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MARISSA LINDQUIST, PAUL SANDERS

School of Design, Queensland University of Technology [email protected], [email protected]

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 asHot 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 and a respect for climate and site that Trotter developed his own unique practice. Brown notes that Cities in the Sun “was a rare instance of the power of the illustrated travelogue and was of sure interest to those craving design strategies to cope with tropical climates”26. The report has been recognised by Elizabeth Musgrave for investigation of the vernacular and for Trotters differentiation of sub-tropical climates27. Silvia Micheli and Andrew Wilson have acknowledged its contribution to Queensland’s growing interest in international architecture, specifically Asian building forms and of Trotters advocacy of biculturalism28. Similarly, Jim Birrell who started his career in Queensland as City Architect for Brisbane City Council in 1955 and subsequently Staff Architect for the University of Queensland in 1961, advocated for new master-planning approaches as developed through the scholarship. Birrell’s study looked at the work of independent architects commissioned on large-scale master planned projects29, touring through the United States, Great Britain, Europe, India and South East Asia. The knowledge gained through the scholarship had direct influence for Birrell in terms of architectural tectonics (JD Storey Building and Union College), as town planner throughout southern Queensland and most significantly for regional institutional commissions at Townsville College University and PNG University. The tour marked Birrell’s esteem for Walter Burley Griffin, and provided substantial content for his internationally lauded publication Walter Burley Griffin30, a biography of the great architect and his planning approaches to Canberra, Australia.

The exposure of the Sisalkraft scholarship to architectural practice around the world, cemented the take up of foreign approaches Trotter and Birrell had observed

22 BROWN 2005. 23 TROTTER 1964 24 Tropical countries and their tropical buildings, as well as examples in hot dry countries. 25 DENNIS 1999. 26 BROWN 2005. 27 MUSGRAVE 2017. 28 MICHELI AND WILSON 2015, p118. 29 BIRRELL, MAKULA & CAMPION 2013, p77. 30 BIRRELL 1964. 261 through print. As many have noted31, the impact of international developments and key protagonists through journals and periodicals were considerable in the contemporary practice of young Queensland architects through the 50s and 70s. For Trotter, two key magazines had great significance in his early work; Architectural Review from the UK and the American journal Architectural Record. It was due to an American presence during World War II, that “half the population of architectural students were looking toward the US for inspiration …the American Journals particularly had lots of articles on Japanese gardens and architecture.”32 Trotter was particularly influenced early on by the California style architecture developed substantially from Japanese aesthetics. This was evident architecturally in his early houses which engaged with terraces and courtyards, and visually, through the many and varied watercolour perspectives produced around that time (Fig. 1). Climatic planning and screening were also influenced by American architect Edward Durell Stone, who’s American Embassy New Dehli inspired Trotter’s UQ Students Union Complex buildings and later design for the Rabaul Embassy in Papua New Guinea.

Figure 1: Mathers House by Stephen Trotter (1963). Source: Fulton Trotter Architects Archive.

Birrell who was educated at the Melbourne Tech and University of Melbourne, gained full exposure from recent emigres to Melbourne following the war. Birrell notes the influence by Ernest Muehlstein, a refuge from Central Europe and an expert in European architectural history, who instilled an appreciation of the European Baroque33, as well as the considerable design influence through Roy Grounds while at university. To maintain interest following his education he cofounded Architecture and Arts, and became a vocal challenger of the Boyd’s devotion to the international canon, rallying for a more humanist approach. In the Victorian Architectural Students’ Association Journal Smudges, Birrell wrote “Our modern architecture, if it is to go forward, must find architects of vision and courage who will carry human values to the functional skeletons of our hospitals and factories”34.

Sculpture and the fine arts were enjoyed by both Trotter and Birrell and had an indelible influence on their later architectural work, each collaborating with artists

31 WILLIS & GOAD 2008; GOAD 2015; MACARTHUR ET AL. 2015. 32 DENNIS 1999. Interview with Stephen Trotter. 33 BIRRELL MAKULA & CAMPION 2013, p2. 34 Ibid, p5. 262 on architectural commissions in Brisbane and the tropics. Trotter attended the Central Technical College (CTC) from a young age (10 or 12 years) to study under Melville Haysom. Haysom was involved with the Contemporary Arts Society (CAS) Queensland Branch35 and had been highly influenced by Max Melbourne who brought an exposure of the contemporary movements from the Continent36. Trotter continued at the CTC for the first stage of the diploma course in Architecture, which he later completed at the University of Queensland. This artistic training exposed Trotter to a number of young artists at the time, formalising a working friendship with artist and subsequent architect Kevin Brereton for the Capricornia Institute of Advanced Education Resource Library in Rockhampton. Likewise, Jim Birrell37 was heavily associated with the Contemporary Art Society of Australia, designing the catalogue for the 1954 Royal Tour Exhibition, which included amongst others, Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, Donald Friend, Fred Williams and Albert Tucker38. Later, Birrell noted considerable exposure to leading artists on the Sisalkraft tour, including Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth who inspired “[a] relation of texture and form”, and convinced Birrell that art should be integral to a building and not something stuck on in compliance to legislation39. In Brisbane he established relationships with Betty and Roy Churcher and art dealer Brian Johnstone whose gallery was a haven for young contemporary artist and architects alike. In 1968, a retrospective exhibition of leading Queensland architects entitled 48|68 was held at the Johnstone Gallery which included James Birrell and Partners and Fulton Collin Boys Gilmour Trotter & Partners, along with Karl Langer, Hayes and Scott, Job and Froud, Robin Gibson and others40. Birrell developed ongoing relationships with these local artists, such as James Meldrum, who designed the concrete murals to the Wickham Terrace Carpark (1958-61). Both Trotter and Birrell fused artistic and sculptural sensibility within their later architectural work, alongside influences from Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Burley Griffin and Marcel Breuer (who’s proportions and later concrete plasticity were engineered by Luigi Nervi); and from the local artistic world they inhabited, who unashamedly embraced context.

The Regional Shift: Regional Modernism and Education Building

As noted extensively elsewhere the Federal and Queensland State government ploughed the economy into a building agenda both pre and post-World War II41. This included building schemes in Queensland focusing upon a program of hospital building (1946), and investment in tertiary education through the 1909 University of Queensland Act which established the University42 within Brisbane and regionally, in the construction of Colleges of Advanced Education. In Queensland, firms such as Donoghue and Fulton43, and later Fulton, Job and Collin, with whom Stephen Trotter was employed, received several commissions for regional ‘base hospitals’ and health buildings. John East notes that Charles Fulton modernist approach during practice with John Donoghue (1937-46), shifted the regional appetite for the “latest and most sophisticated facilities … in a new and striking ultra-modern style”44. Relationships with the Hospital Boards, through extensive regional travel, shored up relationships

35 FRIDEMANIS 1991. 36 HAYSOM & DE BERG 1963. 37 BIRRELL MAKULA & CAMPION 2013. 38 Ibid, p7. 39 MACARTHUR 2004. 40 MACARTHUR ET AL. 2015 p25. 41 SEE GOAD 2015, 2018; MACARTHUR ET AL. 2015; EAST 2017, MUSGRAVE 2015, McDONALD 1983. 42 QUEENSLAND STATE ARCHIVE 2019. 43 Donoghue’s first hospital commission was in Stanthorpe for the Stanthorpe Hospital Board. See EAST 2017. 44 EAST 2017, p30 263 between government agencies and architectural practice which created a climate within Brisbane and in the regions for modern architecture.

Following the transfer of University of Queensland from its prior location in Old Government House to St Lucia (1949), the University College of Townsville (a subset of UQ) was established with enrolments commencing in in 196145. In the 1960s James Birrell as staff architect, advised the UQ senate on the further expansion of the St Lucia campus, part of a national improvements scheme spearheaded by Menzies’s Australian University Commission (AUC). Birrell was also involved in development of the Stephenson Masterplan for the University College of Townsville, employing planning principles gleaned from Walter Burley Griffin46. Soon after, the provision of technical education made possible by the Education Act 1964, was legislated to meet the needs of the community, industry and commerce. This was overseen by the Technical Education Advisory Council (TEAC), subsequently developing the Central Technical College (Brisbane) into the Queensland Institute of Technology in 196547. In 1967, two further Queensland Institutes of Technology were established: QIT, Capricornia (Rockhampton) and QIT, Darling Downs (Toowoomba). The three institutes, became recognised as the Colleges of Advanced Education (CAEs), later known as Institutes of Advanced Education.48

The provision of tertiary buildings and libraries, shared a similar role to that of the new base hospitals developing in the regions. They became a sign for modern thinking, new innovation, and a new expression of monumentality befitting the heart of campus. Philip Goad49 highlights the damning appraisal of libraries Australia wide in the 1935 Munn-Pitt report, and the Murray Report of 1957 into university libraries, “triggering a wave of changes to the library system”50 both within state libraries and the tertiary sector. Library developments reflected modernist themes which varied in composition, from monolithic curtain glazed structures following Miesian lines (for example Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology), to more expressive monolithic concrete structures reflecting the new Brutalist tectonic and, in other cases, incorporating Giedion’s ‘new plasticity’.

Trotter and Birrell | University of Queensland and the Regions: University of Queensland Students Union Complex

The late Frank Moss51, attributed Fulton and Collin’s role in developing the UQ Students Union Complex commission to Sir James Holt, who had an established relationship with Charlie Fulton through regional health projects52. Holt was the Coordinator General and Senator of the university, who Birrell described as an “engineer of great distinction with an appreciation of architecture.”53 Fulton and Collin were commissioned in the late 50s to provide a masterplan and architectural design for the refectory, student health centre, sports union, council administration office & common rooms (Fig. 2). Stephen Trotter has noted the influence of Edward Durell Stone’s American Embassy Building, New Dehli, in the design of the complex.

45 DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, TRAINING AND EMPLOYMENT, QUEENSLAND 2019. 46 BIRRELL 2013, p87. 47 DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, TRAINING AND EMPLOYMENT, QUEENSLAND 2019. 48 QUEENSLAND STATE ARCHIVES, p2-3. 49 GOAD 2018 50 GOAD 2018, p217. 51 Frank Moss was the former director of Fulton Trotter Gilmore and Moss (1980-1997), and Fulton Trotter Moss (1997-2004). 52 SANDERS & LINDQUIST 2018. Interview with Frank Moss. 53 BIRRELL 2013, p72. 264 Intriguingly Robin Boyd in his publication The Puzzle of Architecture (1965), had held Stone the key figure responsible for an attack on the International style through his ‘fatal fascination’ with ornamentation (and downward spiral toward featurism) as exemplified by the American Embassy New Dehli54. Trotters scheme which won the RAIA (Qld Chapter) Bronze Medal (1965), developed a climatic response to Brisbane’s subtropical context. The main administration building incorporated cross ventilation principals which engaged a “lightweight construction with concrete encased steel frame (columns) and steel frame open webbed roof joist, with a metal pan deck.”55 The breeze block façade was a collaboration between Trotter and Besser who developed the ‘Union Screen Block’ or ‘Trotter Block’, a half block with tapered webs offering larger sized openings reinforced at the ends with rods56 . The building incorporated a threshold strip pond to its entry, offset by a contemporary sculptural work (Fig. 3). Centrally was an internal court naturally lit from above by a covered lightwell emblematic of Californian modernism. University of Melbourne’s Cross Section noted at the time that the “solar screens & studied detailing confirm an evident trend in recent Q’land architecture towards an Exotic Tropic style, solidly based on local climatic conditions & pierced blocks.”57 A recent appraisal of the complex for Heritage consideration argues that Trotter “designed a set of buildings exceptionally well-adapted to the aesthetic and functional requirements of participatory democracy.”58

Figure 2: University of Queensland Students Union Building Complex (1958). Source: Fulton Trotter Architects Archive.

54 BOYD 1965, p8. 55 SANDERS & LINDQUIST 2018. Interview with Frank Moss. 56 Ibid. 57 UNKNOWN AUTHOR (CROSS SECTION) 1961. 58 RICKERT 2019, p26. 265 Figure 3: The University of Queensland Union Buildings (1961). Source: Fulton Trotter Architects Archive

Central Institute of Advanced Education (CIAE), Rockhampton From the success of Student Union Complex, Trotter was offered partnership of the practice in 196259, establishing Fulton Collin Boys Gilmour and Trotter. Following significant institutional (International House UQ), commercial, civic and state building projects, Trotter was commissioned to design the Central Resources Library for the Capricornia Institute of Advanced Education. The Second Report of the Commonwealth Advisory Committee on Advanced Education (1969) advocated for the pivotal importance of library development within Colleges of Advanced Education as “a source of information for the technological fields.”60 The quality of libraries was viewed as a critical component of CAE’s and subsequently attracted considerable funding, as Oakshott notes:

“The need for the library directly to support the CAE’s distinctive mode of education, combined with the fact that libraries were found to be in such poor condition, convinced the CACAE that ‘urgent, generous and expert attention’ was required… a special Commonwealth library grant of $500,000 ‘to accelerate library development’ to help bring them ‘to the point where they are not only capable of sustaining present activities but are able to support the greatly diversified activities which this Committee is charged to promote.”61

59 FULTON TROTTER ARCHITECTS 2019. 60 OAKSHOTT 1997, p62-63, CACAE, Second Report. 61 Ibid, p39, CACAE, First Report. 266 The development of Capricornia fell under the direction of Professor Arthur Appleton. Graham Black, director of library services, acknowledges that Appleton was “a driving force preparing for the conversion of the CIAE to university status. He made a particularly strong contribution developing the University’s art collection. He was also instrumental in commissioning the sculpture around the library building making it an iconic building on the Rockhampton campus.”62 Trotters scheme for the library, built in 1977 provided a large spanning open planned facility following typical library design at the time, with student and staff provisions on ground floor, and the main library book store and special collections above. Master-planning wise, it formed the anchor to the institute, projecting a commanding presence through the use of a custom designed precast panel façade aloft imposing pillars facing the remainder of the campus. The main entry to the rear, engaged with a shift in landscape levels to provide a more intimate connection to the surrounding tropical gardens. The large sculptural precast panels were seen as highly innovative at the time63 particularly for its location, with Australia having pioneered reinforced precast panels relatively recently in 194564. The design of the façade was developed through partnership with sculptor Kevin Brereton, who had developed a strong family friendship with the Trotters. Kevin was inspired by the natural wind and sea erosion of coastal rock occurring along the eastern coastline particularly in the Central coast (See Figs. 4-6). The panels were cast using preformed fibreglass moulds and articulated a system of openings and sculptural relief to the façade65, to provide thermal mass comfort for the interior, whilst also integrating stylised openings at calculated points for cross ventilation and natural lighting to the upper levels. The ground floor was recessed back from the façade to control heat gain, supported further by large floating roof above, befitting architectural science advocated by Balwant Singh Saini forTropical Architecture (1970), and integrating lessons learnt from Cities in the Sun.

J.D Story Building, University of Queensland.

“The J.D. Story Building was a shock. Curving round the outer edge of Circular Drive, its height exaggerated by strong vertical emphasis, its Le Corbusier fire-escapes protruding from either end, and its raw grey aggregate so at variance with the soft sandstone — a building of stamina and vitality completely foreign to Hennessy’s conception. People asked when it was going to be painted!”66

The ideas behind the JD Story Administration Building (1963) at the University of Queensland were based on a fascination with the modern movement of Breuer and Corbusier, testing the arc concept as seen through Walter Burley Griffin, and integrating architecture within the ‘lie of the land’67. Birrell had established an emphasis of master planning and landscape through his Sisalkraft scholarship68 which, David Pestorius has suggested, “always retain[ed] a certain intimacy and integrity” due to a “keen sense of the site and implications for its use.”69 Macarthur and Murray have observed that the arc of the JD Story plan establishes a landscape

62 CENTRAL QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY 2010. 63 SANDERS & LINDQUIST (2017/18). Interviews conducted with Jack Gilmour, Ivan McDonald, Frank Moss, Phil Tait, Mark Trotter, Paul Trotter. 64 AUSTEHC 2000, p326. 65 SANDERS & LINDQUIST (2019). Interview with Paul Trotter on site. 66 McVINISH & PEACHY 1982, p72. 67 WILSON & MACARTHUR 1997. 68 GOAD 1997, p21. 69 PESTORIUS 1999, p6. 267 device in which a much larger spatial volume of a full circle is implied70, exemplifying Birrell’s tendency “to design buildings on sight lines into the landscape.”71

Clockwise from Top Figure 4: Capricornia Institute of Advanced Education Library (Now Central Queensland University) (2019). Source: Cian Sanders. Figure 5/6: Window Opening Detail (2019) and Wind- blown Coastal Rock (2017). Source: Marissa Lindquist.

70 Ibid, p8. See also MACARTHUR & MURRAY 1997. 71 MACARTHUR 2004. 268 Figure 7: J.D Story Building, University of Queensland. Source: University of Queensland Archives, UQA S909 p55a.

Birrell had also visited the London Wharf Labourer’s Union building by Sir Frederick Gibberd which was built with prefabricated units, to which he adapted to the curved plan at the JD Story Building72. The use of concrete, the deployment of labour, construction processes and indeed prefabricated systems, were a pioneering technical development for the time in Queensland73. Birrell noted that the building was “a study in symmetry and proportion with a tactility associated with ‘as found’ textures in the materials of construction.”74 It also integrated sun-shading and new innovations in precast concrete and operable double glazing discovered from his Sisalkraft tour of Milan75. The design exemplified a developed modernist palette extended by respect for the nature of raw materials, their inherent thermal performance, and an embrace of site (Fig.7).

Eddie Koiki Mabo Library - James Cook University (JCU), Townsville.

Birrell has stated that the remoteness of Townsville was far enough away to get away with such an expressive library building76at the University College of Townsville (now James Cook University, JCU). The library’s dominant ‘floating’ roof took reference and inspiration from those of Corbusier particularly at Chandigarth,

72 WILSON & MACARTHUR 1997. 73 TAYLOR 1986. 74 BIRRELL & HASTINGS 1999. 75 BIRRELL 2013, p78. 76 MACARTHUR & MURRAY 1997, p26. 269 and it established the necessary form and scale as the centrepiece of the campus77. The library exemplifies critical aspects of Birrell’s work, what Macarthur and Murray78 discuss as “deeply contextualised in physical siting and culture’79 through the use of “the concept of significant form and scenography.”80 Birrell acknowledged the influence Roy Grounds design for The National Gallery of Victoria in the design for the library building. Grounds had been his studio instructor at university, and brought to his architecture a “source of humanism”, with Birrell later noting, “Grounds had a terrific influence on me.”81The master-planning for the library was centrally based on the junction of axes generated from Mt Stuart and Magnetic Island. Birrell conceived of the building as:

“A three-storey rectangle of off-form concrete with a great overhanging roof. The lowest level was open as a central, shaded undercroft where all the university population could meet and relax. The concrete walls of the exterior sloped slightly as they rose and at the level of this meeting place, they were pierced with circular windows, which were random in size and location. This added an atmosphere of relaxation. I felt this important as a counter point of study and research. … The enormous roof was to be supported at only eight points so that the top floor would be free of obstructions and could be furnished without constraint.”82

The design of the library imbued an atmosphere of relaxation, counter to the load of study, and followed the relaxed tropical feel of the campus, with one student of the time noting that “It was a beautiful setting with the new Arts and Engineering Faculty buildings and the Library nestled in the untouched bushland of the area. Wildlife was in abundance … and, coupled with the tranquility of the surroundings, created an environment unique to our university.”83The open plan under-croft space surrounded by a plastic off-form concrete embrace, was an appropriate and successful space as a cooling platform from Townsville’s humid sun (Fig.8).

77 Ibid, 1997, p27. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid, p7. 80 Ibid, p8. 81 BIRRELL, 2013. 82 BIRRELL, 2013, p103. 83 JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY 1989, p59. 270 Figure 8: Eddie Koiki Mabo Library/University College of Townsville Library in Townsville, Queensland. Source: Unidentified; Beverly Studio; John Oxley Library; State Library of Queensland. Image no. 6523- 0001-0413. http://hdl.handle.net/10462/deriv/256113. Collection Reference: 6523 Royal Australian Institute of Architects Photographs and Plan. The open plan for the upper floors, though described as an outstanding achievement in design and layout, was seen by John Penbrook, librarian at the time “as suffering from a noise problem, mainly due to its open design”, adding that “whilst architecturally this building might have been innovative and pleasing to the eye, as a functional library building, in has never been the success that … had been envisaged.”84 Notwithstanding this functional oversight, the façade and structural system of the JCU library represents Birrell’s exploration of ‘abstract distractions’ which had informed his career since his student days, tangentially recalling influences of Barbara Hepworth’s landscape sculpture work of carved form and absent circles. Monumentally expressive and complete with monolithic rectangular cantilever roof, the library exploits the plasticity of concrete through broad filleted corners, and opens up to the campus with the humanness of a low sprung (horse-shoe) arch.

Conclusion

In Brazil’s Modern Architecture85 authors Elisabetta Andreoli and Adrian Forty speak of transcultural adaptation or hybridity as a means to describe the translation of modernism at the margins. They make the point that Modernism in Europe was linked to new technologies of construction and a language that “rejected the values of the bourgeois culture, discarded decoration, [and that] celebrated light and air”86. In Brazil (and indeed other regional tropics/subtropics such as Queensland), they note that climate was already over sufficient in sunlight and air, and economies were regionally based, lacking much of the means and industrial infrastructure of the Continent. Clients were also state or governmental rather than the private bourgeois 87 and with this came a desire to express ingenuity but also an identity in context

84 Ibid, p36. 85 ANDREOLI & FORTY 2004. 86 Ibid, p16. 87 Ibid, p16. 271 rather than industrial or international zeal.

The post-war financial boom of the 1950s was a period of expansion and development in Australia that “provided opportunities for architects, for the first time in decades, to ‘stretch their wings’ and to look towards an architecture to do justice to the country’s newly attained global status.”88 In particular, the new building program presented great opportunities for young architects, who were aware of international trends, and to whom the “the adoption of a brutalist aesthetic of a diverse ‘ideological base’ would find its most enduring expression in buildings for education.”89 James Birrell and Stephen Trotter seized their own opportunities through major commissions at the University of Queensland and at new regional campus settings of Rockhampton and Townsville, but did so however through a bold extension of the prevailing approaches to institutional buildings by fusing regional sensibilities of climate, vernacular form, and technology.

The innovations possible through concrete construction and architecture throughout the 60s and 70s, coupled with new ideas championed across the globe fusing climatic principals with the plastic properties of concrete, shifted the language of modernism to engage in an architecture with greater integration of sculptural relief. This shift was denounced by commentators such as Robin Boyd, who argued for a return to the respect for the nature of raw materials and construction practices in a bid to avoid forays into Featurism. Both Trotter and Birrell though practicing early on within a traditional modernist framework, experimented with the innovations made possible through concrete ‘plasticity’ espoused by Giedion. They exploited opportunities provided by associations and friendships with contemporary local arts communities, and discoveries found through their Sisalkraft tours to render ground-breaking large-scale institutional projects such as the College libraries in Rockhampton and Townsville. They continued to collaborate with artists throughout their architectural projects, specifically in Papua New Guinea’s new civic buildings. These artistic collaborations imbued an embrace of the creative dimensions of place and context through innovations of concrete as an interpretation of a local way of life.

88 TAYLOR 2004, p3. 89 GOAD 2015, p200. 272 Bibliography

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