post-occupancy history of all Le Corbusier’s villas during the subject period. 53 Dolores Hayden published Seven American Utopias: the Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976); The Grand Domestic Revolution: a History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981); Redesigning the American Dream: the Future of Housing, Work and Family Life (New York: Norton, 1984). Gwendolyn Wright published Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1873-1913 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Building the dream: a Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981). 54 Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: the Suburbanisation of the United States (New York, Oxford University Press, 1985; Clifford Edward Clark Jr., The American Family Home, 1800—1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1993). 55 Esther McCoy, Modern California Houses, Case Study Houses 1945—1962 (New York: Reinhold, 1962). 56 Esther McCoy, “Arts & Architecture Case Study Houses”, Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 18. 57 Leonard Eaton, Two Chicago Architects and their Clients: Frank Lloyd Wright and Howard Van Doren Shaw (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969); Richard Longstreth, ed., The Charnley House, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of Chicago’s Gold Coast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Donald Hallmark and Richard Taylor, Dana-Thomas House (Springfield: Dana-Thomas House Foundation, 1989); Susan Bandes, ed., “Affordable Dreams: The Goetsch-Winkler House and Frank Lloyd Wright”, Kresge Art Museum Bulletin 6 (1991); Kathryn Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright, Hollyhock House and Olive Hill: Buildings and Projects for Aline Barnsdall (New York: Rizzoli, 1992); Donald Hoffman, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (New York: Dover, 1992), and Franklin Toker, Fallingwater Rising, Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America’s Most Extraordinary House (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2005). 58 Toker, Fallingwater Rising, Frank Lloyd Wright, E. J. Kaufmann, and America’s Most Extraordinary House. 59 Frederic Schwartz, ed., Mother’s House: The Evolution of Vanna Venturi’s House in Chestnut Hill (New York: Rizzoli, 1992); Suzanne Frank, Peter Eisenman’s House VI, the Client’s Response (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1994); Dietrich Neumann, ed., Richard Neutra’s Windshield House (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), and Stephen Leet, Richard Neutra’s Miller House (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004). 60 Leet, Richard Neutra’s Miller House, 14. 61 Ibid., 23. 62 Colomina, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism”, 73-128. 63 Alice Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House a Social and Architectural History (New York: Harry Abrams, 1998); Sylvia Lavin, Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004). 64 The original proposal, which was not built, was for Olive Hill to be transformed into a “gift to the people of Los Angeles”—an elaborate, public “art park” with indoor and outdoor theatres, establishing Barnsdall’s house as the centre of a new artistic community. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House, 37. 65 Ibid., 42. 66 Ibid., 66, 74-77. 67 Ibid., 162-63, 176-77. 68 Ibid., 134, 140, 144-47. 69 Thomas Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture, a Biography and History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982). 70 Lavin, Form Follows Libido. 71 Ibid., 7, Acknowledgements, ix. The Banham reference is to a collection of his essays in Penny Sparke, ed., Design by Choice (London: Academy Editions, 1981). Lavin was successful in her attempt to escape the boundaries of architectural historiography: in 2000-01 she was invited to become a Fellow of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

29 Chapter One

ARTS AND CRAFTS ROOTS: DESBROWE-ANNEAR, THE LANE POOLES AND WESTRIDGE HOUSE

… designing for domestic work is not only the cradle of Architectural Design, but its whole gamut, for the problems that have to be solved therein are much more important, intricate, and far-reaching than any presented by city or civic buildings. Harold Desbrowe-Annear, 19331

1.1 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, Westridge House from north-east, c 1930.2

A large, two-storey house in Banks Street, Yarralumla, Westridge House was designed in a combination of the English Arts and Crafts and Tudor styles by Melbourne architect Harold Desbrowe-Annear in 1926 and 1927 for Charles Lane Poole, Principal of the Australian Forestry School, his wife Ruth, and their daughters Charlotte, Mary and Phyllis.3 One of the first significant houses to be built in Canberra, Westridge House is closely associated with the early development of the Federal City and is physically and conceptually linked to another kind of beginning: the adjacent nursery of horticulturalist

30 Charles Weston, the original “seed-box” from where the plants that adorn the Garden City were propagated.

Westridge House, and the story behind its design, documentation and construction, provides evidence of a particular way of thinking about architecture that was prevalent in Canberra—and in Australia in general—during the interwar years. An understanding of this approach to house design is necessary in order to be able to contextualise the shift away from this view that occurred in the post-World War II decades. Westridge House is a representative example of a view—or paradigm—of domestic architecture in which it was considered desirable that house styles should rely on historical precedent and should be chosen from a range of known, and accepted, styles or models. The aspirations, motivations and interactions of Desbrowe-Annear and Charles and Ruth Lane Poole are all built into the fabric of this house as physical evidence of their commitment to that principle.

Arts and Crafts Roots

In late 1924 the Australian Government appointed Charles Lane Poole as Commonwealth Forestry Adviser, and the Lane Pooles moved to Melbourne where they rented an elegant apartment overlooking the Yarra River at 915 Punt Road, South Yarra. The flat had been designed four years previously by Desbrowe-Annear for J. T. Collins, and the architect was living just around the corner, at 13 Tivoli Place. Having resided in the Punt Hill area since the end of World War I when his marriage to Florence had ended, Desbrowe-Annear was surrounded by a network of family, friends, and clients, including wealthy and influential pastoralists, industrialists and financiers.4 The Lane Pooles soon developed a friendship with the architect, and became part of this social and cultural milieu.

Ruth became involved with the Victorian Arts and Crafts Society, a movement to which she had, much earlier, acquired an unexpected introduction. When she was fifteen her parents’ marriage ended and she became a ward of her cousin, Susan Mary (“Lily”) Yeats, and moved from her home in Ireland to live with Lily’s family in London. The Yeats were heavily immersed in the English Arts and Crafts movement: Lily had been taught embroidery by William Morris’s daughter May, another cousin, Elizabeth (“Lollie”) had trained as a printer in Morris’s Kelmscott Press, while a third cousin was the celebrated poet and playwright W. B. (William Butler) Yeats.5 Ruth worked with the Yeats cousins in London and Dublin, and there is little doubt that her experiences and connections close to the geographical and ideological origins of Arts and Crafts impressed Desbrowe- Annear, who had been a leading polemicist for Arts and Crafts in Victoria since the turn

31 of the century. Having previously claimed that a true alliance between art and craft was the only way for Australian architecture to advance, Desbrowe-Annear must have considered his new neighbour to be an ideal accomplice.6

1.2 Ruth Pollexfen,7 Blackbirds, embroidered cushion cover.8

In Melbourne the Lane Pooles renewed their friendship with Russell and Mabel (“Mab”) Grimwade. Charles and Russell had met previously when Charles was State Conservator of Forests in Western Australia, and the two shared a passion for native trees. In Melbourne they found they had more in common: the Grimwades had commissioned Desbrowe-Annear to design an extension to their house, Miegunyah, in Toorak, in 1920. The living hall of Miegunyah, complete with Minstrel’s Gallery, has been described as testament to Desbrowe-Annear’s “continuing debt to British Arts and Crafts architecture”. Desbrowe-Annear also designed the Grimwades’ later country house, Westerfield, at Baxter, near Frankston. Another fluent exercise in the English Arts and Crafts tradition, Westerfield was designed in 1924, just two years before the Lane Poole’s house. It is highly likely that this house—similar in many respects to Westridge House— influenced the Lane Pooles in terms of architectural style.9

1.3 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, Westerfield, Frankston. Photo by Harriet Edquist.10

It is also probable that Westerfield played another important role: as a site for the expansion of the Lane Poole’s professional network. In the 1920s the Frankston- Langwarrin area, where Desbrowe-Annear designed another three houses in addition to Westerfield, was the favoured location of rural retreats for Melbourne’s establishment. Amongst a veritable “who’s who” of Melbourne society, this area contained Pinehill, Robert Hamilton’s Spanish-style home for the then Prime Minister Stanley Bruce and his wife Ethel.11 The Grimwades were popular entertainers, and shared with the Bruces and the Lane Pooles an interest in outdoor activities such as golf and riding. Ruth’s increasing exposure within influential Melbourne circles led to her establishing friendships with Ethel Bruce, and with Lady Stonehaven, the wife of the Governor- General.12

1.4 Robert Hamilton, Pinehill, Frankston, country house of Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce and Ethel Bruce.13

The city in which Westridge House was built was itself historically and ideologically linked to the Arts and Crafts movement. Marion Mahony Griffin, who assisted her husband Walter Burley Griffin in the design of the Federal Capital City and prepared the rendered drawings, was, along with her former employer Frank Lloyd Wright, a foundation

34 member of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society. Although the Canberra plan that was ultimately approved and implemented by the Australian authorities was not the one prepared by the Griffins, but a hybrid of various proposals and concepts, many of the Griffins’ principles were retained. These principles—including the idea that the Federal City would be organised along democratic planning principles, that it would be an ideal, modern, suburban city that responded to local topography and climate, and that the single-family, detached house on its own separate block would be the predominant housing type—were all precepts shared by Australian Arts and Crafts polemicists and practitioners.

“More than the usual public servant’s home” 14

Au plus profond des bois la patrie a son coeur. In the depth of the woods beats the heart of the nation. Anonymous poet, quoted by Charles Lane Poole, 1925.15

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a number of significant scientific research institutions established footholds in the Federal Capital Territory. In addition to the Australian Forestry School, there was the Commonwealth Solar Observatory at Mount Stromlo and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) at the foot of Black Mountain.16 The success of these institutions depended on prodigious amounts of funding, which, in turn, required support from wealthy individuals, from the Australian government, and from established overseas institutions. The founders of these organisations were particularly well connected within Australia and overseas, possessed extraordinary vision, and were excellent lobbyists and tireless promoters of their respective causes.

Charles Lane Poole was born in Sussex, England in 1885 to a widely travelled, scholarly family.17 Educated in forestry at L’Ecole Nationale des Eaux et Forêts de Nancy (The French National Forestry School at Nancy), he began his work experience with the British Colonial Forest Service in Transvaal and Sierra Leone, and was appointed Conservator of Forests for Western Australia in 1916. He soon became Australia’s leading advocate for a coordinated national forestry policy, and for the establishment of a Federal Forestry Bureau. From the beginning of his advocacy Lane Poole was aware of the importance of publicity to advance his causes: Item 8 of his 1919 forest policy invoked “The initiation of a wide publicity campaign in order to awake a forest conscience in the minds of the people.”18 Lane Poole wanted to change the public perception of forestry—from the existing situation where it was regarded as a form of mining—towards an industry that was more aligned to resource management. Through numerous articles and official

35 bulletins, Lane Poole proposed the establishment of a forest products laboratory for research into areas including the minimisation of waste, more efficient use of timber, the potential of hardwoods for paper-making, possible uses for neglected timber species, and the use of bark for tanning.19 Throughout all of this were implicit links to Arts and Crafts, the most obvious being that timber, in the form of finely crafted panelling, beams and furniture, was the dominant material for the interiors of Arts and Crafts houses. Secondly, Lane Poole’s vision for Australian forestry—like Arts and Crafts philosophy— was essentially moralistic in that it called for the sensible use of timber resources, and holistic, in that it was founded on faith that the physical world could be shaped, for the better, by rational thought.

In April 1925, in his role as Forestry Adviser to the Commonwealth Government, Lane Poole wrote to the Federal Capital Commission specifying a list of buildings required for the establishment of an Australian Forestry School at Canberra. In regard to staff accommodation, he instructed that “A principal and two lecturers will compose the teaching staff and these will require quarters …” Lane Poole preferred the location of the school to be “outside the main centre, and as near as Mr. Weston’s arboreta and nursery at Westbourne Woods as possible.”20 No doubt it helped to have friends in high places: Cabinet approved funds the following month, and Prime Minister Bruce wrote to the state premiers to inform them that that the Federal Government planned to establish a national forestry school in the Federal Capital Territory.

On 18 August—a “lovely day” in Canberra—Lane Poole inspected possible sites for the Forestry School in the Westbourne Woods vicinity with Henry Rolland, Principal Architect for the Federal Capital Commission, and an agreed site was marked out on a plan in red ink.21 Later that evening Lane Poole dined with Geoffrey Duffield, Director of the Commonwealth Solar Observatory on Mount Stromlo, and his wife Doris, at the Hotel Canberra where they were staying.22 In terms of setting, the location for the Forestry School was perfect: sited on the end of a spur, or ridge, it was elevated above the surrounding land and above the level of the street. The pine trees of Westbourne Woods to the rear of the house site assumed a number of functions: as a backdrop to enhance the presence of the building from the street below, as a metaphorical reference to the function of the School, and as an educational resource.23 But the site was also strategic in another sense: as John Butters, Chairman of the Federal Capital Commission noted, it was “a very prominent one which will be right in front of the main view from the permanent Government House”.24

1.5 Feederal Capital Commission, Proposed School of Forestry Site, 1925. Government House (‘Yarralumla Homestead’) is in top left-hand corner. 1.6 Henry Rolland, blueprint of Preliminary Sketch Plan, Principal’s Residence, 1925.25

By late August 1925 it had been decided to build the Principal’s house only. Lane Poole asked Rolland: “Would you add this as a separate item? Six rooms and a kitchen will suffice?”26 Rolland instructed the Principal Assistant Architect of the Federal Capital Commission to commence preparation of sketch plans for the School, and confirmed that a “six room residence” had been approved for “the Principal or his Chief Assistant”. A preliminary site plan from that time showed a “thumb-nail” layout of a single-storey, symmetrical residence of rectangular configuration, with a central entrance leading to a corridor off which seven rooms opened (see Illustration 1.6).27

In March 1926, with the facilities in Canberra still a long way from completion, the school was temporarily housed in the University of Adelaide with Professor Norman Jolly as principal. This was on the understanding that the school was to relocate to Canberra the following year. Lane Poole continued to act as adviser to the government, which meant that in many instances he was an intermediary between Jolly—the intended occupant of the Principal’s Residence—and the Federal Capital Commission.

The Commission had been set up for the express purposes of establishing the national capital, and for arranging for the transfer of the Parliament and public service from Melbourne in time for the opening of Parliament in 1927. In 1926 the Commission had a heavy workload, and was under considerable pressure to complete a number of projects—including Parliament House, office buildings and residences for the civil servants due to arrive in Canberra the following year. There were difficulties sourcing sufficient quantities of bricks to construct the new buildings, and the Commission had resorted to importing quantities from Sydney until the local kiln, at Westridge, came into operation. All of this resulted in lengthy delays and increased building costs.28

By April 1926, with tenders for the Forestry School delayed, Lane Poole was becoming anxious that the facilities in Canberra would not be ready for the beginning of the following school year, and turned up the heat on the Commission: “I trust there will be no further delay in calling for these tenders, as it is most necessary that a start should be made with the building as soon as practicable”.29 Upon receiving a curt reply from Butters, stating that “the Forestry School must be considered of secondary importance as compared with the officing and housing of the Public Service”,30 Lane Poole fired off a Memorandum to the Secretary of the Home and Territories Department. The tone and content of his response gave an indication of what was to come in regard to the Principal’s Residence:

I would suggest that the Chairman be asked to complete the building by the time originally agreed on, and if he cannot do so, then I would recommend that the whole system be altered and that the plans of the School be entrusted to a good architect in Melbourne to design a wooden building, comprising all the educational and living accommodation required. In the hands of a good man, there is no doubt that a very beautiful wooden structure could be built … The Commission’s main trouble—the supply of bricks—would be overcome.31

There can be little doubt as to the identity of the “good architect” and “good man” into whose trustworthy hands Lane Poole wished to place the design of the Forestry School: none other than his neighbour and friend, Desbrowe-Annear. But there was another element of opportunism present here: Lane Poole was capitalising on the Commission’s shortage of bricks to pursue his personal preference for a timber building.32

In March 1926 Ruth was appointed “furniture specialist” for the furnishing of the interiors of Yarralumla (the Governor-General’s Canberra residence), and the house designed by Percy Oakley and Stanley Parkes of Melbourne for the Speaker of the House of Representatives (which later became the Prime Minister’s Lodge). Her fees were to be £2.5.0 per day for each day spent on the job, plus expenses, and all work had to be complete by May 1927.33 A newspaper headline of the time read “Bruce’s Irish Lady Help Will Decorate New Canberra Home”.34 Meanwhile, Ruth’s other role, as unofficial publicist for the Federal Capital Commission, was taking shape. On 7 May Australian Home Beautiful published “The Small House at Canberra”,35 in which Ruth’s positive descriptions of the Federal City created a favourable impression of Canberra, and of the progress being made by the Federal Capital Commission. The Lane Pooles were, by now, in a position to exert some influence behind the scenes in regard to the Forestry School and their proposed residence. While Charles did not win any of the immediate

38 battles over the main forestry school building—which was designed and built, in masonry, by the Commission—he would eventually get his way in regard to the residence.

While design work on the main building was progressing, Lane Poole asked the Federal Capital Commission if he could obtain plans of the Principal’s House. No doubt thoroughly piqued at Lane Poole’s recent threats, the Commission seemed at this point to relegate his house to a lower status, and sent him a copy of their booklet entitled “General Notes for the Information of Public Servants”, that contained their standard house designs for civil servants. Two factors indicate that the course of action adopted by officers of the Commission appeared to be somewhat provocative, and point toward a loss of patience in dealing with Lane Poole. The first of these was that the Architect’s Department had previously delineated—albeit in indicative sketch plan form only—a bespoke house on the Forestry School site. The second fact was that it was customary for the Department to design one-off houses for directors of such institutions. These included a house for the Director of the Institute of Anatomy, in the grounds of the Institute (now the National Film and Sound Archive), in Acton, and for Geoffrey Duffield, inaugural Director of the Commonwealth Solar Observatory at Mount Stromlo, Federal Capital Territory. Both of these were generously proportioned, two-storey residences (see Illustrations 1.7 and 1.11).

1.7 Federal Capital Commission Architect’s Department, Director’s Residence, Institute of Anatomy, Acton, c 1930. View from south-east. Photo by the author, 2009.

Rubbing salt into the wounds, Rolland followed up with a blunt telegram to Lane Poole:

RE PROPOSED QUARTERS FOR PRINCIPAL PLEASE ASCERTAIN WHETHER ANY TYPE SHEWN IN FEDERAL CAPITAL COMMISSIONS BOOKLET SUITABLE STOP IF NOT ALTOGETHER POSSIBLE YOU MIGHT SUGGEST SUITABLE AMENDMENTS36

Shortly afterwards Rolland reminded the Secretary for Home and Territories Department that he was waiting for a reply to his telegram.37 Lane Poole, who was no newcomer to the art of brinkmanship, calmly replied that he had forwarded the request to Jolly, and had received advice that none of the plans were appropriate:

Prof Jolly writes that none of the published plans is in his opinion quite suitable to the requirements of the Principal of the National School of Forestry in Australia; or in keeping with the School buildings themselves as shown in the elevation you sent me.

Lane Poole added, however, that the Principal did like “the one shown on page 13”. In fact page 13 of the Commission’s Booklet did not illustrate a Commission design, but showed photographs of two, more prestigious, civil servant’s houses, designed by Oakley and Parkes for the suburb of Blandfordia (now Forrest). Lane Poole felt that a house designed along the lines of one of those houses might be suitable, but remained concerned that it would clash architecturally with the main building. He then proceeded to provide the Commission’s Chief Architect with a new, expanded brief for the Principal’s Residence:

The Principal will require a drawing room and a dining room, a main bed room and a bath room with w.c.; also two single bedrooms; all these in the main part of the house. Then there must be a kitchen maids room and bath with w.c. Prof Jolly would also like a servery from Kitchen to dining room and he does not like the dining room or drawing room treated as a hall.

Lane Poole asked Rolland to “run out a ground plan” that included the above spaces, and stated that the size of the rooms, as previously shown, were “as a rule rather on the small side”. These new requirements represented a brief for a house that was much larger and grander than any included in the Commission’s standard layouts—none of which contained a drawing room or maid’s quarters. The fact that this was to be a much grander house than what the Commission was prepared to offer the principal was underlined by Lane Poole’s reminder that “this house is more than the usual public servants home for it is an official adjunct to the School. Guests will be, from time to time, entertained there no doubt”.38 Rolland instructed his Principal Assistant Architect to prepare a new sketch plan for the Principal’s Residence based on the information in Lane Poole’s letter, but with a proviso that “the design of the residence must be kept within reason in order to provide the accommodation asked for without too great an expense”.39 Six weeks later Rolland forwarded two alternative plan layouts for the

40 Principal’s Residence—which located the residence on the opposite side of the road from the Forestry School—to Jolly in Adelaide.40 Lane Poole’s response to Rolland’s latest design was that it was “not in keeping with the dignity of the position of the Head of the Forestry School of Australia”. He believed that the bedrooms were too small, and didn’t like the maid’s bedroom being at the front of the house. What he really wanted was a two-storey house, with the bedrooms (except for the maid’s) being relocated to the first floor.41

No response from Jolly to these plans was recorded, and with the benefit of hindsight it is easy to see why: he quite clearly had other things on his mind. In late 1926 he stepped down as Principal of the Forestry School to become Chief Commissioner of the New South Wales Forest Service. Lane Poole was the obvious choice to become his successor, but was reluctant to do so, for a number of reasons. The first of these was that Canberra in the 1920s was not considered to be a desirable location—a sentiment encapsulated in a diary entry by Doris Duffield: “My! How I do envy the people leaving tonight who are going down to civilized places. I pine for the sight of a train.”42 Furthermore, Lane Poole was reluctant to become a teacher—a reservation that he retained throughout his career43—and his family was firmly ensconced in Melbourne. Ruth was building up a successful interior decorating practice: engaged by the Myer Emporium to provide interior furnishing advice to their clients, she had worked on properties such as “Little Milton”, grocery magnate Leslie Moran’s Toorak mansion.44

The dynamics of this situation provided Lane Poole with substantial bargaining power. To persuade their man to leave the comforts of South Yarra for the far less desirable Canberra, the Department of Home and Territories had to offer an incentive. While the exact arrangements remain unclear, it appears that some form of agreement was reached in late 1926, when Lane Poole reluctantly assumed the role of Acting Principal: “There being no-one else available, I was forced to take up the position as Principal of the School … I regarded my position as purely temporary.”45 But there was a silver lining: Desbrowe-Annear was immediately engaged as architect for the Principal’s Residence.46

By mid-November copies of Desbrowe-Annear’s design for the residence arrived on Rolland’s desk at the Federal Capital Commission.47 It was now a two-storey house relocated back on the same side of the road as the main forestry building—where Lane Poole had always envisaged it. The two-storey form of Westridge House—while suiting Lane Poole’s requirements for a house of substantial form and presence—was also a favourite technique used by Desbrowe-Annear to gain winter sunlight into the majority of rooms.48 The house was well oriented for both sun and view, with the best views to be

41 obtained from the windows on the northern and eastern walls of the open plan living room.

1.8 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, Westridge House, ground floor plan, c1927.49

1.9 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, Westridge House, first floor plan, c1927.50

Still believing that the Forestry School should be an advertisement for Australian timbers, Lane Poole saw Desbrowe-Annear’s arrival on the scene as an opportunity to extend this concept to the residence, and attempted to persuade the Federal Capital Commission to clad the roof with timber shingles instead of tiles. Rolland replied that the Commission had considered his request but, although the costs were similar, he strongly recommended tiles due to the increased fire risks associated with shingles—particularly in the proposed location on the edge of Westbourne Woods.51 While this request was to no avail, all of the timbers in the house were of Australian origin. Some that were originally specified proved to be unavailable to the Controller of Stores—who was responsible for procurement of all materials and fittings—and were replaced by similar equivalents. External wall framing was Hoop Pine, while other timbers were from seasoned hardwood: flooring and external door sills were Jarrah, window sashes were Richmond River Pine (in lieu of Celery Top), joinery timbers were Tasmanian hardwood, and doors were Richmond River Pine (in lieu of Hoop Pine). While the house was under construction, Desbrowe-Annear supplied the Federal Capital Commission with many

43 joinery details, including fireplace surrounds, front door porch, windows, and external doors. The front door was to be constructed of Richmond River Pine with an external cedar facing.52

Following a number of modifications that the Commission deemed necessary to make Desbrowe-Annear’s design “suit the conditions of Canberra”, and to address their concerns that “the specifications and quantities were very vague and lacking in detail”, public tenders were received early in 1927. As these were considered to be too expensive, it was decided that the Superintendent of the Building Construction Department would build the Principal’s Residence based on his own estimate of £3,900.0.0.53

Publicity and Privacy 54

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold … W. B. Yeats

While her husband was busy promoting forestry policy, Ruth Lane Poole was establishing her own publicity campaign: one that would eventually overlap with his, and with the design of their Canberra residence. In September 1925 she began to publish articles on interior decorating and furnishing in Australian Home Builder (renamed Australian Home Beautiful in November of that year), and continued to publish similar articles over the next three years.55 Ruth’s first article—“Bringing Spring Indoors”—endorsed the use of Australian flowers within interior decoration. A later article promoted the advantages of constructing with plywood, and described the economical utilisation of timber, the minimisation of expansion and contraction, and the decorative qualities of Australian timbers. Photographs of interiors of Melbourne homes showed rooms panelled in highly figured Blackwood and Queensland Ribbon Maple.56

Soon after she was commissioned to design the interiors of Yarralumla and the Speaker’s house, Ruth took every opportunity to promote the work being carried out in Canberra. Throughout her descriptions of the new houses for civil servants in Blandfordia, designed by Oakley, Parkes and Scarborough,57 there was an overriding impression of grandeur, of wide open spaces, of planning that was both rational and beautiful, and of houses that combined the latest in labour-saving devices, comfort and hygiene. None of this was available to the “unfortunate town dweller who lives in a sordid street”, in a cramped and dirty city, whose “topsy turvy” growth had resulted in inhabitants living in “lines of jerry- built houses crammed together”.58 In “Home Life in Canberra” Ruth declared that Canberra, “with its steam laundry, its electric light, its hotels fitted with day and night hot

44 water service, its refrigerating plants, its modern houses”, was no longer the “primitive” location that some people believed it to be.59 Ruth also promoted her professional colleagues. In 1926 she wrote prolifically on the houses and interiors of Debrowe-Annear and his clients,60 leading to Harriet Edquist’s claim that this was part of “a deliberate policy” by Australian Home Beautiful to promote the architect, who became “the journal’s most widely published designer.”61

When Desbrowe-Annear took over responsibility for the design of the Lane Pooles’ house, Ruth—who had stated: “the beautifying of the interior of the house has always been left to the woman to do”62—worked closely with the architect, and made a significant input into many aspects of the interiors. Her role was not limited to the embellishment of pre-determined space: she frequently questioned Desbrowe-Annear about aspects of the planning. Responding to one of her questions, the architect wrote to Charles: “In the last series of queries your wife submitted to me there was reference to the bedroom No 5 on the first floor and where the bed would go in this room. This gave rise to a careful reconsideration of the room in question and I thought it best to send you a tracing of what I think would be an improvement.”63 Ruth prepared a kitchen plan showing the location of cupboards, selected various fixtures and fittings including the stove, sixteen twisted candle lamps, and bellpushes to summon the maid. She also chose the interior colours.64 By combining Desbrowe-Annear’s architecture with Ruth Lane Poole’s knowledge of interior furnishing, the house exemplified one of the central tenets of Arts and Crafts design: a coordinated approach to design that extended from external form through to internal space.

From this time on many of Ruth’s articles for Australian Home Beautiful became virtually autobiographical. Publicised accounts of the decisions that she was making on her own house, they were presented as guidelines for other homebuilders. In July 1927 she began a series of articles—‘How to Furnish Successfully’—in which she discussed, in chronological order, all of the challenges and decisions she was facing in regard to the design of Westridge House.’65

The other role played by publications such as Australian Home Beautiful was to promote new appliances that had become available for the Australian home. Domestic electricity was a new phenomenon in 1927, and appliances such as electric stoves were still relatively rare. Wood-burning stoves were still installed in the majority of homes, and many people were unfamiliar with the electric versions.66 Wishing to select an electric stove for their house, Charles wrote to Max Fizelle of the Federal Capital Commission, asking where such items had been installed in Canberra, and if he and Ruth could inspect one. Fizelle responded with a list of residences, and added that the owners

45 would not object to an inspection.67 It is not clear if the Lane Pooles availed themselves of the latest developments in domestic refrigeration. On 3 January 1928, shortly after moving into their new residence, Lane Poole wrote to the Commission’s Chief Architect, Thomas Casboulte, describing how “the cellar in the house is a good success rarely have I known beer keep so cool without ice. Possibly you will find time to visit us, inspect the house, see the progress & share your thoughts one of these hot days”.68

1.10 Advertisement for “Falco” Electric Cookers, Warburton Frank.69

But not long after the Principal’s Residence was completed, its architect—and to a considerable extent the house itself—disappeared from public view. Scandal and controversy were the reason for both events. All of Ruth’s publicity had come too late to save Desbrowe-Annear’s architectural career: the long run of prestigious commissions that he had enjoyed for nearly forty years slowed dramatically, and eventually came to an end in 1928. There were rumours that his professional downfall was due to some form of scandal in his private life, but no details were certain.70 Whatever the circumstances, at some time in 1928 Desbrowe-Annear decided to escape the rumour and innuendo that had spread through Melbourne society. Vacating Tivoli Place, he retreated to Clover Hill, a sequestered cottage that he had built the previous year at Crossover, near Warragul, in Gippsland, and virtually disappeared from public life. While Desbrowe-Annear later returned to Melbourne—where the patronage of a few loyal clients led to further architectural projects—his career never fully recovered, and he died in ill health in 1933.

46 Desbrowe-Annear’s involvement in Westridge House eventually led to the disappearance of this house from the public domain. But this was not because of any indiscretion that the architect may have committed in his private life. Rather, it was due to the way in which Desbrowe-Annear, through no fault of his own, had been engaged to design the house, and to the final cost of the building—both of which were subject to public enquiry soon after it was completed. The process of engaging Desbrowe-Annear had been unorthodox, and—in direct contrast to the open nature of Ruth’s earlier descriptions and photographs of houses, interiors and everyday life in Canberra— completely opaque. From the time when Lane Poole became Principal of the Forestry School the decisions regarding the choice, engagement and remuneration of the architect all appear to have been shrouded in secrecy. At best, they could be described as “gentlemen’s agreements”, at worst, as “back-room deals”. It was not long before questions began to be asked. When Rolland contacted Lane Poole in mid-1927 regarding the payment of fees to Desbrowe-Annear, he noted that a discussion had taken place between Lane Poole and Butters in which it had been decided to pay Desbrowe-Annear four percent of the estimated cost—which at that time was £3,500.0.0. But Rolland couldn’t find written confirmation of that agreement, and asked Lane Poole—and later the Chief Commissioner—if either of them could provide a copy.71 However, the question of whether or not Desbrowe-Annear had ever been formally engaged did not deter the Commission from threatening to defer payment to the architect until he had completed the drawings.72

The way in which Desbrowe-Annear—the Melbourne “outsider” and close friend of the client—had been brought in at the last minute to design Westridge House became an issue of contention for officers of the Commission. The Architect’s Department had previously designed houses for directors of equivalent institutions, and the fact that this job had been taken out of their hands and given to a high profile, private practitioner from Melbourne was interpreted by some officers as preferential treatment.73 Lane Poole was, after all, a civil servant, and the house—which many believed was too expensive— had been paid for with public funds. The cost of official homes in Canberra became the subject of questions in Parliament, and in November 1927 The Canberra Times published an article titled “Official Homes, Details of Staggering Costs, Big Prices for ‘Temporary Residences’”, which detailed the costs of the residences of the Prime Minister and Governor-General.74 All of these factors contributed to a situation where some officers of the Commission harboured a thinly disguised resentment towards those involved with Westridge House, and began to question the quality of Desbrowe-Annear’s documentation. These sentiments were apparent between the lines of Casboulte’s reply to Commissioner Mr. [Crosbie] Goold during an enquiry into the cost of the house:

47 This dwelling house was built by the Day Labour Department from plans and specifications supplied by a Melbourne Architect, apparently under a special arrangement. The building was commenced and well under way prior to my connection with the department. On taking over the job I found that there were serious discrepancies in the drawings, to such an extent that they had to be entirely redrawn, many of the details recast and necessary work carried out in connection with the construction of the building, which was not provided for in either the plans or the specification.75

Federal Capital Commission records indicate that there was a steady escalation in cost estimates for the residence, and a quantum leap in that figure from the time when Lane Poole became Principal of the Forestry School and Desbrowe-Annear became involved. In September 1925 the cost of the Principal’s house, based on the Commission’s own sketch plan, was estimated at £1,484.0.0. By October of that year—following “an unofficial request from Mr. Lane Poole”—the estimate had risen to £1,800.0.0.76 When Desbrowe-Annear’s plans became available, the Superintendent of the Building Construction Department, who organised construction through the Day Labour Department, estimated the cost at £3,900.0.0—more than double the cost of the Commission’s original design.77 When questions were raised in Parliament in mid-1928, the cost of the Principal’s residence was reported as £5,105.0.0,78 while in the following year it had risen to £5,376.9. 7.79

The fact that Ruth had intervened on a number of occasions regarding interior finishes and furnishing was another reason given by the Commission to justify the escalation in cost, and a number of her requests were classified as extras. These included her favourite flooring—Jarrah—which she specified throughout the house, including external door sills.80 Other items that were later termed extras included the selection of the hearth tiles and the fitting out of the cupboards—details of which Ruth had supplied to Mr. Williams, the foreman. At the time, however, Fizelle had endorsed that request, responding to the Superintendent that: “Foreman Williams has received particulars from Mrs. Lane-Poole in regard to fitting up cupboards, with shelving, hooks, etc. This should be carried out as requested”.81

It is important to note that, in spite of all the accusations, the final cost of this house compared favourably to that of Duffield’s on Mount Stromlo, which had been designed by Rolland himself, and built at around the same time for a tender price of £5,182.0.082 It is possible that the cost of Duffield’s house was not subjected to the same scrutiny as Westridge House because of the astronomer’s own personal contribution: Charles Daley, Secretary of the Federal Capital Commission, recalled that Duffield had

48 contributed a substantial sum of money towards the cost of his house.83 But location was another factor that added to the cost: at the Joint Parliamentary Committee enquiry into the cost of housing in Canberra it was reported that the cost of building there was twenty-five percent higher than that in Melbourne.84

1.11 Henry Rolland, Federal Capital Commission Architects’ Department, Director’s Residence, Commonwealth Solar Observatory, Mount Stromlo, c1928.85

Faced with all of this unwanted publicity—whether justified or not—it is little wonder that the Lane Pooles had no desire to add to the speculation. The very hot day of 3 January 1928, when they moved into their new residence, marked a turning point in the propagation of information. From that day on, publicity of the house ceased. While Ruth published further articles for Australian Home Beautiful, she made no more references to her own house. The Canberra Times, which had published a large article on 25 November 1927 to commemorate the opening of the Forestry School, and contained a regular column on building in the Federal City, made no mention of the Principal’s Residence. The National Archives of Australia retains a few external photographs of Westridge House from the late 1920s, and the National Library of Australia holds Charles Lane Poole’s personal papers. But no photographs of the original interiors of Westridge House exist in the public domain.86 Edquist’s monograph on Desbrowe-Annear contains one external photograph of the house from the National Archives collection, while John Dargavel’s 2008 biography of Charles Lane Poole—The Zealous Conservator—contains no images of Westridge House.87 Coverage of the house, and its architect, went from

49 journalistic excess to zero—almost overnight. Perhaps it was fitting that, in this new era of privacy, Desbrowe-Annear provided the Lane Pooles with one of his favourite details: a false wall and secret room opening off their upstairs bedroom.88

An Atavistic Type?

Originally intended, by the Federal Capital Commission, to be no more than a modest, civil servant’s cottage taken from one of their standard designs, Westridge House benefitted from an unorthodox and protracted gestation process to be designed by one of Australia’s most innovative domestic architects, and to be one of the finest houses in the Federal City. The reasons for this dramatic elevation in scale and quality can be attributed entirely to the influence exerted by the Lane Pooles.

For Charles Lane Poole—who, more than any other individual, was responsible for the establishment of the Australian Forestry School—it was of paramount importance that his residence, sited prominently on the edge of the school grounds and highly visible to the passing public, should reflect the professional status of the Principal of the Australian Forestry School. As the residence of the highest authority in Australian forestry, it was important to Lane Poole that the location, aspect, form and materials of this house were all commensurate with the way in which he perceived his professional status and ideologies. Westridge House became an extension of his publicity campaign—an advertisement for the School and for the advancement of his ambitions for Australian forestry.

He achieved this through a number of carefully considered gestures and references. These included architectural style, the impression of the building when viewed from Banks Street, the relationship to Westbourne Woods and the materials used in construction. What was important to Lane Poole was how these aspects of the design could be manipulated to promote the ideas that forestry was a serious profession and an important science, that timber was a valuable commodity, and that Australian species were just as precious as those from overseas.

Many descriptions of Westridge House confirm the success of Lane Poole’s intent. Les Carron, in A Brief History of the Australian Forestry School, stated that the “style and location” of the principal’s residence made it “something of a landmark in Canberra”. Athol Meyer, in The Foresters, described it as “an imposing Tudor-style two-storey mansion”.89 Charles was not so successful, however, in his other endeavour: to present the house as a showcase of Australian timber. He had been unable to persuade the Federal Capital Commission to clad the roof in timber shingles, resulting in the “half-

50 timbered” first floor—consisting of regularly spaced, painted timber battens in the Tudor Style—comprising the major timber component of the exterior. But while the use of timber throughout the house was minimal, and therefore largely symbolic, there was still a higher timber component in Westridge House than in most houses of the period.90

The reasons behind the architectural style of Westridge House—generally accepted to be an amalgam of English Arts and Crafts and Tudor revival—demand a rigorous examination of the many factors that influenced both client and architect. There is no evidence to suggest that the Lane Pooles—who originated from England and Ireland, but spent a great deal of their working lives in Australia promoting the timbers, products and lifestyle of their adopted country—had any explicit desire to live in a house that reflected their British heritage. But there was a strong belief, in Australia at the time, in the quality of British products, and in the timeless quality and longevity of classic designs that had been developed over the years. This was evident in the brief that the Australian Government issued to Ruth for the interiors of Government House and The Lodge. Furnishing was to be carried out using a combination of Australian materials and “Best British” manufactures, constructed by Australian artisans from Australian timbers. Other materials and fittings, ordered from Britain, were to be “British and first quality throughout” in accordance with the Empire trade policy.91

There were two implications in this that related to the “British” qualities of Westridge House. The first was that Ruth, when she came to design the furniture for Government House and The Lodge, designed modern reinterpretations of traditional designs in Australian timbers—a direct parallel, it could be claimed, to Desbrowe-Annear’s approach to the residence.92 The second implication was that Westridge House could be considered as an imported product: an English Arts and Crafts residence, chosen and ordered by the Lane Pooles—not after viewing an image in a sales catalogue—but after visiting the real thing at Westerfield. The idea that Westridge House was a product that was ordered in much the same way as a motor car or dinner set was supported by documentary evidence: on 7 June, 1927 an officer of the Federal Capital Commission filled out a “Main Requisition Form” for expenditure on “Erection of Residence for Principal of the Forestry School” at Westridge.93

1.12 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, Westridge House from south-east, c 1930.94 1.13 Ruth Lane Poole, armchair for Governor-General’s Drawing Room, 1926.95

Desbrowe-Annear designed Westridge House relatively late in his career. Edquist classified it as one of his “country houses”, all of which were designed during this period. This taxonomy was broad, and covered houses in a wide variety of locations: from Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, Dandenong Ranges and Western District to the New South Wales Riverina and the Australian Federal Territory. It also included houses in locations such as Burwood, Victoria, which started life as rural locations but became subsumed by the spread of suburbia. Edquist found it difficult to classify these houses in terms of a common typology or style—or to find evidence, within their eclectic mix, of any notion of chronological progression within Desbrowe-Annear’s design oeuvre. It is true that, in the design of these houses—which included references to British Arts and Crafts, Tudor Revival, American Colonial and Spanish Colonial origins—Desbrowe- Annear’s was protean in approach, and he clearly felt free to explore a wide variety of architectural influences. Some of the results were fanciful, even whimsical.96

There was similitude to be found, however, within a microcosm of this group. Between 1924 and 1932 Desbrowe-Annear designed three very similar houses, all of which were late explorations into the Arts and Crafts idiom. These were Westerfield, Westridge House and the Gair House in Burwood—the latter, designed in 1932, being one of the architect’s last works. All external ground floor walls to these houses were masonry, while first floors were half-timbered, and were cantilevered out over the lower floor in various locations. Roofs were studied compositions of hips and gables clad with Marseilles tiles.

52 In spite of this consistency, the different locations and contexts of these three houses— together with those of the remaining country houses—indicate that Desbrowe-Annear’s typological selection was not related to geographical location. Nor does the more fundamental issue that all of these styles had been transplanted to Australia, from Europe or North America, in the first place.

To some extent the concept of place, or genius loci, was relevant to these late Arts and Crafts Houses. Two of the clients—Grimwade and Lane Poole—shared a friendship and an interest in plants. There is some credibility to the argument, put forward by Edquist, that this might have been one of the reasons why Grimwade wanted a house that expressed “a sense of place”: immediately after buying the land, he began to establish a setting for his rural retreat by planting at least twenty varieties of eucalypts, an orchard, fifty fruit trees, and acreages of lavender and geranium.97 Four years later Westerfield was built in the space that Grimwade had cultivated, using local materials (including granite, which formed the ground floor walls), as much as possible. Charles’s prediction that his house would belong to its setting, where it would be backed by the pine trees of Westbourne Woods, indicated a similar desire to create a sense of place.

Edquist’s difficulty in trying to locate these houses conveniently within an overall lineage of Desbrowe-Annear’s residential design work implied that there was, in fact, no progression—a conclusion that is easy to understand with Desbrowe-Annear. Chronological analysis of his career reveals a number of important facts. For a start, he designed Arts and Crafts houses as far back as 1903 in Eaglemont, Victoria, and continued to explore variations of this theme over the next ten years. In 1915 and 1916 Desbrowe-Annear designed what became his most well-known buildings—Inglesby, the Francis House at South Yarra, and Broceliande, the Elliot House in Toorak. Both of these were claimed by many writers to be Australia’s first truly modern houses. Boyd described how, in Broceliande, Desbrowe-Annear had embraced “logic, honesty and common sense in the flush wall, the plain window and the low roof”, and had created Australia’s first Functionalist building.98 He further declared the house to be “one of the world’s early pioneers of rational architecture”.99 Max Freeland, impressed by Broceliande’s austerity, lack of ornament and apparent adherence to functional determinism, described Desbrowe-Annear as Australia’s first “pure Functionalist” architect.100

1.14 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, Broceliande, Toorak, 1916.101

A further reason why Desbrowe-Annear was categorised as a functionalist was a series of technical innovations that he introduced to his houses from an early stage in his career.102 Most of these inventions appeared in the group of houses he designed in the first decade of the twentieth century for the Mount Eagle Estate in Heidelberg, and were ingenious for their simplicity and mechanical practicality. Melbourne architect Peter Crone restored and adapted the Chadwick House, one in a precinct of three Desbrowe- Annear houses in Eaglemont. While working in the roof space of the house he discovered the secret of the counter-balanced windows:

The architect had devised a system whereby the top of each sash window was joined to a cord which went up into the roof cavity, over a couple of pulleys, and was attached to a brick. Open a small brass catch, and the window slides up effortlessly thanks to its counterbalance hidden above … A closer look at the windows throughout the house reveals another of Annear’s extraordinary innovations. Undo a catch on the top windows in each frame and they drop open by themselves, thanks to a frame more heavily weighted at its top.103

Crone discovered that Desbrowe-Annear used the same system for every window in the house. In fact it didn’t stop there—once he found a solution that worked, Desbrowe- Annear continued to use it ad infinitum. Westridge House was no exception, containing many of his technical innovations: counter-balanced sliding windows that slid vertically up into the wall cavities, automatically dragging fly screens behind them so that the fly screen covered the window opening; chimneys that helped to ventilate the room

54 through vents on either side of the central flue; flush doors with ledges that were dovetailed into the back of vertical, butted boards, and built-in wardrobes.

So what did it mean for Desbrowe-Annear, this erstwhile proponent of the Arts and Crafts movement and vanguard of everything rational, to return to Arts and Crafts principles with Westridge House in 1927—a full quarter of a century after his first excursions into the genre, and more than ten years after he had designed Australia’s first “modern” house? In reality it wasn’t that he needed to return to his first principles, because he had never actually left them. Desbrowe-Annear’s houses did not “progress” in the sense that they followed some logical and inevitable path, through Arts and Crafts, towards modernism. Described in personal terms as everything from an eclectic, an enigma, a maverick and an iconoclast who liked to shock, Desbowe-Annear’s swashbuckling and creative approach to architectural design defied any attempt at linear analysis. Detailing was, both literally and philosophically, a microcosm of Desbrowe- Annear’s overall approach to architecture—within which there was little evidence of cause and effect, of gradual improvement or of incremental changes that signposted a certain trajectory. He was clearly capable of designing houses in a variety of architectural styles, and the International Style was, in a sense, just one style to choose from. The argument that early twentieth-century Melbourne architects were capable of designing in a number of styles, and that Modernism was simply one alternative, was explored by Goad in “The Modern House in Melbourne 1925-1975”.104 It is a position that is diametrically opposed to that taken by previous historians such as Nikolaus Pevsner, who argued that there was a logical and inevitable evolutionary progression, from various pre- modern styles and ideologies such as Arts and Crafts, through to modernism and the International Style.105

The best indication of the ideological context in which Desbrowe-Annear operated can be found in the journal that he and Ruth Lane Poole contributed to. Australian Home Beautiful was the monthly forum where debates regarding style and design in Australian housing were expressed: debates that, through their own constant exposure, they found themselves to be located at the centre of. In the 1920s Australian Home Beautiful took the position that modern, up-to-date ideas in architecture and design should be encouraged, but that these ideas were, to a large extent, independent of external architectural form and style. What was important, in terms of modernity, were new developments in interior planning and appliances. Hattie Knight described Alec Eggleston’s Home Science School at the Methodist Ladies’ College in Hawthorn—a “two-storied brick building of Tudor design with pressed cement decorations of a Gothic character”—as “one of the most up-to-date educational buildings” in Australia, principally because of its internal planning.106

In fact buildings that appeared to be “modern” in external form and style were actively discouraged in the pages of Australian Home Beautiful, where there was a distinct preference for houses that follow accepted—and usually English—styles. The illustrations of modern German architecture that had appeared in the First International Architectural Exhibition in Melbourne in 1927 were criticised for their “cold severity”, “stark exterior” and even “ugliness”.107 The austere, two-storey high cream-coloured walls of Peter Behren’s Bassett-Lowke House, published in the February 1928 edition, were considered to be “extremely severe”, and most of the description ignored the exterior and focused instead on internal colours and finishes.108

1.15 Peter Behrens, Basset-Lowke House, c1927.109 1.16 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, Westridge House from north- east, c 1928.110

Ruth’s background was in art and design rather than architecture, and in some ways she exhibited an expedient attitude to architectural style. In a review of the Moran House she wrote that the clients had desired “an English type of architecture”, reminiscent of houses they admired “in the Cotswold villages in England”. It was therefore, she believed, the obligation of the architect to design a “Cotswold house”. While there is no direct evidence to suggest that Ruth Lane Poole was involved in the external design and form of Westridge House, she shared with Desbrowe-Annear a love of the picturesque, the informal and the asymmetrical. This was reflected in a number of articles in which she expressed a preference for informality in design, an inclination that was materialised in the most striking external quality of Westridge House: the dominant, asymmetrical hipped roof that slopes dramatically down towards the northern side.111

But Ruth was not the only contributor to Australian Home Beautiful who enjoyed the picturesque and old English styles. R. Chandler believed that the architectural styles of the past should be regarded as timeless classics. Like a number of other commentators of the time, he believed that the use of older styles did not necessarily preclude sound design principles, or modernist planning concepts. To Chandler, Barlow and Hawkins’s

56 W. D. Gillespie House of 1927, an Arts and Crafts Tudor style house, was not a flippant exercise in overt stylism, but a “carefully planned”, “thoroughly modern” house.112 This concept of modifying and reinventing design classics—rather than adopting wholesome, radical change—was the same methodology used by Ruth in her furniture design for Government House and The Lodge. It was an attitude that permeated her writing: in spite of her love for the picturesque, and for traditional English design, many of her attitudes were underscored by a modernist sensibility. She opposed the acceptance of traditional ideas and practices without proper consideration, was aware of the changing function of spaces within the house, and was enthusiastic in her descriptions of these new developments.113 In 1927 she published an article proclaiming a new type of drawing room:

Now behold the contrast that time has effected! We have opened the windows, torn up the carpets, thrown out the wax flowers and the crewel work, banished the family Bible and replaced the portrait album with books of snapshots… Today, indeed, all the rooms in the house are eminently rooms to be lived in.114

Ruth’s enthusiasm for the new drawing room, dramatised by graphic descriptions of the sweeping away of all that was old and undesirable, was imbued with a fervour similar to Susan Buck-Morss’s description of Walter Benjamin’s “One Way Street”, which was published one year after Ruth’s article. Buck-Morss described “One Way Street” as a textual representation of the differences between the stuffy, claustrophobic, “upholstered bourgeois interiors of the nineteenth century”, with the “light, air and permeability of the new architecture of [Walter] Gropius or Le Corbusier”.115

In some articles Ruth wrote about changes in the way in which the internal spaces of the house were utilised. One example was the shift away from large, formal dining rooms, which had enjoyed prominence in Victorian days when “dinner was served at four o’clock in the afternoon and frequently continued late into the night”. By the 1920s the dining room was occupied for only about two hours each day, and was therefore the least important room in the house. The living room, or sitting room, on the other hand, was “the most important room in the house—the room that will be occupied at all hours of the day, and at times by all members of the family”.116 Both of these shifts in spatial hierarchy were inscribed in Indian ink on Desbrowe-Annear’s floor plans: Westridge House did not contain a dedicated dining room. Instead, a dining space was incorporated into a large, open-planned living area on the north side.

1.17 Westridge House. Ground floor showing open plan living and dining area. Sketch by the author, 2009.

Further evidence of Ruth’s modernist sympathies was apparent in her advice on interior furnishing. In late 1927, coinciding with developments in her own house, she wrote an article about “the right and wrong way to curtain a window”. This was illustrated with two comparative photographs of a corner window facing onto a garden. These were furnished alternatively in the “right” way and the “wrong” way. In the “right” solution the curtains, which were set within the depth of the window reveal, extended from just above the window head and finished on top of the sill. There was no pelmet, and no additional layer of net curtains. In this solution the curtains were subservient to the architecture: they fitted within the space of the window, and, when open, they maximised the view to the garden. The “wrong” solution, on the other hand, showed a much larger curtain that negated the space and proportions of the window by extending past it in all directions— on the head, sill and jambs—and contained a heavy pelmet and fringed net curtains that significantly obscured the view of the garden.117

1.18 Ruth Lane Poole, ‘the right way to curtain a window’.118

The importance of a holistic, integrated design that extended from interior space and furniture through to external form and style, and finally to garden design, was one of the central tenets of the Arts and Crafts house. Westridge House benefited from expert design in all three of these domains: in addition to the contributions of Desbrowe- Annear and Ruth Lane Poole, the garden was designed by the landscape designer Edna Walling—a colleague of Desbrowe-Annear and fellow contributor to Australian Home Beautiful.119

Westridge House could be considered as the culmination of a true collaborative ethos. A product of Australian Home Beautiful at least as much as it was an advertisement for Australian forestry, it was like a three-dimensional construct, or frozen image, that encapsulated within its fabric the middle ground of accepted good taste: a built summary of the ideas and ideologies that were expounded, by various writers, within the pages of that popular journal. Ideologies that clearly preferred the picturesque, familiar and informal attributes of traditional British domestic buildings, and the “Ivory White”, roughcast and buttressed walls of Westridge House, to the austere, pure white “Ripolin” walls of International Style modern architecture.

English in style, Westridge House employed familiar forms and followed Arts and Crafts doctrines such as the use of natural materials and a harmonious relationship to its setting. In spite of the atavistic nature of the formal architectural language, Desbrowe- Annear approached the planning of the house primarily from interior function—zoning, efficiency, open planning and orientation—and in doing so demonstrated what was unquestionably a modernist sensibility. Like most Desbrowe-Annear houses, it contained a number of innovative technical details. Westridge House, like the magazine it owed so much to, did not reject historical forms and embrace the cool elegance of the machine aesthetic, but was nevertheless founded on rational design principles. It represented the

59 conviction that a genuine and appropriate Australian architecture, of beauty and amenity, would inevitably evolve through a gradual process of adaptation and refinement of established models and accepted techniques.

1 Harold Desbrowe-Annear, “What to do when in difficulties”, Lines (Melbourne, 1933). This was from a lecture that Desbrowe-Annear delivered to the Victorian Architects Students’ Society, just one month before his death in 1933. 2 National Archives of Australia, NAA: A3560, 6234. 3 The house was formerly known as “Tudor House”, and the suburb as “Westlake”. 4 Harriet Edquist believes that one of Desbrowe-Annear’s most significant, but least understood legacies, was his ability to attract and retain informed, well-off clients who were willing to spend money on good design. Along with a small group of his peers—including Walter Butler and Rodney Alsop—Desbrowe-Annear helped to create this new clientele. Many of these clients, who became lasting friends, displayed loyalty to their architects by returning for further commissions such as town and country houses, office buildings or even family tombs. Harriet Edquist, Harold Desbrowe-Annear: A Life in Architecture (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2004), 202, 254-55. 5 John Dargavel, National Archives of Australia, “Uncommon Lives: Charles and Ruth Lane Poole”, http:/uncommonlives.naa.gov.au. 6 Inspired by the concept of the English Art Workers’ Guild that had been established in the London office of Richard Norman Shaw in 1883, Desbrowe-Annear founded the T-Square Club of Victoria, a club for architects, artists and craftspeople, in January 1900. Becoming Australia’s first Arts and Crafts association, and a precursor to the more ambitious Arts and Crafts Society that was formed in 1908, the club held regular meetings in the architectural classroom at the Melbourne Working Men’s College. Edquist, Harold Desbrowe-Annear, A Life in Architecture, 47-53. 7 “Pollexfen” was her maiden name. 8 Yeats Collection, National Gallery of Ireland. Cited by John Dargavel, National Archives of Australia, “Uncommon Lives: Charles and Ruth Lane Poole”, http:/uncommonlives.naa.gov.au. 9 Edquist believed that the Lane Pooles may have been influenced by Westerfield. Edquist, Harold Desbrowe-Annear, A Life in Architecture, 138, 166. 10 Ibid., 163. 11 “The Home of the Prime Minister”, Australian Home Beautiful (1 August 1927): 13-18. 12 While Charles and Russell knew Stanley Bruce professionally through their joint lobbying for an Australian school of forestry, Russell also counted Bruce as a personal friend. It is highly likely that the Bruce and Lane Poole families met socially through a number of activities: by visiting the Grimwades—who were popular and well-known entertainers and in the habit of spending most weekends at Westerfield—by invitation to the Bruce’s nearby Pinehill, or through a round of golf on the “Millionaires’ Golf Club”, a local course embellished by Russell’s knowledge of native flora. See J. R. Poynter, Russell Grimwade (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 1967), 141, 213, 268. The Lane Pooles shared a love of riding with Lord and Lady Stonehaven, and in later Canberra years Ruth was a frequent visitor to Government House when the Stonehavens were in residence. John Dargavel, National Archives of Australia, “Uncommon Lives: Charles and Ruth Lane Poole”, http:/uncommonlives.naa.gov.au. 13 Australian Home Beautiful (August 1927). Illustration by Frank Hedley Sanders. 14 “It must be borne in mind that this house is more than the usual public servants home for it is an official adjunct to the School.” Charles Lane Poole to Rolland, Melbourne, 10 July 1926. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. 15 Charles Lane Poole, Commonwealth Forestry Adviser, “Forestry Position in Australia: Report with Summary” (Australia: Commonwealth Government, 27 August, 1925), 7. 16 The Australian Forestry School and the Commonwealth Solar Observatory were based in the Federal Territory, while the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research retained Melbourne as its base, and established research divisions of Economic Entomology and Plant Industry in the Federal Capital Territory. 17 Charles’s father Stanley, an orientalist and archaeologist, was Professor of Arabic Studies at Dublin University. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries he published books on Egypt, Medieval India, Turkey, Israel, the Saracens, the Mohamedan Dynasties and the decay of the Mughal Empire. Charles’s uncle—Reginald Stuart Poole—catalogued coins and medals for the British Museum’s collections, and became Keeper of the Archives at Oxford University. 18 Charles Lane Poole, “A Forest Policy for Australia, Part 3”, Australian Forestry Journal, vol. II, no. 12 (December 1919): 376. 19 Athol Meyer, The Foresters (Tasmania: Institute of Foresters of Australia, 1985), 7. 20 “List of buildings required for establishment of the Australian Forestry School at Canberra”. Charles Lane Poole, 15 April 1925. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. Charles Weston, a horticulturalist, was the Director of Parks and Gardens for the Federal Capital Territory.

21 Rolland was promoted to “Acting Principal Architect” with the Federal Capital Commission on 21 August 1925. On 20 October this was confirmed by the Public Service Board, subject to review “upon completion of the erection work in connection with Parliament House”. Extract from Minutes of 27th Meeting of Federal Capital Commission, 21 August 1925, and correspondence dated October 1925. NAA: CP846/2, S/317. 22 “18.8.25 Lovely day. Dined with Mr. Lane-Poole.” Doris Duffield, “Woods” Australian Diary, 1925. Duffield, Walter Geoffrey (1879–1929), Manuscript Collection, AAS Adolph Basser Library, MS 095, Series 3, File No. 3.23. 23 “The School buildings situated as they are on the Eastern fall of Westridge, and within the arboretum, have a very fine outlook to the East over the plain towards the civic centre. The site for the Principal’s residence has been chosen 90 yards north of the main educational block. The fact that there are clumps of pine trees behind both sites makes the situation a very desirable one both educationally and aesthetically.” Charles Lane Poole to Secretary, Home and Territories Department, Melbourne, 13 October 1926. NAA: A1/15, 1929/1875. 24 John Butters, Chairman, Federal Capital Commission, to Secretary, Department of Home and Territories, Canberra, 21 April 1926. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. 25 National Archives of Australia. 26 Charles Lane Poole to Rolland, Melbourne, 25 August 1925. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. The total cost estimate for the school, including residences, was £31,000.0.0 (or £33,160.0.0 for an alternative arrangement, referred to as “Scheme 2”). Rolland to Charles Daley, Secretary, FCC, Canberra 30 July 1925; FCC Quantity Surveyor to Architect, 1 September 1925; Rolland to Secretary, FCC, 27 October 1925. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. 27 Rolland to Principal Assistant Architect, Canberra, 20 January 1926. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. 28 Butters to Minister for Home and Territories, Canberra, 15 February 1926. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. 29 Charles Lane Poole to Chairman, FCC, 7 April 1926. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. 30 Butters to Charles Lane Poole, Canberra, 8 April 1926. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. 31 Charles Lane Poole to Secretary, Home and Territories Department, 9 April 1926. NAA: A1/15, 1929/1875. 32 The idea that the main forestry building would be constructed exclusively of Australian timbers, thereby turning the structure into an advertisement, or showcase, of local species, was promoted as a key element of the design. It is important to note, however, that this concept appears to have originated from Daley rather than Lane Poole. In March 1926, Daley wrote to Lane Poole: “The designs which we are preparing for the Forestry School up here do not, of course, include the use of a lot of the expensive joinery timbers such as Black Bean, Queensland Walnut, Blackwood, Maple, and so on. It is a plain structure designed on economic lines. Now, it occurred to me that as a forestry proposition it would be nice to work in samples of the special timbers of the various States, and you might be able to get a donation from the various States or from some of the principal sawmillers of sufficient timber to do quite a bit of the sort of work which would show the various timbers off to the best advantage.” Daley to Charles Lane Poole, Canberra, 4 March 1926. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. A press release stated “The Minister for Home and Territories (Sir William Glasgow) anticipates that the School, when completed, will provide a striking advertisement of the beauty and utility of our native timbers.” Press release for Secretary, Prime Minister’s Department, 21 October 1926. NAA: A1/15, 1929/1875. “Our Forestry School is rather a special building in that nothing but Australian timber was used throughout.” Butters to Rivett, Chief Executive Officer, CSIR, Canberra, 21 October 1927. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. 33 Daley to Ruth Lane Poole, Canberra, 29 March 1926. NAA: A6266, G1926/2359, 46. 34 Unnamed newspaper cutting stamped “June 25 1926” held by Publicity Branch, Prime Minister’s Department. NAA: A1, 1926/9335, 56. 35 “The Small House at Canberra”, Australian Home Beautiful (7 May 1926): 15-19. 36 Telegram, Rolland to Charles Lane Poole, Canberra, 5 July 1926. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. 37 Rolland to Secretary, Home and Territories Department, 6 July 1926. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454 38 Charles Lane Poole to Rolland, 10 July 1926. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. 39 Rolland to Principal Assistant Architect, 14 July 1926. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. 40 Rolland to Professor Jolly, Canberra, 31 August 1926. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. 41 Charles Lane Poole to Secretary, Department of Home and Territories, 16 September 1926. Australian National University Archives, ANUA: A3056, 1928 B4. 42 Doris Duffield, “Woods” Australian Diary, entry for 9 January 1925. 43 Meyer, The Foresters, 12.

44 Ruth wrote about this property in “Some Charming Home Interiors”, Australian Home Beautiful (1 June 1928): 33-37. 45 Lane Poole in fact continued to hold this “temporary” position for a further seventeen years. Meyer, The Foresters, 12. 46 As Greg Murphy explained, “Lane Poole had evidently driven a pretty stiff bargain for consenting to come to Canberra.” Greg Murphy, “House Should be Preserved”, Canberra Historical Journal 8 (September 1981): 10. A Canberra Times article quoted one of Lane Poole’s daughters as saying that he was given permission to engage the architect of his choice, on the condition that the cost of the house did not exceed £3,000.0.0. “Flight of architectural fancy”, Canberra Times (19 May 1993): 24. 47 Desbrowe-Annear sent drawings of the Principal’s Residence to Rolland at the Federal Capital Commission on 17 November 1926. NAA: CP698/29/1/p. 314. 48 In a critique of “monotonous, one story houses” in Melbourne, Desbrowe-Annear argued that there was an additional, functional advantage to having a two-storied house: it was easier “to get the first essential—that of winter sunlight—into every room.” Harold Desbrowe-Annear ed., For Every Man his Home: A Book of Australian Homes and the Purpose of Their Design (Melbourne: Alexander McCubbin, March 1922), 12. 49 National Archives of Australia. 50 Ibid. 51 Rolland to Charles Lane Poole, 15 November 1926. NAA: CP698/29/1/p. 317. 52 NAA: CP698/29/1, NAA: CT86/1. 53 Rolland to Daley, 9 December 1926. NAA: CP698/29/1/p. 309; Rolland to Chief Commissioner, FCC, 18 July 1927. NAA: CP698/29, 1, p. 165. 54 This subtitle is a reversal of Beatriz Colomina’s Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). 55 “Bringing Spring Indoors” (15 September 1925); “How Shall I Treat my Walls? Part 1. From Tapestry to Water Paint” (12 January 1926): 35-8; “How Shall I Treat my Walls? Part 2. The Many Advantages of Plywood” (12 February 1926): 35-38; “The Dream Cottage and the Reality” (12 March 1926): 32-35; “China for the Cottage” (12 March 1926): 43-45; “How to Furnish a Girl’s Bedroom for £20” (12 April 1926): 35-37; “The Small House at Canberra’ (7 May 1926): 15-19; “The House and its Interior’ (7 June 1926): 39-42; “The House and its Interior Part II. Period Furniture—its Use and Abuse” (5 July 1926): 40-42; “The House and its Furnishing, the Diningroom—Part 1” (1 September 1926): 26-29; “I Simply Must Have New Curtains” (1 October 1926): 33-36; “The House and its Furnishing Part II—How to Furnish the Small Diningroom” (1 October 1926): 37-41; “The House and its Furnishing Part III—Fitting up the Library, Study or Den” (1 November 1926): 30- 33; “The House and its Furnishing Part III (Continued)—Fitting up the Library, Study or Den” (1 December 1926): 32-35; “The House and its Furnishing Part IV—Planning the Boudoir or Morning Room” (1 January 1927): 27-30; “The House and its Furnishing Part V—The Drawing-room, Its Furniture and its Outlook” (1 February 1927): 29-33; “Why not Paper Your Walls?” (1 April 1927): 46-47; “A Home for a Governor-General” (2 May 1927): 13-18; “Furnishing Government House Canberra Part II, Selecting the Glass, Silver, China and Furniture” (2 May 1927): 35-42; “How to Furnish the House Successfully” (1 July 1927): 20-24; “How to Furnish Successfully Part II—Lighting the Exterior of the House” (1 August 1927): 35-37; “Make Your Curtains at Home” (1 October 1927): 40-44; “Window Boxes and Their Decorative Value” (1 November 1927): 31-33; “Flowers for the Festive Table” (1 December 1927): 15-18; “Linen Cupboard” (2 January 1928): 34- 37; “A Spanish House That is True to Type” (1 February 1928): 12-19; “Cottage Furniture: Its History and Development” (1 March 1929): 19-23; “Bachelor’s House in Melbourne” (2 April 1928): 21-25; “Some Charming Home Interiors” (1 June 1928): 33-37; “A Menu for the Young Housekeeper” (2 July 1928): 53-55; “Where Outlook is a First Consideration” (1 September 1928): 23-27; “From Palliasse to Spring Mattress” (1 October 1928): 29-33. 56 “How Shall I Treat my Walls? Part 2. The Many Advantages of Plywood”, Australian Home Beautiful (12 February 1926): 36-37. 57 Scarborough left Australia soon afterwards, leaving Oakley and Parks to form a partnership. Instead of using the Oakley and Parks subdivision layout, the Assessors decided on an alternative arrangement based on site plans purchased from two unsuccessful entrants: Kaad and Weider of Chatswood, New South Wales, and Sale and Keage of Melbourne. Peter Corkery, “Canberra’s First Private Architects: Percy Oakley, Stanley Parkes and Kenneth Oliphant”, in Peter Freeman, ed., The Early Canberra House (Fyshwick: The Federal Capital Federal Press of Australia, 1996), 109-10. 58 “The Small House in Canberra”, Australian Home Beautiful 4, no. 5 (7 May 1926): 15. 59 Ruth Lane Poole, “Home Life in Canberra”, Table Talk.

60 These included articles on the houses of including Ernest Kaye, and the evolutionary biologist and ethnologist Sir Baldwin Spencer. Edquist, Harold Desbrowe-Annear, A Life in Architecture, 209; Australian Home Beautiful (12 January, 1 September, 1 October, 1 November, 1 December 1926). 61 Edquist, Harold Desbrowe-Annear, A Life in Architecture, 229. Ruth wasn’t the only one: regular columnist “Architect” used Desbrowe-Annear’s glass collection in the article “The Charm of Glass”, Australian Home Beautiful ( 1 January 1926): 32-33, and K. Wallace-Crabbe showed Desbrowe-Annear’s ship models in his “den” in “Ship Models in the Home”, Australian Home Beautiful (1 March 1927): 43-45. 62 Ruth Lane Poole, “How Shall I Treat my Walls? Part 1. From Tapestry to Water Paint”, Australian Home Beautiful (12 January 1926): 35. 63 “I propose that the door from this bed room to the store and linen be done away with and a cupboard built into its place and an opening be formed in the linen pantry to get into the store that way; remember there is only 2’ 2” head room on the outerside of the store and boxes. I propose a 2’ 0” wide cupboard in the corner of No 5 next to bed room No 4 and have shown two alternative places for the bed. Let me know what you think of these suggestions.” Desbrowe-Annear to Charles Lane Poole, Melbourne, 29 July 27. NAA: CT86/1, 473, p. 167. 64 John Dargavel, National Archives of Australia, “Uncommon Lives: Charles and Ruth Lane Poole”, http:/uncommonlives.naa.gov.au. The following is in regard to colours: “Dear Sir, Mrs. Lane –Poole has chosen the colours for the walls of the Principal’s house, as follows:’ Two downstairs rooms and north upstairs room Russolene – fawn East bedroom Majora, No. 33 – powder blue Maid’s bedroom and west bedroom Keystone, No. 15 – green North-east bedroom Russolene – paris grey” Charles Lane Poole to Chief Executive Architect, FCC, 21 November 1927. NAA: CT86/1, 473, p. 137. 65 Ruth recommended to those readers who were building a house that they should “visit it frequently in course of construction in order to become familiar with the disposition of its rooms and all its aspects”. In regard to lighting she wrote: “With each visit to the house we are about to furnish, we are impressed anew with the urgency of dealing with the question of the lights, for until they are purchased neither the walls nor the ceilings can be finished.” Ruth Lane Poole, “How to Furnish Successfully Part II—Lighting the Exterior of the House”, Australian Home Beautiful (1 August 1927): 35. A short time later Ruth advised the Architects Department that she had “chosen a lantern for outside our residence from the firm of Wright and Co., 181 Clarence Street, Sydney, price 120/10d, of British Manufacture”. Ruth Lane Poole to Architects Department, 20 February 1928. NAA: CT86/1, 473, p. 43. By October 1927, with their own residence nearing completion, Ruth was writing about curtains. The anticipatory “Flowers for the Festive Table” was published in December 1927, just weeks before the Lane Pooles moved to Canberra. “Linen Cupboard” was published in January 1928, just as they moved into their new residence. In that article Ruth wrote: “So with the New Year start the new linen cupboard, and as a beginning buy a little pure Irish linen from a reputable firm during sale time.” Australian Home Beautiful (2 January 1928): 37. 66 This has been assumed from the fact that advertisements in Australian Home Beautiful for wood-burning stoves still outnumbered those for electric versions. See J. S. H., “The Electrical Kitchen”, Australian Home Beautiful (1 November 1926): 42; Winifred Russell, “The Joys of an All-Electric Home”, Australian Home Beautiful (1 October 1927): 52. 67 Fizelle stated that electric stoves could be found in the residences of Mr. Shelton, Mr. Murray or Mr. David Limburg (a Federal Capital Commission architect who left to join L. H. Rudd in private practice), of Ainslie, or in those of Mr. Bale or Mr. Lancaster—the Australian General Electric Representative—of Blandfordia. He added that it was “anticipated that the owners would have no objection to an inspection of their stoves”. Max Fizelle to Charles Lane Poole, Canberra, 28 September 1927. NAA: CT86/1, 473, p. 153. 68 Charles Lane Poole to Thomas Robert Casboulte, 12 January 1928. NAA: CT86/1, 473, p. 102. Casboulte took over as Chief Architect of the Federal Capital Commission when Rolland transferred to Adelaide in 1926. 69 Australian Home Beautiful (February 1926). 70 Years later Boyd wrote to Romberg saying that a former employee of Desbrowe-Annear’s, Raymond Wilson, had told him that a “fantastic scandal” had occurred, but no details of this event were confirmed. Edquist, Harold Desbrowe- Annear, A Life in Architecture, 237-38.

71 “I would be glad if you could forward as early as possible any copy of agreement that was made with Mr. Desbrowe Annear, if such is in your possession, so that the claim can be passed for payment. I enclose letter from Mr. Desbrowe- Annear addressed to yourself, as requested by you.” Rolland to Director-General of Forests, Forestry School, Canberra, 13 July 1927. NAA: CP698/29/1/p. 171. “There appears to be no actual approval on paper in regard to the agreement between the Commission and Mr. Desbrowe-Annear and this approval is now sought.” Rolland to Chief Commissioner, FCC, 18 July 1927. NAA: CP698/29, 1, p. 165. 72 “With reference to plans and specifications supplied by Mr. H. Desbrowe Annear in connection with the residence for the Director of Forestry School at Canberra, Commissioner Sir John Harrison instructed that payment of the Architect’s claim for professional services referred to above should be held up until Mr. Annear had supplied all the drawings and details required. All information and drawings required from Mr. Annear has now been received …” Casboulte to Secretary, FCC, 10 September 1927. NAA: CT86/1, 473, p. 159. 73 The other residences included those for the Director of the Institute of Anatomy, in Acton, and for Duffield at Mount Stromlo. 74 Canberra Times (18 November 1927): 1. 75 Casboulte to Mr. Commissioner [Crosbie] Goold, 4 May 1929. NAA: CT86/1, 473, p. 6. 76 Rolland to Daley, 30 July 1925; FCC Quantity Surveyor to the Architect, 1 September 1925; Rolland to Secretary, FCC, 27 October 1925. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. 77 Rolland to Daley, 9 December 1926. NAA: CP698/29/1/p. 309, Memorandum from Rolland to the Chief Commissioner, FCC, 18 July 1927. NAA: CP698/29, 1, p. 165. 78 Secretary, FCC to Secretary, Home and Territories Department, regarding question in Parliament about cost of Forestry School, 3 May 1928. NAA: A6269/1, E1/29/454. 79 Accountant, FCC, to Secretary, Department of Home Affairs, 21 March 1929. NAA: A1/15, 1929/1875. 80 Ruth preferred Jarrah for its “warm tint”. Australian Home Beautiful (1 January 1927): 30. 81 Fizelle to Superintendent, Building Construction Branch, 14 November 1927. NAA: CT86/1, 473, pp. 47, 48, 122. 82 With contingencies and other amounts added on, this amounted to £5623.0.0, still above the increased £5500.0.0 authorised by the Minister for Home & Territories. Mason started work on site, but “did not receive complete plans and specifications describing the work” until some weeks later. This would become one reason given later for the delay in finishing the job. Items 87, 186, NAA CP 698/30, 1/2. In addition to the Director’s Residence, Mason built a number of Mount Stromlo buildings including the Sun Telescope Building, Reynolds Telescope Building, Workshop, Store and Sub- station. NAA: A6270/1. 83 Charles Daley, As I Recall, Reminiscences of Early Canberra (Canberra: Mulini Press, 1994): 151. 84 “Housing Enquiry Opened”, Canberra Times (28 March 28). The problems Rolland and his team faced in building up on Mount Stromlo were the same as they experienced in the Molongolo Valley below, but made worse because of the altitude and isolation. The architect described the problems associated with getting workmen up to the site, which was very cold for much of the year, and of transporting materials up the hazardous road. An additional challenge was that of constructing a tunnel through the granite substructure of the mountain to accommodate reflectors for the main telescope. Henry Rolland, second interview by Donald Brech, 27 November 1967. Commonwealth Archives Office, NAA: A750, 1968/294, 29. 85 National Archives of Australia, NAA: 3560, 7569. 86 Freeman’s 2001 Conservation Management Plan contains photographs of all internal spaces taken at that time. They reflect, however, the significant alterations that took place in the 1960s when Westridge House was converted from a residence into the Administration Headquarters for the Forestry and Timber Bureau. Peter Freeman, “Westridge House Precinct Yarralumla Conservation Management Plan”, July 2001. Volume 1, “The Plan”, Volume 2, “Precinct Inventory”. 87 John Dargavel, The Zealous Conservator, A Life of Charles Lane Poole (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2008). 88 This was referred to by Edquist in Harold Desbrowe-Annear, A Life in Architecture, 167, as a variation on a similar detail to be found in the Devine and Ince Houses. The Gair House had a similar door opening off a bedroom that concealed a gun-room built into the wall, and a priest-hole off the landing that opened into the roof space. See “Tudor Style Mansion”, The Age Real Estate (1 October 1983). 89 “In the same year (1927), a residence for the Principal, named ‘Westridge House’, was built adjacent to the School, its style and location making it something of a landmark in Canberra.” Les Carron, A Brief History of the Australian Forestry

School (2000): 5. “The Lane Poole family lived only a stone’s throw from the main school building, in the principal’s residence, an imposing two-storeyed Tudor-style mansion built in 1928.” Meyer, The Foresters, 14. 90 For instance, the Director’s Residences at Mount Stromlo and Acton were designed with full masonry walls and tiled roofs. 91 Ruth Lane Poole, “Capital Interiors”, “Empire Trade”, John Dargavel, National Archives of Australia, “Uncommon Lives: Charles and Ruth Lane Poole”, http:/uncommonlives.naa.gov.au. 92 See “Working Sketches for Modern Versions of Chippendale Chairs”, Australian Home Beautiful (1 September 1926): 29. 93 Federal Capital Commission “Main Requisition Form”, 7 June 1927. NAA: CT86/1, 473, p. 170. 94 National Archives of Australia, NAA: A3560, 6040. 95 National Library of Australia. 96 Desbrowe-Annear’s 1928 alterations to Keith Murdoch’s Cruden Farm at Langwarrin ended up resembling a Southern American plantation-owner’s house—a fact that apparently took the unsuspecting client by surprise when he returned from overseas. Harold Armytage’s Delgany, at Portsea was an elaborate Gothic castle constructed of local sandstone. See “The Country Houses 1919-1928”, Edquist, Harold Desbrowe-Annear, A Life in Architecture, 161-184. 97 Russell Grimwade, in Poynter, Russell Grimwade, 137-141. 98 Robin Boyd, Australia’s Home, Its Origins, Builders and Occupiers (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1952), 160. 99 Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1960), 101. 100 Max Freeland, Architecture in Australia, A History (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1968), 238. 101 Edquist, Harold Desbrowe-Annear, A Life in Architecture, 92. 102 Freeland described how Desbrowe-Annear “had an inventive turn of mind and a belief in the supremacy of reason”, how “every building was a bundle of new challenges to his ingenuity”, and that he was “a ready-made Functionalist—a native pragmatist who needed no conversion to its rationalist philosophy”. Ibid., 243. 103 Guy Allenby, Eight Great Houses (Sydney: Pesaro Publishing, 2002), 125. In 2008 Crone won an Australian Institute of Architects National Award for Heritage for Stage 1 of his work on the Chadwick House. Architecture Australia 97, no. 6 (November/December 2008): 90. 104 Goad, “The Modern House in Melbourne 1945-1975”. 105 See, for example, Nikolaus Pevsner, The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969). 106 Australian Home Beautiful (1 September 1926): 30-32. 107 The Editor of Australian Home Beautiful clearly preferred an English-style stone house in South Africa, by architect Sir Herbert Baker, than he did work submitted by the Bund Deutscher Architekten, Berlin (the German Institute). See “The First International Architectural Exhibition”, Australian Home Beautiful (July 1927): 13-19. 108 “Something Startling in English Architecture”, E. W. Hobbs, Australian Home Beautiful (1 February 1928): 24-25. Describing the W. J. Bassett-Lowke House by Peter Behrens, Hobbs found the rear elevation “extremely severe”. Ivory White was the colour specified for the walls of Westridge House. Fizelle to Superintendent, Building Construction Branch, 31 October 1927. NAA: CT86/1, 473, p. 136. 109 Australian Home Beautiful (February 1928). 110 National Archives of Australia, NAA: A3560, 4216. 111 Ruth Lane Poole, “The Dream Cottage and the Reality”, Australian Home Beautiful (12 March 1926): 35. 112 Ibid., (2 May 1927): 28-33. 113 Ibid., (7 June 1926): 39. 114 Ibid., (1 February 1927): 29-31. 115 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 17-18. Benjamin’s “One-Way Street” (Einbahnstrasse) was first published by Rowohlt, Belin, in 1928. 116 Australian Home Beautiful (1 July 1927): 21. 117 Ibid., (1 October 1927): 43. 118 Ibid. 119 “Rough Sketch Plan of Garden for Mrs. Lane Poole, Forestry School, Canberra, Federal Capital Territory” is held by the State Library of Victoria. See John Dargavel, National Archives of Australia, “Uncommon Lives: Charles and Ruth Lane Poole”, http:/uncommonlives.naa.gov.au.

66 Chapter Two

“AGE OF THE MASTERS”: ESTABLISHING A SCIENTIFIC AND INTELLECTUAL COMMUNITY IN CANBERRA 1945 - 1970 1

The Formation of the Australian National University

Having proven their worth in wartime, scientists in the 1950’s were as powerful as they ever had been, confident of their own capacity to change the world, and dismissive of those who stood in their way. Stephen Foster and Margaret Varghese2

The architect must be entirely subordinated to the scientific requirements of those who are to inhabit [the building] … I will not be pushed around by an architect for architectural reasons. Sir Howard Florey3

One evening in April 1946, Australian Prime Minister Ben Chifley, in London for the first post-war Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, booked a large table for dinner at The Savoy Hotel in The Strand. Also dining with him that night was a thirty- six year old economist and planner, Herbert Cole (“Nugget”) Coombs,4 who he had appointed Director-General of the Commonwealth Ministry of Post-War Reconstruction, Dr. Herbert Vere (“Doc”) Evatt, the Minister for External Affairs, and other members of the official party. The Savoy, one of London’s most distinguished and elegant hotels, was upgrading its menu now that rationing was over, and under the French maître-chef dishes from the Normandy region such as Tripes á la Mode de Caen and Canard á la Rouennaise were available. It is possible that former British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill was also there: a frequent patron, he was known to have dined there as often as five times a fortnight.5 But Chifley was not interested in the guests at other tables that evening. He had invited Marc Oliphant,6 an expatriate Australian nuclear physicist, to join his party, and was transfixed by what he was telling him. Oliphant held the Poynting Chair of Physics at the University of Birmingham, and already had an impressive career: he had worked with Oppenheimer on The Manhattan Project, with M.A.U.D., a secret British committee that investigated the uranium bomb, with the British Admiralty to develop new microwave technology for radar—the one weapon that Hitler conceded had prevented German victory in the Atlantic—and with revered New Zealand-born physicist Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.7

Chifley began by asking Oliphant the question that was on everyone’s mind: what was the likely impact of the atomic bomb on the balance of world power? His guest duly obliged, and conveyed a sense of the excitement that he had experienced working on the Manhattan Project. He then digressed to his favourite topic: how a new world order would be built around the use of nuclear power for energy purposes. Oliphant was a great communicator: his knowledge and passion soon had his audience captivated. He described his proton synchroton project at Birmingham, and ventured to add that, under the right circumstances, Australia could be a world leader in nuclear physics. As Coombs later recalled, Oliphant “was absolutely at his spell- binding best, we were all ga ga … the impact on Chifley was tremendous”.8

The Prime Ministers’ Conference was not the only reason that Chifley and Coombs were in post-war London—they were also headhunting. The cornerstones of Coombs’s vision for post-war Australia were the construction, in Canberra, of a new, research- based, national university—an “intellectual powerhouse for the rebuilding of society”9—and the reconstruction of the existing Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. Coombs, who sometimes referred to himself as an “economic scientist”, was a practical idealist who believed that a combination of careful planning and strategic government intervention would improve Australia’s physical and social environment. His vision was essentially utilitarian, based on the premise that improved education in social sciences would result in improved government, and that increased scientific research—particularly in nuclear physics—would allow science to “serve humanitarian purposes as forcefully as it had served those of mass destruction”.10 While the origins of his ideologies have been generally credited to Keynesian economic rationalism, Coombs’s position was similar to the declarations laid down by a group of prominent modern architects at the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) at La Sarraz and Athens. CIAM envisaged a holistic and integrated approach to planning and building that was “intimately associated with the evolution and development of human life”, in order to satisfy its “spiritual, intellectual and material needs”.11

In the old hospital buildings at Acton, Canberra, where the Ministry was located from early 1943 until its abolition in 1946, Coombs had assembled a group of “brilliant staff”—including one architect, Grenfell (“Gren”) Rudduck—which was credited with providing a significant boost to the intellectual life of the city.12 One of the plans they hatched there involved luring the cream of Australasian scientists and scholars—all of whom were ensconced in prestigious overseas positions—to Canberra to head up the schools, and to become the “founding fathers” of the proposed national university. In the first instance they would be invited to become “Academic Advisers”. Once they

68 became settled in that role—and once the buildings were established in Canberra— they would be asked to move permanently to Canberra as heads of the various research schools. It was firmly believed that if the top positions could be filled with highly respected names, the rest would follow: as Coombs’s colleague Alfred Conlon stated, “never mind about blueprints, pick the men and the rest will look after itself”.13 Along with Oliphant, who was to head the Research School of Physical Sciences, the names on Coombs’s list were the medical scientist Sir Howard Florey for the Research School of Medical Sciences (later named the John Curtin School of Medical Research), the historian William (“Keith”) Hancock for the Research School of Social Sciences, and the New Zealand-born anthropologist, Raymond Firth, for the Research School of Pacific Studies.14 John Dedman, Minister for Post-war Reconstruction, explained to Parliament the importance of bringing these men back to Australia: “we must leave no stone unturned to secure their services”.15

Oliphant left The Savoy that evening in a buoyant mood, leaving those who remained at the table to ponder how they could possibly lure him back to Australia. “It’s going to cost a hell of a lot of money”, said Coombs. Chifley wanted to know if Oliphant would really come. Coombs thought there was a good chance he would. Chifley’s response was “you get Oliphant. I’ll persuade Cabinet to face up to it”. As usual, Coombs’s hunch was correct: Oliphant was beginning to see the limitations of an “old” country like Britain, and was realising that the long-term future of the Commonwealth lay in newer countries like Australia, where “fresh thinking about academic and technological activities” was possible.16

Securing Florey, who was currently Professor of Pathology at the University of Oxford, was no less of a priority. A team headed by Florey and Ernst Chain had successfully converted Alexander Fleming’s penicillin from a “laboratory curiosity”17 into an antibiotic, becoming “the most significant medical discovery of the twentieth century”, and earning Fleming, Florey and Chain a shared Nobel Prize.18 But Florey had other attributes. On two significant occasions throughout an illustrious career he demonstrated a commitment to architecture. As President of the Royal Society in London, he persuaded the organisation to move from a long-established location in Burlington House, off Piccadilly, and to refurbish numbers 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, a group of dilapidated grand mansions designed and built by John Nash. Nash was England’s foremost architect of the Picturesque movement and most successful civic designer. Later in life Florey became Provost (President) of Queen’s College, Oxford, and engaged English architect James Stirling, with whom he worked closely, to design new student residences on a site overlooking the River Cherwell in St. Clements. While Florey died before the building was completed, it was named after him as a

69 permanent memorial to his contribution. The Florey Building became one of Stirling’s best-known—and most controversial—works.19 While Florey remained in Oxford, and was never “brought back home” on a permanent basis, his role as Academic Adviser for almost a decade was crucial to the development of the Australian National University. Like Florey, Firth could not be persuaded to move to Canberra, and remained an Academic Adviser only.

2.1 Coombs and Chifley in front of Great Palm House at Kew, London, 1946.20 2.2 J ames Stirling , Florey Building, Queen’s College, Oxford, 1966.21

With the process of securing the founding fathers under way, attention turned to the design of the university campus. Coombs envisaged a grand design—possibly the result of an architectural competition. But the Advisers, particularly Oliphant, favoured a more pragmatic approach, believing that the provision of “simple buildings” in a short timeframe was more important than grand statements. They asked Council to appoint an architect immediately and, following the recommendation of a member— Roy (“Pansy”) Wright—engaged Brian Lewis, Professor of Architecture at the University of Melbourne, as consulting architect in late 1947. Wright, who knew Lewis through his position as Professor of Physiology at the University of Melbourne, considered him a “good fellow”, and believed that his robust personality and no- nonsense approach would stand him in good stead for confronting the equally forthright Academic Advisers and Interim Council.22 Others described the Tasmanian- born architect as “a pugnacious and learned man, accustomed to having his own way”, and “short, red-haired, blunt, quick in repartee and even more aggressive by nature than Oliphant”.23

70 Lewis immediately prepared a master plan, which a majority of the Interim Council approved, and was sent off to London to meet the Advisers. But even though the Advisers—who were “known to be tetchy”24—had asked to meet him earlier in the year, they were piqued that Lewis apparently arrived without notice. Oliphant didn’t help by questioning the architect’s credentials for the job: “We were puzzled”, he recalled, “by the fact that Lewis was able to show us no examples of his work beyond some rather conventional housing and some lavatories for the Great Western Railway”.25 Believing that he had come to discuss “their” buildings—physics and medicine—Oliphant and Florey were further dismayed to see a site plan for the whole campus instead. And when they cast their eyes over that, they baulked at an eight- storey structure for administration staff. Believing this was too prominent, they proceeded to give Lewis a lesson in University planning. An administration building, they explained, was lower in the university hierarchy, and should be small and efficient. Furthermore, Florey didn’t want his medical laboratories to be symmetrical with the other buildings on the campus—possibly because that implied some form of equality to which he did not subscribe. The architect and Council were immediately informed that all plans were to be considered “absolutely tentative” only. But rather than returning to Australia with his tail between his legs, the irrepressible Lewis was cock- a-hoop. The Advisers had all shown off to each other, he told Wright, and were “a bit bloody silly”. He had handled them well, he said, and had gained their confidence— especially by “saying what sods the Interim Council were”.26 It would prove to be a massive misjudgment.

During Easter 1948 the Interim Council and Academic Advisers visited Canberra, and met in the Institute of Anatomy building, next to the University site. Lewis attended the meetings, and expected to meet the Advisers on site to discuss the proposed campus. However, he found himself snubbed, and complained “they were too busy on other things”. In fact the Advisers did meet on site, as the photograph on the following page shows—they just hadn’t got around to asking him. On his last night in the capital Lewis was on his way back to his room at the Hotel Canberra when he came across Oliphant, by chance, in the guests’ lounge. Oliphant had recently received the Faraday Medal, and was surrounded by a group of eager journalists. Beckoning the architect over, he called out: “Oh, Professor Lewis, would you give me a set of your plans—not that I’m interested myself, but my wife would be, she did art when she was at school”. “Certainly, Professor”, Lewis replied. “And perhaps you could let me have a copy of your physics programme for my own wife. She did physics at school, you know”. Lewis went on to suggest that, in regard to the design of Oliphant’s house, it might be a good idea for the scientist to find another architect. Oliphant agreed, adding that he might then get a competent one.27

2.3 Oliphant, Hancock and Florey inspect the University site, Easter, 1948.28

2.4 Brian Lewis, who was not invited.29

72 At the time, Oliphant and his wife Rosa were living on a country estate near Barnt Green, in Worcestershire. Covered with ancient oak trees, the five-acre site contained one of the remaining fragments of Arden Forest—the same forest where Shakespeare’s Orlando was said to have courted Rosalind whilst standing up to his knees in summer flowers. When the Oliphants purchased the property in the late 1930s the main residence was beyond repair, so they built a large, two-and-a-half-storey extension to the original gatekeeper’s cottage. Named “Peto” after a family motto—Altiora peto: “I seek higher things”30—the first Oliphant House contained many trademarks of modern British architecture of the interwar period: uncompromising, block-like form, flat wall surfaces, brick construction, regular fenestration, steel-framed windows with small cantilevered hoods, roof terrace with steel pipe handrails, and flat roof. In external appearance, the addition was very similar to English architect John Proctor’s Dorset house, illustrated below.31

2.5 Peto, the first Oliphant House.32 2.6 J ohn Proctor, Dorset House.33

Having ostracised Lewis, Oliphant was left to his own devices regarding architectural advice for his Canberra house. During the Easter 1948 visit he approached Malcolm Moir, of the husband-and-wife architectural firm of Moir and Sutherland. Oliphant, Moir and Charles Daley—who was by then known unofficially as “the Mayor of Canberra”—visited several sites. Eventually they decided on a large, elevated block that was part of Weetangera sheep station, just outside the surveyed limits of the city (now Dryandra Street, in the suburb of O’Connor).34 The second Oliphant House was a disappointment to all those involved. A very large, conventional brick house with pitched tiled roofs—like an over-inflated, interwar suburban bungalow—it appeared to be the outcome of clients who became obsessed with quantity rather than quality. Like her fictitious namesake, Rosa Oliphant was reluctant to leave the pastoral delights of Worcestershire, and “demanded solid proof of equal benefit” in Canberra. Mark reminded the University of the sacrifices that he and his wife would be making by coming to Canberra, and insisted that they obtain accommodation equivalent to Peto’s forty squares and six bedrooms.35 The Oliphant House also suffered from severe budget cuts and design revisions, and protracted, long-distance communications between the clients—who remained in England—and Moir in Canberra.36 Lewis was

73 not impressed with the final result, noting that the main living room windows “faced into a raw cutting driven by a bulldozer” into the hillside, while the spectacular views on the other side were enjoyed by “the main bedroom, the garage and a second toilet”.37

2.7 Moir and Sutherland , Oliphant House, O’Connor, Canberra. “Where the Professor Lives”.38 2.8 Roy Grounds and Brian Lewis, ANU staff house ‘Type ‘D’.39

According to the Oliphant’s daughter, Vivian, the house was too large for the family, and she felt embarrassed “by its size and relative grandeur” in comparison to the modest homes of her school friends. Canberra was a small community, and the advantages of being a senior university employee did not go unnoticed. Many residents had their names down on a long waiting list for government housing, and resented what appeared to be preferential treatment. Speculation was particularly rife about the Oliphant House—a situation that was not helped when the physicist complained to the local press about the poor standard of houses in O’Connor that he could see from his upstairs bedroom. Arthur Shakespeare, a member of the Advisory Council, spoke out on behalf of those who were uncomfortable with the disparity between some academic staff and the general population, reporting that the University was “declaring war on the security of the Canberra community, and, through power and opulence, was able to place itself in a position more advantageous than any other authority”.40 By 1966 the Oliphants, tired of all the fuss—and most probably of the house as well—moved to a smaller house on the other side of Lake Burley Griffin at 37 Colvin Street, Hughes.41

The University made a concerted effort to provide accommodation for University staff—whose “irregular hours of work and occasional periods of almost constant attendance, demand accommodation near their jobs”—and their families, but due to a number of difficulties only a small number were built. Lewis was instructed to design a series of houses to be built on University land overlooking the proposed lake, a task for which he enlisted the help of his colleague Grounds—who had replaced him as Professor of Architecture at the University of Melbourne when he took on the University consultancy.42 Lewis provided details of a range of houses for different

74 categories of university staff: the Vice-Chancellor’s would be the largest, followed by a “Type A” for senior staff, a “Type D” for the Registrar, a “Type E” for non-senior staff, right down to the smallest—a single storey “Type B” for “other staff”.43

But in April 1949, when word got back to Lewis in Melbourne that the National Capital Planning and Development Committee did not approve of his single-storey design, he was not impressed: “I do not like my work as an architect being debated by a collection of Civil Servants, Surveyors, Engineers, with a minority of Architects”. His response was to provide an alternative design that would be “cheaper, but duller”.44 In regard to the revised plan, Leonard Strudwick, the University’s Buildings and Equipment Officer, asked Lewis if he “might care to alter” the “position of the door leading from the laundry to the entrance hall”. Strudwick also informed Lewis—who was quickly running out of patience with everyone in Canberra—of the Committee’s advice that that the two-storey houses should not be erected, that the boundary of the proposed lake (which the houses were supposed to overlook), could not be confirmed, and that the overall position with regard to the University housing was “far from satisfactory”.45 Ross Hohnen, the Acting University Registrar, instructed Lewis to stop work on the houses, at which point the architect expressed his dismay at the confused state of the University’s building policy, describing Hohnen’s personal attitude as “rigid and illogical”.46

In May 1949 the National Capital Planning and Development Committee confirmed that it was unable to approve the proposed “Type B” houses, stating that not only were they unsuitable for Canberra, they were unsatisfactory for residential use in any location. They also believed that the houses failed on aesthetic grounds, contained too much glazing, and would be prohibitively expensive. In regard to the location and orientation of the houses, the Committee reminded Lewis of the importance of sunlight and prospect.47 Subsequently the University abandoned plans for “Type B” houses, and adopted a “Type F” instead. After cost reductions—of which the major contributions were the omission of heating and the replacement of concrete floors with timber—the University eventually built a cluster of five of Lewis’s “Type F” staff cottages. These linear-shaped, single storey houses were sited in parallel rows—two in the front row and three behind—following the natural contours of the site to provide potential views of the proposed lake to the east.48

2.9 Collard and Clarke, site plan showing 5 Lewis “Type F” ANU staff houses, and proposed house for Sir Keith Hancock (lower left).49

2.10 Bri an Lewi s, ANU “Type F” staff houses, Brian Lewis Crescent, Acton. View from east. Photo by the author, 2009.

Lewis was also involved in protracted discussions regarding a residence for the Australian National University Vice-Chancellor, Sir Douglas Copland, and his wife Lady Copland. In 1950 he designed a large house for a site in McCoy Crescent,

76 opposite the Institute of Anatomy building. However, budget considerations forced him to design a smaller residence for an alternative site in Balmain Crescent, accessed via Mills Road. Lewis worked closely with Lady Copland on the design of the Vice- Chancellor’s house, and in May 1951 he asked Canberra-based architect Ken Oliphant to assist with the preparation of specifications and site supervision.50

2.11 Bri an Lewi s (with K en Oliphant), ANU Vice-Chancellor’s House, Mills Road, Acton, 1951. View from north. Photo by the author, 2009.

But with Lewis having lost the confidence of Oliphant and Florey—as well as key figures in the University administration—his role in the design of the Research School of Physical Sciences and the John Curtin School of Medical Research was diminished. Florey was adamant from the outset that the John Curtin School was to be designed by himself and his scientist colleagues, with some assistance from an English architect with whom he was acquainted.51 Lewis, the University’s appointed architect, found himself relegated to documenting the external shell and having no real involvement with the design of the exterior or interior. When this situation became known in Canberra, everyone involved—from Lewis to members of the Building and Grounds Committee—was outraged.52 Florey’s steely response, from Oxford, left no doubt as to how he viewed the increasingly isolated architect’s position:

The architect must be entirely subordinated to the scientific requirements of those who are to inhabit [the building]. As Professor Lewis has had no previous experience of constructing laboratories he may not be aware of this point of view. When this initial plan is received I will arrange to have it seen by those in this country with recent experience of building laboratories (scientists not architects!).53

Florey believed that the John Curtin School should be designed by those who were to occupy it. Having just appointed the first three medical professors for the School, he invited them to Oxford for discussions. In 1949 Arnold (“Hugh”) Ennor, Professor of Biochemistry,54 Adrien Albert, Professor of Medical Chemistry, and Frank Fenner, Professor of Microbiology, met Florey and his associate, Gordon Sanders, to discuss the layout. Influenced by new laboratories at the British National Institute of Medical research at Mill Hill, they sketched an “H”-shaped plan. Inside each parallel wing were south-facing laboratories and service rooms on either side of a central, narrow corridor, while in the connecting link were shared facilities such as administration, a library and lecture theatres.55 Lewis was not invited to the discussions, nor was he consulted: the first he heard about the layout was when Sanders travelled to Melbourne and presented it to him later that year. Lewis wrote to Copland, explaining his concerns that “no step taken now will hinder it from being a building of world importance”, and of the dangers of rushing into an “ill considered scheme”. He believed that the only way to avoid this was to establish “personal consultation between the Architect and the Scientists involved”—the very opposite approach, in fact, to that taken by Florey and his associates.56

When Sanders visited Lewis’s Melbourne office again the following year he reported back to Florey that “only one man” was working on the project. This signaled Lewis’s denouement.57 By 1953 his position was untenable, and, “given a hefty push”, he resigned as architect for the John Curtin School of Medical Research building.58

In 1957 Hancock requested that a house be built for himself and his family near the existing “Type F” cottages. The University engaged Max Collard, of Max Collard and Guy Clarke in Sydney—who were architects for the Australian National University Rock Mechanics Laboratory in Rivett Road—to design it.59 When Denis Winston—who had replaced Lewis as the university planner—attempted to change the orientation of the house, Hancock, who obviously understood the benefits of a north-facing house, confirmed his preference for the house to run “due east and west”. His only other

78 concern was for some form of fencing to prevent horses from eating his shrubs.60 The Hancocks lived in this house for a short time before moving to Campbell.

2.12 Collard and Clarke, ground floor plan, Hancock House, 14 Liversidge Street, Acton, 1958.61

2.13 Collard and Clarke, Hancock House, 14 Liversidge Street, Acton, 1957. View from north-east. Photo by the author, 2009.

Lewis battled on designing Oliphant’s Research School of Physical Sciences building, (later known as “The Cockroft Building”), despite Oliphant’s constant jibing that he was over-designing his laboratories by “building a palace” when he wanted a shed, and accusations that he was amending drawings without consulting him.62 Lewis did, however, remain design architect for one University building that neither Oliphant nor Florey had much influence over: University House. An attempt to introduce “gracious living” to the campus, University House had been largely Hancock’s idea, but was supported by his fellow Advisers because they believed it would make Canberra a more tolerable destination for themselves and their wives. Initially referred to as a “faculty club”, it was based on traditional Oxford or Cambridge colleges. The main functions of University House were to accommodate single University staff members, (Albert, a bachelor, lived at University House), researchers and visitors, and to provide a variety of formal and informal spaces for dining, meeting or study. As the centre of academic social life, and the most frequented building on campus, it was to be a showcase of contemporary Australian art and design, demonstrating that while the University maintained Oxbridge traditions, it also supported contemporary Australian culture.63 Melbourne-based designer Fred Ward—whose furniture design Boyd had praised in Victorian Modern in 194764—was commissioned to design furniture and fittings in local timbers, and Australian paintings were hung on the walls. Lewis had recruited Ward to teach interior design in the Architecture Department at the University of Melbourne, and his design work—a restrained, modernist interpretation of the English Arts and Crafts style, underscored by a sound knowledge of Australian timbers and construction methods—was the perfect match for his own architecture. University House was Lewis’s most successful building in Canberra, earning him a Sulman Medal in 1953.

2.14 Bri an Lewi s, courtyard, University House, 1953.65 2.15 Fred Ward , low table, Australian Academy of Science, c 1959. Photo by the author, 2009.

80 Ward moved to Canberra as Head of the Australian National University Design Unit in 1952, and designed some 4,000 furniture items, as well as fittings and accessories, for many Canberra buildings over the next eight years. His work was incorporated in the John Curtin School of Medical Research, the Australian Academy of Science, and the National Library of Australia. His elegant and reductive designs were skillfully interpreted by a generation of European master-craftsmen and cabinet-makers who arrived in Canberra via the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric scheme. Many of them went on to produce refined timber tables and chairs that graced the capital’s best modern interiors. One—Oswald Paseka—commissioned an architect to design his house.66

In addition to University House, Hancock’s other contribution to the University Campus was a new building for the Research Schools of Social Sciences and Pacific Studies, required to replace overcrowded premises in the old hospital building at Acton. Jim Davidson, Professor of Pacific History and a “known aesthete” who possessed a “romantic attachment to the South Seas”, had his friend Grounds design a series of buildings grouped around a lagoon with an Asian-Pacific theme. Hancock, however, had other ideas, favouring a geometric design prepared by Mockridge, Stahle and Mitchell that consisted of a series of introverted hexagons connected by covered ways. Just when it appeared that Grounds’s design had won the day, Hancock undermined it at a Council meeting and the hexagonal plan prevailed. Coombs, whom the completed building was named after, was somewhat uncomfortable with the honour, given that it was normally reserved for deceased persons, but thought that it would be churlish not to accept.67

2.16 “New Australians… new Furniture”. Immigrant master-craftsmen in Canberra admire a chair by Oswald Paseka. From left: Paseka (Austria), Hugo Vilumetz (Estonia), and Frommel (Germany).68 2.17 Mockridge, Stahle and Mitchell , model, Coombs Building, Australian National University, c 1961.69

In the 1950s, Ward’s wife Elinor (“Puss”) wrote a number of articles on architecture and design in Canberra for Australian Home Beautiful, becoming an unofficial publicist for the developing national capital in much the same way that her Melbourne compatriot,

81 Ruth Lane Poole, had done some thirty years previously. A March 1955 article, credited to the Wards, claimed that Canberra was no longer a “government town”, dominated by politicians and bureaucrats, but that other, “vital influences”, had appeared. The reasons for this shift were due to The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, which had added a “large body of scientists and their families”, and the Australian National University, which had “brought in more people of varied and exciting interests”.70

All of these new residents needed somewhere to live. While the procurement process for the Oliphant House had been highly unorthodox, the medical professors’ houses were a truer reflection of the conditions under which the University appointed senior academics, and the way in which they set up residence in Canberra. At the time, these were circumstances that were not only superior to those enjoyed by other Canberra residents, but were better than those offered by other Australian universities.71 To build a university in a country town containing a handful of existing residences, it was essential to offer incentives to prospective employees. For this reason the Department of the Interior provided professors with a temporary house upon arrival, and a block of land upon which to build a house. They had some choice regarding the building site—which was granted at a nominal lease—on the condition that they commence construction of their house within six months.

The fourth medical professor appointed by Florey, John (“Jack”) Eccles, Professor of Physiology, described the process by which he and wife Irene (“Rene”) acquired a large site at 28 Monaro Crescent, Red Hill: “One had to select a suitable block of land and then have a house built on it. I had officials of the ANU helping me and eventually on October 9th I selected a very large block of land in a very good site adjacent to the Embassy area. The government owned all the land and one had to make a nominal deposit and then pay a rental of £18 a year which I did on 9th October 1950 for a 99 year lease.” The neurophysiologist did not, however, avail himself of the services of a design architect, preferring to design the house himself and engage Tom Haseler—a Commonwealth Department of Works architect who had supervised University House—to complete the documentation and engage a builder.72 While Eccles was proud of his efforts as an amateur architect, his daughter Mary thought otherwise: “He might have been a brilliant scientist, but he was no architect. The house, with its two long dark passages at right angles to each other, was not the best design for living”.73

2.18 Eccles House, Red Hill. View from north, 1952.74

After considering one of Lewis’s standard houses for senior staff, Eccles’s neighbour Ennor engaged Robert Warren of Hocking and Warren to design a one-off house at 3 Vancouver Street, Red Hill.75 Like his client, Warren had just moved from Melbourne, and anticipated great opportunities for architecture and building in the rapidly developing capital city. The Ennor House was built by Austrian immigrant Karl Schreiner. Schreiner had built the Hancock House and both the temporary and permanent John Curtin School buildings, and his furniture had been featured in the Wards’ article on local design.76 The Wards described the Ennor House as typifying a “new kind of architecture” that was appearing in Canberra in the 1950s—one that formed a complete break from previous styles.77

2.19 Hocking, Warren and Associates (Bob Warren design architect), Ennor House, Red Hill, from east, 1955. The cantilevered box on the left was an extension of the living room.78

2.20 The four medical professors—Eccles, Albert, Fenner and Ennor—study plans for the John Curtin School of Medical Research, Canberra, August 1950.79

Another close neighbour was Fenner. When it came to choosing an architect, his decision was a direct result of the feud between Lewis and Oliphant. After looking at existing houses in Canberra and seeing nothing to his liking, Fenner asked Lewis if he could recommend an architect. With an oblique reference to the Oliphant House, which he obviously regarded as a failure, Lewis’s blunt response was that there were “two excellent architects in Melbourne—Roy Grounds and Robin Boyd—and none in Canberra.”80 He distinguished between Grounds and Boyd by saying that “if you choose Roy Grounds, he’ll build you a nice house, but you’ll live in the house that he designed. If you choose Robin Boyd he’ll build you a nice house, but you’ll live in the house that he designed for you. He will follow your wishes.” Based on this advice, Fenner—who obviously felt it important that his wishes be considered—contacted Boyd.81

On 29 September 1949 another future Boyd client left the comforts of Melbourne to begin a new life in the national capital. Although this event was not particularly significant in itself, the repercussions would have a major impact on Australian historiography. When Australian historian Manning Clark left coastal Melbourne for the inland high country of the national capital to become foundation Professor of History at the Canberra University College, (later incorporated into the Australian National University), he was seen to be leaving behind outmoded ideals and practices, and making a fresh start. In 1952 Dymphna Clark saw that her husband needed a dedicated space in which to write, and suggested that they build their own house. To

84 design a suitable space in this new, liberated location, from where Manning was to reflect on the nation’s history, they chose the avant-garde Boyd, who they both knew from Melbourne. Boyd, who was himself reflecting on the nation’s history of domestic architecture for Australia’s Home,82 travelled to Canberra to meet his clients on site at 11 Tasmania Circle, Forrest. Afterwards, as his airport bus was leaving the Trans Australia Airlines terminal in Civic, the author called out to him from the footpath: “Robin, put one room upstairs”.83 The architect duly obliged, and what began initially as an afterthought became Clark’s celebrated rooftop study, accessible only by ladder, perched like a tree- house over the central link in the binuclear plan. In the week that the builders were finishing the house, Australian poet Alec Hope stood with Manning in the study, looked out of the windows towards Mount Ainslie and Black Mountain, and said “I see books being written here”.84 And he was right. It was there, as the suburb of Forrest was built around him, that Clark wrote his six consecutive volumes of A History of Australia.85 The impact of this work on the national consciousness was so profound that, for a significant time afterwards, it was as if no previous Australian history existed.86 Manning Clark House is now administered under a family trust for the purposes of scholarly and cultural pursuits.

2.21 Rob i n Boyd , Manning Clark House, Forrest. View from north-west showing upstairs study. Photo by Conrad Hamann.87

The last of the Australian National University founding professors was known as “the father of the contraceptive pill”. While researching hormones for fighter pilots during World War II, Arthur Birch, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Sydney, experimented with the manufacture of male hormones through a synthetic process, and by 1950 was able to prepare analogues of natural steroid hormones. The process that he invented, but never patented—“Birch Reduction”—became universal practice in modern synthetic organic chemistry, and paved the way for others to manufacture oral contraceptives in the 1960s.88 In the late 1950s, when the idea of a Research School of Chemistry was raised, Ennor made it his priority to recruit Birch. But his

85 quarry, by then established in Manchester, had reservations about moving to Canberra and was hesitant to commit. After a lengthy period of negotiation Birch issued an ultimatum to the University: he would come if he was paid a certain amount, was made head of school, and was provided with a “decent house”. At this point the University sprang into action, engaging Sydney-based architects Bunning and Madden, who were then working on the Haydon-Allen Building for the Faculty of Arts, and the National Library of Australia. Sydney University-trained Noel Potter, who had moved to Canberra with Bunning and Madden in 1962 to oversee the Library, was asked to find a suitable site and to design the Birch House.89

With little contact with his clients—Arthur and his wife Jesse were still based in England—Potter relished the autonomy this commission offered. After inspecting five sites offered by the Commission—all of which had been set aside for diplomatic purposes—he selected a private, battleaxe block on the crest of a low rise at 3 Arkana Street, Yarralumla, and designed a rectangular, single-level house enclosing a central courtyard with swimming pool. With large expanses of glazing, the house was very open in character: panoramic views of the Brindabella Ranges were obtained from the entire living areas, most rooms looked into the internal courtyard, and a clear sightline was maintained from the front door right through the centre of the building to the landscape beyond.90 Potter encountered only one tricky design problem: the need for two extra bedrooms when Jesse gave birth to twins—whose arrival, coincidentally, was the same reason Arthur gave for not having time to take out a patent on his reduction process.

While Birch’s input into his own house was limited, he had more involvement with planning the new building for the Research School of Chemistry. Designed by Victorian architects Eggleston, Macdonald and Secomb, Birch proudly described it as a “beautiful, simple, scientific building”, one that was “technically and aesthetically the best in the University”.91 With his laboratories and house finalized, he was installed as foundation Dean of the University’s fifth research school, the Research School of Chemistry, in 1967.92 The Birch House was awarded the C. S. Daley Award (named after Charles Daley), for domestic architecture in Canberra by the Royal Australian Institute of Architects in 1968, was featured in The Australian Women’s Weekly and Australian House and Garden in 1969,93 and became a well-known venue for social functions in the capital city. Some time after Arthur died, Jessie sold the house to the architect Romaldo (“Aldo”) Giurgola, the designer of Australia’s Parliament House. Potter was delighted when Giurgola phoned him to say “it was the best house he ever lived in”.94

2.22 Bunning and Madden (Noel Potter), Birch House, Yarralumla, 1968. Central courtyard with swimming pool. Photo by Max Dupain.95 2.23 Birch House, living room with view of Brindabella Ranges. Photo by Ron Berg.96

The Reformation of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research

the great surge in the popularity of scientific education in the post-war era was … propelled … by the hope that scientific rationality would be able to fashion a new world order. Boris Schedvin97

At the second Annual General Meeting of the Australian Academy of Science, held in temporary premises at the Australian National University from 26 to 28 April 1956, the Treasurer, Hedley Marston, placed an architectural sketch on the table. Marston wanted the Academy to build a national headquarters in Canberra, and had, along with Eccles, been given the task of finding a suitable architect. The sketch that he presented to the other Fellows had been prepared by an architect friend in Adelaide, and depicted a classical-styled structure with columns. Also attending the meeting were Oliphant, President of the Academy, Otto Frankel, Vice-President and head of the Division of Plant Industry at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, and John Nicholson, Secretary for Biological Sciences.

Frankel was the first to react. He was appalled by the proposal, believing it to be “the kind of building that an Academy might have selected some 50 years ago”. Concerned that such a regressive style of architecture might become accepted as a “pattern for the building”, he vetoed it and initiated the appointment of a design committee.98 Unbeknownst to the others, Frankel had already approached Oscar Bayne—an independent Melbourne architect who later worked for Grounds—to ask his opinion about a suitable architect for the Academy building. Bayne had accompanied Grounds and Geoffrey Mewton on an overseas trip between 1928 and 1933,99 and was well connected in Melbourne circles.

Frankel had explained to Bayne that it was important to avoid “the safe and conventional” route, and how he wanted to engage an architect who was “modern in outlook", but whose competence could not be questioned. He wondered if Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School, would be suitable. Bayne replied that it was essential to employ an Australian architect—“it is Australia’s job to do its best and let it stand or fall on that”100—and provided Frankel with a list of prospective firms. It was decided to hold a limited design competition, and to invite most of the names on Bayne’s list to submit a proposal. When news of this came out, Frankel was confronted by Race Godfrey, President of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, who claimed that the terms of the competition had to be in accordance with the Institute’s rules. But Frankel wouldn’t have a bar of it: he wanted scientists to be in control, and wasn’t about to be dictated to by architects. If the Institute of Architects took over, decision- making would be removed from the scientists and placed in the hands of an external assessor. Frankel discussed with Oliphant the idea of having one architect sit alongside the scientists on the Committee in an advisory capacity—as a form of adjudicator in case they got stuck on some technical matter. Fearful of receiving conservative advice from an unknown quantity—like Godfrey—they asked Bayne if he would fulfill that role.101

For a fee of £50.0.0 to appease the Institute, Bayne attended the one and only meeting of the Building Design Committee, held in Marston’s library in Adelaide, on 1 December 1956. By this time another entry had appeared on the scene: Warren, having heard that no Canberra architect had been invited, had complained to the Academy and been given permission to submit a proposal.102 Oliphant—who deferred to Frankel’s better judgement when it came to matters of architectural aesthetics—asked Frankel to take the chair, and six design proposals were considered. Of these, the Committee voted unanimously in favour of the dome-shaped proposal by Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, who were selected as architects for the Australian Academy of Science building.103

Frankel looked back upon this process as “an adventure”. The Committee, he recalled, was an “active and highly argumentative body” whose members all contributed ideas and criticisms. He believed the success of the completed building was due to a combination of Oliphant’s obsession with quality of material and services, and his own concern with architectural design. Grounds’s contribution was an amalgam of “imaginative initiative, resilience, and, at times, tolerance”, and he believed that all those involved—including the architect—were “richer for the experience”.104 The Academy building, for which the architects won a Sulman Medal in 1959, was indeed

88 an unqualified success. Frankel described how it “helped to generate a corporate consciousness and, thanks to its architectural distinction, it enhanced a growing pride in the Academy. For the public it became a symbol of Australian science”. Goad described it as “Canberra’s, and Australia’s, first public building of national significance since World War II”, and ventured to add that it signified a turning point beyond which modernist ideals began to gain acceptance.105

2.24 Bob Warren, model of unsuccessful proposal for Australian Academy of Science building, Acton, Canberra, 1956. 2.25 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd , winning proposal for AAS building.106

That Frankel played such a key role in the Academy building is no surprise, given his background. A charismatic, idealistic, but sometimes brusque man, he held strong convictions about a range of issues. One colleague described him as a “geneticist by training, plant breeder by occupation, cytologist by inclination, and genetic conservationist by acclaim”.107 What he failed to mention was the scientist’s extraordinary contribution to the promotion and cultivation of modern architecture: it was Frankel, more than any other individual, who was responsible for creating what will be demonstrated to be an “architecture culture” within the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation during the 1950s and 1960s.

So where did Frankel’s passion for architecture come from? Born into a well-off family in Vienna in 1900, he studied at universities in Munich, Vienna and Giessen. An idealistic trait was evident from an early stage: Frankel withdrew from chemistry and enrolled in agriculture because he saw that as a better way to fight world hunger. Sometimes his strong convictions led to trouble: as a student in Vienna after World War I he was a committed communist, and on one occasion was arrested for addressing a street gathering. This readiness to stand up for what he believed in remained with him throughout his career: at the age of 89 he was photographed in a Canberra rally protesting at government cutbacks to science budgets.108

In Berlin Frankel gained a doctorate for a study of genetic linkage and married a German woman, Mathilde Donsbach (“Tilli”). He worked as a plant breeder on a

89 private estate near Vienna, and gained work experience in Palestine and England, before accepting a position as a geneticist in Christchurch, New Zealand, with the Wheat Research Institute. Frankel immersed himself in his work, and in the many outdoor activities offered by New Zealand’s South Island—including tramping, camping and fly-fishing. A pioneer skier in Canterbury, he helped to establish the Christchurch Ski Club and facilities at Arthurs Pass, and regularly competed in events throughout the South Island. But he always felt like a foreigner in Christchurch, stating that he was only really accepted in the ski huts.

2.26 “Dr. Otto Frankel competing in the langlauf [cross-country] race”. “New Zealand Skiing Championships Decided at Mount Cook, Southern Alps, South Island Last Week”.109 2.27 “Margaret and Otto Honeymoon 1940 Lake Wanaka New Zealand”.110

In 1937 Frankel divorced Tilli, and two years later married Margaret Anderson, a Christchurch artist and art teacher with whom he had conducted a secret affair for eight years—a very unusual practice in conservative, 1930s New Zealand.111 A painter and potter, Margaret had studied art in New Zealand and lived in Paris. With a group of artists and writers including Cora Wilding, Dame Ngaio Marsh, Edith Wall, Evelyn (“Eve”) Page and Viola McMillan Brown, she formed The Group, a breakaway from the conservative local arts society. Margaret and Page would paint each other naked in the Port Hills just outside Christchurch, and arrange their own exhibitions.112 The Frankels were regular visitors to Waitahuna, the Pages’ homestead at Governor’s Bay, which became a mecca for many of New Zealand’s most prominent creative minds, including the painter Toss Woollaston and poet Denis Glover. Former guests at Waitahuna remember being presented with beef cooked according to a Virginia Woolf recipe. The Frankels became key figures in the Christchurch artistic and cultural world, associating with other progressive thinkers such as university academics, musicians, skiers and artists.113 With Margaret’s parents they established the Risingholme Community Centre on the Anderson family estate (now Risingholme Park) in Opawa.

2.28 “Otto’s two wives Margaret Anderson Tillie Donsbach in the Port Hills”. 2.29 William (“Bill”) Sutton, Homage to Frances Hodgkins. Margaret Frankel is portrayed in the middle, facing the easel.114

In the same year that he married Margaret, Otto made another commitment—one that would alter the trajectory of twentieth-century New Zealand architecture. From 1937 to 1939 he was secretary of a committee that assisted Jewish refugees to immigrate to New Zealand. Frankel and the chair of the committee, Karl Popper, (who had attended the same school as Frankel in Vienna, in a class with his younger brother Paul), favoured the importation of intellectuals. The government, however, believed there were already enough of those types in the country, and preferred migrants with more practical skills. After managing to bring in a number of Jewish intellectuals “under the guise of cabinetmakers and pastrycooks”, Frankel must have thought that Ernst Plischke, the young Viennese modernist architect whose immigration he sponsored in May 1939, offered the best of both worlds.115 Frankel’s connection to Plischke had been established through his brother Theo, who had commissioned the architect to design his house in Vienna.116 Plischke had all the right credentials: he had studied in Behrens’s Master School at the Vienna Academy—where his final project in 1926 had been an Academy of Science building—had worked in Behrens’s office, and was regarded as a leader of the European modern movement.117 In New Zealand he settled in Wellington, where he worked for the Housing Department from 1939 to 1947. He then went into private practice with Cedric Firth—who, coincidentally, was the brother of Raymond, the Australian National University Academic Adviser for the Research School of Pacific Studies.118 Over the next two decades Plischke became the architect of choice for Wellington’s intellectual and artistic elite, and one of New Zealand’s most important practitioners.

Frankel’s contribution to Plischke’s antipodean career was significant: not only did he assist the architect’s passage to New Zealand, he also provided him with his first

91 house commission—the Frankel House, at 9 Ford Road, on part of the Anderson family’s Risingholme estate.

2.30 Ernst Plischke, Vienna, c 1930.119 2.31 “Otto [right] with his Ford Street House and Builder”, c 1939.120

A single-storey, timber house based on an “L”-shaped configuration, the Frankel House was designed to maximise afternoon sun while providing privacy from both road and neighbours. With a functional plan that abandoned internal circulation in favour of a very optimistic “sunporch”, a flat roof, large sliding doors and austere, crisp forms, it was a radical concept for New Zealand in the late 1930s—particularly for the Dominion’s most English city, where it generated “as much notoriety as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin House in Arizona”.121 Frankel proudly claimed his house to be “the first modern house in Christchurch”.122 But the Frankels’ assistance to Plischke’s architectural career did not end with their own house—he went on to design a number of others for members of their social and artistic milieu.123

2.32, 2.33 Ernst Plischke, Frankel House, Opawa, Christchurch, c 1940.124

In Christchurch the Frankels established a number of living and working patterns that would stay with them for the remainder of their lives. By building a house that, for its

92 time and place, was radically modern, they established a commitment to contemporary design that they would take with them to Canberra. They developed gardens around their home that were described as “a tribute” to their “imaginative and energetic work”, while at the Wheat Research Institute—where he became Chief Executive Officer in 1942—Otto embarked on a major construction program of new research facilities.125

In 1949 the Australian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research acquired a new name—the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)— and appointed a new chairman, the agricultural scientist Ian Clunies Ross. This was an important period for the Organisation, which was benefitting from unprecedented confidence in Australian science, and a dramatic increase in research funding.126 But Clunies Ross could see problems in the Division of Plant Industry, which was suffering from low morale and a lack of direction.127 There was also the need to implement Coombs’s vision, whereby the Organisation would not only be capable of reacting to immediate problems, but would be able to anticipate future tasks and to act as a public advocate for scientific research.128 One of the chairman’s first responsibilities was to appoint a scientist capable of heading the Division, and addressing these issues. Frankel, still living in New Zealand, was somewhat surprised when he was offered the job, given his already formidable reputation as a critic and “stormy petrel”.129 But it was partly those qualities that attracted Clunies Ross to him. A feeling of intellectual isolation in New Zealand, combined with a lack of “old stones and modern art”, led to Frankel’s decision to accept the position in Canberra. Although he felt even less at home in the Australian landscape, and was no closer to the European culture that he longed for, Frankel claimed he was “never made to feel a foreigner” in Australia.130

When Frankel arrived in Canberra he noted that the Division was “getting older”, and immediately set out to attract “very good young people in scientific fields”, whose expertise was directly related to the particular environmental problems that Australia was facing.131 The atmosphere of scientific autonomy that pervaded the Organisation, combined with the post-war impetus, provided a context in which he was able to recruit highly qualified scientists for specific research areas.132 In the first two decades after World War II “some of the world’s most brilliant minds” arrived in Canberra to work in the rapidly expanding Organisation. As Brad Collis explained, “the benefits to a young, developing country were incalculable.”133

At the same time Frankel became convinced that he needed a “big science” project to “put the division on the world map”, and to lift the Organisation’s profile and morale.

93 For Frankel, there was no better way to encapsulate the spirit of this venture than through architecture. The project soon evolved into the idea of a building whose form would be a physical manifestation of the expertise, energy and goodwill that science was attracting. But the building could not be a mere symbol of Australian science’s improving fortunes—it required a function. The rationale for the type of building this would be became evident as Frankel considered the myriad diverse climates and environments across the Australian continent, and the logistical problems associated with carrying out research in many isolated locations. If a large building, capable of simulating various climates, could be constructed in Canberra, it would centralise plant research across Australia, eliminate weather hazards encountered in remote field stations, and provide the Organisation with major reductions in running costs. The only similar building in the world at the time—although it was closed down shortly afterwards—was at the California Institute of Technology (“Caltech”) in Pasadena.134 Frankel and his biologist colleagues developed a sophisticated concept that improved on the Caltech prototype. To reduce the amount of time and energy that was consumed transporting plants into different rooms, it was decided to reverse this process in Canberra so that the climates—controlled by the latest air conditioning and remote control techniques—would be taken to the plants.135 The “Phytotron”, as it became known, was designed by Grounds, with whom Frankel had nurtured a friendship through the Academy building. It was subdivided into a series of individual chambers, each of which simulated a different climate, to enable scientists to research the responses of plants to varying climatic conditions.

2.34, 2.35 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd . Phytotron Controlled Environment Research Laboratory, CSIRO, Black Mountain, Canberra, 1962. View from south-west and interior, c 1963. (The lean-to glasshouses are on the northern side.)136

94 Legacy

Talents as well as bacteria need a nourishing medium in order to thrive. Siegfried Giedion137

The absolute power that the Academic Advisers—particularly Oliphant and Florey— exerted during their reign had profound consequences for the architecture of the Australian National University campus. At the core of their being was an unwavering belief that scientific rationality would build a better world, and that no-one—not even a highly regarded architect—was going to prevent them from achieving their goal. The control that Florey and the founding medical professors imposed over the design of the John Curtin School was based on function: they had clear ideas about the overall form of the building (based on the success of a previous model), and about the internal requirements of the laboratories, with their specialised equipment. In their relentless pursuit of functionality, the only part of the building that the medical professors were prepared to relinquish control of was the external cladding; an aesthetic matter, it was of little concern to them. As Florey stated so unequivocally: “The architect must be entirely subordinated to the scientific requirements of those who are to inhabit [the building]”.138 Sometimes the architectural results of this rigid, authoritarian approach—fed by their considerable personal successes—were unsuccessful: the first Oliphant house in Canberra was one example. But generally the Academic Advisers were not driven by arrogance or hubris as much as they were motivated by the desire to implement Coombs’s primary vision: that science should serve humanitarian purposes in an attempt to improve Australia’s physical and social environment.

The Academic Advisers’ parallel building project—constructing the personnel component of the University—brought to the national capital a group of young, highly qualified and highly specialized scientists and academics, many of whom were world leaders in their fields. In accordance with the spirit of post-war rejuvenation, all of the scientists who accepted chairs at the University were in their thirties or forties when appointed.139 Most were well travelled: many had served overseas during World War II, or had completed post-graduate studies or work experience in Europe or North America. In this way they had been directly exposed—either wittingly or unwittingly— to new developments in modern architecture within university campuses, scientific institutions and private residences that they had visited. Confident, forward thinking and optimistic about the modern world, they brought fresh impetus to the city.

95 In relation to the Kuhnian notion that certain factors contributed to paradigm shift, these scientists were in a prime position to bring about change. All were relatively young, and all were involved in building a new research university that had no existing traditions or ideologies to maintain. They were in an ideal position to observe new ways of thinking, and were operating within a professional context that encouraged them to be receptive to new ideas.

Through a network of contacts, conversations and recommendations, many of these new arrivals commissioned architects to design their houses. Fenner recommended Boyd to Dr. Clark from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, and to Dr. Hilary Roche, a physician from the Department of Health.140 One of Fenner’s first appointments, the microbiologist Ian Marshall and his wife Kathleen, commissioned Theo Bischoff, a Melbourne University architecture graduate and ex-student of Grounds, who had moved from Melbourne to work on the John Curtin School, to design their house in Curtin.141 Vladimir (“Val”) Paral, official Photographer for the John Curtin School, and his wife Heather commissioned Derek Wrigley to design their house in Narrabundah.142 Gordon Ada, who replaced Fenner as Professor of Microbiology in 1968 when he became director of the John Curtin School, lived in a house designed by Kevin Curtin in Pearce.143 Gutta Schoefl from the John Curtin School, and her mathematician partner, commissioned Roger Pegrum to design their Wamboin house. Ernest Titterton, appointed Professor of Nuclear Physics by Oliphant, and wife Peggy, built a modern house in Forrest, the geologist John Lovering and wife Kerry engaged Sydney architects Ancher, Mortlock and Woolley for their house in Deakin, while geophysicist Mervyn Paterson and his wife Katalin commissioned Canberra-based architect Enrico Taglietti for their Aranda house.144

2.36 Enrico Taglietti , Paterson House, Aranda. View from Juad Place, c 1968.145

Many of these clients had firm ideas regarding the type of house they wanted to live in. Paola Favaro claimed that it was largely because of the Paterson’s input that Taglietti—who had previously demonstrated a limited affinity to the Australian landscape—showed, in their house, a closer connection to the colours and textures of the surrounding environment.146 Ken Charlton described how the fortress-like appearance of the Paterson House was the result of the client’s request for a private house that withdrew from its suburban neighbours. He also noted that Taglietti amended his design for the living room fireplace so that the occupants could gather around the hearth, as was the practice in Katalin Paterson’s native Hungary.147

University administrators, and academic staff from the general studies, social sciences and Pacific studies faculties, extended the network of house commissions. University Registrar Ross Hohnen, and his wife Phyllis, commissioned John Scollay—who had worked with Lewis on University House—to design a house in Deakin.148 Economic historian Barnard appointed Anthony Pegrum for his house in Campbell,149 while Bischoff was engaged by Professor Douglas Pike—an historian who Hancock had appointed founding editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography—to design a house for himself, and his wife Louisa, in Campbell.150 Historians Deryck Scarr and Margaret Steven commissioned Hancock, Courtney and Renfree to design their houses in Curtin and Garran respectively, while anthropologist Derek Freeman and wife

97 Monica engaged Wrigley for their Deakin house. Another who commissioned Wrigley was statistician Ted Hannan and his wife Irene, whose house was in Red Hill.151

Oxford-trained philosopher Bruce Benjamin from the School of General Studies, and his wife Audrey, commissioned Melbourne architect Alex Jelinek to design their house at 10 Gawler Crescent, Deakin. In 1957 the Benjamin House overcame stiff opposition from such luminaries as Seidler, Boyd, Ancher, Mortlock & Murray, John Dalton and Peter Muller to be awarded House of the Year by the editors of Architecture and Arts.152 Commonly known in Canberra as the “round house”, the Benjamin House was in fact based on a Pythagorean spiral. Due to its striking appearance and prominent corner location, it is probably the most well known modern house in the capital city.

2.37, 2.38 Alex Jelinek, Benjamin House, Deakin, 1957. Photos by Wolfgang Sievers.153

Through his overall influence on the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, and his personal involvement in a number of significant architectural commissions, Frankel’s contribution to the architecture of post-war Canberra was significant. In addition to his central roles in the Academy building and the Phytotron, he built two modern houses for himself and Margaret in the capital (see Chapter Seven). Frankel possessed as much confidence in his beliefs as his Australian National University equivalents, and at least as much commitment to carrying them out. Like them, he was single-minded, determined, and dismissive of those whose opinions he did not respect. But he had additional qualities. When it came to architectural patronage, Frankel arrived in Canberra with considerable form, having worked with Plischke on his own house and having supervised the construction of new scientific facilities at the Wheat Research Institute. Frankel was a discerning aesthete with confidence in his own aesthetic judgement, and he would not hesitate to back his own opinion when it came to questions of architectural language and form. It was these qualities that led to the mutual respect, and close friendship, that he developed with

98 Grounds—a working relationship that underscored (and survived) their collaboration on a number of houses and buildings.

Grounds’s continuing success in Canberra owed much to Frankel. In addition to the above buildings he designed the School of Botany for the Australian National University. A number of his subsequent residential commissions for scientists working at the Organisation were a direct result of these larger projects. In addition to the Frankel House there were the Campbell houses for Nicholson and his wife Phyllis, John and Frances Philip and Bruce and Penny Griffing, the Philip and Moira Trudinger House in O’Connor, and an unbuilt proposal for Sir Rutherford (“Bob”) Robertson.154 Some of Grounds’s commissions extended outside the boundaries of the Capital Territory: in 1958 he designed a clubhouse building for the “Blue Cow” Ski Club at Guthega, of which Frankel was a founding member.

But Grounds was not the only architect employed by scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. The entomologist Doug Waterhouse and his wife Dawn engaged Moir and Sutherland for their house at 58 National Circuit (corner of Melbourne Avenue), Deakin. A modern interpretation of the Georgian style, the Waterhouse House was reminiscent of Doug’s family home, Eryldene, in Gordon, New South Wales, which had been designed in 1913 by William Hardy Wilson for his parents.

2.39 Moir and Sutherland, Waterhouse House, Deakin, 1958.155

The network of residential commissions for Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation scientists extended to new architectural firms in the capital city. George Stewart engaged Latvian immigrant architect Rudi Krastins, who his wife Valeska had met through the local Latvian community, to design their house in O’Connor. Stewart’s colleague Ralph Slatyer, and wife June, engaged Krastins for their house on an adjacent site. Keith and Mary Boardman hired Scollay to design a house in Forrest. When the suburb of Aranda—to the north-west of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s Black Mountain location—was

99 developed, John and Enid Falk, and Colin and Pam McDonald employed Roger Pegrum.156

Underlying the way in which these scientist-clients approached the problem of building a house was an acute awareness of climate and environment—a situation that was not altogether unexpected, given the nature of their day jobs. When asked why they commissioned architects to design their houses, these clients invariably responded that it was due to a lack of appropriate housing at the time. Their criticisms of existing models were based on two major concerns: inappropriate style and lack of sensible, environmentally aware design. All considered the popular way of building in historical styles, such as “Tudor” or “Spanish”, as totally inappropriate solutions to the problem of building a house in Australia. June Slatyer explained how she and Ralph did not like other houses in Canberra in the 1950s for that reason. Wanting “something that was more in tune with the land, more environmentally aware”, they were impressed by the understated, well-orientated solution that Krastins had provided for the Stewarts, and commissioned the same architect to design their house on an adjacent site. The resultant house was, June believed, “one of the first solar passive houses, orientated for north sun”, in Canberra.157

2.40 Rudi Krastins, Slatyer House and Stewart House, Hobbs Street, O’Connor. Mt. Ainslie is in the background. Photo by the author, 2009.

John Zwar, a plant physiologist who had been one of Frankel’s earliest recruits to the Division of Plant Industry in 1952, went further afield by commissioning Sydney-based Seidler to design his house in O’Connor. Zwar believed that existing Canberra houses were “pretty dreadful”. Describing the brick and tile houses that were constructed en masse in suburbs such as Turner in the immediate post-war years, he noted that they

100 were “very well built houses, brick houses… but there’s no light in them at all!” In regard to historical style, he considered that “building houses in imitation of something in the past … was just the most stupid thing you could do.”158 John and Frances Philip admired the way in which some early Australian buildings dealt with the harsh climate, but had very specific ideas about how their own house should deal with issues of sun control and heating, both of which John was able to quantify to Grounds through mathematical calculations based on his knowledge of physics.159

The idea of an architecture based on rational, environmental principles rather than style was nurtured and propagated throughout the corridors and tea-rooms of the Acton campus and Black Mountain laboratories during the 1950s and 1960s, where scientists regularly discussed houses, and architecture in general, with their colleagues. Often the results of these encounters were profound: it was through discussions with his colleagues that Zwar ended up asking Seidler to design his house, while discussions between Frankel and Philip resulted in the complete re-planning of Frankel’s second Canberra house.160 Many scientists, academics and their wives demonstrated a wider concern for their adopted environment by becoming involved in environmental organisations and lobby groups. Five—Hancock, Slatyer, Fenner, Frankel and Audrey Benjamin—formed a residents’ group with architect Wrigley and sought a legal injunction to stop construction of a telecommunication tower, (now known as “Telstra Tower”), on Black Mountain.161 That so many of those involved in building this scientific and intellectual community in the national capital were honoured with knighthoods for their work—Florey, Oliphant, Ennor, Copland, Clunies Ross, Frankel, Hancock, Grounds, Titterton and Eccles, (Eccles was also a recipient of the Nobel Prize and was Australian of the Year in 1963, while Coombs resisted the offer of a knighthood on several occasions)—is a measure of the enormity of their contributions. It was the legacy left by this extraordinary and unprecedented colony of national capital inhabitants, fired by the uncompromising ideals, energies and enthusiasms of the Academic Advisers amongst them, that led to the building of the houses discussed in the following chapters.

May you live for as long as man will bend the knee, or doff the lid, to imagination truth and integrity. Grounds’s tribute to Otto Frankel upon his Knighthood.162

101

1 “Age of the Masters” follows Reyner Banham’s Age of the Masters, a Personal View of Modern Architecture (London: The Architectural Press, 1975). On page 3 Banham—referring to a group of architects who he described as the “Masters of the Modern Movement” (Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Richard Neutra and Mies van der Rohe)—wrote: “While they lived they tyrannized the modern movement, monopolizing attention and preventing the attention of other (not always lesser) talents. The powerful example of their work seemed to circumscribe the range of action of architects all over the world …” The scientists Sir Howard Florey and Sir Mark Oliphant were sometimes referred to as “maestros”. See Stephen Foster and Margaret Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96 (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1996), 20, 22, 27, 32. 2 Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96, 256. 3 Howard Florey to Douglas Copland, Vice-Chancellor, ANU. Trevor Williams, Howard Florey, Penicillin and After (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 251-52; Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96, 74. 4 For a detailed account of the various explanations for this unusual nickname, see Tim Rowse, Nugget Coombs: a Reforming Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1-2. 5 Alison Lech, ed., The Savoy Food and Drink Book (London: Pyramid, 1988), 25. 6 Oliphant was named “Marcus” after Marcus Clarke, the Australian author, who his parents knew. Most people knew him as “Marc” until he was knighted in 1959. From then on he changed the spelling to “Mark”. In spite of the unusual surname that they shared, Marc Oliphant was not related to Canberra architect Ken Oliphant. 7 Stewart Cockburn and David Ellyard, Oliphant, The Life and Times of Sir Mark Oliphant (Adelaide: Axiom, 1981), 89. 8 Ibid., 145; Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96, 21. 9 Ibid., 19. 10 H. C. Coombs, Trial Balance (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1981), 20, 27. 11 John Maynard Keynes’s seminal work was The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936). “Reaffirmation of the Aims of CIAM: CIAM 6, Bridgewater”, Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture Culture 1943-1968 (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 100-01. 12 Jim Gibbney, Canberra 1913-1953 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1988), 209-210. 13 Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96, 22. Conlon was chair of the Australian Army’s Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs. 14 Frank Fenner and David Curtis, The John Curtin School of Medical Research, the First Fifty Years 1949-1998 (Gundaroo: Brolga Press, 2001), 9. 15 Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96, 22. 16 Cockburn and Ellyard, Oliphant, The Life and Times of Sir Mark Oliphant, 145-48. 17 Fenner and Curtis, The John Curtin School of Medical Research, the First Fifty Years 1949-1998, 3. 18 Walter Isaacson, cover notes, Eric Lax, The Mould in Dr. Florey’s Coat, the Story of the Penicillin Miracle (New York: Henry Holt, 2004). 19 Florey apparently passed away the same day that work was due to start on site. Williams, Howard Florey, Penicillin and After, 357-58. Stirling, a highly original architect, was often accused of building iconic “diagrams”, or powerful formal solutions that did not adequately address some issues. His History Faculty Library at Cambridge University was another building that fits into this category. One of the main criticisms of the Florey Building was noise transmission between rooms, which mostly occurred at the junctions between common walls and the glazed façade. 20 Coombs Papers, National Archives of Australia. 21 James Stirling, James Stirling: Buildings and Projects 1950-1974 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 114. Photo by Brecht-Einzig, London. 22 Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96, 67-69. 23 Geoffrey Serle, Robin Boyd, a Life (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 105; Cockburn and Ellyard, Oliphant, The Life and Times of Sir Mark Oliphant, 154. 24 Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96, 33. 25 Cockburn and Ellyard, Oliphant, The Life and Times of Sir Mark Oliphant, 154. 26 Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96, 70. 27 Cockburn and Ellyard, Oliphant, The Life and Times of Sir Mark Oliphant, 154.

102 28 Oliphant Papers, Barr Smith Library, University of Adelaide. 29 Australian Official Photograph, ANU Archives. 30 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 1599-1600. The references to the forest of Arden and Shakespeare are cited by Cockburn and Ellyard in Oliphant, The Life and Times of Sir Mark Oliphant, 71. 31 R. Myerscough-Walker, “Modern Design Midway”, Choosing a Modern House (London: The Studio), example 19. 32 Cockburn and Ellyard, Oliphant, The Life and Times of Sir Mark Oliphant, 88. 33 Myerscough-Walker, Choosing a Modern House. Photograph by Herbert Felton. 34 Even though Daley himself lived in a central location—from 1926 to 1967 he occupied a cottage at 20 Balmain Crescent, Acton, designed by Edwin Henderson, Executive Architect of the Federal Capital Advisory Committee—it appeared that he had a vested interest in expanding Canberra’s subdivision into new territory. Locals recalled that during Easter 1948 Daley took Oliphant to “some rather strange places in the landscape”. Cockburn and Ellyard, Oliphant, The Life and Times of Sir Mark Oliphant, 155. “When Professor Oliphant decided to return to Australia he asked Mr. Malcolm Moir, of Moir and Sutherland which designed the Oliphant House, to find him a quiet spot out in the bush away from the city and, if possible, with a view.” Australian Home Beautiful (March 1955): 47. 35 Advising the University that Peto was worth about £12,000.0.0, he felt that a house of about £10,000.0.0 in Canberra would be appropriate. Cockburn and Ellyard, Oliphant, The Life and Times of Sir Mark Oliphant, Axiom, 155. 36 The lowest tender, from Simmie and Co., came in at almost £16,000.0.0, more than 50% over budget. RAIA Contract between Oliphant and Simmie and Co., Rankins Road, Kensington, Victoria, 2 March 1950, for “erecting a part two storey brick residence at Block 1, Section 1, Division 1, Belconnen, ACT” (Dryandra Street was then unnamed). The cost stated in the contract was £15,822.0.0. The University offered to build the Oliphants a temporary house on the University site, but Rosa interpreted this as an attempt to avoid their obligations, and insisted that the house go ahead. With significant alterations to the documents to reduce costs, the Oliphant House was eventually built. The NLA file includes an undated “Reduction Bill”, with an extensive list of proposed omissions and savings. Specification and Bill of Quantities dated July 1949. Papers of Malcolm Moir (1903-1971), Manuscript Collection, National Library of Australia, MS 9169, Box 4, 1/55 O’Connor. 37 Cockburn and Ellyard, Oliphant, The Life and Times of Sir Mark Oliphant, 155. 38 Australian Home Beautiful (March 1955): 47. 39 “National University, Canberra, From Royal Academy Exhibition, London, 1950”, Architecture (April 1950): 47. 40 Gibbney, Canberra 1913 – 1953, 261. 41 Australian Commonwealth Electoral Roll, 1966. 42 Architecture (April 1950): 45. The collaboration is also mentioned by Conrad Hamann in “Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971”, (Ph.D. diss., Visual Arts Department, Monash University, 1978), 2.1, 43. 43 Lewis to Acting Registrar, ANU, 16 March 1949. Australian National University Archives: University Records, ANUA 53, Correspondence files, Box 469, 12.1.2.9 (1). 44 Lewis to Douglas Copland, ANU Vice-Chancellor, 12 April 1949. ANUA 53, Correspondence files, Box 469, 12.1.2.9 (1). 45 Leonard Strudwick to Lewis, 2 May 1949. ANUA 53, Correspondence files, Box 469, 12.1.2.9 (1). 46 Lewis to Hohnen, Acting Registrar, ANU, 5 May 1949. ANUA 53, Correspondence files, Box 469, 12.1.2.9 (1). 47 Daley to Hohnen, 26 May 1949. ANUA 53, Correspondence files, Box 469, 12.1.2.9 (1). 48 Grounds claimed that the main reason no more staff houses were built was because “the university authorities decided that if they provided housing for professors, they would have to provide it for all staff”. Roy Grounds, interview by Conrad Hamann, January 1978. Hamann, “Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971”, 51. 49 ANUA 53, Correspondence files, Box 980, 12.1.2.131 (1). 50 Oliphant originally worked in the Melbourne office of Percy Oakley and Stanley Parkes, and moved to Canberra in 1926 when the firm was awarded first prize in the Blandfordia residential design competition. In the following year he left Oakley and Parkes to establish his own practice in the Hotel Canberra, and became one of the capital’s first private architects. He continued to practice in the city for another forty years. In the early 1930s Oliphant designed a two-storey house at 2 Moresby Street, Blandfordia, for Robin Tillyard, Chief of the Entomological Division at the CSIR, and his wife Patricia (“Pattie”). The house became known as “The Dial House” because of a large sundial mounted on the northeast façade.

103 51 By early 1948 Florey decided that he was not happy with the architectural advice he was receiving from Australia, and asked Stephen Welsh, an English architect and Professor of Architecture at Sheffield, to design the medical school in collaboration with the Academic Advisers. This effectively relegated Lewis to the status of documentation architect. Williams, Howard Florey, Penicillin and After, 251-52. 52 Lewis was furious, especially when he realised that Welsh’s fees were to be deducted from his own. He fired back a hostile response, claiming that Welsh had been “unethical” and “impertinent”. He threatened to take the matter to the RIBA and the RAIA, and to resign if the University did not retract. Williams, Howard Florey, Penicillin and After, 251. 53 Florey to Copland. Trevor Williams, Howard Florey, Penicillin and After, 251-52. 54 While Florey instigated planning of the medical school, it was Ennor, more than any other person, who was responsible for its development into a world-class research centre. He was knighted in 1965. 55 Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96, 74; Williams, Howard Florey, Penicillin and After, 252-53. 56 Lewis to Copland, 21 July 1948. ANUA 53, Correspondence files, Box 469, 12.1.2.9 (1). 57 Fenner and Curtis, The John Curtin School of Medical Research, the First Fifty Years 1949-1998, 16; Williams, Howard Florey, Penicillin and After, 257. 58 Ibid., 16; Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96, 74. 59 The Rock Mechanics Laboratory was completed in 1959. A later version of the firm, Collard Clarke and Jackson, designed the Research School of Earth Sciences in Mills Road, Acton, in 1959 and 1964, and collaborated with J. Scarborough and Partners on the R. G. Menzies Library Building. 60 Extract from minutes of ANU Building and Grounds Committee, 11 September 1957; Hancock to Registrar, 25 September 1957. ANUA 53, Correspondence files, Box 980, 12.1.2.131 (1). 61 “House for Sir Keith Hancock”, 20 May 1958. “Pencil comments noted herein by Lady Hancock, 28.5.58.” ANUA 53, Correspondence files, Box 980, 12.1.2.131 (1). 62 Cockburn and Ellyard, Oliphant, The Life and Times of Sir Mark Oliphant, 162. 63 Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96, 71-73. 64 Robin Boyd, “Frederick Ward and the raspberry jam”, Victorian Modern, One hundred years of modern architecture in Victoria, Australia (Melbourne: Architectural Students’ Society of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, July 1947), 20, 45. The handles of a cabinet designed by Ward were made from raspberry jam wood, which smells like raspberry jam when being worked. 65 Australian News and Information Bureau. 66 Oswald Paseka built a house at 15 Yapunyah Street, O’Connor, designed by Krastins. Ann Whitelaw, “An open plan on sloping block”, Canberra Times (10 February 1970). Other craftsmen who worked with Ward at the Australian National University included Heinz Frank, Kees Westra, Conrad Tobler and Alphonse Stuetz. The architect Derek Wrigley also worked in the Design Unit. Derek Wrigley, “The ANU Years”, in Fred Ward, a Selection of Furniture and Drawings (Canberra: Drill Hall Gallery, ANU, 2.5.96-16.6.96). 67 Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96, 106-07, 134. 68 Australian Home Beautiful (March 1955): 55. 69 Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96, 134. 70 “Changing city of trees and sunshine”, Australian Home Beautiful (March 1955): 37-39; “The house they wouldn’t alter” (August 1957): 15-19; “Look – no Backyards!” (August 1958): 26-29. Canberra had been promoted as the Australian centre of scientific research as far back as 1947, when Australia: the Official Handbook, issued by the National Publicity Association, rated Canberra’s scientific credentials as second in relative importance only to its role as the centre of government. With the University still under construction, most of the credit for this was due to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and the other existing bodies: The Commonwealth Solar Observatory, the Australian Forestry School and the Australian Institute of Anatomy. Australia: the Official Handbook (Melbourne: Speciality Press, 1947). 71 Fenner and Curtis, The John Curtin School of Medical Research, the First Fifty Years 1949-1998, 12. 72 John Eccles, Papers of John Eccles (1911-1997) (manuscript), NLA MS 9330. folder 1, 164. The Eccles House was demolished for Enrico Taglietti’s 1976 Apostolic Nunciature. 73 Mary Mennis, The Book of Eccles, a Portrait of Sir John Eccles, Australian Nobel Laureate and Scientist, 1903-1997 (Queensland: Lalong, 2003), 150.

104 74 Ibid. 75 Lewis to Robert (“Bob”) Osborne, ANU Registrar, 8 November 1948. ANUA 53, Correspondence files, Box 469, 12.1.2.9 (1). 76 Schreiner arrived in Canberra in 1949, and built up a successful construction business based in Lonsdale Street, Braddon, with a factory in Cotter Road. He later returned to his native Austria. Gibbney, Canberra 1913 - 1953, 240. 77 Australian Home Beautiful (March 1955): 55-59. 78 Ibid., 51. 79 Australian News and Information Bureau, ANU Archives. 80 Serle, Robin Boyd, a Life, 133. 81 Frank Fenner, interview by the author, 18 October 2007. Serle’s account of Fenner’s recollection is essentially the same: “the client would have to live in whatever house Grounds built, whereas Boyd would build a house that incorporated the wishes of the client.” Serle, Robin Boyd, a Life, 133. 82 Robin Boyd, Australia’s Home, Its Origins, Builders and Occupiers (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1952). 83 The conversation at the bus terminal was described by Serle in Robin Boyd, a Life, 132, and by Peter Freeman in “Manning Clark House: an architect’s view”, in Trevor Creighton, Peter Freeman, Roslyn Russell, Manning Clark House Reflections (Canberra: Manning Clark House, 2002), 36. 84 Ibid., 37. 85 C. M. H. Clark, A History of Australia (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1962). 86 This view was identified, and then questioned, by Stuart Macintyre in his Trevor Reese Memorial Lecture of 28 April 1992 titled “History, the University and the Nation”. Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. The belief that no previous Australian history existed would not have been shared by Hancock, who wrote Australia in 1930 (London: Ernest Benn). 87 Geoffrey Serle, Robin Boyd: a Life (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 133. Following a request from Dymphna Clark, Boyd extended the cantilevered awning to protect the study from winter sun. 88 “Chemist had a thirst for research”, Arthur Birch Obituary, The Australian (19 December 1995); “A Medal for the Birch Reduction”, Canberra Times (21 December 1972). 89 Noel Potter, interview by Margaret Park, National Library of Australia, 16 August 2004. 90 Potter claimed that the openness of the design was influenced by an earlier house he had designed in Lightning Ridge for Patricia Waterford. He described this precursor as “a slab on the ground, every room opened out, little courtyards. Every room you either had a courtyard or a garden you just walk through. Open plan and tiles all throughout”. Noel Potter, interview by Margaret Park, National Library of Australia, 16 August 2004. 91 “A Medal for the Birch Reduction”, Canberra Times (21 December 1972). 92 Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96, 120, 229-31. 93 Ron Berg, “Canberra House Wins Design Award”, Australian Women’s Weekly (April 23, 1969): 70-72; “Contemporary Canberra, a Winner all the Way”, Australian House and Garden (August 1969): 36-37, 78-79. 94 Noel Potter, interview by Margaret Park, National Library of Australia, 16 August 2004. 95 The Work of Bunning and Madden, Architects and Town Planners (Sydney: 1970), 96. 96 Australian Women’s Weekly (April 23, 1969): 70. 97 Boris Schedvin, Shaping Science and Industry, a History of Australia’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 1926-49 (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 287. 98 Otto Frankel, “A Personal Memoir on the History of the Design of the Australian Academy of Science Building”, 16 September 1970, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900-2007), Manuscript Collection, Adolph Basser Library, Australian Academy of Science, MS 106, Box 13, Item C, 2. 99 Phillip Goad, “The Modern House in Melbourne 1945-1975” (Ph.D. diss., University of Melbourne, 1992). Part 1, 30. 100 Bayne to Frankel, 17 May 1956, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900-2007), 13/C. Gropius had also been mentioned by Moir as a possible architect for University House. See Jill Waterhouse, University House as They Experienced it, a History 1954-2004 (Canberra: Australian National University, 2004), 26. 101 Bayne was a highly influential figure. Some time later he was asked to advise on a list of suitable architects for the Victorian Arts Centre, for which Grounds was eventually selected. Vicki Fairfax, A Place Across the River, They Aspired to Create the Victorian Arts Centre (Victoria: MacMillan, 2000), 63.

105 102 Warren’s design was a rectangular building with various elements cut in, or added, to the overall form: a fan-shaped entry on the Gordon Street side, an auditorium perched like a landed spacecraft on the roof, and a raised volume at the western end for accommodating visiting scientists. AAS Collection, Basser Library, MC 4, Items 10, 11, 12. 103 These were by Borland, McIntyre & Murphy, Powell, Mansfield and Maclurcan, Grounds, Romberg & Boyd, Hassell and McConnell, Mockridge, Stahl & Mitchell, and Robert G. Warren. “The Academy Building”, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900-2007), Box 13, Item D, p. 3. For an account of the design submissions see Philip Goad, “Shells, Spires and a Dome, Science and Spirit in the Space Age”, in Ann Stephen, Philip Goad and Andrew McNamara, Modern Times, the Untold Story of Modernism in Australia (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2008), 134-141. 104 Otto Frankel, “A Personal Memoir on the History of the Design of the Australian Academy of Science Building”, 16 September 1970, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900-2007), Box 13, Item C, 5-6. 105 Otto Frankel, quoted by Lloyd Evans, “Otto Herzberg Frankel 4 November 1900 – Elected FRS 1953”, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900-2007), MS 106, Box 12, Item A, 54; Philip Goad, in Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, Philip Goad, Modernism & Australia, Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917-1967 (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2006), 899-901. 106 Basser Library, Australian Academy of Science. 107 Lloyd Evans, quoted in Brad Collis, Fields of Discovery, Australia’s CSIRO (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002), 205-06. 108 Ibid., 205-06. 109 Auckland Weekly News (6 September 1933). 110 Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900-2007). 111 Margaret Evans, speech given on the occasion of Margaret Frankel’s eightieth birthday, 8 October 1982, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900-2007), Box 12, Item B. Otto met Margaret when she and some friends asked Tilli about German lessons. Even though she and Otto were living apart, Tilli would not agree to a divorce, so Otto and Margaret virtually lived together for 9 years. In “discrete, NZ – Ch-Ch style”, however, during this time Margaret always returned home for breakfast. Lloyd Evans, handwritten notes, “Otto”, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900-2007), Box 15, Item F, 202. 112 Margaret Evans, speech given at Margaret Frankel’s funeral, 11 December 1997, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900-2007), Box 12, Item B. “When Margaret F. described how she & Eve Page painted one another nude in a valley near Ch.Ch., Otto boasted ‘I soon cured her of her lesbian tendencies.’” Lloyd Evans, “Otto 31.10.84”, handwritten note, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900- 2007), Box 15, Item E, 167. 113 Lloyd Evans, “Otto Herzberg Frankel 4 November 1900 – Elected FRS 1953”. The painter Toss (later Sir Toss) Woollaston was among their Christchurch friends from that period. In later years Otto and Margaret gifted two of his paintings to the National Gallery of Australia. Glover, and the Virginia Woolf recipe, are mentioned by Glenys Bowman in “A Page of NZ Artistic History”, New Zealand Woman’s Weekly (23 February 1987): 35. 114 Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900-2007). 115 Evans, “Otto Herzberg Frankel 4 November 1900 – Elected FRS 1953”; Evans, handwritten notes “Otto 25/5/87, notes from dinner”, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900-2007), Box 15, Item E, Page Number 155, Note 3. 116 Evans, “Otto Herzberg Frankel 4 November 1900 – Elected FRS 1953”. Another connection was through the modernist Viennese potter Lucie Rie and her husband Hans, who Theo Frankel met skiing at St. Anton. The Ries had provided Plischke with one of his first commissions, the interior of their apartment at No. 24 Wollzeile in Vienna. In 1938 Theo assisted the Ries to move to England. Tony Birks, Lucie Rye (Somerset: Marston House, 1987), 28-29, 33. 117 Ernst Plischke, On the Human Aspect in Modern Architecture (Vienna: 1969), 18; D. G. Porter, “An Immigrant Brought Live Vision to New Zealand”, The Dominion (6 April 1963). 118 “His brother, Raymond Firth, had become an internationally acclaimed anthropologist”. Greg Bowron, “Firth, Cedric Harold 1908 – 1994, builder, architect, writer”. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, http://www.dnzb.govt.nz. 119 “The youthful, compelling architect Ernst Plishke, designer of the Apartment Rie”, Tony Birks, Lucie Rye, 28. 120 Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900-2007). 121 Evans, handwritten note quoting Nancy Sawyer, Basser, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900-2007), Box 15, Item D, 74. 122 Evans, “Otto Herzberg Frankel 4 November 1900 – Elected FRS 1953”. See also Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, At Home, A Century of New Zealand Design (Auckland: Godwit, 2004), 82. 123 For instance Evelyn Page and her husband Frederick commissioned a Plischke house at Waikanae, near Wellington, in 1951. This is mentioned in a letter that Frankel’s first wife Tilli wrote to him about mutual friends “Eve and Fred”, and their

106 dealings with Plischke. Tilli Aldrich to Otto Frankel, Takapau, Hawke’s Bay, 30 October 1967, 3 November 1967, 4 November 1967 (same letter). AAS Adolph Basser Library, Frankel, O. H., MS 106, Box 13, Item B. 124 Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900-2007), Box 13, Item A; Plischke, On the Human Aspect in Modern Architecture, 130. Photographer unknown. 125 “New Post in Australia. Leading Plant geneticist. Christchurch Pair Will Be Missed.” New Zealand Herald Free Lance (19 September 1951): 22. 126 “In scale, range and self-confidence, the organization was unrecognisable in 1945 compared with the small and somewhat defensive entity of the late 1930s. The most obvious change was the four-fold increase in size.”… “CSIR was in an exceptionally favourable position at the end of the war to achieve its scientific ideals. It received much of the credit for the rapid wartime technological progress, and had established itself as the premier scientific institution in the country.” Schedvin, Shaping Science and Industry, a History of Australia’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 309, 318. Being a short distance from Parliament House and government offices, the Black Mountain laboratories were within sight of politicians and bureaucrats, another factor that contributed to the expansion of the Council, in conjunction with the growth of federal government, in the post-war decades. Again, Coombs was a key figure: with William Dunk, chairman of the Public Service Board, he prepared a report on the reorganization of the Council for Prime Minister Chifley. Ibid., 339. While biological and environmental scientists enjoyed the spoils of wartime success, the same could not be said for physicists. There was much unease about nuclear physics since atomic bombs had been dropped on Japanese cities, and “Cold War paranoia” affected many scientists working in that field. Ibid., 318. 127 Brad Collis, Fields of Discovery, Australia’s CSIRO (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002), 206. 128 The Minister, John Dedman, stated that a post-war Council needed to do more than solve technical problems. In March 1944 he began to urge the Council to plan ahead, so that in a post-war environment it was ready to take on a broader role as public advocate of the benefits of scientific research: “CSIR must be more than a great scientific organisation—it must … play an important part in public education, in foreseeing the problems which will cry out for solution in ten years’ time …” Schedvin, Shaping Science and Industry, a History of Australia’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 1926-49, 325. 129 Bruce Juddery, Canberra Times (29 May 1968). 130 Evans, “Otto Herzberg Frankel 4 November 1900 – Elected FRS 1953”. 131 Bruce Juddery, Canberra Times (29 May 1968). 132 One of the founding principles of the Organisation was that it would be managed by scientists rather than by bureaucrats, so that research priorities would be, as far as possible, insulated from potentially conflicting political agendas. 133 Collis, Fields of Discovery, Australia’s CSIRO, xii, vii, xiii. 134 The Caltech Phytotron at Pasadena was largely due to Frits Went, a Dutch biologist who moved to Caltech in 1933. In 1949, with the support of a generous benefactor—Harry Earhart—Went constructed the Earhart Plant Research Laboratory, which his Caltech colleagues nicknamed the “Phytotron”. This building became the prototype for the Canberra installation, and for others around the world. The Caltech Phytotron was demolished after a few years, when it became apparent that its enormous operating costs far exceeded the Institute’s budget. Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences (U.S.), (Washington: National Academy Press), Vol. 74, 351-2. 135 Architecture in Australia (December 1964): 108-09. 136 Ibid., 108, and CSIRO. 137 Giedion stated that Neutra would not have enjoyed the success that he did if he had not left Austria early in his career. Siegfried Giedion, “R. J. Neutra, European and American”, in Richard Neutra 1923-50, Buildings and Projects (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964), 8. 138 Florey to Copland. Williams, Howard Florey, Penicillin and After, 251-52. 139 Fenner, Professor of Microbiology, was aged 34; Ennor, Professor of Biochemistry, was 35; Titterton, Professor of Nuclear Physics, was also in his mid-thirties; Albert, Professor of Chemistry, was 41; Eccles, Professor of Physiology, was aged 47, while Birch, appointed Dean of Chemistry some years later, was in his mid-forties. The Academic Advisors were all under fifty years of age: Oliphant was 45, Florey—already a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for the development of penicillin—and Hancock were both 48. 140 Of these, only the Roche House, at 4 Bedford Street, Deakin, which Boyd designed in 1955, went ahead. 141 Ian Marshall and Kathleen Sutton, a laboratory technician, moved to Canberra, from Melbourne, at the same time. But, as their former employer Fenner explained, they “made the mistake of not getting married before they came up, so they were

107 separately located in boarding houses. And they got married, and they had a hell of a job in trying to get a house built for themselves”. Frank Fenner, interview by the author, 18 October, 2007. The Marshall House, at 86 Morgan Crescent, Curtin, was designed by Bischoff in 1966. An upstairs extension has since been added. Ann Whitelaw, “Children Have Their Own Living Area”, Canberra Times (9 July 1968). 142 The Paral House was at 22 Brockman Street, Narrabundah. In 1965 it received a Commendation from the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (ACT Chapter). 143 Whitlelaw wrote that the Ada House, at 71 Parkhill Street, Pearce was designed by Kevin Curtin and was being built for Mr. H. Constable when the Adas bought it. “Character in a House”, “Homes and building”, Canberra Times (30 June 1970). 144 The Schoefl-Miles House was at 1 Sutton Road, Wamboin, New South Wales; the now-demolished Titterton House was at 8 Somers Crescent, Forrest; the Lovering House of 1967 was at 38 Beauchamp Street, Deakin, and the Paterson House was at 7 Juad Place, Aranda. For the Lovering house see Whitelaw, “Reaching for the Stars at Deakin”, “Homes and Building”, Canberra Times (12 November 1968). 145 Enrico Taglietti: Architect in Australia (Milan: Lodigraf, 1979), 61. Photographer not noted. 146 Paola Favaro, “Drawn to Canberra: the Architectural Language of Enrico Taglietti” (Ph.D. diss., Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales, 2009), 287-88, 292. 147 Ken Charlton, Bronwen Jones, Paola Favaro, The Contribution of Enrico Taglietti to Canberra’s Architecture (ACT: RAIA, ACT Chapter, Register of Significant Twentieth Century Architecture Committee, 2007), 6, 51. 148 The Hohnen House, c 1956, was located on the corner of Empire Circuit and Grey Street, Deakin. 149 The Barnard House, c 1963, was at 18 Godfrey Street, Campbell. Patricia Clarke, “Couple build solar house for £7,500”, “Homemakers”, Canberra Times (17 July 1964). 150 The Pike house, designed by Bischoff in 1965, was at 2 Garsia Street, Campbell. See Whitleaw, “Courtyard and Fountain Provides Bright Focal Point”, Canberra Times (4 June 1968). 151 The Scarr House, designed in 1966, was at 38 Munro Street and corner of Munro Place, Curtin. Whitelaw, “House which seems bigger than it really is”, “Homes and Building”, Canberra Times (30 August 1968). The Steven House of the same year, at 3 Bonwick Place, Garran, was not designed specifically for Steven—it was already under construction when she arranged to purchase it. Margaret Steven, in discussion with the author, 2007. The Freeman House was at 5 Daly Street, Deakin, while the Hannan House, c 1962, was at 8 Penrhyn Street, Red Hill. 152 Architecture and Arts (March 1958 and June-July 1958). The Benjamin House, at 10 Gawler Crescent, Deakin, was designed by Jelinek in 1956. Bruce and Audrey’s son, Roger, is writing a book on the Benjamin House. 153 “On File: Benjamin House by Alex Jelinek, 1957, Gawler Crescent Canberra”, Transition 24 (Autumn 1988): 80-81. 154 The Nicholson House, designed in 1965, was at 24 Cobby Street, Campbell; the Philip and Griffing Houses, completed in 1961, were at 42 and 44 Vasey Crescent, Campbell, and the Trudinger House of 1965 was at 144 Dryandra Street, O’Connor. The Robertson House was not built. It was listed as a project of c 1966 in Hamann, “Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971”, vol. 2, 66. 155 Australian Home Beautiful (March 1955). 156 The Stewart and Slatyer Houses were at 6 and 8 Hobbs Street, O’Connor. See Illustration 2.36. For the Stewart House, see Whitelaw, “The house with a swinging wall”, “Homes and Building”, Canberra Times (25 November 1969). The Boardman House was at 6 Somers Crescent, Forrest; the Falk House was at 18 Araba Place, Aranda, and the MacDonald House was at 46 Mirning Crescent, Aranda. 157 Like Krastins, Stewart’s wife was Latvian. June Slatyer believed this was the connection that linked the Stewarts to Krastins. Interestingly, the Slatyer House contained an oval shaped kitchen which June Slatyer described as being “very Freudian—an egg shape for the lady of the house”. Whether or not her husband Ralph spent a lot of time in that room is not particularly relevant, yet it seems that the ovoid space might have contained equal significance for a biological scientist. June Slatyer, in discussion with the author, 28 October 2008. 158 John Zwar, interview by the author, 26 September 2008. 159 See Chapter Five. 160 Frankel to Grounds, 6 November 1969, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900-2007), Box 13, Item C. 161 Their attempt, in 1973, was unsuccessful. NLA Manuscripts Collection, MS5350, NAA: 8869243, A10273. 162 Grounds to Frankel, 14 January 1966, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900-2007), Box 13, Item A.

108 Chapter Three

PARADIGM SHIFT: BOYD AND THE FENNER HOUSE

Designed for microbiologist Frank Fenner, his wife Bobbie and their two children, the Fenner House was Boyd’s first commission in Canberra, and the second house that he designed for these clients. The first design was for a site in Hotham Crescent, Deakin, but proved to be too expensive, and was abandoned.1 This version, for a much larger site that the Fenners acquired on the corner of Monaro Crescent and Torres Street, Red Hill, was built during 1953 and 1954 by Karl Schreiner for the contract sum of £8,500.0.0.2

3.1 Robin Boyd, Fenner House, view from north-east, 1956.3

The story of the Fenner House is chronologically and conceptually linked to Boyd’s seminal 1952 publication Australia’s Home, an analysis of Australian houses in which he was particularly critical of those in Canberra. It is highly likely that, in 1950, when Boyd stood in “the lonely valley” and lamented the “kaleidoscope” of historic styles: “jazz, Californian bungalow, Spanish Mission and Elizabethan”, all borrowed from Sydney and Melbourne, and the “curving avenues of florid, pretentious façades”,4 he had travelled to Canberra to meet the Fenners, and was standing on their original house site in Hotham Crescent.5 The Fenner House was Boyd’s reaction to all that had come before. A riposte to Canberra’s existing domestic architecture, it signalled the arrival in the national capital of a new way of thinking about architecture, and a new aesthetic.

Everything about this house was different. While most faced the street, the Fenner House straddled the large corner site diagonally in two completely separate blocks, connected

109 only by a barely-visible glass link containing an entrance hall. It was hard enough to distinguish where the “front” was, let alone the entry. Unfamiliar from every angle, and deliberately eschewing any gesture to known symbols or established reference points of what houses were supposed to contain—front and back, prominent entrance, verandah, street elevation, façade, symmetry, dominant roof-form—the Fenner House, to many, hardly qualified as a house at all.

Those who ventured inside might have been further surprised by the fact that the professor’s house was so fundamentally grounded in functionality and rational thought that it was laid out according to what time of day it was. To the right of the entrance hall a north-facing “diurnal” block catered for day-time activities: living room, dining room, kitchen and laundry. To the left of the entrance the south-facing, “nocturnal” block contained a garage, playroom, bedrooms, bathroom, and study.

3.2 Robin Boyd, Fenner House, view from west, 1954. Diurnal block is on the left, nocturnal on the right.6

110

3.3 Robin Boyd, Fenner House, floor plan, 1953.7

More than half a century after it was built, members of the Fenner family still live on the site: Fenner, “the most highly decorated and awarded Australian scientist of the 20th and 21st century”,8 now a widower in his mid-nineties, lives in a 1982 addition to the main house. His daughter Marilyn—who grew up in the original house—now lives there with her family. While the interior is virtually the same as it was in the 1950s,9 the exterior is now largely screened by trees, providing a vivid contrast to the early photos depicting a white house of simple, bold forms with splashes of primary colours sitting in an open landscape. The colours have mellowed, trees and bushes have grown, and all that is visible is the garage to Monaro Crescent, the addition to the Torres Street side—which replicates the forms and detailing of the original house—and part of the glazed gable wall above the rampant Sessile Juniper. But the house remains incongruous with its neighbours: perhaps more than ever. Many of the original houses in the suburb have been demolished and replaced by large Palladian, Tuscan and Balinese-style, air- conditioned mansions with swimming pools, high steel fences, automatic gates and imported chandeliers: the latter alone, in some cases reputedly costing as much as the original Fenner House.10 These are a far cry from this genuine attempt by Boyd and the Fenners to find an appropriate post-war house—an undertaking whose commitment to clear thinking and experimentation is embodied in the fabric of this house.

111

3.4 Viewing Canberra Medallion on wall of Fenner House, 1956. From left: Karl Schreiner (holding screwdriver), Vicki Fenner, Mrs. Schreiner, John Scollay (ACT Chapter, RAIA), Frank Fenner, Marilyn Fenner and Bobbie Fenner. Boyd was in the USA at the time.11

A New Type

The simplicity of this work was akin to the simplicity of the farm- building and out-house. Robin Boyd, Australia’s Home12

As eminent practitioners and writers within their own professions, Fenner and Boyd were both conversant with systems of typological classification. Fenner’s introduction to typology began while he was a boy at secondary school. His father Charles—also a scientist—took him to see the rocks at Hallets Cove, where Frank accumulated “quite a good collection of fossils”. By trading with other collectors, he eventually acquired a Triassic fossil of Ginkgo leaves, and now claims to have the best Ginkgo tree in Canberra in his garden at Torres Street. Fenner believed that these early interests in the order of the natural world played a large part in the direction of his career.13

The concept of type as a classificatory system is not unique to architecture or to science, but is a device that both have employed, in various manifestations, since the eighteenth century. The introduction of type within architectural discourse can be traced back to scientific classificatory systems, particularly to Carl Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum of 1753,

112 and Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle of 1749, both ambitious attempts at global classification of biological phenomena.14 Other important contributions were made by the poet- scientist Goethe, who invented the word “morphology”—the science of form—and Georges Cuvier.15 French writer Jacques Francois Blondel’s 1777 Cours d’Architecture is frequently cited as the origin of the modern architectural system of typological classification, but that system was essentially based on genres and appropriate character rather than on morphology.16 Nineteenth-century German architect and writer Gottfried Semper based his theory of architectural type on animal and plant morphology. His “prototypical forms”—Urformen, Normalformen, Urkeim and Urmotiven—were all taken from Goethe’s theories of plant and animal form.17 In a further link to biological classification, Adrian Forty even suggested that the number of types recognised by Semper—four—was influenced by Cuvier’s identification of that same number of types within the animal world.18

More recent examples of architectural classification were contained in Boyd’s Victorian Modern of 1947, and in Australia’s Home. In Victorian Modern Boyd teased out and wove together selected strands of twentieth-century domestic architecture that he believed were most appropriate for the Victorian context to form a specific, ideal type. He termed this the “Victorian Type”. Boyd believed that, subject to local climatic variations, the basic principles underlying this were relevant to all of Australia. Although the existence of such a type has since been questioned by others—such as Philip Goad—it is useful in understanding Boyd’s architectural criticism and practice to examine his intent.19 The Victorian Type was essentially a “long, low, light house [that] spreads over the lot … made up of wings of single room width … One long simple stretch of low roofed house.”20

In Australia’s Home Boyd attempted to classify twentieth-century houses on a national basis, condensing what initially appeared to be “at least seven hundred varieties” to five principal house types. These were “The Primitive Cottage”, “The Bungalow”, “The Asymmetrical Front”, “The L-shape” and “The Triple-front”.21 Notably, his Fenner House did not fit any of these categories. It will be established that this house, designed at the same time that Boyd was formulating his typology of Australian domestic architecture, was heavily influenced by his reaction to that research.

Another Australian architect whose houses departed from Boyd’s classification was Seidler, who had previously worked for Marcel Breuer in New York. There he had drawn the plans for the Geller House, Breuer’s first realised binuclear house. Boyd described Seidler’s houses as “sure, mechanically precise things … square, straight, white and challenging.”22 The 1948 Rose Seidler House, designed for the architect’s mother in

113 Turramurra on the northern fringes of Sydney, was essentially a solid, white object raised above the landscape and “hollowed out” to accommodate an outdoor deck. The Rose Seidler House owed everything to International Style modernism, and nothing to existing Australian house typology. Seidler’s houses proved to Boyd that regionalism, as exemplified by the Victorian Type, was not the only solution for the post-war house in Australia.23

In addition to the morphological system, the other common method of classification within architecture is by function: for instance, “house”, “school”, “farming shed”, “factory” or “laboratory”. Much of the discourse around typology has focused on the nexus between the two systems: that is, the extent of correlation between formal types and functional types. It is within that lacuna between morphological classification and functional classification that this analysis of the Fenner House is located.

It is important to note the formal similarities between the Fenner House and its client’s temporary and permanent laboratories at the John Curtin School of Medical Research. All three buildings were, at their most elemental, “H”-shaped, binuclear plans: two separate blocks linked by a connecting element. Fenner described how the temporary John Curtin School facilities “were built by juxtaposing two prefabricated wooden buildings and constructing a passage where the adjoining roofs touch”.24 In his autobiography Fenner placed photographs of the temporary laboratories and his own house on opposite pages, and the typological similarities are striking.25 It is interesting to note that both the temporary and permanent John Curtin School of Medical Research laboratories, the Ennor House, and the Fenner House were all built by Schreiner.

3.5, 3.6 Temporary John Curtin School of Medical Research laboratories.26

114 It appears that houses and laboratories, as quite distinct functional typologies within architectural classification, were in fact never far from each other in Fenner’s mind. When visiting virology laboratories across the United States in 1953, he simultaneously visited many private houses of his colleagues, and made comments in his travel diary about each. In Baltimore he visited Dave Bodian, whose house was “a converted barn, amid trees in the country, but only 8 miles from his labs.” Back in New York he engaged in a “long talk with Rene and Jean about the plans of our lab as well as the house”.27

Boyd’s colleague in the Small Homes Service in Melbourne, Neil Clerehan—who had assisted Boyd with research for Victorian Modern—experimented with a range of plan types in the early years of the service, and designed two modest binuclear houses, the T226 in 1948, and T280 in 1950. Both of these were published in The Age. Another binuclear plan was Seidler’s Hutter House of 1952 in Turramurra, completed in the same year that Boyd designed the second version of the Fenner House. For Seidler, the binuclear plan had two advantages over a standard plan: first, it was a way of keeping children away from the “more delicately furnished adult living quarters”, and second, the disjunction of blocks permitted a more economical bedroom wing, as “comparatively little time is spent there”.28 Given Boyd’s interest in Seidler’s houses, the Hutter House would have undoubtedly been a significant influence—an opinion that was shared by Conrad Hamann.29

In terms of architectural typology, the Fenner House is a direct descendent, via the Hutter House, of Breuer’s first built version of the binuclear house, the Geller House I in Long Island, New York, of 1944-46. The plans are quite similar: from the two separate blocks for day-time and night-time activities, to the open plan living areas and central play area within the bedroom wing. In final architectural resolution the Fenner House departed from the Geller House, and reflected Boyd’s evolving position within the architectural zeitgeist of the early 1950s—which he described as somewhere between “the white cubes of the Functionalists and the woody intricacy of Organicism”.30 With its merging of International Style binuclear plan type with less austere, Victorian Type low- pitched roofs, the Fenner House consolidated Boyd’s position between those two poles.

But why did Boyd choose the binuclear configuration? Was it more than a coincidence that the Fenner House layout resembled that of the John Curtin School laboratories? It is possible, but highly unlikely, that the plan was an interpretation of Fenner’s work environment—the reference is perhaps too obvious for Fenner not to have mentioned it. It is also important to remember that the binuclear plan type was not Boyd’s first choice for the Fenner House—the small area of the original Hotham Crescent site precluded that type. For that site Boyd designed a compact, linear house, sited across the contours

115 to provide two levels of accommodation at one end. When the larger site was obtained, Fenner described Boyd’s transition from the first design to the final binuclear plan as a form of natural evolution:

And then what Robin then did was just to shift them like that [places hands on top of one another, and then slides one hand across until they are separate and parallel.] So that instead of the bedroom part, which is the rear block of that house, being the upper level, it just went down.31

While this was a logical process, it was not an inevitable outcome: a number of permutations were possible by rearranging the building blocks on the new site, and the binuclear arrangement represented only one of those. It is possible that, for Boyd, this was merely one of a number of plan types to try out. In the early 1950s he was enmeshed in an intensely creative period, referred to as his “experimental”, or “style-forming” phase, in which he designed a range of small, low-budget houses of varying plan form. Breuer’s Geller House I, still only some six years old, and Seidler’s more recent Hutter House, would both have been on his mind.

However, given that Boyd’s other house in Canberra, designed at around the same time for Manning and Dymphna Clark, was another rearrangement of the binuclear model, it would appear that there was more to it than random experimentation. Perhaps there was something about these particular academic clients—or about Canberra—that led Boyd to this plan type. In relation to the clients, the Fenners and the Clarks were both fairly typical post-war “nuclear” families: two parents with between two and four children.32 Boyd held similar views to Seidler regarding children in the house, believing that the post-war “elevation of the rights of children” had given them free reign of the house, and that as a result the suitability of the open plan was brought into question. One solution suggested by Boyd was separate zoning of different activities or age groups.33 But most of Boyd’s clients were from a similar demographic, and while he often provided separate zones within his houses, he didn’t design binuclear houses for all of them. It does not appear that privacy was the key determinant of plan form. Fenner carried out most of his work in the John Curtin School, and had no specific requirement for a completely private study at home (although there was a small study in the house). Clark wrote from home, and did require a quiet space, but Boyd provided that by placing the study on a higher level rather than relying on the segregation provided by the binuclear plan.

116

3.7 Robin Boyd, working drawing, Manning Clark House, 1952. Section B showing study.34

The fact that Boyd, after these two commissions, designed no further binuclear houses in Canberra to some extent reinforces the notion that it was simply an experiment that followed Breuer and Seidler houses of the same period. But when all aspects of Boyd’s domestic architecture in Canberra are considered, a compelling argument for the use of the binuclear type relates to the influence of Canberra itself. In the early 1950s there wasn’t a lot there. Hindered by post-war restrictions and shortages in regard to building approvals, materials and labour, Canberra was in the doldrums. It consisted of not much more than the meandering Molonglo River, a network of unformed roads, and scatterings of houses in a few inner suburbs. Between all of this was a lot of open space criss-crossed with walking tracks. No significant facilities had been completed on the Australian National University campus, whose new academic arrivals were often met at the airport, or train station, by the Registrar, Ross Hohnen. Tall and bespectacled, he would proudly take them on a tour of the new university site, pointing out the location of proposed future buildings. But many were not impressed: as Stephen Foster and Margaret Varghese wrote, “it took a fair stretch of the imagination to accept Hohnen’s vision of a university in a paddock”.35 In the open landscape of 1950s Canberra there was no density, no sense of urbaneness, and little sense of place. In this way it was a totally different environment to both Melbourne—where Boyd and many of the new academic arrivals had been living—and Sydney.

Within this open, semi-rural landscape, lacking clear definition and any sense of urban structure, it is possible that Boyd saw the need to place a strong figure—a plan form with clear definition and strong sense of place. It can also be hypothesised that this distinct plan form was a reaction against what Boyd saw as the mediocrity and sameness of the few predominant house types that existed in Canberra. By importing what was, to Canberra, a “new” paradigm in terms of house type, he was deliberately proposing an alternative approach to residential design for this location, and one that did not—in accordance with his vehement rejection of the superficiality of Canberra’s “kaleidoscope” of historic styles—resort to mere stylistic borrowing in order to do so.

117

Lindsay Pryor’s landscape design reinforced Boyd’s siting. Pryor, a schoolboy friend of Fenner from Adelaide, was Keeper of Parks and Gardens for the Capital Territory, and a former graduate of the Australian Forestry School. The Fenner House landscaping represented a clean break from the traditional Canberra garden typology. As front fences were not permitted in Canberra, most houses were bordered by hedges. These were maintained by the Department of the Interior on the condition that they conformed to the species nominated for that particular street. After consulting Fenner, Pryor decided on a layout that responded to the unique footprint of the house, and—in contrast to the predominant pattern—left the site relatively open to Torres street. In this way the eastern and western edges of the site were planted with a variety of trees and shrubs to provide privacy and shelter from winds. A “peninsula of trees” ran out from the northeast corner of the house, Sessile Juniper was planted to shelter the front terrace, and a broad sweep of lawn to the north of the house extended to the boundary, leaving the major street frontage largely exposed.36

3.8 Lindsay Pryor, landscape design, Fenner House, c 1954.37

The Aesthetic Imperative

If to be “modern” in post-war Australia was to read every international architectural publication that you could lay your hands on, to value creativity and experimentation, and to exhibit a strong interest in contemporary movements in art, music and films, then Boyd fitted the bill.38 As a practising architect and writer, be became Australia’s leading “propagandist” for the modern movement during the 1940s and 1950s.39 His own

118 architecture was experimental, adapting concepts from key figures of Modernism—such as Le Corbusier—to suit local contexts. Boyd’s first design for the Fenner House—an exploration of vertical space that has been compared to Le Corbusier’s two-storey high Citrohan living rooms40—was described by his client as being “unusual at the time”, “revolutionary” and even “unbuildable”.41

That Boyd was a modern architect, and had been modernist in inclination from an early stage in his career, is well established. But what of Fenner? What was his position in regard to modernism? In his case, the circumstances under which he came to Canberra were of equal importance to his interests in art, architecture or music. As inaugural Professor of Microbiology, Fenner played a key role in the process of establishing the Australian National University in Canberra in the years immediately after World War II. He was particularly well informed in regard to international developments in modern art and architecture: not only was he observant, he recorded extensive notes and diagrams in his travel diaries, and his interest in modernism extended to an appreciation of art and design.

By late 1952 temporary laboratories were set up in Canberra for the John Curtin School of Medical Research, and Fenner—who had been based in Melbourne until the facilities were ready—drove with Bobbie and their two children, Vicki and Marilyn, to the capital in a small convoy of Morris Minor and Ford Prefect. It may have been a modest arrival, but it was nevertheless an important milestone in the establishment of the University—and, as it turned out, in the history of the modern house in Canberra. Fenner had been to Canberra before the war—to study aboriginal skulls at the Institute of Anatomy42—but aside from that had no previous connections, and no vested interests, in the city. Arriving with a clean slate, he brought with him a sense of optimism about the future: setting up new laboratories in which to continue his research, building a house for himself and his family, and establishing professional and social connections in a relatively new and rapidly expanding city were all exciting prospects.

Fenner sought to incorporate a number of modernist ideas and concepts into his house. A principal source of influence was his first overseas study tour, taken soon after he had taken up his appointment at the University. He flew out from Kingsford Smith Airport in Sydney to San Francisco on 23 May 1953, just a few days after signing the contract documents with Schreiner for his Red Hill house. Often flying by Comet, and carrying a suitcase filled with presents such as stuffed koalas and books on wallabies, Fenner proceeded to visit the laboratories “of almost every virologist in the United States”.43 Throughout the trip he was frequently invited back to spend the evening, or to stay overnight, with colleagues and their families. Fenner was methodical and thorough. Each

119 evening he recorded, in his travel diary, details of after-dinner conversations, the houses they had occurred in, the names of the family members, and the presents he had given the children. His notes indicate that after a period of “shop” talk about infectious diseases and antibodies, conversation would invariably turn to contemporary house design.

In Berkeley he stayed a few days with Bill Reeves from the University of California, and noted that his house was in a “very pleasant spot in hills. Fine view of San Fran & Berkeley at night.” In Denver he visited “Gardiner’s house”, which was “contemporary style, very low ceiling, 2 storey but looks like one… sliding doors also used effectively.” From New York he went to New Jersey where he stayed a few days with a gynaecologist friend, Grogan O’Connell, and his wife Janet, who had just built a contemporary house in Alpine. Fenner was obviously very impressed by the O’Connell’s house, as he made a number of diary notes and sketches on different days. He described the house as “modern and attractive, in 2 acres of thick woodland, so that no other house can be seen nearby…” He took several photos of the house, and even made notes of “Features of the house that we might copy” for his own house. These included details of recessed heaters, light fittings, and bathroom cupboards and mirrors. He was particularly interested in a glass-topped, steel framed table on the terrace that he sketched on two separate occasions, noting that it “Looks the type of thing we could get made at the workshop.”44

3.9 Frank Fenner, sketch of table, New Jersey, 1953. 3.10 Frank Fenner, sketch detail of Lever House, New York, 1953. “Something like this might be ideal for our house”.45

By 1953 there was evidence of the beginning of a post-war recovery in architecture in North America and Europe, heralded by the completion of a number of seminal modernist buildings. One of these in particular aroused Fenner’s interest. On his last day in New York, with his BOAC flight to London delayed, he wandered over to the recently completed Lever House. Designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Lever House in 1953 was “one of the sights of New York”: a tall, prismatic glass tower supported on Le Corbusier-style pilotis rising from a glass podium, it was the forerunner

120 of the commercial skyscraper, the ultimate in big business architecture, and, at the time, the epitome of the modern urban structure. As Reyner Banham stated, Lever House was the first architectural expression of a new, post-war age—“a monument to an America whose existence could barely be sensed at the time: Eisenhower America, grey-flannel- suit America, with Madison Avenue only a block away.”46 This new age was one of corporate capitalism, for which the sleek, modern forms of Lever House, derived from International Style architecture, provided a new public emblem. But this building did not represent purely commercial aspirations. The ideologies and values that lay behind its repetitive, graph paper structural grid—including technological advancement and rationalism—also applied to the scientific world.47

3.11 Skidmore Owings and Merrill, Lever House, New York, 1950.48

It was no surprise that Fenner loved this building. The clean, smooth lines of Lever House impressed him because it was “beautifully simple—glass & stainless steel & flush lines.” Not intimidated by any disjunction of scale, function or context between a New York office tower and a Canberra house, he enthusiastically sketched a detail of the building in his travel diary, noting: “Something like this might be ideal for our house.”49 While there is no evidence of any influence of Lever House on the Fenner House—and it is not clear if Boyd was ever shown this sketch—it is highly likely that if Fenner did discuss it with him at the time of his return the architect might not have approved: at that stage Boyd was not fond of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s architecture, which he believed was too commercial. However, he began to change his mind three years later when he saw Lever House for himself, and even became something of a disciple of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill when shown around the Chicago office by Bill Hartmann, with whom he

121 proceeded to get drunk over dinner.50 It is testament to Fenner’s enthusiasm for modernism that he was one step ahead of his architect on this occasion.

In Paris, Fenner found the Musee de l’Arte Moderne “a superb new building with a wonderful collection & good display”. After arriving in Rome by train he was equally impressed by Eugenio Montuori’s new Main Railway Station. Standing on the polished floor of the main booking hall, under the curved ribs of the vaulted roof, he looked out through the glazed end wall over the city, and described the building as “a magnificent and very modern structure with beautiful clean lines & fine materials.”51 In Stockholm, Ragnar Ostberg’s earlier Arts and Crafts style City Hall was appreciated for “the splendour of the halls, especially the Golden Hall with its mosaics on a gold mosaic background. It is a really impressive building … in position, surroundings, conception, grandeur. Something we might well have somewhere in Australia, but don’t.”52

3.12 Eugenio Montuori, Booking Hall, Main Railway Station, Rome, 1950.53

Boyd had written that modern architecture was “inevitably linked with modern art in the public mind”,54 and Fenner was no exception to this rule. During this overseas trip he regularly visited art galleries in every city, often returning for more than one visit. Descriptions of art and architecture share the pages of his travel diary, and through an examination of these it is apparent that he was particularly interested in modernism and abstraction. In New York he made frequent excursions to the Sol Guggenheim Collection, to Edward Durell Stone’s gleaming white Museum of Modern Art, and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art—whose central, sunken court was a favourite lunch venue. He observed modern paintings in private residences, and visited art institutions in other cities such as the National Gallery in Washington, the Baltimore Art Museum and the Musee de l’Arte Moderne in Paris. One exhibition at the Guggenheim contained “several Kandinsky’s Mondrian. Some very good Chagall, an attractive Modigliani nude, & interesting Klee and Seurat”; an apartment in New York displayed “a wonderful lot of

122 modern originals—Picasso, Rouault etc”; the National Gallery had “Picasso Derain Dufy Vlamincks that I had not seen in original or reproduction previously”, while the Baltimore Art Museum was noted for works by Picasso and Rodin.55

Fenner was the ideal client for an aspiring modernist architect. He clearly appreciated modern art and architecture, was well travelled and visually astute. As a scientist, he would obviously have been comfortable with a rational design methodology: an architectural process that recognised specific problems and proceeded to find solutions in a systematic manner. But as a client Fenner offered—and expected—more from his architect than a rational design process. Underscoring his detailed diary descriptions was a genuine excitement over the visual and tactile experience of these new, modern objects. His enthusiasm was not based on any apparent rationality as much as it was on an admiration of simple, elegant design, and an appreciation of the materials, colours and details of modern architecture.

The Fenner House became a successful collaboration between an architect and a client who shared a common interest in modernism. When Grounds, Romberg and Boyd were awarded the Australian Capital Territory Chapter Medallion, The Canberra Times reported that that the house “contributed much to architectural thinking and contemporary design”.56 The Fenner House received a four-page spread with colour photographs in the November 1956 edition of Australian Home Beautiful. However, it wasn’t “modern” enough to appear on the cover of that edition: television had just arrived in Australia, and the cover displayed an image of a happy family, complete with white poodle, gathered around the latest modernist icon: an upright, timber-veneered Radiola television set, courtesy of Amalgamated Wireless. Boyd, the modern evangelist who had, seven years earlier, placed a mock-up of a television set in his “House of Tomorrow” in Melbourne because the real thing was not available in Australia, had finally been upstaged by the real version.57

123

3.13 Australian Home Beautiful, November 1956, cover.

Imitation of Life

The most expert Artists among the ancients … were of [the] Opinion that an Edifice was like an Animal, so that in the Formation of it we ought to imitate Nature. Leon Batista Alberti, Ten Books on Architecture58

The key to its success will be the determination to allow the human element to become the dominant factor. The biological principle must be paramount. Man is to be the focus for all design; then it shall be truly functional. Walter Gropius, “Reorientation”59

In the new climate beyond the door, a house which better expresses the life and the land may grow more profusely and the scattered seeds spread by creative architects may take abundant root. Robin Boyd, Australia’s Home60

Fenner was well informed in regard to the physical environmental from an early age, and became increasingly involved in environmental issues throughout his career. Charles was

124 a member of the Field Naturalists Society, and published scientific papers on geology and fieldwork. During the 1930s he took Frank on overland excursions in an open car across South Australia and Victoria, where he explained “features of the countryside … geological, botanical, historical, in a fascinating way”.61 From 1948 to 1949 Fenner studied at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York under Rene Dubos. Dubos was a huge influence: Fenner described how he later became “an environmental guru” and coined the term “think globally act locally.”62 Later in his career Fenner became a member of the Scientific Community on Problems of the Environment, foundation Director of the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University, and Vice President of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

There are a number of examples of Fenner’s awareness of environmental issues in regard to architecture. In 1949, when he and the other founding professors of the John Curtin School met with Florey in Oxford to plan the new Canberra building, Fenner recalled they “decided on an H-shape… with the main laboratories on the south of each wing, to avoid direct sunlight”.63 During his 1953 overseas trip he made frequent entries in his travel diary describing the details of his surroundings. Flying from London to Paris he observed “Many fruit orchards. Courtyard type farmhouses etc.” While travelling by train down the coast of Italy to Rome he was “Struck by colour of houses in this bright sun, & the manifold measures adopted for keeping out the sun.”64

3.14 John Curtin School of Medical Research building, Australian National University. Aerial view of permanent building in early 1957, just before completion.65

Of all the sciences, it was biology that architects most frequently turned to for analogy: the purpose of the comparison being to facilitate the understanding of new, unknown concepts by connecting them to known ones. Since the eighteenth century a number of writers have explored the potentialities of biological analogies to inform architectural theory. In the main these have consisted of the typological analogy, by which specific types are identified with a classificatory system; the ecological analogy, where the

125 appropriateness of a building for its environment is compared to that of plants and animals;66 the organic analogy, meaning the harmonious relationship of parts to the whole; the anatomical analogy, or relationship between skeleton and structure, and the Darwinian analogy of evolutionary trial and error.67 But the drawing of analogies between architecture and biology is an exercise to be treated with prudence: as architect and writer Philip Steadman warned, in his study of the biological analogy in architecture and design, buildings are not organisms like plants or animals, but remain “inert physical objects”.68 Architectural historian Peter Collins argued that the strongest analogical link to architecture was the influence of environment on design—a concept that he believed came from Darwinism. But the concept of natural selection was taking the analogy too far, as “after all, in architecture it is not only the Fittest which Survive”.69

Consideration of the formative influence of environment on design, and of the subsequent scientific analysis of building form, both derive from the notion of biotechnical determinism. Architectural commentator Alan Colquhoun considered this to be an underlying principle of the modern movement, and traced it origins to nineteenth- century cultural evolutionism philosophy, particularly that of Herbert Spencer. As Colquhoun explained: “Form was merely the result of a logical process by which the operational needs and the operational techniques were brought together. Ultimately these would fuse in a kind of biological extension of life, and function and technology would become totally transparent.”70

There was evidence of this way of thinking in Australian architectural discourse in the immediate post-war years. Anticipating an unprecedented demand for new houses, and faced with a serious lack of funds and building materials, a number of government and private initiatives encouraged designers and builders to construct more efficient houses. What was required were pragmatic, scientific-based methods of analysis to improve the ways in which buildings related to their environment.

Consideration of the effects of the Australian sun and climate was nothing new—this had been a common topic within architectural discourse since the late nineteenth century— but what was different was the process. No longer left to conjecture, the strategies were to be founded on solid, quantifiable research. For instance, in Sub-tropical Housing, Viennese immigrant architect Karl Langer emphasised the need for mathematical calculations in regard to the dimensions of eaves overhangs.71 Architecture published details of the “Heliodon”, an instrument devised by the English Building Research Station to replicate, in model form, the motion of the sun. Working with models of proposed houses, the Heliodon could demonstrate the precise amount—and duration— of sun penetration into a building.72 Australia’s Commonwealth Experimental Building

126 Station, (CEBS), set up to research construction materials and methods—particularly in relation to house design and thermal comfort—published a series of bulletins titled Notes on the Science of Building. An important publication by the Station was R. O. Phillips’s Sunshine and Shade in Australasia, in which sun angles in relation to time and geographic location were mathematically determined. To this publication Philips appended details of his own Australian version of the Heliodon, which he named the “Solarscope”.73

Walter Bunning’s Homes in the Sun74 included a plea for appropriate planning in relation to solar orientation, and provided plans of “Suntrap” and “Solar” houses as exemplars. Along with J. W. Drysdale’s Designing Houses for Australian Climates, this made the Commonwealth Experimental Building Station’s information more accessible to the general public. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation provided further scientific-based analysis by publishing reports such as Thermal Conductivities of Building Materials and The Design and Construction of Solar Water Heaters.75 Popular periodicals such as Australian Home Beautiful began to cover similar themes, publishing articles such as “What is a Solar House?” “For Sydney’s Sun”, “Enjoy Our Climate at Home”, “Sited for Sunshine”, “Houseful of Sunshine”, “Comfort or Convention”, “Cool in Summer—Winter Sun Trap”, and “An Asset in the Sunless South”. All of these addressed the issue of appropriate design for Australian climates.76

But in some instances this belief in determinism—of the potential for scientific analysis to improve the relationship between a house, its occupants and the prevailing climate— extended beyond the considered, incremental modification of building form and veered into pure conjecture. It was this type of naïve faith in biotechnical determinism that lay behind American-based architect Marcel Breuer’s conception of his “binuclear” house design. Published in John Entenza’s Californian Arts & Architecture in December 1943, it was, like the John Curtin School of Medical Research building, essentially an “H”-shape: two separate, rectangular forms joined by a smaller connecting element containing an entrance hall. One wing was for “every day’s living”, while the other was for “concentration, work and sleeping”. Predicting a model of post-war, suburban lifestyle that would never eventuate, Breuer promoted his house as a form of technological, protective cocoon for his male client: the post-war man would return to a house that was “heated, protected, insulated, mechanized”. As he would only need to enter his “mechanized world”, or place of work, “three or four days a week”, he would be spending more time in the house and would “more than ever appreciate his privacy”.77

127

3.15 Marcel Breuer, “binuclear” house proposal, 1943.78

While—with the benefit of hindsight—Breuer’s projections about post-war work patterns proved to be incorrect, his binuclear plan was inextricably linked to biology. The first connection was semantic: “binuclear” was a biological term meaning a cell comprising two nuclei, while the second connection related to the splitting of the plan into two separate blocks. In a criticism of open planning that, quite unintentionally, reinforced the binuclear configuration, English biologist, geneticist and philosopher Conrad Waddington compared the practice of combining different functions in the one general space—kitchen, dining, sleeping—to the form of highly evolved animals. The animals, he pointed out, “divided themselves into separate blocks, each of which does something to function, liver, kidney, intestine, muscles, brain …” To Waddington, the open plan comprising various functions within the same block, was “not sound biology”,79 while by implication, the binuclear plan, divided into separate blocks, was.

If Breuer was unwavering in his acceptance of technological progress, Boyd was circumspect. In the first edition of Australia’s Architecture and Arts, Boyd applauded the pragmatism of science, stating: “eventually science will answer all the problems. I don’t mean just in architecture—I mean in everything …”80 But he remained wary of some aspects of scientific discourse. When Ernest Titterton, Professor of Nuclear Physics at the Australian National University, delivered an address to the Australian Architectural Convention in Melbourne titled “Modern Warfare and Australian Cities”, Boyd accused him of making the advent of the “1st Atom bomb sound like a great humanitarian venture.”81 He was also sceptical about some of the research by the Commonwealth Experimental Building Station, claiming that it “seemed to justify some of this unscientific sympathy of popular buildings”.82

Boyd, like many Australian architects before him, believed that careful consideration of the Australian climate, in particular the sun, was one of the critical factors that needed to be addressed to improve the quality of Australian houses, whose ability to cope with

128 extremes of temperature he found wanting. He was critical of the lack of insulation and heating to houses in the southern states, and the lack of cooling and sun shading in those to the north.83 He applauded Walter Butler’s “revolutionary suggestion” of 1902 that recommended northern orientation for all rooms, and “an eave of calculated width which would shade the glass only in summer”,84 and was supportive of Bunning’s Homes in the Sun, describing its author as “the best known architectural publicist in the country”.85 Central to Boyd’s position on sun and climate was an appeal to cease fighting against “the un-English qualities of Australia’s climate”, and to learn to live with it.86 While the notion of identifying a particular “Australian” architecture was controversial at the time—and not an idea that Boyd readily subscribed to—he nevertheless believed that the requirements of the “modern Australian” were different from those of inhabitants of other countries. It was important to address these specific needs—to “let these differences rule shapes, forms and details in one’s building.”87

It was the way in which Boyd allowed the “difference” of the bright Canberra sunlight to generate specific forms and details that most clearly expressed this ideology, and resulted in the most striking visual aspect of the Fenner House. The north faces of the two rectangular blocks are glazed full-height throughout their entire length. Regularly spaced, white painted mullions extend from floor to roof soffit, broken by a continuous horizontal transom at door head height. The overall effect of these glazed walls is reminiscent of a school classroom or laboratory building from the same period, where the same criteria—maximum admission of northern light—operated. This aspect of the Fenner House is similar to other Boyd houses, including the north-facing glazed wall of the 1952 Darbyshire House in Templestowe, Melbourne.

For Boyd, the glazed wall was impervious in two directions: “a transparent wall which dissolved the barrier between indoors and outdoors”. As well as admitting “light, air and view”, it also worked in the opposite direction, projecting "the enclosed space into the open”, and extending “the spatial experience within the room”.88 In relation to transmission of light and view this aspect of the Fenner House worked well, but was less successful for thermal comfort. In keeping with building practice at the time, the entire walls were single glazed, and would have contributed to high internal temperature fluctuations. In contrast to the glazed northern walls, the eastern and western walls, and southern wall of the diurnal block, were constructed of solid brickwork with a painted finish. The original colours specified by Boyd were a further method by which he controlled the amount—and quality—of light that entered the interior: most walls were white, but surfaces capable of reflecting the intense Canberra light to the interior were painted grey.89 By adjusting the exterior wall treatment to address the comfort level of the occupants, Boyd clad the Fenner House in a responsive skin.

129

3.16 Robin Boyd, Fenner House, entrance terrace, 1956.90

The roof of the Fenner House was a further physical expression of the moderation of sunlight. A clean, low-pitched gable roof, edged by a continuous fascia line, (the gutters and downpipes were concealed), it adjusted in relation to the need for sun protection as it swept around each block: flush on the south, east and west facades, and cantilevered on the north side to form a deep eaves overhang. The way in which this house admitted the low winter sun, while excluding the majority of summer sun, was the one aspect of the design that Fenner believed indicated Boyd’s main intent. According to the client, the provision of wide eaves to the north was a design element that Boyd had insisted on for the earlier Hotham Crescent proposal: “He was extremely keen on a feature of this house which was unusual in the time: that you’d have wide eaves which would keep the sun out in the summer and let it in [during] the winter”.91

There was, however, one qualification to Fenner’s approval of the second design: the house admitted too much morning sun. Soon after they moved in, he wrote to Boyd complaining: “The sun through the upper glass of the kitchen at breakfast (before the eaves cut out some—the house faces far enough east to get early east sunlight) is very trying. We were thinking of bamboo blinds or some sort of obstruction to the sun on the upper fixed panes but would like to have your views on this.”92

130 The two separate blocks of the Fenner House, and additive nature of the plan, created a large footprint, which gave the house a significantly high proportion of external surface area in relation to overall volume. While that high ratio of external surface was an optimum condition for the ingress of heat and light—at times when that was desirable— the opposite applied in regard to heat loss. The additional outer surface area of walls and roof provided more opportunities for loss of heat, via conduction, to the atmosphere. In turn this created heating and cooling problems, and higher operating costs than that of a standard, more compact, plan form.

Two environmental influences—neither of which was anticipated by Boyd—came into effect after the Fenner House was completed. The cumulative effect of these led to the Fenners experiencing great anxiety, and considerable tension with their architect. The first was caused by alternating expansion and contraction of the timber roof sub-frame in the extreme temperature fluctuations of the Canberra climate. This caused the Malthoid roofing material to alternatively stretch and buckle in response, eventually leading to a number of tears in the material and numerous leaks inside the house. The failure of the Malthoid roof was not uncommon—almost all such roofs by Boyd and Grounds suffered the same fate—but the process was in this case undoubtedly accelerated due to the higher temperature fluctuations between day and night experienced in Canberra’s inland, high altitude location.93 The cause of the other problem was of a biological nature, but not in the broad sense that has previously been alluded to: this was very specific. To achieve the clean, continuous line of the fascia running around the edge of the roof, Boyd had concealed box gutters within the roof. But these were not designed with correct overflow safeguards, and when the outlets became blocked with leaves from nearby trees, they flooded with water and formed a further source of water penetration into the interior of the house.

At this stage in his career Boyd had limited knowledge of construction and detailing. While he had many projects under way, the rapid acceleration of his practice had provided minimal post-occupancy feedback—but that would come. His partner, Frederick Romberg, was known for his attention to detailing. Romberg considered Boyd’s house designs at that period to be “outstanding”, but “a little suspect” in construction.94 When Boyd travelled to the United States in August 1956—missing the celebration for the award of the Canberra Medallion shown in Illustration 3.4—he left behind a number of houses at various stages of construction. Problems soon arose, including leaking roofs and chimneys that smoked inside the rooms. Complaints were directed to his partners, who did not let these go by without comment to Boyd. Boyd later complained that his sleep was interrupted by nightmares of “Dr. Roche, Mrs. Ednie, and the little man from Lemon Street, North Balwyn, shaking their poor, rain-soaked

131 heads at me and disappearing in billows of smoke”.95 While there was no apparition of the Fenners in his dreams, they had in fact notified their architect that the house leaked as far back as June 1955.96

Over a four-year period the Fenners did the best they could by treating the symptoms. But, by late 1958, after a series of particularly heavy downpours, they ran out of patience. Fenner made an impassioned plea to his architect to address the cause, writing “we have never had a year (indeed hardly a month) in which there were not leaks somewhere; … We have decided that the only thing to do is to re-roof the house with something that will not leak … There is no such guarantee and we’re up for the whole price of re- roofing—unless you are willing to make a contribution towards it.” Stating that he and Bobbie appreciated “many aspects of the design of this house”, he regretted that “its complete failure to exclude water makes it impossible for us to leave it even for a week, lest the floor and carpets somewhere else are ruined by water.” At this point the Fenners were prepared to walk away from their award-winning house:

Bobbie would like to sell it and live in a rented house because she can no longer put up with dishes and towels all around the floor when it rains; but we can’t even sell it with the roof as it is. Yours sincerely, Frank.

p. s. Since beginning this letter a new leak has developed in the Drawing-room, so that we now have three dishes on the floor of the family room and one on the cabinet in the drawing room.97

A further effect of the ingress of moisture was that timbers began to rot, particularly in the frame of the glazed connecting link. In an attempt to solve this problem, Fenner sent samples of the affected timber for analysis to the Division of Forest Products at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Melbourne. Receiving confirmation that the rot was a fungal infection associated with excessive dampness, Fenner forwarded this to Boyd for his attention.98

In 1960 Boyd engaged Bischoff to act as his representative in Canberra. Bischoff arranged for the Malthoid roof to be replaced by a previously unavailable Swiss designed aluminium foil, and reported to Boyd that “Mrs. Fenner reports no leaks recently so here’s hoping”. However, this solution also failed. In July 1961 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd wrote to the roofing company complaining of new leaks.99 The roofs to both blocks were eventually re-roofed with continuous steel roof sheeting, which finally solved the

132 problem, but at significant cost: Hamann claimed that each time the roof was replaced, the cost was almost equivalent to the total original building fee.100

Riposte

By omitting any consideration of the role of women in his analysis of the “post-war man”, Breuer’s methodology was flawed. His whole idea that the functional requirements of a house could be considered purely from the male occupant’s needs was deficient, as were many of the reasons for his subsequent advocacy of the binuclear plan type. The Fenner House, as a descendent of that type, retains within its layout, atavistic evidence of those same assumptions.

When the Fenner House won the Canberra Medallion, the judges claimed that the plan “has the merit of separating the sleeping accommodation and children’s playroom from the general living and entertainment part of the home”.101 But there are a number of comments to be made about this separation of functions. The post-war idea that leisure time would increase had resulted in a growing emphasis on the provision of recreation spaces within the home. Many of the Californian Case Study Houses incorporated such spaces. In some of these, a child’s playroom was located adjacent to the kitchen, facilitating supervision from the kitchen, while others provided an adult “hobby” space near the kitchen.102 But in the Fenner House the kitchen and playroom were located in separate blocks, making supervision of young children from the kitchen impossible. When the house was first built Vicki was old enough to play by herself, but Marilyn would have required supervision. The functional ramifications of this were either that both children were left unsupervised at times, that the relatively small dining room doubled as a playroom during the day, or that Bobbie sought domestic help for either cooking or child minding.103 A further issue was the location of the study opening directly off the playroom, making this space impractical while the playroom was being used. The decision to place adults’ and children’s bedrooms in the same wing was practical while the children were young, but not so desirable as they grew older, when separate parents’ and children’s zones might have been a preferred option.

133

3.17 Fenner House. Floor plan showing separation of functions. Sketch by the author, 2009.

It has not been possible to give a full account of the role played by Bobbie Fenner in regard to the story of this house. As a partner in marriage it is most probable that she played an equal role to Frank in most respects. However, she died in 1995 and left few written records.104 On the other hand, Frank, a highly prolific publisher and diarist, left many written accounts of his public and personal lives, and these, plus recorded interviews, form a large part of the documented history of the Fenner House. It is for this reason that the client’s perspective has been related through his voice.

The available documentation does reveal, however, that Bobbie was the client contact throughout almost the entire construction phase, a period of six months. Frank departed for overseas study just after the contract documents were signed, leaving her in charge of “any problems that might arise” before he returned at the end of October.105 As it turned out, there were plenty. Boyd initially engaged Tom Haseler (who had previously worked with John Eccles on his house) to supervise construction, and attended site infrequently himself. However, the Fenners found Haseler to be “very conservative”. Bobbie became concerned that he seemed to be making endless decisions that were in conflict with Boyd’s ideas, and with their own. She apparently had “quite an argument” with Boyd about this before she managed to convince him to “take over supervision himself and come up more frequently”.106 Frank’s travel diaries from this period indicate

134 that there was frequent communication between the Fenners regarding construction of the house.107

The “sensitive use of colour and texture of materials” was another aspect of the Fenner House that attracted praise from the Canberra Medallion judges. 108 Elinor Ward, writing for Australian Home Beautiful, was impressed by this feature. “As always with a Robin Boyd house, the colour is exciting and imaginative”. The bold use of colours throughout the house expressed a sense of playfulness. A deep blue entrance door appeared to “float” in the glass link, while the living room had teal blue ceilings, a light green wall, and chairs upholstered in plum, blue, lemon and yellow fabric. The dining room was painted deep coral, the kitchen had blue cabinets, scarlet bench-tops and black linoleum tiles, while the children’s bedroom had grey walls and a citron yellow ceiling.109 For stuffy, English-influenced 1950s Canberra—where wall-to-wall floral carpets, pastel-coloured walls, rose-patterned linen upholstery and checked gingham or lace net curtains were de rigueuer—this represented a quantum leap into the future. Boyd described the colour scheme as “varied, but not riotous … which can’t result in discords”, relying on a “basic grey neutral” background to provide a foil to the brighter colours. Francis Hutchison believed that Bobbie deserved credit for the interior colours. In Australian House and Garden she reported that the colour schemes were “worked out by Mrs. Fenner using the children’s paint boxes”. It is clear that Boyd liaised with Bobbie on the colours: a letter referring to the colour scheme, and to “linen colour samples from Miss Hardess”, was addressed to Bobbie rather than to Frank.110

135

3.18 Robin Boyd, Fenner House living room, 1956.111

136

3.19 Robin Boyd, Fenner House living room, 1956.112

While the significant contributions of women are hidden within the text, the female presence, from Boyd’s point of view, has been visible throughout. To him, the Australian house was strictly women’s territory, and feminine in gender. This was not based on his own ideals as much as it was on how he perceived the realities of male culture. For the sensitive, artistic Boyd, the conventions of 1950s male comradeship—and related fears of being labelled “effeminate”, “affected”, or “pansy”—restricted male involvement in domestic matters to the mere solving of practical problems. Those elements of the house that he believed males were permitted to concern themselves with were thus limited to “parts that were liable to leak or jam”, including “eaves gutters” and “sliding sashes”. The woman, on the other hand, was given free reign over everything else: “the plan, the colours, the fabrics, the shapes”.113 Boyd’s gendered taxonomy of the Australian house revealed two important issues. By building “male” components, such as gutters and downpipes, within the depth of the roof and wall cavities of the Fenner House, he rendered invisible and inaccessible the very elements that required male attention. And so, when the rainwater system did inevitably fail, for the reasons outlined above, it was almost impossible to rectify.

Boyd’s reading of 1950s Australian masculinity needs to be placed in perspective. In a number of articles he revealed a lack of affinity for what he termed the “lowbrowism” of the average Australian male, a sentiment that sometimes veered into snobbish distaste.

137 As his biographer Geoffrey Serle pointed out, Boyd was “the very opposite of the good- on-yer-mate backslapper”, and in his contempt for “the mob swilling their beer in squalid pubs”, and the “empty arrogant look of the ockers”, he might not have sufficiently appreciated some of the decent qualities of the ordinary Australian man.114 The positive side of this was Boyd’s own lack of arrogance, and his genuine sensitivity to clients’ needs—the very characteristics that had led to Fenner to Boyd, rather than to Grounds, in the first place.115

The Australian Government’s decision to establish a national, research-based university in Canberra in the immediate post-war years coincided with a belief that scientific rationality provided the guidelines for a new world order, and the key to a new, rational form of architecture. But while Boyd believed that scientific thought was indeed the way to solving virtually any problem, his enthusiasm was not limited to an unquestioning acceptance of the new materials and visual forms of technological progress. Instead, science offered a rational and pragmatic approach to problem solving. The Fenner House was an incremental part of Boyd’s search for the appropriate post-war house—for a house that displayed a genuine response to local conditions, climate, appropriate materials and human comfort. The design of the Fenner House reflected his writing, in which he called for simple, practical plans with open living areas, grouped in blocks of single room width. Sited to maximise north and south light, and to provide shelter from prevailing winds, these were to be covered by low-pitched roofs whose overhangs responded to seasonal sun angles. But what was most important to Boyd was the example set by scientific methodology: that all of these factors—the orientation of buildings on the site, the dimensions of window openings, the depth of eaves cantilevers—were not subject to conjecture, but could be mathematically determined in relation to specific geographic location.

While Boyd had been highly critical of existing domestic architecture in Canberra, believing it to be pretentious and style-driven, he nevertheless held a genuine respect for the underlying structure of the city: “despite all the architectural chauvinism, despite architecture itself, Canberra is beautiful …” This, he believed, was mainly due to a combination of Griffin’s street planning and Pryor’s planting.116

138

3.20 Lindsay Pryor, Trees in Canberra, 1962, cover.117

Within this context it appears that the Fenner House commission, with its lack of concession to accepted local convention and absence of historical style, became his riposte to all that had come before. This was Boyd’s opportunity to show how houses could be built in Canberra. And the success of the Fenner House in this respect was largely due to the binuclear plan. While there were shortcomings in regard to internal relationships and efficiency, the clear logic of the articulated binuclear plan provided Boyd with an opportunity to break the house down into three smaller, easily manipulated elements. Each of these was then adjusted carefully in relation to criteria such as roof pitch, eaves overhang and fenestration, so that each responded to individual requirements, but still remained part of a coherent whole. There were problems with the implementation of some of this—an excess of morning sun to the kitchen at breakfast time and leaking roofs being the main issues. These were due in part to Boyd’s relative inexperience, but also to a lack of available technology: steel roof sheeting was not initially available in sufficient lengths to provide continuous coverage.

139 In spite of the significant technical shortcomings, this was a brave house, and one that, in accordance with Boyd’s intentions, departed radically from the kaleidoscope of historical, style-based houses that pervaded Canberra suburbs. In the design of the Fenner House Boyd allowed the specific requirements of Canberra’s climate, altitude, sunlight and lack of existing built form to inform the shape and detail of the built fabric. Fenner’s enthusiasm for the project can be detected in a series of letters that he wrote to Florey at Oxford in late 1953. Keeping Florey regularly informed of progress at the University, Fenner usually concluded his letters with a brief update on progress at his own house. In February 1954 he reported that it was “going well and the painters are now at work on it. We expect to move in in 2 or 3 weeks. We’re very pleased with it and think that it is quite a handsome structure, and will be comfortable too.”118

140

1 Fenner recalled: “The builders in Canberra had never seen anything like [it] and did not want to build it so they tendered quotes that were far beyond our reach.” Only one tender was received, for £25,000.0.0. “At the time, I was a young professor, it was just out of my [price range] altogether.” Geoffrey Serle, Robin Boyd: a Life (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 133. Frank Fenner, interview by the author, 18 October 2007. 2 This figure excluded heating. Schreiner arrived in Canberra in 1949, and built up a successful construction business based in Lonsdale Street, Braddon, with a factory in Cotter Road. He later returned to his native Austria. Jim Gibbney, Canberra 1913 – 1953 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1988), 240. 3 Australian Home Beautiful (November 1956). 4 Robin Boyd, Australia’s Home: Its Origins, Builders and Occupiers (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1952), 206. 5 Boyd began writing Australia’s Home before he and Patricia departed for their overseas study tour in the second half of 1950, completed it after his return to Australia, and published it in 1952. Fenner initially engaged Boyd in 1950 to design a house for a site in Hotham Crescent, Deakin, which coincides with the year—1950—that Boyd included his critique of Canberra in Australia’s Home: “By 1950 the lonely valley had grown into a city …” In 1952-3 Boyd modified the design of the Fenner House to suit the clients’ new site in Torres Street, Red Hill. Boyd’s other early Canberra house, for Manning and Dymphna Clarke, was designed in 1952 and completed in late 1953. 6 Architecture and Arts (August 1954). 7 Ibid. 8 Ann Moyal, Preface, Frank Fenner, Nature, Nurture and Chance: the Lives of Frank and Charles Fenner (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2006), vii. 9 In 2007 the interior of the house was virtually unchanged from when it was first built—right down to the blue Grant Featherstone Contour chair. Fenner seemed proud of the original state of the house, confirming that the only changes were the addition of a microwave oven and compact disc player. 10 Mike Power, resident of Vancouver Street, Red Hill, in discussion with the author, 2007. 11 Fenner, F. J., FAA (1914-), Manuscript Collection, Adolph Basser Library, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, MS 143/8/4H5, Box 3. Photographer unknown. 12 Boyd, Australia’s Home: its Origins, Builders and Occupiers, 119. Boyd was referring to the austerity of post-war Australian houses. 13 Frank Fenner, Nature, Nurture and Chance: the Lives of Frank and Charles Fenner, 9-10. Frank Fenner, interview by Ann Moyal, 8 March 2001, 4 April 2001, Canberra, NLA Oral History Section. 14 For Buffon, see George Louis Le Clerc, Count of Buffon, Natural History of Birds, Fish, Insects and Reptiles, in six volumes (London: H. D. Symonds, 1808), or A Natural History of the Globe, and of Man; Beasts, Birds, Fishes, Reptiles and Insects, from the writings of Buffon, Cuvier, Lacepede, and other eminent naturalists. To which are added, Elements of Botany. Corrected and enlarged by John Wright, in four volumes (London: F.Z. S., T.T. and J. Tegg, 1833). For Linnaeus, see Species Plantarum, a facsimile of the first edition, 1753 (London: Ray Society, 1959). 15 Peter Collins, “Biological Analogy”, Architectural Review 126 (London, December 1959): 303-06. 16 Jacques Francois Blondel, Cours d’Architecture, Desaint (Paris, 1777). 17 Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, Harry Francis Mallgrave & Michael Robinson, trans. (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2004). 18 Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: a Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 304-06. 19 Philip Goad, “Eclectic synthesis and the emergence of the so-called Victorian Type”, in “The Modern House in Melbourne 1945-1975” (Ph.D. diss., University of Melbourne, 1992), 37. 20 Robin Boyd, Victorian Modern (Melbourne: Architectural Students’ Society of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, 1947), 67, 63, 60. 21 Boyd, Australia’s Home: its Origins, Builders and Occupiers, 7-11. 22 Ibid., 181. 23 For a discussion of Seidler’s influence on Victorian architects, see Philip Goad, “Melbourne, Harry Seidler and the East Coast International Style”, in “The Modern House in Melbourne 1945-1975”, 5/66-5/81. 24 Frank Fenner and David Curtis, The John Curtin School of Medical Research, the First Fifty Years, 1948-2008 (Gundaroo: Brolga Press, 2001), 22. 25 Fenner made no reference to any similarity in the text. Fenner, Nature, Nurture and Chance, the Lives of Frank and Charles Fenner, 60-61.

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26 Fenner and Curtis, The John Curtin School of Medical Research, the First Fifty Years, 1948-2008, 22. 27 Frank Fenner, “Collins Trip Book”, 1953, entries for 22 July 1953, 21 August 1953, Fenner, F. J., FAA (1914-), MS 143/8, Box 22. This was a reference to Rene and Jean Dubos. See page 17. 28 Harry Seidler, Houses, Interiors and Projects (Sydney: Associated General Publications, 1954), xvi. 29 “Seidler’s work … encouraged Boyd immensely, and he gave Seidler considerable prominence in Australia’s Home, and directly incorporated the forms of Seidler and his mentor, Marcel Breuer, in some of his own architecture.” Conrad Hamann, “Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971” (Ph.D. diss., Visual Arts Department, Monash University, 1978), 159. See also Robin Boyd, “A New Eclecticism”, Architectural Review CX, no. 657 (September 1951): 151-53. 30 Boyd, Australia’s Home: its Origins, Builders and Occupiers, 183. 31 Frank Fenner, interview by the author, 18 October 2007. 32 The Fenners had two children, Marilyn and Vicki. When the Clarks moved to Canberra they brought four of their children to live with them: Sebastian, Katerina, Axel and Andrew. 33 Boyd, Australia’s Home: its Origins, Builders and Occupiers, 149-152. 34 This image is reproduced from the inside cover of Trevor Creighton, Peter Freeman and Roslyn Russell, Manning Clark House: Reflections (Canberra: Manning Clark House, 2002). 35 Stephen Foster and Margaret Varghese The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96 (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1996), 241, 237, 67. 36 Frank Fenner, “The Garden at 8 Monaro Crescent, Red Hill”, March 1977, Fenner, F. J., FAA (1914-), MS 143/8/4H7. 37 Ibid. 38 The sources of Boyd’s architectural education were claimed to be seminal writings by McGrath, Pevsner, Bertram, Richards, Mumford, Le Corbusier and Giedion, supplemented by an influx of overseas journals and magazines. Boyd’s interests in the other arts were demonstrated by numerous conversations he shared with his cousin Arthur in his Murrumbeena studio. For Boyd as a “Modern”, see Serle, Robin Boyd: a Life, 55-62. 39 Ibid., Preface. 40 Hamann, Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971, 169-70. 41 Fenner, Nature, Nurture and Chance, the Lives of Frank and Charles Fenner, 60; letter to Geoffrey Serle, 17 June 1994, Fenner, F. J., FAA (1914-), MS 143/8/4H5, Box 3. 42 As a medical student from 1934 to 1938, Fenner a received scholarship that allowed him to research aboriginal skulls held in the Institute of Anatomy in Canberra. He stayed in Beauchamp House (now Ian Potter House, Australian Academy of Science), which was located opposite the Institute. 43 Fenner, Nature, Nurture and Chance, the Lives of Frank and Charles Fenner, 64-65. 44 Frank Fenner, “Collins Trip Book”, 1953. The table represented in the sketch is similar to steel-framed tables designed by Jean Prouve and Le Corbusier. 45 Ibid. 46 Reyner Banham, Age of the Masters, a Personal View of Modern Architecture (London: Architectural Press, 1975), 114. 47 Joan Ockman gives a good account of this aspect in comparing Lever house to Levittown. See “Mirror Images: Technology, Consumption, and the Representation of Gender in American Architecture Since World War II”, in The Sex of Architecture (New York: Harry Abrams, 1996), 191-210. 48 Banham, Age of the Masters, a Personal View of Modern Architecture, 113. Photo by J. Alex Langley. 49 Frank Fenner, “Collins Trip Book”, 1953. 50 Serle, Robin Boyd, a Life, 168. 51 Assisting Montouri in the design of the Rome Main Railway Station were Leo Calini, Massimo Castellazzi, Achille Pintonello and Annibale Vitellozzi (who went on to design the Palazzetto dello Sport with Pier Luigi Nervi in 1956-57). 52 Frank Fenner, “Collins Trip Book”, 1953. 53 Gerd Hatje, Encyclopaedia of Modern Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963), 157. Photographer unknown. 54 Boyd, Australia’s Home, Its Origins, Builders and Occupiers, 95. 55 Frank Fenner, “Collins Trip Book”, 1953. 56 Canberra Times (November 1956). 57 Australian Home Beautiful (November 1956). 58 Leon Batista Alberti, Ten Books on Architecture, 1755, reprint (London: Alec Tiranti, 1955), Book IX, 194.

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59 Walter Gropius, “Reorientation”, in Gyorgy Kepes, The New Landscape in Art and Science (Chicago: Paul Theobold, 1956), 97. 60 Boyd, Australia’s Home, Its Origins, Builders and Occupiers, 278. 61 Fenner, Nature, Nurture and Chance, the Lives of Frank and Charles Fenner, 9-10. 62 Frank Fenner, interview by Ann Moyal, 8 March 2001, 4 April 2001, Canberra, NLA Oral History Section. 63 Fenner, Nature, Nurture and Chance, the Lives of Frank and Charles Fenner, 55. 64 Frank Fenner, “Collins Trip Book”, 1953. 65 Fenner and Curtis, The John Curtin School of Medical Research, the First Fifty Years, 18. 66 Fenner recalled a scientific anecdote, regarding the ‘extraordinary specialisation of the location of insects’ in vegetation: “The ticks that cause tick typhus in New Guinea were always on the margins of the forest, where you had a bit of savannah, a bit of open country, grass and then trees. And it was when troops got into that sort of country that they got scrub typhus. So I am sure, especially for insects, there are relationships of that kind.” Frank Fenner, interview by the author, 18 October 2007. 67 Blondel’s Cours d’Architecture is frequently cited as the origin of the modern architectural system of typological classification. Nineteenth-century German architect and writer Gottfried Semper based his theory of architectural type on animal and plant morphology. A more recent example is Philip Steadman’s The Evolution of Designs, biological analogy in architecture and the applied arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 68 Philip Steadman, The Evolution of Designs, biological analogy in architecture and the applied arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 6. 69 Collins, “The Biological Analogy”, Architectural Review 126 (December 1959): 305. This was published in 1959 to coincide with the centenary of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species. 70 Alan Colquoun, “Typology and Design Method”, Perspecta 12 (1969): 72. Cited by Steadman, The Evolution of Designs, biological analogy in architecture and the applied arts, 1. 71 Karl Langer, Sub-Tropical Housing (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, May 1944). 72 Architecture (January-March 1945): 137-142. 73 R. O. Phillips, Sunshine and Shade in Australasia (Sydney: Commonwealth Experimental Building Station, 1951), Technical Study 23 (D.D.23). 74 Walter Bunning, Homes in the Sun, the past present and future of Australian housing (Sydney: W. J. Nesbitt, 1945). 75 J. R. Barnes, Thermal Conductivities of Building Materials (Melbourne: CSIRO Division of Building Research, March 1946) Report No. R. 2; R. N. Morse, The Design and Construction of Solar Water Heaters (Melbourne: CSIRO Central Experimental Workshops, April 1954), Report No. E. D.1. 76 “What is a Solar House?” Home Builders Annual (1946): 20, 21, 64. The editions of Australian Home Beautiful were January 1950, August 1950, March 1951, September 1951, February 1952, September 1952 and February 1953 respectively. 77 California Arts & Architecture (December 1943). 78 Peter Blake, ed., Marcel Breuer: Sun and Shadow, the Philosophy of an Architect (New York: Dodd, Mead), 149. 79 Conrad Waddington, “Biological Form and Pattern”, talk given to the Architectural Association, London, 1958. Architectural Association Journal vol. LXXIV, no. 825 (September/October 1958). 80 Architecture and Arts 1, no. 1 (July 1952): 15. 81 Serle, Robin Boyd, a Life, 114. 82 Boyd, Australia’s Home, Its Origins, Builders and Occupiers, 200. 83 “Lack of Comfort Deplored in Modern Homes”, Canberra Times (16 January 1953). This article was based on a paper Boyd that had delivered to the ANZAS conference in Melbourne the previous day. 84 Boyd, Australia’s Home, Its Origins, Builders and Occupiers, 60. Butler designed buildings in the Federation Arts and Crafts Style in Melbourne, including the 1912 Mission to Seamen in Flinders Street. 85 Ibid., 191. 86 Ibid., 93. 87 Robin Boyd, NLA Oral History Program, August 1962. 88 Boyd, Australia’s Home, Its Origins, Builders and Occupiers, 170-71. 89 Elinor Ward, “This House is Canberra’s Medallion Winner”, Australian Home Beautiful (November 1956): 41. 90 Australian Home Beautiful (November 1956). 91 As I prepared my digital recorder, and before I began the formal interview, Fenner started explaining how the house was well oriented for sun and light, with large areas of glass to the north, and generous eaves overhangs. He pointed to the

143 deep, raking eaves overhanging the north-facing glass wall and described how this was designed to keep the sun out in summer while allowing it to penetrate during the winter months. He believed that Boyd, in this way, was advanced in his thinking. Frank Fenner, interview by author 18 October 2007. 92 Fenner to Boyd, 14 April 1954. “Fenner House Canberra”, Grounds, Romberg & Boyd Records 1927-1979, Manuscript Collection, State Library of Victoria, MS 13363, Box 43/16(a). There is no record of Boyd’s reply to this request. 93 Graemme Gunn, a former Grounds, Romberg and Boyd employee, attributed the problems of Malthoid roofs to excessive “expansion and contraction of wood subframes in the extremes of Australian temperature”. Hamann, “Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971”, footnote, 165. 94 Serle, Robin Boyd, a Life, 130-31. “Some contemporaries were eventually to consider that in many respects Romberg was the best architect of the three, especially as a technician and an ‘administrator’ of a building”, 143. 95 Hamann, “Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971”, 206-08. Dr. Roche was a Canberra client to whom Fenner had recommended Boyd’s services in June 1954. Fenner to Boyd, 10 June 1954. “Fenner House Canberra”, Grounds, Romberg and Boyd Records 1927-1979, MS 13363, Box 43/16(a). 96 Letter from Frank Fenner to Robin Boyd, 23.6.55. “Fenner House Canberra”, Grounds, Romberg and Boyd Records 1927-1979, MS 13363, Box 43/16(a). 97 Letter from Fenner to Robin Boyd, 1.12.58. “Fenner House Canberra”, Grounds, Romberg and Boyd Records 1927-1979, MS 13363, Box 43/16(a). 98 Fenner to Division of Forest Products, CSIRO, Melbourne, 21 May 1958. “Fenner House Canberra”, Grounds, Romberg and Boyd Records 1927-1979, MS 13363, Box 43/16(a). 99 “Fenner House Canberra”, Grounds, Romberg and Boyd Records 1927-1979, MS 13363, Box 43/16(a). 100 Hamann, Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971, 165. 101 Canberra Times (November 1956). 102 The “utility” space that Boyd indicated next to the kitchen in the Fenner House was a combined laundry, pantry and storage area, not a hobby space. 103 The first option was highly unlikely, the second was plausible, but impractical, given the dimensions of the dining room, while the third was also possible, but remains unconfirmed—Fenner was unavailable to answer some questions. Joachim Driller made a similar observation regarding the separation of kitchen and playroom in the Geller House I. Joachim Driller, Breuer Houses (London: Phaidon, 2000), 150. 104 The only available documents consist of personal letters that Bobbie wrote to Frank when he was overseas. Unfortunately these are from an earlier trip: the 1953 letters, written when the house was under construction, are not available. 105 Fenner, Nature, Nurture and Chance, the Lives of Frank and Charles Fenner, 61. 106 Tom Haseler, of 56 Arthur Circle, Forrest, was stated to be the supervisor on 14 September 1953. “Fenner House Canberra”, Grounds, Romberg and Boyd Records 1927-1979, MS 13363, Box 43/16(a). “At first Robin employed a local architect as supervisor, and came up rather infrequently. However, this man was very conservative, and repeatedly made decisions which went against Robin’s ideas and our own. Bobbie had quite an argument with Robin about this, but eventually persuaded him to take over supervision himself and come up more frequently.” Fenner to Serle, 17 June 1994, Fenner, F. J., FAA (1914-), MS 143/8/4H, Box 3. 107 Fenner, “Collins Trip Book”, 1953. 108 Canberra Times (November 1956). 109 Elinor Ward, “This house is Canberra’s Medallion winner”, Australian Home Beautiful (November 1956): 40-42, 45. The chairs included a Grant Featherstone-designed Contour Chair. 110 Boyd to Bobbie Fenner, 29 January 1954. “Fenner House Canberra”, Grounds, Romberg and Boyd Records 1927-1979, MS 13363, Box 43/16(a); Frances Hutchison, “Medal-Winning House”, Australian House and Garden (November 1956). 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid. 113 Boyd, Australia’s Home, Its Origins, Builders and Occupiers, 266, 272. 114 Serle, Robin Boyd, a Life, Melbourne University Press, 138, 328-29. 115 See Lewis’s comments to Fenner regarding the differing personalities of Boyd and Grounds in Chapter 2. 116 Robin Boyd, “The Functional Neurosis”, Architectural Review (August 1954). 117 Lindsay Pryor, Trees in Canberra (Canberra: Department of the Interior), 1962. Photo by W. Pedersen, News and Information Bureau, Department of the Interior.

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118 Fenner to Florey, Canberra, 4 December 1953, 18 February 1954, 23 April 1954, Fenner, F. J., FAA (1914-), MS 143/19/1 A to G, Box 38.

145 Chapter Four

AGENTS OF CHANGE: SEIDLER AND THE ZWAR HOUSE

4.1, 4.2 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, 1955, south-east view from Yapunyah Street, cantilevered deck detail. Photos courtesy Brendan Lepschi, 2005.

One prerequisite for paradigm change in architecture not identified by Kuhn within his analysis of the scientific revolution is the need for individuals to promote the advantages of the new way of thinking. Throughout the history of architecture there have been numerous pamphleteers, publicists and polemicists who have played a pivotal role in helping to change public perception regarding an existing view, or doctrine, and in advancing the new idea which is intended to replace it.

One such individual within Australian modernist discourse was Seidler. His campaign in the early 1950s to rid Australia of outdated design modes, and to introduce modernist ideas and principles to all facets of life, gained much publicity—and some unusual headlines: “High Priest of the Twentieth Century”, “Modern Master: How Harry Seidler changed the way we live”, and “Harry Seidler preached the gospel of modern architecture to his adopted country” were some examples of the veneration that Seidler was accorded.1

Seidler’s campaign attracted the attention of many Australians who followed architecture, art and design. One of these was John Zwar, a young plant physiologist who arrived in Canberra, from Adelaide, in 1952. Zwar was one of the first scientists recruited by Frankel to the Division of Plant Industry at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. Like others who worked under Frankel, he was well

146 informed about modern architecture. He had read Walter Gropius, and had an eye for contemporary design, owning a dining suite designed by California-based Charles Eames. In 1955—the year after Zwar bought an elevated house site with a view over the Civic Centre, at 12 Yapunyah Street, O’Connor (which was then located on Canberra’s north-west fringe)—he came across a copy of Seidler’s first publication, Houses, Interiors and Projects. He was particularly impressed by the seven pages of plans, sections and photographs that the architect had dedicated to the Bowden House, located on the south side of the Molonglo River in Canberra.2

4.3 Harry Seidler, Bowden House, Deakin, Canberra, 1950. View from south-west, 1954. Photo by Max Dupain.3 4.4 ‘HHIGH PRIEST OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Harry Seidler has trouble persuading conservatives that his houses are just right for this modern age … Seidler’s determination not to conform with what he considers outmoded and unaesthetic design has caused some friction between himself and Willoughby Council over this modernistic plan.’4

The result of this encounter led to Seidler being commissioned, in 1955, to design a house for Zwar and his wife Heather, who was a potter. A single story, split-level house with a mono-pitch roof whose slope approximated the gradient of the site down towards Yapunyah Street, the Zwar House consisted of a central core—an almost perfect square—with three appendages: a garage, connected by a covered link, and two bedroom additions. A small addition to the rear of the garage contained Heather’s pottery studio. The roofs of all the separate elements followed the same profile as the main roof. The main entry to the house was discrete: approached through a courtyard to the right of the house (between house and garage), it was located halfway up the north- eastern façade. The entrance door opened onto a central passage that continued across the centre of the house, running parallel with the street frontage. On the same level as the passage were the main living room and bedrooms, while six steps up from there were the dining room, family room, kitchen, laundry, and a bedroom extension containing an extra toilet and bathroom.5 Windows consisted of Mondrian-like patterns of clear glass alternated with opaque panels of teal blue and lemon yellow, while brick

147 walls to the entrance courtyard were perforated with geometric openings. A small deck to the front façade, and concrete stair treads at the side entry, were all cantilevered from supporting walls.

4.5 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, floor plan. Drawing by Colin Griffiths, 1955. Mitchell Library, NSW.

All of this resulted in a house that was radically different from others that existed in Canberra. As was the case with the Fenner House, neighbours and visitors didn’t know what to make of it. The plain lines and lack of traditional ornamentation reminded some of austere government buildings of the time, prompting tradesmen to ask if it was a “guvvie” (government house)—presuming that no-one in their right mind would actually choose to live there. To others it appeared out-of-place, like a small beach house that had somehow been washed up in suburban Canberra.6

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4.6 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, 1955, view of entrance court with grille brick wall and cantilevered concrete treads. Photo courtesy Brendan Lepschi, 2005.

Promoting the New Paradigm

A significant part of Zwar’s attraction to Seidler was his growing reputation as a vanguard of modernist taste and sensibility: an individual who was prepared to challenge accepted conventions of taste and design. A number of articles in popular journals in the post-war years publicised Seidler’s battles with conservative local councils, and portrayed him as a zealot who was determined not to conform to “outmoded and unaesthetic design”. Zwar, for whom existing domestic architecture in Canberra was moribund—both aesthetically and functionally—saw in Seidler a potential kindred soul. Here was someone who not only shared his own views about current house design, but was prepared to stand up for his principles. Zwar was particularly impressed by Seidler’s success in taking on planning authorities, noting how “several municipalities had challenged his plans and he’d gone to court and won every one”.7

Seidler was aware that some of the interest in his architecture was generated by his growing notoriety, and recent successes in the Land and Evaluation Court. But he believed that the principal reason he was in demand was because many clients, like Zwar, saw that it was time for a change: “a lot of people were genuinely sick of the rather routine brick boxes that were built everywhere at that time, and the place was simply ripe for new things”.8 But while Seidler’s increasing notoriety appealed to Zwar, the

149 architect’s formidable reputation was also something of a deterrent. For some time Zwar hesitated in contacting him. Would he accept such a modest commission? And would Zwar be able to get along with the architect—who, like his boss Frankel, already had a reputation as a “stormy petrel”?9 For some time Zwar mulled over these issues. Following protracted discussions with his Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation colleagues, he was eventually persuaded by one of them to contact the architect. But he was disappointed with the response: Seidler was grateful to receive the enquiry, but would not be able to accept, due to other commitments. At this point Zwar was ready to concede defeat, but his colleague suggested that he should visit Seidler in person and try to talk him into accepting the commission. With nothing to lose, Zwar drove to Sydney, picked up another friend for moral support, and went looking for Seidler’s Point Piper office.10

After parking outside 4 Wolseley Crescent, Zwar descended a long flight of steps and arrived at a solid, blue-painted door. The door was set, off-centre, in a Mondrian-like pattern of square, horizontal and vertical glazing panels. Looking through those panels Zwar could see right into the office. Behind Seidler, who was already getting up from his desk on the right, there was a freestanding open bookcase that formed a visual separation between the front office area and the living area to the rear. The modulated compartments of the bookcase—containing books, architectural models and other objects—formed a composition of shapes that contrasted with, and countered, the glazed panels of the entrance wall. When viewed together, the patterns of these vertical surfaces created visual tension across the depth of the space between them, forming a coherent spatial composition.11

4.7 Harry Seidler, Point Piper Studio at night.12

The visual interplay experienced by Zwar was an example of what Seidler referred to as “counterpoint”: a musical term that he borrowed to describe an interaction between contrasting elements. Seidler believed that counterpoint—an ideal composition

150 containing the right balance between opposing characteristics such as solid against void, vertical against horizontal, curved against straight or dark against light—was capable of invigorating a work of art or architecture.13 In his own words, the office achieved counterpoint by “coordination of glass division pattern and free-standing interior unit”. The effect was further enhanced by the use of colour. The side walls, carpet, ceiling, and freestanding bookcase were all a neutral grey, the back wall was dark grey to accentuate the impression of depth, while the curtains were yellow. Contrasted with this were small highlights of strong colour: doors and cushions of bright blue, red and yellow, and a cantilevered, black wall unit. Zwar found the overall effect of this composition impressive—as had Seidler’s first Australian client, who requested the exact same colour scheme for her own house.14

4.8 Harry Seidler, Point Piper studio. Model of Rose Seidler House (aka Thompson House) is displayed on middle shelf.15

Believing that Seidler was out of his league, and that he, as a young scientist on a modest income, would not be able to impress him, Zwar opened the discussion on safe territory. He said that he liked the Bowden House, and described his Yapunyah Street block—photographs of which he had previously sent to Seidler’s office. Confident that the conversation was going well, Zwar decided to make his pitch. In his matter-of-fact manner he explained that his budget was £5,000.0.0, and added: “That’s the amount of money. I want a house—the sort of house you design. What can we do for that?” Perhaps it was Zwar’s enthusiasm that impressed Seidler, because he soon agreed to take on the

151 project. A brief discussion followed, during which it was decided that Seidler would design a basic module that could be added onto as the family grew. Seidler mentioned that he knew a good firm of builders in Canberra—Primmer and McPhail, who had constructed the Bowden House—and said that he would talk to them once the plans were ready.16

Seidler met with Zwar in Canberra on a number of occasions, both prior to and during construction. Earlier meetings were at the Zwar’s rented “Tocumwal House” in Todd Street, O’Connor, while later ones were held on site at Yapunyah Street.17 Following these meetings Seidler often asked Zwar to drive him somewhere around Canberra—on one occasion they visited Enrico Taglietti’s office. Zwar found that, in spite of his architect’s increasing reputation for being difficult, he was “a charmer”—the easiest man to get along with. He was aware, however, of the reason for this: he let Seidler have “free reign”, by agreeing to almost everything he suggested. Had that not been the case, Zwar believed that the situation would have been quite different.18

4.9 John and Heather Zwar’s first Canberra house, a “Tocumwal House” at 2 Todd Street, O’Connor. Photo by the author, 2009.

Zwar attempted, wherever possible, to shield Seidler from potentially difficult situations—such as when others became involved in the design and construction processes. For instance, obtaining approval from the Department of the Interior was difficult. The electrical connection to the house was to be on the eastern side, but Seidler had positioned the garage right up against that boundary. The solution proposed by the Departmental officer responsible for granting planning approval—officially termed “The Proper Authority”, a name that Zwar found highly amusing—was to flip the whole house over so that the garage would be on the western side instead of on the east. This would have meant that the laundry and bathroom were on the northern wall, and the entrance courtyard on the southern side—a situation that Zwar knew, without needing to consult Seidler, was unacceptable. Without telling Seidler about any of this—he didn’t think it was a good idea for him to meet “The Proper Authority”, because “people had a lot of trouble” with him—Zwar and McPhail negotiated a compromise solution: a six-inch gap

152 would be maintained between the eastern boundary and the garage wall. Due to his client’s diplomatic intervention, it appears that Seidler, with an unblemished record in such matters, might have been denied his first victory over a Canberra planning authority.

On a later occasion when Seidler and Zwar inspected progress on the house they became involved in a confrontation with tradesmen. Having been informed—after the event—about the previous issue, Seidler became concerned about the location of every electrical and telephone connection. Unfortunately he arrived on site just as Departmental electrical contractors were fixing a bracket to the side of the house to support the main power connection. For Seidler, this was in the worst possible location: right alongside the main entry. Zwar thought “here’s trouble”, and tried to defuse the situation by remarking “I wonder what that is?” Seidler, of course, knew full well. A vigorous discussion ensued, after which the contractors, somewhat piqued at Seidler’s attitude—they believed they were there to help, and should have been treated with more respect—disappeared behind the garage to establish a more discrete connection.19

Seidler personally prepared the colour scheme for the Zwar House. He specified colours and finishes for all external and internal surfaces, including fabrics for curtains, upholstery and cushion covers, and stipulated where the various items and materials could be purchased. Zwar remembered visiting Rene’s in the Strand Arcade in Sydney on one occasion to check on a black and white curtain fabric that Seidler had selected, and he followed his architect’s instructions as much as his limited budget would allow. When the house was finished, Zwar was criticised by friends and acquaintances for following his architect’s colour scheme so faithfully: “What, you’re letting your architect dictate your taste?” they exclaimed. As he recalled, they thought he was mad.20

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4.10 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, samples of colour and fabric, 1955. 4.11 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, bedroom 1 curtain swatch from Rene’s, Strand Arcade, Sydney, 1955. John Zwar collection.

154

4.12 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, colour code, 1955. John Zwar collection.

But with the passing of time Zwar became more adventurous in questioning Seidler’s control over all aspects of his home environment. After the upstairs bedroom addition was completed, he saw an opportunity to alleviate a lack of space in the main living room by removing a dividing wall between that space and the adjacent bedroom 2. For this alteration he did not seek Seidler’s approval, and admitted to experiencing some nervousness: “So one day we did it … it was a bit of a risk thinking about it, because I was confident the wall wasn’t load-bearing, but I really didn’t [know] … I’d have been embarrassed if it had have been!”21

Zwar obtained first-hand experience of how Seidler took an avid interest in the condition of his houses, and in the way his clients used them—a situation that continued long after they were completed. On one occasion in 1960, when staff from Seidler’s office visited Zwar at Yapunyah Street, they explained how they had seen the Bowden House, and were horrified to find that it was in a terrible state.22 When it came time to sell the Zwar House, Zwar’s son wanted it to be advertised as a “Harry Seidler-designed house”. Somehow, word got back to Zwar that Seidler did not approve. Whether this was because of the house being sold, or because Seidler had found out about the internal alterations, Zwar was not sure. However, he believed a phone call to Seidler was the right

155 thing to do. Zwar recalled that they had a pleasant conversation, and there was no dispute. He explained to Seidler that he’d been “very happy with the house”, but as Heather had died and his family had grown up, he was selling it. Seidler—who remembered Zwar and the house—said that he appreciated the call. As Zwar noted, it was not long after that when Seidler died.23

Zwar had generally remained faithful to his architect throughout the processes of designing, building, living in and selling the Yapunyah Street house. Seidler, in turn, had demonstrated unwavering dedication to his own mentor, Breuer. The experience of preparing working drawings for a series of seminal houses between 1946 and 1948 in Breuer’s New York office had left a lasting impression on Seidler’s design philosophy and work practice.24 It was this legacy that led architectural commentator Philip Drew to describe Seidler’s architecture as “East Coast Modern, the American idea of the Bauhaus idea restated by Breuer”.25

The opportunity to design a house for his parents in Sydney had lured Seidler away from Breuer to set up his own practice in Australia. Within a week of arriving in Sydney, he began to explore the region for suitable house sites—a selection process that was directly transplanted from his American experiences. Seidler recalled how he “drove around Sydney and looked for large areas of land like we built on in Connecticut while working for Breuer”. As his biographer, Alice Spigelman, explained, he was thinking of “the houses Breuer and Gropius had built in the rural settings of Cambridge”.26 After the family settled on a six-hectare bush-land site in Clissold Road, Turramurra, Seidler set about designing his first house, which became known as the Rose Seidler House, after his mother. Designed and built between 1948 and 1950, it was the precedent for the Zwar House, which Seidler would design some five years later.

4.13 Harry Seidler, Rose Seidler House, Turramurra. Photo by Max Dupain.

156 Seidler was quite open about the international origins of this house: “It was probably … a direct transplantation of European through Eastern United States developments in architecture centred in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just plonked straight into the North Shore of Sydney”.27 He was not exaggerating on that last point: what he “plonked” onto his parents’ site was in fact a previous design that he had prepared in Breuer’s office in 1947. In association with Rolland Thompson, the son of the client, Seidler had designed the Thompson House for a site overlooking a lake in Foxborough, Massachusetts. While it was never built, Seidler retained the model and brought it to Australia with the rest of his belongings. When it came to designing his parents’ house in Turramurra, Seidler took the Thompson House and turned it through ninety degrees to relate to the southern hemisphere location. Aside from that, the house remained substantially unchanged—in fact the designs were so similar that the scale model that Seidler presented to his parents for their house was actually the original model of the Thompson House.28

Point Piper Laboratory

Harry always liked to do houses because it was sort of his laboratory—you were always searching for types … They were experiments, there were versions that never went anywhere, but somehow [they] became the launching pad for other variations. Colin Griffiths29

In mid-1955 Colin Griffiths, who had not been present when Zwar first visited the office, was briefed by Seidler and began to prepare the sketch plans for the Zwar House.30 Griffiths was one of Seidler’s first employees, having joined the office at the beginning of 1954 to replace Don Gazzard, who had travelled overseas.

The Zwar House, a “one-box”, square house measuring approximately 11.6 metres by 11.6 metres (excluding the garage block and bedroom extensions), conformed to a particular type of small house that Seidler and Griffiths were continually developing and adapting: a compact, minimum, low-cost model that could be manipulated to respond to the topography and solar orientation of various sites. Griffiths recalled that the small houses presented a constant challenge, particularly in finding the right builders and keeping within budget. They were simple brick houses with a mono-pitch, “shed” roof of corrugated “Super Six” asbestos. Usually square in configuration, they often incorporated a split in level to accommodate the slope of the site. The square form was partly based on the rationale that the lowest budget was obtained through the most compact plan form, and that any attenuation of that basic form increased the wall areas and material costs. But the prevalence of the square, compact plan type in Seidler’s early

157 work was not only governed by economy—its origins owed as much to the influence of Bauhaus aesthetic principles. Griffiths recalled how it was based on the Bauhaus idea that you began with a pure, platonic form that was then manipulated. Internal spatial variations would be investigated, and the external form played around with through modulation of the façade, puncturing voids, or pushing out or recessing various elements.31

Sometimes referred to by Seidler as “ring plan” houses,32 the first of these compact models was a proposal for a house in Beecroft. The Marcus Seidler House in Turramurra, of 1949-51, was an enlarged version, as was another in Gordon. The standard Universal House proposal, designed by Seidler for the Small Homes Bureau of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects—and drawn by Griffiths—was a further variation. The 1956 Heyden House in Miranda, the 1956 Breakspear House in Clontarf, a 1958 house in Kangaroo Point, the 1958 Luursema House in Castlecrag, the 1958 Bland House in Coogee and exhibition houses in Pennant Hills of 1960 and Carlingford of 1962 were all variations of the same theme.33

4.14 Zwar House. Floor plan showing square format divided into two equal rectangles by change in level. Sketch by the author, 2009.

158 Seidler used the split between the two levels—which effectively divided the house into two identical rectangles—for two functions: to follow the natural site slope, and to separate the house into functional areas. In the Zwar House the bedrooms and the living area were placed on the lower level, while the dining room and “service rooms”— kitchen, laundry and bathroom—were located on the upper level. It was the nexus between the way in which the internal plan was split according to the functions, and the need to provide a change in level to correspond to the natural site conditions, that provided Seidler with an opportunity to achieve one of his principal goals: maximum spatial effect for minimum use of material. The split-level configuration of the Zwar House provided a higher volume through the main entry, central corridor and bedroom spaces, dramatizing the internal experience of the house at key points.

4.15 Zwar House. Section A-A showing ceiling height at entry and living areas. Sketch by the author, 2009.

But the corridor, which divided the plan across the centre and separated the bedrooms and living room from the rest of the house, also conceptually divided the Zwar House from all of Seidler’s variations on the square compact house theme—none of which contained a corridor.34 While it is clear that the main reason for the central passage in the Zwar House was to accommodate the proposed main bedroom addition to the south- west, other houses in the compact series solved that problem without providing a separate corridor.

Seidler’s overall approach to the production of design and documentation was one of extreme efficiency. Fundamental to this was the establishment of archetypal solutions that functioned well, and the adaptation and reuse of these in future projects. Griffiths described his former employer as a “performance-based operator” who “didn’t muck around with the design” once it was accepted. Seidler saw no advantage in arriving on a Monday morning with a new scheme and starting all over again, and if a solution was successful it was reused.35 Proof of this can be seen in the 1958 Bland House in Coogee,

159 which was demolished in 1988. This house utilised virtually the same plan as the Zwar House, even though its orientation was turned through ninety degrees. The main differences between the houses consisted of adjustment of fenestration, roof form and sun shading. Even the built-in joinery units separating the dining area from the entry and living spaces were similar, as shown in the following illustrations.36

4.16 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, 1955. 4.17 Harry Seidler, Bland House, 1958.

4.18 Zwar House, 1955, photo courtesy Brendan Lepschi.37 4.19 Bland House, 1958, photo by Max Dupain.38

That Seidler saw his office as an efficient operation was evident by the small size of the studio that he shared with Griffiths, but of course the same logic also applied in reverse: the operation had to be streamlined in order for it to function within that space. Seidler sat at a desk perpendicular to the front wall, while Griffiths was stationed nearby at a collapsible drawing table. They worked on all aspects of projects together, and the nature of the space dictated a close working relationship. When they discussed a drawing Griffiths would turn around and kneel on the floor with his arms resting on Seidler’s desk. In that way they were able to work on a drawing together, and turn it around to view the composition from alternative angles. The confined space meant that

160 Griffiths worked a lot from memory: “there was no layout space, so you devised the plan, and you kept that and all its dimensions and that was put aside and you put another piece of paper [on the drawing board] and you started the sections and elevations by recalling all that”.39

To emphasise efficiency as being such an integral part of the Seidler office is not to say that there was any lack of information within the documentation. In spite of the modest budget and scale of the Zwar House, the working drawings for this building consisted of no less than seven drawings of approximately B1 size. In addition to the standard floor plans, sections and elevations, there were sub-floor, roof framing and electrical plans, and a comprehensive series of details, many of which were drawn full-size. These covered all aspects of the kitchen, laundry, bathroom, bedrooms, built-in furniture and freestanding fireplace. Although this was a comprehensive set of drawings, it relied on standardisation, adaptation and repetition. For example, in Seidler’s office two types of freestanding metal fireplaces were developed: a conical version and a triangular version, with the latter being specified for the Zwar House. Throughout the documentation the emphasis was on simple, direct detailing, the accumulation of knowledge from previous projects and a minimum of variations.40

The final interpretation of efficiency in the Seidler office was in regard to choice of builders. As with his selections of house type and construction detail, Seidler was clearly of the opinion that if a particular solution worked it should be repeated. And so he cultivated a select group of builders who were familiar with his working methodology and could be trusted to maintain his high standards of workmanship, and he negotiated a price with them once the documents were ready. One of his preferred firms was Primmer and McPhail, whose quote of £4,600.0.0—comfortably within Zwar’s budget—was accepted.41

A number of parallels can be drawn between the way in which Seidler practiced architecture, and the way in which scientists operate. Seidler was committed to what might be termed a “scientific approach” to all aspects of the design, documentation and construction phases. One manifestation of this was the extreme efficiency of his operation. Another was the importance that he attached to the science of building. Griffiths recalled that they regularly consulted the Commonwealth Experimental Building Station (CEBS) reports and studies.42 To step back from the details of Seidler’s houses and look at the bigger picture, it could be argued that his primary motivation for practicing architecture was essentially the same as those that led scientists, like Zwar, to practice science. Underlying the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s separate research areas were a number of common ideologies. Many of

161 these—the ideas of working for the public good to improve the human condition, the faith in scientific rationality and in knowledge transfer between disciplines—were shared by practitioners of modern architecture.43 After attending Gropius’s Master Class at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1945 and 1946, Seidler wrote how Gropius had instilled in him “the firm belief that we are to bring about vital changes to the physical environment—to better the man-made world.”44

But the most important—and relevant—similarities between Seidler’s methodology and that of scientists were not related so much to his “scientific” use of technical data, or to his primary motivations, as much as they were to his modus operandi. Conrad Waddington, a scientist who spent a large part of his career exploring the overlapping territories between his own field—biology—and those of art and architecture, identified a potential link between Seidler and scientific procedure. In The Nature of Life he examined the key differences between scientific and artistic methodology. Waddington described how one of the central tenets of scientific research was that it was never the work of one individual—or even a succession of individuals—but was based on cooperative effort. To illustrate this point, he employed a constructional analogy: “An individual man can, of course, add a brick to the structure, or even lay out the plan of a new room, but his brick must be added to a wall which others have already partially built, and his new room must join on and communicate with the rest of the whole palace of knowledge.”45

Waddington believed that science, more than any other cultural activity, was built on the foundations set down by previous research. While there was generally an uneasy relationship between tradition and originality in the arts—painting, poetry and literature—no such suspicions were aroused in the field of science. As Waddington explained, if a work of art displayed obvious references to previous examples, the artist would probably be dismissed as derivative. But in scientific work, unless the scientist could demonstrate understanding and respect for the work of predecessors, he or she would not be taken seriously. This “communal, co-operative nature of scientific endeavour”, Waddington believed, was one of its main strengths.46 While disputes still arose in the scientific world regarding individual authorship—it was widely known, for example, that Fleming, Florey and Chain had a falling out over that very issue in regard to penicillin—Waddington had made a valid point. And one that, although he did not identify it himself, applied as much to architecture as it did to art or to literature.

If Seidler’s approach to architecture is considered in regard to Waddington’s statements, a number of issues come to light. Seidler saw his domestic architecture in Australia as being a logical continuation of the modernist houses that Breuer was building on the

162 East Coast of North American—houses that he, as Breuer’s documentation architect, was familiar with. In his own words, Seidler looked for similar sites around Sydney for his parents’ house. When he found one, he placed on it a design for a house that he had prepared while working in Breuer’s office. The adjustments that he made to the house to adapt it to local conditions were minimal, involving re-orientation and not much more. It was not important to Seidler that his Australian houses were “original” works of art. But it was vital that they originated from a sound pedigree—were linked genetically to established architectural forebears. Seidler made no secret of the origins of his architecture—and no apologies for it. By propagating the ideologies and forms of Gropius and Breuer, he believed that he was spreading the word and showing Australians the correct way to build.

Of course Seidler was not the only Australian architect to borrow overseas models. Boyd, for instance, had taken Breuer’s binuclear house plan and reproduced it on two different sites in Canberra. But when the work of Boyd is considered in its entirety, these direct transplantations were isolated examples. Boyd’s house designs varied significantly throughout his career, and he frequently incorporated input from a number of sources. Seidler, on the other hand, stayed true to his original mentors. This is not to say that he repeated exactly the same forms and spaces as Breuer’s originals. Over time he tinkered with, adjusted, and improved aspects of these transplanted designs. But in spirit and ideology they remained European modernism—via East Coast North America—in origin.

Seidler’s process of incremental modification began at an early stage. As with most architects’ first houses, there were problems with the Rose Seidler House. Seidler was unaware of the strength of the Australian sun, and had to retrofit heavy curtains on the window of his parents’ bedroom to block out the morning sun.47 The Rose Seidler House, and other early houses with flush glass facades, weathered badly in the harsh Australian conditions. Seidler “felt so guilty” about some that he and Griffiths would visit them on weekends to “caulk joints and paint window frames”. But Seidler learnt quickly from his mistakes, and gradually adapted his designs to suit local conditions. Observing that “the sun used to come in and fade curtains”, he began to avoid east and west orientation for windows, and introduced more substantial eaves overhangs, or recesses in the house form, to provide protection from sun and rain. At the same time he ceased to construct houses of lightweight, timber-framed external walls, clad with asbestos cement sheets— which provided poor thermal insulation—and adopted heavier, masonry construction techniques, such as that employed on the majority of the Zwar House.48

In relation to Waddington’s theory of scientific practice, the strength of Seidler’s Australian houses was not that they were isolated, independent structures, but that they

163 constituted fragments of a bigger picture. Fragments that both acknowledged the existence of international architectural discourse, and claimed their place within that community. Building on the solid foundations of previous research, Seidler made clear and explicit references to previous work by Breuer. While, in Waddingtonian terms, these aspects of Seidler’s approach were his strength, to many observers those same aspects were his biggest weakness. Seidler was often accused of being derivative, and of not attempting to address the Australian context. These were criticisms that Seidler—who didn’t believe in either the existence of, or need for, a unique “Australian” culture— usually dismissed with contempt. One commentator who saw Seidler’s lack of connection to Australian culture as a problem was Philip Drew. Citing Seidler’s formative years at Harvard, Drew wrote that “the universals which animate Seidler’s work are European not Australian … The price of sticking to the task of faithfully enlarging Modernism was the exclusion of Australian content.”49

Underscoring the debate about Seidler’s apparent lack of Australian substance was an ongoing debate regarding regionalism, the roots of which can be traced back to the Gropius House at Lincoln, Massachusetts, designed by Gropius and Breuer in 1937 and 1938. In 1954 Sigfried Giedion cited that house to be an exemplar of the “New Regionalism”. For Giedion, the concept and structure of the Gropius House placed it firmly within the canon of contemporary architecture, yet aspects of its design also displayed empathy with the “natural conditions of its region”. These latter aspects included a reworking of the traditional New England front porch, and the fact that it was constructed of a traditional wooden frame, clad with white painted weatherboards. In fact the only difference that Giedion claimed to see between this house and its more traditional New England neighbours was that the weatherboards ran vertically rather than horizontally.50

But what Giedion failed to comprehend were the considerably more significant dissimilarities: the floor plan was not based on traditional New England models, nor was the flat roof. Joachim Driller believed that, rather than being an example of a “New Regionalism”, the Gropius House was nothing more than an amalgam of Gropius’s and Breuer’s previous European buildings and projects. This, he believed, was confirmed by the Gropius House’s initial lack of a southern roof overhang to protect it from the sun. If Gropius and Breuer had been genuinely attempting to consider the natural conditions of New England, he asked, why would they have made such a fundamental omission?51 Breuer’s first house, located just down the hill from the Gropius House,52 suffered from a similar lack of regard to local weather conditions and poor detailing. Six months after it was completed the majority of the window frames leaked; after two years so did the flat roof, and there were ongoing problems with the oil-fired central heating.53

164

It was in this area—the failure to adequately address local climatic conditions—that created serious flaws in the regionalist argument. This was also where Seidler was most frequently criticised—and where the problems with the Zwar House began.

The Dilemma of the Universal Paradigm

Ev’ - ry-where you go you always take the weather with you. Neil Finn and Tim Finn54

In overall concept rather than detail, the precedent for the Zwar House was the Rose Seidler House, designed and built some five years earlier. It caused quite a sensation when it appeared to land, like an object from another planet, amongst the market gardens, orchards, poultry farms and dairies of Turramurra. In many ways it was the direct inverse of the traditional approach to house design in Australia, particularly in the way it dealt with climate. Not founded on an additive design process—whereby climate moderation devices such as verandahs, decks and sunshades were added to a basic form—the Rose Seidler House was reductive. It gave the impression that a solid, cube- like form had been hollowed out, or had elements removed from it, to accommodate climate control devices. Like its predecessor, the Zwar House was a fragment of international modern architecture. Precise, hard-edged and built of straight, geometric lines, it stood detached from its site and was only notionally site-specific: subject to hemispheric solar orientation and repositioning of internal steps to traverse the slope, it could just as easily have been located, with varying results of human comfort, on any site in Sydney, North America or Europe. Which it was: Seidler admitted that his houses stretched “from one side of the United States to the other”, and he had had no hesitation in building a second “Zwar House”—for another client, on a site in Coogee with different orientation—three years after the Canberra version.55

In his Houses, Interiors, Projects of 1954, Seidler published drawings, photographs and texts of buildings and projects completed during his first five years of Australian practice. Aware that a true regional architecture must address local conditions, he devoted much space in that publication to the discussion of climate. Almost all of his commissions were in and around Sydney, a location that he termed “South East Australia”, and which he believed enjoyed a climate “comparable to that of some Mediterranean countries or of California”. Seidler claimed that “few countries in the world” were blessed with the mild conditions of “South East Australia”, where there were no extremes, and where temperature variations between summer and winter were so minor that—if a building

165 took into account “special local conditions”, (whatever that meant)—no heating or cooling would be required.56

Houses, Interiors, Projects also included houses for contexts outside Sydney: a sheep station at Quirindi, country New South Wales, the Bowden House in Canberra, and two projects for standardized houses, to be constructed in various locations.57 Of the non- Sydney houses, the binuclear Quirindi farmhouse design represented a departure from Seidler’s Sydney houses. Designed to accommodate the “intense summer heat and bushfire danger” of its specific location, it contained a force-ventilated roof cavity. A similar roof form was evident on the 1959 Paspaley House in Darwin, Northern Territory, which incorporated additional measures to address the tropical climate.58 However, aside from an acknowledgement that Canberra’s westerly winds limited outdoor living, and the presence of a small courtyard cut into the northeast façade to provide some shelter, the Bowden House did not appear to be substantially different to Seidler’s Sydney houses of the same period.59

It is possible that an understanding of Canberra’s climate somehow slipped through Seidler’s net. He did not appear to consider the different climatic conditions of the national capital as much as he did that of other, non-Sydney, locations—such as Quirindi or Darwin. The problem most likely originated from the geographical location of the capital city. Relatively close to Sydney, and technically within the region of south-east Australia, Canberra nevertheless experiences vastly different climatic conditions from Sydney due to its high elevation and inland location. Anyone who has lived there, and has experienced the marked daily and seasonal temperature fluctuations and frosts, would realise that the climate of the national capital is quite different to the benign Mediterranean conditions that Seidler described—and that heating is essential. Although Seidler visited Canberra on a number of occasions, it is possible that, due to time constraints, he returned to Sydney the same day and did not experience the overnight drop in temperature for himself.60

Seidler made a number of further generalisations about Australian climate. On one occasion he claimed that heating was more of a luxury than a necessity, and conflated survival with comfort: “In this country … people are just simply uncomfortable. It’s not as bad as it is in Europe where … you have to protect yourself from the cold otherwise you can’t exist”.61 To Seidler the fireplace—which he included in almost every one of his houses—was a symbolic and formal device more than it was a functional item. Like the Zwar House, most of Seidler’s houses were divided into two zones: bedrooms and living. In the centre of the living zone was a fireplace, a visual device that marked the geometric and spiritual centre of the house: “Although anything but an efficient method of

166 heating”, Seidler wrote: “the psychological warmth of the sitting group around the open fire is still the centre of the present-day home.”62 Seidler’s fireplaces were divided into two basic types: those constructed of masonry and those of metal. In houses of more than one level the former type, which usually originated on a lower level and extended through the floor to the main living area above, formed an additional formal and aesthetic function: a device that visually and tectonically anchored the house to its site.63

Perhaps it was Seidler’s view of fireplaces as being mainly symbolic and visual that contributed to a common lack of functionality in their design. Griffiths remembered how there was “a long history of unsuccessful fireplaces in the houses”, with a number of them discharging smoke into the living room. In an anecdote reminiscent of Boyd’s nightmares of rain-soaked clients disappearing into billows of smoke, one client refused to finally pay his final fees installment because Griffiths and Seidler could not prevent his fireplace from smoking inside the house.64

For the Zwar House, Seidler specified his standard, triangular section metal fireplace, which was welded together by a boilermaker from quarter-inch thick mild steel plate.

4.20 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, elevation of triangular fireplace. Drawing by Colin Griffiths, 1955. Mitchell Library, NSW.

167 A number of Seidler’s statements demonstrate that he had little understanding of the extreme cold of Canberra—where, in winter, temperatures at night drop to minus six degrees Celsius, and where something more substantial than psychological warmth is required. This failing on Seidler’s part was substantiated by Zwar’s personal experience. While he was generally happy with the house, he remained convinced that Seidler did not realise how cold Canberra was during winter. In fact cold climate appeared to be a novelty for Seidler’s employees: Zwar recalled that during a visit to Canberra some of them, not having seen snow before, asked if he would take them up to the Brindabella Ranges.65 Zwar believed it was Seidler’s lack of understanding of Canberra’s climate that led to one of the main problems with the house: the inadequate fireplace, which required almost constant stoking to maintain an effective temperature.66 In the late 1960s Zwar removed the fireplace in order to demolish the internal dividing wall between the living room and bedroom. Heating was then supplied by a rudimentary oil heater, which he installed on the north-east living room wall. Left on almost permanently in the colder months, it only succeeded in keeping some of the chill off, and was replaced by an electric unit in the 1980s.67

Seidler was aware that a compact building such as the Zwar house was the most thermally stable. He was also cognisant of the implications of various materials, stating: “Light and open construction is thermally unstable. A solid, heavy building will have a desirable heat storage capacity, ready to dissipate heat in our cool evenings.”68 But in regard to the Zwar House, these issues were not particularly well resolved. The entire north-west wall, and a large proportion of the south-east wall, were single-glazed, providing large surface areas for heat to escape, while the two remaining external side walls, although constructed of bagged and painted double brickwork, would have provided little useful heat storage and dissipation due to their orientation. Additionally, the timber-floored Zwar House was particularly vulnerable to heat loss through that perimeter. To minimise heat loss from the downstairs living area, which was originally separated from the dining and family rooms by a half-height wall only, an additional full- height wall was installed between the passage and living room in the late 1970s. Constructed of Alpine Ash boards with glazed panels above, it incorporated a sliding door for access (see Illustration 4.18).

Seidler was aware of the opposite requirement: that a house should provide adequate protection from the heat of the sun. In 1963 he wrote: “It is impossible for us to live comfortably in buildings which admit too much of the sun’s heat.”69 Zwar recalled that Seidler was particularly concerned about that aspect of the house, and believed that he generally got it right. But there was one problem: before the upstairs bedroom was added in 1967, the glazed north-west wall admitted too much sun in late afternoon when

168 the western sun came in low over O’Connor Ridge.70 When the addition was added Seidler placed a timber screen to shade the upper part of the windows, but Zwar found that it was largely redundant in that location.71

4.21 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, view from north showing timber sunscreen to bedroom addition. Photo courtesy Brendan Lepschi, 2005.

Counterpoint

With the benefit of more than half a century of hindsight, Zwar looked back on his approach to obtaining a site, choosing an architect and building a house, and decided that he must have been “pretty naïve”. Perhaps that was partly true. But it was a combination of his youthful optimism and quiet determination that resulted in this small but significant house being built. In accordance with Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shift, the relative youth of the major contributors was significant: in 1955, when Zwar commissioned Seidler, he was twenty-eight years of age, Seidler was thirty-two, while Griffiths was barely twenty.

The notion of counterpoint, which was so central to Seidler’s architecture, entered the story of the Zwar House well before that day in 1955 when the client stood, apprehensively, outside the blue door and peered into Seidler’s Point Piper office. It fact it was the search for a counterpoint to Canberra’s 1950s architecture that led Zwar to that destination. Modest and unassuming by nature, he claimed little credit for his role, saying that it was essentially limited to providing the site and stipulating the maximum budget. Yet without Zwar’s pursuit of Seidler—a quest that he followed with some determination and tenacity, given his limited means—the house would not have eventuated. Fundamental to Zwar’s attempt to engage Seidler was his desire to build a

169 radical modernist house in the national capital as a counterpoint to the existing architecture—including the Black Mountain laboratories where he worked.

When the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research decided in 1929 to establish two lines of research—economic botany and entomology—in the Federal City, Bertram Dickson, a mycologist,72 was made Chief of the Division of Economic Botany, (later renamed the Division of Plant Industry). Establishing these divisions was a long and drawn out process that tested the patience of those involved. Many felt isolated and cut off from the rest of the scientific community, regarding themselves as “outcasts in a scientific and social wilderness”. To make matters worse, the Canberra location was far from ideal for entomology, the severe winters and barren soil were quite unsuited to botanical work, and there were long delays in completing the laboratories and glasshouses.73 As a result, the long, grey façade of the classically inspired Black Mountain Laboratory became a symbol of lost opportunities for Dickson, reminding him of “Queen Hatshepsut’s funeral buildings at Dayr al-Bahre in the Valley of the Kings of Ancient Egypt”.74

4.22 Federal Capital Commission, CSIR Laboratory buildings, Black Mountain, c 1932. Division of Economic Entomology is on the left and Plant Industry on the right. 4.23 Decorative ceramic plaque with Scarab Beetle, Entomology Building. National Archives of Australia.75

Zwar considered the existing domestic architecture of the national capital to be no better, believing that it was mundane and functionally deficient. The government-owned Tocumwal House, at 2 Todd Street, O’Connor, that he and Heather rented from when they married in 1954 until their new house was built, was one of about one hundred almost identical houses, lined up in rows in the suburb of O’Connor. Each house was

170 oriented to a street front, regardless of solar orientation. Windows were generally small, and the houses were dark and cold.

4.24 “One of the suburbs said to be in search of a city.”76 Newly erected Tocumwal Houses in O’Connor, early 1950s. The first Zwar House, at 2 Todd Street, is in the third row from the top, extreme right. Australian Information Service.

171

Sheena Jack, another resident of Todd Street, described her impressions of the living in the street after moving from Melbourne:

… a row of fibro and wood boxes perched on the rotary-hoed clay in the wettest winter for years, no trees or shrubs anywhere and sheep paddocks and flies at the end of the street. It was a real shock after the gentle, manicured streets of Melbourne.77

Zwar believed that the new houses being built in Canberra’s suburbs were not much better. Many of these conformed to one or another of a series of prescriptive, historical styles. He considered this to be an abhorrent practice, and a far cry from the rational world of science in which he operated. Zwar believed that a radical modern house—the sort that Seidler designed—would not only function better in terms of admitting natural light and addressing other pragmatic considerations, but would act as a visual counterpoint to what was then a dreary Canberra suburb. It was Seidler’s growing reputation as a modernist visionary—someone who was prepared to take on, and beat, conservative planning authorities responsible for this existing suburban malaise—that most appealed to Zwar.

4.25 Zwar’s local store. Tom Cosier’s General Store, O’Connor’s first suburban shop, c 1950. Department of Territories.

The idea of counterpoint was followed through in many aspects of the built fabric of the Zwar House. Although it was not elevated above the landscape like its more illustrious

172 predecessor, the Rose Seidler House, the Zwar House—like all other Seidler and Breuer houses—was clearly a constructed, geometric object that contrasted with nature and stood apart from its surrounding landscape. Zwar claimed that he, like Seidler, had little time or interest for gardening.78 His house reflected this in the way that it sat starkly in a field of grass, with no attempt at mediation between nature and artifice. It was this aspect of the Zwar House that led some observers to compare it to a coastal beach house. The external walls, which met the ground abruptly, contained material contrasts between the bagged and painted brick walls that ran parallel with each other from north- west to south-east, and the infill cross walls that were largely glazed. The fenestration of those cross walls continued the interplay of contrasts: small window openings were punched through large, solid walls on the south-west facade, while the brick walls to the garage and courtyard were peppered with small, vertical slots to form grilles. The infill walls, running at right angles to the solid, parallel walls, were mainly glazed, and subdivided into studied compositions of squares and rectangles—the latter with alternating horizontal and vertical thrust. The counterpoint effect was further highlighted through the use of opposite colours: doors, and solid asbestos cement sheet panels above windows, were painted in complementary colours of salmon pink, teal blue and lemon yellow.

4.26, 4.27 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, detail views from south and north. Photos courtesy Brendan Lepschi, 2005.

The play of opposites continued through to the interior of the Zwar House, with many similar colour juxtapositions and geometric manipulations such as painted doors and window proportions. The interior contained extensive areas of timber. These included Tallow Wood floors, vertical Alpine Ash boarding to selected walls in the central passage and living and dining rooms, Alpine Ash door and window frames, and a combination of solid Alpine Ash and Canadian plywood to built-in joinery units. The warm hue of these surfaces, coated in clear polyurethane, provided a further contrast to the adjacent painted walls. Yet in spite of these visual contrasts, consistent detailing and the repetitive

173 use of a family of fixtures, fittings and materials throughout the interior resulted in a coherent and homogeneous internal space.

4.28, 4.29 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, interior view from passage towards entrance door, view from kitchen. Photos courtesy Brendan Lepschi, 2005.

Economy

Zwar, like Fenner, saw modern architecture as a potential solution to practical problems. Yet both scientists were just as attracted to the visual appearance of this new phenomenon: to the details, forms, materials and colours. What fascinated them was how modern architecture combined these aspects to become a physical manifestation of a new world—a modern, post-war world whose emergence and progress was so intimately tied to their own fields. When Zwar paid Seidler for his design and documentation services he was essentially purchasing a modernist artefact that reflected these aspirations as much as he was commissioning a house to provide shelter for his family. This aspect of the transaction between client and architect was summarised by the fact that Seidler presented his client with a print by the Bauhaus student and teacher Josef Albers to hang on the wall of his new house. Titled Seclusion and dated 1942, it now hangs in Zwar’s new residence in the Canberra suburb of Pearce. With Zwar having

174 sold the Zwar House in 2003, and the new owners demolishing it to make way for a much lager residence, Seclusion is the only surviving element of Seidler’s comprehensive vision for an affordable small house in the national capital.79

4.30 Josef Albers, Co-ordinal, 1942. Similar to the print that Seidler presented to the Zwars.80

For a young scientist on a relatively modest income, the Zwar House was a significant purchase. While Zwar was content to accept Seidler at face value, and did not have a profound influence over the planning of the house, he nevertheless made a significant contribution to the architecture of the national capital. By going to the trouble of commissioning Seidler, Zwar was instrumental in bringing, to a less affluent suburb of Canberra, an example of a new type of domestic architecture—the affordable modern house.

In this respect the house that Seidler designed for John and Heather Zwar represented a significant return to one of the earliest tenets of modern architecture: response to social need. Unlike Breuer’s houses, which increasingly exemplified a consumerist notion of modern architecture as an expensive and fashionable commodity, the modest Zwar House was a demonstration of affordability. Seidler was aware of this distinction, writing how different his first Australian clients were to Breuer’s in New York, “who were wealthy and wanted modern houses mainly for elitist-visual reasons”.81 Just how affordable the Zwar House was is evident when the cost—£5,000.0.0 in 1956—is compared to that of other houses. The Rose Seidler House had cost approximately £8,000.0.0 to build in 1948-50,82 while the cost of the Fenner House was £8,500.0.0 (excluding heating) in 1954. Breuer’s first house in Lincoln, Massachusetts, cost around US $10,000 as far back as 1939, while the monumental Frank House in Pittsburg, designed with Gropius, cost a mammoth US $250,000. Breuer’s averaged-sized house Geller House I, which Seidler

175 documented between 1946 and 1947, had a budget of US $25,000, while his relatively modest House II of 1947-8, which Seidler also draughted, cost over US $17,000.83

After 1955—the year the Zwar House was designed—Breuer rarely built any house for less than US $100,000, and many cost significantly more than that.84 While average salaries were higher in the United States of America than they were in Australia at the time, it was clear that Breuer was not designing houses for the average clients. And when he attempted to do that, he failed miserably. His demonstration “House in the Museum Garden”, built in the grounds of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1948-49, was intended to be a display house for clients on average incomes. But the cost—between US $20,000 and $27,500 (depending on the choice of variations)—placed it out of reach of those for whom it was supposedly designed.85

Seidler’s entire approach to domestic architecture was informed by Gropius’s doctrines and Breuer’s methodology. From Gropius came the desire to build a better world by making modern design available to people of average incomes, and the will to promote modernist principles.86 From Breuer came the design and documentation methodology. His houses were limited to a few recurring set pieces: standard floor plans and details that he combined in various combinations and permutations.87 Seidler learnt from Breuer that design and detailing could be universal—part of an integrated, coordinated process whereby solutions were constantly refined and reused for successive projects.88

That Seidler never departed far from the underlying themes and ideologies of his mentors’ original doctrines when he designed houses within the Australian context was not, in itself, a problem. Nor was it a problem that he chose to do that instead of pursuing a unique “Australian” architectural vocabulary—in the form of references to the vernacular, or to traditional ways of building. By importing an established ideology on which to establish a local architecture, Seidler avoided such issues, and had no need to invent a new architecture from scratch. Instead, working on a sound intellectual platform, he could build on the knowledge of others within the international architectural community. By testing, analysing and modifying those established models, Seidler approached Waddington’s description of the methodology of publishing, sharing and building on scientific knowledge. Griffiths, Seidler’s employee, confirmed that when it came to the modification and adaptation of these transplanted designs to suit Australian conditions, Seidler employed a scientific approach in relation to sun angles and material properties.

But the problems identified with the Zwar House—principally associated with inadequate heating and cooling—seem to have arisen from a lack of accuracy in that approach. Data

176 regarding sun angles and temperature fluctuations were not adequately considered in relation to details of the roof overhangs, the sun screening, the type of heating, or the thermal properties of the materials. The lack of any true scientific analysis of these factors seems to have occurred because of a form of blindness on the part of Seidler—an affliction from which Gropius and Breuer also suffered. Problems that were already inherent in their New England houses were further compounded when their protégé, Seidler, imported the same minimalist white boxes to Australia, and failed to adequately adjust them to suit prevailing conditions.

In spite of the rhetoric about the age of science that was often discussed in the popular architectural and design journals of the time, a true scientific approach was not implemented to adapt these archetypal houses to local conditions at any stage of their migration from Europe to New England, Sydney and Canberra. Seidler, like his mentors and their supporters such as Giedion, were blinded by the visual qualities of these icons of modernism. This was a self-inflicted form of blindness that came from being seduced by the formal qualities of the crisp, modern forms that had come to represent the modern world. It was not simply that they were naïve. The problem they faced was that the formal qualities of this new architecture that they so vigorously espoused were entirely dependent upon a few set pieces: minimalist, sharp-edged, white boxes in various permutations. These characteristics were very easily lost once too many practical requirements were added: roof eaves to provide shade and protection from the weather, or recessed doors to form transitional spaces between inside and outside.

And so the image of the house, and what it represented, became, in many ways, more important than its ability to function as a series of habitable spaces. Although Seidler tinkered with aspects of his houses, he was reluctant to modify the inherited designs beyond a certain point: the archetypal clean, crisp box only remained as such for so long, and was easily lost amidst the multifarious requirements of a fully functional house. But it was these same limitations that enabled Seidler to operate so efficiently, and to produce affordable, modern houses such as the Zwar House. While not as well known as some of his other buildings, the Zwar House was part of an ongoing experiment within the Seidler office: an experiment into the compact, modern house type in which he sought to inject the maximum amount of modern design for the minimum cost. In this respect the Zwar House exemplified an extraordinary commitment to a consistent intellectual rigour, and to the pursuit of a singular, modernist vision of what an affordable post-war house could be.

177

4.31 Harry Seidler, Zwar House, 1955, working drawings title block, Lettering by Colin Griffiths.

178

1 People presented a four-page article on Seidler in January 1951 in which he was ordained the “High Priest of the Twentieth Century”, one whose duty was to persuade “conservatives that his houses are just right for this modern age”. Seidler was presented as a form of avenging angel who “wears bow ties, walks on crepe-soled shoes, and talks with an American accent.” People (17 January 1951): 17-20. The other references are by Philip Drew, Domain, Sydney Morning Herald (16 March 2006): cover, 8. 2 Harry Seidler, Houses, Interiors and Projects (Sydney: Associated General Publications, 1954), 52-58. 3 Ibid., 53. 4 People (17 January 1951): 17. 5 The first extension, a new bedroom to the south-west corner, was designed in January 1961 and documented in February 1962 by Peter Hirst. The second extension, a new bedroom with shower and toilet to the west corner, was documented in October 1967 by John Daubney (later of Rice and Daubney). Original drawings held in Harry Seidler Collection of Architectural Drawings, 1948-1987, Manuscripts, Oral History and Pictures Catalogue, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, PXD 613, Tube No. 28, Job No. 55.15, “John A. Zwar House, Lot 68 Yapunyah St., O’Connor, ACT”. Both extensions were built by Chris Schulein, who lived in Yapunyah Street across the road from the Zwars. 6 Neighbouring resident of Yapunyah Street in discussion with Brendan Lepschi, 19 January 2009. 7 John Zwar, interview by the author, 26 September 2008. Australian Home Beautiful published a proposal for a binuclear house in May 1950, and in September of the following year published an article explaining how Seidler had become embroiled in “a three month fight” to obtain a building permit for another house. The Rose Seidler House was published by Woman’s Day and Home and Australian Home Beautiful in 1952, the latter describing how Seidler, “a young man now barely 30, a ‘New Australian’ of a few years standing, who was already one of the most controversial figures in Australian architecture”, had won the 1951 Sir John Sulman Award for architectural merit. In 1954 Seidler’s prefabricated steel “House of the Future”, a one-bedroom house for “a young married couple”, was assembled at the Armco factory in Sutherland, New South Wales, and later erected inside the exhibition floor of the Sydney Town Hall as part of the Architectural and Building Exhibition. The exhibition was opened by Walter Gropius on a visit to Australia. Details and photographs of the house, which had been drawn by Colin Griffiths, were published in Australian Women’s Weekly and other publications. 8 Harry Seidler, interview by Hazel de Berg, 13 January 1972, NLA Oral History Program. As Philip Drew wrote, these new clients were responding “to the clarity and rationalism of Modernism” that Seidler promised. Kenneth Frampton and Philip Drew, Harry Seidler, Four Decades of Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 19. 9 “His stormy-petrel idealism has won him admiration”. People (17 January 1951): 19. 10 As was the case with the Fenner House, it is difficult to establish the role that Zwar’s late wife Heather played in the process. John said that she did not travel to Sydney with him to meet Seidler. When asked how much she was involved in discussions regarding the house, he said “oh, a bit”. John Zwar, interview by the author, 26 September 2008. 11 The Point Piper office was described in People (17 January 1951): 18; Harry Seidler, Houses, Interiors and Projects, 124- 25, and more recently by Philip Goad, “An Interview with Penelope Seidler, The Architect’s Studio, 1948-49”, in Ann Stephen, Philip Goad and Andrew McNamara, Modern Times, the Untold Story of Modernism in Australia (Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2008), 114-19. 12 Stephen, Goad and McNamara, Modern Times, the Untold Story of Modernism in Australia, 117. 13 “Visual opposition will give life to environment. Not all transparency and not all solidity, not all soft and not all hard, but a skilful visual interplay between opposites; planes opposing each other, verticals against horizontals, solid opposed by void, hard-rough texture against soft-smooth, dark against light, cold colour against warm, curve against straight line, and above all in Australia’s climate sunlight against shadow.” Harry Seidler, “Notes on Architecture”, in Harry Seidler, Houses Buildings and Projects 1955/63 (Sydney: Horwitz, 1963), 11. 14 People (17 January 1951): 18. The studio was linked, via an intellectual framework of European modernism, to Seidler’s first studio in New York. There, at 222 Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side, he had decorated the walls with a Mondrian-like pattern of black and yellow lines. As Penelope recalled, Mondrian was “the connecting thread between both of Harry’s apartments”. Philip Goad, “The Architect’s Studio, 1948-49, an Interview with Penelope Seidler”, 117. 15 Ibid., 116. 16 John Zwar, interview by the author, 26 September 2008.

179 17 “Tocumwal Houses” were converted sleeping huts from a World War II Air Force base at Tocumwal in southern New South Wales. From the late 1940s about 200 were relocated to the northern Canberra suburbs of O’Connor and Ainslie by the Federal Government to alleviate the post-war housing shortage. 18 In this respect Zwar cited John Philip, the subject of a later chapter, as an example of a client who would not have been as compliant as he was. John Zwar, interview by the author, 26 September 2008. 19 John Zwar, interview by the author, 26 September 2008. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Griffiths believes that this was because Bowden had been renting out the house while he was on an overseas posting. 23 John Zwar, interview by the author, 26 September 2008. 24 “Anyway in the two years that I spent in Breuer’s office I did most of the drawings for the houses he built between 1946 and 1948, including his own, well-known cantilevered timber house—which has been very much publicized in the world—in New Canaan. He had a great influence all round on me, obviously my total, coming to grips with a building, from design right to the finish, was really experienced in his office, and that had an influence on me, particularly in the early years of my practice in this country… coming to grips with a building, from design right to the finish, was really experienced in his [Breuer’s] office, and that had an influence on me, particularly in the early years of my practice in this country”. Harry Seidler interview by Hazel de Berg, 13 January 1972, NLA Oral History Program. 25 Philip Drew, in Frampton and Drew, Harry Seidler, Four Decades of Architecture, 15. 26 Alice Spigelman, Almost Full Circle, Harry Seidler, a Biography (Rose Bay: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2001), 171-72. 27 Harry Seidler, interview by Hazel de Berg, 13 January 1972, NLA Oral History Program. 28 Drew described what he termed the “minor changes” to the Thompson House. Frampton and Drew, Harry Seidler, Four Decades of Architecture, 20. 29 Colin Griffiths, interview by the author, 31 October 2008. 30 The sketch plan is dated 4 August 1955. 31 Colin Griffiths, interview by the author, 31 October 2008. 32 Seidler, Houses, Interiors and Projects, xvii. 33 Details of these houses are included in Seidler, Houses, Interiors and Projects; Seidler, Houses Buildings and Projects 1955/63, and Frampton and Drew, Harry Seidler, Four Decades of Architecture. 34 The one exception was a short section of corridor in the 1960 Pennant Hills exhibition house. 35 Colin Griffiths, interview by the author, 31 October 2008. 36 Seidler, Houses Buildings and Projects 1955/63, 45. 37 The timber partition with glazing above was added in the 1970s. 38 Seidler, Houses Buildings and Projects 1955/63, 45. 39 Colin Griffiths, interview by the author, 31 October 2008. 40 The tracings measure approximately 925 x 725 mm. B1 size is 1000 x 707. Harry Seidler Collection of Architectural Drawings, 1948-1987. 41 The final cost of the house was closer to £5,000.0.0. John Zwar, interview by the author, 26 September 2008. There were other advantages in maintaining relationships with builders: through McPhail, Seidler obtained a commission to design the South Canberra Bowling Club in Austin Street, Griffith. It is possible that Seidler returned the favour in kind: the Harry Seidler Collection of Architectural Drawings, 1948-1987 contains sketch plans of a proposed house in Ryrie Street, Campbell, for Miss June McPhail. 42 Colin Griffiths, interview by the author, 31 October 2008. The publications included J. R. Barnes, CSIRO Division of Building Research, Report No. R. 2: Thermal Conductivities of Building Materials (Melbourne, March 1946), and R. O. Phillips, CEBS Technical Study 23 (D.D.23), Sunshine and Shade in Australasia (Sydney, 1951). 43 Brad Collis, Fields of Discovery, Australia’s CSIRO (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002), xii-xiii, Boris Schedvin, Shaping Science and Industry, a History of Australia’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 1926-49 (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 287, 355-56. 44 Frampton and Drew, Harry Seidler, Four Decades of Architecture, 390. 45 Conrad Waddington, The Nature of Life, (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961), 14-15. 46 Ibid. 47 Spigelman, Almost Full Circle, Harry Seidler, a Biography, 178. 48 Colin Griffiths, interview by the author, 31 October 2008.

180 49 Philip Drew, “The Migration of an Idea 1945-1976”, in Frampton and Drew, Harry Seidler, Four Decades of Architecture, 81. 50 Sigfried Giedion, Walter Gropius, Work and Teamwork (New York: Reinhold, 1954), 71. The regionalism debate was taken up later by Frampton, who coined the term “critical regionalism”. Kenneth Frampton, “Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance”, in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), 16-30. 51 Joachim Driller, Breuer Houses (London: Phaidon, 2000), 106-07, 114-15. In 1967 Giedion wrote: “Yet neither its flat roof, its screened porch … its vernacular weatherboarding … nor it large windows could be said to mark any notable divergence from the local New England building idiom”. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, the growth of a new tradition, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 502. (The first edition of Space, Time and Architecture, published in 1942, contained no references to Gropius’s American work). 52 The Gropius and Breuer Houses were funded by Mrs. James Storrow, who donated the land and paid for the construction. Driller, Breuer Houses, 104, 125. 53Ibid., 130. 54 Weather With You, words and music by Neil Finn and Tim Finn, 1991. 55 This is a reference to the Bland House—see earlier. Seidler was proud that “Homes to the specification of my plan stretch from one side of the United States to the other”. Harry Seidler, quoted by Peter Emmet, “Rose Seidler House, Wahroonga 1948-50: Conservation Plan” (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of NSW, 1999), 92. 56 Seidler, Houses, Interiors and Projects, xii, xvii. 57 These latter examples included a “Universal House” to be “used on any reasonably flat site regardless of its orientation”, and a prefabricated house. 58 Seidler, Houses Buildings and Projects 1955/63, 33-35. 59 Seidler, Houses, Interiors and Projects, 52-58. 60 Zwar recalled that Seidler visited Canberra on “two or three occasions” in regard to his house. He did not think that Seidler stayed overnight. John Zwar, interview by the author, 26 September 2008, and in discussion with the author, 7 December 2008. 61 Harry Seidler, interview by Russell Henderson, 21 April 1986, 21 May 1986, NLA Oral History Program. 62 Seidler, Houses, Interiors and Projects, xv. 63 See, for instance, Rose House, Turramurra (1949-50), Marcus Seidler House, Turramurra (1949-51), and Harry and Penelope Seidler House, Killara (1966-67). 64 John Zwar, interview by the author, 26 September 2008. 65 ‘”Oh, at that stage—when we came back from America—some of his people had never seen snow, and they came down to Canberra and wanted us to take them up to the snow, so we did that.” John Zwar, interview by author 26 September 2008. Zwar drove them up to the Brindabella ranges, not far from Canberra. This was probably associated with a trip to Canberra to discuss the design of the second extension to the Zwar House in 1967, which was drawn by John Daubney. Seidler had previously designed a Ski Lodge in Thredbo, in the Snowy Mountains, in 1962. 66 Ibid., and John Zwar, interview by Brendan Lepschi, 2005. Brendan Lepschi, “Canberra Post-War Houses Project, No. 12 Yapunyah Street, O’Connor”, November 2005. Griffiths agreed with Zwar’s reservations, admitting that, in Canberra, a single fireplace was not appropriate. He confirmed that, although Seidler’s early training and experience were in North America, he was not aware of the coldness of some Australian locations, and didn’t install sophisticated heating systems into his houses well after the Zwar House. Colin Griffiths, interview by the author, 31 October 2008. 67 John Zwar, interview by the author, 26 September 2008, and John Zwar, interview by Lepschi, 5. 68 Harry Seidler, “Notes on Architecture”, in Seidler, Houses Buildings and Projects 1955/63, 11. 69 Ibid. 70 As Zwar recalled, “the sun did come in a bit, in the Autumn … when it’s getting round to the west … It was alright in the middle of the day when the sun was high, but it … could get quite warm”. John Zwar, interview by the author, 26 September 2008. 71 Zwar believed that might have been because of the shade provided by a nearby tree. Ibid. 72 A botanist who studies fungus. 73 Robin Tillyard was a prominent English entomologist who was recruited from New Zealand as Chief of the Entomological Division. To a large extent the delays were unavoidable. The Federal Capital Commission was attempting to complete a large number of buildings in time for the relocation of Parliament and the public service. Henry Rolland

181 recalled that the deadline for the completion of Parliament House was so tight that on the opening day, May 9, 1927, he still had carpenters working in the building. Henry Rolland, Over the Years, an Autobiography of H. M. Rolland, OBE, FRAIA (Hawthorn: 1971), 15. But, for Dickson and his staff—who were temporarily housed in the Botany School in Sydney and then in the upper floor of the Entomology wing—the prolonged disruption to their research was a constant source of frustration. 74 Schedvin, Shaping Science and Industry, a History of Australia’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 1926-49, 87-90. 75 NAA: A3560, 6648 and NAA: A3560, 6408. 76 Eric Sparke, Canberra 1954-1980 (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1988), xiv. 77 Sheena Jackson, “Remembering Todd Street”, in The Tocumwal Archive, Australian Capital Territory Heritage Library, Woden Library. Tocumwal Houses are now appreciated by many in the Canberra community. 78 John Zwar, interview by the author, 26 September 2008. 79 Zwar was surprised, believing that Seidler usually sold these to his clients. John Zwar, interview by the author, 26 September 2008. 80 Jo Miller, Josef Albers, Prints 1915-1970 (Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Museum, 1973), 37. 81 Frampton and Drew, Harry Seidler, Four Decades of Architecture, 394. 82 Emmet, Rose Seidler House Conservation Plan, 100. 83 The costs of houses are all based on figures that were current at the time of their construction. 84 Driller, Breuer Houses, 20, 125. 85Ibid., 186. 86 Frampton and Drew, Harry Seidler, Four Decades of Architecture, 395. 87 Driller, Breuer Houses, 39. 88 Frampton and Drew, Harry Seidler, Four Decades of Architecture, 391.

182 Chapter Five

FORM FOLLOWS FORMULA: GROUNDS, BOYD AND THE PHILIP HOUSE

John Philip was brought to Canberra as part of Frankel’s ambitious post-war recruitment programme, and was appointed head of a new agricultural physics group at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. Regarded as Australia’s leading environmental physicist, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1967. His wife Frances (“Fay”) was an accomplished artist who was related to the Boyds via the Mills and à Becketts, and had attended the Murrumbeena State School in Victoria with Mary and Arthur Boyd. Many of Fay’s portraits of Australia’s leading scientists and academics—including Sir Mark Oliphant, Doug Waterhouse, John Jaeger, William Rogers, Patrick Moran and Manning Clarke—are held in the collections of the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian National University.

5.1 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Philip House from Vasey Crescent. Photo by the author, 2009.

The Philip House, at 42 Vasey Crescent, Campbell, is one of three adjacent houses by Grounds, Romberg and Boyd that are known collectively as the Vasey Crescent Group. The other two houses in the Group are the Blakers House and the Griffing House.

183 Grounds and Boyd were both involved with these houses. All three were designed by Grounds, who arranged initial briefings, recorded the client’s requirements, and prepared sketches from late 1959 through to early 1960. Boyd met with the clients in January 1960, and took control of the houses from May of that year as Grounds prepared for a three-month overseas trip. Grounds’s departure, and Boyd’s subsequent involvement from early documentation phase through to completion, resulted in Graeme Gunn—who prepared drawings for the Philip and Griffing Houses during July and August 1960 under Boyd’s direction—having no recollection that Grounds had ever been involved.1

5.2 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Philip House floor plans.2

A study of the Philip House is important to the dissertation for three principal reasons. The first is connected to its status as part of a group. This signals a shift away from a focus on the house as a singular, artistic statement—an edifice that is complete in its own right. The Philip House, as one member of a group of three adjacent houses, provides an opportunity to discuss a more collaborative approach to residential design that relates to Conrad Waddington’s idea of the communal, cooperative atmosphere that exists in the scientific community.3

The second reason for studying the Philip House is to examine the extraordinary contribution made by John Philip. It could be argued that his involvement in the design process, and his impact upon the built form, was equal to that of Grounds or of Boyd. But unlike his capital city predecessors in architectural patronage—Fenner and Zwar— Philip was not primarily motivated by the visual iconography of modern architecture or design. What drove him instead was a relentless pursuit of the optimum way in which the house, as a habitable structure, could perform in relation to function and to human comfort. To these concerns Philip imparted his considerable knowledge of the physical

184 sciences. His influence over the house included modification of the form to admit sunlight and relocation of activities to optimise thermal comfort.

The third aspect of the Philip House’s relevance to the dissertation stems from Kuhn’s question of incommensurability between the new paradigm and the one that it replaces. Kuhn and Feyerabend identified different interpretations of incommensurability, or situations where there was no common measure, or comparative standard, available to quantify and compare the new paradigm with the old. In one version of incommensurability, concepts associated with the old theory were retained, but with a different meaning, within the new paradigm. It will be argued that the architectural form and style of the Philip House, developed by Grounds and Boyd with input from the Philips, can be considered as a constructed example of this type of incommensurability.

A Collaborative Ethos

5.3 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Vasey Crescent Group, Campbell, 1963. From left: Blakers House, Griffing House, Philip House.4

It was through a series of fortuitous events that the Vasey Crescent Group came to be planned as a coordinated series of houses by one architectural firm. On 21 July 1959 the three blocks in Section 36, Campbell, that would become numbers 42, 44 and 46 Vasey Crescent, were sold by the Department of the Interior at public auction in the Albert Hall. The bidding for Block 9 (number 42) proceeded for some time before Philip raised his

185 hand, doubled the previous bid, and ended up purchasing the lease for £1,010.0.0. Number 44 was purchased by Bruce Griffing—a quantitative inheritance geneticist who also worked under Frankel—and his wife Penny. Gordon Blakers, a senior public servant, and his wife Catherine, bought number 46. The day after the auction The Canberra Times reported on the front page that “some of the highest premiums ever offered for residential leases in Canberra were paid in keen bidding”, and that “Mr. J. R. Philip of Lyneham” had paid the highest premium for his site.

Part of the attraction of Campbell was the views to be obtained from the elevated location. Philip explained to The Canberra Times that he and Fay were “pleased with the view from the land and they might even see the Lakes in the future, ‘if we crane our necks’”.5 Although Philip and Griffing knew each other through working at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, they had not arranged to attend the auction together. Nor had they agreed to buy adjacent sites. Neither of them knew the Blakers. The first time the three owners met was when they went to inspect their sites, where they discussed general ideas for their houses.6 Over the ensuing months all three Vasey Crescent owners independently approached Grounds to design their house: the Blakers shortly after the auction, the Griffings in August 1959, and the Philips in December.7

It was largely due to Fay that the Philips commissioned Grounds. With her father and brother both being architects, hiring an architect was the normal thing to do. Having seen a house in Melbourne that attracted her attention, Fay knocked on the door to enquire if Grounds had designed it. Receiving confirmation that he had, they contacted the architect and visited his office, a converted terrace at 340 Albert Street, East Melbourne. There they were greeted by Grounds, who descended down the stairs with open arms and announced—with “great pomp and ceremony and drama—‘ah, The Philips! Do come in. So you want me to do your house!’”8

While it was a genuine coincidence rather than an orchestrated campaign that led to all three clients choosing Grounds, it was not altogether surprising given the influence of his Australian Academy of Science building. The critical acclaim that the Academy received greatly enhanced the reputation of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd in both Melbourne and Canberra contexts: the Griffings, for instance, considered them to be “the leading architectural firm in Australia” at the time.9 The Academy building also played another role, becoming a regular location for Grounds and Boyd to meet their scientist clients when visiting the capital city.

186

5.4 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, c 1960.10

Although the idea of coordinating a unified approach to the three houses appears to have originated with Grounds, it was an opportunity that all clients welcomed. Philip was aware of the significance of the venture. In 1960 he wrote to the Department of the Interior stating that “the prospect of three adjacent private houses designed by, and built under the supervision of, Roy Grounds is surely a chapter in domestic architecture unique not only to Canberra, but, indeed, to Australia as a whole.” He was also cognisant of the challenge that lay before them: “the need for the three adjoining houses to be planned, to some extent, in concert … has demanded the resolution of the conflicting requirements of three separate families.”11

While the Vasey Crescent clients were from professional backgrounds—including scientists, a senior public servant and an artist—they were by no means well off, and shared a common concern for budget. Other traits they shared were a disdain for the average post-war house—the Philips, in particular, were “fairly scathing about the typical suburban box”12—a preference for modern architecture and design, an interest in gardening, and a strong commitment to environmental concerns, including passive solar design. In this way the Vasey Crescent clients shared many attributes with those who commissioned post-war modern houses in North America, such as the Case Study House clients. Kevin Starr described these clients as “progressive professionals who preferred modern architecture and the ideas and life style it embodied to that associated with the

187 standard, traditionally-styled, suburban tract homes that proliferated in the postwar period … intellectual and sophisticated in taste if not in income”.13

An opportunity to design three adjacent houses for well-informed clients who were sympathetic to the tenets of modernism was rare in architectural practice. It was an opportunity that Grounds was equal to. Informed by his experience on previous house designs, he began by establishing a “kit of parts” to work with. This allowed him the freedom to express the individual requirements of each house, yet retain an overall consistency of architectural language. The most fundamental element of the kit was a simple rectangular prism constructed of unpainted concrete block-work, and protected by a low-pitched, metal deck roof with deep eaves overhangs. This appears to be an element that Grounds arrived at early on: an undated “thumbnail” sketch alongside notes from his first meeting with the Philips indicated such a form. Added to the basic kit were vertical, black painted timber posts to support cantilevered floors and roofs, timber planked eaves soffits, and large, timber-framed windows. In formal architectural terms, the compatibility, and ultimate success of the group, was due to Grounds’s skill and dexterity in manipulating this limited range of components.

Grounds proceeded to arrange these elements on the three sites in various permutations. Conrad Hamann explained how the three houses were “conceived as elementary groups of two rectangles. In the Blakers’ house, the rectangles were juxtaposed. In the Griffing house, they were placed one in front of the other; in the Phillip house they were stacked on top of each other”.14 The end result was that each house was able to respond to the individual owners’ requirements in terms of internal accommodation and facilities, resulting in varying internal room dimensions, plan types and overall form, while the whole group resembled a coherent architectural composition. Grounds considered the houses as a group from very early on: at the same time that he was holding preliminary discussions with the Philips about their house, all three clients were presented with a composite sketch layout that showed the footprints of the houses.

The means by which Grounds achieved a coordinated group were twofold: first, by creating a seamless visual flow across the site, and second, by maintaining and optimising views from each house. The house sites were located on a spur running in an east-west direction from nearby Russell Hill, which ended in a steep fall on the western boundary of the Philip’s site. The Blakers’ site was on the highest point of the spur, the Griffings’ in the middle, and the Philips’ at the lowest point. In the other direction, all sites sloped down from Canberra Nature Park at the rear towards Vasey Crescent. To achieve the optimum siting for the houses, Grounds radically departed from the normal practice of setting houses twenty-five feet back from the street line. Instead, by setting

188 each house progressively further back from its immediate neighbour, he allowed all three houses to follow the same hillside contour. In this way the Blakers House was located in the centre of its site, the Griffing House behind the centre line, and the Philip House right back to the rear of its site. As the Blakers and Griffing Houses were essentially “L”- shaped, the resultant composite site plan appeared as a continuous line of building, stepping back up the hill, broken only by the two intermediate boundary lines.15

5.5 Vasey Crescent Group, site plan. Sketch by the author, 2009.

By stepping the houses in this way Grounds achieved two objectives. The first was that all ground floors were virtually on the same level, avoiding what would have been an abrupt visual disjunction at floor level, and creating visual continuity. And, although the Philip House—at two storeys with a basement partly below ground level—was the tallest structure, because it was also the most recessive of the three, it did not dominate its neighbours. The second result of the stepping configuration was that views from each house were preserved and enhanced. All three enjoyed potential uninterrupted views towards Mt. Ainslie to the north, and towards Civic (the city centre) and the proposed

189 lakes to the west. Again, had either the Philip House or the Griffing House been set at the standard twenty-five feet distance from the street boundary, the scheme would not have worked, as western views from the other houses would have been obscured. The placing of the houses on the sites in such a sympathetic manner was appreciated by the clients: Catherine Blakers wrote to Grounds stating that “we very much like the sketch plans and the placing of the three houses on the block”, while the Griffings appreciated “the pattern made by the three houses and are pleased that each family has a view from its living area”.16

5.6 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Philip House, looking north-west from Griffing House, 1963 (before Lake Burley Griffin).17

But Grounds’s carefully resolved site planning would have been negated had traditional, individual garden plans been implemented by the Vasey Crescent owners. With front fences banned by the Department of the Interior, the common solution was for individual owners to plant hedges or thick foliage along the front boundaries of their properties. The Philips, Griffings and Blakers realised from early on that this would not be an appropriate solution, and decided to coordinate an integrated landscape plan. Fay had long held a keen interest in cultivating and growing Australian native plants, and took a

190 leading role in the discussions.18 The Vasey Crescent Group owners decided to aim for consistency by planting native gardens to present a “continuum” to passers-by. While each garden was to be designed by its owners, it was expected that “individual talent and enthusiasm” would provide diversity.19 Eric Wilson, writing for Australian Home Beautiful, noted how this undertaking had “involved a great deal of discussion, mutual consideration and effort on the part of the three families”.20

The Philips believed that it was important to maintain an Australian theme in the street planting. Upon hearing that planners from Parks and Gardens were intending to plant Pinoaks in Vasey Crescent, John contacted them to say that the Philip, Griffing and Blakers houses “were being planned to have a certain unity which might have a distinctly Australian flavour about it”, and that the owners of the houses believed that Australian trees such as Eucalyptus Maculosa would be more appropriate. Having received confirmation that their preferred trees would be planted in the street, Philip wrote to Grounds to inform him, adding: “I hope this does not conflict with your ideas!”21

5.7 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Vasey Crescent Group, 1970. Philip House on right.22

There was, however, disagreement between the clients over one planning issue. The Philips proposed combining all three driveways into one road that followed the site contours. In March 1960 H. R. Stafford from Grounds, Romberg and Boyd prepared a site plan showing how this might work, and sent it to the Blakers and the Griffings for consideration. But, to Philip’s disappointment, the proposal did not meet with his neighbours’ approval, mainly because of uncertainties over the arrangement if any of the houses were sold in the future.23

A further reading of collaboration in regard to the Vasey Crescent Group was that all three houses were constructed from a unified palette of materials, colours and textures,

191 all of which adopted characteristics of the adjacent bushland of Canberra Nature Park.24 While the architectural form of the Academy building reflected the local topography (see Illustration 5.4), the Vasey Crescent houses were not topographically inflected. Like so many Grounds buildings they were composed of regular, geometric forms that stood out sharply from the landscape, and made no attempt to follow the site contours. Yet the selection of materials, colours and textures suggests the opposite: a genuine attempt to visually merge buildings with landscape. Wherever possible Grounds and Boyd specified natural, “rough” materials, finishes and colours for the exterior and interior of the houses, as described by Hamann:

The interiors of all these houses mirrored the exterior. Walls were left unplastered and unbagged ... Ceilings were of the most elaborate mitred planking, varnished and running through the window walls to connect with the soffit areas outside. Paintwork was virtually absent. The Canberra houses had black painted iron posts running up to the fascias, but it is difficult to recall paintwork anywhere else on these designs. Where wood fittings occurred, they were either varnished or limed.25

Affinity with landscape, and the belief that buildings should be “an extension of nature”, were common themes in Grounds’s domestic architecture. The origins of this approach can be traced back to a number of sources. One of these was his knowledge of the appearance of surfaces and colours in sunlight. When Japan entered World War II, Grounds joined the Royal Australian Air Force. From 1942 to 1943 he was Area Camouflage Officer with H. Q. N. E. A. Unit. His Reporting Officer stated that, in addition to having “tremendous drive”, and being “smart and punctilious on matters of discipline”, Grounds “possessed a very intimate knowledge of the requirements of the area”, and was “a good officer in Works on Camouflage duties”.26

The art of camouflage, or concealment through deception, was an early example of a multi-disciplinary activity that combined knowledge and skills from a number of sources—particularly from science and the arts. Scientific connections included biology, physics and chemistry. Zoologists studied camouflage patterns and disruptive colouration in the animal world, physicists examined the physical effects of light and colour, while chemists experimented with dyes and paints. In relation to the arts, camouflage was especially suited to architects, artists and photographers, a number of whom found themselves contributing to camouflage activities during World War II.27 As was the case with other architects such as Walter Bunning, Grounds’s major contribution would have been to provide working drawings of camouflage installations.

192 A recurring theme throughout Grounds’s life was the strong emotional link that he forged to natural settings and places, and his desire to spend time there to recuperate from stress. Immediately after returning from active duties, he spent two years working as an orchardist and dairy farmer in country Victoria.28 Grounds claimed that his affinity with nature became stronger in later years because of his association with scientists on the Academy building. This was when he purchased “Penders”, a coastal property on the New South Wales south coast with “nearly five miles of waterfrontage”, to which he escaped “for a week every month, and a month in the summer”. Part of the appeal was the seclusion: writing to Philip, Grounds explained how he and Betty had “just returned from a month’s vacation in complete isolation in our forest”.29 The other attraction to Penders was his desire to return the land to its natural state: Grounds claimed that he “bought it to prevent subdivision and to return it back to the wonders of nature, a part of Australia that would for all time remain that way.”30 After his death in 1981, in accordance with his wishes, Grounds’s remains were returned to his coastal retreat.31

While Grounds’s reasons for relating these houses to their natural settings are clear, the same cannot be said for Boyd—who, after all, had based his polychromatic colour scheme for the Fenner House on Vicki and Marilyn’s paint-boxes. It is possible that he had mellowed in his approach to colour by the time that he took over the Vasey Crescent houses from Grounds. Another factor was that Betty Grounds—who had been involved with the interiors of the Academy building—seemed to have the final say on colours for the Vasey Crescent houses. At one stage Boyd wrote to Penny Griffing stating: “Mrs. Grounds was not enthusiastic about any of the colours in the carpet range you mentioned”.32 But whether it was due to those reasons, or simply because he wanted Grounds’s design intent to remain intact, Boyd showed as much control over choice of colour as his partner. Most of Boyd’s efforts on the Vasey Crescent houses seemed to be concerned with maintaining visual continuity between the three houses, and between them and the adjacent bushland. A large part of the success of this venture can be attributed to the persistence of John Philip, who regularly checked with Boyd to ensure that visual aspects of the houses would present an integrated overall appearance.

Immediately after signing the building contact Philip wrote to Boyd—who had formally taken over responsibility for the Vasey Crescent houses from Grounds—expressing his concern about details that he believed might affect the external appearance of the houses. One of these was the colour of the mortar. When visiting houses under construction in Canberra, the Philips had observed that the predominant mortar colour was mustard, which they thought would clash “quite horribly with the pale grey of Besser blocks”. They asked Boyd if there was any way of adjusting the mortar colour to provide

193 a closer match.33 Writing to Dalheim Constructions the next day to confirm that they were the successful tenderers, Boyd wasted no time in asking them to:

Please be careful to match the finishes, especially in the Besser block work, with those on the Griffing House next door, which has started a little ahead of yours. Also the colours when we finally get around to them will be matched. We would be grateful if, all along, you would keep in mind that the three houses in the row should present a unified appearance.34

Boyd replied to the Philips that he knew “the normal colour in Canberra is bad, due to the yellow-brown colour of the sand”, but regretted that there was no way of changing this without resorting to expensive colour mixes. He recommended that, as the Griffing House was already under construction, it was more important to match the mortar colour to that.35 The Philips stated that they were happy with this solution—as long as their mortar did in fact match that of the Griffings. To see if this was the case, the Philips inspected another house in Vasey Crescent that was being constructed by Dalheim Constructions, and noted that the mortar there was more mustard in colour than that mixed by Meli and Eglitis, the builders of the Griffing House.36 Boyd wrote to Dalheim Constructions again, stressing the importance of matching “the effect of the Besser block work with Griffing’s”, and also “the colour of the mortar which, of course, depends on the colour of the sand”. He instructed Dalheim Constructions to check with the other builders as to “what sand they used, and endeavour to get the same.”37

In keeping with the rigour imposed on the exterior, the interior colours of the Philip House were strictly controlled, with only a few tones. Great care was taken to ensure that nothing would clash with the exterior, or with the natural tones of the bushland setting. Carpet and tiles were a soft teal blue, walls were unpainted concrete blocks or blond- coloured vertical ash boarding, and ceilings were ash. Much of the furniture consisted of natural materials: the Robin Day-designed steel framed chairs, for instance, were covered in leather hide. Eric Wilson, writing for Australian Home Beautiful, noted that the only accents of colour to the interior were the satin chrome light fittings, copper flue and pans, white porcelain dishes and coffee pots, and books.38

194

5.8 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Philip House living room, 1963.39

This coordinated approach to natural and muted colours, with an emphasis on a blue- grey theme, was continued throughout the interiors of the other Vasey Crescent houses. Boyd provided extremely specific and detailed advice in this regard to Penny Griffing, reminding her that “The building itself will be, of course, grey and natural-timber”, and that “Grey on the floor will maintain this background scheme”. The Griffings were instructed therefore to “keep to greys in all floor coverings and to blues and greens in all your furnishings—throughout the whole house”. And, just to make sure that she understood, he included a final reminder that the colour scheme was: “BACKGROUND: Grey and light natural timber. FOREGROUND: Blue-Green and dark natural timber.” Such was the control exerted over colour by the architects that the clients were further instructed to “banish reds, oranges, golds”, but were permitted to introduce these colours “accidentally” into the spaces in the form of ephemeral items such as “flowers or books or a dress”!40

Penny Griffing wrote to Boyd a number of times seeking advice on such issues as the preferred type and location of paintings, lights and rugs—“square, rectangular or round?”—and often included sketches of alternative locations for these. Boyd replied, in equivalent detail, to all of her requests.

195

“Physics in the Home” 41

In the lovely austere world of mathematics there are no uncertainties. There are no people, no classes, no warm or cold, no hate or spite, no time, no death. There are only numbers. Norman Mussen, Structural Engineer, Philip House42

Stepping up to address the 1945 Annual General Meeting of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, physicist Ken Grant compared his predicament to that of a young boy who, upon being asked by his hostess if he could play the violin, replied that he didn’t know, but was willing to try. Like that boy, Grant felt that he was in unfamiliar territory: an amateur with little understanding of structure and aesthetics, attempting to address experts in those areas. But on the other hand, Grant—who was Professor of Physics at the University of Adelaide—was familiar with transformations of matter and energy in the material world, and was perfectly capable of discussing how these related to specific aspects of the home.43 The first of these was associated with energy: the amount that was required to produce the building materials to construct the home, and the subsequent amount required to supply it with heat, light, gas and water. The second area included all those aspects of the house that affected the “health, the comfort, the convenience and the physical and mental state of the occupant”: specifically, “ventilation, heating or cooling, lighting, noise-suppression and the provision of mechanical aids”.

Consideration of the environment in relation to the physical sciences was John Philip’s area of expertise, and, unlike his contemporary Grant, he had no hesitation in discussing any aspect of architecture that he believed warranted his attention. Writing to brief Boyd, who was about to come to Canberra to meet with the Philips, that their “sometimes difficult” client was fired up about the window heads not being flush with the ceiling, Grounds, Romberg and Boyd’s supervising architect Fritz Suendermann warned Boyd that “Undoubtedly you will have the pleasure of being lectured by John Philip on various aspects of architecture, ranging from ‘Spec-Builders’ Aesthetics’ to ‘Beaumaris Romantic’”. 44

In the 1950s Philip was one of a small group of scientists across the world who realised the potential of mathematical physics to aid environmental studies. His research, through which he revolutionised scientific understanding and became a world authority, involved the thermodynamics of water movement: the way in which water moves through soil. By providing the key physical concepts and mathematics required for a unified

196 understanding of hydrological principles, Philip presented a generation of scientists and engineers with clear sets of principles to maximise use of available water on any particular site. His work was especially important in dry countries such as Australia, where he studied unsaturated soil, whose pores contained both air and water.45

Philip was a child prodigy and an outstanding mathematician. Qualifying for university at the age of 13, he was considered too young to attend, and, after filling in two more years, attended the University of Melbourne and graduated as a Bachelor of Civil Engineering at age 19. In 1960 he was awarded a Doctorate of Science (physics) by the same university. David Smiles recalled that mathematics provided Philip with “both his language and his logic”.46 Earlier in his career the problems he was working with were too complex for computers of the time, so Philip developed his own methodology using a simple hand calculator. He never used a modern computer, and had a habit of performing extremely complex calculations while lying on the floor. His daughter, Candida Griffiths, described how her father viewed mathematics “as a very beautiful thing: as you or I might think of something that we’ve just drawn as very beautiful, he really, really saw great beauty in his calculations”. She also recalled her father’s delight in the momentary observation of a “beautiful number” on the speedometer of the family car during Saturday morning shopping expeditions.47

But for Philip, numbers reached profound significance as tools for investigating order in the physical world: “The great task of science reduces ultimately to the search for order: to discern the regularities in the bewildering universe around us—firstly so that we may gain understanding of it and our place in it; and secondly so that we may use this understanding to manage both our world and ourselves more wisely.” That this quest for order was common to both physics and biology was exemplified, for Philip, by the fact that the “two great generalisations” of science—in physics the second law of thermodynamics, and in biology the principle of evolution by natural selection—both represented a search for order. Philip’s summary of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection described it as “the process whereby organisms automatically evolve into ever more highly ordered forms of ever-increasing complexity … The organism with the talent of coping with the environment automatically inherits the environment; the one without it automatically disappears.”48

Philip displayed a keen interest in the arts, listing his hobbies as “reading, writing, architecture, cooking”. John and Fay were both involved with the commissioning of Ken Woolley’s F. C. Pye Laboratory at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Black Mountain. John’s appreciation of the completed building indicated his view of architecture as being an ideal combination of rationality and aesthetics: “It

197 also seems to us to be unique in other, more human, senses. It is a delight to work in this building. It is a pleasure to the eye and satisfying to the mind to find oneself in a building combining beauty and logic, humanity and efficiency.”49

5.9 Ancher, Mortlock and Woolley, F. C. Pye Laboratory, CSIRO, Black Mountain, 1968. Photo by the author, 2009.

When Frankel wrote to Grounds in November 1969 with a series of criticisms of the architect’s sketch plan for his second Canberra House in Cobby Street, Campbell, he included a list of amendments and a revised floor plan. Frankel claimed that these changes were the result of a discussion with John Philip. But, as Candida Griffiths explained, it was highly likely that Frankel had met with both of her parents to talk abut his house, and that her mother had played a significant role. While John was a natural extrovert and was more outspoken, she believed that Fay had a sounder understanding of domestic design.50

As a Fellow of the Academy, John Philip provided advice on a number of issues. In the late 1980s other Fellows became concerned by reports that a similar concrete domed roof, on Eero Saarinen’s Kresge Auditorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, was beginning to fragment due to a continuous cycle of freezing and thawing in winter. Believing that the cold nights and sunny days of Canberra might have the same effect on Grounds’s dome, the Academy asked Philip to investigate. Philip organised the

198 installation of temperature and water content sensors in the roof, and through data obtained from these established that “the temperature in the concrete ceiling below the copper roof never dropped below 5° C during the frostiest nights”.51 Philip’s passion for architecture resulted in an invitation to be a Sulman Award jurist in 1964.52

It was no great surprise, therefore, to find that Philip approached the design of his own house with the same combination of passion and exactitude that he displayed in other endeavours. Absolutely nothing was taken for granted or left to chance throughout the design process. Every possible physical aspect of the house—from initial choice of site to the level of the floor in relation to that of the adjacent houses, and from the colour of the mortar joints in the concrete block-work walls to the corner detail of the eaves soffits— was calibrated, recorded, compared and discussed with the architects to achieve, from Philip’s point of view, the optimum result in terms of aesthetics, human comfort and the most efficient use of resources. His energy, commitment, and level of engagement throughout the entire design process were extraordinary. In late 1959, before they had engaged their architect, Philip had already fired off a number of letters to the National Capital Development Commission, offering his comments on the planning of tennis courts and pre-school centres in Campbell, and to the Department of the Interior to seek their assurance that an existing tree in Vasey Crescent would not be damaged by footpath construction. Throughout the entire design and documentation phases he wrote long, highly detailed letters—many containing alternative sketches and extensive lists of items for consideration—to Grounds, Romberg and Boyd on a weekly basis.53

Fay was also involved in the process. Griffiths attributed her parents’ decision to build on an elevated site to her mother’s childhood memories of holidays in the Gippsland hills. The sloping land of Campbell was ideal for the Philip’s requirements, and they walked “the length and breadth” of the suburb investigating preferred sites. One street that aroused their interest was Vasey Crescent, which at that time was no more than a dirt track. On one of the sites there they leant a ladder up against an old Yellow Box tree to confirm potential views of the future lake. At a later stage in the design process Robin Boyd, on one of his trips to the capital, was also persuaded by Fay to climb a ladder to confirm the views that would be obtained from the upper level.54

There is no record that Grounds, who Fay thought was “a bit of an arrogant so-and-so”55 compared to the more approachable Boyd, was ever asked to perform such tasks. With his Academy building just having won the Sulman Medal, and with a string of commissions for scientists in Canberra on his drawing boards as a result, it would appear that Grounds was carving out a niche in the scientific world. It is important to note, however, that in spite of his growing connections to the scientific community,56 Grounds

199 remained suspicious of those within his own profession who believed that science represented the future of architecture. Rather than welcoming scientific progress as a source of new opportunities and directions, he saw it as a potential form of control. Worse still, he believed that the obsession with science was an indication that architects had lost touch with their principal purpose: to design spaces for people.

We have been using the tools of science as an emphasis to justify the fact that we don’t have ideas and we have forgotten about the very important thing— the human being and that architecture is an art. This age of science that we have engaged upon for some thirty or forty years has got us all terribly excited. We have been so concentrating ourselves on exemplifying science that we have forgotten about the fact that we deal with human beings.57

Grounds thought that Le Corbusier never really believed a house was “a machine for living in”—it was only “a nice catch phrase” that had caught on with a lot of people. For Grounds, the logical outcome of Le Corbusier’s aphorism was that architecture was a form of scientific experiment on humanity, whereas, in reality, humanity was made up of a variety of individuals, each with their own specific requirements. Moreover, these requirements, in spite of technological progress, were “much the same today as they were about two thousand years ago …” Emphatically rejecting popular scientific jargon, Grounds claimed that clients “want to be left alone and not pushed around by a group of scientific architects who are trying to use clichés which have not a great deal to do with a human being but have a great deal to do with a scientific attitude gone pseudo.”58

For Grounds, consideration of the individual client’s needs was more important than the application of over-arching scientific principles. But what did this mean in practice? From a study of the way he worked with clients on domestic projects it is apparent that Grounds perceived his domestic architectural consultancy as being akin to that of a neighbourhood physician, a situation reinforced by his belief that clients only went to an architect when they were “in trouble”—wanting to do something that they were not capable of doing for themselves:

You go to a doctor when you’re ill, you go to a solicitor when you’re in trouble and you go to a dentist when you’ve got a toothache, you go to an architect when you want something done that you’d like to do yourself but you can’t. You’re in pain, you need help, you need advice, you need assistance, so you’ve got to act like a doctor to help them over a hurdle, they’d do it themselves, otherwise.59

200 Grounds was a specialist who would listen to clients’ needs and attempt to solve them. In an interview with Hamann he described himself as a “’sociologist’, interpreting people’s needs and ‘painting pictures’ of his clients in wood, stone, brick or concrete.” This was essentially how Grounds saw his role on the Academy project, describing himself as “the instrument of [the scientists’] needs, the professional instrument of their hopes, their wants, their needs”.60 And, in spite of having a reputation for a strong personality and a tendency towards bullying tactics on occasions, this was essentially how Grounds ran his domestic projects. He treated his consultations with clients seriously. He would arrange an initial meeting, often asking the whole family to attend. During this he would take copious notes, and make a determined effort to ascertain their individual requirements such as household routines and entertaining patterns. The initial consultation was often followed up by a phone call from Grounds, or even a subsequent, unannounced visit. These could occur at any hour: some clients recalled him phoning them late at night, another received a visit at 2 am, while others woke up to find their newly-commissioned architect standing outside their front door before breakfast, notebook in hand, ready to study their morning routines.61

The first Canberra “consultation” with the Philips took place in late 1959 in a house they were renting at 22 Longstaff Street, Lyneham. At that meeting Grounds recorded the names and ages of the children, and the family’s hobbies, lifestyle and requirements, in a small, lined writing pad. These notes, later typed up back in the office, included the following:

One car Mr[s]. Philip is a painter Mrs. Philip enjoys work in a “no work” studied carelessness garden Mr. Philip avoids gardening, but is a good cook—and does it—most of it Likely to entertain over meals Table tennis—in a Rumpus Room Radio, TV, etc.—quite incidental Up to 2 cars in basement + table tennis + a workshop (future) + access to kitchen

One of the first questions that Grounds asked his new clients was how much money they had. In the Philips’ case this amounted to £9,000.0.0—or, depending on how John’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation salary details eventuated—possibly only £8,500.0.0. For this reason, economies of scale and materials

201 were of primary importance.62 The compact design of the Philip House seems to have been established from that first Canberra meeting: Grounds’s notes describe a “2/12 to 3-storey house towards the rear of the site”, and contain four “thumbnail” sketches of a rectangular, two or three-storey house roofed by a shallow gable. Calculations of the floor area—“19.76 plus porch and garage”—resulted in a preliminary estimate of £10,700.0.0. The Philips explained how they were embarking on this project five years before they could really afford it, but they did not want that fact to prejudice the size of the house. They hoped to be able to build the “bare bones” and add on later.63

A short time later the Philips received preliminary sketch designs, drawn by James McCormick. These were very similar in layout to the thumbnails. The Philips’ response, sent in December 1959, was a portent of what was to come. Ten pages long, it was extremely detailed, and included calculations of sun angles, heating costs, and alternative plans—the latter drawn by Fay and notated by John.64 The clients told Grounds that they appreciated the architecture on aesthetic principles, but believed that there were “quite formidable practical objections to the concept” as it stood. They requested major alterations, implementation of which would “demand quite radical changes from the present plan”.

These changes were grouped under two categories: “The Roof, the Balcony and the Sun”, and “Relocation of Activities Within the House”. Both of these were based on the idea that the passive design of the house, rather than artificial heating or cooling, should be able to provide adequate levels of comfort during Canberra’s long, cold winters and hot summers. Both of the clients’ suggested modifications were informed by John’s acknowledgement of the importance of the sun, from which he confirmed “all life on earth depends ultimately on … for its supply of free energy and order.”65

The cantilevered eaves were the subject of the Philips’ first criticism. While Boyd, in his two designs for the Fenner House, had incorporated significant eaves overhangs on the northern side of the blocks to provide protection from the sun, Grounds had proposed six feet deep eaves on all sides of the three Vasey Crescent houses. As there was no functional requirement for such a deep overhang on the south side, and limited requirements on the east and west where the sun is predominantly at a low angle, it appears that the protective nature of the roof was as much a symbolic gesture of dealing with the Australian sun as it was a practical solution.

John Philip was concerned that the continuous six feet eaves would not only “make the house inordinately gloomy and chilly”, but would result in “a very serious and continuing economic loss which results from the neglect of winter heat supply from the sun”. He

202 calculated that, in regard to the north wall, “there would be no penetration of sun into the house at midday between about August 25 and April 17”, while “Even in mid-winter (June 21) at midday only the bottom half of the window would receive the sun”. He provided evidence of the savings that would be incurred by reducing the depth of the eaves: “It is, for example, easily shown that 20 square feet of sunlit window supply, on the average, 1 kilowatt of heat (1 radiator bar). Reducing the northern overhang from 6 feet to 2 feet would save of the order of £70 per annum in winter heating bills without admitting more summer sun into the house than we should desire.”66

The Philips were not the only ones to object to the deep roof overhang: in early December 1959 all three Vasey Crescent clients wrote to Grounds requesting that the cantilever be reduced in depth. The simultaneous timing of their requests indicates collaboration between the clients on this issue, and it is most likely that John Philip— whose submission was the most detailed and scientific—played a key role in orchestrating their coordinated responses.67

The second major issue raised by the Philips was the location of activities within their three-storeyed house. At the initial meeting with Grounds they had discussed a traditional configuration with living areas on the lower levels and bedrooms above. But after considering the preliminary sketches, Philip’s scientific training prevailed, and he asked for the layout to be amended. As Griffiths explained, “my father was a physicist, and very aware of the fact that heat rises, and wanted to use the physics of the way heat worked rather than working against it”. This meant placing the living areas, where the family spent most waking hours, in a position to benefit from that principle. “So they said to Grounds ‘no, that’s not what we want, we want it to be an upside-down house’. And Roy Grounds said, ‘well I suppose you know what you’re doing’, and wasn’t particularly thrilled, but I suppose realised he had to back down, because they knew what they wanted.” Philip no doubt felt that his insistence was justified when an article in Australian Home Beautiful titled “Sun Keeps Heating Bills Low” described the success of the passive solar design: “On bright midwinter days the temperature on the top floor can top 70 deg. without any warmth from the oil heater. This contribution from the sun has had an important part in keeping the Philip fuel bill low.”68

A later innovation, introduced by Philip after the house was completed, was related to the same principle. Aware that the combination of rising warm air and solar heat gain through the metal roof would make the upper level—where the family was primarily located during the daytime—intolerably hot in summer, Philip installed a sprinkler system on the roof to cool the surface temperature. However, this was not a success—on the hottest days most neighbours operated sprinklers in their gardens, and the increasing

203 demand placed on the water supply lowered the pressure to a level where the cooling system was ineffective.69

In January 1960 Grounds thanked his clients for their “very orderly tabulation of criticisms”, and explained how they had substantially revised the plans in accordance with most of their objections, whilst “maintaining the essential character and reducing the cost”.70 Revised drawings, prepared by Pat Moroney, showed the activities relocated to specific levels according to the Philips’s instructions (see Illustration 5.2). Grounds reminded his clients of the subsequent, unorthodox result—that the entrance to the house was now through the children’s playroom on the lower level. The Philips had already decided that they would solve this problem by installing an operable screen to block off the playroom when they invited guests over for dinner parties.71

In accordance with the clients’ instructions the revised sketch drawings showed a reduction in the roof eaves overhang on the north and the south elevations from six feet to three feet.72 In spite of this, however, Grounds, Romberg and Boyd were reluctant to change this detail on the working drawings, and retained the eaves at a consistent six feet depth all around, with a cut-out opening over the northern windows. Philip persuaded the architects to increase the size of this aperture to extend beyond the width of the windows to allow for the angle of the sun, resulting in the final configuration where the cut-out extended to the line of the return walls. He also convinced Grounds, Romberg and Boyd to reduce the overhang to three feet on the south elevation (see Illustration 5.10).

The Philips then focused their energies on the resolution of various details—and errors— in the revised plans. These included the optimum utilisation of internal space to avoid waste—for this they specified dimensions down to half an inch—provision of adequate natural light to all rooms, acoustic treatment to avoid noise transmission via the internal staircase, installation of a prefabricated acoustic phone booth, provision of impermeable sills to cope with condensation on windows, and the inclusion of adequate insulation. John Philip noted the incorrect orientation of north points on three of the plans, reminding the architects that “the block faces slightly east of north, not west of north.”73

A number of concerns expressed by the Philips concerned aesthetic principles. However, these were not in relation to abstract notions of style or design, but were quantifiable issues regarding visual compatibility and order between the three houses. After examining a preliminary site plan of the Vasey Crescent houses, Philips noticed that there was a difference of one foot between the proposed floor level of their own house, and that of the Griffing House next-door. Philip asked Grounds if this disparity would be

204 obvious, “for example, via the non-alignment of window levels.” A reply from Grounds, Romberg and Boyd reassured their anxious client that, due to the location of the houses on their sites, the one-foot difference would not cause visual conflict. Having already expressed a preference for the concrete block external walls to be laid in a “stack bond with the long emphasis vertical” to provide a “rather desirable vertical emphasis to the house”—presumably to match the verticality implied by the timber posts—the Philips further stated that they preferred the blocks to be hollow Besser blocks because they were “both cheaper and better thermally”.74 Another issue that concerned the Philips was how the architects intended to treat the eave soffit corner detail where the eaves, to be constructed from timber boarding, reduced in width from six feet down to three feet. The solution is shown in the illustration below.75

5.10 Philip House, reflected eaves plan. Sketch by the author, 2009.

205 But by early 1961 the Philips’ robust, “hands-on” approach had so exceeded normal levels of client involvement that it began to be interpreted by their architects as interference. In January 1961 Suendermann wrote a file note instructing that “Philip [was] to be told not to discuss anything with builder!” Later that year Suendermann’s patience finally ran out when he received a phone call from Fay on a Sunday evening:

last Sunday, 8.15 pm Mrs. Philip rang, saying the whole of the first floor construction has been done wrongly, the whole house is now a mess and John was stamping up and down the floor, cursing Grounds, Romberg and Boyd. When I found out that they had these detail drawings since August last year, I could not help but blowing my top and telling them one or two things that have been on my mind for a long time. But after that mild storm we are all good friends again …76

Conflating the Paradigms

There is no record that Grounds ever discussed the Vasey Crescent houses in regard to architectural style. But there was nothing unusual about this: he rarely talked about such issues. Grounds’s overall attitude towards architecture was based on a “commonsense”, “workman-like” approach to problem solving that had been instilled early in his career.

Returning to Australia in the early 1930s after living overseas for four years, Grounds saw the architecture of his native country with an increased awareness: “I saw it with a fresh eye completely and I couldn’t understand why people didn’t build buildings according to the climate and our own materials instead of aping buildings that had been done in England or in France or in Italy”.77 Associated with this was his realisation that some earlier Australian buildings functioned well in relation to the local climate. This perception reinforced in Grounds a preference for tried and true, traditional building forms, and he began to adopt a select group of these elements—gabled roofs, verandas, vertical posts, pergolas and louvred timber shutters—to incorporate within his domestic architecture. As a result, many of Grounds’s houses from the late 1930s through to the 1950s established subtle visual connections to “old colonial Georgian and rural vernacular” buildings.78

Grounds’s commonsense attitude to domestic design extended through to building construction, for which he favoured well established, traditional practices such as bricks, timber framed windows and “V”-jointed timber boarding. He was sceptical about the advantages of technological progress, and of new materials and building techniques. For him these made no sense when existing methods did the job adequately—and often for

206 less cost.79 At a debate in 1952 Grounds voiced his frustration with those in his profession who he believed placed too much faith in machine production or in scientific progress:

We should build buildings not for the purpose of exemplifying machine production; we should build buildings sheerly because they are very beautiful things to look at and live in and a brick is still the same as it was an awful long time ago, the advances of science we were excited about, or have been for too long, are not very advanced, and human beings are still very much the same people they were a long time ago.80

For Grounds it was all about finding the right balance between tradition and modernity: too much of one or the other, and the integrity of the idea was lost. One of the challenges faced by Grounds—and by other architects with modernist inclinations—was how to convince clients to accept new aesthetic paradigms. Hamann saw a tactical advantage in the way in which Grounds sometimes disguised certain modernist ideas and innovations—ideas that would have been too radical for some house clients— “among warm and traditional forms and materials”.81

Grounds, of course, had no need to resort to such tactics with the Philip House, or with the Vasey Crescent Group in general. The clients for these houses were receptive to modern aesthetics and materials, and the raw concrete block walls of all three houses were anything but traditional. But this dialectic between “traditional” and “new” is evident throughout the Philip House. Although it is generally regarded to be a “modern” house, the Philips nevertheless believed that it was informed, to some extent, by historical precedents. As Griffiths, herself a practising architect, recalled, her parents were “very much attracted to the look of the old pub, and the veranda, and … liked the honesty of the old rural outbuildings … the posts, the veranda”.82 They saw connections between these structures and the house that Grounds and Boyd designed for them. They also saw parallels between the way in which country homesteads were approached, and the way that their house, set back some distance from the street, was approached. The Philips’ post-war experience of living in an old hospital building in Deniliquin had some bearing on the matching pairs of wide, double doors that allowed the ground floor of their house to be opened up. Griffiths recalled how the “Australian building that was an old hospital really influenced them, and the fact that the doors opened and they went straight out onto the veranda, that was something of enormous importance.”83

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5.11 Fay Philip, painting, Philip House from north, 1988. Candida Griffiths collection.

It was principally through the use of the simple, rectangular building forms and symmetrical façades that Grounds referred to historical architectural precedents, particularly to those of nineteenth-century Georgian buildings. A further characteristic of this architecture that Grounds employed on the Philip House was the row of vertical timber posts around the perimeter of the roof and floor cantilevers, which created the impression of a colonnade. Similar to the posts that commonly supported verandas on Georgian buildings such as Rouse Hill House, these posts had generally been located to support verandas on the lower level only, but on the Philip House extended for the full two storeys. A further reference to Georgian precedents was the way in which Grounds ordered the fenestration by vertical alignment of the openings through ground and first 84 floor levels.

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5.12 Richard Rouse, Rouse Hill House, Windsor Road, Rouse Hill, New South Wales, 1813-18. Photo by Solomon Mitchell.85 5.13 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Philip House from west. Photo by the author, 2008.

It is indicative of the subtlety of Grounds’s designs for the Vasey Crescent houses—and of the fine line that existed in his domestic work between modernist interpretation of historical themes and outright stylism—that the Philips made various comments in this regard that, on the surface, appear to conflict. They initially acknowledged that certain stylistic influences existed in their house. Directly after receiving McCormick’s preliminary sketch design drawings, John Philip wrote to Grounds saying: “We appreciate your imaginative and poetic scheme to provide a unity to the three houses by means of the roof forms with their suggestions of both Colonial Australia and the Orient”.86 However, one year after the house was completed, the Philips claimed to be opposed to any sense of historical style, stating that, “because of its simple form, the house would avoid any suggestion of architectural stylism, and would remain timeless in this age in which most houses are classified by ‘periods’”.87 The key to their satisfaction with the house in relation to the question of style would appear to be the word “suggestion”: indicating the existence of inscrutable visual references to the past that are implicit rather than explicit.

The Philip House became an embodiment of one of Grounds’s major strengths as a house designer: his ability to skilfully fuse together historical and modernist elements into an integrated whole. By juxtaposing the familiar in a way that was essentially new, Grounds—and his co-designer Boyd—created a modern and original house that incorporated subtle traces of architectural precedents within the massing, proportion and detail of its fabric.

Boyd described how this worked in an analysis of earlier houses by Grounds: “the materials looked new because they were put together in a new way. They looked squarer and lighter and there were fewer lines, ridges and pockets … they were ordered into more precise shapes and they seemed to cohere better, making a simple but vigorous little pattern of every house”.88 But it was in this refinement process that the correct

209 balance between traditional techniques and the modern aesthetic was sometimes lost. The reductive approach that Grounds and Boyd both applied to architectural massing— where they took a form and pared it down to its simplest and most elemental state—had its drawbacks when it came to detailing. Of particular concern was Boyd’s predilection for concealing roof gutters, as demonstrated by the Fenner House. In locations such as Vasey Crescent, which is adjacent to a bush reserve, the box gutters of the houses invariably became blocked with leaves, resulting in water penetration into the interiors during heavy downpours.89

After it was completed in early 1962 the Philip House attracted a lot of interest from the public. This was something that it shared with its capital city predecessors—the Fenner and Zwar Houses—but with one major difference. In this case the attention was due to the fact that there was not just one modern house that stood out, but three in a row. Griffiths remembered seeing many cars slowing down outside the house, and the drivers and passengers stopping to look. She imagined that many of them were shocked by the “three ugly houses” set back so far from the street, made out of Besser Block, with their large windows and flat roofs.90

It was this fact—that this was a group of modern houses, rather than a single house—that polarised opinion about the Vasey Crescent Group. Writers such as Eric Wilson and Morton Herman were enthusiastic in their appraisal. Wilson wrote that the group was an excellent example of an alternative to the “anarchy” of “uncontrolled design and speculative building” that was taking over new suburbs. Most houses in Canberra, he believed, were “a chaotic mixture of the conventionally dull and stridently gimmicky”: houses that were similar to those found in other cities, but “out of character with the generally conservative architecture of Canberra”. The Vasey Crescent houses, however, provided “harmony with the landscape and with each other”, were appropriate for the dignity of the national capital, and demonstrated many of Griffin’s ideals in regard to the planning of private houses.91 Herman wrote how the three houses were vastly different in design, but they were given “harmony of appearance” through similar materials. Because the contours of the sites were largely unchanged, the houses displayed a “very natural relationship between buildings and ground”.92

But the strengths of the Vasey Crescent Group, through the eyes of their critics, were also their main weakness. Traditionalists, opposed to modern design, thought that these houses signalled too great a departure from what they were used to—brick-walled bungalows with tiled, hipped roofs—the sort of houses that had established a foothold in the capital city back in the 1930s. The key to their disenchantment was the underlying threat implied by the uniformity of the houses—as Wilson described, “the hint of

210 regimentation” that they detected in the unified designs. The critics saw this as a dangerous precedent, a potential imposition on freedom of choice, and asked: “who would want to live in a city of homes all designed by Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, or Burley Griffin, or any other architect for that matter?”93 There was, of course, no possibility that such an event would ever have occurred, and a city of uniform house design was never the intention of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd—nor of Griffin. Rather, the Vasey Crescent Group was a unique opportunity for an experiment into the coordination of three adjacent houses. It was an opportunity that Grounds, Boyd, and all three clients fully exploited.

In a cheeky note to John Philip that Grounds left under the front door of the Philip House when he passed through Canberra, he wrote: “Betty and I are in Canberra just for today, so I brought her upstairs here to see as much as I felt I could walk into of what I believe to be the loveliest example of architecture in Canberra.”94 Boyd believed, however, that the real significance of the Vasey Crescent Group was not as a series of individual houses, but as a group. In August 1962, after a period of friction between the partners— generated by Grounds’s decision to break away from the firm and carry out the National Gallery of Victoria project on his own—the firm of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd was liquidated, and the new firm of Romberg and Boyd was founded. During the following month Grounds, following requests from the Philips and the Blakers, entered the Vasey Crescent Group into the Royal Australian Institute of Architects single-family residence award. Boyd did not agree with this decision, writing:

I think it is a pity that these houses were entered in the competition. I don’t think that they are likely to win. I am proud of them as a group and I think they prove something—as a group. But individually nobody has ever pretended that they are very remarkable houses, and the competition is for individual houses.95

The response from Grounds, via Lou Gerhardt, was ambivalent: “We can cancel out now if either firm wishes … Mr. Grounds said that he has no feelings pro or con, and would leave it to you”. He did add, however, that the clients could have entered on their own behalf if he had have refused.96 Against Boyd’s wishes the entry was not withdrawn, and the houses failed to receive an award.

Essentially, Boyd was correct. The ultimate significance of the Philip House resides not so much in the quality of its individual form as it does in the contribution that it makes to the overall success of the Vasey Crescent Group: a fully integrated residential precinct that is testament to a successful collaborative process between clients and architects.

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While it is difficult to talk of the significance of the Philip House as a separate entity— most of its strengths and weaknesses exist in relationship to those of its immediate neighbours, and to its existence as part of the Group—some issues stand out above others. There was an extraordinary amount of correspondence between the clients and the architects throughout the design and documentation phases. An equivalent level of care and consideration was given to every detail, and to every decision that was made. In this regard the Philips deserve credit for their energy and enthusiasm, and the architects for their patience in dealing with clients who were so intimately involved. John’s enthusiasm for architecture and boundless energy for what became his pet project, coupled with his application of scientific theory and complete inability to accept refusal for his ideas, was a major contribution. His passion for architecture continued to the end of his life: in July 1999 he was tragically run over and killed by a car after stepping off a tram in Amsterdam. Griffiths recalled—with some trepidation—how her father was most probably on his way to visit an exhibition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work at the time of the accident.97

The final house design reflects many of John’s aspirations and ideals—particularly in regard to passive solar design. The emphasis he gave, however, to this aspect over and above all other criteria did create problems in regard to the way the house was used. The decision to place the kitchen and living spaces on the upper level meant that it was necessary to carry grocery items up two full flights of stairs from the basement car space, and it physically detached the living spaces from the garden. In regard to the former issue, early drawings indicated that a dumb-waiter was to be installed between the basement and kitchen, but this was later deleted to save cost. The Philips did not regret this decision, as they viewed negotiation of the stairs as being part of their daily exercise regime.98 The physical separation of the living spaces from the outside, however, remained a significant shortcoming that was alleviated, to some extent, by the provision of a small balcony. Shared by bedroom 1, this overlooked the nature reserve to the south.

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5.14 Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Philip House from south-west showing balcony. Photo by the author, 2008.

Finally, the architectural character of the Philip House represents the idea that it is valid for the new architectural paradigm to incorporate ideas and concepts from the previous version. In this way the house becomes a conceptual bridge that spans the incommensurability that Kuhn identified between the “old” and the “new” paradigms. Unlike Seidler, Grounds and Boyd saw no need to discard previous ways of designing and building houses in the search for a radical new solution. In the Philip House they endeavoured to construct a house that was a genuine amalgam of the best of both worlds: a delicate balance between known and established techniques and contemporary approaches.

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5.15 Fay Philip, painting, Philip House and children, 1965. Left to right: Peregrine, Candida and Julian. Candida Griffiths Collection.

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1 In addition to Gunn, other architects and draftsmen who worked on the Philip House included James McCormick, Pat Moroney and H. R. Stafford. Conrad Hamann, “Modern Architecture in Melbourne: the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971” (Ph.D. diss., Visual Arts Department, Monash University, 1978), 186, footnote. 2 Australian Home Beautiful (December 1963). 3 See “Mapping the Terrain”. 4 Australian Home Beautiful (December 1963): 5. 5 Canberra Times (22 July 1959): 1. At that time Lake Burley Griffin did not exist. Some details of the auction were obtained from Candida Griffiths, interview by the author, 27 June 2008. 6 Eric Wilson, “Good-Mannered Houses”, Australian Home Beautiful (December 1963): 5. 7 Conrad Hamann, “Modern Architecture in Melbourne: the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971”, 186, footnote. 8 Candida Griffiths, interview by the author, 27 June 2008. Details of the meeting with Grounds were compiled from information from that interview, and from Geoffrey Serle, Robin Boyd, a Life (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 192. 9 “Griffing House, 44 Vasey Crescent, Campbell, Canberra”, Papers of John Philip (Manuscript), National Library of Australia, MS 9801, Box 1. Author not noted, but most likely Bruce or Penny Griffing. 10 Canberra Australian Federal Capital, Nucolorvue Productions, Mentone, Victoria. 11 John Philip to J. N. Rogers, Assistant Secretary (Lands), Lands and Survey Branch, Department of the Interior, Canberra, ACT, 9 April, 1960, “Philip House Canberra”, Grounds, Romberg & Boyd Records 1927-1979, Manuscript Collection, State Library of Victoria, MS 13363, Box 61/1(b). 12 Candida Griffiths, interview by the author, 27 June, 2008. 13 Kevin Starr, “The Case Study House Program and the Impending Future, Some Regional Considerations”, in Esther McCoy, “Arts & Architecture Case Study Houses”, Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 163. 14 Hamann, Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971, 239. 15 Eric Wilson described the design in “Good-Mannered Houses”, 5-7. 16 Catherine Blakers to Grounds, 2 December, 1959, “Blakers House Canberra, Correspondence”, Grounds, Romberg & Boyd Records, 1927-1979, MS 13363, Box 63/2 (b); Bruce and Penny Griffing to Grounds, 4 December, 1959, “Griffing House Canberra, Correspondence”, Grounds, Romberg & Boyd Records, 1927-1979, Box 63/1; “Griffing House, 42 and 44 Vasey Crescent, Campbell, Canberra”; Papers of John Philip (Manuscript), National Library of Australia, MS 9801, Box 1. 17 Australian Home Beautiful (December 1963). 18 During the 1930s, while still a child, Frances established an early native garden at her Melbourne home, propagated from seeds obtained from her aunt’s property in the Gippsland hills. She maintained a glasshouse, and trips to the country were punctuated by diversions to local nurseries to supplement her collection. 19 “Griffing House, 42 and 44 Vasey Crescent, Campbell, Canberra”. 20 Eric Wilson, “Good-Mannered Houses”, 7. 21 John Philip to Grounds, 17 March, 1960. Papers of John Philip. 22 J. R. Conner, A Guide to Canberra Buildings (Sydney: Angus and Robertson in association with the RAIA, 1970), 40. 23 ‘It seems that our future neighbours are unimpressed with the virtues of the combined drive, and that this proposal will be abandoned. Personally, we think that an excellent opportunity for unified site treatment is thus lost; but we can see that the combined drive has practical disadvantages for the other houses, particularly the Blakers.” John Philip to Grounds, 28 March, 1960, “Philip House Canberra”. 24 Roy Grounds, De Berg Tapes, National Library of Australia, recorded in Melbourne, 11 October 1971. 25 Hamann, “Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971”, 62-4, 239. 26 Royal Australian Air Force Record, “Grounds R. B.” National Archives of Australia, NAA: A9300, Grounds R B, 27, 31, 32. 27 Among the architects were Walter Bunning, John D. Moore and Leslie Wilkinson, while those from art backgrounds included William Dobell, Eric Ernest Joliffe, Daryl Lindsay, Keeper of the Prints, National Gallery Melbourne and Lewis McCubbin, Director National Gallery of Adelaide. The photographer Max Dupain was another camouflage officer. National Archives of Australia, NAA: A5954/69, NAA: A453/1, 1942/28/2298. 28 Hamann, “Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971”, 45. 29 Grounds to John Philip, 29 January 1969, Papers of John Philip.

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30 Roy Grounds, De Berg Tapes, National Library of Australia, recorded in Melbourne, 11 October 1971. 31 “At Penders, the spirit of Sir Roy Grounds still roams at large. In the moody surroundings of his beach retreat on the New South Wales South Coast, strange upturned tree sculptures stand guard like pagan charms. With single stone eyes, they watch the spot where Grounds’s ashes were sprinkled in March, and the unoccupied house, a stylised tee-pee of fibreglass and nylon sailcloth which has stood for 12 years”. Geoff Strong, “Centre of Contention”, The Age (8 August, 1981): 19-20. 32 Boyd to Penny Griffing, 13 December, 1960, “Griffing House Canberra”. Betty Grounds had previously been involved in the interiors of the Australian Academy of Science building, for which she had selected light fittings. 33 John Philip to Boyd, 25 August, 1960, “Philip House Canberra”. 34 Boyd to Dalheim Constructions, 26 July, 1960, “Philip House Canberra”. 35 Boyd to John Philip, 29 August, 1960, “Philip House Canberra”. 36 John Philip to Boyd, 31 August, 1960, “Philip House Canberra”. 37 Boyd to Dalheim Constructions, 5 September, 1960, “Philip House Canberra”. 38 Eric Wilson, “Style is Timeless”, Australian Home Beautiful (December 1963): 11. 39 Australian Home Beautiful (December 1963). 40 Boyd to Penny Griffing, 13 December, 1960. “Griffing House Canberra Correspondence”. 41 Title of address given to the RAIA by Ken Grant, Professor of Physics, University of Adelaide, 1945. Architecture 34 no. 1 (January-March, 1945): 131-36. 42 Norman Mussen, “There are Only Numbers”, Architecture and Arts 1 no. 1 (July, 1952): 23. Mussen was a structural engineer and Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture at Melbourne University during the 1950s. He was the structural engineer for the Philip House. See Fritz Suendermann to Boyd, 23 March 1962. “Philip House Canberra”. 43 Grant believed that the need to obtain regular sources of power for factories was the greatest problem faced by the building industry. Professor Ken Grant, “Physics in the Home”, Architecture 34, 1 (January-March, 1945): 131-36. 44 “I accept all your explanations for Philip’s queries and I know he can be very difficult …” Boyd to Suendermann, 20 June, 1961, “Philip House Canberra”, and Suendermann to Boyd, 6 June, 1961, “Philip House Canberra”. 45 One practical outcome of his theoretical work was the practice of planting of trees in dry locations to improve local climates. 46 David Smiles, John Philip’s Commemorative Gathering, Australian Academy of Science, 18 July, 1999. Papers of John Philip. 47 Papers of John Philip. 48 John Philip, undated draft script for “Insight”, ABC “Physics and Biology”. National Library of Australia, “Philip House Canberra”. 49 John Philip, “The elements—earth, air, fire, water”, special feature on Ken Woolley’s F.C. Pye Laboratory, Canberra Times (30 August, 1966). Candida Philip and Toss Gascoigne (a former CSIRO employee) both recall that the basic configuration of the F.C. Pye Laboratory was first sketched by Fay Philip. Candida Griffiths, interview by the author, 27 June, 2008, and Toss Gascoigne, in discussion with the author, 2008. 50 “The suggestion to place the kitchen where it is shown on our sketches 1 and 2, was made by John Philip, and we thought it an excellent one”. Otto Frankel to Grounds, 6 November, 1969. Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), Manuscript Collection, Adolph Basser Library, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, MS 106, Box 13. Candida Griffiths, in discussion with the author, Canberra, 14 Novermber 2009. 51 Ross Taylor, John Philip’s Commemorative Gathering, Australian Academy of Science, 18 July, 1999. Papers of John Philip. 52 “D. J. Philip” was listed as a member of the Sulman Award jury in 1964. Presumably this referred to John Philip, whose initials were actually “J. R.” Andrew Metcalf, Architecture in Transition, the Sulman Award 1932-1996 (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1997), 96. 53 Letters dated August 1959, Papers of John Philip. 54 Candida Griffiths, interview by the author, 27 June, 2008. The reference to Boyd climbing the ladder is from Serle, Robin Boyd, a Life, 192. 55 Ibid. 56 Other commissions in Canberra that followed the Australian Academy of Science building were a group of townhouses in Forrest for “Academics Anonymous” (which included Grounds), the Phytotron Building at the Commonwealth Scientific

216 and Industrial Research Organisation, Black Mountain, and the Botany and Zoology buildings at the Australian National University, Acton. 57 “Three sided debate”, Architecture and Arts 1 no. 1 (July, 1952): 13. 58 Ibid. 59 Roy Grounds, De Berg Tapes, National Library of Australia, recorded in Melbourne, 11 October 1971. 60 Roy Grounds, interview by Conrad Hamman, January 1978. Cited by Hamann, Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971, 53; Grounds, De Berg Tapes. 61 Ibid., 51-53. 62 Candida Griffiths, interview by the author, 27 June, 2008. 63 “Philip House Canberra Correspondence”. 64 Candida Griffiths, interview by the author, 27 June, 2008. 65 John Philip, undated Draft Script for “Insight”, ABC “Physics and Biology”. 66 John Philip to Grounds, 4 December 1959, “Philip House Canberra Correspondence”. 67 A letter from the Griffings to Grounds was dated the same day, while Catherine Blakers wrote on 2 December, 1959. “Griffing House Canberra Correspondence” and “Blakers House Canberra”. 68 Eric Wilson, “Good-Mannered Houses”. The Blakers and Griffing Houses were also designed on passive solar design principles. The Griffings discussed their house in this regard under “Heating, Griffing House, 44 Vasey Crescent, Campbell, Canberra”, Papers of John Philip. 69 Candida Griffiths, interview by the author, 27 June, 2008. 70 Grounds to John Philip, 15 January, 1960, “Philip House Canberra Correspondence”. 71 A double-hinged screen, constructed of an ash frame with Japanese-style blind, was hinged on one side to the stringer and handrail of the stair. This was rolled across to screen off the playroom—which was essentially a second living area—on occasions when guests were arriving at the house via the “formal”, front entry. On most days the screen was folded back, and the Philips entered the house through the laundry to the east. Candida Griffiths, interview by the author, 27 June, 2008. 72 “Philip House Canberra Correspondence”. 73 John Philip to Grounds, 15 February, 1960, “Philip House Canberra Correspondence”. 74 John Philip to Grounds, 28 March, 1960; Grounds, Romberg & Boyd reply, 31 March, 1960; Pat Moroney’s file notes after speaking to Philip on the telephone, 12 April, 1960, 13 April, 1960. “Philip House Canberra Correspondence”. 75 As there is no record of a reply from Grounds, Romberg & Boyd, it is most likely that this issue was discussed by telephone. The solution was a part 45 degree mitred joint that squared off in line with the return wall. See Illustration 5.10. 76 Suendermann to Boyd, 6 June, 1961, “Philip House Canberra Correspondence”. 77 Roy Grounds, De Berg Tapes, National Library of Australia, recorded in Melbourne, 11 October 1971. 78 Hamann, Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971, 67. 79 Ibid., 55. 80 “A three sided debate”, Architecture and Arts, I, No. 1 (July 1952), p. 13. 81 Hamann, Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971, 56. 82 Candida Griffiths, interview by the author, 27 June 2008. 83 Ibid. 84 Hamann refers to the use of these devices to produce a “Georgian allusion” in the houses of both Grounds and Boyd. Hamann, Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971, 298. 85 Richard Apperly, Robert Irving and Peter Reynolds, A Pictorial Guide to Identifying Australian Architecture: Styles and Terms from 1788 to the Present (North Ryde: Angus and Robertson, 1989), 25. 86 John Philip to Grounds, 4 December, 1959. “Philip House Canberra Correspondence”. 87 “Style is Timeless”. Author not noted, but possibly Eric Wilson. Australian Home Beautiful (December, 1963): 10. 88 Robin Boyd, Australia’s Home, Its Origins, Builders and Occupiers (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1952), 175. 89 While there is no evidence of problems with the Philip House in this regard, the other two both leaked. “Vasey Residences. Saw Bruce Griffing Sunday after a very heavy downpour, and both his and Blaker’s houses leaked badly. Water seemed to fill gutters and run back up under roofing and distribute itself over ceiling boards leaking through at every crack. Large amounts at windows running down inside face of walls…” Lou Gerhardt (Grounds, Romberg and Boyd representative in Canberra) to Boyd, 26 October, 1962, “Philip House Canberra Correspondence”.

217

90 Candida Griffiths, interview by the author, 27 June, 2008. 91 Eric Wilson, “Good-Mannered Houses”, 5-6. 92 Morton Herman, “Is YOUR house in the upper ten?” Australian (3 August 1964): 10. 93 Eric Wilson, “Good-Mannered Houses”, 6. 94 Grounds to John Philip, undated, Papers of John Philip. 95 Boyd to Lou Gerhardt. 24 September, 1962, “Philip House Canberra Correspondence”. 96 Grounds (per Gerhardt) to Romberg and Boyd, 28 September, 1962, “Philip House Canberra Correspondence”. 97 Candida Griffiths, interview by the author, 27 June 2008. 98 Ibid.

218 Chapter Six

WHERE SCIENCE MEETS ART: BISCHOFF AND THE GASCOIGNE HOUSE

Theo said “What a great house it is … but it takes two people to build a house, an architect and a client—and you have been very good clients.” And I was pleased to hear that. Ben Gascoigne1

6.1 Theo Bischoff, Gascoigne House, view from north. Photo by the author, 2009.

Sidney (“Ben”) Gascoigne chuckled and leaned across the dining table, placing his hand near a small groove on one edge of its otherwise pristine surface. “Do you see that saw- cut there? Rosalie made that! She used to put bits of wood on the table and saw them, you see. And when I came home one day and she showed it to me, I said ‘well, we’re not going to fill that, not for anybody—this was made by Rosalie Gascoigne!’” It was late November 2007, and I was interviewing Ben in the dining room at 3 Anstey Street, Pearce—a house that Theo Bischoff designed for the Gascoignes in 1967 and 1968. This was the last week that Ben was to spend in the house. Rosalie, his wife of fifty-six years, and one of Australia’s most highly regarded artists, had died eight years previously, and

219 he was about to move into a smaller property. Many of her artworks had been prepared on the table where we were sitting. Now they were going to new homes: to Ben’s apartment, to the National Gallery of Australia, or to other family members’ houses.

But the courtyard of the house, where Rosalie stored the raw materials for her assemblages, was still cluttered with ephemera that she had accumulated over thirty years of fossicking: dozens of old porcelain dolls’ heads, stacks of sun-bleached animal vertebrae, piles of weathered timber slabs from old soft drink crates, worn enamelware bowls and teapots, fragments of road signs, rusted iron, metal fans, wire grilles and assorted kitchenalia.

6.2 Rosalie Gascoigne, found objects on courtyard wall. Photo by the author, 2009.

Ben and Rosalie were both born in New Zealand, and emigrated to Australia during World War II when Ben took up a position at the Commonwealth Solar Observatory on Mount Stromlo. During the war Ben worked on optical munitions: one of his first projects was designing a sighting telescope for anti-aircraft guns.2 In the post-war years he began observing stars in the Magellanic Clouds, two small galaxies 170,000 light years away. He explored the photometry of faint stars and the maximum effectiveness of telescopes, and was instrumental in setting up the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring.3 Ben’s observations and research contributed to the understanding of galactic distance and evolutionary theory. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, he was the first Australian to be elected as Associate Member of the Royal Astronomical Society.4

220

6.3 The Small Magellanic Cloud.5

The Anstey Street house (hereafter referred to as “the Gascoigne House”) was the third of three houses in the Australian Capital Territory that the family lived in. The first was Residence 19, a staff house on Mount Stromlo, where they lived between 1943 and 1960, while the second was a house in Deakin, owned by the Australian National University, that they leased from 1960 to 1969.

Ben and Rosalie both contributed to their house. It was largely Ben who initiated the processes of deciding to build, obtaining a site and engaging an architect. His contribution to the briefing of Bischoff was the most comprehensive and detailed of any client in this dissertation, and was based on an analysis and critique of problems that the family had experienced with their first two houses. As such, it provides an excellent example of the way in which deficiencies in an existing paradigm can be examined, and how observations and recommendations from this process can provide a brief for a new, improved version. Rosalie added to Ben’s criticisms of the previous houses, but did not become particularly involved with the project until she could see that it was becoming a reality. From that time on she became heavily involved in the process.

In comparison to his distinguished clients, Bischoff remains a little-known architect. Many of his houses were published in The Canberra Times, The Australian and other publications in the 1960s soon after they were completed, and a few were included in J. R. Conner’s A Guide to Canberra Buildings of 1970, but very little has been published on his work during the intervening decades.6 His well-crafted, modernist houses, however, have stood the dual tests of time and of changing architectural fashion, and are today held in high regard by those in Canberra who are aware of his work. Most of his houses have been retained—many preserved in near original condition—while others have been

221 restored or extended.7 When the Marshall House at 86 Morgan Crescent, Curtin— originally designed by Bischoff for the Australian National University microbiologist Ian Marshall and his wife Kathleen—was advertised for sale in 2007, the real estate agent attempted to explain the reasons for its enduring appeal: “Theo Bischoff’s timeless architecture is as relevant today as it was when he designed the single level residence almost forty years ago. Extensive timber joinery and the simple detailing of natural material and finishes are evident throughout … and are so evocative of the sixties.”8

Residence 19, Commonwealth Solar Observatory

In 1905, in the midst of post-Federation debate over where to locate Australia’s new Federal City, Australian astronomer Geoffrey Duffield approached the Australian Government with a proposal. But, unlike many others who were lobbying the government at that time, his proposition had nothing to do with the location of the capital city. Instead, Duffield wanted the government to establish a solar observatory, the function of which would be to provide an Australian connection in a global network. He believed that an Australian observatory would fill a gap in the system between existing observatories in the British colony of India and the United States, enabling research into areas of the sky not visible from other countries.9

Like many architects and planners of the same period, Duffield was interested in the sun from a climatic point of view.10 New instruments, allowing observation of the sun’s atmosphere, had revealed luminous clouds that were larger than sun-spots. Believing that there might be a connection between sunspots, magnetic fields and rainfall, he hoped that the study of solar phenomena might provide a greater understanding of terrestrial meteorological conditions, and assist with weather forecasting and anticipation of drought.11

In 1908 the Australian Government decided to locate the Federal Capital Territory in the Yass-Canberra region, and in the following year confirmed that an observatory would be located within the Territory.12 Duffield’s environmental criteria for the observatory included large numbers of sunny days, low average rainfall, low wind velocity, steady barometer readings, clearness of atmosphere, good elevation, and the presence of vegetation and foliage to prevent excessive radiation. A number of elevated sites within the Capital Territory were considered, and Mount Stromlo—the highest peak in a one- and-a-half kilometre-long ridge, situated eleven kilometres to the west of the proposed Federal City and approximately two hundred metres above its general level—was selected.13 However, plans for a full-scale observatory were put on hold during World War I, when the principal activity on Mount Stromlo consisted of the planting of a Pinus

222 Radiata (“Monterey Pine”) plantation by the horticulturalist Charles Weston. This forest, which was ostensibly introduced to get rid of rabbits, stabilise the soil and improve atmospheric conditions in accordance with Duffield’s guidelines, spread over the mountain in the ensuing decades and eventually reached the ridgeline.14

When the government finally committed to the establishment of a full-scale observatory in 1923, attention was focused on the layout of the complex, including the location of staff houses. The Commonwealth Meteorologist believed that “the crest of the Mount Stromlo ridge” was “an ideal site for a scientific community”, but was concerned about the location of staff accommodation: “The exclusion of the dwellings, which would be situated on the slopes without the compound, is also important as difficulties are always liable to arise from purely personal reasons, particularly where the families of married officials are concerned.” He added “the roofs of dwelling houses should not rise above the level of the crest of the hill, and the houses themselves should be situated preferably on the south-eastern slopes”.15 In July 1923 Duffield, Henry Rolland and Colonel Percy Owen—Director General of the Department of Works and Railways—met on site to discuss the siting of the observatory buildings. Afterwards they confirmed that the staff housing would be located on the eastern side of Stromlo ridge to provide shelter from the prevailing winds.16

It was determined that houses would be required for the Director, two assistants and possibly one senior mechanic, while single accommodation would be needed for research fellows, clerks, a professional officer, apprentice, janitor, chauffeur and cook.17 During the 1920s the Federal Capital Commission’s Architect’s Department, under Rolland, designed and built a community of eight staff residences on Mount Stromlo. Termed “cottages” in the English tradition by the Commission, these were similar to the standard houses provided for civil servants in Canberra at the time. Constructed of double brickwork, stuccoed on the exterior and smooth plastered inside, they had low- pitched, tiled roofs and timber-framed doors and windows. Their simple forms rejected elaborate ornamentation, but contained passing references to Mediterranean and Georgian styles.

The Mount Stromlo cottages followed contemporary planning principles, including accommodation of families without servants, and more efficient, less formal planning. They also incorporated new technological developments such as plumbing, sanitation and electricity. For these reasons they would have been considered up-to-date at the time they were built.18 They were not, however, particularly well equipped to deal with the extremes of climate on the exposed slopes of Mount Stromlo.

223

6.4 Federal Capital Commission, “Residence H”, Mt. Stromlo Observatory, drawn 27 November 1925. This is similar to Residence 19, the Gascoignes’ first house. National Archives of Australia.

224

6.5 Federal Capital Commission, “Cottages at Commonwealth Solar Observatory on Mt. Stromlo”, c 1928. National Archives of Australia.19

Ben arrived at the Commonwealth Solar Observatory in August, 1941, and moved into the Bachelors’ Quarters. Rosalie, who had met her future husband in Auckland in 1933, remained in New Zealand where she asked Ben—by telegram—if he would marry her. Receiving the response that she wanted to hear, she arrived in Sydney, by flying boat, in January 1943 and transferred to Canberra and then on to Mount Stromlo.20 After they were married, in early 1943, the Gascoignes moved into one of the staff cottages, Residence 19.

Rosalie’s first impression of her new environment was the intense colour: “Green, orange and blues. It was terribly coloured.” And the fact that “the sun came out like a hammer. As soon as you stepped out the door—bang!”21 But by winter of her first year on the mountain she was convinced that the house had been designed with little appreciation of local conditions: “that big open cold ‘built on the south side of the hill’ house that we had ... It was cold. And the air hung purple like that, purple in the passages”. She recalled that on some days it was warmer outside the house than it was inside. When inside she found it was too cold to go down the passage to get a handkerchief, and preferred to huddle around the fuel fire in the kitchen.

225 But Rosalie found various ways to pass the time indoors. In an indication of what was to come, during “one drab winter” she began constructing a patchwork quilt. “While the wind howled among the pines and hurled itself against the side of the house and my husband went up to work I used to sit patching flowery hexagons together, and the colour and the cheerfulness of the materials never failed to bring company into the room for me”. The darkness of the winter months in the Mount Stromlo house had other repercussions. The Gascoignes began buying modern art prints from Ben’s friend Carl Plate, an abstract artist who ran the Notanda Gallery in Rowe Street, Sydney. But the lack of natural light inside the house became a problem: one of the prints, a Braque in a green frame, “was too dark for their gloomy house”. Rosalie began to dread the arrival of winter, when “all colour vanished from the garden and the hill was bitter with meager grass and stones”. Finding the colours of the landscape barren, she would search desperately “for any kind of visual excitement”.22

The problems inside the house were all aggravated by Weston’s pine forest. Although the huge trees had been cleared in patches to accommodate clusters of observatory buildings, they still obscured views, and prevented any significant amount of sunlight from reaching the house—which, because of its location on the south-eastern slope of the mountain, was already in shade for most of the day. For an astronomer who was able to see further than anyone else into the night sky through a telescope, it was frustrating for Ben to return to his own house, further down the mountain, and find that the potentially wonderful views over the Molonglo Valley were obscured by a wall of pine trees.23 Rosalie remembered the oppressive denseness of the plantation, how the “pine clad mountain closed in on her as she drove back up from town”. It was a memory that stayed with her: when she eventually moved down from the mountain to live in the suburbs of Canberra below, she gave a radio talk for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about her Mount Stromlo experiences. Titled “Too many pine trees”, it contained numerous references to her memories of the dark and gloomy forest.24

226

6.6 View over Canberra from Mount Stromlo, with pine trees in foreground, c 1920. National Archives of Australia.25

Ben recalled how the pine trees, until they were decimated (for the first time) by fire in 1952, shaded their house from what little sun was available: “we didn’t get the winter sun until ten or eleven in the morning, not properly, and there’d be a frost on the southern side of the house—frost there all day sometimes”. To combat the cold, Residence 19 was equipped with no less than five separate fireplaces, a wood stove and a copper for heating water. At a later stage Ben arranged for oil-fired heating to be added.26 While the house was virtually sunless, Ben found another problem: any heat that was generated inside quickly dissipated through the external fabric. Following advice from the Australian National University—which had taken over administration of the Observatory from the Department of the Interior in 195727—Ben arranged for ceiling insulation to be installed at his own expense. This amounted to £91.4.2—a significant amount at the time. Two years later, when they moved to the Canberra suburb of Deakin, Ben wrote to the University asking if they would purchase the insulation back from him, stating that “ceiling insulation can now be regarded as standard practice in Canberra”.28

More than forty years later the same pine forest played another, more deadly role, providing fuel for a massive firestorm that gutted most of the buildings on Mount Stromlo—including Residence 19 and the Director’s Residence—and devastated Canberra’s western suburbs.

227

“A Feeling of Space and Air” 29

If the Gascoigne House is considered as a series of spaces, then it follows that Rosalie’s contribution to its design is best approached through a corresponding analysis of the way in which she worked. Descriptions of her art and influences contain many references to space, as do the artist’s own accounts. These can be divided into two principle types of space: the external environment that Rosalie explored on foot—and later by car—and the internal spaces of her houses and studio.30 An appreciation of how each of these spatial typologies impacted on Rosalie’s creative process is critical to an understanding of her art—and, consequently, to an appreciation of the role that her domestic environment played in that work.

Rosalie spent a lot of time exploring Mount Stromlo and the wider area of the Monaro region, becoming intimate with these environments and collecting raw materials and found objects. Many writers commented how something of the essence of these spaces was captured in the assemblages of objects that became her completed artworks. Edmund Capon wrote how her art was “inspired by the surroundings of her immediate landscape, the spacious grazing lands of the Monaro region near Canberra. Reflecting that inspiration, a feeling of space and air echoes eloquently through her work.”31 Kelly Gellatly described how one of Rosalie’s largest works, Monaro, a sprawling 4.6 x 1.3 metre composition of fragments from yellow soft-drink containers, “seems to hold the effect of wind rippling across sun-drenched grasslands at its very surface”.32

228

6.7 Rosalie Gascoigne, Monaro, (left hand panel of four), 1989. Art Gallery of Western Australia.

It was the way in which the unfamiliar Mount Stromlo environment appeared to be barren that trained Rosalie’s perception in her early years: “Through that sort of poverty with things, your eye gets very sharp”. At that stage Rosalie was observing out of pure necessity—a desperate attempt to fill a visual void: “I had to have things that I found interesting. There wasn’t any stimulation of the eye. You fed your eye as much as you could.” Studying her new landscape in detail, she learnt to identify “every sort of gravel on that mountain, every sort of grass”.33 When she found time between domestic duties Rosalie created a flower garden on the steep land behind the house. Closely related to Rosalie’s observation of her surroundings was the desire to pick up objects that interested her and take them back home: “I used to go out, which I liked doing, and I'd

229 take anything that was beautiful … I’d gather that home.”34 She began collecting native Australian plants, and learnt how to preserve flowers and grass. Gathering roadside grass in spring, she would tie it in bundles and hang them under the house. An indication of how serious Rosalie was becoming about her interests, and how keen she was to acquire technical information, was apparent in 1960 when she wrote a paper on plant properties, drying methods and the impact of seasonal changes.35

Other items that she hoarded during the Stromlo period included skulls, bones and rocks. But Rosalie wasn’t the only one: her children—Martin, Thomas (“Toss”) and Hester—also started to bring found objects back to the house. Martin recalled how bringing “a good stone or a nicely shaped piece of wood” home was the way to his mother’s heart, and how he and his siblings became quite good at it.36 All of the items that were brought home were carefully placed in various locations around the house:

It was just something to have on the mantelpiece. I needed things to look at, you see … So if I put an old kerosene tin lid on because I thought it was a lovely orange or something, and put it there, well that was something for me to look at. See, it's sort of need of the pleasures of the eye. I needed it badly.37

This is where the importance of that other type of space—the private, enclosed spaces of her house—becomes apparent. Intimate spaces inside and underneath the Mount Stromlo house provided Rosalie with an opportunity to remove the found objects from their original setting, to introduce them to her own context, and to contemplate them over time. But nothing happened immediately: “It was very gradual. I had to bring things into my house to look at.” Any available horizontal surface became a potential display space:

As vision grows I see more, I bring back materials from the landscape and place them around. Little things on ledges, or laid out on the floor or in the garden. They are then available to be looked at in my space. As things are moved about, there are more discoveries, more is revealed.38

The domestic spaces where Rosalie studied her findings became “intensely private” places, inner sanctums where she attempted to create order out of chaos. In there she would rearrange objects until she reached a point where they recalled “the feeling of an actual moment in the landscape”.39 From the early 1950s Rosalie became involved with flower arranging, entering her displays in the annual Canberra Horticultural Society Shows—often held in the Albert Hall on Commonwealth Avenue—or at events organised by the Country Women’s Association. At these she had significant success—regularly

230 winning prizes right through until the mid-1960s—and developed a reputation for her arrangements in the Canberra region.40

In 1960 the Gascoignes left Residence 19 on Mount Stromlo and moved to a much smaller house, owned by the Australian National University, at 22 Dugan Street, Deakin. While this leafy suburb is now considered to be established and central, when they moved there the house was one of the first in the area, and was still surrounded by farmland. Rosalie described the house as “very badly designed”, a “terrible house” with “no room in it”.41 But the surrounding paddocks and slopes of Red Hill became her new domain—and an abundant source of found objects for an artist whose eyes were becoming “attuned to the landscape”. On fine mornings she would go on walks across the paddocks and collect “mountain stones and river stones and flat frost-split rocks, dry grasses, cones, thistle heads, lichens and driftwood” which she would fill her house with.42 In 1962 Rosalie began attending formal lessons in ikebana under Norman Sparnon, Director of the Australian branch of the modern Sogetsu school. Considered to be a fine art in Japan, Sogetsu was considered to be sculpture rather than pure decoration.43

During the 1960s Martin Gascoigne became acquainted with the art curator James Mollison, who was then working with the National Gallery of Victoria. Mollison later became the inaugural Director of the National Gallery of Australia and became a central figure in the importation to Canberra of one of the icons of modern art: Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles. When he visited Canberra, Martin would bring him to the Dugan Street house. Just prior to these visits, Rosalie would strategically place her latest creations around the house, hoping to elicit comments from the young curator. Mollison was not particularly forthcoming at first, but his advice, when it came, was direct: “get down onto the lawn” and move up to a larger scale.44 Heeding his advice, Rosalie’s work increased in scale, as did the found objects that she brought home. Discarded agricultural implements and broken fragments of farm machinery began to appear on the lawn, several of which Ben welded together under Rosalie’s direction to form garden sculptures.45 While Sparnon’s ikebana classes had helped to develop her compositional eye, Rosalie eventually found them to be too restrictive. Ceasing to attend in 1970, she progressed on to pure sculpture. For this, the confined spaces of the Deakin house were a limitation. The only place where she could accumulate material was the garden: “But when I wanted to do something, there was nowhere to do it in the house. There was one sitting room, lots of passageways. Two bathrooms. A lot of passage … [but] there was nowhere to settle in the house.” At this point Rosalie became convinced that she and Ben would have to build their own house.46

231

6.8 Rosalie Gascoigne with her “farm iron” in the back yard at 22 Dugan Street, Deakin, September 1968. Rosalie Gascoigne Archives.

When it came to finding an architect, the Gascoignes did their research. Rosalie knocked on the door of houses that she liked, asking the owners who had designed them. They were attracted to Ken Woolley’s Pettit and Sevitt Houses, which, by the late 1960s, were appearing in large numbers around Canberra suburbs. They visited the Lovering House—just around the corner in Beauchamp Street, Deakin—that Woolley had designed for the Australian National University geologist John Lovering and his wife Kerry, and inspected Noel Potter’s Birch House.47 But it was when Louisa Pike invited the Gascoignes to see their Bischoff-designed house at 3 Garsia Street, Campbell, that they really took notice. For clients who were concerned with views, and who valued natural light, the Pike House was a revelation. Bischoff had designed it as a series of cellular, rectangular spaces separated by a “star pattern” of variously proportioned open courtyards. Spread round a square, central court that contained a fountain, there were five courtyards in total. Most spaces looked onto at least one of these, each of which flooded the adjacent spaces with an abundance of natural light.

232

6.9 Theo Bischoff, central courtyard, Pike House, c 1968.48

Further aspects of the Pike House that the Gascoignes liked were the wide circulation gallery surrounding the central court, and the sensible solar orientation. Ben remembered how the house “took advantage of the site … the sun came around on the right side”, and “it had a certain eastern aspect to catch the early morning sun, which in Canberra’s important because the winters, of course, can be mighty cold”. After their experience with the Mount Stromlo house he was determined that they would have a house with a northern, or north-eastern, aspect.49 Some time later Ben and Rosalie noticed an article in The Canberra Times about the Pike House, which they cut out and saved for future reference. Ben, no doubt, was intrigued by the optical theme of Ann Whitelaw’s article: “Courtyard and Fountain Provides Bright Focal Point”.50

233

6.10 Theo Bischoff, Pike House, floor plan. Bischoff described the house as being “closely related to the 5 courtyard areas that form a star pattern for it”.51

Whether Ben was also aware that Bischoff had generated his plan from a “star pattern” of courtyards is not clear. But there was already enough evidence to convince the Gascoignes that they had found the right architect, and Bischoff was engaged to design their new house.

An Informed Brief

After all, houses are important: it’s where you live, and it’s worth giving serious thought to. Ben Gascoigne52

The one activity that underscored and informed all aspects of the Gascoignes’ involvement with their house was observation. In terms of relative dimension between observer and object, Ben and Rosalie—as astronomer and artist—could not have approached this from more opposite poles. But despite these extremes of focal length, it was the act of observation in its broadest dimension—of studying physical objects in three-dimensional space—that united these two clients in their approaches to their surroundings, and to the way in which they considered domestic space. That the fundamental purpose of observation, for Ben, was to find an essential truth, or quality, in the physical environment, was a truism. Yet the same objective also applied to Rosalie,

234 for whom “the bottom line in art” was honesty: a quest for “eternal truths in nature, the rhythms, cycles, seasons, shapes, regeneration, restorative powers, spirit”.53

Ben and Rosalie had strong ideas about what kind of house they wanted to live in, and both made major contributions to Bischoff’s brief. In accordance with their contrasting approaches—as their eldest son Martin observed, “their personalities were famously unlike”—these ideas came from widely differing perspectives.54 Ben’s approach, naturally, was rational and scientific—based on an analysis of known facts, establishment of problems, and the formulation of specific design criteria. These were requirements that, to a competent architect, were able to be clearly understood—and even quantifiable in the completed building. Rosalie’s approach, by contrast, was more instinctive and intuitive: a combination of gut instinct and practicality, expressed in the form of poetic aphorisms. True to form, Rosalie’s instructions to Bischoff were brief and to the point: “don’t shut us in”… “I need space … lots of air: high ceilings and wide windows to allow the elements in and frame views of the distant hills”.55

All of the problems that the Gascoignes experienced with Residence 19 had been filed away in Ben’s memory. From there they resurfaced, some years later, as the generating force behind his brief to Bischoff. Added to that was his analysis of other houses for sale in the Australian Capital Territory. He was appalled by their neglect of aspect: “They all faced the same way—they all faced out onto the road and they had little verandahs or porches, so you could sit out there. [But] Nobody ever did!”56 In early July 1967, soon after the Gascoignes obtained the lease for an elevated site in Anstey Street, Pearce for the sum of $2,200, Ben wrote to Bischoff to explain his requirements, adding that it had been “Impossible to do anything until we had settled on a block.”57

Gascoigne’s extensive and detailed notes reveal that the entire concept of the Gascoigne House was based on maximising the potential for observation. Both external and internal environments were to be framed and defined by the house, which was to become a form of habitable optical instrument. In regard to looking outwards, this meant providing the best opportunities for views of varying depth through the garden and over the Woden Valley to the distant Black Mountain. From the outset, Ben made it quite clear that the house was to relate to the northern view and aspect, and to turn its back to the street:

The block is on the NE slope of Mt Taylor, and has a NE aspect and views E and N. It runs N-S, with a fall of about 1 in 15. We bought it chiefly because of the aspect and view, of which we want to take full advantage, and with this

235 in mind envisage a house with its back to the road and living rooms looking out N or NE, across a terrace to a native garden in the lower part of the block.58

Rather than being detached from its setting, the house was to be a natural extension of the site, to appear “as if it grew out of the block.” It was, nevertheless, to maintain a distinction between inside and outside, and a reasonable degree of privacy. Inside, the emphasis was on facilitating the display of art. The overriding function of internal spaces was to provide naturally illuminated wall surfaces for hanging pictures, and horizontal benches for constructing and displaying ikebana arrangements. The dining space— which was to double as Rosalie’s ikebana studio—was to be a simple room, possibly enclosed by white painted, bagged brick walls, with plenty of natural light. It was to be a long room, with a large table and strong shelves for supporting vases and containers. The kitchen was one space from where a view was particularly important. The various spaces would be linked together by a well-lit hall, possibly containing a skylight, which would also double as a gallery space. With these written instructions Ben included an outline sketch plan and a schedule of areas.59

Protégé

Like Grounds and Boyd, Bischoff was a native Victorian and a graduate of the School of Architecture at the University of Melbourne. But while his mentors both remained in Melbourne, Bischoff decided early in his career that the best opportunities were to be found by relocating to Australia’s rapidly developing capital city. In a career that spanned thirty years in Canberra he designed, documented and supervised a large number of buildings, ranging from private houses to Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation laboratories and facilities for government departments. After initially working in private practice, he joined the Australian Capital Territory Region of the Commonwealth Department of Works. When Bischoff left the Department in 1981 to pursue other interests, his retirement notice stated that he specialized in scientific facilities.

Born in Oakleigh, Melbourne, in 1927, Bischoff attended the Murrumbeena State School from 1932 to 1937. He received a Daffyd Lewis Trust scholarship, which allowed him to enrol at the University of Melbourne. Not knowing whether to enter surveying or architecture, Bischoff eventually settled on the latter and entered the School of Architecture—headed by Leighton Irwin—in 1945. In early 1947 Irwin was replaced by Brian Lewis, who became the inaugural Age Professor of Architecture. Lewis’s pedagogical approach emphasised the practice of architecture, based on a sound knowledge of building construction complemented by an appreciation of fine arts. But in

236 late 1947 Lewis left his position at the School of Architecture to become consulting architect for the Australian National University in Canberra. Arranging for Grounds to replace him, Lewis recruited a series of part-time lecturers including Boyd, Raymond (“Ray”) Berg, George Mitchell and John Mockridge.60 Other lecturers that Bischoff would have encountered during his studies included Frederick Romberg, Fritz Janeba, Keith Mackay and structural engineer Norman Mussen.61

In the spirit of his immediate predecessor, Grounds emphasised a “back-to-basics” approach to teaching architecture. A natural showman, he devised novel ways of introducing students to building materials—sometimes with unexpected results. On one occasion, after asking students to bring in two bricks each the following day, he found himself bricked inside his office.62 Grounds developed a reputation as an architectural guru, often inviting students back to his Toorak house or to spend weekends engaged in “talk-fests” at his country house at Ranelagh, Mount Eliza.63 Bischoff established bonds with Grounds, and with Mussen and Mackay, whose office—Mussen, Mackay and Potter, Architects and Engineers—he worked in after graduating with a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1951. Phoebe Bischoff, who married Theo in the same year, remembered Mussen, Mackay and Potter working together on projects with Grounds—or later with Grounds, Romberg and Boyd—when they set up their partnership in 1953. She also recalled the two of them being invited to stay at the Grounds, Romberg and Boyd country retreat in Marysville.64

When Mussen, Mackay and Potter replaced Lewis as architects for the John Curtin School of Medical Research building in 1953, Mussen and his wife Ruth moved to Canberra to set up a branch office in a room of Lewis’s newly-completed University House. Bischoff, who had worked for the firm for barely two years, was offered a position as supervising architect for the John Curtin School—an opportunity that he gladly accepted. There were a number of advantages associated with working in the University House office. These included the proximity to the building site—a mere three hundred metres away—and the opportunity to meet potential University clients such as Pike and Marshall.65

After the John Curtin School building was completed and occupied in 1957, Bischoff joined Mussen, who had by then established his own practice in Canberra as a consulting engineer. A brilliant mathematician, Mussen published widely—and sometimes in unexpected locations. When Peter Burns published Mussen’s “There are Only Numbers” in the first edition of Architecture and Arts in July 1952, he thought that the topic was so unusual that he claimed: “Here, possibly for the first time, an article on mathematics is included in an art magazine. Only after reading this absorbing article, will it be realised

237 why some people place the art of mathematics before all others”.66 Mussen introduced his essay with a brief polemic on the advantages of a cool, detached mind that was oblivious to the subjectivities, shortcomings and frailties of the specific individual—in other words, a scientific mind. Mussen’s approach, which essentially called for an appreciation of beauty in numbers, was close to that of Philip—for whose house Mussen had been structural engineer. While in Mussen’s office, Bischoff discovered a building site in Griffith that was part of a disused quarry. With no-one else interested in purchasing it, the Bischoffs took over the lease and Theo designed a house for his own family. Completed in 1959, the Bischoff House at 47 Carstensz Street, Griffith, contained many ideas that would become part of his domestic vocabulary: rectangular plan, northern orientation, concrete floor slab, unpainted brick walls and low pitched, gable roof of galvanised iron.

In 1960 Bischoff left Mussen to set up his own Canberra practice. By that time Grounds, Romberg and Boyd were expanding their Canberra operation, and he began to assist them on various projects. In 1960 he helped Boyd with the leaking roof of the Fenner House, and with the tender process for the Philip House. He assisted Grounds, Romberg and Boyd with the Japanese Ambassador’s Residence at 114 Empire Circuit, Yarralumla—which was designed by the Japanese Government Architect I. Shimoda— and supervised the Forrest Townhouses at 2 Tasmania Circle and 3 Arthur Circle. In 1964 Bischoff formed a partnership with John Scollay and Tony Pegrum. It was a flexible arrangement that allowed each partner to work on individual projects, while providing an opportunity to collaborate on larger commissions when required.

Bischoff was a rigorous, methodical and highly organised designer who believed that a thorough understanding of the technical aspects of architecture was one of the keys to successful design. He had an intimate knowledge of the properties of timbers and of other building materials, and of the principles behind construction techniques and mechanics. His sketch plans and working drawings—hand-drawn in ink, with notation in a combination of stencil and hand lettering—were so precisely executed that they appeared as precursors of computer drawings.

238

6.11 Theo Bischoff, Gascoigne House, isometric sketch, roof 67 gutter overflow, June 1968. ACT Heritage Library.

Bischoff’s domestic architecture reflected all of this. Precise, reductive, simply planned and practically detailed, these houses were, at the time they were built, among the most refined and understated modernist designs in Canberra. He impressed many clients with his eye for detail. Wendy Benson, a client whose house Bischoff designed at 61 Quiros Street, Red Hill, in 1962, described how he “even measured wall spans to ensure that small pieces of brick were not needed, only whole or half pieces.”68 But Bischoff was far from a detached technocrat. Like his friend and mentor Grounds, he was motivated primarily by client needs. He believed in getting to know his clients well before he started designing, and was careful to incorporate appropriate spaces to meet their individual needs. Dorothy Clark, whose house at 210 Dryandra Street, O’Connor, Bischoff designed in 1958, confirmed that their architect had listened to their wishes, providing her, and her husband George, with their “exact needs and tastes”.69 Douglas and Louisa Pike’s son Andrew recalled Bischoff coming to meet his family on a number of occasions in 1965 to discuss the planning of their house. He and his brother—both teenagers at the time—were impressed that Bischoff took the time to ask them what requirements they had for their bedrooms.70

239

71 6.12 Theo Bischoff, George Clark House, 210 Dryandra Street, O’Connor, c 1958.

Like Grounds, Bischoff generally worked with a limited vocabulary of forms and material. Following detailed discussions with clients in the preliminary stages, he tested various permutations and combinations of these forms until the final resolution was reached. The end result was a varietal family of different plan forms that Bischoff recalled in the form of tiny, almost iconic thumbnail “general layout” sketches that graphically summarised each commission.

240

6.13 Theo Bischoff, “Houses by T. B. 1960-66” (1958-1963 shown only). Phoebe Bischoff Collection.

Whitelaw regularly interviewed Bischoff and his clients, featuring the results in her weekly “Homes and Building” columns. In these articles she reinforced how Bischoff attempted to understand his clients’ requirements. She explained how he designed houses that were not “foregrounds”—elaborate, formal statements that dominated the site—but were “backgrounds”. Neutral, recessive, and in harmony with the site, they provided backdrops to their clients’ lives. Whitelaw stated that the Watson House, at 13 Waller Crescent, Campbell, not only provided comfort and convenience, but formed “an encouraging background” to the Watsons’ way of living, and “grew from the owners’ requirements, the particular site conditions and the materials and methods of construction”. In the same way that Grounds used natural materials and natural colours to visually anchor his buildings to their site, Bischoff specified that the brick walls of the Watson House were to be bagged and “left the natural sandy colour of the mortar”.72

Whitelaw described “a timeless quality” in the house that Bischoff designed for medical practitioner Dr. Aubrey Tow at 56 Vasey Crescent, Campbell—a house that was completed in 1964, and is currently owned by members of the Gascoigne family.73 The Dr. Tow House, which she described as “20th century Georgian”, was similar to the Philip House in its modernist interpretation of that style. A two-storey house with a symmetrical street frontage, and with the horizontal lines of the cantilevered first floor slab and roof

241 eaves countered by regularly spaced, slender steel columns, the Tow House, like its predecessor, made gentle allusions to Georgian precedents. It was constructed of similar materials and finishes to the Philip House—face brickwork in a blue-brown colour, low- pitched metal deck roof, and ceilings and deep eaves soffits lined with matching limed ash boarding. The main departures from the Philip House were in the external proportions—longer and lower—and the direct, central external access stair. The Gascoignes retained a copy of Whitelaw’s article on the Tow House for future reference.74

The Gascoigne House, which Bischoff designed in 1967 and 1968, was one of his last domestic commissions.75 Throughout the briefing, design and construction stages he made a concerted effort to ascertain the clients’ wishes, to formulate appropriate design responses, and to clearly communicate his intentions. Ben Gascoigne, an enthusiastic and involved client, had plenty to say about what sort of house he wanted, and what he believed Rosalie required for her artwork. The combination of all of this was a particularly comprehensive and well documented briefing and design process.

In July 1967, a short time after Bischoff had received Ben’s written brief, he met with his clients at their Dugan Street house. He made detailed notes of the family: “Parents, 2 grown-up boys, girl 17”; the number of bedrooms—“Parents’, Girl, Boys and Study”, and the total spaces required—“3 bedrooms, 1 study, separate entrance hall, separate dining room, kitchen, living room”. Opposite these room names he jotted down cryptic notes to remind himself of specific requirements: “many paintings”; “ikebana display—inside, working space inside and outside”; below he repeated in capitals ‘”IKEBANA in various states of disarray”; “lots of callers but only a few parties”; “no steps”; “neutral and light and informal”; “house on the ground, easy access to garden”; “strong, plain statement”; “not formal, not novel”; “outside brown inside white”; “Car 2”, and “storage (mainly of ikebana)”.76 The Gascoignes told Bischoff that they preferred “real wood”, and Ben recalled that the architect supported this.

After discussing many detailed requirements, Bischoff asked “do you have any other ideas about the house?” Ben replied: “well, we see a house running across this way, and perhaps a kitchen here and a dining room there, living room there and a bedroom there …”77

242

78 6.14 Theo Bischoff, Gascoigne House briefing notes, July 1967.

243 In January 1968 Bischoff wrote to Ben confirming the discussion, and describing how he envisaged the preliminary design. Ben was satisfied to find that Bischoff had listened to his ideas, and had provided them with a solution that was close to what they had asked for.79 Bischoff explained that the main rooms were to face north, and would open off a gallery that extended around a courtyard, enclosed on the street (south) side, by a garage and store. The main rooms would open onto a terrace along the northern side, and would overlook the main garden, with a distant view across the Woden Valley. The house was to be constructed of concrete floors and face brickwork, with a timber-framed roof covered with steel decking. There was to be an emphasis throughout on natural finishes: windows, doors and selected internal walls were to be timber, while the standard of finish was to be similar to that of the Pike House. Bischoff estimated the cost of the proposed house to be $21,000. Like Seidler, he recommended to his clients that the best option would be to negotiate a price with a selected builder. He suggested Hubert Roetzer of 54 Girraween Street, Braddon, who had “successfully completed a number of houses” for his clients.80 Ben approved the completed documents in June 1968, and in July a tender of $21,670 was received from Roetzer. After ensuring that finances were approved, Ben signed the contract documents on 22 August 1968.81

244

82 6.15 Theo Bischoff, Gascoigne House, floor plan, June 1968. ACT Heritage Library.

“Entry into the Art World”

To me, as to all of us, her work was so intimately associated with her domestic setting … the house really marked her entry into the art world. It gave her space, and she wanted space in which you could assemble things. Ben Gascoigne 83

By Christmas of 1968 Roetzer was making good progress on site. Up until that time it had largely been Ben who had driven the project. But now Rosalie—who never drew or planned her own work in advance, but preferred to work directly with the materials themselves—could see the internal spaces taking shape, and began to have ideas of her own. These were primarily associated with providing places to display her work.84 Following Rosalie’s instructions, Bischoff provided sketches and quotations for a series of horizontal surfaces for constructing and displaying sculpture in various locations

245 throughout the house and garden. These included a 450 mm wide by 975 mm high “polished dark wood shelf” to the living room, a 300 mm by 50 mm “rough-work” bench to the west terrace, and a 3000 mm by 750 mm workbench on legs to the garage. Emphasising the importance of display space to the overall concept, Ben noted that the very strong and wide living room shelf was ideal for big, heavy vases. He believed that it was “a brilliant idea”, and “made the house”.85 (See Illustrations 6.16 and 6.20.)

6.16 Theo Bischoff, Gascoigne House, preliminary sketch of display shelf in living room.86

One measure of whether a house is “background” rather than “foreground” might be the way in which it is perceived when construction is completed, and before the clients fill it with possessions. A background is neutral, incomplete—a pre-existing state that anticipates completion. It cannot exist in its own right, and requires the presence of its opposite condition—foreground—to become activated. The Gascoignes had asked for a house that was “neutral and light and informal”, but they also wanted a “strong, plain statement”. The reality was that they required a building of mass: solid walls for paintings, and heavy timber shelves and benches for sculptures. Views to the outside were important, where required, and so was the admission of natural light. But, as Rosalie had requested, these were to be framed views rather than expansive areas of glass. The predominant condition was to be solidity, with a clear demarcation between inside and outside. And so the house was primarily constructed of masonry—concrete floor slab and a majority of brick walls. In spite of the generous internal spaces, whose volume followed the raked roofline, the whole house was long and low. The concrete floor slab hugged the ground, and the roof was set at a very low pitch. The Gascoigne House was not intrusive, and did not dominate the site. But, as a three-dimensional object, it had substantial physical presence.

246

87 6.17 Theo Bischoff, Gascoigne House, cross section, June 1968. ACT Heritage Library.

The design of the house generated two unexpected responses. The first was that a neighbour lodged an objection to the corrugated iron roof, an objection that the Department of the Interior dismissed. The second was that when Roetzer finished on site, and the Gascoignes took possession of the house, Ben remembered being “alarmed by it, and rather appalled because it was empty”. With nothing to cover the internal surfaces, and no objects to focus the eye, the building materials themselves became dominant, and the plain surfaces and natural materials assumed an institutional appearance. As Ben explained: “And just being plain brick walls, and this courtyard out there like a prison yard … I thought ‘by golly, you know, this could just about be a branch of the prison!’”

But Bischoff had not done his clients a disservice, and Ben’s fears soon dissipated. Once Rosalie began to bring in her artworks and materials the house took on a different appearance: “Once we got it going and we got our furniture and hung a few things on the wall … it certainly became very integral to what we did”.88 What was important about that last statement was not so much that unadorned surfaces were simply more palatable when covered with possessions, but the implication that, once occupied, the house was no longer perceived as an independent and isolated object, but was an integral and inseparable component of the clients’ lives and activities.

The increased space for storing materials provided Rosalie with more opportunities for hoarding, a situation that she fully exploited. As Ben recalled:

She began collecting on an ever-increasing scale, and over what now seems a very short period she had accumulated an incredible variety of stuff (there is no other word)—telephone pole insulators, swan feathers from Lake George, sheets of corrugated iron (especially from the old brickworks), postcards and old photographs, discarded beer-cans, bleached bones, sea shells, battered enamel-ware, dried grasses and other vegetation, bric-a-brac from old country fair sideshows, and boxes, always more boxes.89

247 With Ben now travelling frequently for work, Rosalie felt more than ever that she needed “something to fill the vacuum”. This was when she decided to get “into art in a big way”—a process she instigated by making things “all over the house.”90 As her reputation in the art world spread, journalists and writers visited her at home to report on her progress. That the house was an important and integral part of what she did is apparent from reading these articles. In 1970, not long after the Gascoignes had moved in, one writer noted the Rosalie had displayed “an arrangement of two pieces of dried fern and a berry branch in an old motorcycle petrol tank in her elegant entrance hall”.91 Two years later, an article in Vogue Living commented on the various roles played by the house, which was also a “gallery and studio: extremities piled with rusting iron shapes, logs, twigs, bundles of seed heads, cartons of broken glass; and shelves and mantels inside showplaces for the sculpture and other art works these things ultimately become”.92

6.18 Rosalie Gascoigne, works in progress, Gascoigne House, 1973. Rosalie Gascoigne Archives.

By the time Matt Abraham visited some years later, the artist’s collection had spread in all directions. He observed how “Rosalie Gascoigne has a house full of junk. Old newspapers, pieces of wood, bunches of twigs and grass stalks, faded tobacco tins, empty shotgun shell, feathers and rusty corrugated iron are among the discards of man and nature which litter every room of her Canberra home.” He was shocked to find that one artwork in particular, made from squares of newspaper and titled Paper Squares, almost reached the ceiling. Even the outside walls of the house were not exempt: there the artist had placed other works to weather over time.93 Jacqueline Rees, writing for The Canberra Times, also noted that Rosalie’s work was not limited to the interior of the house. She observed “26 yards or so of threaded sheep bones” in the Pearce garden.94 Rosalie only constructed two of these monumental bone sculptures, which formed a transition between ikebana and her later installation works. Perhaps that was just as well, because they became the subject of some consternation from a neighbour.95

248

6.19 Rosalie Gascoigne, Joie De Mourire, bone installation, Pearce garden, c 1972. Ben Gascoigne is in the background. Rosalie Gascoigne Archives.

The house became a central character in Rosalie’s own narrative. When Martin left Canberra to take up his first overseas posting in late 1971, she began writing to him regularly, explaining in minute detail what she was thinking and doing. After finding “300 wooden blocks” at Captains Flat in June 1972, she proceeded to place them in rows “on top of the wrought iron table” in the dining room. In May of the following year she discovered an abandoned apiary near Gundaroo, and brought back twenty-two weathered, wooden bee boxes of “faded pink, green, brown and white paint”. That night she piled them up in the “gallery between [the] sitting room and courtyard and was amazed at how good they looked”. Her only concern was to prevent Ben from “making an unguarded left turn when he returned home” and discovering her latest acquisitions. She later stacked the crates on the terrace outside the dining room, but believed they didn’t look so good there, and required the “confinement of a gallery and not so much sky”. In February 1976, after finding an entire circus sideshow discarded at the Bungendore dump, she wrote enthusiastically to Toss: “I have the house to myself for a fortnight, and am busy sorting out my circus … The place looks like sideshow alley at the Queenbeyan show.”96

249

6.20 Rosalie Gascoigne, Country Air, 1977, above bench in living room. Rosalie Gascoigne Archives.

In early 1978 Rosalie described how: “The pale beer cans [Early Morning] are sitting on a corner of mantelpiece above Jim’s flower bucket [Bucket of Flowers] and beside the lino on wood panels [River Banks] and it looks very good to me.” In some of these descriptions the house appeared to take on the character of an active, although not always cooperative, participant—one that was sometimes capable of thwarting her ambitions. When she found herself watching “a large arrangement [of dismantled drink boxes] over the fire place”, Rosalie claimed to “have also held the window corner with a corner piece of the same height but can’t get the reading I want as the window is recessed after the chimney breast”. On other occasions the house was simply too small to cope with the scale and vibrancy of the works. This was the case with Parrot Country, another work constructed from dismantled drink boxes. Consisting of three large panels of horizontal red, green, yellow and white painted boards, (which she later modified to become four panels), Parrot Country took up “the whole width of the white alcove” in the living room. Although Rosalie found it “very dashing—all sideways flight”—she admitted to feeling “quite ill sitting in the room with it”, and concluded that it would be more appropriate in a gallery space. She quickly removed the cause of her nausea— which, incidentally, eventually found a more fitting home in the cavernous spaces of the Jasmax Architects-designed Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, in Wellington—and replaced it with a smaller work constructed entirely of white boxes, which she found to be “quite beautiful and restful”.97

250

6.21 Rosalie Gascoigne, Parrot Country (right hand panel of four), 1983. Rosalie Gascoigne Archives. 6.22 Theo Bischoff, Gascoigne House, entrance porch. Photo by the author, 2009.

In another letter Rosalie explained how she was observing an installation of thistle stalks that she had found in the new suburb of Erindale: “I have it cleaned and piled in the passage between the courtyard and the sofa.” In a reference to the quality of natural light that would have pleased her architect, she described how the installation reflected the light, producing “a beautiful metallic grey”.98

It was in this respect—as a setting in which Rosalie could collect objects, assemble them and observe them—that the Gascoigne House was most successful. Rosalie believed that Bischoff had been “very sympathetic” to what she did.99 In fact the house was so closely tailored to her requirements that the floor plan can be considered as a virtual diagram of her activities. Rosalie’s domain was a spine, measuring up to 2.3 metres wide, that extended from the specially-designed, wide front door—through which she carried her materials—around an “L”-shaped hall and gallery space where she displayed her work, and into the dining room, her main work area.

Bischoff covered the floor of this zone with six-inch by six-inch semi-glazed tiles, and clad the solid wall areas with continuous vertical boards of tongue-and-groove, “V”-jointed Alpine Ash. The combination of these materials separated this area, visually and aurally, from the remainder of the house, and enhanced its location as a central domain. The remainder of the house and garden were extensions of this central zone. From her work table Rosalie could observe the courtyard, where she stored her materials and works in progress. Through the courtyard she could access a series of semi-enclosed working

251 spaces on the southern side of the house (the rear porch and west terrace). From the dining room she could look, to the north, across the garden and the Woden Valley, and she could walk out onto the more open north terrace. In this reading of the Gascoigne House the kitchen, laundry, living room and separate bedroom and bathroom wing were ancillary to this central zone of activity.

6.23 Gascoigne House. Plan showing Rosalie’s principal work area and ancillary spaces. Sketch by the author, 2009.

252

6.24 Rosalie Gascoigne in her domain, 1975. Looking from gallery through to dining room, showing tiled floor and vertical boarding. Flower Towers is in foreground and Last Stand behind. Photo by Matt Kelso, Rosalie Gascoigne archives.

In addition to providing spaces in which Rosalie could view her assemblages, the Gascoigne House allowed visitors to view the completed works in carefully constructed

253 settings, a development that contributed significantly to her rapid ascension within the art world. The house, with her work in progress all around, was where she met fellow artists such as Michael Taylor. It was Taylor, a painter who lived at Bredbo and taught at the Canberra School of Art, who, perhaps more than anyone else, convinced Rosalie that she could become a successful artist. As Martin recalled, Rosalie’s work provided the background to their conversations. “Her thinking revolved around what she was making and the objects—made and half made—were in the room while they talked, for her house was her studio.” Taylor was instrumental in setting up Rosalie’s first exhibitions: a solo exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries in Canberra in 1974, and a group show titled “Artists’ Choice” at Gallery A in Sydney the following year.100

When Rosalie’s work was removed from the house and exhibited in galleries, some writers stressed the importance of its domestic origins. Hannah Fink believed that Gallery A, a stripped-back sandstone terrace house at 2 Gipps Street, Paddington, was an appropriate setting for that reason:

As it turned out, the formalist context of Gallery A Sydney showed Rosalie’s originality in greater relief. There was still a sense in the gallery of the house it had once been, a domestic scale that suited works made in a living room and on a dining room table.101

As an environment for Rosalie to produce art, the Gascoigne House was an unqualified success. A number of commentators observed how it was during the years that she lived and worked there that her art and career flourished, and she became prominent in the art world. Many believed that the house was a fundamental reason for her success. In Rosalie’s obituary, Daniel Thomas highlighted two factors that contributed to her success—her husband and her Pearce house and studio: “Rosalie Gascoigne is survived by her husband, Ben … who long ago brought her down from Stromlo, built her a house for making art in and then a studio.”102

In 1982 Rosalie’s work was chosen to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale. After that she exhibited extensively in Australia, England, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Korea, Japan, Taiwan and New Zealand. Her art has been purchased by major galleries in Australia and New Zealand, and by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. At the time this chapter was being written—approximately ten years after her death—the Ian Potter Centre of the National Gallery of Victoria was showing a major retrospective of her work.103

254 But while the Gascoigne House influenced Rosalie’s art, what of the reverse effect—that of her art upon the house? What is important here is not so much that the house itself was changed through this—although, as discussed previously, the house did assume different qualities when it became inhabited—but that Rosalie allowed the art to affect her experiences of working within its spaces. A large part of her early years in Australia had been spent exploring the wide, open spaces of Mount Stromlo and the Monaro region. While her working environment at home had improved since she left the mountain, the work itself, which was essentially always about landscape, was still informed by the natural qualities of those vast spaces. As Rosalie explained:

After seventeen years living on Stromlo and later in suburban Deakin, I felt defenceless. On Stromlo, there was a feeling of emptiness … I needed art as an extension of what I honestly did like, air, hills, freedom, grass mowing; I am so moved by natural things. Living on Stromlo was lonely, but it provided good quality experience. Standing on the mountain, looking to the Brindabellas is so beautiful. I always wanted to possess it, to set it in time.104

And so Rosalie, living and working in the confines of suburban Pearce, attempted to experience a sense of what it was like to be in an open landscape through the process of making her art installations. Her landscape assemblages were a form of surrogate spatiality—constructed objects whose large scale and weathered colours provided a sense of openness within the walls that Bischoff had built around her. Rosalie’s art became a physical affirmation of her desire to “possess space”. Attempting to express this in words, the fiercely independent Rosalie appeared, for once, to have borrowed a metaphor from her astronomer husband: “Nature selects, makes, abandons, is big. We need to be reminded of this because suburbia is boxed in; we need confirmation of an expanding universe”.105

255

1 Ben Gascoigne, interview by the author, 26 November 2007. 2 Vici MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne (Paddington: Regaro, 1998), 13; Tom Frame and Don Faulkner, Stromlo, An Australian Observatory (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2003), 81. 3 “Some Recent Advances in the Optics of Large Telescopes”, ANU News 1 (October 1964): 12; Q. Jl R. Ast. Soc. (1968): 9, 98-115); Stephen Foster and Margaret Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96 (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1996), 98-99. 4 Ragbir Bhathal, Australian Astronomers, Achievements at the Frontiers of Astronomy (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1996), 48. 5 ATCA radio image by Shaun Amy; X-ray:NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/HST. www.narrabri.atnf.csiro.au/.../ e0102- 723.jpg. 6 J. R. Conner, A Guide to Canberra Buildings (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1970). No work by Bischoff appears on the Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ Register of Significant Twentieth Century Architecture, or on the Institute’s Map of Significant Canberra Architecture. Bischoff’s work is not included in Andrew Metcalf’s Canberra Architecture (Sydney: Watermark Press, 2003), and he is only mentioned on Martin Miles’s Canberra House: Mid-Century Modernist Architecture website as being project Architect for the Frankel House in Campbell and a partner in the firm Scollay, Bischoff and Pegrum. Martin Miles, Canberra House: Mid-Century Modernist Architecture, Martin Miles and Canberra House, http://www.canberrahouse.com 7 Toss and Lyn Gascoigne live in a house at 56 Vasey Crescent, Campbell designed by Bischoff in 1964 for medical practitioner Dr. Aubrey Tow. This house is in original condition. Other Bischoff houses include the Clarke House at 212 Dryndra Street, O’Connor (1958), the Bischoff House at 47 Carstenz Street, Griffith (1959), the Watson House at 13 Waller Crescent, Campbell (1961), the Cleland House at 33 Godfrey Street, Campbell (1961), the Benson House at 61 Quiros Street, Red Hill (1962), the Homer House at 25 Chermside Street, Deakin (1963), the Dr. Andrea House at 32 Holmes Crescent, Campbell (1965), the Kellow House at 11 Rason Place, Curtin (1965), the Dr. Horniblow House at 15 Theodore Street, Curtin (1965), the Marshall House at 86 Morgan Crescent, Curtin (1966) and the Pike House at 2 Garsia Street, Campbell (1966). Some of these—including the Andrea, Marshall and Pike Houses—have had sympathetic additions or alterations. 8 Raine and Horne advertisement, agent Mary Debus, “Domain” section, Canberra Times (18 August 2007). 9 Solar Physics Committee of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, “Memorandum upon the Proposed Solar Observatory in Australia” (Adelaide, 1909), 6. 10 English planner and theorist Charles Reade (writing as “Ebenezer Howard”) endorsed the importance of the sun in relation to urban planning by identifying sunlight as an essential element of his “Garden City” concept. Reade’s Garden City ideal, with its explicit debt to scientific thought, was an important influence on later planners and architects of the Federal Capital such as John Sulman and John Murdoch. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow (London: Faber, 1946), originally published under title Tomorrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform, 1898. In 1908 English-trained architect Robert Haddon’s Australian Architecture, a Technical Manual for all those engaged in Architectural and Building Work, attempted to address the Australian climate and sun. Robert Haddon, Australian Architecture, a Technical Manual for all those engaged in Architectural and Building Work (Melbourne: E. W. Cole, 1908). 11 Duffield wrote that an Australian solar observatory could undertake “the measurement of solar radiation from different parts of the [sun’s] disc, and from sun-spots; atmospheric absorption; sunspot spectra; solar radiation, and the determination of a standard wavelength”. Duffield to Professor Bragg, 1907, cited by Frame and Faulkner, Stromlo, An Australian Observatory, 16. 12 By 1909 the two issues were linked. A minute signed by King O’Malley, the Minister for Home Affairs, on 5 April 1909 included the following: “I think that it is desirable, within certain limits, for the Commonwealth to take its place in the scientific world and to assist in the education of the people, also owing to the geographical position of Australia a National Astronomical Observatory is necessary. The foregoing will be provided for by the establishment of a Commonwealth Observatory at the Federal Capital when the time arrives.” The Deakin Government delayed development of the Observatory until the location of the Capital had been fixed. Extract from minute signed by King O’Malley, Minister for Home Affairs, 5 April 1909, “Commonwealth Observatory at Canberra”. Duffield, Walter Geoffrey (1879 – 1929), Manuscript Collection, Adolph Basser Library, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, MS 095, Series 4/15. 13 Surveyor Charles Scrivener met the Government Astronomers of New South Wales and Victoria, plus the Commonwealth Meteorologist, in the Federal Capital Territory on 1 March 1910. They inspected potential observatory

256 sites at Black Mountain, Mount Mugga, Mount Ainslie, the Cotter-Murrumbidgee River Junction and Mount Stromlo. Of these, some were considered too small, while there were concerns that Black Mountain would be affected by the glare from city lights. Frame and Faulkner, Stromlo, An Australian Observatory, 23-25. 14 Ibid., 29-30. According to Henry Rolland, this was facilitated by “putting half a plug of gelignite in the solid granite of the mountain”. Henry Rolland, interview by Donald Brech, 27 November 1967. Commonwealth Archives Office, National Archives of Australia, NAA: A750, 1968/294, 30. 15 Frame and Faulkner, Stromlo, An Australian Observatory, 31. 16 Owen was appointed Director General in 1904. A retired colonel from the Royal Australian Engineers, he was trained in mechanical engineering and had also studied architecture. He became the Government’s technical advisor in regard to the Federal Capital, particularly in regard to the provision of power, water and sewerage. Owen moved to Canberra in 1925. See also Henry Rolland, interview by Donald Brech, 29, 32, and Frame and Faulkner, Stromlo, An Australian Observatory, 32. 17 Commonwealth Department of Works and Railways, “Commonwealth Observatory Mount Stromlo Erection—Notes on Projected Commonwealth Observatory, Stromlo, Federal Territory”, 19 February 1923, National Archives of Australia, NAA Series A199, Item FC 1926/206. 18 For a description of the Federal Capital Commission houses see Ruth Daniell, “Imported Styles, Some origins of Federal Capital architecture”, in Peter Freeman, ed., The Early Canberra House, Living in Canberra 1911-1933 (Canberra: The Federal Capital Federal Press of Australia, 1996), 91-106. 19 NAA: A3560, 7513. 20 Martin Gascoigne, New Zealand Lives, the New Zealand Families of Rosalie Gascoigne and Ben Gascoigne (Canberra: private publication, 2005), 316. 21 Vici MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne (Paddington: Regaro, 1998), 13. 22 Rosalie Gascoigne, interview by Robin Hughes, Australian Biography Project, 12 November 1998. http://www.australianbiography.gov.au/subjects/gascoigne/interview; MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, 13-16. 23 Gascoigne recalled we “didn’t get any view … we couldn’t see through these pine trees”. Ben Gascoigne, interview by the author, 26 November 2007. 24 MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, 14-15. 25 National Archives of Australia, NAA: A3560, 4659. 26 Ben Gascoigne, interview by the author, 26 November 2007. 27 In 1957 Mount Stromlo was formally transferred from the Commonwealth Department of the Interior to the Australian National University and renamed the Department of Astronomy in the Research School of Physical Sciences. Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University 1946-96, 99; Frame and Faulkner, Stromlo, An Australian Observatory, 131. 28 Ben Gascoigne to Registrar, ANU, 12 July 1960. Papers of Ben Gascoigne (1938-2007), Manuscript Collection, National Library of Australia, MS Acc08/33, Box 4 (House). 29 Edmond Capon, Preface, in Deborah Edwards, Rosalie Gascoigne, Material as Landscape (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998), 5. 30 The Gascoignes bought their first car “from the people across the way” in “about 1948”. MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, 16. 31 Edmond Capon, Preface, in Deborah Edwards, Rosalie Gascoigne, Material as Landscape, 5. 32 Kelly Gellatly, “Rosalie Gascoigne: Making Poetry of the Commonplace”, in Kelly Gellatly, Rosalie Gascoigne (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2008), 20. 33 MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, 15-16. 34 Rosalie Gascoigne, interview by Robin Hughes, 12 November 1998. 35 MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, 17. 36 Ibid., 18. 37 Rosalie Gascoigne, interview by Robin Hughes, 12 November 1998. 38 Rosalie Gascoigne, in Edwards, Rosalie Gascoigne, Material as Landscape, 8. 39 Deborah Edwards, Ibid., 8. 40 Ian North, “Signs of Light”, in Australia Venice Biennale 1982, works by Peter Booth and Rosalie Gascoigne (Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, 1982), 48-49. 41 Rosalie Gascoigne, interview by Robin Hughes, 12 November 1998.

257 42 Rosalie Gascoigne, “Too Many Pine Trees”, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1962. MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, 15. 43 The Sogetsu School was created in 1926 by Sofu Teshigahara. Kasumi Teshigahara, The Sogetsu Text on Moribana (Tokyo, 1969). 44 MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, 22. 45 Ibid., 20. 46 “You can't have what you want unless you build it yourself.” Rosalie Gascoigne, interview by Robin Hughes. 47 Hester Gascoigne, in discussion with the author, 26 July 2009, Canberra. 48 Canberra Times (June 4, 1968): 12. 49 Ben Gascoigne, interview by the author, 26 November 2007. 50 Ann Whitelaw, “Courtyard and Fountain Provides Bright Focal Point”, Canberra Times (June 4, 1968): 12. Clipping held in Papers of Ben Gascoigne, 1938-2007, Box 4, House. 51 Theo Bischoff, “House for Professor and Mrs. D. H. Pike”, undated notes held by Phoebe Bischoff. 52 Ben Gascoigne, interview by the author, 26 November 2007. 53 Janet Hawley, “A late developer”, Sydney Morning Herald “Good Weekend” (15 November 1997): 44. 54 Martin Gascoigne, New Zealand Lives, the New Zealand Families of Rosalie Gascoigne and Ben Gascoigne, 8. 55 Rosalie Gascoigne, in MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, 22. 56 Ben Gascoigne, interview by the author, 26 November 2007. 57 Ben Gascoigne to Bischoff, 2 July 1967. Bischoff, Theo, Australian Capital Territory Heritage Library, HMSS 0159, Box 4, Project Files, “Prof. Gascoigne House, Anstey St., Pearce, 1968-1970”. Decimal currency was introduced to Australia on 14 February 1966. 58 Ibid. 59 Although the sketch is referred to in Ben Gascoigne’s letter, there is no copy of it in the Bischoff or Gascoigne archives. 60 Geoffrey Serle, Robin Boyd, a Life (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 104. 61 Conrad Hamann, “Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971” (Ph.D. diss., Visual Arts Department, Monash University, 1978), 45-46. 62 Serle, Robin Boyd, a Life, footnote, 104. 63 Ibid., 63, 104. 64 Phoebe Bischoff, in discussion with the author, 13 January 2009. 65 Marshall, a microbiologist, and his wife Kathleen, worked under Fenner in the John Curtin School. 66 Architecture and Arts 1, no. 1 (July 1952). 67 Bischoff, Theo, “Prof. Gascoigne House, Anstey St., Pearce, 1968-1970”, Drawing No. B. 105/3. 68 Canberra Homes, undated copy held by Phoebe Bischoff. Author not named. 69 Ibid. 70 Andrew Pike, in discussion with the author, 8 September 2007, Canberra. 71 Canberra Homes, undated copy held by Phoebe Bischoff. 72 Ann Whitelaw, “House and a Half at Campbell”, Canberra Times (25 October 1963). 73 Ann Whitelaw, “20th Century Georgian, Timeless quality of simple lines”, Canberra Times (16 April 1968). The house is currently owned by Toss and Lyn Gascoigne. 74 Papers of Ben Gascoigne, 1938-2007, Box 4, House. 75 The Gascoigne House was completed in 1969. Two years later Bischoff’s practice with Scollay and Pegrum was dissolved and he joined the Commonwealth Department of Works. 76 Theo Bischoff, handwritten note on file. Undated, but most likely between 2 July and 20 July 1967. Bischoff, Theo, “Prof. Gascoigne House, Anstey St., Pearce, 1968-1970”. 77 Ben Gascoigne, interview by the author, 26 November 2007. 78 Theo Bischoff, handwritten note on file. Bischoff, Theo, “Prof. Gascoigne House, Anstey St., Pearce, 1968-1970”. 79 Ben Gascoigne, interview by the author, 26 November 2007. 80 Papers of Ben Gascoigne, 1938-2007, Box 4, House. 81 Bischoff, Theo, “Prof. Gascoigne House, Anstey St., Pearce, 1968-1970”. 82 Ibid., drawing no. B. 105/1. 83 Ben Gascoigne, “The Artist-in-Residence", in From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, (Canberra: The Australian National University, Drill Hall Gallery, 2000), 12; Ben Gascoigne, interview by the author, 26 November 2007.

258 84 Marie Hagerty, in discussion with Mary Eagle, in From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, 20. 85 Ben Gascoigne, interview by the author, 26 November 2007. 86 Bischoff, Theo, “Prof. Gascoigne House, Anstey St., Pearce, 1968-1970”. 87 Bischoff, Theo, “Prof. Gascoigne House, Anstey St., Pearce, 1968-1970”, drawing no. B. 105/1. 88 Ben Gascoigne, interview by the author, 26 November 2007. 89 Ben Gascoigne, “The Artist-in-Residence”, 10. 90 MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, 25. 91 Author and publication unknown. From a cutting of an article titled “Ikebana Fad Spreading in Australia” in Rosalie Gascoigne’s scrapbook. Cited by MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, 19. 92 Vogue Living (May 1972). 93 Matt Abraham, The Advertiser, Adelaide (28 February 1980). 94 Jacqueline Rees, Canberra Times (20 June 1974). 95 MacDonald, Rosalie Gascoigne, 22. 96 Rosalie Gascoigne to Toss Gascoigne, 8 March 1976. Rosalie Gascoigne Archive. 97 The letters were written between 1971 and 1980. Extracts from some of these were selected and edited by Mary Eagle, From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, 29-61. For quoted extracts, see 35, 37, 41, 52, 55, 60 and 61. 98 Ibid. 99 Rosalie Gascoigne, interview by Robin Hughes, 12 November 1998. 100 Martin Gascoigne, “Rosalie’s Artists”, in Gellatly, Rosalie Gascoigne, 35. Taylor helped to convince Anna Simons, the Director of Macquarie Galleries, to show Rosalie’s first solo exhibition. 101 Hannah Fink, “The Life of Things: Rosalie Gascoigne at Gallery A Sydney”, in Gallery a Sydney 1964-1983 (Campbelltown: Campbelltown Arts Centre and Newcastle Region Art Gallery, 2009), 150. 102 Daniel Thomas, The Australian (29 October 1999). The studio, which was completed in 1983, was designed by architect Trevor Gibson. 103 See Gellatly, Rosalie Gascoigne. 104 Rosalie Gascoigne, “In her Own Words”, James Mollison and Steven Heath, in Edwards, Rosalie Gascoigne, Material as Landscape, 7. 105 Ibid., 8.

259 Chapter Seven

THE ORIGINS OF FORM: GROUNDS, BISCHOFF AND THE FRANKEL HOUSE

The Frankel House, at 4 Cobby Street, Campbell, was designed by Grounds in 1969 and realised by the same team that produced the Gascoigne House: Bischoff—who worked closely with the Frankels to develop the design and prepare contract documents from late 1969 to early 1970—and Roetzer, who constructed the house during 1971 and 1972.

A single-storeyed house, built in the shape of a shallow arc with the concave side facing Cobby Street, it was constructed of brick veneer walls with a low-pitched, ribbed metal roof and metal fascia. The mathematical profile of the arc was determined by Bischoff, while the internal planning arrangement owed much to the input of John Philip and Otto and Margaret Frankel. The Frankel House was the third house commissioned by the Frankels, and the second in Canberra. The first, discussed in Chapter Two, was in Christchurch, New Zealand, while the second (now demolished), was adjacent to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation at 40 Nicholson Crescent, Acton.

7.1 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, view from Cobby Street. Photo by the author, 2009.

When the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC) decided to widen Nicholson Crescent to form part of Barry Drive—a major new road intended to connect the expanding suburbs of Belconnen to the city centre—one major obstacle stood in

260 their way: the Frankel’s first Canberra House, designed by Oscar Bayne.1 This was not so much a physical impediment as a political one: Otto—already “Sir Otto”—and Margaret had significant clout. Not wanting to become embroiled in a drawn-out battle, officers of the Commission offered the Frankels an alternative building site in Campbell in return for their undertaking to vacate Nicholson Crescent.2 But it was not just any site that they offered the Frankels: in Otto’s words, it was “quite unlike anything a normal citizen could aspire to”:

It is three-quarters of an acre on a very favoured and secluded site in a prestige area in Campbell and we are able to select our particular site … It is rather dramatic with a view of mountains and lake and bushland.3

The house that was built on this secluded site was the result of an association between two individuals who had worked together on many previous occasions, and who had developed a mutual respect and understanding. Grounds had already designed a number of projects for scientists, and believed that he understood their motivations and aspirations. Frankel, his client, had been involved in many previous alliances with architects. He was also highly knowledgeable about art, due mainly due to Margaret’s influence.

In mid-1968, when Frankel asked Grounds to design his house, both men had received knighthoods and were in the twilight of their careers. Although Frankel was involved in many professional activities—both within Australia and overseas—he had been retired from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation for two years.4 Grounds was fully committed to the Victorian Arts Centre and National Gallery projects, making the Frankel House an unusual commission at that time.5

Because of this, Frankel wasn’t sure if Grounds would accept the commission. So he began his request in such a way that the architect could hardly have refused: “There is nothing we would wish better than for a house designed by you”, he wrote. Frankel then explained how he and Margaret should have commissioned Grounds for their existing house in Nicholson Crescent. He disclosed that Oscar Bayne—the architect who had designed it—had apparently confided to him that he regretted not recommending Grounds back in 1953, and felt that his own design was “too unadventurous”. (Frankel didn’t know Grounds in 1953—that was before the Academy building). Believing that praise would get him everywhere, Frankel continued with:

But genius apart which we take for granted, with no-one else, would we be so sure of intrinsic quality of design and thoughtfulness of detail. Besides, you

261 know us so well that we would scarcely have to use more than shorthand in conveying our own ideas; and I believe that both parties would enjoy the collaboration as of course we did on earlier occasions.6

Buoyed by Grounds’s initial response—“I’d be a bastard to say no”7—but aware of his other commitments, Frankel offered a compromise in order to secure Grounds’s design input. Cognisant that the architect’s associates would be familiar with his methodology, he was prepared to permit others to carry out the details, so long as Grounds himself made the major contribution. But just in case there was any doubt as to what level of commitment they expected from him, Frankel added that “the burden on you would be there and this has to be reckoned with by both parties”. And there was yet another condition: to prevent the Frankels from having to move house twice, the design drawings were required urgently.8

On one level, it is a wonder that Grounds accepted the invitation. After all, he was based in Melbourne and was fully committed to a major architectural project. Given that Frankel was aware of this, it is surprising that he bothered to ask Grounds. There was no shortage of available architects in Canberra at the time: officers of the Commission—which, by the late 1960s, had seized control of the design and construction industry in Canberra—had advised Frankel that they could “bring an element of pressure to bear on Canberra architects, most of whom they employ in one way or another”, to obtain a house design for him at short notice.9

But none of this takes into account one overriding factor: the close professional and personal relationship that had developed between Frankel and Grounds. It was a friendship that had been nurtured through the design and construction of the Australian Academy of Science building in the late 1950s, and had developed through the Phytotron project. Although they came from different countries and professions, they had much in common—not the least of which was a shared interest in conservation of the natural environment. Frankel’s area of expertise was the conservation of genetic plant resources, which were becoming increasingly depleted through development. He addressed a United Nations committee on genetic conservation, and was instrumental in founding an international “genetic bank” of plant gene pools, through which plant breeders contributed to the collection, conservation and exchange of rare specimens.10 In later years the approach to genetic resources that Frankel had been so instrumental in establishing became known as “biodiversity”.

Grounds believed that he inherited his interest in nature conservation through his association with Frankel and his colleagues. He claimed to have “got very close to nature

262 through the scientists of the Academy of Science”, and in the last fifteen years of his life spent much of his spare time returning the flora of Penders, on the New South Wales South Coast, to its natural state.11

Personal qualities shared by Frankel and his architect included supreme confidence in their own judgment and intuition, and an uncompromising determination to pursue their goals. Both saw themselves as pragmatists, and both had agrarian connections. Frankel liked to portray himself as a practical person who had become an agriculturalist due to his mother’s background. A farming family from Galicia—“the Austrian part of Poland”— he claimed they had given him his “peasant instincts”.12 Grounds, who also prided himself on his practicality, could claim an even stronger connection to the land, having spent two years working as an orchardist and dairy farmer in country Victoria.13

So significant was the alliance established between the two that not only did Grounds accept the commission—he promised to do it for free.14 But there were other reasons why he agreed. In Canberra he had an excellent accomplice in Bischoff, who had worked on a number of previous Grounds, Romberg and Boyd projects. There was also the question of convenience: Bischoff’s office—which he shared with John Scollay and Anthony Pegrum—was located in the townhouses that Grounds had designed on the corner of Tasmania Circle and Arthur Circle, Forrest, and where he retained an apartment as a Canberra pied-à-terre.15

The Origins of Form

[Otto] had a very attractive French nursemaid, who took him for a walk in the park every afternoon. On one occasion, a young man turned up, gave Otto a pink sugar mouse to suck quietly on the park bench, and then whisked the maid behind the bushes. But Otto finished the mouse too soon, and when he found out what was going on, he decided that he too must become a geneticist. Lloyd Evans, speech on Frankel’s 80th birthday, 4 November 1980.16

So what was it about Grounds’s architecture that had Frankel so clearly hooked, so keen to have him design his house—in spite of all the obstacles that were placed in his way? The path towards that answer must be navigated through two separate but overlapping routes: an examination of the way in which Grounds regarded science, and the way in which Frankel, his client, thought about architecture. But a simplistic reversal of their professional stereotypes—with Grounds recast as scientist and Frankel as aesthete—will not lead to a satisfactory answer. Grounds, as demonstrated in Chapter 5, was highly

263 skeptical of the so-called “scientific age” and all the “pseudo-scientific” jargon that went with it.17 Frankel, on the other hand, came from a background where acute visual awareness and observation skills were just as important as pragmatic, scientific accuracy.

To get to the core of the answer it is necessary to uncover Frankel’s roots as a geneticist, and to examine how his aspirations and ideologies in that field informed his perceptions of the physical environment. Previous connections have been established—somewhat precariously—between genetics and architecture. In The Monumental Impulse: Architecture’s Biological Roots, art historian George Hersey cited a number of examples. Hersey believed that Vitruvius, by individually naming and specifying the measurements and proportions of the elements required to construct a temple in De architectura, allowed other architects to “reproduce” his designs. Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, a nineteenth century French architectural theorist, had similar intentions with his variations on façade design.18

In 1930 a potential link between genetics and architecture—specifically between chromosomes and Borromini—was explored by Hans Sedlmayr, an Austrian art historian and contemporary of Frankel. Sedlmayr was influenced by a reawakening of interest in the experiments of Gregor Mendel, an Austrian Augustinian priest and scientist. Mendel had proven that characteristics of offspring followed particular laws that could be represented in mathematical form.19 While Mendel calculated that there were seven pairs of possible characteristics that might appear in the offspring, Sedlmayr concluded that the walls of Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane were composed from a “gene- pool” of five elements: convex segment, concave segment, triangular moulding, large column and small column. It was the appearance of these inherited traits as dominant elements—or, on the other hand, their non-appearance as recessive elements—that constructed the total body of the architectural organism, as interpreted by Hersey below.20

7.2 Hans Sedlmayr, the five “genetic elements” of Borromini’s architecture. Redrawn by George Hersey after Sedlmayr, Borromini.21 7.3 Roy Grounds, Site Plan, Frankel House. Drawing by Theo Bischoff, 8 December 1969.

264 While the striking similarity between Sedlmayr’s concave segment and the Frankel House plan shape was purely coincidental, and there is no evidence to suggest that Frankel knew Sedlmayr or his work, the close resemblance reflects Grounds’s search for a plan form that was reduced to a singular, elemental concept.

A similar search for the origins of form preoccupied many geneticists and biologists during the early twentieth century. Frankel, however, was initially motivated to study genetics by a more ambitious and idealistic aim: to solve world hunger. One day in 1922 he attended a lecture in Berlin by Erwin Baur on plant genetics, and a whole new world opened up. Frankel was particularly challenged by Baur’s Mendelian claim that he could “work with genes and the genetic combinations” of plants in the same way that a chemist worked with “atoms and molecules”. Frankel’s enthusiasm was infectious: even though he was only in his second year of study, Baur allowed him to enroll in a Ph.D. on the snapdragon (antirrhinium), which Frankel claimed included “the first review on linkage in plants”.22

7.4 Snapdragon mutants, International Genetics Conference, Berlin, 1927. Photo by Hermann Kukick.23

In his study of the German genetics community between 1900 and 1933 Jonathan Harwood identified two distinct styles of thought: the “pragmatists” and the “comprehensives”. The pragmatists—exemplified by Baur—believed that genetics was a highly specialised subject requiring specific knowledge and skills for solving practical problems. Comprehensives, on the other hand, favoured a broader approach that encompassed development, evolution, heredity and morphology. Alfred Kühn, a contemporary of Baur and Professor of Zoology at Göttingen, encouraged a scholarly and holistic approach to biology based on sound observation skills. Kühn wrote: “For the biologist who genuinely notices the diversity of organisms in nature, the question of their transformation is simply inescapable … The description and comparison of forms deserves a place alongside the experimental work.”24 Kühn possessed a highly developed visual and aesthetic sensibility, and was fascinated not only by animal morphology, but by architecture and art—particularly Italian Renaissance and

265 expressionism. He believed that an appreciation of art led to a broader scientific perspective, and claimed: “the most insightful scholars are those who have also been interested in art”.25

In the circles in which Kühn, Baur and Frankel moved, many scientists were accomplished in fine arts, music and writing. On a lecture tour of the United States in 1938, Fritz von Wettstein visited every major art museum he could find and, like Fenner, filled his diary with details of the collections that he observed. Karl Pirschle studied Egyptian art, Richard Goldschmidt and William Bateson collected fine art, Johannes Holtfreter, Carl Correns, Edmund Sinnott and Theodor Boveri were gifted artists, while Karl Henke wrote articles on contemporary art.26 But, as Harwood explained, their interest was not limited to after-hours. It was impossible, he argued, to separate aesthetic sensibility from scientific research: for these biologists, artistic intuition was intrinsic to their work.27 Underlying the connections between art, architecture and biology within that fraternity was the notion of ontological holism—or the search for truth in form. This was part of a broad enquiry into the nature and meaning of form: of making sense of the morphology by questioning the forces that generated it.28

Of all the twentieth century biologists who ventured into the realms of art and architecture it was Conrad Waddington who became the most well known. And it was Waddington who, through a long professional association and personal friendship with Frankel, was the one most likely to have influenced his way of thinking. Frankel first met Waddington in the late 1920s when he spent nine months at the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge, where Waddington was a lecturer in Zoology and Fellow of Christ’s College. From there their paths continued to cross both socially and professionally. The first connection was through their wives, and a particular Christchurch property. Waddington’s second wife—the architect Justin Blanco White—was the daughter of the feminist writer Amber Reeves, and grand-daughter of the New Zealand politician and social reformer William Pember Reeves, who had represented Christchurch in Parliament. The Reeves family had built Risingholme, which they later sold to the Andersons, Margaret Frankel’s family. (It was on part of the Risingholme estate that the first Frankel House, designed by Plischke, had been built.) In later years Waddington and Frankel continued a professional association as committee members of the International Biological Programme.

Waddington was well connected in cultural and artistic circles, prompting a scientific colleague to comment at one stage that he was more of an artist than a scientist.29 His friends included Walter Gropius, the artists John Piper, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Alexander Calder and László Moholy-Nagy, the physicist and novelist

266 Charles Snow, and the scientists Sir Julian Huxley and John Bernal.30 He published prolifically, and spent a large part of his career exploring the overlapping territories between biology and the visual aspects of art and architecture. In 1941 Waddington published The Scientific Attitude, in which architects and architecture were given special prominence. Waddington claimed: “Of all the artists, it is probably the architects who have realised most fully both the scientific character of the point of view to which they have come, and the existence of an essentially poetic element in scientific thought.” The reason for this was simple: architecture was “half scientific”, and in order to fully understand the potential of new materials such as reinforced concrete and glass, the architect needed to become like an “applied scientist’”.31 Along with the best architectural polemicists of the period—such as Le Corbusier—Waddington complemented his text with evocative, black-and white photographs of images of the modern world derived from new developments in art, design and technology.

7.5 “The Philips High Tension Generator for ‘atom-smashing’ in the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge”, (where Oliphant worked with Rutherford). 7.6 “A Nazi aeroplane hangar.”32

But Waddington believed that the most profound influence of science on architecture was not through the technical properties of materials as much as it was through a quantum shift in attitude: the adoption of a scientific spirit that questioned established assumptions about a building: “what is it that goes on here? what is my building required to do, and what will be the effects in practical use of possible alternatives in design?” He

267 believed that it was architecture, more than any other field, in which the enormous potential of this new attitude could be unleashed.33 Waddington gave many public lectures on these themes, including one titled “Biological Form and Pattern” at the Architectural Association at Bedford Square, London, in May 1958. A study of biological form in relation to geometry, this talk covered ontological aspects such as symmetry, repetition, rhythm and periodicity, and ended with a similar analysis of painting and sculpture.34 A later series of lectures, delivered at the University of Wales, led to the publication of his most comprehensive and best-known exploration of the nexus between science and art: Behind Appearance, published in 1969.35

Waddington and Frankel had much in common. Both were geneticists, and although Frankel had trained in the pragmatic school, the wider knowledge that he received through subsequent experience indicated a strong comprehensive tendency. Both had married women of New Zealand extraction who worked in the closely related professions of architecture and art. Both located themselves at the centre of an artistic and cultural community, and in doing so became exposed to contemporary attitudes in art, design, architecture and literature. But Frankel differed from Waddington in one key respect: in spite of his lifelong patronage of modern art and architecture, he was always perceived as a scientist—nobody accused Frankel of being “too much of an artist”. Unlike Waddington, whose publication record reflected his position as a leader of the comprehensive school, Frankel generally limited his research and publication activities to scientific fields.

But there was one notable exception. In 1981, following Grounds’s death, Frankel published a tribute to his friend in the Historical Records of Australian Science. In this acknowledgment of Grounds’s contribution to Australian domestic architecture, Frankel explained how the architect had been a true comprehensive. Grounds, he said, had aimed to “integrate the nature of the site, its possibilities and challenges, the chosen materials, the surroundings, and, foremost, the requirements, ideas, idiosyncrasies of the client, to result in a building in which simplicity and efficiency in construction and operation were combined with evident effort (and with evident success) to perpetuate the kind of good taste which some modern architects neglected”.36

Frankel noted that while Grounds responded to a range of criteria before he decided upon a design solution, he always limited himself to a set range of materials, components and spatial permutations: “Interior brick walls and floors, hardwood wall covering fixed vertically, muted colours, a minimum of paint. Space was broken up to the least possible extent, allowing the most adaptable use and providing pleasing aspects throughout the building”. Adding that “the planning of form and space” became a

268 dominant theme, Frankel elaborated on three Grounds houses. The architect’s own house in Hill Street, Toorak, of 1954, was “a square unit with a round, glassed-in courtyard-garden in the centre, and wide-open living space in between”, the 1951 Leyser House in Kew was triangular, while the 1952 Henty House in Frankston (the second house for that client), was circular and “attracted wide publicity”.37

7.7 Roy Grounds, Grounds House, photo by Michael Wee.38 7.8 Roy Grounds, Leyser House 7.9 Roy Grounds, Henty House.39

Frankel was aware that his creative architect was influenced by a wide range of sources, and that his designs were not generated purely through an analysis of site conditions or client requirements. For instance, even though Grounds had stated that the circular plan of the Academy of Science building was “strongly influenced by the shape of the site”, and that “the domed shape was a corollary of the rounded hills and mountains which enclose the valley of Canberra”, Frankel doubted that these were the main reasons for the architectural form. He knew that Grounds had visited Saarinen’s Kresge Auditorium in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was completed in 1955. Constructed of a concrete shell, sheathed in copper, that formed a one-eighth segment of a sphere, the structure was enclosed by glass curtain walls and attached to a circular brick platform at only three points. Grounds had been particularly impressed by Saarinen’s auditorium, and the similarities between it and the Academy building led Frankel to conclude that the architect’s references to the rounded hills of Canberra “may have been an afterthought”—a view that was shared by Conrad Hamann.40

269

7.10 Eero Saarinen. Kresge Auditorium, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 1955. Photo by Nanette Sexton.41

Frankel was unaware what form his Cobby Street house would assume. He was also oblivious as to whether it would respond to some aspect of the surroundings, or simply follow Grounds’s intuition. But he was familiar with the gene-pool of characteristics— including materials, colour and articulation of internal space—that his architect operated with. When Frankel wrote to Grounds asking him to design their house he claimed that he and Margaret were “thoroughly happy” with the “architectural language” that Grounds had developed, and how this language had “led to the elements we have come to like and admire”.42

While an attempt has been made to locate Frankel’s attitude to architecture within a wider context, what of Grounds’s perception of science? That he was skeptical about the so-called “age of science” has been established. But how did the way in which Grounds viewed science unfold in his relationship with Frankel, and how did it affect his approach to designing the Frankel House? There was one particular aspect of science that motivated Grounds, and it had nothing to do with the popular practices of borrowing scientific methodology or metaphors. What interested Grounds were the scientists themselves—in particular, the way in which they thought. Remembering the Academy building, Grounds recalled that:

What I was concerned about was in the main that the scientists were a group to me of very mysterious men. Sir Mark Oliphant was chairman of the building committee, a loveable man, a very dominating character, a very wilful man and a very loveable human being, and I became very attached to him and his colleagues.43

In the process of becoming acquainted with his clients, Grounds came to two important conclusions. The first was that scientists understood art better than artists understood science. The second was that scientists were “intensely creative” people. To Grounds there was something rational and disciplined—but at the same time opaque and

270 enigmatic—about the Academy clients. It was with this dialectic in mind that he proceeded to design their building:

I wanted a sense of enormously disciplined order, which is the way their minds work, and I wanted it to have a big emotional impact, because they are very emotional people. They’re intensely creative but they don’t know how to create in an abstract way. That was my task. And so it was a blending of forces: they were emotional, they were intellectual, they were intensely personal, and I decided that I must produce a building that combined all of those factors.

An impossible brief, it would seem, given the complexity and contradictions within the above statement. But then Grounds proceeded to conceal his design process under a shroud of mystery, describing it as a creative act that defied rational explanation: “There was no preconception, there was no anything, and so it grew out of me, out of them …” In case there was any doubt remaining about the elusive and indeterminable origins of the Academy, he finished with “There is no other reason why that building … it can’t be rationalised”.44 But perhaps, to some extent, it could. While Grounds was correct that there was no rational connection between the form of the Academy building and the clients’ needs—it represented neither discipline, emotion, intellect nor the personal— there was another possible explanation for its origin: Frankel, for one, clearly believed that the structure owed much to Saarinen’s Kresge Auditorium.

The Mathematics of [Re]Production

But I must not teach my grandmother what to do with the eggs! Otto Frankel, letter to Roy Grounds45

There is considerable irony in the fact that the last house designed and built by the environmental conservationists Grounds and Frankel—and indeed the final house of this dissertation—should have owed so much to a road. In fact the Frankel House was not just indebted to one road, but to three. Directly attributable were both origin and form: the house would not have been built if it were not for the arrival of Barry Drive; it was the shape of Cobby Street that generated its architecture, while it was the threat of yet another proposed road—Monash Drive—that influenced the landscape design.46

The way in which the house, and the constructed elements of its landscape, reproduced the physical structure of Cobby Street and sought to provide shelter from a potential environmental threat, can be compared to the biological term mimicry, where plants and animals assume physical resemblances to their surroundings as a means of self-

271 protection. This was further enhanced by the Frankels’ choice of materials and colours: “darkish brownish in harmony in bush”.47

The mimetic form was nothing new for Grounds. As Hamann explained, the architect had experimented with relating building form to some aspect of site shape from an early stage in his career. In his 1940 Quamby Flats in Toorak the separating walls were set out on radial lines generated from a point in the centre of Glover Court, so that each flat became a segment of a circle. A project for Sir Lawrence Hartnett responded to a conical site in a similar way. In a number of house designs for unorthodox-shaped sites—such as the Hall House of 1948 and the Neale House of 1949—Grounds had simply allowed the boundaries of the site to dictate the outline of the house.48 Of all the Grounds houses, however, the one that was closest in form to the Frankel House was an unbuilt proposal for Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt, designed in 1960. Although it was a much larger house, built over two levels, the Holt House was based on the same arc shape with cross walls set out in a radial pattern.49

After Grounds agreed to take on the Frankel House, Otto sent him a very detailed brief. Four typed pages of notes, divided into separate subheadings for each space, contained very specific requirements such as room relationships, fenestration, furniture and storage. Overall measurements were supplied for specific storage items, and sizes of storage spaces were suggested. Total requirements for bookshelves were “120 running feet”, while Margaret’s pottery kiln could only be relocated to Campbell once their current house in Nicholson Crescent had been demolished around it. It appears that, even at that early stage, Frankel had some inkling of what the final form of the house might be. In amongst his written specifications was the following comment:

If the house is L (or U) shaped, one should think of a future wall as protection should Monash drive eventuate.50

The Frankel house site, which Grounds studied in late 1969 when he began to prepare the sketch plans, was, like those for a number of his Melbourne houses, irregularly shaped. Located at the end of Cobby Street where it branched off Rosenthal Street and curved sharply around, the site was fan-shaped—like a segment of a circle with the apex removed. The shortest boundary, facing onto Cobby Street, was curved to follow the line of Cobby Street, whose centre-point it shared. The two side boundaries radiated out from the same centre-point, while the boundary to the rear of the block was formed by another curve—one that was generated from a different centre-point. The Cobby Street frontage of the block faced southwest.

272

7.11 Map Campbell, c 1962. Frankel House site shown in red at top right. Dotted line represents Monash Drive. 7.12 Roy Grounds, site plan, Frankel House. Drawing by Theo Bischoff, 8.12.69.

In October 1969 Grounds prepared a plan of the house at a scale of 1/8” to 1’-0”. He proposed a single-level, rectangular-shaped house, curved along its major axis to form an arc shape, with the concave side facing the street. The curvature of the arc was generated from the same centre-point as Cobby Street, with the radius of the internal (street-facing) wall being 210 feet.51 While the longitudinal external walls were both curved, both end walls, and all internal cross walls, were radial. Internal longitudinal walls were generally “faceted”—broken down into shorter, straight sections.

The internal layout was tripartite, divided into separate zones by radial cross walls. The north-west zone contained “service” functions—garage, utility (pottery workshop) and tool shed—the middle zone contained the living, dining and kitchen areas, while the south-east area contained three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a study.

The south-east zone was designed to accommodate a live-in nurse to care for the Frankels in their later years. The nurse was to use the guest bedroom for sleeping, and the study—which had its own external access via a raised porch and steps—as a sitting room. This idea of the live-in nurse—which never eventuated—also explains the reason for the two adjacent bathrooms described as “main” and “guest”.52

273

7.13 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, preliminary floor plan, October 1969. Service functions to the left, living zone in the 53 centre, bedrooms on the right. Cobby Street is to the bottom of the sheet.

With the combined lengths of the service zone and the living zone approximately equalling that of the bedroom wing, and the recessed entrance porch being placed between, the Frankel House was symmetrical when viewed from Cobby Street. In the symmetrical placement of the front door the Frankel House resembled Grounds’s own house in Toorak.

7.14 Roy Grounds, Grounds House, Toorak, front entry. Photo by Michael Wee.54

274

7.15 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, Canberra, front entry. Photo by the author, 2009.

An analysis of the location and plan form of the Frankel House indicates that geometry— limited to two-dimensional form on a site plan—was Grounds’s primary consideration. By reproducing the curve of Cobby Street in the plan form of the house, he relegated practical and environmental considerations—such as natural site contours and solar orientation—to secondary priority. The site is located on the lower slopes of Mount Ainslie, and falls from north to south. But Grounds’s arc cuts across the natural site contours, rather than following them. Based on a finished floor level of 100.00, the highest natural point of the site (RL 103.00) is at the northernmost corner of the utility room, while the lowest is the guest bedroom in the opposite corner, at RL 95.5. With no changes of level throughout the house to accommodate the fall, the difference between the highest and lowest levels—7’-6”—meant that a significant amount of cut and fill was required in order to pour the suspended concrete floor slab.55

The problems regarding the shape and orientation of the Frankel House were further compounded in terms of solar orientation. In this regard the house was reasonably positioned, but far from ideal. With its major façades facing north-east and south-west, and with the service zone in the north-west corner, the pottery workshop—which Grounds initially showed with no windows to the north—and tool shed commanded the sunniest parts of the house. If the house had followed an east-west principal axis, with the rooms facing north, it would have been a much more successful solution for solar

275 orientation, and for minimisation of cut and fill. This indicates the lengths that Grounds was prepared to go to in order to mimic the road—whose form was, after all, an arbitrary one created by National Capital Development Commission road engineers.

7.16 Frankel House, alternative site plan based on northern orientation and minimum site disturbance. Sketch by the author, 2009.

It is clear that the shape, location and orientation of the Frankel House were generated more by abstract, geometric planning than by consideration of environmental aspects. The simple, gestural flourish with which Grounds bent his wrist and allowed his pencil to

276 follow the curve of the street was a familiar creative process, and one that he had successfully employed on previous projects. Perhaps expediency was part of the reason: having completed the National Gallery project, Grounds was turning his attention to the Cultural Centre and Concert Hall, and would have had little time for other projects.

Frankel, a scientist with a considerable background in art and architecture who valued creativity as much as rationality, had no problem with Grounds’s methodology. After all, he was aware that geometrically-derived solutions were a modus operandi of his architect. But the internal layout of the house was an entirely different matter, and one in which both Otto and Margaret became heavily involved. Having praised Grounds before he accepted the commission—“you know us so well that we would scarcely have to use more than shorthand in conveying our own ideas”56—his clients had no hesitation in providing very detailed criticisms of the layout once they received it. The dining room was “in a dark corner” and had an undesirable entrance directly off the garage, which would “be behind somebody’s chair”. Margaret preferred a sideboard in the dining area with direct access to the kitchen, where they could “serve and carve”. The living area, they believed, was “rather diffuse”. With the dining room so close, it would not be quiet enough for people sitting around the fireplace, while the depth of the living room— between the fireplace and bedroom 1—was too large and “scarcely usable”, particularly given that they no longer held “stand-up” parties.57

The Frankels then proceeded to redesign the living areas of the house, a task for which they enlisted the advice of Otto’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation colleague John Philip—a Campbell resident, soon-to-be neighbour, and previous Grounds house client. Philip proposed a number of strategic changes, the combined effect of which solved all of the problems simultaneously. He turned the kitchen through ninety degrees, so that instead of protruding into the living space it was set back parallel to the Cobby Street façade and opened up extra space towards the centre of the house. This allowed the fireplace unit to be detached from the radial wall and left as a free-standing unit to separate the dining and living spaces—where it was more effective both thermally and spatially. Philip’s intervention resulted in the dining room becoming located on an external wall, facing north-east, where it was more clearly defined as a separate space to the living area. The living space was more practical in size, and the door from the garage opened onto a circulation space rather than into the centre of a room. There was a stronger connection between the kitchen and the dining space, whereby the connecting doorway was at the end of the dining area rather than in the middle—where, like the door from the garage, it would have clashed with a dining chair. A generous servery was accessible from a major circulation route, rather than from the dining room itself. All of these improvements, plus possible solutions to address the

277 lack of a dedicated laundry space, were set out in a letter from Frankel to Grounds.58 Attached were revised plans, and detailed instructions about the preferred location for a variety of items: firewood, art books, pottery, after-dinner drinks and coffee cups.59

In December 1969 Grounds incorporated the suggestions into a revised plan layout that represented a significant improvement on his rather crude and unresolved preliminary sketch. The new plan reflected a better understanding of the ways in which the spaces were to be used, and was more successful in terms of functional relationships, articulation of space and circulation flow. If it were not for the intervention of Grounds’s clients—both current and former—the Frankel House would have been both impractical and uncomfortable, and may well have proved a disaster.

7.17 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, revised plan, December 1969.60

This entire intervention occurred before Bischoff appeared on the scene.61 At 10.40 on the morning of 3 December, 1969, Grounds arrived at the Canberra Aerodrome on TAA Flight 406. Bischoff, as arranged, met him and they drove to meet the Frankels, to whom Grounds presented the revised sketch plans. It was a relatively short meeting—Margaret had been elected as a jury member for the C. S. Daley Architecture Award, which was being judged that afternoon62—but there was ample time for Bischoff to jot down a few salient points. The house was to be of brick veneer to allow for a “timber interior”, with “ply face in corridor”. The exterior was to be “darkish brownish in harmony in bush”, the budget was $50,000 overall, and the program was tight: tenders were to be called within three months and the construction period was to be six months.63 After returning to his office and writing “superseded” across the original plan, Bischoff studied Grounds’s new

278 drawings—three sheets containing revised plan, elevations, roof details and brick grille details—and began to consider how the Frankel House would be documented and built.

Bischoff held a number of subsequent meetings with the Frankels, during which they discussed details of the layout, materials and colours. The Frankels confirmed that internal walls were to be of plywood, the floor was to be carpet, and the ceilings—of ex three-inch by one-inch ash boards spaced apart—were to run in a radial direction. Otto told Bischoff that he liked the boarded ceilings, particularly in the living area, and thought that this surface should be continued into the kitchen.64 Details of the pottery room were finalised, the garden layout was discussed, and external materials were selected. In keeping with the desire for the house to reproduce the darker colours of the bush,65 the Frankels chose “Tan Manganese Nutex” bricks to be “raked with dark mortar”, a fascia of “Burnt Copper” and bronze anodised aluminium windows.66

In late February 1970 Bischoff sent prints of the working drawings—comprising ten A2- sized drawings—to Grounds in Melbourne for his approval. In the accompanying letter he stated that the project had “proven quite a difficult undertaking”.67 The reason for this was the curved form of the house: what appeared to be a simple gesture in plan form had implications for almost every component. To begin with, the mathematical setting out of the arc was complex, particularly given that it was carried out without the aid of computer technology. The thorough and methodical Bischoff—who, as a former employee of structural engineer and mathematician Mussen, was experienced in this area—filled at least fourteen foolscap sized pages with handwritten trigonometric calculations. He manipulated sines, chords and arcs until he found the right combination and shape.68

Just how thorough Bischoff was can be seen in his dimensioning of the Cobby Street wall. In accordance with the Grounds plan the radius was given as 210 feet. But Bischoff also dimensioned the wall in two further ways: as an arc (the “true” length of the wall taken around the line of the curve, which came to 87’-3 7/16”), and as a chord (a straight line drawn between the two end points, given as 86’-7 3/8”). The plans contained “notes on setting out”, in which Bischoff confirmed that all cross walls were to be radial, while walls along the length of the building were concentric with the street boundary. Also concentric was a 54’-8” long garden wall that was set back forty feet from the rear of the house to provide privacy from Monash Drive. To make sure that his instructions were fully understood, Bischoff included a condition that the builder was to mark out the position of the walls on the top of the concrete slab before proceeding further.69

279 It was as if nothing on the Frankel House site could escape the tyranny of the centre- point. A landscaping plan prepared by Bischoff showed how it was not only the house and garden wall that were set out in ever-expanding arcs from the same centre-point: beyond them a row of fruit trees, a concrete path and vegetable garden were all concentric.70

7.18 Roy Grounds, site plan, Frankel House. Drawing by Theo Bischoff, April 1970. Curved garden wall is shown to left of house.71

It was in the geometric setting out of the various materials and components that the documentation became difficult. Bischoff pondered over questions such as whether linear materials should be set out in a radial or tangential direction, and whether curved elements were to be literally curved or comprised of short, straight segments. Bischoff resolved that the external brick wall veneer was to be circular in form, as were the fascia and eaves. Internal curved walls were to be made up of straight chords joining concentric points, and clad with plywood on timber framing, while ceilings were to be ash boards, spaced apart over foil paper, running in a radial direction. The front faces of kitchen benches and cupboards were to be constructed in straight segments. Although the fascias were to be curved, and skylights set out radially, the Brownbuilt steel ribbed roofing and majority of the framework was to be on the orthogonal (parallel and at right angles).

280

7.19 Roy Grounds, floor plan, Frankel House. Drawing by Theo Bischoff, April 1970.72

For some of these issues Bischoff sought Grounds’s opinion. One question was the direction of the ash boards to the eaves soffits. After initially believing that they should be set out radially like the internal ceilings, Bischoff changed them to concentric in general, but radial on the wide eaves to the rear terrace and street entrance.73 Grounds agreed, except for the main entry, where he believed they should run concentrically like the rest of the eaves on that elevation. He also added that the house was going to be “really first class”. In a later note to file, Bischoff proudly recorded his mentor as saying the documents, which he had laboured over so carefully, were “a sheer delight”.74

75 7.20, 7.21 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, eaves and fascia details. Drawings by Theo Bischoff, April 1970.

281 But the difficulties associated with building an arc-shaped house did not end with the documentation—Bischoff had a fight on his hands to make sure that the subtlety of the curved line was not compromised through poor workmanship on those surfaces that were visible to the human eye. Bricklayers normally set their bricks out with the aid of a string-line. Nothing more than a piece of string secured at both ends and pulled tight, it is a traditional and very simple solution to the problem of how to define the outer face of the brick skin during construction. But it is not possible to set out a curved wall with a string-line, and the smooth profile of the finished wall—as shown in Illustration 7.22—is testament to the skill and patience of Roetzer’s bricklaying team.

Bischoff’s other concern was reproducing the curve of the arc on the fascia, which formed the edge of the roof. Constructed of Brownbuilt 12-inch Mark III profile .025-inch thick galvanised steel roofing trays laid horizontally (with the ribs facing inwards), it was a similar detail to commercial and industrial buildings. Bischoff was not satisfied with the way that the fascias had been fitted, and met Roetzer and the roofing contractor on site, on 27 April 1971, to relay his concerns. The list of defects he identified included “joints, dips at corners, making good, touch up … pop rivet front capping, birdproofing end cappings, slope rear cappings, fixing down of lap fronts”.76 By late May, with the situation still not rectified, he issued a hand-written reminder:

NOTE. AS FIRST ADVISED, BUILDING APPEARANCE DEPENDS ON A WELL EXECUTED FASCIA.77

Two days later Bischoff fired off a letter to the roofing contractor: “As has been stated to you a number of times, the fascia has been and remains critical to the appearance of the house and to the building progress.” But sadly, in spite of his best efforts to fix the problem, Bischoff was denied a satisfactory outcome: a later file note read: “Fascia: not satisfactorily completed but accepted deduction to be made”.78

282

7.22 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, west elevation showing brick grilles and curved fascia. Photo by the author, 2009.

An Artistic Gesture

We prefer our own company to that of others. Otto Frankel79

The above comment was Frankel’s favourite response to a question that he was often asked: why did his house have no windows facing the street? But he was joking—Otto and Margaret were in fact frequent and hospitable entertainers who welcomed many people into their house. The question remains, however: why did the house appear so private, so withdrawn and detached from the street? And why did the Frankel House provoke so many comments, such as that made by Peter Frith, son of the current owner, who, rather unflatteringly, compared the family house to a public toilet block?80

The provision of private space was a common thread that linked all three Frankel houses. The form of the Plischke-designed Christchurch house—an “L”-shape, built around a private, walled garden—was generated by the desire to provide maximum privacy from both road and neighbours. Plischke envisaged this house, his first in New Zealand, to be a prototype for a new model of urban living. In Design and Living he described the Frankel House: “Far from being a show-piece on the street front the garden is domestic

283 and private. It becomes even more private if the neighbouring houses have similar shaped plans, enabling the bedroom wings of the houses to create enclosed living courtyards”. But, as others have suggested since, this house type was possibly too private, and too urbane, for its time and context in late 1930s New Zealand.81

7.23 Ernst Plischke, perspective sketch, Frankel House, Christchurch, 1938-9. The next house in the series is shown in the bottom right hand corner, where the architect has placed his initials.82

Frankel wanted his second house, in Canberra, to be built on a corner of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s land, close to his laboratories. When Clunies Ross questioned whether that was an appropriate environment for the head of the Division of Plant Industry, Frankel’s brusque response was: “We don’t mind. We make our own environment”.83 Some years later, when Otto and Margaret were offered the new site in Campbell, Otto wrote to Grounds describing how the few existing houses in the precinct “could be readily screened by fast growing eucalypts and wattles”.84

The previous statement demonstrates that, in Frankel’s ideal environment, the protection of his own views looking outwards was just as important as the prevention of others from looking in. Evans recalled an issue that arose one day in Frankel’s Black Mountain office: “He was working up a head of steam once, looked out the window, saw the washing [to the rear of Bruce Hall, an Australian National University student residence across the road] and immediately wrote a letter … complaining that CSIRO did not relish being in the backyard of an ‘Italianate slum’.” As a result of Frankel’s complaint, the University constructed a brick screen wall that later became known as “the Frankel fence”.85

284 Another indication of the Frankels’ need for privacy was evident during the construction phase of the Cobby Street house, when they requested that their names be omitted from the signboard.86

While the plan form and orientation of the Frankel House were not harmonious with the natural landform, and were not ideal for solar orientation, those same aspects were highly functional when it came to the question of privacy. The Frankel House was essentially an impervious wall, two rooms deep, that formed a barrier between the street and the rear garden. The concept of the house as a protective shield between public and private was dramatised through a lack of visible fenestration on the public side—the principal reason that the house elicited so many comments about its appearance. Grounds’s only concession to the concept of “windows” on the Cobby Street elevation were seven repetitive grilles, formed by leaving geometric openings in the stretcher bond external skin. While windows were placed in the cavities behind these grilles— some as operable louvres, others as fixed glass with a mechanical fan—they were not visible from the outside of the house.

87 7.24, 7.25 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, west elevation. Drawings by Theo Bischoff, April 1970.

In spite of the private aspect to the rear, fenestration to that elevation was limited to two sliding doors, (one each to the dining and living areas), and relatively modest bedroom windows. A potential lack of natural light to the interior was offset by a series of small roof-lights: three to the passage, two to the kitchen and one to each bathroom. This aspect of the Frankel House marked a departure from most other Grounds houses, where a clear distinction between public and private aspects was articulated through fenestration. The architect’s own Hill Street house, for instance, also presented a solid, impervious shell to the street, but opened up in the centre to a fully glazed, internal private courtyard. One possible reason for the lack of windows on the private side of the Frankel House was the uncertainty surrounding Monash Drive, which was proposed to run very close to the rear boundary of the site. (See Illustration 7.11.)

285

88 7.26 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, east elevation. Drawing by Theo Bischoff, April 1970.

The external materials were typical for a Grounds building: industrial-style bricks, anodised aluminium windows, metal roof and metal fascia. Yet in terms of materials and finishes the house incorporated a further conceptual departure from his previous houses: a clear disjunction between outside and inside. In the Vasey Crescent houses, for instance, the interior was a continuation of the exterior: walls of concrete block extended inwards, and timber boarding on eaves soffits continued inside to become ceilings. Grounds’s own house in Hill Street followed a similar principle—although it contained timber ceilings and timber joinery, the remaining internal surfaces were lightly bagged and painted brickwork walls that reflected their external counterparts. The Frankel House, with its complete internal sheathing of timber, broke the tradition of a seamless continuity between exterior and interior. From the understated and anonymous Cobby Street façade—a simple, planar form, with no visible windows, constructed of “commonplace”, industrial style materials—nothing of the interior was revealed. The true function of the building, the disposition of its internal spaces and the activities that took place therein were all hidden. In this respect the Frankel house was one of the most private of the Grounds houses, even more so than his Hill Street house which, although it presented a private face to the street, provided glimpses of the interior through a continuous strip of windows at high level. (See Illustration 7.14.)

Once inside the Frankel House, the transformation between private and public became complete: the house revealed itself as a beautifully crafted vessel that enveloped and cosseted its occupants in a lush, private, internal world. The spaces, materials and detailing all contributed to the impression of a cocoon-like interior that enveloped its occupants in a warm and private inner sanctum. The brick grilles—which, from the outside, gave away no clues about the interior—suddenly assumed a whole new significance. From the safety and anonymity provided by the house, the inhabitant was able to observe the outside world without being detected.

286

7.27 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, “spy-holes” above kitchen bench facing Cobby Street. Artwork by Virginia Reid. Photo by the author, 2009.

This feeling of being wrapped in a protective cushion and insulated from the outside world was accentuated by a low ceiling height of 8’-4¾” throughout the house, and further enhanced by the warm glow of the timber surfaces: “Hanbro” rotary cut, Victorian Ash-faced plywood veneer to the walls and doors, and ex 3” x 1” spaced ash boards to the ceilings, all finished in clear, matt polyurethane.

In the comprehensive documentation Bischoff included a number of measures to maintain clean, uninterrupted surfaces and spaces. To ensure that nothing could detract the eye from the sensuous, curved lines of the internal spaces, he eliminated mouldings, instructing the builders: “there are generally no skirtings or cornices, and, except in Bathroom area, no architraves”. He maintained visual continuity by coordinating the height of doorknobs and light switches to a uniform 3’-4” above finished floor level. A variety of storage spaces, for specific items such as toilet paper, were ingeniously recessed into the brick cavities and covered with sliding or hinged flush ply panels that matched the surrounding wall surfaces.89

287

90 7.28 Roy Grounds, Frankel House, passage elevation. Drawing by Theo Bischoff, April 1970.

The documents contained a number of subtle measures that added to the feeling of privacy throughout the house. A short, radial section of trellis constructed of 1” by 1” timber verticals fixed to both sides of horizontal timber rails was provided outside the dining area. The function of this was to divide the rear terrace into two separate zones for dining and for pottery, and to screen views from the dining terrace into Margaret’s work area. Bischoff maintained acoustic privacy by specifying sound insulated walls to be constructed between the living space, bedrooms and study.

The interaction between Grounds and the Frankels on this, the final house of the dissertation, reveals more of the interrelationships between architecture and science— and of the many twists and turns between the separate threads of artistic expression and scientific rationality—that weave through the discourse. When Frankel asked Grounds to design this house, it is clear that he had complete faith in his architect. He described the site to Grounds, and explained its potential to provide the private spaces that he and Margaret desired. In the same way that dominant characteristics of offspring could be predicted according to Mendelian theories, Frankel could predict the types of materials, finishes and spatial configurations from Grounds’s architectural “gene-pool” that were most likely to appear in his house.

Yet in spite of this, and in spite of his extensive knowledge of the physical environment and previous experience in building houses, Frankel could not imagine the complete form of the house, nor its location or orientation on the site. He had no desire to do so— that was what Grounds was for. Grounds was fully aware of the boundary between Frankel’s area of expertise and his own, having previously noted that the scientists involved in the Academy project were intensely creative and well informed about art, yet incapable of abstract thought. Understanding what was expected of him, Grounds

288 delivered the Frankels the artistic statement that they wanted: with one sweep of his hand across the site plan he mimicked the form of Cobby Street and produced the single, powerful idea that provided the concept and generated the plan form of the house. The fact that this solution inherited a number of practical limitations was not as important to Grounds—or to his clients—as was the fact that it was an exceedingly simple, iconic, shape that could be developed into a house. The simplicity of that solution provided Grounds and Bischoff with a further series of challenges as they worked through the house, in increasingly smaller scales, to consider how to build it. It was the care with which this process was carried out, and the intellectual rigour that was applied to all aspects of the detailing and construction, that resulted in the house appearing as a finely crafted artefact.

The Frankels—and their surrogate planning consultant, Philip—did not question the form, orientation, or location of the house. Nor did they comment on its external architecture. For them, the reasoning behind all of those decisions was Grounds’s territory. But when it came to the internal configuration of that prescribed form, they had no hesitation in questioning Grounds’s judgement, and no qualms about completely redesigning the living areas in accordance with their own functional criteria. That the changes they made were extensive, and that all were valuable improvements in terms of practicality and articulation of architectural space is, in itself, not so important. What is significant is the fact that the clients chose to make no contribution to the initial design phase. That was not their area. For that, they required an architect: someone who could apply conceptual thought to the problem of designing a house, and give three- dimensional form to a series of disparate ideas. It was not essential for that process to be based on rationalism—reproducing the shape of the adjacent road seemed, to Frankel, to be as valid as any other methodology. It was the integrity of the artistic gesture that was important.

It would seem that, within the tangled threads of aspirations and ideologies that led to the creation of the Frankel House, art was of equal value to the scientist-clients as scientific rationality was to the architect-designers. Both the remaining Frankel houses continued to delight architects and artists for decades after they were built. When Otto and Margaret visited the Christchurch house in the 1970s, some thirty-five years after they had commissioned Plishcke to design it, they were pleased to find it being lived in by an architect “who loved it and cared for it”.91 Following Margaret’s death in 1997, and Otto’s during the following year, their friend and colleague Lloyd Evans was appointed executor of the will (the Frankels did not have children), and was given instructions regarding the estate. On 16 February 1999, the Frankel House was sold by public auction at Olim’s Hotel in Braddon. Like their Christchurch house, it was also purchased by an

289 architect: Stephen Frith, Professor of Architecture at the University of Canberra. And, like Margaret, Frith’s wife, Catherine, was a potter.

There was one final twist in the story of the Frankel House—one that will forever equate Grounds’s creation with art. Evans was instructed by the Frankels that the proceeds from the sale were to go to the National Gallery of Australia in order to purchase a painting. But not just any painting. They stipulated that they wanted to donate a significant New Zealand painting to the Gallery’s collection. When Margaret had been involved with The Group in Christchurch some seventy years previously, she had befriended and helped a struggling young artist named Colin McCahon. In the intervening years McCahon had become New Zealand’s most renowned modernist painter, with a considerable international reputation for his powerful and iconic “biblical landscapes” in which he attempted to explore questions of his own faith in relation to the New Zealand context.92 In 2004, with funds from the Sir Otto and Lady Margaret Frankel Bequest, the National Gallery of Australia purchased McCahon’s Crucifixion: the apple branch, a large oil-on- canvas painting that McCahon had painted in Christchurch during April, 1950—the year before the Frankels had departed that city for Canberra. An intensely personal painting that depicted the artist, his family and a crucifixion scene all set within a diptych of South Island landscapes, it had been exhibited only once in McCahon’s lifetime—in The Group exhibition, with Margaret Frankel, in 1950. After that time the painting had remained with the artist, in his studio, until his death in 1987.93

The acquisition and hanging of this painting completed a number of cycles within the story of the Frankel House. New Zealand, the country where Otto and Margaret met, began their patronage of art and architecture, and spent a significant portion of their lives together, would forever be represented in Australia, the country in which Otto had achieved his considerable success. Otto and Margaret, with some help from a fellow scientist, (Philip), had collaborated with Grounds to build a house that owed more to the freedom of artistic intuition than it did to any notion of scientific rationality. A house that, after their deaths, had been sold to purchase a work of art.

When the National Gallery of Australia hung McCahon’s masterwork—unseen by anyone except McCahon and his closest associates for over fifty years—within the cavernous spaces of Col Madigan’s concrete labyrinth, the cycle from private house to public exhibition was complete.

290

7.29 Colin McCahon, Crucifixion: the apple branch, oil on canvas, 1162 x 870 mm., 1950. National Gallery of Australia Collection. Purchased with funds from the Sir Otto and Lady Margaret Frankel Bequest, 2004, which was funded by the sale of the Frankel House.

291

1 In 1958 Frankel discussed the road widening with Ruddock—Associate Commissioner and former member of Coombs’s Ministry for Post-War Reconstruction—and Grounds, who was site architect for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. The original road alignment, which they marked up on a site plan, would not have affected the Frankels’ house. 2 The Frankels enjoyed living in the Nicholson Crescent house, and put a lot of work into the gardens. They initially considered staying in the house and fighting the Commission, but decided that it would be in their best interests to cooperate. The Commission gave the Frankels an undertaking that they could occupy the Nicholson Crescent house until the new one was available. Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), Manuscript Collection, Adolph Basser Library, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, MS 106, Box 13, Item C. 3 Otto Frankel to Roy Grounds, 31 July, 1968. Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), 13/C. 4 Frankel was Vice-President of the International Biological Programme (IBP). 5 In 1966 Grounds designed a house in Canberra for the plant physiologist Sir Rutherford Robertson, which was not built. The only other domestic projects that he appeared to be involved with at this stage of his career were the M. A. Nicholas House at 22 Hill Street, Toorak, (near his own house), and the Ken Myer holiday house and Kraal structure at Penders, southern New South Wales. Conrad Hamann, “Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971” (Ph.D. diss., Visual Arts Department, Monash University, 1978), vol. 2, Bibliography and Catalogue, Part II, Grounds, 66-69. 6 Frankel to Grounds, 31 July, 1968. Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), 13/C. 7 Ibid.; Frankel to C. H. Davis, Acting Assistant Secretary, (Land Administration), Department of the Interior, 29 June, 1970. Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), 13/C; Lloyd Evans, handwritten notes, 27 June, 1990, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), 15/E, 114 (p. 2, point 5). 8 Frankel to Grounds, 31 July, 1968. Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), 13/C. 9 Ibid. 10 “Interview—a Scientist in Stockholm”, Australian Country (June, 1968): 40, Coresearch (CSIRO newsletter) 161 (August 1972). 11 Roy Grounds, De Berg Tapes, National Library of Australia, recorded in Melbourne, 11 October, 1971. 12 Lloyd Evans. “Otto Herzberg Frankel, 4.11.0-", Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), 12/A. But, as Evans stated, Frankel was “some peasant!” Evans’s speech at Otto Frankel’s 80th birthday celebration, 4 November 1980. Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), 12/A, 1. 13 Hamann, “Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971”, vol. 1, 45. 14 Grounds to Theo Bischoff, 13 February 1970. Bischoff, Theo, Australian Capital Territory Heritage Library, Woden, Canberra, HMSS 0159, Box 5, “Frankel House, Campbell”, File 2/2. 15 Otto Frankel, “Sir Roy Grounds, 1905-1981”, Historical Records of Australian Science 5, no. 3 (1982): 89-91. 16 Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), 12/A, 1-2. 17 Roy Grounds, Architecture and Arts 1, no. 1 (July 1952): 13. 18 George Hersey, The Monumental Impulse: Architecture’s Biological Roots (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 158-60. 19 Although Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) published during Darwin’s lifetime, his work was neglected until the early twentieth century when its reappraisal led to the foundation of the science of genetics. Waddington described how Mendel “discovered that from crosses between certain types of parents particular categories of offspring were born in definite proportions which could be stated as simple arithmetic ratios”. Conrad Waddington, The Nature of Life (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), 12. 20 Hersey, The Monumental Impulse, Architecture’s Biological Roots, 158-62. 21 Ibid., 161. 22 Otto Frankel, interview by Gavan McCarthy, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), 12/A; Evans, “Otto Herzberg Frankel, 4.11.0-“; Jonathan Harwood, Styles of Scientific Thought, The German Genetics Community 1900-1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 245; Otto Frankel, interview by Dr. Max Blythe, 15 September, 1993. Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), 12/A. 23 Harwood, Styles of Scientific Thought, The German Genetics Community 1900-1933, 201. 24 Alfred Kühn, 1950, 178, cited by Harwood, Styles of Scientific Thought, The German Genetics Community 1900-1933, 235. Alfred Kühn was no relation to Thomas Kuhn. 25 Ibid.. 240-41.

292 26 Other biologists who were known for their visual sensibility included Otto Bütschli, Ernst Haeckel and Carl Chun. Fritz Baltzer, Viktor Hamburger, Hilde Mangold and Fritz Süffert were of a similar inclination. Ibid., 255, 257, 358. 27 Ibid., 255. 28 “The aesthetic appeal of biological form, combined with the intellectual puzzle as to how it is generated in development and modified in the evolutionary process, made biology especially attractive to this generation”. Ibid., 257. “This ability can be understood as a part of the sense of form which makes a good naturalist and morphologist.” Richard Goldschmidt, Portraits from Memory: Recollections of a Zoologist (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1956), 62-63. 29 John Bernal, “Vote of Thanks” to Waddington after his talk at the Architectural Association, Architectural Association Journal, LXXIV, no. 825: 77. 30 Conrad Waddington, The Scientific Attitude (Pelican Books, 1941), 10; Conrad Waddington, Behind Appearance: a Study of the Relations Between Painting and the Natural Sciences in this Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969), Foreword. 31 Waddington, The Scientific Attitude, 49. 32 Ibid., Illustrations 11 and 12 (between pages 64 and 65). 33 Ibid., 49-50. 34 Conrad Waddington, “Biological Form and Pattern”, Architectural Association Journal LXXIV, no. 825: 71-76. 35 Waddington, Behind Appearance: a Study of the Relations Between Painting and the Natural Sciences in this Century. 36 Historical Records of Australian Science 5, no. 3 (1982): 89-91. 37 Ibid. 38 Karen McCartney, 50/60/70, Iconic Australian Houses, Three Decades of Domestic Architecture (Sydney: Murdoch Books, 2007), 59. 39 Peter Cuffley, Australian Houses of the Forties and Fifties (Melbourne: Five Mile Press, 1993), 102. 40 Historical Records of Australian Science 5, no. 3 (1982): 89-91. Hamann believed the fact that Grounds had “tried and failed to get a hemispherical house built five years earlier” was a more plausible reason for the form of the Academy building, than was its supposed relationship to the “rolling hills of the Canberra countryside”. Hamann, “Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971”, 295. For an analysis of the influence of geometry on Victorian architects during this period, see Philip Goad, “Form and the so-called Melbourne Geometric School”, in “The Modern House in Melbourne 1945-1975” (Ph.D. diss., University of Melbourne, 1992), 5/39- 5/62. In a later essay on domes, Goad stated that the most commonly cited source for Grounds’s Academy of Science dome was an amalgam of Saarinen’s Kresge Auditorium with the same architect’s adjacent Kresge Chapel. Philip Goad, “Shells, Spires and a Dome: Science and Spirit in the Space Age”, Ann Stephen, Philip Goad and Andrew McNamara, eds., Modern Times: the Untold Story of Modernism in Australia (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2008), 141. 41 Donald Freeman, ed., Boston Architecture (Cambridge: The Boston Society of Architects and MIT Press, 1970), 101. 42 Frankel to Grounds, 31 July, 1968. Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), 13/C. 43 Roy Grounds, De Berg Tapes, National Library of Australia, recorded in Melbourne, 11 October 1971. 44 Ibid. 45 Frankel to Grounds, 6 November, 1969. This was a very detailed letter in which Frankel explained how he, Margaret and John Philip had redesigned a significant portion of the house. The “eggs” reference was associated with their questioning of the size of the shower cubicle in the main bathroom. Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998). 46 Monash Drive was a road proposed on the Territory Plan to link Canberra’s easternmost suburbs in a north-south direction, and would have cut across the lower slopes of Mount Ainslie. It was not built, and was finally removed from the Territory Plan in 2009. 47 Theo Bischoff, handwritten notes at meeting with Grounds and the Frankels, 3 February, 1969. “Point 5, ‘Exterior’”. Bischoff, Theo, Box 5, “Frankel House, Campbell”, File 2/2. 48 Hamann, Modern Architecture in Melbourne, the Architecture of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, 1927-1971, 61, 286. 49 Ibid., vol. 2, Bibliography and Catalogue, Figure 7: 15. 50 “Original brief supplied to RG”, undated document consisting of four typed pages with handwritten notes added. Bischoff, Theo, Box 5, “Frankel House, Campbell”, File 2/2. 51 In 1969 the Imperial system of measurement was still in place. Australia changed over to the Metric system between 1970 and 1988. For consistency, all original measurements specified by the architects have been left in the Imperial system. 52 Stephen Frith, in discussion with the author, 4 Cobby Street, Campbell, 18 August 2009.

293 53 A3-size print of drawing by Roy Grounds and Company Pty. Ltd., 100 St. Kilda Road, Melbourne. Plan at scale of 1/8”: 1’ 0”, dated October 1969, (not signed], marked “Superseded”. Bischoff, Theo, E 1 FF 14-25. 54 McCartney, 50/60/70, Iconic Australian Houses, Three Decades of Domestic Architecture, 46. 55 Theo Bischoff, Drawing B107-4p, “Preliminary slab layout, showing building work below top of floor, draft only, 24.2.70”. Bischoff, Theo, E 1 FF 14-25. 56 Frankel to Grounds, 31 July, 1968. Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), 13/C. 57 Frankel to Grounds, 6 November, 1969. Ibid. 58 Otto quoted Margaret as stating that Grounds’s proposal for clothes to be washed in the main bathroom was “rather slummy”. Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Bischoff, Theo, E 1 FF 14-25. 61 Grounds sent Bischoff a print of the preliminary schematic plan in November 1969, noting that, while it indicated “the general location and shape of the proposed house sketch plans were currently undergoing development”. Grounds to Bischoff, 20 November, 1969; Bischoff reply 26 November, 1969; Bischoff handwritten notes, 3 February, 1969. Bischoff, Theo, Box 5, “Frankel House, Campbell”, File 2/2. 62 Ibid. Bischoff to Grounds, 26 November, 1969. 63 Ibid. Theo Bischoff, handwritten notes, 3 February, 1969. 64 Bischoff, handwritten notes at meeting with Grounds and the Frankels, 3 February, 1969, “Point 1, ‘Site & character’”; handwritten notes at meeting with the Frankels 1 May, 1970. Bischoff, Theo, Box 5, “Frankel House, Campbell”, File 2/2. 65 Ibid. “Point 5. ‘Exterior darkish brownish in harmony in bush.’” Theo Bischoff, handwritten notes at meeting with Grounds and the Frankels, 3 February, 1969. 66 Ibid. Bischoff met with the Frankels on 9 December, 1969, 3 February, 1970 and 20 February 1970, when they chose a dark coloured brick from the trade catalogue of “Multibricks”, a local Queenbeyan supplier. “Nutex Face” referred to the surface texture of the brick, which was lightly pitted in a random pattern. (Also available was “Rustic Face”, a rough, patterned surface, and “Vertex Face”, whose parallel vertical marks expressed the wire-cut process.) 67 Ibid. Bischoff to Grounds, 25 February 1970. 68 Ibid. 69 “Working drawings, Frankel House”, Bischoff, Theo, E 1 FF 14-25. 70 This was a rough sketch, which is why it is not reproduced here. “Landscaping Plan, Frankel House”, Bischoff, Theo, B107-1 b, E 4 CC 10. Ray Margules was a landscaping consultant. 71 Bischoff, Theo, E 1 FF 14-25. 72 Ibid. 73 Bischoff to Grounds, 25 February, 1970, 26 February, 1970. Bischoff, Theo, Box 5, “Frankel House, Campbell”, File 2/2. 74 Roy Grounds, letter to Theo Bischoff, 11.3.70. Theo Bischoff, note to file 24.4.70. Bischoff, Theo, Box 5, “Frankel House, Campbell”, File 2/2. 75 Bischoff, Theo, E 1 FF 14-25. 76 Bischoff, note to file 27 April, 1970. Bischoff, Theo, Box 5, “Frankel House, Campbell”, File 2/2. 77 Ibid. Theo Bischoff, 29 May, 1971. 78 Bischoff to roofing contractor, 31 May, 1971, undated file note. Bischoff, Theo, Box 5, “Frankel House, Campbell”, Files 1/2 and 2/2. 79 Frankel, quoted by Lloyd Evans in discussion with the author, May 2009. 80 Stephen Frith in discussion with the author, 18 August, 2009. Frith said that Peter came to this conclusion after noticing similarities between the house and a toilet block in the Canberra show-grounds at EPIC. 81 Ernst Plischke, Design and Living (Wellington: Department of Internal Affairs, 1947). Douglas Lloyd Jenkins wrote that the Frankel House in Opawa remained an “essentially isolated” example of modernism in New Zealand, and that it “alluded to a more expansive, more urbane world than was typical of domestic life in the 1930s (it simply doesn’t look like New Zealand in the 1930s), this promise did not survive translation into the built structure”. Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, At Home, A Century of New Zealand Design (Auckland: Godwit, 2004), 82, 109. 82 Ernst Plischke, perspective sketch, Frankel House, Christchurch, New Zealand, 1938-9. Plischke, Design and Living, 129. 83 Evans, “The Man”, “Sir Otto Herzberg Frankel 4 November 1900—21 November 1998”, Obituary for the Royal Society, London, 1999. Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), 12/C. 84 Frankel to Grounds, 31 July, 1968. Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), 13/C.

294 85 Evans, handwritten notes, “Otto Dinner 4.3.80”, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), Box 15, Item D, 17. 86 Frankel to Grounds, 6 November, 1969, Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), 13/C; Bischoff, note to file 24 April, 1970. Bischoff, Theo, Box 5, “Frankel House, Campbell”, File 2/2; drawing no. B107-14. Bischoff, Theo, E 1 FF 14-25. In accordance with their instructions, Bischoff sketched a signboard specifying himself as “Executive Architect”, Grounds as “Consulting Architect” and Roetzer as builder. 87 Bischoff, Theo, E 1 FF 14-25. 88 Ibid. 89 Bischoff, working drawings, Frankel House, April 1970. Bischoff, Theo, E 1 FF 14-25. 90 Ibid. 91 Evans, handwritten notes, 4 November, 1989. Frankel, Sir O H, FAA (1900 – 1998), Box 15, Item E, P. 130, 2. 92 Lloyd Evans, in discussion with the author, 14 June, 2009, Canberra. 93 Deborah Hart, Colin McCahon: Focus Exhibition (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2007), 5-7.

295 Before and After Science1

By commissioning the most highly regarded and avant-garde Australian architects of the day to design their houses, the scientists whose houses are described in the preceding chapters allowed their building sites to become a focus for new ways of thinking, and a showcase of modernist ideals—both of which challenged the status quo. Most of the scientists exerted considerable influence over the architectural form and character of their houses—an influence that was brought to bear through their hands-on involvement in all stages of the briefing, design and documentation processes. As common participants in these processes, many of their wives were also involved. The nature and extent of that input varied from client to client—and from house to house.

The ways in which the scientists who commissioned the houses, and the architects who designed them, approached the problem of building houses in the national capital varied throughout the period of the study. This was in accordance with a number of external pressures, ranging from changing dynamics and attitudes within the professions of science and architecture to shifts in the broader social, cultural, and political contexts. At the core of these forces, and at the centre of the philosophical and ideological foundations that underpinned the houses, were two independent dualities: one that operated in the space between the disciplines of architecture and science, and another that existed between the notions of scientific rationality and artistic expression.

When Charles and Ruth Lane Poole built an English Arts and Crafts-style house, Charles was attempting to establish forestry as a recognised science in Australia. In accordance with this, his architectural ambition was to build a house that established a visible presence in the Federal Capital and reflected the level of prestige that he believed was appropriate for his emerging discipline. Ruth, an interior decorator and author, published articles instructing readers how to design and furnish houses, and became an unofficial publicist for the city of Canberra. Westridge House was a physical representation of their ideals and motivations: a fully integrated and coordinated environment that extended from exterior elevations and garden through to interior spaces, furniture and furnishings, it was nothing less than an advertisement for Australian forestry, and an example of how to build and furnish a house according to best contemporary principles. Every aspect— from its commanding siting, two-storey street presence, traditional English style, and use of Australian timbers—contributed to the effect that the Lane Pooles desired.

Lane Poole, like later scientists who built houses in the national capital, used the power of his academic and bureaucratic standing, plus his extensive political connections and force of personality, to obtain the house that he wanted. In this respect he was as much

296 an entrepreneur and a publicist as he was a scientist. To meet his clients’ ambitions, Desbrowe-Annear designed a house of familiar architectural form and style, based on a model that had been imported from England some years previously. It was important to all concerned that Westridge House represented continuity with tradition: Lane Poole wanted to promote the idea that forestry in Australia could become a viable industry by building upon established overseas practice. Westridge House looked like an expensive house compared to others in Canberra—and it was. But that was precisely the intention.

Desbrowe-Annear’s architectural career did not follow any notion of linear, logical “progression” from Arts and Crafts beginnings through to modernism. He believed that styles were equal and interchangeable: modernism, like Arts and Crafts, was just one of many to choose from. In this respect Desbrowe-Annear’s career was not incremental, cumulative and linear, but dynamic and creative. It could be argued that his maverick, unpredictable approach to architectural design represented a microcosm of Kuhn’s history of science: a history that Kuhn also believed to be discontinuous, vibrant and imaginative. There is further evidence of Desbrowe-Annear’s creativity in the number of technical innovations that he introduced into his houses. Many of these appeared in Westridge House—which, in spite of the atavism of its style and form, incorporated a degree of technical competence and innovation that was missing from some of the later, more modern, houses.

When Australia entered World War II a sequence of events was set in chain that dramatically altered the directions of Australian architecture and Australian science. The obsession with importing familiar house styles from Great Britain was—for the time being—discarded. Buying the “best of British”—the Australian government policy that had so much influence on the design of Westridge House—was no longer the paramount aim. In its place was the search for an appropriate, affordable, post-war house: a house that was more efficient and functional, responded to the local climate, and was built of available materials. Supported by Federal Government initiatives such as the Commonwealth Experimental Building Stations, the post-World War II era ushered in a more scientific and rational approach to residential house design, where the data that was required to build this new type of house was mathematically calculated and published for the aid of architects and designers.

At the same time, Australian science underwent a similar change of direction. Pre-war debates regarding the value of scientific research were forgotten, and existing research programmes were abandoned or altered in favour of more immediate problem solving. Many of these new tasks involved cross-disciplinary partnerships between government, private enterprise, the armed services and universities. The idea that Australian science

297 was a colonial outpost of British science disappeared. All vestiges of Imperial scientific collaboration—with their inherent connotations of centre versus periphery, of English dominance and Colonial subordination—were swept away. The significant contributions that scientists made to the war effort did not go unnoticed: by the end of the war there was unprecedented confidence in Australian science, and a dramatic increase in expenditure allocated to scientific organisations.

A fundamental component of this expansion was another Federal Government initiative: the decision to rebuild Canberra as the centre of Australian scientific research. This brought to the national capital new residents with contemporary ideas and fresh impetus. Confident, environmentally aware and forward thinking, scientists such as Ennor, Fenner, Frankel, Griffing, Philip, Slatyer, Stewart and Zwar were in an ideal position to see that domestic architecture needed to change. All were relatively young when they came to Canberra, and all were involved in the optimistic, forward-looking processes of building new careers and new lives in a rapidly growing city. Because of this they were not overly committed to maintaining an existing worldview, and were ready to accept change in their personal living environments. Furthermore, they could see that existing domestic architectural models were technically and environmentally deficient, and that a new kind of house was required. The undersupply of suitable houses in Canberra, and financial assistance provided to some of them for the purchase of building sites, all contributed to the decision by many to engage an architect and to build a new house.

It was within this context that the Fenner and Zwar Houses appeared to land, like some kind of foreign objects, on suburban Canberra sites in the early 1950s. Erected during the same years that Kuhn was constructing his theory of paradigm change, these houses signified the arrival, in the capital city, of a new direction in domestic design.

Before they approached their architects, Fenner and Zwar carried out their own research. Neither approved of the historical architectural styles that were popular amongst Canberra homebuilders at the time, and neither saw any houses in Canberra that he approved of. Both scientists believed that rationality was the key to building a better post-war world, and that an improved understanding of environmental principles needed to be applied to residential design. Their houses became manifestations of this vision. Along with other houses built in the 1950s for scientists, academics and researchers such as Ennor, Clark, Roche, Frankel and Benjamin, the Fenner and Zwar Houses became Canberra’s modernist vanguards: expressions of a new, post-war age of residential architecture, and physical proof that modernisation had reached the suburbs of the national capital.

298

However, these harbingers of a new era contained serious technical flaws. It was as if the enthusiasm for the images and iconography of modernism had overtaken the architects’ and builders’ abilities to construct them as fully functioning houses. Secondly, once the novelty of the new colours, forms and materials had worn off, it appeared that post-war domestic architecture in Canberra might not have altered its course quite as radically as what was originally thought. The Fenner and Zwar Houses were based on an imported ideology—European modernism, via the East Coast of the United States—and were totally integrated designs, from external landscaping right down to furniture and artwork. But Westridge House had also been founded on an ideology—Arts and Crafts—and was a completely integrated design.

It wasn’t that the brave new world promised by these post-World War II houses lacked courage—it was just that the world they had promised to usher in was not so new after all. And, in purely technical terms, they promised more than they delivered. Unlike Desbrowe-Annear, Seidler believed that his version of transplanted European modernism was the only way for architecture to progress, and worked with a limited architectural vocabulary that he derived from that singular source. While this was a limitation, it was also his strength: it allowed him to pursue a sustained and incremental modification of these introduced models and patterns. In doing so Seidler was able to avoid some of the dilemmas that obsessed his fellow practitioners—how to design houses that were “Australian”, or “regional”, in style.

Seidler’s architectural methodology, as implemented in the Zwar House, most closely approached that of the traditional scientific experiment—where scientists acknowledge the findings of previous researchers and build upon that with their own experiments. The importance of the house, like the scientific experiment, became not so much what it symbolised in its own right, but what it contributed to the ongoing search for knowledge in that field. The strengths of Seidler’s Zwar House were not that it was an original, site- specific object, but that it represented an ongoing experiment: a single increment in a careful and sustained development of an existing type. The Zwar House was part of a process of continual refinement through repetitive design and documentation processes in different offices—and on different continents. A compact, modestly proportioned house, it was more affordable than either Westridge House or the Fenner House. In this way Seidler’s Zwar House reclaimed one of the philosophical cornerstones of modern architecture: the idea that houses should be affordable for those on average incomes. This was important in Canberra, where Zwar’s income was closer to the national average than that of Lane Poole—the principal of a national teaching institution, or of Fenner—a university professor.

299

Boyd was more inclusive than Seidler in his architectural influences, which came from a wide variety of sources. In that regard he sat somewhere between Desbrowe-Annear and Seidler. The binuclear plan, which he “borrowed” from Breuer for two houses in Canberra, was just one of many modernist ideas and concepts that he experimented with during his prolific and creative 1950s period. In one respect, Boyd’s architecture could be termed experimental because of this inclusiveness, but at the same time his approach was the antithesis of the true scientific experiment—as exemplified by Seidler—where problems are solved through the observation of limited and incremental interventions on a specific model.

Boyd’s partner Grounds was highly skeptical about any references to an “age of science”. Architecture, for him, was tied up in the mystery of the creative process. Clients’ needs were recorded and adhered to, but the design process was not a rational one, based on quantifiable data, as much as it was an artistic venture. Grounds believed that the best designs, like his Academy of Science building, transcended analysis—their qualities could not be explained in purely rational terms. For Grounds, scientists were the ideal clients because they complemented his own abilities: while they showed respect for abstract thought, they were incapable of thinking that way themselves. Grounds’s substantial connections to scientist clients—he was the most prolific, and most successful, designer of buildings for scientists in Canberra during the period of this study—were forged through a mutual understanding that architectural design was fundamentally a creative act.

It was not that Grounds’s houses lacked rationality. While the architectural form of his Academy of Science building might have defied a purely rational explanation, the three houses in Campbell that he designed with Boyd (the Vasey Crescent Group), did not. The idea that these houses would be a coordinated group was suggested by Grounds and welcomed by the clients. The fact that two of the three clients for the Vasey Crescent Group were scientists, and that this ambitious attempt at cooperative design was an unmitigated success, are highly relevant. The Vasey Crescent clients dispelled the notion that architectural design must be an individualist statement. They did not buy into the accepted orthodoxy that each house must, like a work of art, reflect originality, a sense of uniqueness, or some identifying mark of its designer or owner. What was more important to them was the pursuit of a coordinated, symbiotic form of environmental design in which the houses worked in unison to create an architectural whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. The Philips, Griffings and Blakers saw no need for each house to make an individual mark in terms of style, form, materials, colour or landscape. Instead, all of these aspects—from the exterior through to the interior—were considered as part

300 of an integrated unity. The whole exercise represented a controlled, measured and carefully calculated experiment—and a welcome change to the practice of building houses that appeared to compete for attention, as was the case in most Canberra suburbs at the time. That all those involved went along with this idea so enthusiastically is testament to their understanding and commitment. The irony was that the success of the Vasey Crescent venture was also, to some extent, an Achilles heel. Some observers saw the coordinated group as a potential threat—as if Grounds, Romberg and Boyd were trying to take over residential design in Canberra. But that was never the intention.

As significant as the cooperative efforts behind the Vasey Crescent Group was the fact that the Philip House demonstrated a more accurate understanding of the science of building. While material from the Commonwealth Experimental Building Station had been available for some years, it had not been incorporated accurately in houses such as the Fenner and Zwar Houses. While Boyd and Seidler demonstrated an understanding of the general principles involved, they often fell short when it came to the detailing. When considering issues such as sun angles and thermal properties of materials, it is possible that Boyd and Seidler had followed their own intuition rather than placing their trust in mathematical calculations.

But it wasn’t Boyd, or Grounds, who could claim credit for the success of the Philip House in relation to environmental design. It was John Philip—a mathematician and environmental scientist—who was most responsible. Philip, however, did not begin his approach to architectural design with scientific calculations. Nor was he seduced as much as some of his predecessors had been by the appearance of modern architecture or design. Instead, Philip began his consideration of the kind of house that he wanted to live in with an analysis of existing Australian building types. Both he and Fay saw merit in the way in which some older Australian buildings responded to the local climate by incorporating cantilevered floors and roofs supported by vertical columns. In this way the external walls of the buildings, where required, were set back to provide shelter from the strong Australian sunlight. Since Westridge House, this was the closest that any of the scientist-clients had come to acknowledging the existence of traditional architectural style. While Fenner, Zwar and Frankel all considered the idea of building in anything that resembled a historical style to be abhorrent, Philip was not so dismissive. But he was not interested in style in terms of providing a satisfactory aesthetic appearance—he and Fay clearly stated this was not what they wanted. The merits that Philip could see in Australian vernacular buildings were the way in which they worked—how they operated in functional terms. In his search for an appropriate house design, Philip followed scientific methodology by building on established practice and knowledge rather than attempting to design from scratch.

301

After Grounds presented the Philips with a design solution that was a reduced, modernist interpretation of those historical precedents—an adept amalgam of old and new design paradigms—Philip introduced mathematical calculations into the process. He decided that living areas should be located upstairs to make use of the rising heat, and calculated the optimum eaves overhangs based on projected sun angles. He provided his architects with calculations explaining the extra running costs that he and Fay would incur if the eaves were left as shown on the design drawings. Philip later appeared as an unofficial architectural adviser for the Frankels, and helped them to re- plan their Campbell house according to functional considerations. By being the principle protagonist for the Vasey Crescent Group, and by contributing so much to the design of his own house and to the Frankel House, Philip’s contribution to the environmental and functional aspects of domestic architecture in the national capital was significant indeed.

Philip’s contribution to the Frankel House revealed the importance of another factor. To the scientists who built these houses in Canberra, architectural design was not limited to quantifiable, technical and pragmatic concerns. If that had been the case, more of them would have followed the same approach as John Eccles, who had essentially designed his house himself. But that approach was not considered by Fenner, Zwar, Philip, Gascoigne or by Frankel. What was important to them was that their houses were founded on some form of architectural concept. The formulation of this concept required abstract, creative thought—an area that was outside of their abilities. For this they required an architect. This was where Grounds excelled, providing his clients with a series of strong—even iconic—initial design concepts: a dome for the Academy building, a series of repetitive “building blocks” for the Vasey Crescent Group, and a reflexive, crescent-shaped house plan for the Frankel House. So robust were these sketch concepts that the clients could adjust various aspects to improve functionality—internal circulation, materials and eaves details—without destroying the integrity of the idea. Grounds—who had a reputation for being something of a bully on occasions—deserves credit not only for the rigour of his conceptual thought, but for his patience and willingness to compromise in order to address the myriad concerns raised by his demanding clients.

Like Philip and Frankel, Ben Gascoigne provided his architect, Bischoff, with a list of requirements for his house. His was the most systematic, and the most detailed, of all the briefs, and was formulated upon his experiences of living in deficient houses in the Capital Territory. Gascoigne’s elaborate critique of an earlier paradigm in domestic architecture formed the basis of a corrective and comprehensive brief to Bischoff. This specified the way in which the house was to be orientated for sun and light, how it was to

302 provide specific views outwards into the landscape, and how it was to contain adequately proportioned, well-lit internal spaces for Rosalie to construct and view her artwork. Rosalie, an artist who worked directly with her materials and never sketched or planned in advance, had little interest in the brief, the drawings, or in the early construction phase. It was only when she could see the forms and spaces taking shape on site that she became involved—issuing Bischoff with a series of instructions to mould the internal spaces and surfaces of the house into a three-dimensional construct for her art installations.

It is the reasons behind all of these activities—the thought processes that motivated the various clients and their architects to design and build the houses—that is central to the dissertation, and fundamental to providing answers to the questions that were raised at the beginning.

That a paradigm shift in Canberra domestic design occurred with the arrival of the Fenner House on the corner of Monaro Crescent and Torres Street in 1954, and that this shift was confirmed by the construction of the Zwar House in Yapunyah Street, O’Connor, some two years later, has been established. The reasons for this paradigm shift were very similar to those identified by Kuhn as being necessary for scientific revolution, but with a different emphasis, and with the addition of a further contributing factor. The clients and architects who welcomed these new ways of thinking were relatively young, and were operating in professional and intellectual environments that were receptive to change. The new paradigm that they nurtured grew, in part, from their rational analysis of problems that existed with the previous version. The new paradigm also took hold, to a large extent, because of one factor that was not part of Kuhn’s theory: the promotional activities of its most ardent supporters. The Zwar House, for instance, would not have eventuated without Seidler’s vigorous publicity campaign, which convinced Zwar that he had to have a house designed by the Sydney-based architect.

But this new paradigm in Canberra domestic architecture was not a logical and inevitable result of the relative youth of the protagonists, their professional environments, nor their exposure to publicity about modern architecture. Nor was the expectation that a new form of architecture could solve technical and environmental problems the overriding factor that convinced Fenner and Zwar to reject accepted architectural styles and to embrace modernism. The principal reason was Kuhn’s other motivation for paradigm change: the aesthetic imperative. For Kuhn, the subjective qualities of the new paradigm—including aesthetics, neatness and simplicity—provided no more than a minor, previously unattributed, contribution to paradigm shift. But for Fenner and Zwar,

303 the visual appearance of modern architecture, art and design was the most decisive factor that seduced them into accepting Boyd and Seidler’s visions of modernity.

The thought processes behind the design and construction of all of these houses were as much grounded in the subjectivity of art and creativity as they were in the objectivity of “pure” scientific rationality. All of the clients’ very detailed, and very specific, requests about technical and functional aspects of the houses were incorporated faithfully into the finished designs by the architects. But these requirements did not, in themselves, generate the design of any of the houses. They were simply added to the mix. Each house was based, primarily, on an architectural concept that originated from a variety of subjective sources—overseas examples, a contemporary re-working of traditional designs, or the geometric shape of a road—each of which existed independently of the client requirements.

The architectural design processes for these houses were not objective experiments based on a fusion of client requirements and functional considerations. Some of the clients’ instructions to their architects showed little regard for functionality. Fenner, for instance, sketched a detail of an external corner of Lever House—a new steel and glass skyscraper in New York that he had come across by chance in 1953 when his BOAC flight to London was delayed—and noted that something similar would be appropriate for his Red Hill house. On that same overseas trip Fenner sketched details of a Le Corbusier-like steel and glass table—noting that he could have a similar one made by his technicians at the John Curtin School—and recessed light fittings. What was important to Fenner, and to other scientist-clients in Canberra, was that their new houses incorporated forms, materials, details and equipment that represented particular physical attributes of the modern world. Whether or not these related to the functional requirements of a suburban house was not particularly important. That Fenner’s encounter with Lever House occurred by chance, and that the subjective, emotive qualities of his search for suitable architectural forms for his house seemed to outweigh any objective, practical concerns that he might have had, reinforce the importance of subjectivity to the design process.

The idea that subjective qualities of artistic expression and creativity are central to this study was introduced in the chapter on Desbrowe-Annear’s Westridge House, and became more apparent as the study progressed. The binuclear-planned Fenner House was Boyd’s riposte to existing Australian domestic design, while the Zwar House was Seidler’s radically modern counterpoint to the suburb of O’Connor—his national capital version of the affordable, compact family house. While the Gascoigne House was essentially a series of crisp, modern and well-lit spaces for constructing and displaying

304 art, the Frankel House itself became the art object. No longer part of a search for a rational, post-war house that followed correct siting and planning procedures to optimise sun, light and view, this house was a perfectly executed, built diagram of a robust and singular artistic gesture.

The connections to art continue long after the original clients have vacated the houses. When the Zwar House was first completed, Seidler presented his clients with Seclusion, a Josef Albers print, to hang on the wall. Over half a century later, with the Zwar House demolished, Seclusion—now displayed in Zwar’s townhouse—is the only remaining element of Seidler’s integrated vision for a new way of living. After Candida Griffiths helped her mother Fay to restore the Philip House, the property was sold. It is now the home of Ron Radford, the Director of the National Gallery of Australia. The idea that these houses equate, in some way, with art, became unequivocal when Otto and Margaret stipulated that the Frankel House was to be sold to purchase a painting after their deaths.

The nexus between rationality and creativity, and between science, art and architecture that lies at the core of this discourse was navigated expertly by Grounds more than fifty year ago when he worked with Oliphant, Frankel and Eccles on the Academy of Science building. Scientists, he decided, knew more about art than artists knew about science.

Grounds’s theory is backed up by an intriguing statistic. Of the six scientists whose houses form the subject of the preceding chapters, no less than five were married to artists or designers. Ruth Lane Poole was an accomplished designer of interiors, furniture and furnishings, and had trained and worked in London and Dublin during the formative years of the Arts and Crafts movement. Heather Zwar and Margaret Frankel were potters; the latter was also a painter. Frances Philip was a painter whose portraits line the walls of Canberra institutions such as the Academy of Science and the Australian National University. But of all the artist wives it was Rosalie Gascoigne who became the most celebrated. In the latter years of her life, due to a number of factors—including the spaces and opportunities that Bischoff provided her with in her Anstey Street house— Gascoigne came to be regarded as one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists.

The above statistic reveals that the scientists whose houses are studied in this dissertation chose partners who complemented their own ways of thinking and working. In life, and in architecture, they chose allies and accomplices whose abilities compensated for their own lack in certain areas. These personal and professional unions formed mutually beneficial partnerships that combined objectivity with subjectivity, and scientific rationality with artistic creativity. The houses that the scientists built for

305 themselves and their families reflect a number of aspects of these dualities. Within their fabric there is evidence of a passion for the modern world, of optimism, and of an underlying rationalism, all of which contributed to the overwhelming idea that the national capital location represented a new beginning, and these clients were building a new world.

306

1 Before and After Science was the name of British musician Brian Eno’s fifth studio album, released in 1977.

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323

Journals

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Architecture

Architecture and Arts (Australia)

Architecture in Australia

Architectural Association Journal

The Architectural Review (London)

Arts and Architecture (California)

Australian Country

Australian Forestry Journal

Australian Home Beautiful

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Canberra Historical Journal

Canberra Homes

Coresearch

Historical Records of Australian Science

Home Builders Annual

324 Lines

Transition

Vogue Living

Woman’s Day and Home

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Miles, Martin, Canberra House, Mid-Century Modernist Architecture: http://www.canberrahouse.com.

325 Appendix

INTERVIEWS

Frank Fenner Ben Gascoigne Candida Griffiths John Zwar Colin Griffiths

326 FRANK FENNER INTERVIEWED BY MILTON CAMERON

9.30 a.m., 18 October 2007, Canberra.1

1 Frank Fenner was aged 92 when this interview took place.

327

M. C. I am conducting research into the development of the modern, architect- designed house in Canberra from 1953 to 1970. Of particular interest to me are a number of significant houses designed during that period for scientists, academics and medical practitioners. Frank Fenner, what was the atmosphere like in Canberra when you first came here as Professor of Microbiology in 1952?

F. F. Well I was appointed to the position of Professor of Microbiology while I was at the Rockefeller Institute in New York and I took up the job essentially when my visa ran out there and my wife and I went back home through England and Europe. We bought a car there and spent six months driving round looking at various virology labs and just looking at Europe. I’d been in the army and been abroad in that sense, but only to Palestine and hadn’t been to Europe. [We] had a little Ford and drove all round England and up to Scotland. Because there were no labs in Canberra at all, and the ANU, having just been set up, arranged for me to work at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute where I’d been working before I went to the Rockefeller. At the time, when we did come up here, I used to come up to meet Council. I suppose it met three or four times a year and the few professors that were about the place, another one was Professor of Biochemistry, he was Hugh Ennor, he was working in the Commonwealth Serum Labs. Sir Howard Florey used to come out even before we had any labs, to talk with us, and we went to England to talk with him just after I got appointed to the position.

The position after the War, with anybody that came up here—it was of course Commonwealth Government, no ACT Government in those days—you had to be provided with a house. And while I was still down in Melbourne because there [were] no labs up here, I was allotted a house [site] in Hopetoun Circuit, a much smaller block than this, and we were living in the block just next-door. That was the one that we rented, where we were staying. And I’d planted some trees round there, and I’d decided on an architect. I’d looked at the locals and I didn’t think too much of them, and so I consulted Professor Brian Lewis who then had the Chair of Architecture at the University of Melbourne, and he suggested two people to me who I might consult. He said “Roy Grounds and Robin Boyd”. And he said if—essentially this is what he said, I’m making it briefer—but essentially he said: “If you choose Roy Grounds, he’ll build you a nice house, but you’ll live in the house that he designed. If you choose Robin Boyd he’ll build you a nice house, but you’ll live in the house that he designed for you. He will follow your wishes.”

M. C. So that’s why you went with Robin?

328 F. F. Yes, but of course he made suggestions as an architect that wouldn’t have been made by others.

Now, the law at the time was that if people held a block of land, a lease, for six months and hadn’t started building, they would have to surrender it if somebody else wanted that block. Now I was living in the house that preceded the present one that was knocked down, and the present one was built just a few years ago. And this block was empty, and I found out that it had been empty for six years. A Greek grocer I think, something like that, held it. So I wrote in and asked the authorities here if I could—first, as I say I’d spoken to Brian Lewis and decided on Robin Boyd. He’d designed a house for the Hopetoun Circuit building [site]. He was extremely keen on a feature of this house which was unusual in the time: that you’d have wide eaves which would keep the sun out in the summer and let it in in the winter. But the block wasn’t big enough for a one storey house, so he designed a two storey house for it, which was very unusual at the time because it was looking—the street was here, and the front of the house was there— looking actually into the back yard of what was then, I think, the Irish Embassy, or something like that.

Well, we got this block of land because no building had been started on it, but they said ‘You can’t hold two leases, you must surrender the other one’. Which I did, with pleasure, getting this block. And then what Robin then did was just to shift them like that. So that instead of the bedroom part, which is the rear block of that house, being the upper level, it just went down. It’s sloping land, so there were two steps in it, and they were some trouble, but the land was sloping like that, you can understand why you put the steps in. But my wife came from Perth, and her mother was ill over there, and she bought her over here, and she had to be moved around in a wheelchair, and it was a bit awkward getting down the steps. That house wasn’t designed for easy entry.

M. C. I understand that that first scheme for the other site was quite radical, and some builders quoted you a very high price. How was it radical?

F. F. Oh yes, it was very hard to get anybody to quote for it. Now I remember somebody was quoting £25,000.0.0, which at the time—I was a young professor—it was just out of my [reach] altogether.

M. C. Why do you think it was so expensive? It was different to other houses in some way, was it, that first design?

329 F. F. Oh, very different. It was so different to other houses it was hard to get anybody to quote for it. And that was the nearest we got, this £25,000.0.0, and it just wasn’t on for us. And then we got the chance to put it here. By that time a Builder called Karl Schreiner had been selected as the person who was going to build the John Curtin School of Medical Research. And I got a quote from him at a much lower price, about [£]10,000.0.0. That didn’t include the heating. But that was the house, something like that, £10,000.0.0. And because he got a good quote for the John Curtin School, and he knew I was the Professor of Microbiology there.

M. C. That worked out well. What do you remember about your first meetings with Robin Boyd?

F. F. Well, we started the house on the other block, it must have been about 1950, because I’d got back to Australia in February 1950. I knew I had to come up to Canberra and I’d been allotted this block. And I’d made the decision—after the discussion with Brian Lewis—that I’d choose Boyd of the two that he suggested. So it’d be some time—I arrived back in February 1950—and so it must have been some time in 1950 that he designed the two storey one. And then I got this block and he just altered the—kept the fascias, but on a block like this you could face it just slightly east of north and use the sun to heat it up. And then just he got on with designing the house, and had just started building it. For a while he used a local architect to supervise the building—Schofield, was it?

M. C. Tom Haseler?

Haseler, it might be Haseler. I have forgotten who it was, but he wasn’t doing it to my satisfaction, or Robin’s satisfaction, so Robin used to come up quite frequently to supervise the building. And I know I went away for six months, just leaving my wife to supervise the building, just as they’d started in fifty-three. And we occupied it I think in fifty-four.

And it turned out it was an excellent house. We had real problems with the roof. The first roof that was designed, because Robin didn’t like outside gutters, so he got very deep, very large, squarish gutters inside the slope of the house. And there were leaks from the first aluminium strips across with, … as I remember it was board and black stuff that you put over…

M. C. Malthoid?

330 F. F. Malthoid, yes. And then strips of aluminium on top, but that leaked. And then there was a second one that he put on, and that leaked, and finally we were able to get the metal ones, and they don’t leak.

M. C. Yes, I read about—at one stage your wife being very frustrated about the number of pots that she had to place around to catch the drips!

F. F. Yes. It has leaked since, because the internal one on that got blocked once when there was a violent storm. There was a tree just there, and a bit of that broke off and blocked the drain. And then another time hail blocked it, so much hail that it just blocked the drain. Just as it did in that storm in February recently—not in this house, but in Civic and all over the ANU.

M. C. The ANU was badly affected.

F. F. Yes.

M. C. Do you remember if there were there any issues in receiving—any problems getting approvals from authorities, for this design, when Robin first designed it?

F. F. No, I don’t think there were any.

M. C. It all went through OK. Do you remember any reactions from neighbours and friends when the house was first built and you moved in here? Do you remember reactions about what your friends—or what the neighbours—thought of the house?

F. F. Oh, I remember, while it was being built, some people nearby were thinking it was a farming shed or something like that. I remember a comment like that. They were… It was a very unusual house to be built at that time. He built the Manning Clark house a little while afterwards. But that was also unusual. It’s on a block so it faces the same way, but you sort of enter from the side. Boyd was very keen on the wide fascias and protection from the sun. And Manning Clark had a wish for that study to be isolated so he could go up and write his history.

M. C. It just had a ladder up.

F. F. A ladder up, that’s right.

331 M. C. And what sort of relationship did you have with Robin Boyd? Did you enjoy working with him?

F. F. We got on very well together. I was really very, very upset when he, … he was only fifty-two, he was in Japan, and he got a staph’ infection or something and died. Very, very sad.

M. C. I noticed that you recommended Robin Boyd to two other clients: there was a Dr. Roche, and a Clark from CSIRO. Do you remember about what happened to those? There is a Dr. Roche who has a house in Bedford Street, in Deakin. I wonder if that’s the same Dr. Roche that you recommended?

F. F. Yes, there was. I had forgotten. I think his field was TB, he was in the Health Department, I think.

M. C. “Hilary” Roche?

F. F. Yes, I think that’s right. I think that’s what his job was. I was very pleased with the house, but I’d forgotten that I had recommended it to him.

M. C. And also a Dr. Clark from CSIRO? I don’t know what happened to that.

F. F. Clark? Well, I knew CSIRO people quite well, because when I was still down in Melbourne I had started working on myxomatosis, and I came up here and worked with CSIRO Entomology. There was a man there, Max Day, who was actually born on the same day as I was, a year later. And we’ve been close friends. He’s still going, his wife is not very well, but we used to alternate our birthday dinners with one another. So I could well have … I remember Hilary Roche, but I don’t remember the name of the other one. But I went up and worked with CSIRO because he was working on insect transmission of plant diseases, and I was interested in the mechanical transmission of myxomatosis. And so I arranged for him to have the rabbits up here and we did some experiments on that, and published them.

M. C. Now something about the landscaping of the house. Last time I was here you mentioned that Lindsay Pryor was involved. Did you have conversations with him or Robin Boyd about the landscaping, or the relationship between inside and outside?

F. F. Well look, primarily the garden was designed by Lindsay Pryor. Lindsay belonged to a Boys’ Club. I was in Adelaide. I was living in Rose Park and just opposite there was a

332 Congregational Church and they used the … not the shed, but there was a large open space, not in the church, that they used for a boys’ club, and Lindsay was a person who went there when we were thirteen or fourteen. And he was a big, bulky chap and we used to wrestle and do that sort of thing. And I remember wrestling—not boxing, wrestling—with him, and of course I was much smaller and couldn’t cope! But he was a very nice fellow.

And when I came up here, my first visit up here, I came up as a medical student. He [Pryor] did forestry, which was very unusual, you had to come to Canberra to do your forestry, finish your forestry. He did two years in Adelaide, then he came here to finish forestry, and he had a house in La Perouse Street. And I came up, I got a scholarship which I used to come to Canberra to examine aboriginal skulls in the Institute of Anatomy. They had a good collection there. And I stayed at Beauchamp House, which is now the Ian Potter House of the Academy of Science. But I knew Lindsay was here, he was Keeper of Parks and Gardens, and designed a lot of the … followed Weston on and designed a lot of the avenues as Canberra expanded. And I got him to design the garden and the major trees. The entrance has got that curve in it because there was a tree just standing sort of in the bit that’s like that … That’s why it didn’t come straight in. The other one just goes straight in. But there was a tree there, I think it died, and we had it cut down.

M. C. Was there an emphasis on growing plants that were local, of the area?

F. F. No, well there was a mixture. Just as it was in the various avenues, he used both exotic trees, … and of course that’s one of the things that makes Canberra so lovely in the autumn: the colour of the different avenues. And here, I don’t know why … I’d been interested in Geology as a boy, and I’d got a—among my collection of geological fossils, I had one of a Ginkgo tree, which is an ancient tree. There are no other trees like it. It’s got no vein, central vein. The leaf is sort of triangular, with a lot of veins but no central vein. And another thing it does—I’ve never talked to a plant physiologist about this—but when we had a very heavy storm, the leaf broke off there, they weren’t blown off at the connection, because there wasn’t a connection of that kind, and then they regrew again. Which is really very remarkable. Anyhow, I decided on a Gingko, and I got one planted— and it’s still growing—outside the temporary labs that were built here in 1952. And that one there, which is the best one in Canberra. It’s a lovely tree. And in the autumn, its bright yellow leaves. They’re absolutely beautiful.

M. C. Yes, I read about your early fossil collection and the trips you used to do with your father and family across Victoria a long time ago. OK. Now, just to look at the bigger

333 picture outside of this house, there are a number of significant houses for scientists and medical practitioners between 1953 and the late 1960s. There’s two or three I’d just like to mention to you, and see if you remember them. Hugh Ennor’s house, just around the corner in Vancouver Street, is now demolished. What do you remember about that house?

F. F. Hugh was of course a colleague and a close friend of mine. It wasn’t designed by Boyd. I didn’t think it was anything like as good a house as mine. But it was on a big block, and he subdivided it, and sold part of it. Across the road from him was [Sir John] Eccles’s house, on a block of three acres. The Vatican Embassy is there now.

M. C. Oh, is that where it was. I was wondering where it was.

F. F. Yes, that was it. He had eight kids, so he got a big block, a very big block, and the front of it was all vegetable garden, with vines and tennis court. He used to have Scottish type dancing—outdoor dancing—and so on, and they had a swimming pool.

M. C. What about Ian Marshall’s house in Curtin? That was designed by a local architect, Theo Bischoff. And I believe Ian was your first Ph.D. student.

F. F. Ian was the second appointment. Gwen Woodroofe was the first appointment. They’re both still alive, but Ian’s got Alzheimer’s, unfortunately. He was a new graduate in agricultural science when I was down in Melbourne working on Myxo[matosis] and I needed some assistance and I appointed Gwen Woodroofe. I’d done some work in the War and got acquainted with the microbiologist in charge in Adelaide, in the Department, and I asked her about a microbiologist I could appoint as an assistant, and she suggested Gwen Woodroofe, who was in her Department. As an assistant, she was not a Ph.D. graduate, they didn’t have them, hadn’t introduced a Ph.D. Anyhow, she came across. Ian was an Ag’ Science graduate and was appointed. And Ian was attracted by another technician, Kathleen Sutton, her name was. And she was a very attractive woman, and he made the mistake of not getting married before they came up, so they were separately located in boarding houses. And they got married, and they had a hell of a job in trying to get a house built for themselves. But finally got a house built. And I think Kathleen is still in the house, out in Mawson, somewhere like that.

M. C. And another house that I’ve come across that is very interesting was for a colleague of yours. Is it Gordon Ada?

F. F. Yes, Ada.

334

M. C. He had a house at one stage in Parkhill Street, over in Pearce, with lots of courtyards. It looked like a very interesting house.

F. F. Yes, he had an underground water tank, I think. His wife got Alzheimer’s disease, and he looked after her. He used to go to—I’ve forgotten where it was that she was kept—but he used to go there every day at lunchtime and feed her and so on. He had four kids, there’s still one up here I think, and the rest are dispersed. But he didn’t come up here until 1968, when I was appointed Director of the John Curtin, and he came up and took my place as Professor of Microbiology. He still works, he got a back injury, he’s terribly stooped, so he walks with a triangular thing. And he used to drive his car in, but now he can’t drive it in. And somebody drops him in. He still comes every day to the John Curtin and has got the office next to mine. I don’t say a lab, because all we’ve got is a computer.

And I used to have a lot of books but I’ve emptied them out now because I’m leaving the place and going to live in that room there [points to room off kitchen]. And I’ve arranged with Derek Wrigley to get one of these screens that he puts on for reflecting and keeping—you can raise the temperature of the room like that by about eight or nine degrees, and that essentially is where I live. I’ve got a room along there for a computer, and a table and all the rest of it, and that’s where I’ll put the computer. But we had a bit more money when we put this extension on, but we had to make it a concrete floor. We couldn’t just extend out, because again it slopes down that way. It’s about a metre deeper, and that allowed us to put an ensuite in there which we couldn’t do in the other one. And pantries with sliding doors, and a number of improvements.

M. C. Just a final couple of houses. I wonder, did you ever visit Otto Frankel’s house, or John Philip’s house, in Campbell?

F. F. I remember Otto’s. He had to move then because the first one he had was on Belconnen Way, or somewhere like that. And he kicked up a hell of a fuss about it, and Roy Grounds built his house didn’t he.

M. C. Yes, in Cobby Street, Campbell.

F. F. Yes, I knew that.

M. C. And also John Philip from CSIRO, he had a Roy Grounds house, next to Bruce Griffing.

335

F. F. Yes. It was a very small scientific community. Actually, because of myxomatosis I worked very closely with a number of CSIRO people. And I was on their advisory board for two five-year stretches, and so I got to know CSIRO people very well.

M. C. OK. I just want to step back and look at the bigger picture. I’d like to round off this interview. Part of my dissertation, and the question I’m asking, is why was there so many modern, significant houses built in Canberra for scientists during that period. Now there are a couple of ideas I have. I’d really love to get your impressions, to see what you think. The decades after the Second World War were times of enormous change and new possibilities. It appears also there was a sense of optimism about what was possible, in many disciplines, including architecture, science and medicine. Do you think it was possible [that], because scientists could see that their world was changing, their profession was changing, that they were in a good position to see that architecture could change also? They could see this possibility, and that would explain why they were such good patrons of architecture for their own houses? Do you think there’s anything in that?

F. F. Well the fact that fifty-four was the foundation of the ANU, and the first building that they built, because of the advisory committee they had in Europe, [Sir Howard] Florey was the medical representative of it. But they got Brian Lewis to be the architect, and he designed University House. That was the first collegial system of … all Ph.D. students had to live there. And they’d get breakfast, lunch and dinner in the Great Hall. And I remember there were two sets of tables: one with hot, and one with cold dishes on them. And I remember taking a visitor from overseas who was a visiting fellow, or had just come out as a visitor. And I was explaining to him how you’ve got twenty-eight different dishes here if you count up the different sorts of things on either side. And the student right behind me said “the same twenty-eight every day!” So you could never please everybody!

M. C. I note that in one part of your very extensive career you were Director of the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies (CRES). Now, with that in mind, I would like to ask you two final questions about a potential relationship between architecture and science, to see what you think. This is a little bit log-winded—I apologise.

In 1954 American architect Richard Neutra wrote a book called Survival Through Design, in which he advocated lessons from biological science as a way of addressing the problems in architecture. He called his approach “Biorealism”, and he argued that instead of looking at buildings as isolated objects, architects should adopt a more holistic viewpoint. In this approach the design and impact of buildings is considered not

336 just in isolation, but as an essential part of a greater whole. Through this approach, which considered the relationship to landscape and to the wider environment, in some ways Neutra anticipated the later ‘environmental’ movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Do you think there’s anything in that as a potential link—a very general link—between biology and architecture, and the idea of using biological principals as a way of thinking about the architecture? Do you think there’s anything in that?

F. F. I don’t think that appeared very much in the agenda of CRES at all. It was set up originally as a Centre for Environmental and Resource Studies, but when we used the acronym “CERS” we didn’t like it much and so we reversed the “R” and the “E”. Now it’s called the Fenner School, it’s a school now, of Environment and Society—which covers everything! But it was a difficult one to handle, always, for everybody, all those involved, because covering trans-disciplinary things, people, especially nowadays, they have very narrow vision, they’ve got blinkers on, they’ve got very specialised things. Because science has got so detailed. So that that sort of interaction between the social sciences and biological sciences in a broad sense is not easy to handle.

M. C. Right. OK. I’ve got one more question. It’s about a more specific connection— possible connection—between biology and architecture, I would just like to hear your comments on. This potential connection is to do with the way in which you describe this house, both in your autobiography, and today, and last time I visited. It’s a description that does not mention any architectural styles, or what it looks like, but talks about orientation and sun angles: “… a single storey house, facing slightly east of north, with large windows and wide eaves to make the most of the winter sun while excluding the summer sun in winter.” So it’s about sensible solutions to specific problems, and about the appropriateness of the house to suit its environment. And I wonder if that could be compared to the way in which natural organisms adapt to their environment? So that a series of forms in architecture (such as roofs, eaves, sunscreens, and the things that Deryk’s going to help you with there), arrived at by trial and error, over a period of time, they provide comfort and habitability for a specific location and climate, as this house does very, very well. Could this relate to the way in which natural organisms also evolve, and adapt, to be appropriate to their environment?

F. F. Very interesting question. I really don’t know. Certainly you get extraordinary specialisation of the location of insects, for example in vegetation. I’m thinking of medical things. The ticks that cause ticktyphus in New Guinea were always on the margins of the forest, where you had a bit of savannah, a bit of open country, grass and then trees. And it was when troops got into that sort of country that they got scrub typhus. So I am sure, especially for insects, there are relationships of that kind.

337

M. C. Thanks! There’s a lot of stuff I can work with there. You’ve been most helpful. Many thanks.

Interview concluded at approximately 11.20 a.m.

Milton Cameron PhD Candidate Faculty of the Built Environment The University of New South Wales

338 BEN GASCOIGNE INTERVIEWED BY MILTON CAMERON

2.30 p.m., 26 November 2007, Canberra.2

2 Ben Gascoigne was aged 92 when this interview took place.

339

B. G. For the first years of our married life we lived up on Mount Stromlo. And that was about for sixteen years I think. And Mount Stromlo was in those days very isolated. There was a poor country road running from Canberra out to Stromlo, and it hindered a lot of things that distance. It also had advantages as it turned out. But anyway, we decided that it was time we moved into town. And the University had a house they offered us to rent. And we moved into town partly because the children were growing up, and there was a lot of out-of-school activities, and we were forever running them in and out of town, and things like that. And also the social life and so forth. And I mean as far as Rosalie and I were still concerned, we were rather a long way out of the swim.

But anyway, so we decided to build a house. This was mostly me I think. I remember announcing at dinner one night: “I have opened a savings account with the bank, and we are going to pay so much pay into this account, and this is going into building our house.” So that was that. And then that went on for a couple of years, and it amounted to enough money to be useful. Interesting. And then we decided that it was time we made a move. And we noticed that this area was coming up for auction, and they’d sell big chunks of it off at auction in Canberra. Oh yes, first of all we looked around at houses for sale. And oh, dreadfully boring houses. And they had a family room and a dining room and a kitchen, a kitchen family room. And the bathroom was tiled, and you could just about nominate the colours of the tiles from looking at the place outside. And very sort of useful houses, but boring. And they all faced the same way—they all faced out onto the road and they had little verandas or porches, so you could sit out there. Nobody ever did! But you could sit out there and have a drink, you see, and watch the traffic go by.

So anyway we took the plunge. We got enough money together to buy a block. And that was an exciting day! [laughs] Yes, buying your own land! Got it for $2,200 by the way. It’s now valued at about $370,000. Of course, the inflation has made a big difference. $2,200 would be worth ten times that these days. And then we looked around for an architect, and this is where Rosalie came in, because by this time she was getting herself known as a decorator you might say of flower arrangements, on a rather exotic scale, and things like that. And she’d made some good friends out of this. And one of them said, knowing she was thinking of building a house: “You ought to have a look at the—”what the Dickens was his name?

M. C. Was it Pike?

340 B. G. Pike, that’s right. Yes, at the Pike’s house, which had been designed by Theo Bischoff.

M. C. Yes, in Campbell.

B. G. Yeah, in Campbell. It’s still there, I think. We went and had a look at the Pike’s house, and this suited us, sold us—in fact this is quite like the house that they built at Campbell.

M. C. What sort of things did you like about the Pike’s house when you saw it? What was it that appealed?

B. G. Yes. I find that rather hard to answer actually. Well first of all it wasn’t one of these conventional houses. It was an interesting design. And it was a design that took advantage of the site: you know, the sun came around on the right side, and things like that. It had a certain eastern aspect to catch the early morning sun, which in Canberra’s important because the winter’s sun rising in the east of course can be mighty cold.

Oh yes, and our Stromlo house—it was a reaction against the Stromlo house, which was designed, as much as anything, by the wife of the first director, who was English. And he brought her out to have a look and they designed a very grand house for the Director, where they used to entertain the Prime Minister among others. And then they designed this house and other houses. But this house was on the south side of the slope—yeah this is very relevant. And first of all, it didn’t get any view because there was a bunch of pine trees, the south side, yeah that’s right. Well the house was there, and there was a stand of pine trees around there, and the house was in there. We couldn’t see through these pine trees. And also it was cold—we didn’t get the winter sun until ten or eleven in the morning, not properly, and there’d be a frost on the southern side of the house— frost there all day sometimes—well frost up till midday anyway.

And, whatever we did, we were going to have a house with a northern aspect, a north- eastern aspect, and things like that.

M. C. To get the sun?

B. G. Yes, that was one important factor. And then Theo—we just liked the Pike’s house. And I can’t remember any particular features about this—Rosalie would have been the one to answer that.

341 M. C. But I think sensible siting, and orientation for sun—I can understand what you’re saying.

B. G. Oh, yes. But anyway, when we finally bought this block, we saw Theo and we said: “Would you like to design a house for us?” And he said, yes, he would. And anybody would have—Rosalie having acquired something of a reputation by this time.

M. C. Rosalie?

B. G. Yes. And I was the one who sort of layed down the basic ideas: “We want a house that faces north or north-east, catches the winter sun, and we want a kitchen that’s got a proper view”—therefore that kitchen brings that about very well. Oh yes, and then the road. “We don’t want one of these cute little porches opening out onto the street”. And this house has its back to the street and it looks out the other way, influenced by some particular sort of Japanese houses in that way. Which tend, as I remember anyway—I certainly thought at the time—that they built with their backs to the public, and they looked out that way.

And then I dreamt it, and he said “do you have any other ideas about the house?”. And I said: “well we see a house running across this way, and perhaps a kitchen here and a dining room there, living room there and a bedroom there”, this sort of thing. And that’s pretty well what we got. I was quite surprised—I thought Theo would ignore this! But he didn’t though, and so that’s how we got the house that we did get. And then once it got going—well, Rosalie hadn’t taken much part in it up to now. I don’t think she thought that it was ever going to come to anything. But once it got going she had some very positive ideas.

M. C. Once he designed it, or once they started building?

B. G. Oh, bit of each, mostly in the design. One of her ideas—oh, she definitely wanted places to show off her work. And one of the things—the shelf that we have running down the wall in the next room—this is a very strong, wide shelf, and she said she wanted a good strong shelf to put big heavy vases on, and so forth, and that’s what she got. My word, that shelf was really a brilliant idea, it made the house really. And so the house really marked her entry into the art world. It gave her space, and she wanted space in which you could assemble things, you know. Have you seen much of her stuff?

M. C. Oh yes.

342 B. G. Well she assembled these wooden things, and spread them out, and [would] have a look at them. That saw-cut there—she used to put bits of wood on the table and saw them, you see. Well that’s the place where she …. And I said “Well, we’re not going to fill that, not for anybody!”

M. C. It’s a very significant saw-cut now, isn’t it!

B. G. Oh yes, this was made by Rosalie Gascoigne!

M. C. Yes, this table’s worth a lot more money.

B. G. Yes, and that was when she really got going. And we moved into this house I think about, when was it?

M. C. The date on the drawings was about 1968. The first meetings Theo—because Phoebe did the right thing, and left all his records at the ACT Heritage Library, so I’ve had a look at the file, and I have helped them collate them.

B. G. Oh, did she?

M. C. Yes, and I’ve seen some note and things you wrote, and they were dated 1968, the first notes and things.

B. G. Oh yes, that’s right. And her first big show—I’ll get the dates out later—it was about eighty-four that she really got going, and began to make a real mark and began to be treated seriously.

One contribution of hers by the way: Theo didn’t want a wall there, [points to opening between dining and hall] and in fact he was thinking of having an archway there. Rosalie didn’t want that, she vetoed this. So that was that. The other feature of the house—we had an oil burning heater in there, and that served us well. But it eventually, one of the parts, a tap got broken or something and you couldn’t replace it because they didn’t make them any more, and so forth. So we had that converted into cupboards—that was only a fairly short while ago, five years perhaps. But apart from that, of we’ve since had the bathrooms redone, or the bathroom redone, retiled and so forth. But basically this house is as Theo left it. Oh, another thing we told Theo we liked wood, and we liked real wood, and Theo approved of this.

343 Theo said, later on he said: “What a great house it is”. And he said “I think so too, but it takes two people to build a house, an architect and a client—and you have been very good clients.” And I was pleased to hear that.

M. C. Yes, good input. That’s good. I agree with that, I think that’s part of it.

B. G. Yes, so that was it. It’s mostly Theo’s house. And least of all, my influence. Early on, just these few points I mentioned earlier. That was about all. And what’s good, it became a place for Rosalie to show her work, so it’s very important for her career. Yes, plenty of space you see, around here.

And we moved in in seventy-two or three I think it was—maybe earlier. And then she was moving into bigger and bigger things and—oh yes, I got some money. I retired in eighty—I got a golden handshake. In what was a special golden handshake. It’s a, oh, complicated business. This is an example of how the Lord favours the … No, I’ve got that wrong, haven’t I!

But anyway the Mount Stromlo Observatory was a part of the Department of the Interior. But the University got going, we thought it should be taken over by the University, it was much more appropriate it should be taken over by the University. The Department didn’t like this, but anyway eventually they agreed. And so the University took it over. And at that time all the staff were on Commonwealth superannuation. And Commonwealth superannuation, every three years I think, you got a year’s long service leave, and every ten years you got … No you got three months long service leave, and at the end of fourty years you got a year’s long service leave. Well I’d joined up with the Commonwealth at the end of the year, in about 1940-something. But at the time their Superannuation officer came to see … I was overseas, and I missed out on his spiel, and everybody else signed up with the University, except me. And then about a year after I’d been back they said: ”Your superannuation’s a bit odd. Why haven’t you joined us?” And I said “Oh yes, well what are the pros and cons of this, and what’s the advantages?” “Well actually’, he said, “the Commonwealth one is much better, especially for University people. Because University academic staff get a year off or something every seven years, this sabbatical leave. And you already get three months off every ten years because of sabbatical leave. You can either take it as leave, or you can take it as pay. And if I were you—I mean you’re getting all the leave you want, and you’ll probably get more if you get one of these overseas postings. And so I’d stick to the University.” So when I retired, I had thirty-eight years on Government superannuation. But I’d really had quite a few years at the University, and I got a thumping—I got about two years pay when I retired.

344 So we said “ah, we’re going to build a proper studio”. And so we did, and that’s it up there.

M. C. OK. So that was added later.

B. G. Yes. So that was about 1980-something, ‘82 or something like that. In fact I’d just come across some of the papers on it.

M. C. OK. Did Theo design that? Was he still around?

B. G. No, he’d dropped out by then, and we hadn’t seen him for a long time. Our understanding was that he’d given up designing houses. And anyway, Martin had something done to his house, and he found an architect he thought was reasonable, and he had something built onto his house and so we got Martin’s architect to build the studio. [Trevor Gibson was the architect for the studio.] The studio actually has its faults, but it’s been a great success. It was five by eighteen metres. Or it is five by eighteen, quite big. And somebody said that you’d make a good Boy Scouts’ hall out of it! And this was heaven for Rosalie. And every artist who visited the place would look around and [say] “Oh, you’re lucky to have all of this space!”

M. C. Yes. Where did she do her work before that?

B. G. Mostly around here. Where we’re sitting now.

M. C. In the dining room?

B. G. Yes, in the dining room, and in this passage over here, and partly in the next room too, depending on how big it was, but mostly in this room. [laughs] We were partly—well we had to get in to the dining room table. So that was it. So that’s the sum total really of my contribution, just here and there. But the studio was totally my idea, and I said “we’re going to build that studio, whatever you think”. And it isn’t a perfect studio, it’s not an architect-designed studio, but we made it double brick, in case anybody ever wanted to convert it into a bedroom or something like that.

M. C. In the notes on the file that I saw, when you first met Theo, either you or Rosalie had written some notes down. And it said something like you wanted architecture, but not with a capital “A”, or not a “grand statement”, or something.

345 B. G. Oh look, I can’t remember that. That sounds much more like her writing than me, although I’d certainly have gone along with that.

M. C. It sounded to me like, similar to what you were saying before, that you wanted a house that wasn’t so much a monument standing by itself, but something that was part of the landscape and related to the site, and the sun, and things like that.

B. G. Yes, that’s right, yes.

M. C. Were you or Rosalie ever involved in organizations such as the Society for Growing Australian Plants, or anything like that?

B. G. Oh, Rosalie was a member of the Canberra Gardening Society, a very enthusiastic and prominent one too, and she used to exhibit, not so much plants, but in the flower section, and floral arrangements. Got to be rather a dirty word round here in a way, but she wasn’t into floral arrangements, she was into Ikebana—Japanese—which is rather a higher level. She got to be the local champion at Ikebana. Have you heard all about this?

M. C. I did read that, yes. That was how she got started with her art, wasn’t it.

B. G. Yes, and there was a chap in Sydney, who’d been in Japan as an interpreter, I think it must have been after … what was his name? His name just escapes me. [Norman Sparnon] And he used to come up here once a month. And he would come if we could raise twenty students. So somebody approached him, and she was number twenty. And she rapidly sailed to the head of the class. And … some name like that. [Sofu Teshigahara, founder of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana, which is what Rosalie learnt from Norman Sparnon.] And oh, he was a big name in Japan. And she was … to gather all his material and then he would arrange it, and he was very pleased with the best lot of material that he’d had all the time he’d been in Australia, and so forth. But she was pretty expert at this. And he had, in a way, quite an influence on her. But that was when she changed really, so gets through school, what’s the word for Ikebana? I’ve forgotten it. [Sogetsu] Anyway, it was a very social kind of thing. And she wanted to match herself against proper, professional art, and she more or less moved out of Ikebana into proper art. Much under the influence of James Mollison—in fact he became a friend of Martin’s, and so forth.

M. C. When the house was designed, do you remember, was there any trouble getting approval from authorities?

346 B. G. Not that I remember.

M. C. Yes, some of the earlier houses with low-pitched roofs—like a lot earlier than this one—weren’t favourably looked upon, but by 1968 I guess …

B. G. Oh yes, well actually the chap next-door, who’s a builder, he didn’t like our corrugated iron roof, and he put in a protest. We never heard about this until later, but this was knocked back. This building came out of the Department of the Interior, and they okayed ours, so that was alright.

M. C. And what did you and Rosalie think of the house when it was first built, do you remember what you first thought when it was built?

B. G. [laughs] I wonder actually. I remember I was alarmed by it and rather appalled because it was empty. And just being plain brick walls, and this courtyard out there like a prison yard from the prison … I thought: ”by golly, you know this could just about be a branch of the prison!” But once she got it going, once we got it going and we got our furniture and hung a few things on the wall and so forth, it certainly became very integral to what we did. And oh yes, she really swore by it. I would have thought—Martin could give you a better answer than that. We got a lot of visits from artists and gallery directors, and so forth, and they used to admire the house a lot.

M. C. Do you remember comments from friends or neighbours when they first saw it?

B. G. From whom?

M. C. People who came and saw the house, or neighbours or friends. [Were there] any comments about it when [it] was first built? Because, you know, these modern houses were different to most of the houses around, weren’t they?

B. G. Oh, yes. [laughs] One of them slips my mind: “its very modern isn’t it?” As if modern was rather a disparaging word! But they were sort of traditionalists, rather. No, mostly people [said] “I do like the house”, and “I do like the space”, and things like that. And the courtyard turned out to be very well too, it worked very well once you got used to it. It was a question of growing into the house from Rosalie’s point of view. But after a couple of years, though, she could hardly have lived without it.

M. C. Yes. It would have looked lovely with all the artwork in it.

347 B. G. Oh yes it did. It’s a pity you missed that. We just moved it out last weekend. In fact you still can see it hanging up in the new place.

M. C. OK, and I think Lyn’s taken some photographs [of it].

B. G. Yes, I think she has. Oh yes. One thing I did is, I became a sort of “artist’s handyman”. And one thing I decided I was going to do was to take photographs of every piece that left the house. And my word, I’m very glad I did, because its turned out to be valuable, and every show, I had photographs of every art[work], with the dimensions, sizes and materials, and so on and so forth. And who it went to if it got sold, and prices. This has turned to be … I’ve had high praise for this in this. It was a sort of catalogue raisonnée, about five hundred pieces or something. And then that kept me pretty busy in fact. And I got to be not bad at photographing art, after I’d had about three hundred goes! But, you know what to do, and how important it is to get even lighting, and to get absolutely square on, and so on, and things like that. And then of course she got photographed at shows, and things like that.

M. C. I wondered if you’d visited, or been to some of the other houses designed for scientists around Canberra. I mean Theo Bischoff did one for Ian Marshall, over in Curtin. He was at the John Curtin School [of Medical Research].

B. G. Yes, that’s right. No, I haven’t very much. It just happened, you know. Now, for instance, the Fenner’s house, I think I’ve been in that, but Rosalie was the link there, she was a great friend of Bobby Fenner’s, his wife. I’ve visited there. They were very keen on gardens. And then the chemist, Arthur Birch. Well he was interested in the arts too, from a collector’s point of view.

M. C. Jesse [Birch] was an artist, wasn’t she?

B. G. Yes, Jesse was something of an artist. Jesse and Rosalie were very thick. But they bought a couple of houses. I don’t think they had a house built—the Fenners, they certainly had a house built.

M. C. Yes. The house that was designed for Arthur Birch was in Yarralumla. That was designed by the chap who worked on the National Library [Noel Potter]—a house with a big central courtyard.

B. G. Oh yes, that’s right, the central courtyard. With a pool in it, a swimming pool. Oh yes, I’ve swum in that pool!

348

M. C. That’s another very modern house, about the same time as this one, I think.

B. G. I think it was too. I think it was a bit after this one. Jesse was kind of influenced a little bit by this. But theirs was a grander house than ours, though. And Arthur was a good deal senior to me in the academic world, and so forth.

M. C. Do you remember anything about the house—besides swimming in the pool?

B. G. Oh, it had rooms all around. I remember they had quite a big living room, with a dining room there, off it. And they had a great array of curios, objets, you know, various things: pieces of old skeletons and things like that, all sorts of weapons—the sort of things you’d get in a museum. Arthur had a great eye for things like this. But he himself— oh, he was interested in art, you know, but he wasn’t really a critical sort of bloke.

M. C. Yes. The architect said that when he designed it, Arthur and Jesse were in England, they were over in Britain, they were still in England, before they came out here. And then Jesse was pregnant with twins, so they had to put another bedroom on for the other child. Hugh Ennor’s house—that would have been in the early days over in Vancouver Street?

B. G. Oh yes, I knew Hugh well, he was my boss for quite a while. And I’ve been in their house, but really you know, we hardly moved in the same social circles. He was the head of a school, and he was a big figure in the science world, in the same way that Arthur Birch was. Arthur was an FRS and all that sort of stuff. And I was in the next layer down. And then the next house next-door to his—Ringwood—have you had anything to do with him?

M. C. Yes, I met a neighbour there recently, someone who owns the house next-door, and I believe what happened was Hugh Ennor subdivided his place and built a house next-door, and sold the old one, that’s been demolished, and Professor Ringwood moved in to one of those houses.

B. G. Yes, there was something—I never really understood what was going on. Ted Ringwood, he also was a very experienced senior geologist. He was a marvel, Ted. I don’t know whether he had the house designed or built, or not. Again, it was his wife who was very thick with Rosalie. I knew Ted pretty well too.

349 M. C. Yes. There’s a chap called Mike Power who lives in that house now. I don’t know what he does, but he told me that he lives in that house now and when I was photographing it from the street he went inside and looked at the records to find out who designed it—this is the Ringwood’s one—but he couldn’t find the records. And also, Sir John Overall lived in that house afterwards too.

B. G. Oh, I didn’t know that. We rather lost touch with Ted, and Ted died rather early. And his wife was Swedish, and she went back to Sweden for a while. And she returned to Australia, but we weren’t as close with them after that as we had been.

M. C. Did you know Gordon Ada, he’s in Parkhill Street?

B. G. Oh yes, he just lives along the road.

M. C. Does he still live in Parkhill Street?

B. G. No, I think he left the house there—only a short while ago. And moved into something more compact. The same reason as I have, in fact.

M. C. Yes, I’d like to catch up with Gordon. He used to have an office next-door to Frank Fenner, and I met someone else who knows him, but I haven’t met him yet. But I’ve looked at all The Canberra Times articles about all the houses that were built, and it was a very nice house originally, with courtyards.

B. G. Yes, that’s right. Oh it was a nice house. And did he have it built, did he?

M. C. I think so. But what it said in the paper was, he and his wife came to Canberra, and again it was late, fairly late nineteen sixties, because he took over from Frank as Director of the John Curtin. And then they saw a house under construction, and they approached the owner and bought the house already under construction apparently. That’s what it said in the newspaper.

B. G. Is that so? Oh yes, that could well be.

M. C. There’s a woman called Anne Whitelaw—she wrote all the articles for The Canberra Times in the sixties.

B. G. I remember that name.

350 M. C. I thought I’d ask Phoebe Bischoff about her, because Phoebe kept all the dates of all the newspaper articles about Theo’s houses.

B. G. How is Phoebe, by the way, now?

M. C. I’ve spoken to her on the phone and she sounds fine. I’d like to interview her at some stage—she’s very helpful when I speak to her on the phone—but she says: “I don’t really know anything”, and I said “no, you know a lot, you’ve been very helpful”.

B. G. Oh yes I’m sure she would be, and knowing that you’ve been round all Theo’s houses. And having been to this one for instance—yes, and the Pikes’ house. Yes, the Pikes had a bit more money than we did, and you could see this reflected in some of the fittings. Actually, Rosalie began to make big money after a while, but anyway that didn’t really matter—she had the house that she wanted, this was the kind of house we wanted. We had some discussion as to whether the studio should be built apart from the house, down on the lawn down there, or somewhere like that. But I wrote a piece about this once, and I said that it soon became clear that what she did was so much part of her domestic life, you know—the house was an integral part of what she did, almost.

M. C. Yes. You wrote something about that?

B. G. Oh. yes, a bit about that. But I’ll give you a copy of that.

M. C. I’d love to see it. Maybe Martin might have that?

B. G. Oh yes, he would have a picture of that.

M. C. Possibly up there would also be good for all the materials coming and going. I mean if you had to walk all the way down to the garden with materials and big things …

B. G. Oh yes. But mostly it was a domestic thing though. There was a piece I wrote in there about the show she had after she died—the retrospective—and I wrote, what did I call it? Oh, “The Artist in Residence”, which I thought was a good title, but nobody else did! (laughs) Pride cometh before a fall! No, but there might be a few bits in there you might pick up. And if Martin hasn’t got one you can get it off somebody else.

M. C. I just wanted to ask … a couple of other houses I wondered if you’d been to. Over in Campbell there’s two or three houses. Otto Frankel’s house, or John Philip’s.

351 B. G. John Philip’s. Oh yes, we knew John pretty well.

M. C. A Roy Grounds house.

B. G. Yes. Toss, our second son, knows him. He’s got a house over there, in fact. They know these houses well. And John Philip[s]—no it wasn’t John Philip[s]—who was the architect?

M. C. Roy Grounds.

B. G. Roy Grounds, of course. He designed three houses, of whom John bought one. And it’s a nice house. That’s the house that I think has gone to …

M. C. Hester’s boss, right? From the [Australian National] Gallery.

B. G. Oh yes, I’ve got very bad on names as you can remember. Ron Radford.

M. C. Yes, I think she said Ron is renting that one.

B. G. Yes, that was one of Hester’s great achievements. She’s sort of his personal something or other, and he was looking for a house within walking distance of the Gallery because he hasn’t got a licence. But it had to be a house with some fashion, some style about it. And she dug up this house, she and Toss dug up this house by Roy Grounds. He moved in and he’s got some complicated arrangement.

Well science and art aren’t all that far apart.

M. C. That’s one of the questions I was going to ask you. Science, art, architecture— what do you think is the relationship?

B. G. Well I did write a little piece about that once—[a] very small piece. And I said that … [looks unsuccessfully through art journal for his article]

What I set out to do—people used to think that because I had a bit of a science reputation, I was the brains behind Rosalie, but this was not at all … not the slightest bit true. And I set out to describe what I actually had done for her and whatnot. And there were a few pieces that I had had an appreciable hand in—you know, a hand—a marginal hand. But that’s not …

352 It’s a bit that says, “the exciting and vital work of the scientists and, you’re lucky if you’ve got one foot in the exciting and vital world of scientific astronomy, and another in the equally exciting and vital world of art, you know”. That was a phrase that I thought summed it up pretty well. But I’m just looking to see what the exact wording is.

This might just interest you, some of the things in this book. This is much more about what she did. You know, about people. The other two people that, who I think of—Peter and Marie [Hagerty] Vandermark, and they … Marie worked as her assistant—Marie’s a pretty good painter. Peter works at the Gallery, and he is a pretty good sculptor. And she got very close to them—especially in the later parts of her life.

M. C. Yes, and they helped with her work in the studio—he was her assistant?

B. G. Yes, Peter used to help a lot. But she was very jealous about this, though—hated people working ... She even got a little bit … her granddaughter once was sitting on the floor once by [her], and there’s some odd scraps about. And she picked out one, and she stuck them onto the board. A few odd bits of yellow, and there was the sun up there and … coming out there. And she said “oh look”. [And] Rosalie [was] not pleased! I was really surprised by this. I thought, being challenged by your own granddaughter—doesn’t happen to many people! I was rather pleased with it, but … But she was always like that though. She was very much of this view that … I got credit for some of the things she did. Oh she didn’t like this. That was why I wrote this bit really. But I was quite clear what I did do. And I think it did that.

M. C. Finally, one thing I’d like to ask, just to get your impression about, we started to touch on it then, about the number of scientists who have these modern houses in Canberra, and from my impression it wasn’t money, because they were often done to a budget, and Frank Fenner’s house was done to a strict budget. And I noticed in your house, on the file you had a budget of $20,000 for everything. And it came very close to $20,000.

B. G. Did it? Oh, I though it was a bit more. But anyway we were very conscious of the fact of money.

M. C. So it wasn’t the fact that scientists could afford big budget houses, it wasn’t that. And I just wondered what you think about this: That after the Second World War, the decades after the Second World War, seemed to be times of enormous change and new possibilities in architecture, science—various disciplines. Do you think it’s possible that, because scientists could see that their world was changing, and new things were

353 happening, that they were in a good position to see that architecture should change also? Do you think there’s anything in that?

B. G. Yes, I’d … could be, could well be. I’ll tell you what, what I would add to that is that Canberra is a very specific place because there’s a relatively high proportion of scientific—well, of academic—people here. The National University is a big place, and it sets a very high standard. It’s urbane. They made this clear from the outset—it was going to be a good place, elite place. So there’s a lot of academics who value academic values and things like that. That would be one point to make about that. And there was a second one, I’ve forgotten what it was now. No, I can’t quite remember.

M. C. Well there’s CSIRO here as well, of course, bringing people here.

B. G. Yes. Oh indeed, indeed. I’m sorry, I forgot about that. Oh yes, CSIRO had about four divisions. They still do out there. Of course they’ve been cut to pieces by the last wretched government. Thank God he’s out of it at last!

M. C. It’s great isn’t it!

B. G. But that was a great organization. And they too were very much aware of sort of artistic values and things like that. A function of that is how a function of art is often very closely associated.

M. C. A few scientists from there [CSIRO] had [architect-designed] houses. John Nicholson, over in Campbell, that was a Roy Grounds house.

B. G. That’s right, so it was, so it was, yes.

M. C. And Frankel—Otto Frankel.

Oh, yes, Otto was a great … Yes. His wife knew Rosalie well too. There was a great wives … it’s funny, all the wives knew each other. I think it was partly interest in flowers I think, although Rosalie sort of branched out of that, you know, into, you can see, you can see around you ...

M. C. Sure. In the early days I think it was—not so much when you moved to this house—but in the early days it was finding things to do in Canberra, because most of the wives were terrified of coming here. And that’s one of the reasons I think—well, in the case of Arthur Birch—that’s why they got such a great, a nice big house, because I

354 believe Jesse wouldn’t come, move out here, and Arthur also, unless they had a good house to come to.

B. G. Is that so?

M. C. And the same for Oliphant—for Mark Oliphant—much earlier. That house over in Dryandra Street. I don’t think it’s a great house, but it’s a very large house, huge house. And they wanted it to be at least as big as the house they lived in, in England, near the place where he was working there. So the University, to get him here, had to build him a big house. It wasn’t, I don’t think, a good house, but it was a very, very large house.

The other thing I am thinking about is, all of these houses, with the exception of—I don’t know if you knew Doug Waterhouse—his house was designed by some local architects, but it’s a, like a Georgian Revival house, it’s a “style” house. All the others [were] very modern houses with nothing to do with any style, and I was just wondering do you think scientists as a group were comfortable with houses that didn’t sort of didn’t fall back on any stylistic clichés, because they encouraged house designs that applied a kind of intellectual rigor, and pragmatism to do with problem-solving that they do in their own research, you know. So everything was thought through carefully and relying on principles to do with sun and light, rather than applying some outdated style. Do you think that scientists applied rigor, you know, to their relationships with architects?

B. G. That could be too, that could be. It’s kind of automatic I think. I mean after all houses are important: it’s where you live, and it’s worth giving serious thought to. It demands the application of serious thought.

M. C. Yes, that’s true. OK. Finally, one question I’ve got here—this has been terrific, because I’ve got a list of questions there, and you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been looking at them, because you’ve actually been saying all the things without me asking you. So that’s great. But the one last thing was, do you see any links between astronomy and architecture?

B. G. Ah, [laughs], that’s rather hard to say … involved in building that big telescope, which, ah … No the architects we had weren’t necessarily, weren’t so conscious of art, except when, when you’re building, designing a dome—I’m talking of domes for telescopes, and workshops and things like that. But oh yes, architects, I thought that they let themselves go a bit. I remember the first fire that we had on Stromlo that burnt the workshop, and the architects designed a new workshop and all the colours in this …

355 M. C. When was this, Ben?

B. G. Oh this was up on Stromlo.

M. C. Yes, but when, how long ago?

B. G. Oh, this was fifty-one, the fire—fifty-two the fire was—and then the new workshop was built about fifty-four. And this was a nice workshop, but the colours inside, the architects selected the colours. Artists would notice this a great deal … but they liked it all the same. And then that workshop got burnt down too, the most recent fire.

Yes, architecture. Well telescope domes demand architecture, of course they’re architectural structures, and the part on top is a hemisphere, and this turns round and it’s got slits that can open and so forth so the telescope can look out. So it’s quite an elaborate architectural structure. And the architectural … very little … functional needs of the telescope, and I don’t know about them paying particular attention to this. I would rather have thought not, but still they thought it was a nice job to have. And they were very keen on the job.

M. C. One of the things that I am starting to find in this—having spoken to one or two scientists and read a lot—is that the houses that were built in Canberra in that time were, as we said before, not grand architectural statements, but more things that related to where they are, the landscape, and where the light’s coming and the sun’s coming, sensible kind of things like that. In a way, I think they almost preceded what was called the environmental movement that was sort of late 1960’s, 1970’s. You know, people were started to get involved in the environment, instead of building monuments that looked great. It was something more sensible about the approach. And that’s come out in the talk to you and other people too, so what do you think about that? Did you have any environmental thoughts about this house?

B. G. Oh no, I never really thought about it. I mean it came of itself, you know. Of course we were aware of architectural aspects of the house, but not to a dominant extent. I think that would be, although ... For instance the argument over whether there was to be a—cutting a big arch in the wall, or not. That’s an architectural argument, isn’t it?

M. C. It is. That’s surprising actually, about that, because an arch seems to be … not within any of Theo’s houses I’ve seen so far.

356 B. G. No, I thought that too. I thought that too. I thought that was quite an unexpected turn for him to take. But anyway, it’s not the way it went.

M. C. OK. Look, this has been most helpful. We’ve covered a lot of territory.

Interview concluded at approximately 4.00 p.m.

Milton Cameron PhD Candidate Faculty of the Built Environment The University of New South Wales

357 CANDIDA GRIFFITHS (NEE PHILIP) INTERVIEWED BY MILTON CAMERON

2.30 p.m., 27 June 2008, Canberra.3

3 The name “Frances” is used in the interview because that is how Candida refers to her mother, and it is the title that Mrs. Philip preferred in later life. For most of her life, however, she was known as “Fay”.

358

M. C. I am conducting research into the development of the modern, architect- designed house in Canberra from 1953 to 1970. Of particular interest are a number of significant houses designed during that period for scientists and academics. This interview is with Candida Griffiths, the daughter of John and Frances Philip, who commissioned a house by Roy Grounds, later taken over by Robin Boyd, at 42 Vasey Crescent in Campbell. Candida, I understand that Frances was related, via the Mills and the à Becketts, to the Boyds. What was that family connection?

C. G. Well, if I had the Boyd book here, I could get out the family tree and I could point to it, but the way I understand it, it was Emilla Mills, she was the daughter of … had a fairly dodgy heritage … I think the story is something like she was the daughter of one of the Mills sons that came out from England, and he was in Australia because he had got into trouble because he belonged to some gang. But anyway, he did his time, he acquired a brewery, and in fact set up the first brewery in Melbourne, and became very wealthy. And Emilla Mills, I hope I’ve got the names right—my Uncle Harcourt, who’s also an architect, he loves family history, and he eats and breathes this stuff. Anyway, so she was not only wealthy—even though she came from a dodgy background—she was beautiful and intelligent, and she had the choice of who she wanted to marry. And she married, I think, William à Beckett, and this was of great embarrassment to the father, because the father had campaigned against alcohol. And so there she was, with money from alcohol. And then so she married him, and then their children all married into whatever artistic families that they married into. And, as I say, if you really want those details you need to talk to Uncle Harcourt, because he’s the family historian.

M. C. Yes, and there’s also the Boyd family history somewhere, so I could check in that.

C. G. Yes I do have a copy of the book, except I believe it’s on our daughter Louella’s bookshelf in Sydney.

M. C. I can get a copy, that’s fine. Did Frances’s interest in painting stem from any time spent with the Boyds?

C. G. Oh, Frances went to school—went to Murrumbeena State School—with Mary Boyd and Arthur, and in fact my Uncle Harcourt tells the story of how they had an art teacher in common, and the most precious pieces of art produced by the children were hung on the chimney breast. And the first piece to be hung was one by Arthur Boyd, and then that was replaced with one by my mother, whose nickname was “Fay” (her maiden name was Long). There’s a story about the art teacher, but I’m sure my mother just was

359 born with an interest, I mean she played with the Boyd children because they were around the corner and there was some sort of distant relationship, but no-one was particularly worried about what that was, and I seem to remember the father, Merrick Boyd—because we have a lot of pieces of pottery by Merrick—I think he used to bring them round as gifts, but I’m not quite sure why … its all been lost in history.

M. C. During the 1930’s, when Frances was a child, I’ve read that she displayed a keen interest in Australian native plants and actually established—in her Melbourne home—an early native garden. I wondered if you knew anything about that.

C. G. Oh yeah, my mother has always been fascinated by Australian native plants. She had an aunt who lived in the Gippsland Hills and she first started propagating and growing from plants from seeds up in the Gippsland mountains in her childhood. And my earliest memories of her as a young child was that along the kitchen bench she’d have little bowls with different seeds in them, and she’d tip out the boiling water and put new boiling over them to get them going. And she always had a glasshouse, and filled the garden with plants that she propagated. And always, whenever we travelled anywhere, we always sort of dotted round the countryside going to some odd-bod nursery or other, and it’s just always a passion. So her three passions were painting, plants and Australian birds, although she always adored having a pussycat as well.

M. C. Do you know why John and Frances decided to commission an architect to design their house?

C. G. OK. So my mother came from a family where her father was an architect, and so was her brother, Harcourt was an architect-town planner, and my grandfather was an architect and a structural engineer. And so it was just the normal thing to do. So that was what her upbringing was. [Candida is also an architect]

M. C. Do you know why they chose Grounds, given there was a family connection to Boyd? Was it because they knew the Academy of Science building?

C. G. I think it was because they … my parents lived in Canberra, obviously, at the time they decided to build, but they came from Melbourne, and they were familiar with the houses in Melbourne that they liked, and I know that my mum actually knocked on the door to check that she was right about who the architect was of a particular house that she liked in Melbourne. So they would have done their research thoroughly—my parents always did their research on everything.

360 M. C. And what do you know of the process of choosing the suburb of Campbell to live in, and obtaining the site?

C. G. Ah, now what do I remember. I remember that it was an auction. Now, the reason why Campbell is so close to Civic, and took so long to be released as land, as I understand it, is it was hilly, and therefore more expensive to do all the digging and everything. And my parents were very keen on the idea of having a house with a view. I think my mother’s background of holidaying in Gippsland with hills and views influenced that. And so apparently I would imagine that my parents walked the length and the breadth of the suburb. I know that a ladder was taken and leant up against an old yellow- box tree and the site was decided upon, that this was the site that would capture a view … and of the future lake. And then at the day of the auction the bidding started, and it got so far and then my father doubled it! And everybody was horrified, and it was in the paper as “Philip’s Folly”—no-one had ever paid so much for a piece of land! And I guess that was what my father decided that he would do, because this was the block that they wanted.

M. C. And Bruce Griffing was a colleague of John’s at CSIRO. I guess they would have probably planned to go to the auction together, did they?

C. G. Oh, I doubt it. They were colleagues, but they were by no means bosom buddies, they just knew each other. And I always was under the impression that it was a little bit of a surprise, the fact that they knew the people that bought the adjoining block. And I also believe that it was a complete surprise that all three owners had approached the same architect. And everyone was very pleased about this—including, of course, the architects—because to be given a commission of three houses in a row is an amazing thing to be given. And so yes, I think it all just fell into place.

M. C. OK, that’s what the old records in Australian Home Beautiful say, they said it was accidental like that. So the three clients ended up side by side, they commissioned Grounds independently, and at what point did the idea of a sort of unity—a planned sort of environment between the three of them—come up? Now, was that Grounds’s idea, do you think?

C. G. I cannot comment. I would imagine the answer is “yes”, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if my parents would have said ‘yes, that’s a fabulous idea, good idea, go with it’. I can’t imagine that they … In fact I wish I’d asked: isn’t it terrible when you realise that you can no longer ask what came first, the chicken or the egg? But I think my parents

361 were really very delighted with … they knew that they were part of something that was quite, quite different.

M. C. Yes, very much, and that comes out in some of the next questions. I just wondered if you knew who wrote … in the records at the National Library there’s a typed history of the Philip House. Would that have been John or Frances, do you think, that wrote that up?

C. G. Well it might have been me, but I don’t know. It could well have been me—I gave a tour, after I did the renovations of the house—you know how the Institute has a bus tour every so often? I partook in that, and I guess that I could have well written that. But I’m not entirely sure because I haven’t got it in front of me. But I certainly would have checked all the facts with my mum. I know that there’s a man called, is it someone Miles in Canberra who has a website? Now he’s certainly written a couple of pages, and there are some things in that that aren’t one-hundred percent accurate.

M. C. Right—that’s Martin Miles?

C. G. Martin Miles, that’s correct. So I’m not sure which document you’re referring to.

M. C. That’s OK. I actually have transcribed a lot of it, but I can’t photocopy it. There was also some notes on the Griffing House, prepared by one of the Griffings, I presume.

C. G. Oh well, it’s an enormously long time ago that they left the house. They really only lived in it for half a dozen years I think. They had one, two, three children, and then quite a big gap to the youngest, and I believe that Penny Griffing suffered from post- natal depression, and they ended up just going back to the U. S. But they did not sell the house for many, many, many years, and they rented it out to sort of a group of young women who mainly worked at CSIRO, so it was a group house for years, and then finally it was sold. It’s always been sold to people who have absolutely not the slightest idea why it’s like it is, and have done nothing but … it’s just been a terrible destruction from day one!

M. C. In a letter to Grounds, very early on, John explained that the three houses were ‘being planned to have a certain unity which might have a distinctly Australian flavour about it’. Do you have any comment about what he might have meant by that?

C. G. Well I think he was—in fact both my parents were—fairly scathing about the typical suburban box. They were all for economy of material and economy of scale, they

362 certainly weren’t interested in sort of the grandiose at all, but I think that they were very much attracted to the look of the old pub, and the veranda, and I think that they very much liked the honesty of the old rural outbuildings.

M. C. Yes. Do you think there’s anything in the Philip House that is a simplification of that colonial style of building, with the posts going up?

C. G. Well yes, I think the posts, the veranda, I think the fact that it’s so well set back from the street sort of gives it the look of, you know, “approaching the homestead from afar”. It’s very symmetrically set out—it’s sort of almost a little bit like you’ve got the three bits: the entrance and the rooms going off from the sides. But there’s really nothing pretentious about the house, it just used materials and space very wisely.

M. C. It’s very interesting what you say about the Australian outback, and the honesty of pubs and buildings. Did they ever talk about the house in that way, that it had any kind of connection to that, because its certainly not mentioned by Grounds anywhere?

C. G. Well I know that a country aunt arrived very shortly after the house was finished, and she climbed the stairs, because of course to this very day Australians have a thing against stairs, they sort of think that they’re a bad thing, I mean when you get old—oh, shock horror! You might fall down the stair! And she looked out the window, and she said: “Well, you’ve got a nice view anyway”. Because, of course, she was horrified there was no wallpaper, there were no nick-nacks, it was all bare, you could see straight into the kitchen. And my father said “So what do you mean by ‘anyway?’” And I think my parents both liked the feel of escaping from the ordinary—not that my mother’s background was particularly ordinary, but my father’s was, and his parents were very ordinary, and they lived in ticky tacky little boxes with no outlook, and every window covered with nylons, and curtain after curtain, and cave-like. And yes, so I think that my parents were both very broadminded, and they liked to be different, and they liked to be their own selves. And if we ever wanted to do something, and we’d say: “Well so-and- so’s got that, or does that”, they would always criticise us for, you know, “why do you want to be like everybody else? You make up your own mind, you do your own thing.” And I think that that was a really nice thing about both of my parents.

M. C. They seemed to be very keen to avoid any suggestion of “architectural stylism”— which is what you’ve just alluded to there—which Canberra was full of in those days. So they were consciously seeking to do something that was different to that.

363 C. G. Yes, they were looking for something … well, as we see here, [points to painting on wall of houses in a streetscape] this is a painting that my mother painted in Donegal, in Ireland, and my mother just had a love of shapes and forms and soft colours, and it goes right through all of her artwork. So it was just an expression of their personalities. I think when you really have had a lot to do with any building, you see your personality coming through it.

M. C. The article in Australian Home Beautiful in December 1963 stated that this house “contains many of Dr. and Mrs. Philip’s ideas, formed from houses they have lived in here and abroad, and from a close study of contemporary architecture”. I noticed that John was a research fellow with the Californian Institute of Technology in 1958 to ‘59. In regard to that previous statement, do you recall John or Frances ever talking about any observations about modern architecture they might have seen in the United States during that period, or other specific buildings that they loved?

C. G. Well, no, but a lot of the things that were in our home came from America, like we had an American traditional mailbox, with the flag, and we had some very simple traditional timber rocking chairs. But from my own experience of living in America, I can see the influences enormously there. But not of the polite American living, more of the modern architecture of that era. And just the melamine cups and saucers and all of that sort of stuff that you now see in museums of what used to be modern art, my parents brought an awful lot back of that sort of stuff. And I guess from my reading, in those days Australians did feel very much isolated and an awful lot of Australians felt like England was home. And I just think that they really enjoyed travelling and just absorbing everything that was different. But they only liked what they liked—they were never the sort of people that would go: “Oh, such-and-such says it’s good, it must be good!” They were never like that.

M. C. In his biography of Robin Boyd, Geoffrey Serle also attributed many ideas in this house to John and Frances, including partial solar heating. What was the deal with that?

C. G. Yes. Well, actually I should go back one step. One of the things that influenced the house a lot was that my parents, when they had been married a short time, lived in Deniliquin. And there was a huge housing shortage, because it was directly after the war, and initially they lived in a tent by the Edwards River. But after that they got to move into the old hospital—and it may have even been the old mortuary so the story goes, but I’m not sure. But anyway there were wide doors and wide windows, and I think in fact their dining room table was either the mortuary bench, or, I don’t know, it’s all lost in history. But that Australian building that was an old hospital really influenced them, and the fact

364 that the doors opened and they went straight out onto the veranda—that was something of enormous importance. But, my father was a physicist, and very aware of the fact that heat rises, and wanted to use the physics of the way heat worked rather than working against it, so that’s why we lived upstairs—because heat rises. And Grounds was very keen on having the six-foot overhang all the way round. And my father said, in fact did the calculations, said “well this is how many … what sort of energy you are robbing us of, and this is how much it’s going [to cost] to heat the house”. And so that’s the reason why the front north eave was cut back to the extent it is. And yes, in comparison to other houses in Campbell, it was certainly the only house that I was aware of that actually made use of the sun to heat the place. And I always think it’s a joke when you get taught about how to design correctly for an environment, and I just love the west sun that we used to get into that house in winter: I used to lie there and soak it all up.

M. C. Were there any solar panels in the house, or were they just talking about solar orientation in design?

C. G. It was just passive solar orientation. Originally there was actually a sprinkler set on the roof, to help cool the house when it was meant to be very hot—that they would put a great lot of water onto the roof, and dripping down. But it never worked, because the water pressure was never good enough to do that, because when we were doing that everyone would have their sprinklers on to water their lawns, and certainly one of the sounds from my childhood and summer holidays was that “swish, swish, swish swish” of sprinklers which I miss enormously. I really miss that sound!

M. C. That idea sounds very progressive for its time. I presume that would have been John’s idea?

C. G. Yes, for sure. John always loved … he found his mathematics incredibly creative. He saw it as a very beautiful thing: as you or I might think of something that we’ve just drawn as very beautiful, he really, really saw great beauty in his calculations, and he loved to graph things, and always by hand, and he really enjoyed that.

M. C. And he also saw beautiful numbers on the speedometer in the car?

C. G. Oh yes, that’s right!

M. C. Now, there’s a few questions here, where obviously you were very young at the time, and you wouldn’t have had personal recollections, but your answers would be

365 based on conversations with your parents, or family stories and things. Do you know anything about the first meetings with Grounds?

C. G. Yes, I do. One of my closest friends is Victoria Grounds, but—it just happens this way—she’s quite a lot older than I am, and she knows nothing of this, because she was brought up going to boarding school. But my parents went to either Grounds’s office or his home—and that I can’t be sure of—and apparently he dramatically came downstairs, spread out his arms and said ‘ah, the Philips, do come in’, with great pomp and ceremony and drama. And my mother actually thought he was a bit of an arrogant so and so, and much preferred Robin Boyd. But nevertheless, I think their interactions and relationships were quite good.

M. C. OK. And reactions to the initial design drawings. Did they talk about what they thought?

C. G. Well, I believe from looking at the drawings, that what was initially produced—he put the living room on the ground floor, and it was quite a traditional layout, and my parents said: “No, no, no, that’s not what we want, we want it to be an upside-down house”. And Roy Grounds said something like “Well, I suppose you know what you’re doing”. And wasn’t particularly thrilled, but I suppose realised he had to back down, because they knew what they wanted.

M. C. OK. And what do you know about Robin Boyd’s involvement? I know that Grounds went overseas, and Robin took over. One source stated that he actually drew the whole thing, another said he did the interiors.

C. G. I don’t know, I think it’s a matter of going through all the records and trying to work it out. All I know is that my mother much preferred working with Robin. I think she thought that he was very sweet-natured, and didn’t have the ego, or the great drama, of Roy Grounds.

M. C. I think your mother spoke to Geoffrey Serle, because that came across in the biography of Boyd. She thought that Robin was a sweetie, and persuaded him to climb a tree to check the view out or something—it sounds like it came from your mother. Now, the idea of entering through the playroom on the lower level: there was some correspondence on the file in the Victorian library about that. What was the reason for that, and do you think that was it a success?

366 C. G. Well, it was one of those formal entrances that was used really for guests. We always went into the house through the laundry. But in fact when Ross and I got married in my parents’ back yard, it was a little bit like the guests came down the aisle, because the two front doors were wide open, and then straight through—well, we’ve always called it the playroom, but it was the second living room—and then the back doors were open, and everybody just filed through the house onto the back terrace. But the screen—there’s a well-documented screen that was on rollers—it was always rolled across to create a more traditional sense of entry. And after my father died, and mum and I redid the house, she decided that she no longer wanted to have a carpeted area down there, and that she really wanted to have a timber floor, and it would have meant doing a bit of joinery on the screen to lift the height of it a bit. And I suggested to her: “Well look, do you really want it? You haven’t actually rolled it into place for years.” And she thought about it. “No, I’m sick of the stupid thing.” Because it was really very beautiful, it was an ash frame with [a] Japanese-type bamboo blind that was held taught by the frame. But I mean we did use the playroom, and we often used to play touch football with a sock, and my brothers were forever crashing into it, and we’d be forever trying to get the dents out and straighten it. But after sort of half a dozen accidents, it was always a bit broken after that, because bamboo blinds are fairly fragile things.

M. C. It’s interesting that you mentioned that, because on the plans I’ve seen in Australian Home Beautiful, it shows a screen, very light-weight, [that] looks like it’s not part of the building.

C. G. Yes, it was actually hinged on the handrail, and the stringer of the stairs, and it was a beautiful piece of joinery, but you know, it was just one of those things that really, we really didn’t use. I mean I was always the one that was sent to the door to tell the Mormons to go away! But if my parents had friends around—and they entertained a lot, and they had a lot of dinner parties—the people would always come through the front door. But from an everyday thing, we always entered from the east, and the east is a far more sensible direction to enter from. And at one stage there was going to be a pulley system for putting shopping in, and hoisting it up the three floors, but that was thrown out—due to costs no doubt. But my parents never regretted having two full flights of stairs to get to the kitchen—I think they felt that this was part of their exercise. And both my parents—well, obviously my father’s life was cut short by an accident, but he never had any problem with the stairs, and my mother, even though she was seriously ill with pancreatic cancer—still climbed the stairs till the last days, so it was a very positive part of their lives.

367 M. C. John listed his interests as being “reading, writing, architecture and cooking”, and I’ve seen some of his poetry. I just wondered, besides his involvement with Ken Woolley—well, they were both involved with Ken Woolley on the Pye Laboratory, and John was also a Sulman Award jurist one year—I wondered if you know what year that was. Sorry to ask you a detailed question, and did he have any other involvement with architecture—I mean he listed it as a hobby?

C. G. Well, he certainly was very interested in architecture, and in fact I have a horrible feeling, the reason he was killed, where he was killed was, he was stepping out of a tram to go to a Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition in Amsterdam. I mean I can’t be a hundred percent sure of that, but it does seem quite likely, because he had a programme of that exhibition in his pocket. We always just used to look at buildings when we travelled. We always visited, not just churches, but villages, it was just what we did. We were not a religious family, and apparently I once said, in a very high-pitched voice, after being dragged to the tenth cathedral in a day: “But Daddy, what are churches for?” And he said: “Oh, very good question!”

M. C. Yes, it was a good question—a way of appreciating architecture maybe!

C. G. But he took an enormous interest in the architecture of, the design of what was originally called the F. C. Pye Laboratory. But I don’t know that he would have developed such a keen interest if it hadn’t been for my mother. I’m sure it was my mother who educated him in the first place, because she came from an artistic family that valued architecture and everything to do with that sort of thing, whereas my father came from a family that … well his mother was a schoolteacher, and she was actually no fool at all, but my grandfather was a dairy inspector, and they only moved to Melbourne because my clever father got a full-paying scholarship at Scotch College. And so his background was quite, quite humble. Another really great thing about both my parents: they were not snobby people, they really valued people for not where they came from, but how interested they were in things. And so it didn’t matter whether you had lots of money— it’s how you wanted to use your mind that counted. And I thought that was a very good thing about both my parents. And so we were not encouraged to be doctors and lawyers or anything like that. We were encouraged to do what we were interested in doing.

M. C. And I’m quite amazed at the amount of energy that John had for this project when it was being built, because, as I said before, I’ve been some way through the archives in Victoria, and he was writing so regularly—and very detailed responses. He was a very energetic person, according to the other records, as a scientist. I guess that

368 was partly it, but was there anything else that was kind of driving him for this? I guess the house was a pet project for him?

C. G. Well it was a pet project, and where he had a passion, he had a passion. He had his blank spots too, but his work—and anything that interested him—he was quite passionate about. My biggest interaction with my father, as a child was, we used to go shopping together of a Saturday morning, and then end up at the library. And because he worked all the time, he was quite driven. We had a very odd timetable to our life. We would eat dinner pretty much at five o’clock at night, and then my parents would retire to their bedroom. We never had television in the house ever, and they would go to bed very early, unless of course they were entertaining. And my father would often get up in the wee hours of the night—and I’m talking about sort of two o’clock—and work for hours through the night, and that’s how he ticked. And he could sleep very easily—he wasn’t the sort of person that couldn’t just go to sleep. And I know that when you get up early, your mind is very fresh and you can work very efficiently. Well my mother made his life very easy in that, you know, in that she was the back-stop, she made everything work, so he really just had his life to himself. And I guess mostly he considered us children to be a bit of a nuisance.

M. C. Was cost an issue in regard to the house? I notice that Grounds wrote down the cost, so they were probably asking him how much it was going to cost.

C. G. Oh, cost was very much an issue, I know that I was under the impression that we were pretty much stony broke, and that my brothers had their school clothes, and a change of clothes, and that was it. And it was very much that we had to be always very careful with money. And the whole design of the house was designed so that it was very efficiently, easily built, with no waste of materials, and it should have been a very inexpensive building to construct. I suppose anything that’s different always makes people worried, and therefore, you know, add on dollars—or in those days pounds—but I think that my father was foolish in that he did accept the lowest quote, because of course it went out to tender more than once because of the two times that the original builders went broke. I think the first time it didn’t even get started. And I know that I would always tell clients it’s not necessarily a very clever thing to take the lowest quote, and I just can presume that this advice was given, because they succeeded in getting a lot of quotes, it wasn’t like they were desperate for a quote. So I don’t know what happened there, but I guess it was a bit of a tragedy, and my parents did suffer through the agony of having a house that was half built for—I think it stood open to the elements for eighteen months at one stage—and I know that when we came to put in new windows, the walls were so twisted, and the reason they were twisted was that in those

369 days the timber windows, that were actually done by Stegbar, were up the full two storeys in one piece, so it had the—what’s it called, the spandel or … in the middle?

M. C. Transom I suppose?

C. G. Oh no, no that’s a transom, [pointing to window]. It’s the actual bit that’s covering up the floor between the two. And the whole thing had twisted, and so the block-work had actually been placed to marry up with this twisted window. And in fact forty years later these Western Red Cedar windows actually did start decaying, which is quite interesting because you were always given the impression that Western Red Cedar is not capable of decaying. So nothing ever locked, because everything was always so warped, and so we made the decision that we would keep the proportion of the timber windows, but we needed to make it so that my mother didn’t have so much maintenance to worry about, so we went for the proportion of the shopfront-type aluminium window, and double glazed—a bit of a contradiction in terms of that sort of frame, I know. But at least it was a sensible decision, and the aluminium fabricators—who were used to working on commercial buildings and therefore weren’t very worried about the heights or anything like that—they really had a bit of a struggle because of these very twisted walls.

M. C. I can imagine!

C. G. And the other thing that was really bizarre when we did the windows was that, even though the original drawings showed lintels, it turned out they’d never been put in, and the windows were load-bearing! And so mum and I, because we both did a lot of work on the job ourselves, we were demolishing a window and the roof started falling in! So we just went and got some old blocks, and some old pieces of post, and a couple of car jacks, and we jacked it all up.

M. C. You did this yourself?

C. G. Yes. Well, you see my mum had a very practical upbringing, and I got that sort of upbringing from her. My father would never know what to do under those circumstances—he was totally hopeless with that sort of thing. But anyway, I was a little embarrassed, because the day the builder started, the first thing I had to say was: “Well, actually, we’ll have to put in a steel frame here, because there’s nothing to actually hold up the roof!” And so this was quite a major bit of engineering. But anyway, it doesn’t wobble now—it’s all very firm.

370 M. C. That’s good. Do you know if there were there any problems in receiving approvals from the authorities when it was first built, for being a little bit different?

C. G. I think it did, but I think Roy Grounds sweet talked them and had them kissing his feet, and even though it must have broken all the rules, he certainly had that all under control, and it didn’t appear to be a big issue. It was more of a big issue when my mother wanted to … she put in the garden walls behind the house. In fact my grandfather was the block-layer for doing those, and after the neighbours put on their, very inappropriate, skillion-roofed extension at the back, mum decided she needed two or three extra courses to try and obliterate the view, and I certainly can remember—it would have been the NCDC then—[the] man coming, and of course the block walls then didn’t even have approval at all, it was all so different then. And I just remember my grandfather saying, because it’s a very rocky site, ultimately it’s the rocks underneath that are being the foundation to this wall, as he threw together a bit of old Canberra reds with a bit of mortar between them, and that’s the real footing that’s there—although, of course, the real footing’s the rock underneath, and, you know, they haven’t cracked much in forty years.

M. C. And when the house was finished, did it meet John and Frances’s expectations, do you think, or did it surprise them in any way?

C. G. Oh, I think that they were really delighted with the place. I know that after my father died mum and I decided to—because by that time the wet areas were well and truly past their use-by-date … My brief to myself, and my brief to my mother, was that everything was to be done almost exactly as it was beforehand, although all the things that had always annoyed my mother were to be fixed. And in the files there’s a huge amount of business about these little Japanese mosaic tiles which were very pretty, apart from the fact that the grout was always a misery. So mum was very happy to get rid of those, and although chose again a tile that was very similar in colour, but I suppose it must have been a hundred by a hundred tile instead. And even the grout, I remember we experimented and we actually bought three colours. It must have been a grey, a white and an off-white, and we mixed these grouts together until we got it just so. Because we didn’t want it to be a yellow off-white, and we didn’t want it to be a grey off- white, it had to be just the right off-white. And so I know how much work was put into the original house, because I saw first-hand how much care we were putting in the second time round. And, of course, in the original kitchen there was no space for a dishwasher, and the fridge, of course, was a lot smaller, so even though we redesigned the kitchen with a dishwasher—I mean we did actually have a dishwasher, it was one of those floating ones which was, you know, a bit of a messy thing to have in the house—so mum was very

371 happy to finally get that built in. But you know, I measured up all the old cabinetry and had it rebuilt exactly the same way, and the only mistake with that—which I sort of feel cross with myself about—was that of course that the backing was thicker in these days than it used to be, and so some of the plates didn’t actually fit in the high cupboard because of that tiny difference. But mum was very insistent that it was done exactly the same way. Although there were subtle changes, like with the cabinet that was over the servery there used to be sort of like a pelmet area, and in that pelmet used to be another one of these Japanese blinds that come down. And this was to create privacy when they were entertaining, so my father could add alcohol to everybody’s desserts without them knowing, or just to screen the clutter of the kitchen from the dining area. And that was used occasionally, but basically it was decided it was not a very important thing after all. And so—but I still had the exact same detail, but in that position instead of having this blind coming down, it was the ideal spot to put lighting over the bench. But another thing was that my mother absolutely insisted on keeping the height of the servery bench at table height, which used to annoy my brothers to high heaven because they were quite tall, and they were forever killing their heads when the cupboard doors above were being left open. But she wouldn’t be persuaded to have a more traditional nine hundred high kitchen bench, and she had decided originally it was to be that height because the spaces really are quite modest. She wanted to have the felling of it being low, and open, so you could see through. She also wanted the bench to be able to be sat at, and in fact my brothers and I used to have our meal at the kitchen bench when my parents were entertaining, and, as I said before, they entertained a lot. And so she insisted on keeping that—although the one thing that she was happy to change was, originally the built-in stove tops were also at a very low level, and then stepped up for just a small amount of the bench where the kitchen sink was, and that was then simplified to a nine-hundred height. But it was all done with huge respect for what had happened before. I think probably more so than most architects would do.

M. C. Oh, well you were definitely the right person to do that. That’s terrific.

C. G. And another thing my mother decided she couldn’t stand any longer and that was the ensuite upstairs. My parents always preferred baths, and so there was a bath with a shower over the top of it, and then a toilet running next to the bath, and the actual hand-basin was part of the bedroom. And mum decided she couldn’t stand it any more … and also she couldn’t stand … oh, it makes my mother sound like she couldn’t stand anything … but she really hated the terrible things that happened to the middle house, you see, and the east always overlooked this roof because of the heights. So it wasn’t the greatest outlook anyway, but by the time they’re all these hideous extensions, and all the fascias had been redone incorrectly, she really decided she couldn’t bare looking in that

372 direction any more, so the windows in the kitchen on the east and in the ensuite on the east were all removed, and they put skylights put in, and in the bathroom that meant that we actually made use of the fact that because the besser blocks, there’s four inches of cavity and then another four inches so the actual depth is quite deep, more like a stone wall. And so there was quite a lot of depth, so we managed to put in a little cabinet that made use of all of this, but it was all done with enormous care, and it was lovely having my mother as a client because she did care so much, and I ended up earning my father’s car from all the work I did! But I was probably working on it for $20 or less an hour, but it was just such a wonderful experience, I wouldn’t have not done it, it was such a pleasure to work with a client who really cared, who actually knew the difference, who’d say “no, I’m not having those hideous taps, I don’t care how cheap they are, I want these ones!”

M. C. Yes, that’s great. And this is the house that Ron Radford is living in now?

C. G. Yes, it was terrible, terrible, like another death, having to sell the house, it was a very traumatic experience, but we sold it through tender, on the grounds that we felt we would have a little more control over where it went because once again, what happened to the house was more important than getting the absolute most in an auction. And of course once you’ve sold you have no control—I can only hope and presume that it’s gone to the best possible home.

M. C. Well all the work you’ve done to the kitchen and things would help, because people could see that it doesn’t need to be done again.

C. G. Yes. Oh, I’ve been in those Roy Grounds two-storey townhouses in Forrest. Oh God, some of those kitchens are such an insult to the architecture, they are so bad, with their forty-five degree angles, and their aqua blues, and—oh, dreadful.

M. C. Yes, I haven’t been in there – just as well—it’s such a lovely building from the outside. When the house was built—when the three of them were built—they were covered in Australian Home Beautiful and The Canberra Times I think, and there’s various references to the fact that they raised “local controversy”.

C. G. Oh, people used to drive past and stop, and it was sort of like: “Oh, have you seen these ugly, disgusting buildings that are made out of Besser Block?” And, well I suppose I am calling them Besser Block because that’s how they were always referred to—but of course they were concrete block, and that was a material that was, you know, a shockingly ugly material that wasn’t for real use, so that had a real shock factor. And the fact that they had big windows, and they had flat roofs, and they were a long way

373 back from the street—even the Blaker’s house was a long way back by normal standards—and yeah, there was a real shock factor there.

M. C. And the fact that there was three of them in a row, do you think that was another shock?

C. G. Oh yes, I think so, that was a shock … that it wasn’t “Have you gone to see the ugly house?”, [but] “Have you gone to see the three ugly houses?”—you know, three-in- one!

M. C. But on the other hand, a lot of people thought it was terrific, there were really good articles—Morton Herman, an architect came down form Sydney—and some of them saw it as the correct way to build, and a new way of living in suburbia, and things like that. I was just interested in the different points of view, that’s all. What about your friends, you know—when you took friends home to your house, did you get any comments?

C. G. Well my closest friend when I was a child was Catherine Evans. And her father was also a scientist, her father was Lloyd Evans, and the Evans’s and the Blakers were all terribly good friends. So it was all terribly … I don’t know why, but I wasn’t really aware that people—I thought everyone’s father worked at CSIRO. I really had no concept that people’s fathers did different things. I guess it was because my parents didn’t talk about class, or people having different amounts of money, I just simply, as a young child, was completely oblivious to the fact … And I really loved my house, and I adored my room— in fact, when I left home the thing that I was most worried about was leaving my beautiful room, and I was worried that I’d be looking at some horrible vermiculite ceiling instead of my lovely timber ceilings. And that did bother me, but I …

M. C. Well look at this! [points to house].

C. G. In fact the funny thing is, I built this house when—oh I guess its twenty years ago now—and we then did the renovation of my parents’ house pretty much ten years ago now, and things from this house were then taken over there. Like my mother decided— because the thing about concrete block is that as it ages it darkens, I guess it’s the grease in the air, and the walls had actually internally become quite dark. And mum decided that she really much would prefer to have painted walls, and so we meticulously—because all the pointing was just a round pointing between the blocks— we filled the pointing to make it all flush, and then we bagged, and we bagged, not sort of with wild strokes going every which way, it was all very neatly done. And my mother

374 was pleased with that decision, I guess I think for her … So we bagged and we painted it, and the two houses kept on looking … so they got more and more similar, which I always found embarrassing, but, on the other hand, you know as I was saying, you can’t sell a house and keep it, and I really like the fact now that I’ve captured so much of the things that I loved most about the house that I was brought up in, in my own house. So whereas before, when people would come here and go “Oh, this is very similar”, I’d sort of cringe with embarrassment and feel like I’d plagiarised the place, and now I feel I’ve captured it. But, just like my mother wanted to change things when we did the renovations that she hadn’t liked so much, I change things too. And one of the things that I particularly prefer about this house is the fact that when you’re in the upstairs you still can walk straight out on ground level, and I do think that was something that made the upstairs very isolated from the garden. You certainly could be involved with it visually, but you couldn’t just step out there. And mum used to enjoy eating on the back balcony, but my father would never do anything like that, and so … but then of course that’s the whole thing about building, there are always compromises, and you always try and accommodate a compromise just between the clients as well.

M. C. I’ve only got about two more questions. This has been fantastic, and there’s been questions here that you’ve already addressed very well in what you’ve been saying. But two other things come to mind. Where did Frances do her painting? Was it one of the downstairs rooms?

C. G. Oh yes, it was in the studio. So you have actually been to the house?

M. C. I haven’t been to the house. I’ve only seen the plan in Australian Home Beautiful.

C. G. Well, I should have enough plans here to sink a ship. See, this [kitchen elevation] is the sort of drawing that my mother did of the joinery in the kitchen. And these were copper-bottom pots that my brother now has. And it’s exactly how things were done. So, you see, she worked on the joinery herself.

M. C. Oh, I’ve seen copies of some of these on the files down in Victoria. So she did a lot of those drawings? Is that her drawing too?

C. G. This is definitely a drawing she did.

M. C. Because the letters always went to John, and so on.

375 C. G. Yes but mum was always … And the studio ran from north to south, directly under my bedroom, and my brother’s bedroom. And that was on the west side of the house, and so that had … in fact I remember, as a three or a four year old, sitting there watching my mother putting the slate on the floor. The central part on the ground floor was the garage, and then the third part, there was a bit of a cellar and a bit of a store. But that was the slope of the land and so some of it’s inaccessible. But anyway, I remember my mum doing the slate, and it was just done on gravel, and she made the mortar and put it between the slate, and it’s such a beautiful, beautiful pattern. It’s just what they call ‘crazy paving’, but you know, you stand there and you just see it as just a delightful pattern. Her studio always had the most wonderful smells of oil paints and linseed oil, and how she managed to do as much work as she did I’m not sure, but she actually has quite an enormous body of work, ‘cos she was the sort of mother who was always available, and in some ways she was saintly, always putting up with making everything just right for my father. But she’s done probably about thirty large portraits, she certainly wasn’t a timid artist: all her work is large, and her earlier work was mainly done with a palette knife, and then in her later years she changed to canvas and worked with both brushes and palette knife.

M. C. No, its really nice to hear, because you always think that often women didn’t get credit for a lot of these things. In Frank Fenner’s house, for instance, Frank is still alive, but his wife Bobbie died a long time ago, so it’s just very hard to get a picture of her involvement. So it’s nice to hear directly from you about these drawings and everything being your mother’s work, because I’ve seen those on the file.

C. G. And you see when the second builder went broke, I also remember her doing the tiling on the bench next to the downstairs bath. She did a lot of the work herself, and the builders were so chauvinistic, they treated my mother as … women in those days tended to wear high heels and skirts every day, and my mother always wore pants. But she was a very pretty woman, and she was very feminine, and boy, did she teach me a thing or two about getting, teaching those men how—well, she’d just get the best out of them—I mean they’d just be so rude and horrible to her for a start, and then slowly they would become respectful as they could see how capable she was. And she always used to praise anything they did well, and they’d drink it all up. And there was a foreman who did a lot of the work at the end called Gerard Reimersmann, he was a Dutchman, and very chauvinistic for a start. But by the end, oh, he respected my mother. And he always came back and did odd jobs for her, because my father was totally hopeless at anything like that, and if my mother couldn’t do it then Gerard would do it. And in fact Gerard came to Ross and my wedding, and I think that was really nice, I really think that that’s lovely that my mother created such a good relationship with anyone she worked with, that they

376 always really ended up enjoying her, in fact after she died I had an afternoon tea for her at her house, and I wanted the windows to be washed, and of course at a moment’s notice, and of course the window cleaner dropped everything to wash the windows of my mother’s house, because he liked her so well.

M. C. Sounds like she was a really good role model.

C. G. Oh she was the best, the best, absolutely! No, I was very, very lucky to have such a—well, you know she was hopeless—there were things she was totally hopeless at, like she was frightened of figures, she hated mathematics, and my father was brilliant at maths, he used to be so “oh, you’re a birdbrain, blah, blah, blah blah”. And yet she was so practical and capable, and ...

M. C. I think I’ve read a poem about that [by John Philip]. There’s a poem about that. I can’t remember the title, but it’s about a woman and maths. I won’t say any more! One last thing. You mentioned Lloyd Evans before, and I think I was looking at their house, but wondering who designed it. Were they in the same street where Pedro Geleris— across from Pedro?

C. G. No, they lived at number 3 Elliot Street, which, if you head towards Campbell Primary School—in other words past the Blakers’ House—there’s a street called Elliot Street, and it goes off to the left. And they were in a government house in Campbell, and they extended that house.

M. C. OK. They had an architect to do that?

C. G. I imagine they would have. The original house, I remember once saying to Catherine, because the new part of the house—I always quite liked that part, but the original bit was pretty much left untouched. And I remember saying something about it would have been nice if the angle of the original house roof had the drama of the extension. And I guess at that age she would have been early teens and being quite scathing about her parents and said something like “well you can’t expect my parents to spend money on something they don’t need to”.

M. C. I know who I was thinking of: David Curtis. He was a scientist at ANU. I’ve got to do some research. It’s probably a later – it’s in Campbell, its across from, pretty much where Pedro is. Possibly a Roger Pegrum house or something. I’ll follow that up.

C. G. Well, that must be a much later house.

377

M. C. It looks like a later house.

C. G. Because the name rings a bell, but I don’t know anything about the house.

M. C. Look, this has been fabulous, thank-you very much!

C. G. You’re welcome. I just wish I had asked my mother more questions about things. But do you want to just flick through any of these folders?

M. C. Yes, if that’s OK.

Interview concluded at approximately 4.00 p.m.

Milton Cameron PhD Candidate Faculty of the Built Environment The University of New South Wales

378 JOHN ZWAR INTERVIEWED BY MILTON CAMERON

8.00 p.m., 26 September 2008, Canberra.

379

M. C. I’m conducting research into the development of the modern, architect-designed house in Canberra from 1953 to 1970. Of particular interest are a number of significant houses designed during that period for scientists and academics. This interview is with John Zwar, who commissioned a house by Harry Seidler at 12 Yapunyah Street, O’Connor. John was a scientist with the CSIRO Division of Plant Industry. John, I note that you came to Canberra from Adelaide in 1952 to work at CSIRO. Were you born in Adelaide?

J. Z. No, I come from country Victoria, but I went to secondary school in Melbourne. And I was briefly in what was then the Bureau of Agriculture. I did Agriculture at University of Melbourne, and then I was briefly in the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, and then I got a scholarship at the Waite [Agricultural] Institute in South Australia, and it was there I joined CSIRO, and then we were moved to Canberra in 1952.

M. C. And your wife was Heather, where did you meet Heather?

J. Z. Oh here, in Canberra, I met her in Canberra.

M. C. OK. And I notice that Heather arrived in Canberra earlier than you, about 1950, and she lived in some hostels, and then you met, and you lived in a “Tocumwal” house in O’Connor.

J. Z. That’s right, for a little while, yes.

M. C. What was the atmosphere like in Canberra when you first arrived—in general?

J. Z. Oh well, it was still a small town—I think there were about 32,000 people in 1952, and it was a small town—nothing like now! I was in Reid House, which was just off Constitution Avenue, and Civic was a reasonably lively shopping centre, but the most lively shopping centre was Kingston—by far. But of course, well I had a car, we’d go over there sometimes, and Manuka was lively enough, but if you wanted to buy something you’d more likely go to Kingston than anywhere else. Civic was a bit of a backwater, little bit of a backwater—that’s my recollection of it anyway. The furthest north street, as I remember it, was Macarthur Avenue, the wooden houses had just been put up there, and I had a friend who lived there then, and he still lives there. Of course the south side I didn’t know much about, I knew very little about the south side, except as I say we’d go to Kingston and Manuka. But they were opening up new areas in, say, 1954, and I got married in 1954, and I was very naïve. And blocks came for sale in Yapunyah Street, and

380 somebody told me about it, I didn’t—I mean I was thinking vaguely about it but hadn’t done anything. But anyway I went up to Yapunyah Street and thought “that’s not a bad block”, and then an auction came on. The auction was only for key money. And I think the number would have been 10 Yapunyah Street, the block there went, I think, for £60.0.0. I thought that was too much and I stopped bidding. The next one was the one I got, I got it for £25.0.0 [chuckles] And the blocks on the lower side of Yapunyah Street— the two I’ve spoken about were on the upper side—the blocks on the lower side of Yapunyah Street, they were passed in, and people just went in and got them for nothing. [chuckles] Of course the scheme was then you rented, you were charged rent for the blocks, there was no—you didn’t ever own the blocks—but you were charged rent. And as I remember it, although I’m not going to swear to this, my rent was £12. 05. 08 per every three months, I think that’s what … And the rent was only on that Henry George, unimproved land value idea, that if you taxed the increase in value of the land you wouldn’t need to have any other taxes—unearned increment, that’s what it is. But it was a bargain at the time! [chuckles].

M. C. Sounds like it! Now, did you have a particular interest in architecture at that time?

J. Z. Oh I was interested, yes, yes. I’ve read books about architecture. I was interested in modern architecture. And at the time Harry Seidler had a fair bit of publicity, because he was in Sydney, and he’d built houses—or designed houses—and several municipalities had challenged his plans, and he’d gone to court and won every one. So that was—it made him—I don’t know whether to say notorious, but they certainly got him space in the press. Now I was naïve, but somebody said to me: “Why don’t you write to”—we used to discuss these things, I suppose—my friend said “why don’t you write to Seidler?” “Alright, I’ll write to Seidler.” So I wrote to him, and he said he was grateful for the enquiry, but he didn’t think that he’d be able to supervise a house, and whatnot. So I probably would have given up at that, but then it was probably the same friend said: “Why don’t you go down to see him?” So I made an arrangement, went down to see him, and, oh, I don’t think I performed particularly well, he … [but] from then in it was accepted that he would do a house.

M. C. So that was his Point Piper office, was it?

J. Z. Yes, it was Point Piper, yes.

M. C. And you drove up to see him?

J. Z. I suppose I did, yes, yes.

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M. C. And did you know of any specific buildings in particular he’d done? Or other modern buildings?

J. Z. Oh no, but I think I’d looked at his books, I think some of his books were published then. I could be corrected on that. And I knew about the Bowden House, although I think that was a bit later—it was being built while mine, no, before mine was being built. I think after we’d made the arrangements with Harry, I went over to look at the Bowden House, and it was in course of construction. But apart from that I hadn’t seen a Harry [Seidler] house, no.

M. C. It’s very interesting that you were attracted to Harry’s houses in those days, because as you say he had a bit of a reputation, and they were quite radically different. And what attracted you?

J. Z. Oh I was interested. I’d read about them, and oh, you know, in not a very organised way, I knew something about these big architects—like Gropius and whatnot—I’d heard of them. In fact that—Harry gave me that [points to framed print hung high on wall], that’s Homage to the Square, that’s a—is it Gropius? I can’t remember. I think it is. Can you see there?

[The print was Seclusion by Bauhaus student and teacher Josef Albers, dated ’42, edition 9/30]

M. C. It’s beautiful, it’s lovely. Alright, so that was a present from Harry Seidler?

J. Z. Yes.

M. C. And did you remember an impression of his office in Point Piper?

J. Z. Oh well, it was not … when you say an office, Harry, I think—well he might have had staff then, but I don’t remember—there must have been others. A friend went with me—not the same friend from Canberra, but a friend went with me. And the press had written up, I mean the way he’d decorated the room with yellow curtains, and all that sort of thing. And it was like that, but you weren’t going to a great office, you were going to a suburban house, which he used as the office, one room of which he used as the office— and it had an outlook over the harbour, from what I remember, yes.

M. C. It was supposed to be very modern in its time.

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J. Z. Oh it was, yes, it was modern, yes. I liked the effect, and the colour that he used, and I found that very appealing—of course not everybody did, but I did! [chuckles]

M. C. What do you remember about the first meeting, and how did you persuade him to take on your job?

J. Z. Oh it didn’t take much persuasion, I just told him about the block—maybe I’d sent him a photograph from before that, I think I had. As I say it was just sort of accepted that he’d do it. I don’t think I performed very well—I didn’t come over very big, certainly. But anyway we got on alright, and he agreed to do it. And he told me that he had the builder, Primmer and McPhail, a builder of whom he thought a lot, and he was building Bowden’s house in Canberra. And Primmer and McPhail built my house. [chuckles] McPhail was a bit of a funny feller, but I got on alright with him. He was the man that I saw most for the house.

M. C. And were you married to Heather at this stage?

J. Z. Yes.

M. C. Was Heather involved in the decision?

J. Z. Oh a bit, yes.

M. C. Did she go up with you, to Sydney?

J. Z. No, she didn’t go up with me, no.

M. C. And, as time went on, what sort of relationship did you have with Harry Seidler? Did you see much of him, or did he just send you drawings?

J. Z. Oh, I saw a bit of him, yes. He—I just can’t put this in chronological order, but— he came down once, and he wanted to go to see that chap who was an Italian, that was ...

M. C. Taglietti?

383 J. Z. Yes, Taglietti, so I drove him over to see Taglietti. And he came two or three times, I can’t remember how many times. But at that stage it was always Harry who came, and what staff he had then I don’t know, but he came.

M. C. So he supervised the job?

J. Z. Oh, he came once before we started too, that’s right. I was in a rented house in O’Connor, he came [there] once, and I don’t know where I took him that time—he wanted to go round to see something—I took him round. But he was not—I mean, despite this reputation of being a hard man to get on with—that was just wrong as far as I was concerned. He was the easiest man to … but of course I didn’t ever tried to, I let him have free reign, and I said ‘yes’ to just about everything he said. I suppose other people … but no, he was a charmer as far as I was concerned.

M. C. Oh, that’s great. And did you have any input into the brief, you know when you talked to him—I mean, did you just give him the number of bedrooms you wanted?

J. Z. Yes, well my main input was the amount of money I had. And I think I said, you could get an [Department of] Interior Loan at that time, and I must have had a bit of money. I think the Interior Loan was £2,000.0.0 then, it went up to £2,750.0.0 later, and I think I did get this, you could apply for more, and I think I did get that later on, but that was later. And I had a couple of thousand pounds, which came from my parents, and I had a bit of money myself, but I wasn’t on a princely salary, by any means, at the time. But that was my main constraint. I said that’s the amount of money, I want a house, the sort of house you design. I mean it was pretty naïve. And what can we do for that? So he drew up those plans that you’ve seen, and as I remember it Primmer and McPhail’s first quote was £4,600.0.0, which I thought was not bad at all. But it did go up a bit, to £5,000.0.0, during the building. Now it was built during 1956, and 1956 was a very wet year. It was wet as wet as wet. And getting things up there was a bit of a problem, and they tried to come down from the back, from what is now … oh, what’s the name of the street round there? Anyway the street right on top of the hill there. [Wongoola Close] The big drain had been put in there, on the contour, to keep the water off, and they got bogged in there, I think they had quite a bit of a struggle there. However, but the wet year did certainly hold it up—there was mud everywhere, mud everywhere. Getting the plans approved with the Department was a little bit difficult.

M. C. Yes, I was going to ask about that. What happened?

384 J. Z. Well, I can’t remember the chap’s name who was in the Department, I’ve forgotten what they called him, but he was “The Authority”, and people had a lot of trouble with him. They said—see, the power had to come up on the east side, and the garage was put on the boundary of the east side. And they said: “You can’t do that, because we can’t have the power over the …”

M. C. Next-door neighbours?

J. Z. Well anyway, you had to have six inches, six inches between the boundary and the thing. And anyway he wanted to—the chap there wanted to turn the house over, to put the garage on the other side. Well, that would have been …

M. C. The Department of the Interior wanted this?

J. Z. Yes, I’ve forgotten what the chap’s name was, he was the “Proper Authority”— that’s what they called him. [chuckles] Anyway, I resisted that.

M. C. Did Harry go to the meeting with you?

J. Z. No, no, I did that—it wouldn’t have been good to have Harry there! [chuckles].

M. C. His reputation might have preceded him!

J. Z. Yes, yes, it might have. But I probably told him about it, but anyway. The builder, McPhail and myself, negotiated that out with them. But that’s right, coming for the six inches, I said: “Well, why can’t we put the power in gal’ pipe and take it under there?” “Oh no, the pipe will rust out, that’s no good, that’s no good.” But they said they were eventually going to put the power underground, and I’d had to leave six inches between the boundary and the wall of the garage. So I don’t know how they were going to do that, but anyway, that satisfied them. But of course the power came in poles. In some parts of Canberra it was underground, but it certainly wasn’t in O’Connor, and isn’t to this day as far as I know. Alright, well then as I say we were building during 1956, and it was very wet and that held up proceedings a bit. And when did we get possession? Well we must have got possession about the beginning of spring, I’d say September ’56. I’d say building must be going ’55, and then during—I’d say we got into the house in—just working back a bit—in probably August-September ’56. And of course as you’ve seen that was just two bedrooms, as is shown on the plan. Well we lived in it for a year and then we went to America. We were in America for two and a half years and the house was let. But nothing particularly bad happened to it, and the tenant was pretty good, nothing

385 bad happened. Oh, the paint job turned out to be pretty poor, and it needed painting when I got back, repainting. And in fact for a long time I had trouble keeping the paint on. The trouble was, they didn’t put on an undercoat, the bricks were rather alkaline, or the mortar was rather alkaline, and that was very bad for the paint. In fact I found that water-based paint was best, that it would stick on better. But I did a lot of painting on that house. So we came back, and by that time we had two children—we’d had one before we went to America—we had two children. So we want the third bedroom. And I just can’t remember how—we came back in 1960—so I’d say the third bedroom was put on in 1960, ’61, I would say in 1960. And that was then the main bedroom, and there was a bedroom for the children, and a spare bedroom. The fireplace, which you’ve seen, was not adequate for Canberra’s climate. Harry was in Sydney, he didn’t quite understand how cold it gets in Canberra, I think. And to keep that place warm, you had to work at that fireplace. Anyway, of course in the winter it was hard to keep the place warm. And what did I do first there? I can’t really remember. Anyway, then we lived in it in that state, with three bedrooms, until about 1965, when we went to Edinburgh for a year, and it was let again. We weren’t away for quite the year, we came back, and then we put on the final addition at the back of the laundry. And Harry designed that again—well I don’t know whether he did. Oh, at that stage—when we came back from America—some of his people had never seen snow, and they came down to Canberra and wanted us to take them up to the snow, so we did that. [to the Brindabellas]

M. C. People from his office?

J. Z. People from his office, yes. No it was a friendly, very, very friendly sort of thing, the whole thing was very friendly.

M. C. They designed that addition at the same time?

J. Z. Well they, I don’t know whether it had been designed at that time. I don’t know, it might have been after that, I thought. But anyway about, in ’67 the upstairs bedrooms, and a bathroom and toilet, an extra bathroom and toilet, were put on. Oh yes, that was another thing. In the original design, you had to have—the toilet of course was in the downstairs bathroom in the original design. But you had to have … They said “that won’t do”—the regulations at the time—“that won’t do, because somebody might be in the toilet, and somebody wants to get into the bathroom”, or something. So you had to have an extra toilet. So we put one at the front of the garage, [chuckles] to satisfy that. And then there had to be an airlock between the living space and the toilet. And so we had to put in a sort of partition halfway along there, and I took that out pretty quickly after it was approved.

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M. C. Were there any comments from the Department of the Interior, you know, about the way the house looked, in terms of approval?

J. Z. No, no, they didn’t object to the way the house looked, no, not even the Proper Authority objected to the way the house looked. No, I wouldn’t say that.

M. C. What about friends and neighbours, when the house was built—did you remember comments from people passing by?

J. Z. Oh, people thought it—the colour scheme came and, oh, I mean it was a very unusual colour scheme, I mean he even designed the cushions on the … and people were inclined to say: “Oh, what, you’re letting your architect dictate your taste?” And all that sort of thing. Which was to some extent [true]. But, no, oh I mean, people thought it was mad. But I didn’t get very many overt comments, no, no, no. I mean you could always sort of feel it in the background a bit, but no, it didn’t worry me much. I didn’t have—nobody came along and abused me about it! [chuckles]

M. C. And when you met with Harry and talked about the design, did he ever talk about whether he would have the house in the one block, or did he ever talk about having a separate wing for the bedrooms? Or maybe the budget wouldn’t allow for that I suppose.

J. Z. No, my budget wouldn’t have allowed it. No, no, he didn’t ever talk about that. I don’t know that he had that in many of his houses. The chap who used to do that was Joern Utzon, he used to put … [chuckles].

M. C. They called it a “binuclear” plan—like Frank Fenner’s house.

J. Z. Yes. Whether he—he may have done that, but I didn’t know about it.

M. C. OK. Did he talk about anything like the sun and the orientation, or the slope of the land?

J. Z. Oh yes, yes, yes. He was very concerned about that. And he got it pretty right, but [as] I say, before the upstairs bedroom was put on, the sun did come in a bit, in the Autumn, you know, when it’s getting round to the west.

M. C. In spite of the hill at the back, it still came in around the side?

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J. Z. In spite of the hill, yes, it did a bit. And it could get quite warm. It was alright in the middle of the day when the sun was high, but it did get …

M. C. So he designed a timber screen for you, or something up there, across, before the bedroom, to try and block it a bit?

J. Z. Well that’s right, because we’d spoken about that. When that upstairs bedroom was put on he did put a screen there. But as I say, it turned out to be rather unnecessary, because it—well with the tree—I just don’t know why it was, but it wasn’t really necessary there.

M. C. And what about the relationship between the house and the garden and the site? Did he ever discuss that?

J. Z. Oh no, he wasn’t much into gardens, and I wasn’t much of a gardener. But no, I mean I was always going to get something designed but I never did get round to it. And the slope … I mean, of course in those days there was no real water shortage—you could water, and we had lawn at the back, and lawn at the front, and some planting, so I, [chuckles] the day before we left for America I think I had sixty plants to put in round the place, and I was just running round—because we used to get the allocation from the Parks and Gardens—and I was running around putting in trees and whatnot. But it was alright, where I put them, I mean it worked out alright—at least I was satisfied with it! But it wasn’t a highly planned garden, no.

M. C. And you mentioned before that Harry chose some cushions and so on. I presume he did the colour schemes, did he?

J. Z. Oh yes, he did the colour schemes, oh yes.

M. C. What about furniture and paintings, and things like that?

J. Z. Oh yes he did, although we couldn’t, at the time, do all of them. But he did, yes, I mean he was interested in … And before I saw him, I had an Eames table and chairs, because I had been interested. But Eames chairs weren’t as good then as they are now— I go round and see them now and [chuckles] they’re much better made now than they were then, in those days.

388 M. C. That’s interesting. Do you remember anything about the house when it was being built? Was it quite exciting seeing it going up?

J. Z. Oh yes, I was terribly interested. I used to go up there every night after work and whatnot—probably annoy the builder. But no, I mean there were no major rows or anything connected with it. Except that [chuckles] he [Harry Seidler] was particular about electrical connections, and the telephone as well. And the electricians were in the street one day, and they put up, just near the front door, one of those brackets, that, you know, they used to bring the electricity in. And I saw that, I think “here’s trouble”. And so Harry happened to come down that time, and I looked at it and I said “I wonder what that is?” [laughs] Because he knew, and there was quite a bit of negotiation. And … they put up a pole on the back of the garage, and brought it from, in there, so that it wasn’t coming in right to the house—it would have been very unsightly, actually. But the linesmen were offended—they thought they were doing us a good turn and here we didn’t … But oh well, that was a bit of a schmozzle.

M. C. So Harry did come down to supervise it?

J. Z. Oh, I wouldn’t say he supervised it, but he came down to look, I’d say about three times I think, about three times.

M. C. Did he drive down in his Citroen or something?

J. Z. Oh I don’t know whether he did. Once he couldn’t have, because as I say, I drove him round to see Taglietti. I don’t remember him ever coming in a Citroen. He used to—I don’t know whether he ever owned a Citroen—but he used to put Citroens in the garages because he liked the look of them!

M. C. For the photos, yes, that’s right: the modern car for the modern house! Now the house, when it was finished, did it meet your expectations?

J. Z. I think so. The heating was inadequate. And eventually we got—yes, there’s something else I must tell you about. When oil heaters became fashionable, we got an oil heater. That would have been in the sixties, and that was certainly better. The thing with it was, with the mezzanine design, it wasn’t much good putting heating at the higher level, because it had to go [chuckles, gesticulates]. So you had to put it at the lower level and hope that it would diffuse up. And it did. And then I had an auxiliary oil heater. [I] converted one of the cupboards in the passage into a place where I could put a, sort of a rudimentary, oil heater, and we just about ran that all the time. And that did keep some

389 of the chill off, though people wouldn’t be happy with it now, but it did help. And then about the time the third bedroom was put on—you may have noticed from the plan that originally there were two small bedrooms, and one of them bordered on the downstairs living room. Well we said: “Alright why don’t we knock this wall down and extend the living room?” And that must have been after the third—after the upstairs bedroom went on. So one day we did it, I mean it was a bit of a risk thinking about it, because I was confident the wall wasn’t load-bearing, but I really didn’t … but it wasn’t. I’d have been embarrassed if it had have been! So that did extend the downstairs living room and made it quite a lot bigger. But we still had three bedrooms. Because those bedrooms— they all had built-ins—but they were a bit small, and whatnot.

M. C. In spite the issue with the heating—the fireplace—and the sun coming in at times from the west, what, do you think was the best thing about the fact that you went to Harry Seidler to design the house. In the end what was the thing about the house that really made it for you?

J. Z. Oh, well I’ve often thought of it since—if I hadn’t, what sort of house would I have got? Now the other houses, one was a wooden house, well it was alright, but I wouldn’t have liked that much. And the next one, built at about the same time, next-door, was a brick house, and, well I never—well it’s not my business to like it or dislike it—I never did like it. I don’t know if you’ve seen the house that the chap who bought my house has built, have you seen it? Oh it’s a real, it’s a big place, he’s really … and it makes all the other houses in the street look very silly.

M. C. Yes, times have changed, haven’t they? The houses that people build now are so different to—I mean, I prefer those earlier ones, I really do. Some of the big ones they build now, all the energy they use, and all the … there’s something …

M. C. Now did the house, did it leak at all?

Well no, the short answer’s no. But one problem with those skillion roofs is condensation. Now it had of course the paper—whatever you call it—silvered on one side [sisalation]. It had that—but that’s another thing Harry didn’t know: in the Canberra climate you could get condensation in that roof space, and some of it, in the bathroom in particular, it did make a mess of the ceiling. So what I did was I sort of put a false ceiling in—well, it was that acoustic board, that you could—that white stuff with little holes in it. And I nailed some battens—‘cos that was not good—I nailed some battens up there and glued that stuff to it. And that was alright, and then painted it, and that was fine.

390 M. C. So that was like a false ceiling below the original one?

J. Z. Yes but it was up against it, but it didn’t ever suffer from the condensation.

M. C. So before that you were getting drips, and water on the ceiling?

J. Z. Oh yes, it was mucking up the ceiling. It was a very high ceiling there, because it was on the lower level, but it was, following the slope of the roof it was very high, and perhaps for that reason or something … It didn’t ever affect the other rooms very much, but where you used to see it was on the west side. It had come out from under the fascia board—what do you call it? I mean it had that Super Six asbestos roof, and it had run down there and looked a little bit unsightly, it didn’t come into the house but it was a bit unsightly so that was the job of keeping it painting. But that was another thing: Harry didn’t realise how cold it gets in Canberra in the winter, and that was a defect.

M. C. Sure, fair enough. But it’s interesting you said they hadn’t seen snow before, so they came down through Canberra to have a look at the snow.

J. Z. Yes, but that wasn’t Harry—that was the people from the office. In fact it was later on, that was in 1960, probably, yes, yes.

M. C. It’s interesting, I can’t find any references to this house in any of the books on Seidler’s work.

J. Z. No, it’s not in any of his books. He came down one day with his camera and he was going to take a photograph, but it was a dull day and it was no good for taking photographs, so it was never done.

M. C. What about any journals or anything?

J. Z. I’ve never seen any reference to it in any journals, no. The Bowden House is probably in things is it?

M. C. It’s in—I’m not sure about journals, but it’s certainly in one of his books. It’s mentioned in books, there’s a few photos of it, yes.

J. Z. Well that was a much more ambitious house than mine.

M. C. Yes. Did you ever go and look at that when it was being built?

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J. Z. Oh yes, I did look at it once when we were just starting building, I think. But I remember when the offsiders—the people from his office—came down in 1960, one of them said to me: “Oh the Bowden House is in a terrible state!” Now maybe he was having an extension or something put on, but it had been built some years earlier. Because it was being built in ’55 I would say, when I went and looked at it, and it was—oh I just can’t remember too much—but it was a long way from finished then, but there was a long break between ’55 and ’60.

M. C. Yes, that’s right. The dates on that house are 1956, I think it was probably finished in ’56, yes. Well, looking at sort of bigger picture things, the decades after the Second World War—you know, this was the first decade after the Second World War—were times of change and new possibilities, and there seemed to be a sense of optimism, in some disciplines, about what was possible. It was certainly so in architecture, and Harry’s work was very much about that. Did the same thing apply in your field, in science—was there a sense of sort of starting again, and new ideas, or was it just a continuation?

J. Z. Oh, I wouldn’t say so. Oh I mean the Plant Industry expanded a lot, with Otto Frankel. Yes, well I suppose the answer’s “yes”. Before I—in the 40s, and before I knew it, the Plant Industry had been mainly … and Agronomic, and they used to call it Agrostology, that was Grassland Division. But it was turned, by Otto Frankel, into a much more scientific outfit in those days, because that continued with successive chiefs. Yes, so the answer to your question is “yes”, there was a change. And of course they built what’s called the Phytotron, that was, you know about that, yes, yes?

M. C. Yes, Roy Grounds [designed that].

J. Z. Yes, Roy Grounds did that, yes. Roy Grounds did a house for Philip Trudinger too, do you know about that?

M. C. Well I do, in Dryandra Street, yes, but I’d love to know more about it, because Trudinger was a scientist, or researcher? Well tell me about that person.

J. Z. Well I can’t tell you much, except that he did it. He’s still alive, but nobody seems to see him. His wife has died, and so on, we were just talking about it the other day. And actually last week there was a dinner for old plant physiologists and the like, and Phil Trudinger wasn’t there, so I don’t think he’s in good health, but I don’t know. But Roy Grounds, that was in the ‘60s that would have happened—the earlier ‘60s when Otto had Roy Grounds design the Phytotron, that’s right, and do other thing round the place.

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M. C. Do you have any idea where Mr. Trudinger might live now?

J. Z. Oh, as far as I know he still lives there.

M. C. In the house?

J. Z. Oh yes I think so, I think so. We looked in the telephone book when we came to have a look. But I think he’s still in Dryandra Street. I think so.

M. C. I’ll follow him up then—thanks for that. There’s another scientist who lived in Hobbs Street in O’Connor, and I’m very sorry I didn’t bring his name with me, but it was a very interesting house, designed by Rudi Krastins. A very modern looking house in Hobbs Street. Did you have any friends down in Hobbs Street? I’m sorry I haven’t got his name with me.

[this was Alan Stewart, CSIRO scientist, at 6 Hobbs Street, O’Connor]

J. Z. No, Hobbs Street, where’s Hobbs Street?

M. C. It’s kind of in behind Dryandra [Street], in behind the corner of Dryandra and Macarthur Avenue. Just in behind there—you can go to it from a couple of different directions. Probably parallel with Dryandra, roughly parallel, just down below it, you know, below the ridge. But I’ll give you a name next time.

J. Z. I don’t know who that would be.

M. C. It’s a little white, a very plain little white house, it just looks very interesting.

J. Z. Yes I think I know the house you mean. But I don’t think … Ralph Slatyer had a house somewhere there, but whether it was in, I don’t know … he was interested in architects, I know, but I don’t know what … he had a house there somewhere, not far from where Koomari is, or used to be. But I don’t know anything about it. [Ralph Slatyer was at 8 Hobbs Street, next-door to Stewart].

M. C. OK, no that’s fine. What’s interesting for me is that I started off looking at houses in Canberra that were interesting modern houses. And I narrowed it down to scientists as clients, because most of the interesting ones were for scientists. And I was wondering whether, do you think it was possible that, because scientists could see that there were

393 changes and things happening in their world, they could see that architecture could change too, or needed to change?

J. Z. Oh, I don’t know. I mean, people were interested in houses and architecture. I mean we used to discuss it. But then, of course, we spoke over the phone about John Philip, there were three houses built there, one was for Philip, one was for Blakers, but there was a scientist…

M. C. Bruce Griffing.

J. Z. Oh, Bruce Griffing, yes, did he build a house there?

M. C. Yes, he was one of those three—next-door to Philip.

J. Z. He was one of those … oh, yes, OK. Bruce, yes.

M. C. He went back to the States fairly early.

J. Z. Yes he did. Yes, yes, I knew Bruce pretty well, yes. I mean the inspectors got into them a bit once—you probably know this story though. What was the regulation height of ceilings? Eight feet I think. And they found the ceiling was three-eighths of an inch too low. So they made them take out the floor and plane down the joists!

M. C. Oh really? In one of those three houses? No, I didn’t know that story. That’s pretty strict.

J. Z. Yes, they did.

M. C. And John Philip was quite a character, from all accounts.

J. Z. Oh yes, John Philip was a character, yes, yes.

M. C. I’ve got some really terrific notes and things about meetings he had with the architects.

J. Z. Oh yes, John Philip wouldn’t have taken the attitude I did. But, no …

M. C. He and Grounds were probably like-minded in a way, I think they were both similar characters.

394

J. Z. Oh well, they might have been.

M. C. Did you ever go to Frank Fenner’s house, over in Red Hill?

J. Z. No. That’s in Campbell, isn’t it?

M. C. No his is, it’s in Red Hill. It’s in Torres Street.

J. Z. Yes, but he lives in Campbell now, does he not?

M. C. No, he’s still in the same house.

J. Z. Frank Fenner?

M. C. Yes, Frank Fenner. Red Hill. It’s the corner of Torres Street and Monaro Crescent. He’s in an addition to the house, and his daughter lives in the main house. He’s still there.

J. Z. Oh, I see, I thought he was in Campbell, OK.

M. C. John Philip was in Campbell, and Otto Frankel was in Campbell.

J. Z. Well, see that was his second house, that was his second house, yes. Yes, that’s right. I don’t know whether Grounds did his first house, I doubt that—Grounds wasn’t around in the ‘50s when his first house was done.

M. C. No, I don’t know the first one, I’ve heard about it, but it was on a busy road.

J. Z. Oh, it was a nice house, it was fairly conventional, but you know, it was … I wouldn’t say it was particularly modern, well it was …. But certainly, Otto was terribly interested in architecture. Well he broke out by the time he got Grounds to do things, but his initial goes in Plant Industry weren’t that happy, but anyway.

M. C. Yes, well he was involved in the Academy, and the …

J. Z. Oh yes, he was, and the Gallery [NGV].

395 M. C. This is pretty much the last question, but what do you think that you, as a scientist, contributed to the house, in any way at all?

J. Z. Oh, not as a scientist, I don’t think I contributed. But it’s just my interest in housing. I don’t know why I was interested in housing, because I didn’t even have much background that would make me interested. But yes, I was always interested in architecture, and, I mean I thought a lot of houses were pretty dreadful. I don’t know when I thought this, but those houses in Turner that they put up, I think early post-war, perhaps 1947, and things. Very well built houses, brick houses and whatnot, but they’ve got no light in them! [laughs] Absolutely, there’s no light in them at all! But they were very well built. But that, well I’m just expressing my opinion, but after that when Canberra was going to expand, really they couldn’t build like that, and so they got into wooden houses, like Macarthur Avenue was all wooden houses.

M. C. And Tocumwals, and things like that.

J. Z. Oh well the Tocumwals. Yes, well when we were first married we lived in a Tocumwal house in Todd Street, yes, yes, yes, yes.

M. C. It’s interesting that, I mean one possibility—I wonder what you think—is an absence of style. The architects [scientists] who commissioned these houses didn’t want to have an historical style, whereas a lot of other people, they wanted houses that looked like Tudor houses, or Spanish houses, you know?

J. Z. Yes, well that sort of thing I couldn’t stand. I mean I thought that building houses in imitation of something in the way past, that was just the most stupid thing you could do. It would really annoy me. And modern houses were the thing at the time. Now, one thing that Harry couldn’t stand was calling a house a “contemporary” house. He could not stand that. I mean I didn’t ever do it, but I heard him being interviewed, like in later years, five or six years ago, by somebody, and they said: “You should build in a ‘contemporary’ style”, and oh, he got quite shirty! He built in a “modern” style. Modern architect, Gropius, and that sort of—and of course, as you know, he’d been in the office, in …

M. C. Breuer’s office? He knew those …

J. Z. Yes, yes, so he knew all about that.

396 M. C. I didn’t know about that, that’s interesting. The National Library has a few recordings of interviews with Harry Seidler, so I’ll look at those next week, and just hear what he had to say.

J. Z. Yes, no, he didn’t like that. And so the modern, the style has sort of gone out. Well that’s what you hear if you listen to that chap on the ABC that does design, what’s his name? [Alan Saunders] I mean he had a session on Seidler, I think about the time Harry died, about modernism, and there were quite a few people who were no admirers of it! [laughs]

M. C. Oh, true, he was always controversial. But there’s still, in architecture, there’s still a lot of admirers. There’s a lot on both sides I think.

J. Z. I think so. I mean, in Sydney they get into Harry on those Blues Point Towers, but at the time that they did it, people thought they were marvellous. But there were other blocks of flats somewhat like that built, but without much flair, and in lots of people’s minds they were lumped in with those. I think that’s what happened.

M. C. Sure. He was living, I think, in Point Piper when you went to see him. His office was, I think,, where he lived, wasn’t it? I think it was an apartment or something.

J. Z. Yes it was. He wasn’t married then. Oh I’m pretty certain he wasn’t, I mean I don’t know anything about his domestic arrangements, but I’m pretty certain he was not married then.

M. C. Penelope was his wife.

J. Z. Penelope, yes.

M. C. I was actually wondering—well, I was going to contact her, but if she wasn’t around then, she wouldn’t have known anything about this commission, or anything.

J. Z. No, I don’t think so, I don’t think she was. I think he married—look, I can’t remember. I musn’t say so, because I don’t know, but I’m pretty confident he certainly wasn’t married when I went to see him.

M. C. And just one thing I noticed: on that drawing it said “Colin”.

[Colin Griffiths worked for Seidler from 1954-1981. See following interview]

397

J. Z. Oh I don’t … that might have been the chap who I went to dinner with once when I—it must have been after we came back from America. I was in Sydney, and I did have a talk to him, and he was a very nice bloke. Harry only came down when the initial house was being built. He didn’t ever come down for the third bedroom, or the upstairs bedroom. Oh, incidentally, I should have said the third bedroom, that’s the one projected, that’s not built my McPhail, that was built by Chris Schulein, who lived across the road from me, and he also did the addition at the back, too.

M. C. I wonder if those builders are still around—do you know?

J. Z. Chris Schulein, no, I don’t think so. Probably in the ‘70s he left Canberra, and went down to the coast to live. And I didn’t ever really hear of him again after that. No, I don’t know whether he’s alive.

M. C. And which was the builder that was a bit of a character?

J. Z. Oh, McPhail. Yes, he was a bit of a character.

M. C. In what way?

J. Z. Oh, sort of a, well when we were building, there was a report I read in The Canberra Times, this McPhail was in court because he’d clonked some bloke—he’d had an argument with him and clonked him! So we were pretty good friends, and I brought this up with him: I said: “Oh, I see you’re …” He might have been fined, but it wasn’t much. “Oh yeah, yeah”, he said—I forgot what his explanation was. But he was a pretty hard man, but we got on very well with him.

M. C. And were they the builders that had built the Bowden House? Were they the ones that Harry recommended?

J. Z. Oh yes, oh yes, yes. I’m sure they did build the Bowden House, yes. He [Harry Seidler] said: “I’ve got a good builder in Canberra.” I don’t know that I’ve got any direct evidence for it, but, yes, I’m sure he did, yes.

M. C. OK. And Colin—on the original drawing, the name “Colin”—you think you might have met him later on?

J. Z. I think I met him later on, yes.

398

M. C. But at the time, the first meetings were just with Harry, in Sydney?

J. Z. Oh yes, all my correspondence was with Harry. I didn’t ever write to anyone else in the ... But when the house was being sold, it was advertised and, of course my son put in it was a Harry house and whatnot, because they were going … anyway. And Harry was a bit upset apparently. It came back to me he was a bit upset somehow, I can’t remember. So I rang him up—and this is not very long before he died—but we had quite a good conversation and, you know, there was no dispute or anything like that.

M. C. What was he upset about?

J. Z. Oh well, he didn’t like people altering his houses. I think he took court action against somebody who altered his house, or—something like that National Library, the Gallery thing, with Colin Madigan. But if anything, as far as I was concerned, anything that was done to it would be designed by Harry or his firm. But other people, I think, ran a bit foul of him.

M. C. So what did you talk about when you rang him up, when you were selling it?

J. Z. Oh, I just told him that we were selling it, and Heather had died—although we’d been separated for some years—but that she’d died, and whatnot, and that I’d been very happy with the house. And he said “good”, and that was it, so ...

M. C. Oh that’s nice. OK, look that’s fabulous! Thank-you very much John!

J. Z. I don’t know that there’s anything else that I can tell you about it.

M. C. Well that’s terrific for now. I mean, maybe I could get back in touch if I have another couple of questions later on? Because I’ll research more into it, and start writing it, and then something’s bound to come up that I’ll ask you about later.

J. Z. Well sure, any time.

Interview concluded at approximately 9.00 p.m.

Milton Cameron PhD Candidate Faculty of the Built Environment

399 The University of New South Wales

400 COLIN GRIFFITHS INTERVIEWED BY MILTON CAMERON

5.30 p.m., 31 October 2008, Sydney.

401

M. C. This interview is with Colin Griffiths, who used to work with Harry Seidler. It’s on the 31st October 2008. And Colin drew the original drawings, in 1955, 1956, for the John Zwar House in Canberra. Colin, just a general question, what do you remember about working on that design?

C. G. Well let me just go back a bit. I did my course here in Sydney, and it was a part- time course which was then at the Sydney Technical College, which had been a great training ground for lots of architects from I think since the late part of the previous century. But I started my course in I think ’52, and I worked for a couple of people, but then I started to work for Harry in the beginning of ’54, because he’d opened—the word was around that he was looking for somebody to take over from Don Gazzard, who had worked for him for a year or so before Don went overseas. And so I brazenly went and said, you know: “Here I am”, you know. And we obviously must have got on alright, ‘cos he gave me, he offered me, he said: “OK you can start”. And I started, and we worked together for quite a few years in that little studio in Point Piper. [Interviewer shows photo of studio] Because Harry sat there, and here was a collapsible drawing table, and I sat there. And I learnt very quickly that there was no layout space, so you devised the plan, and you kept that and all its dimensions, and that was put aside, and you put another piece of paper and you started the sections and elevations by recalling all that stuff. And of course the interesting thing is there’s now an exhibition on at the Powerhouse called “Modernism in Australia”, and they’ve recreated this little part of the studio in the exhibition—the bookcase, the desk, this front here—it’s actually there as part of that exhibition along with other things. And it’s modernism, not just in architecture, but in there’s a fair bit of the Seidler thing, but some other architects, and it relates to early things, including there was the Bauhaus master who came here called [Ludwig] Hirschfeld-Mack, who taught at Geelong Grammar or something like that. So it all pieces together. I think you’d appreciate the exhibition—I don’t know that the public are as enthusiastic as all of us. But anyway, so I started working there. And of course there were people who came down, you know, getting us to design things, like John Zwar. And there was another guy called Ralph Heyden, who came down and he was a signwriter. And he said: “I’ve got this amount of money”—whatever it was—“for a house”. And we just worked so hard on these little house, to, ‘cos I guess we just were, and I’m still absolutely flattered, by anybody coming asking me to do something for them. And we were absolutely intrigued by these things.

I certainly remember meeting John, and I can’t recall the circumstances, whether he came … but you’ll probably elaborate on that. But certainly the only building that Harry had done in Canberra at the time was the house for, the Bowden House. Which I went

402 down as a …earlier, before I might have started architectural, I remember it being in construction to … sort of in construction. But I certainly recall, and from what the plans that you showed me, [sketch plan] were obviously struggling for … and I remember it was a tight budget. And the very nice thing about it is that the guy who built it was McPail from Primmer and McPhail, who had built, I think, the Bowden House, and who was very good to us because we actually, he got the South Canberra Bowling Club to commission us to do that building, which was a bit later on in the ‘50s. But I certainly remember working on that, and I think we did some other work, it might have been also through the Canberra Club—there was a building that had some sawtooth, zig-zag roof, it’s probably long, like all club things it’s probably been subsumed into some other thing. But certainly the diet in the Seidler office for those early years was really small houses. He had previously done small houses, and we always struggled to find builders and budgets, and it was a struggle, you know, to get all that, but from what I see of the drawings you’ve shown me it was pretty much the diet we were doing, which was simple brick houses, a shed roof, with corrugated asbestos “Super Six”, and that gave rise to the simple slope and that tended to be, you know, split levels, because the slope thing, and the sites invariably had some sort of slope on them, so they all had a pattern of split level, you know, single slope roof, corrugated asbestos with a particular detail of how you got the edge and the gutter and so on. And they were very modest little things, and I presume I would have done the working drawings for it, I must have done.

M. C. You did, yes—you did the working drawings—and there were seven sheets, that size [points to sketch plan], which is what size, B1, or B0? Very, very large, seven sheets.

C. G. With everything detailed—and kitchens and cupboards and all of that stuff.

M. C. A few full-size details as well, yes.

C. G. I recently refurbished a house of similar vintage, 1958, which was in Dover Heights here in Sydney, which I did the drawings for, and we’ve now just finished the refurbishment of that. It started off: “Oh, let’s move in and clean it up a bit and then we’ll think about an addition, the second floor addition.” But it grew a bit, because as soon as we wanted to upgrade the kitchen … Anyway, so that’s been finished, and I’ve now got the commission to design this upper floor which I’m now just playing for. But the interesting thing is the client says: “It was all that advanced stuff, that experimental, challenging stuff you were doing in the ‘50s, that’s what the aesthetic was and we’re now 50 years on, and I want you to try and project that aesthetic—be as adventurous now as you did then, as you contributed to the Seidler office”. But Harry and I worked for quite some years before the practice finally got bigger commissions, and we really just were

403 incapable of doing that, so we then moved to the city which followed, you know, the scale of buildings.

M. C. Somewhere up here wasn’t it? [interviewer points out window.]

C. G. Yes, in Caltex, we moved to Caltex House. Because by that time there was a connection made with Civil and Civic and Dusseldorp, that was a long, ongoing opportunity, and that was really the breakthrough to [establish] the practice. But Harry always liked to do houses because it was sort of his laboratory—you were always searching for types and types and things. And any analysis of the Seidler works shows, you know, the basic types, and the refinement and the extensions and the variations on those types.

M. C. Was this house similar to any others that you knew of? I was struggling to find one as small, actually.

C. G. The planning parts are very similar. That type of—well the geometry was that the beds and the services were on one half, and the living was on the other half. And sometimes it’s split that way, and sometimes it’s split the other way. And this is one of the ones that’s split, the bedrooms and the living area on the lower level, and the kitchen and the dining room on the upper level. And there were similar models—I think there was a house in Coogee which I think has also been demolished, but I’ll go and get some books and see if I can get that. But it was very much a type, you know that type because Harry was … that very clean, constrained, you know, plan and form. And you did play around with it to make it …

M. C. Was that because of a limited budget, or because it was sensible design?

C. G. Oh well, it was a combination of both. I think it was that Bauhaus aesthetic of the block, and the solid, and you put voids in it and you played around and you punctuated and did that. And it was also the rationale that the simplest budget is the most compact: you’ll get the most out of a compact plan form, and any attenuation of that just stretches the wall surface, and so on.

M. C. Yes, so this plan would have been too modest for a binuclear plan, to split it into different blocks.

C. G. Yes, that was a more elaborate version of it. But sometimes the variations for that was that if the direction was the east-west business, then you had to get sun into some

404 living area, then you started to split it up. And I guess that some time there are people that are starting to look into Harry’s archives about that sort of stuff. And there are lots of antecedents, there are lots of unbuilt projects, both in the house type and in the apartment types. They were experiments: there were versions that never went anywhere, but somehow became the launching pad for other variations to it. And I noticed that that square plan and that division, there’s all sorts of splits this way, that way, and double splits and things. There’s lots of quite nice sketches, and I had some reasonable ability to do perspective drawings. And of course, if the project was important enough, Harry made a model. I used to always make models, but then because I could do drawings, or do plausible perspectives, and they became very much the sort of diet. And of course the technique was ‘what do you mean you want two days to do a perspective? Don’t be ridiculous!’—you know. And I used to carefully set them all up, construct them. My facility now is that I just do it by eye. And there are some limits to my technique now, because I can do sketches and very free entourage and things, but I just don’t have the patience to do a seriously constructed [perspective].

M. C. Yes. I think I saw some sketches of yours in the Mitchell Library today. Some early perspectives of houses—probably unbuilt houses too.

C. G. Oh yes, there’s quite a lot, the Seidler Archive has a lot of those. Oh no, in fact there was once, when that Archive was announced and shown, there was a bit of a slide show. And I have to admit I knew I did the drawings, because they were obviously my drawings, but I’d completely forgotten that I’d done the drawings. Because there was a lot of projects went through that office. In fact the Seidler office is renowned even now for its small numbers, and the prodigious amount of work that went through the office. But we worked pretty much on all those things, because this little arrangement I’d shown you in that little studio in Point Piper, Harry would sit at that desk and I would be there, but I would turn round and either kneel, you know, like this [illustrates kneeling position with arms on desk]. There would be Harry, and I would ... It was easier to just … and we used to play and I would sketch. It was very brazen of me, but I guess but we got on pretty well, and we were able to, you know, do those manipulations and things. And of course the plan was always then, you know, reversed sometimes, so that somebody saw the plan and the spatial things from a different view.

M. C. Did Joseph Albers teachings and doctrines come into it, because much has been made, and Harry talked about, you know, doing the course with him. Did it affect the colours, or the forms, do you think, of these sort of houses?

405 C. G. Oh, well, Harry, yes, well he, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Harry’s notes from the Black Mountain, I may have a photocopy here, of … he controlled them fairly well, because now, of course, the Albers Archives want Harry’s original notes. And he used to say ‘No, you can have copies’. But he was very generous, and gave various people have copies of those notes, which are, you know, very influential in the pattern thing and the challenge of the geometric variations and so on. And he really had developed a very sophisticated, three-dimensional spatial eye. And I always used to say that, even though I was a contributor and instigator of some things, and like all those practices that you’re in, there’s no point putting something on the table that wasn’t within “the view”. But of the various … I’d say “try this”, and he’d say “I think we’ll go with … this is the one”. And even from a basic little sketch that we might have been working on, I would come in the next day and Harry would have done a very developed, elaborate version of the thing, the pattern, and he was able to see much more the possibilities of it.

M. C. It must have been an exciting period.

C. G. Oh yes, look we had a very good thing, and it was very productive, and you learnt to trust his eye and his judgement. But I guess in an unkind way you might say “OK it was in a limit”, [but] don’t they all practice within a limit? Whether it’s a painter or a musician, you do that sort of thing, and the big leaps beyond that – and I guess the leaps were incremental leaps—and if you go through the archives you’ll see things going and developing, and then suddenly there’s a flourish, and that idea is pushed to a very sophisticated, structured element. But certainly, back to John Zwar’s house, it was very much within that constraint, in that you sensibly limit it, because it was a compact foundation area, a simple roof form, every time you broke it, it was a problem—there was money and things, so you kept everything within simple … and you tried the variations spatially within, and the modulation of the façade, or those façades were pushed and pulled, and things pushed forward and pushed back and recessed. And that was very much the diet, and you knew that. A lot of, some of the smaller houses here, there was a whole range of houses which became slightly bigger. We then got on to a couple of builders who then knew, the builders, and even to the end Harry always had two or three builders he negotiated with—you know, the client came and said: “Well, I’ll do it, this is the budget, this is the builder we will negotiate with.” Of course I know, and that’s how the houses were, mostly, you know, achieved.

M. C. Was there any discussion with the John Zwar House about its location in Canberra in terms of different climate, and different requirements for building in Canberra?

406 Well, Harry has always been very conscious of this, of the sun, because some of the very early houses were translated direct from, you know, East Coast North America, and those flush glass façades and things just finally, those buildings suffered, they weathered badly, and even in my early days we felt so guilty about some of the houses, because we used to go, on weekends, go and caulk joints and paint window frames that were, you know, struggling. And some of those very early houses were just bad, bad news, and so he gave away the lightweight timber frames as quickly as he could because they just didn’t survive. And so they tended to “clunk up” a bit because of the masonry and things, but it was always, you know the detailing was always as direct and as simple, you know, [an] almost automatic thing, you know, if you get sophisticated it’s a problem, it’s budgets, it’s … so you get constrained, constrained all the time by that. But the climate, you know, the sun used to come in and fade curtains and things, so there started to be the overhangs and the recesses, and the projects. So you tended to avoid east and west if you could, and you, south was not too bad, and north you always had the thing. And Harry always relied, and you would probably remember the Commonwealth Experimental Building Station notes on the science of building, which was here and in Melbourne, and that’s still the basis for sustainable design, even now. And us old heads like Glenn Murcutt and I still believe that all that stuff was the science of building, so it was mainly the climate control stuff, you know, the sun can’t come in, but boy, but the glass was a problem because it was a heat loss and in Canberra it was a bigger problem. But at least that house faced north, I think, did it?

M. C. Yes, slightly west of north.

C. G. Yes, there was a bit more westerly.

M. C. There was a hill up behind there. John did say that sometimes the sun would come in pretty hot, pretty low, it would just get around the side of the hill below—you were right, there was, on the eaves there was a downturn, but it still came a little bit under that. He really, really liked the house, he thought it was a really successful house, [he] liked it. The only thing he was critical of, there was the fireplace, and he said he believed Harry didn’t understand how cold it got in Canberra. The heater [fireplace] actually didn’t heat it up enough. That was his only criticism—and the sun coming in a little bit.

Yeah, I think that those fireplaces, because a masonry fireplace—and there was a bit of a long history of unsuccessful fireplaces in the houses anyway—even the bigger houses, you know they always smoked, and I remember one client refused to finally pay the last instalment because this fire, the chimney thing smoked, and we couldn’t get it to work

407 properly. And they were all meant to be like this, and then when I came in I started to, you know, do proper smoke boxes, and then they started to be a bit bigger and then with more sculptural opportunities.

M. C. This was a metal one.

C. G. Oh, it was metal.

M. C. Yes, it was a free-standing custom made one, and you drew it, and it was triangular in shape.

C. G. There were two types. There was the conical one which I did the original, you know, sort of geometric drawing for, and to find a boilermaker who would make it was a problem. And then there were the triangular versions of it.

M. C. Yes, welded up, I think quarter inch mild steel plate, you know, black painted.

C. G. I guess in Canberra, a single fireplace was not really the thing, and I guess there was a timber floor, and there was no insulation there, and I don’t know that it was so well insulated as a house. But it was a bit deficient—the budget—[we] struggled and struggled and struggled with budgets. And I don’t think Harry really—you’re right, I don’t think he appreciated the sort of, the coldness of Canberra, even though his early training and experience was doing houses in North America. You know, they must have, but there was probably, there was always heating systems, and heating pipes, and things. And we didn’t really get into any sophisticated heating until much, much later.

M. C. John was very happy with the whole process. He found it very, very friendly. He’d heard about—he was attracted to—Harry partly because of the notoriety he’d been reading about in the paper, and how he’d successfully won, you know, with councils and so on. And he wanted a modern house, and he actually contacted Harry, he wrote to him from Canberra. Harry said “sorry”, he couldn’t come, he didn’t have time to come down and supervise it. So John got in the car and drove up, and went round to the Point Piper office and knocked on his door and he said he didn’t impress Harry at all—he was a very modest man—but Harry agreed to do it, just because he’d shown up. And he remembers meeting you—he went out to dinner with you at some point.

C. G. That’s a bit hazy. Certainly I remember meeting John, and his wife who was smaller, or much slighter. But I guess the people who came for those houses, well certainly there was a lot of things were connections and people would say, and he was

408 quite notorious. Because when I started my course, I think even before I started my course, I think his mother’s house, the Rose Seidler House, had won the Sulman award and I didn’t have a car, so I got a train and walked all the way from Turramurra Station to, you know, whatever that was to see it. And Harry was very active around in promoting design and architecture and exhibitions and talking, and he was in the Contemporary Arts Society and all those slightly, they were slightly avant-garde things, and the art community of those painters and designers and things were still small. Gordon Andrews, and Douglas Annand and all those people were still small beer, but Harry was always promoting, and trying to, and there was not much publicity here in any, as we now get articles and coverage of architecture, and I still reckon Harry was largely, well helped considerably in raising the profile of the architect, because he did that, and in those early days was accused as an upstart and a flash ... But ultimately the profession benefitted from that exposure and that publicity and now of course, you know, it’s design and architecture, and Saturday morning you’ve got programmes and all that sort of stuff. It was very hard for that ever to get known. But I certainly have met John, I can’t, I don’t recall any meetings or—some of the other clients, and the Sydney clients I met, and they would come for meetings and that sort of thing.

M. C. Yes, and the two extensions he had done by Seidler’s office too. I’ve looked at the drawings for those, and the initials for the first one was “P. H.”

C. G. That’s Peter Hirst, who’s still there.

M. C. And the second one was “J. P. D.” Which was about 1967, that second one. [The initials ”J. P. D.” stand for John Daubney, later of Rice and Daubney]

C. G. Peter Hirst is now the Senior Associate there, and I think sort of, well, Penelope runs the practice, the practice I think is suffering a bit from, you know—the man’s gone! And that happens. I’m not sure what work they’ve got. They’ve got a lot of refurbishment work on Australia Square and Grosvenor Place, those things come back and they’re doing work on that. And I think some of the houses that have been—that have come on to the market—the new owners have gone back to the Seidler office for refurbishment and so on. Though the Seidler office, you know, recommended me to this client in Dover Heights, which is, so far it’s turning out to be a happy situation. But they’re doing, a lot of those little, early houses around about are being resurrected and reconstructed. But they’re pretty limited, because they’re tiny little houses, and maybe the whole thing has come full cycle the enormous houses and we’re coming back to notice that we can live in smaller spaces.

409 M. C. Yes, well John was shocked when he went up to his street and saw what’s been built on his original site, where he had this quite modest house. He said it’s the biggest house in the street—and there was already some big ones—and it just makes the rest of them look silly. So it’s the total opposite of what this house represented.

C. G. Oh yes, well I guess all of us had much more modest expectations. You know, they’re tiny bathrooms, and they’re tiny kitchens, and tiny laundries, and everything was pushed into those diminished things. And they are still, they reflected pretty much the time. We’d just come out of material restrictions on area, sizes and amounts of bricks and things like that.

M. C. No, well John was very happy with the whole process. He found that people were very friendly, and in spite of Harry’s reputation, very friendly and easy to get on with. He suspects that was because he agreed with everything, he was very happy with everything. He couldn’t afford some of the things—he couldn’t afford the curtains there, [points to colour board] which were from the Strand Arcade, from “Rene’s”. And he thinks he remembers going there with Harry, but he couldn’t afford all the furniture that was specified. But he already had an Eames table and chairs, so as a scientist he had some good ideas.

C. G. Oh no, well of course the trouble is the curtains were, you know the glass was fine, but you had to sort of counteract the sun penetration or the heat loss, and suddenly this was a big amount of fabric, and they would be done. In fact, you know, that was always the living areas always had the large glass wall, and it tended to be the most expensive element in the building, because, you know, the cost of glass and framing was much more than brick walls and things like that. And you just somehow couldn’t restrict it, you know. God knows we tried, and I was criticised for saying ‘can’t we make smaller windows? and [Harry said] ‘don’t be ridiculous, you’ve got to have this spatial flow and these planar elements and …’

M. C. OK. In spite of it being a modest house, modest budget—John remembered the Primmer and McPhail quote at coming in at £4,600.0.0—it still had some … I mean, I’ve already mentioned a custom fireplace, a few details, it was a one-off, it had terrazzo sills, grey terrazzo sills, and also some very nicely detailed joinery. There was a cantilevered unit across a whole wall of the dining room, in two sections, quite a long one, divided up for stationery, it had stereo speaker panels, and it had a glass lid that lifted up with little recessed finger pulls for the … I think for the record player, and the radio.

C. G. It still comes with the territory, you see! [points to similar wall unit in apartment].

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M. C. And I was impressed with the drawings—you know, six or seven large sheets of drawings. And they were a very nice set of drawings I have to say, too.

C. G. Well I guess, I’d be intrigued to know if … But Harry was a performance-based operator. And the design, he didn’t muck around with the design—there’s no … ‘what do you mean, the design’s accepted’, you don’t come in on Monday with a new scheme and start all over again, you did it, and the discipline of that production, and that’s the way, and he just couldn’t abide anybody in the office who wasn’t a proficient practitioner. He himself was a brilliant, you know, technical draughtsman, he wasn’t as adept in freehand work as I, but he did it, and he did it in his manner, but he would always sketch, and he still had this … And sort of, one of the engineers who I now work with, you know, still, he says something and he says “I always knew you could always sketch a junction, or some connection”, and that was what he would always say. You know—“how does this work?” And as I say, that’s why I admire a project like the Parliament House. I’ve done some things and said “God, I forgot about that! That thing, why is it so bad?” Because I didn’t work through every corner, every junction.

M. C. Yes, I hate that! I did see, looking through the Archives today, that there was another house in Campbell. I presume it wasn’t built. It was by Harry Seidler’s office, for a Miss June McPhail, in Campbell. There was only sketch plans, and there was no record of any other house besides these two in Canberra. I wonder if that was probably a relation of the builder I suppose—[a] sister or a daughter.

C. G. It must have been, it would have been. What date was it?

M. C. There was no date on the drawings. And it wasn’t signed, I couldn’t tell if it was yours or not.

C. G. If I saw the drawing, I could tell you who drew it.

M. C. There were sketches of it, there were a few perspective sketches. A very plain house—I mean similar sort of thing to this—skillion roof and so on, very interesting. But I’m going to have a look in Ryrie Street in Campbell in case it was built, but I don’t think it was. There was no working drawings, just sketch plans.

C. G. It doesn’t register. But did the office have it as a job number? You’ve spoken to Dirk, have you—Dirk Meinecke?

411 M. C. Yes I did, but not about this one. That’s a good point—I’ll ring him back about that one and confirm that. I spoke to him about the Zwar House.

C. G. Dirk … I think there is a job … I think, oh, I’m not sure. All the jobs are recorded, and if there were drawings they were recorded, but it’s unusual there are no numbers or—is there a Seidler office stamp on the drawings, on the house?

M. C. I’m not sure about the stamp.

C. G. It doesn’t register but that doesn’t mean to say that we didn’t, that it wasn’t done and I didn’t do it, or … I’m pretty good, if I could see the drawing I could know instantly who drew it, I can still … It’s unfortunate that the problem with computer draughting when I taught, and when I do these visiting panels, and I used to go and [look at] the computer. I reckon some architects and some draughtsmen can have a style with their computer, but most of them they’re pretty, you know, unidentifiable. But at least if you had hand drawn you knew exactly, you know, whose ...

M. C. Yes. Also there’s something about the way that you do it. Just on that, drawings produced on computer, people working on their own screen and you know it’s very, just sort of one person, but preparing a drawing the old-fashioned way, was a drawing, and people can stand around it, and it’s more a more public way of working and designing.

C. G. Yes, well that was always the, you know, the drawing office, or the Seidler office was always open and you knew what was happening and now you go to the office and there’s all these low desks and these screens, and there’s no noise. I once introduced a young guy who was doing work experience, and I—he came to my office a bit and I said: “You should go and I’ll get you a day or two in the Seidler office”. And he went there, and he was actually a bright young, you know, fifteen or sixteen, and he had some graphic skills, and he did a little drawing, you know, while he was there, you know, some little thing. And I picked him up in the afternoon to take him home. He said “Nobody laughed, nobody smiled or laughed all day!” But I think that was true, there was always interaction in the open office and the drawing and people could do it. And even though in the office I rent a desk, I’m helping them and they say it’s on the screen and I said: “Look, just print it out. Give me something, I cannot understand all these colours and things!” And needless to say, I’m completely inept when it comes to that sort of stuff!

M. C. OK. Do you remember any other houses for scientists that Harry designed?

412 C. G. I don’t recall. In Sydney there was a journalist, we did a couple of houses for journalists, but then those early houses, they were … I remember the sign-writer fellow, and I remember these people in Coogee who came, and we did a tiny little house for them, and I don’t recall any scientists as such because I think that wouldn’t have been … you know, if they had of come to Harry it would have been an intellectual decision—it wouldn’t have been any social contact, because he didn’t work in those …

M. C. That’s a good point, because this was an intellectual decision, and John didn’t know Harry.

C. G. And I think all those people, you know, who came, were interested in a house, and they would have come to it from some way. I don’t know the profile of some of those people, but certainly a lot of them were connections from friends of people who’d done things. And certainly there was, in the Jewish community, there was some sort of connections. And one of the early houses Harry did was for Meller—Ted Meller in Castlecrag—great big … and then we did a house for his brother, and then there were second houses and things, so there was always a ripple like that. But I certainly don’t recall any particular social connection or any connections that Harry had … even at Sydney University, you know, there was nobody I remember in that sort of … no I don’t remember all those people we did houses and sketches for. No, I don’t recall any particular scientific connection, or anything other than … No, sorry, I don’t recall, not aware of it. I’m just trying to think of the profile of some of those people who used to come down the stairs to the studio. And then once the bigger scale work happened the houses, Harry always liked to do these houses, and he’d say: “God, why are we spending all that time, you’ve got one guy doing that bloody house, and we’ve got all this other stuff to get out?” Oh, he liked doing houses, and that happened all the way through, when the office was over there, that there were these bigger houses, and one of them, Greg Holman, who was one of Harry’s guys, he would spend a whole bloody year doing one house!

M. C. Much grander houses?

C. G. Yes, and they warranted that sort of investment. But I’d imagine that there wouldn’t be many weeks in doing those seven sheets of drawings, you know, they just happened to come out.

M. C. It was a few weeks, that’s right. It was from October-November 1955, and then you did one more drawing in about February of ’56. I was impressed—I used to be a draughtsman, so I know what it’s like to do all those details, so …

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C. G. But you’d work through it, and you knew, and I guess also obviously that assembly of things and some of the details. Not sophisticated, it was pretty direct detailing, it was that and that, and there was no chance for finessing, you just didn’t fiddle around, and because you knew that the price for that big, framed thing with all that glass and the big bit of plate glass was dammed expensive, you know.

M. C. Yes, yes, yes. All about keeping it simple. That’s been great! Thanks Colin.

Interview concluded at approximately 6.10 p.m.

Milton Cameron PhD Candidate Faculty of the Built Environment The University of New South Wales

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