The Tropical House in Northern Queensland From

Settling the Thermal Frontier: The Tropical House in Northern Queensland From Federation to the Second World War. A Thesis Submitted to the University of Sydney in Fulfilment of Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Architecture, Design & Planning by Daniel James Ryan Sydney, New South Wales 2017 Attribution Statement This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes. Sections of Chapter 3 appeared in Ryan, Daniel J. "The Hygienic Holiday: The Country Women's Association and the Reform of the Queensland House." In OPEN: The 30th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, edited by Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach. Gold Coast, Qld: Griffith University, 2013. This is pages 172-176 of the thesis. Chapter 3 also contains material published in Ryan, Daniel "Tropical Panoramas: Competitions for Model Houses in Northern and Western Queensland 1923-30." In Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 32, Architecture, Institutions and Change, edited by Paul Hogben and Judith O'Callaghan. 524-35. Sydney: SAHANZ, 2015. This is pages 185-190 of the thesis. I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged. Daniel James Ryan February 8, 2017 i As supervisor for the candidature upon which this thesis is based, I can confirm that the authorship attribution statements above are correct. Associate Professor Lee Stickells, 08 February 2017 ii Abstract This thesis examines how the thermal performance of the house in tropical Queensland became, during the first half of the twentieth century, an issue located between politics, medicine and architecture. Drawing from medical history, settler-colonial studies and environmental design history the work is concerned with the mobility of architecture’s agency in solving the “problem” of climate at the domestic scale, and how the control and measurement of residential indoor temperatures were racialised, politicised and medicalised. The chapters trace the development of a common culture within medicine about tropical housing design, the role of northern Queensland as a counter-case to other colonial housing models, the emergence of the white settler housewife as a privileged subject of housing reform and the eventual accommodation of a physiological world view in Australian architectural practice. The thesis integrates primary source material from an extensive range of medical, governmental and community organisations. It argues that a distinctive medical and political discourse developed during the early twentieth century regarding the tropical house in northern Queensland. While official discussions about housing in the rest of the tropical world centred on the provision of health and comfort for male colonial officials, the control of indigenous and colonial interactions, and the sanitation of labourers’ housing, this was only partly true in northern Queensland. Officials and community groups in Queensland were more focused in their efforts on the white rather than indigenous or indentured migrant populations. Of most concern was the question of how to make white women more productive, comfortable and healthier at home; questions about domestic productivity and reproductivity of settler housewives were framed both as an environmental and architectural issue with political consequences. The thesis argues that this was driven by racial anxieties about white women’s role in the tropics, emergent research on the physical limits to work in high temperature environments and northern Queensland’s unusual socio-political form, being a settler-colonial society located in the tropics. Far from seeing climatically responsive design as a recent phenomenon, the study highlights the deep historical links between architecture, climatology, medicine and the politics of regional development—all bound to the history of the dual enterprises of colonisation and settlement. iii The thesis tracks the evolving thinking about the tropical house and architecture’s fluctuating agency therein. It demonstrates that debates about tropical housing in the early twentieth century were not driven by architects but by medical experts, women’s groups and politicians. Even where architects played a major role in shaping discussions on housing, such as at the end of the Second World War, they were still reliant on medical and economic research to frame questions about how buildings ought to respond to climate. Here, the thesis emphasises how, in the specific setting of northern Queensland, architecture drew from and normalised knowledge from other disciplines in order to reshape itself and secure an ongoing role in the discourse on the tropical house in Australia. As such the thesis makes a contribution to the ongoing reassessment of the relationship between architecture, climate, and the colonial project; and to the historiography of architecture’s response to environmental politics and thought. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................... viii List of Abbreviations ............................................................................ x List of Figures ..................................................................................... xi Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 Background .......................................................................................... 3 Tropical Architecture and Forms of Colonial Expansion .................... 9 The Tropics as a Temperate Other ..................................................... 12 The Intimate Frontiers of Empire ....................................................... 17 Organisation of the Thesis ................................................................. 25 Chapter 1 Doctors as Architects ................................................................................. 31 The Climatic Prison ........................................................................... 38 The Climatic Enclave ......................................................................... 41 Letting the Air in ................................................................................ 44 Transnational Exchange and the Mosquito-proof Hut ....................... 49 Personal Prophylaxis and Racial Privilege ........................................ 60 Sanitary Existenzminimum ................................................................ 67 Medical Retrofit and Colonial Domesticity ....................................... 73 Reimagining Climate ......................................................................... 80 Conclusion ......................................................................................... 89 Chapter 2 Defining Thermal Frontiers ...................................................................... 92 A White-only Workforce in the Tropics ............................................ 94 Defining Thermal Limits ................................................................. 101 Spatialising Heat Indices .................................................................. 108 Environmental Determinism ............................................................ 115 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 133 v Chapter 3 Holidays, Homes and Thermal Relief .................................................... 135 Early Models .................................................................................... 139 Experiments with Ideal Houses ........................................................ 146 Surveying the Tropical Home .......................................................... 150 First Competition ............................................................................. 156 Disguising the Survey ...................................................................... 162 QCWA: From Tropical Medicine to Tropical Architecture ............ 172 The AITM Director’s House ............................................................ 176 From Town Planning to Architecture .............................................. 183 The Competition for Western Homes .............................................. 187 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 190 Chapter 4 Post-War Reconstruction and Technocracy ......................................... 193 Reviving Northern Settlement ......................................................... 195 How the War Created a Housing Crisis ........................................... 201 The Queensland Tropical Housing Committee ................................ 206 Housing as Social Security............................................................... 215 Bringing the House into the Laboratory........................................... 218 Queensland Evidence on Tropical Housing ..................................... 223 The Tropical House as a Tool for Collaboration ............................. 228 Solar Planning and Climate in the CHC’s Final Report .................. 234 CHC and QTHC Designs for Tropical Houses ................................ 239 Karl Langer’s Sub-Tropical Housing ..............................................

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