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Sub-Tropical Modernism, Featurism and Building Innovation: the Institu- Tional Projects of Stephen Trotter and James Birrell

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Sub-Tropical Modernism, Featurism and Building Innovation: the Institu- Tional Projects of Stephen Trotter and James Birrell This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Lindquist, Marissa& Sanders, Paul (2019) Sub-tropical modernism, featurism and building innovation: The institu- tional projects of Stephen Trotter and James Birrell. In Musgrave, Elizabeth, Guedes, Pedro, & Rann, Lara (Eds.) Urban Tropi- cality:Proceedings of the 7th International Network of Tropical Architecture (iNTA). The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, pp. 259-278. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/133930/ c The authors This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the docu- ment is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to qut.copyright@qut.edu.au License: Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https:// espace.library.uq.edu.au/ view/ UQ:8fb3912 Sub-tropical Modernism, Featurism and Building Innovation The Institutional Projects of Stephen Trotter and James Birrell MARISSA LINDQUIST, PAUL SANDERS School of Design, Queensland University of Technology m.linquist@qut.edu.au, ps.sanders@qut.edu.au Modernist architecture, its extension, and re-invention outside the cosmopolitan centres of Europe and America has been the focus of increasing interest.1 Willis and Goad’s2 survey of modernism within the Australian context, encourages greater localised historiographical studies in regional areas to provide a deeper valuing of experimentation brought on by economic, climate and context driven factors, which pushed beyond ‘pedigree’ examples of the central canon. Many young Queensland architects from the 50-70s cut their teeth through regional institutional commissions (planning and architecture) made possible by a national post-war public works agenda to increase educational campuses across the state3. This paper reviews the institutional work of Stephen Trotter and James Birrell completed in Brisbane and the regional centres of Rockhampton and Townsville during the 60s and 70s. While James Birrell’s work has been the subject of many publications, the extent of Stephen Trotter’s institutional work is less well known. Birrell and Trotter were early recipients of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) Sisalkraft Travel Scholarship, established to promote exploration of architecture both here and across the globe. This influence and their exposure to regional life and practice enabled experimentation with material and building innovation within modernist and brutalist tropes. The paper reviews these works in view of artistic and environmental experimentation which Goad fits within the ‘lost tribe’4 practitioners who broke the modernist cannon espoused by Robin Boyd. Introduction International modernism, by the 1960s, had irrevocably changed. Earlier through the Congrès Internationaux d’ Architecture Moderne (CIAM), Team 10 had emerged to foster a manifesto of New Brutalism. The modern architecture of raw pure forms ‘was an attempt to appropriate elements of everyday buildings and raise them to an aesthetic level’.5 Team 10 duo Alison and Peter Smithson’s influential exhibitions Parallel of life and art (1953) and This is tomorrow (1956) challenged notions of conventional artistic values by promoting ‘bizarre or anti-aesthetic images that flouted humanistic conventions of beauty’.6 Later, in a divergent arc, 1 HERWITZ 1998; 2012. 2 WILLIS & GOAD 2008. 3 BIRRELL MAKULA & CAMPION 2013. 4 GOAD 1997. 5 MACARTHUR & MURRAY 1997, p11. 6 BANHAM 1966, p61. 259 Sigfried Giedion with his Space, Time and Architecture (1967)7, put forward a case for evolving a new tradition in architecture in response to the 1961 Symposium “Modern Architecture, Death or Metamorphosis” at the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Throughout the text Giedion alluded to a reinvigoration of, in his terms, ‘the contemporary architecture’ observed through new contributions in regional countries such as India, South America, Spain and Australia, where a strengthening of ‘plastic tendencies’ beyond the purely rational continued contemporary architecture’s role as an “interpretation of a way of life”8. Giedion praised the evolution through these new centres and argued the case for an “architecture approaching sculpture” which in his belief did not deviate from the development of modernist architecture9. This regional adaptation of modernism, exploited and innovated the plastic properties of concrete to respond to local ways of life, conditioned by climate and context. In Australia, the impetus of Modernism and later New Brutalism was championed early on by Robin Boyd10 who promoted “the search for a local architecture appropriate to its place, its landscape and city, mindful of local materials, climate and construction practices”11 underpinned by a “respect for the nature of raw materials.”12 Boyd’s position was to thwart what he termed a ‘counter-revolution’ which diluted architecture into ‘featurism’ as “an undiscriminating commitment to gratuitous adornment and features for the sake of features.”13 Philip Goad has pointed to Boyd’s ‘selective gaze’14 towards Melbourne and Sydney modernists which excluded many contemporary Australian architects at the time such as James Birrell and Stephen Trotter who worked through modernist and brutalist eras. Julie Willis and Philip Goad’s15 call for a reframing of Australian architectural history with greater exploration of regional developments extending modernism’s trope, has been expertly taken up through SAHANZ (Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand), and publications such as Placemakers (2008)16, Hot Modernism (2015) 17 and Off the Plan (2016)18. The recent Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture (2012)19 impressively maps the Australian context, surveying indigenous beginnings to contemporary eras, of which Queensland architects, including the ‘lost tribe’ of practitioners, such as Jim Birrell are well represented. It is noteworthy however, that despite being an early Sisalkraft scholar, receiving various commissions from the Queensland Government and academic institutions for large scale projects, and identified in publications such as Hot Modernism20 and Cool: The 60s Brisbane House21 for architectural work, Queensland architect Stephen Trotter is missing from this volume. This paper seeks to provide a review of Stephen Trotter and his contemporary, James Birrell, who’s institutional works were completed in Brisbane and the regional centres of Rockhampton and Townsville respectively during the 60s and 70s. Significant to this study is 7 GIEDION 1967 (5th Edition). 8 Ibid, p xxxiii. 9 Ibid, p Xlviii. 10 Robin Boyd’s The Puzzle of Architecture (1965), points to Revolution (modernist tendencies), Counter Revolution (avant-garde featurism) and Solution (new brutalist examples) to explain the changing expression of modernism. 11 GOAD 2004, p7. 12 GOAD 2015, p186. 13 ONANS 2017. 14 GOAD 1997. 15 WILLIS & GOAD 2008. 16 WALLACE & SUTCHBURY 2008. 17 MACARTHUR ET AL. 2015. 18 BOSMAN DEDEKORKUT-HOWES & LEACH 2016. 19 GOAD & WILLIS 2012. 20 MACARTHUR ET AL. 2015 21 AVERY, DENNIS, & WHITMAN 2004. 260 an understanding of the shift in architectural expression from overtly modernist tendencies, to the experimentation with concrete and climatic screening resonant with Giedion’s ‘new architectural plasticity’. Trotter and Birrell: Common Ground The RAIA Sisalkraft Scholarship was established in 1955 to provide an opportunity for young architects “to travel and to study the practice of architecture and the building industry and to obtain training and experience in the duties of an executive architect for the better management and organisation of building projects.”22 It was envisaged as an important grant for researchers to bridge Australia’s remoteness with traditional centres of architectural knowledge and production. As recipients of the prestigious Sisalkraft Scholarship in the early 60s, Jim Birrell (1961 Scholarship) and Stephen Trotter (1963 Scholarship) were exposed to the modernist expansion through masterplanning and architecture projects across the globe. Their subsequent publications (a condition of the scholarship) documented their contact with planning and design practices throughout USA, Europe, India, South East Asia and South America. Stephen Trotter’s Cities in the Sun23, represents a visual catalogue of building details and reflections exploring architecture for climatic response24. In discussing the publication and his subsequent influences, Trotter noted that “the primitive architecture of India and the America’s … had all similar patterns, yet totally different architecture”, and that “people understood climate, they lived climate all their lives”25. It was with this regional understanding
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