This lecture deals with Melbourne architecture of the first decade and a half after the second world war. Although rapidly becoming a field of research there is not much of a literature covering the period. Of the readily available sources Norman Day's little book, 'Heroic Melbourne', addresses the period by narrowing the trends and pre-occupations of the interesting architects of the period to fit an imposed but unstated view of what was important. 'Heroic Melbourne' indicates that architecturally, the immediate post-war period was one of prevailing optimism, structural experimentation, geometric pre-occupations. The main pre-occupation of this book is with a number of generally brightly colored, idiosyncratic buildings [generally suburban houses] which were produced by a small number of young architects at this time. One of the problems of the book is with what was left out. Although the early exuberances of McIntyre and Borland are touched on presumably because they fit the picture of jazzy optimism, the prolific and talented pair David Chancellor & Rex Patrick who did not, are basically ignored. A small number of early houses by Yuncken, Freeman Brothers, Griffiths and Simpson and Mockridge Stahle and Mitchell were included despite the apparent rarity of their excursions into the colourful geometric expressionism which the book investigates. The cool contemporary houses of Neil Clerehan and the somewhat reserved regionalism of John and Phyllis Murphy are all thrown in together without explanation of the differences in position that the images of their buildings make so apparent but the highly influential and somewhat changeable Robin Boyd and the perhaps even more influential Roy Grounds are virtually ignored. J. M. Freeland's 'Architecture in Australia: A History' on the other hand acknowledged the diversity of approaches prevalent in post-war Australian architecture but was inclined to attribute it to the increasing sophistication of available building technologies dazzling architects with a suddenly much wider range of potential formal strategies to apply to their buildings. "To the spectator, which included many professionals as well as the public, it seemed that all the hectic forms and colour were ruled by nothing more than a desire to be different. In following the fashions, they strove for the novel, the startling the unusual and different for their own sake. The disturbing confusion that tormented those who were most deeply involved with the struggle to find a new direction became a sort of carnival approach for those who merely followed the trends." Without laboring the point it is sufficient to note that, in this period as in all others, there were multiple strands running through and shaping the totality of Melbourne architecture. To tease them out it is necessary to look both more carefully outside the contemporary architectural culture of this city at what was happening internationally, particularly in the United States and more carefully at what was happening inside Melbourne's contemporary architectural culture.

Melbourne at the end of the Second World War was subject to fairly severe shortages of building materials. The city was emerging from virtually two decades during which very little new had been built. Despite the Coronation of the English Queen Elizabeth in 1953 which caused a substantial resurgence of patriotic feeling for the 'mother country' regard for England had fallen considerably during the war as a result of the feeling that England, while more than delighted to welcome Australian troops to the European war, had failed us in our hour of need. Australian society oriented itself far more strongly culturally and economically towards the U.S.A. than had previously been the case.

Link to R.A.I.A Awards

The influnce on Melbourne architecture of this period of foreign precursors, generally but not exclusively to be found in the United States was significant but in Melbourne, unlike Sydney, the direct influence of that well known group of significant European modernist architects who emigrated to the United States prior to world war 2 was somewhat muted. Nevertheless, even in Melbourne, the influence of members of this group was felt and it is relevant to briefly introduce them. It was in the U.S.A. that many of the most significant early post-war developments took place, both in architecture in general and domestic architecture in particular. This was in part due to the earlier arrival of several important European modernist architects. In the 1920's Eliel Saarinen, Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra. In the 1930's Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and in 1941 Erich Mendelsohn all played important roles in the development of the North American version of late modernism. In Los Angeles there was a thriving school of post war modernists for whiuch Schindler and Neutra were perhaps the twin points of origin.

In the United States at the time amongst the architectural and design fraternity, there was a strong desire to reach a wider audience, not just in terms of size but in social make-up as well. This they hoped to achieve by encouraging manufacturers to put good quality 'Contemporary' design into mass production, thereby reducing the price to the consumer. These ideas had their origins in Germany between 1910 and 1930 in the philosophy of the Deutscher Werkbund and the Bauhaus but during the 1950's in the United States they actually came to fruition.

Instrumental in creating a climate for change and encouraging a shift in public opinion were the editors of several leading architectural magazines. These included Henry Wright of Architectural Forum, Emerson Gable of Architectural Record and John Entenza of Arts & Architecture. As well as powerfully advocating 'Contemporary' architecture and design to their narrow professional readership they engaged in wider activities such as publishing 'how to' books and surveys of contemporary practice which reached a much wider audience.

John Entenza even initiated the remarkable Case Study House Program in Los Angeles. These houses were commissioned over a twenty year period from the mid-1940's to the mid-1960's and were conceived originally as prototype low cost houses using standardized mass-produced components. Later with the growth of prosperity and full employment during the 1950's the houses began to reflect the needs of an increasingly affluent middle class. Through building the Case Study Houses Entenza hoped to demystify and popularize the aims of the modern movement, to open up its products to public view and its aims to public scrutiny. When the first six houses were opened to the public in 1946-7 they attracted 368,554 visitors. The architects for the Case Study Houses included a number of already established names such as Richard Neutra but most were relatively young and unknown. Charles and Ray Eames and Eero Sarinen were just beginning their careers. Younger still were Craig Ellwood and Pierre Koenig. All the houses were technologically innovative. Sometimes the innovation was in the structure as in the steel framing of Ellwood's Miesian houses and sometimes in the use of building materials. Best known and most influential of the early Case Study Houses was House number 8 by Charles and Ray Eames. The house was built of pre-fabricated industrial steel framing with Diagonal cross bracing. The frame was filled in with transparent and translucent glass and a variety of off-the-shelf light weight opaque board materials. Next door House number 9 designed by Eames and Eero Saarinen for John Entenza contrasted strongly with the Eames House [number 8]. Craig Ellwood, clearly inspired by Mies' Farnsworth House, designed three Case Study Houses number 16 [1952-3], 17 [1954-5] and 18 [1956-8]. Pierre Koenig, dedicated to the use of steel, not just for framing but also for internal cladding designed House Number 21 [1958] and 22 [1959-60]. As a final example, in 1959-60 Edward Killingsworth designed the very elegant House Number 23 'Triad' at La Jolla California.

In Melbourne also architectural publications began to proliferate. 'Architecture Today', 'Architecture and Arts' and the University of Melbourne publication 'Cross Section' are today all important sources of information on the architecture of this town during this important period. In light of the above the contents of the [anonymous] article entitled 'Post War Domestic Architecture' in the Victorian magazine Architecture & Arts from June 1961 are predictable. The article, a retrospective review of the architecture of the previous decade, commences by noting the emergence of a number of talented local architects in the post war period who, overshadowing those architects who had already achieved some prominence prior to the war, were beginning to produce a significant body of [mostly domestic] work in their own right.

"... While the post war period in Australia has not produced any local Leonardos, it has produced a whole generation of talented young architects particularly active in the field of domestic architecture. Although older architects like Sydney Ancher and Roy Grounds still continued building houses in the post war period their efforts were swamped by the younger men...."

The article notes the influence of the international journals in promoting contemporary architecture and the high profile of the pre-war giants of the discipline Frank Lloyd Wright, Gropius and Breuer. ".... Every overseas magazine carried forceful arguments in favour of modern architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright was getting whole issues of Forum devoted to him and Gropius and Breuer were enjoying starring roles in the international scene. In fact the struggle of architects to get their theories across became the theme, in more than one instance, of best-selling novels. ..."

Without giving specific examples the article notes with disapproval the growth of what the unnamed author regarded as architectural exhibitionism on the world scene and the increasing occurence of Wright and Breuer imitators on the local scene. "... Overseas the pattern at least on the surface for the pseudo-architectural genius seemed clear - build something which could be rationalized and make sure it shocked. This would mean publicity and public acclaim as an architectural revolutionary - a short road to fame and maybe fortune. So the path of architectural exhibitionism and half baked experimentation seemed to quite a few an exciting path indeed. ..."

"... The early postwar period also saw a great deal of imitation and 'master architect' adherents. Frank Lloyd-Wright's prairie houses began to pop up in both N.S.W. and Victoria. Marcel Breuer type houses could be seen in the bush and water side around Sydney ..."

Having made these points however, included amongst the illustrations to the article are several designs by Harry Seidler [clearly showing the influence of his former lecturer and employer Marcel Breuer] a couple of houses by Chancellor and Patrick and a couple by the Sydney architect Peter Muller all of which clearly reflect aspects of the work of Frank Lloyd-Wright. The article names the use of 'natural' materials [brick and timber??], some form of modular planning and expression and provision for some form of indoor-outdoor living facilities as common threads uniting the emergent Australian architects it promoted. While acknowledging the - highly stylistic and sometimes very personal - houses designed by some local architects [which for reasons unexplained did not fall into the category of 'architectural exhibitionism and half baked experimentation' which was apparently only a failing of overseas architects] the article maintains that even - the strongest individualist invariably sticks to these ingredients.

It notes the democratic involvement of the profession in the mass housing markets via the various Small Homes Services set up in different states following the model of the Victorian Age - RVIA Small Homes Service under the initial direction of Robin Boyd and the happy involvement of Robin Boyd in the design of the mass produced window elements by Stegbar [the B stands for Boyd]. The article notes the increasing acceptance of the flat roof to both the banks and potential clients and lauds the continued presence of the 'vernacular tradition' [by which it seems to mean verandahs] as a means to achieving - houses which are very suited for today's living requirements -

The article continues with illustrations of five houses, all utilizing variants of what might be termed the 'Contemporary' idiom, by Seidler [dubbed the original exponent of the new brutalism] by Chancellor and Patrick [chastised but still published for "... a more than normal appreciation of the work of the late Frank Lloyd-Wright ..."] Douglas Snelling from Sydney, Don Fulton and Charles Weight. The article concludes with five projects most of them strongly influenced by either Lloyd-Wright or Breuer, but in the author's mind retaining a sufficiently strong personal expression for them to be evidence of the presence of a handful of individualists who had something worth saying. Those not apparently influenced by the two superstars were Grounds Romberg & Boyd's two projects; the ctesiphon shell Wood House and Pharmacy at Jordanville and Grounds' own masterful town house in Hill Street Toorak.

There were other influential North American precursors to the Melbourne architecture of the immediate post-war period. In his extended essay Victorian Modern originally published by the RVIA in 1947, Robin Boyd argued the existence of a residential Victorian type which seemed to involve elongated modernist planning, low pitched corrugated iron clad roofs, long runs of white-painted timber-framed, casement windows extending between sill and eaves, more often than not a substantial 'Wrightian' chimney, a strong visual link between indoor and outdoor living areas and an outer suburban semi-rural site. The models for this type were taken as Roy Grounds' 1938 residence on the Ranelagh estate in Mt Eliza and Norman Seabrook's own residence [ca 1949] in Croydon. In fact the 'Victorian type' owed a great deal to the contemporary architecture of the west coast of the United States whether of the Bay region architects to be found around San Francisco particularly the now largely forgotten but then successful, widely published and exhibited William Wurster or the North West regionalist architecture of Pietro Belluschi and others. Roy Grounds had come into contact with William Wurster and the woody vernacular of the Bay Region style while working in Hollywood as a set designer prior to the war and his domestic designs of the period immediately prior to the war arguably owed much to this style - see for example the first Henty House in Frankston and Lyncroft on the Mornington Peninsula. When Boyd, much influenced by Grounds, wrote 'Victoria Modern' still as a senior architecture student, it is not surprising to find the ideas of his older teacher and mentor at the University of Melbourne reflected in the writing. When Boyd later travelled to the United States to take up a visiting fellowship at MIT it was natural that one of the first things he did on arrival on the west coast was to seek out Wurster and the Bay Region style about which he wrote enthusiastically home to Romberg. There was a further connection here however. Wurster who was Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at MIT from 19?? - 19?? when he decided to return to practice in San Francisco was influential in the choice of his fellow west-coast architect Pietro Belluschi to succeed him as Dean. Belluschi was the Dean during Boyd's visit and subsequently visited Australia twice as a key note speaker at Coventions run by the R.A.I.A. Thus, somewhat paradoxically there is an international aspect to Boyd's assertion of the emergence of a regionally specific architecture in Melbourne. Starting around 1950 the young architectural practice of Chancellor and Patrick commenced the development of a residential style which, while owing much to the Prairie Houses of Frank Lloyd Wright and the contemporary residential architecture of Richard Neutra was yet sufficiently individual to warrant the description, 'Peninsula Style'. The name was due to the fact that Chancellor and Patrick's office was at the time in the southern bayside town of Frankston and most of the many early houses were for clients owning land on the Flinders Peninsula. Winsome Callister has published two articles on the development of a local regionalist style in Transition which I will not summarise here - suffice it to say that a more or less deliberate search for what might be termed Victorian architectural idiom was one important strand in the development of Melbourne architecture during the 1950's.

Another important characteristic of the local architecture of the early 1950's was the structural exuberance it often exhibited. Borland, Boyd and McIntyre all experimented with thin shell concrete construction, McIntyre, Boyd and Chancellor designed colorful houses based on experimental cantilevered and suspended structure, McIntyre, Borland J. & P. Murphy together with the engineer Bill Irwin designed the exemplary and structurally very daring swimming stadium for the 1956 Olympic Games and Yuncken Freeman brothers again with Bill Irwin as engineer designed the tension structure covering the Sidney Myer Music bowl in the Domain. there was a general air of structural inventiveness which characterized the period fed by the optimism generated by the end of the war and the increasing prosperity of the period. World-wide there were three international engineer-architects whose work was the focus of as much attention in Australia as elsewhere in the immediate post-war period. These were Felix Candela, Eduardo Torroja and Pier Luigi Nervi

World-wide the work of Frank Lloyd-Wright had exerted an influence since the end of the first world war. This could be traced in Melbourne as much as elsewhere where the pre-eminent Lloyd-Wright influenced architects during the 1950's were Chancellor & Patrick. The influence of Lloyd-Wright on Melbourne architecture probably peaked however in the 1960's with the work of Geoffrey Woodfall, the former Guilford Bell collaborator David Godsell, Charles Duncan, the commercial practice Jorgensen and Hough and some of the projects of Kevin Knight then design architect for the old Melbourne practice of Oakley and Parkes. Those buildings of Wright's which were probably most influential in Melbourne during this period were probably the houses collectively known as Usonian which were mostly designed during the 1930's. Designs appeared regularly in Melbourne during this period utilising the triangular or hexagonal interlocking geometries at times favoured by Wright in, for example the Hanna House of 1936. See for example the Bond House Tilba Tilba by David Chancellor (1956) and the Okalyi House of Charles Duncan (1968)

The democratic ambitions of the north American 'Contemporary' architects was reflected in the Age RVIA Small Homes Service. This was established in 1947 [a very good year] under the Directorship of the then very inexperienced Robin Boyd who was to continue to head the service for seven years.

The Annual Report of the R.V.I.A. for 1951-2 reveals that over 200 designs for small homes have been prepared which are sold for the nominal sum of £5. An average of 90 - 100 sets of drawings per month were being sold. A booklet containing 32 house designs sold 20,000 copies in seven months and a total of 100,000 copies of all the Small Homes Service Publications have been sold. In 1952 - 3 it was reported that 5,000 copies of Service Plans had been sold in total. and so it went year by year until 1968 when the Service was disbanded. Many of the designs, particularly the early ones owed much to the Victorian type Boyd identified.

This clumsy term is the best I can find to describe the interest of some Melbourne architects during this period in the use of regular geometric shapes as regulators of the plans of their designs, primarily triangles and circles. Roy Grounds was perhaps the main exponent of this strategy commencing with the circular stair tower and lantern of his Moonbria flats (1936) in Toorak but in the 1950's came the circular Henty House 2 in Frankston (1954) the triangular Leyser House in Kew (1954), his own town House in Hill Street Toorak (1954) square with circular courtyard and the exemplary [and circular] Academy of Arts in Canberra, (1958) probably his best work. Grounds visited Sweden before the war and it is tempting to speculate that the Swedish classicism of Asplund, particularly his Stockholm Library, may have attracted his attention. others were experimenting with pure geometric form during the 1950's however and Saarinen's Kresge Auditorium and Chapel at Yale University in the U.S.A. have been linked with Grounds' Academy of Arts design for Canberra. Also in Melbourne others experimented with this formalism. Not least Grounds' later partners Romberg and Boyd in their designs for the MacFarland Library and ?????? at Ormond College in the University of Melbourne. Also worth noting from this point of view are Whitley College (196?), ???? Chapel (196?) at the University of Melbourne, St Faith's Church of England Burwood (1956) and the Monash University Religious Centre (196?), all by Mockridge Stahle and Mitchell.

During his time as a lecturer at Melbourne University Roy Grounds appointed the expatriate German, Swiss trained architect Frederick Romberg and the young Robin Boyd as tutors. In July 1953 they formed the partnership Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, surely one of the most influential and important of Australian architectural practices.
All three of the partners brought work with them. Grounds contributed his own house and block of flats in Hill Street Toorak which won the Street Architecture Medal in 1954 under the name of the partnership. Boyd brought a number of residential commissions and Romberg had several blocks of flats and commercial and industrial commissions. The partners worked individually collaborating to the extent that they supervised each other's jobs while the designers were overseas. Boyd tended to become the residential designer of the trio. Romberg had no interest in houses and concentrated on larger commissions and after 1955 Grounds himself tended to take larger commisions.
In 1953 Boyd acted as an Assessor for the Olympic Swimming Stadium Competition which was won by the young team of Peter McIntyre, Kevin Borland, John & Phyllis Murphy and Bill Irwin, Melbourne, Victoria. Publicly exultant over the triumph of his friends " Its the first fairy story of Australian building " he was privately depressed and envious " here I am again as the publiciser, the urger, the promoter of others and still no bloody building for me " [Serle 1999 : 148]

In 1956 Boyd was invited to take up a visiting professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where his resentment at never having had the large commissions which he craved and which he felt would cement his greatness in the public perception was perhaps exacerbated by his exposure to Gropius [a personal friend] and Pietro Belluschi [Professor of Architecture at MIT] collaborating on the Pan Am building in New York and it cannot have been helped by Grounds winning the limited competition for the Academy of Arts in Canberra [1957]. Grounds, to some extent influenced by Saarinen's Kresge Auditorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, designed the circular Academy of Science building in Canberra, affectionately dubbed the 'Martian Embassy'.

In May1957 Boyd was an invited guest at the AIA convention in Washington D.C.
In 1958 he became FRAIA and in October 1959 he was an invited guest speaker at the AIA convention in Honolulu Hawaii.

In 1959 having worked assiduously to obtain the job, Grounds was awarded the commission to design the Victorian Art Centre - National Gallery of Victoria complex in St. Kilda Road Melbourne.

In 1960 Boyd publishes 'The Australian Ugliness' and is made an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.
Tensions between the partners were exacerbated by Grounds having obtained the commission for the Victorian Art Centre - NGV and in 1962 Grounds left the partnership to devote the last two decades of his life to the completion of this and other large commissions.

A new partnership of Romberg and Boyd was formed which continued to operate from the existing premises at 340 Albert Street East Melbourne. In the same year Boyd published the monograph 'Kenzo Tange - The Walls Around Us'

In the late 1950's and early 1960's Boyd seems to have become increasingly resentful of his role as the practice's house designer and after returning from the U.S.A. in 1957 sought larger commissions with limited success. Chief among these perhaps was the important if architecturally overrated Black Dolphin Motel in Merimbula for David Yencken - still existing but mutilated. In 1963 Boyd told a prospective client that the practice did practically no small house work now - this in the year after grounds' departure in which Boyd received almost no new commissions.

While Grounds pursued his upward trajectory and Boyd apparently fretted over his inability to cement his greatness with the larger commissions he felt this project required. Romberg seems to have been quietly developing. He continued to gain commissions of the scale and type he craved. His ETA factory in Braybrook [1957 -60] was a long way from the earlier regionalist-modernist idiom he employed on his blocks of flats of the 1930's, 40's and 50's and the late St George's Church and parish centre in Ivanhoe seems to indicate local influences.

Meanwhile for Boyd the books kept coming and the international renown kept growing. In 1963 he published 'The New Architecture'. In 1964 he was an invited guest speaker at the Aspen design Conference in Aspen Colorado. between 1964 and 1967 he was the Australian editor of World Architecture and in 1965 he published 'The Puzzle of Architecture'

In 1965 also Frederick Romberg accepts appointment to Chair of Architecture, Newcastle University, N.S.W. Romberg opens a Newcastle office of the partnership Romberg and Boyd, returning to Melbourne in 1975, four years after Boyd's death. Boyd continued to accumulate honours and publish books and articles until his death in 1971 at the age of 52. Romberg died in 1993?? at the age of eighty.

By the end of Boyd's life the optimism which characterised his early writing had been entirely replaced by a deep pessimism about the cultural possibilities of Australia."The idea of an Australian cultural identity is a nineteenth century idea, Australia jumped from being a dependent colony to being a subscriber to the international culture of the late twentieth century without an intervening period of national cultural identity. the problem of the world conscious Australian is not to search for Australia's identity but to escape from it." Boyd seems to have died unfulfilled. Grounds had warned him in the 1950's that he was becoming better known as a writer than an architect and the statement proved prophetic. In later years although showered with honours for his writings the architectural commissions dried up.

Roy Grounds, probably the most influential Melbourne architect of the decades straddling the Second World War, died in 1981. His design for the Victorian Arts Centre - NGV did not bring him the attention and followers that his early houses had. This building complex, now nostalgically regarded by the city's architects as an icon of Melbourne architecture of the period was not well regarded by Grounds' peers. It was defeated for the RAIA Victorian Chapter bronze medal in 1968 by a suburban shopping centre. Hamann writes " Grounds, once the doyen of Melbourne architects, was something of an outsider by the sixties " Romberg's architecture " was seen as the design of a specific individual, outside the mainstream of new Australian work. So by the sixties all three had abdicated their leadership of Australian architecture "

As the 50's became the 60's the architectural sensibility shifted somewhat. By the end of the decade of the 1950's McIntyre had become disillusioned with the possibilities of his earlier bright optimistic houses, not least as the result of the difficultuies he experienced with the very radical McCarthy House, and in the wake of a trip to Japan, shifted his aesthetic towards a more restrained natural-vernacular look and his practice towards larger commercial commissions. Boyd, reflecting perhaps his inability to attract the major commissions which he apparently felt were necessary to establish his pre-eminence, became increasingly pessimistic about the direction of modern architecture in Melbourne and began to cast an increasingly appreciative eye towards contemporary developments in Sydney architecture. However as far as his architecture was concerned he did not seem to have been particularly dismayed by the textured naturalist reformulation of the modernist project prompted by his own interest in Japanese architecture and very much in line with international developments such as the late work of le Corbusier [see maison Jaoul] and the theoretical interests of the leading lights of Team 10 as his own buildings followed the trend. See for example Menzies [?] College at Latrobe University and the Baker and Elizabeth Strickland Houses at Baccus Marsh. A careful eye was still kept on what was happening in the United States where the light, bright, decorative modernism known as 'Contemporary' began to be leavened somewhat with other impulses. David McGlashan produced a string of elegant contemporary houses which owe at least some debt to the contemporary houses of Richard Neutra and Paul Rudolph but especially Edward Larrabee Barnes' 'Platform Houses'. Frank Lloyd-Wright continued to exert a powerful influence, particularly through his Usonian Houses [many of which were designed prior to the second world war]. Chancellor & Patrick, Geoffrey Woodfall, Charles Duncan, Kevin Knight design architect with the old firm of Oakley & Parkes, David Godsell former collaborator with Guilford Bell and Jørgensen & Hough were among those practices whose work most clearly reflected the influence of FLW. The re-discovery of the power of monumental form and a penchant for compartmentalised planning, globally exemplified by the work of Louis Kahn was reflected in the work of Bernard Joyce [Joyce Nankivell & Associates] and Graeme Gunn. In the latter half of the 1960's Kevin Borland a member of the competition winning design team for the Olympic Swimming venue for the 1956 Olympics began to emerge as a design force with an architecture imbued with a strong social agenda and an informal domestic architectural vocabulary which seemed to owe much to the influence of the Eltham and Warrandyte artists communities with which he was strongly connected. Also after 1965 the young Daryl Jackson having recently returned from studies and work in Europe and north America began to establish himself with an uncompromising brutalist architecture which appeared to owe much to contemporary European work, not least that of James Stirling and Herman Hertzberger. Cutting edge Melbourne architecture during this period showed an awareness of the relevance of the indigenous landscape and of indigenous architectural and design traditions world-wide. Most of these effects can reasonably be seen as related to the impact within architecture of the modification of functionalist-modernist thought known as 'structuralism'.

In both the United States and Europe the influence of structuralist thought already prevalent in linguistics and anthropology began to inflect the most adventurous architecture of the period, and many of the changes in arhitecture at this time can be linked with the shifts in thought which accompanied the growth of structuralism. Structuralism in linguistics grew out of the work of Ferdinand De Saussure whose comparative studies led to the discovery of structural similarities between different languages and the idea that there might be 'deep structures' held in common between a wide range of, perhaps all, languages. De Saussure's work in linguistics was paralleled by the anthropological studies of Claude Levi Strauss whose comparative research led him to the belief that there existed 'deep structures' linking the socil patterns of various cultures. In general structuralism was characterised by the attempt to study the relationships linking phenomena rather than the phenomena themselves in isolation. This led to a realisation that individual phenomena are both part-cause and effect of a larger mutually interactive web or matrix of phenomena rather than the outcome of a linear chain of cause and effect. Levi-Strauss' studies of traditional cultures drew attention to the built form of these cultures and drew attention to their additive nature. A limited range of related components arranged in a limited range of variations according to a particular set of rules.

Just as there seemed to be deep structures shaping the social patterns of these cultures there seemed to be 'deep structures' defining the organisation of their traditional built environment. This observation made a deep impact on first the European and later the north American, architects of the time and they began to speculate on the possible existence of deep structures linking late twentieth century western society and its built environment with those of 'traditional' African and Asian cultures.

In the broadest formal sense, the upshot of this was architecture organised as more or less flexible arrangements of interchangeable but generally clearly defined modules. Space was categorised and divided according to use patterns and combined according to devised sets of rules.

The Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck who, for a while edited the influential magazine Forum vigorously pursued his interest in the relationship between the social structures and the built form of traditional cultures, making several field trips to the Dogon people of north West Africa to study their indigenous shelter. He published and lectured very widely on what he saw as the lessons for western architects and urban planners to learn from the Dogon. I heard him lecture on this as an architecture student in Perth in 1966.
Van Eyck was interested in the dwelling as a microcosmic analogy for the city and the city as a macrocosmic analogy for the dwelling; so passage ways in dwellings were analogous to streets and public squares in cities analogous to living rooms.
Van Eyck taught at Penn State for several years during this period along with Louis Kahn whose tartan gridded plans and ideas of servant and served space paralleled the development of Van Eyck's own architecture during his Team X days. This is especially true for his very well known church at Haarlem and his even more famous orphanage in Amsterdam South. Of similar persuasion was Van Eyck's country-man Hermann Hertzberger, and their contemporary, the Dane Jørn Utzon who developed an architectural language based on the careful articulation of each constituent element. In Australia generally, Melbourne included the most progressive architecture seemed to mirror the structuralist shift although as far as I know it was never discussed in those terms at the time.
The re-awakening of interest in monumentality also propelled architecture towards closed forms and the expression of mass and solidity. This tendency is perhaps most clearly represented by the work of Louis Kahn an enormously influential architect at the time. The characteristic structuralist plans and forms of [especially] the early van Eyck of Team X, Kahn and Hertzberger were strongly paralleled by contemporary Australian work. Projects from the late 1960's and early 1970's of many Australian architects including both Daryl Jackson, Graeme Gunn [in Melbourne] and John Andrews [in Sydney] clearly show this influence. In the residential work of many Australian architects of the time one can trace a similar kit-of-parts-variation-on-a-theme approach to designing and planning.

Alongside the shift away from modernist universality, dematerialisation and linear-causality in design there was a re-assertion of the charms of the vernacular. This was not quite the same thing as regionalism although related to it. Alvar Aalto had been admired world-wide for many years for his assertion of the validity of traditional Scandinavian materials and techniques. In the western United States in the early 1960's a regionalist style based on traditional vernacular rural structures which was to become enormously influential world-wide began to be developed by Charles Moore and his various collaborators. The importance of the Japanese vernacular for the architects of both the western and eastern Pacific rim has been regularly asserted throughout the century and whether the importance of 'natural' materials can be said to originate in Finland with Aalto in the United States with the bay region architects and their inheritors Joseph Esherick and Charles Moore or in traditional Japan there is no doubt that domestic architecture in Australia during the [late] 1960's was characterized by a rash of 'natural' materials such as sea grass matting, hessian wall coverings, untreated or stained, probably rough sawn, exposed timber posts and beams, polished-timber, brick-paved or tiled floors and untreated or bagged masonry walls.

The development of the Victorian Type proclaimed by Boyd in Victorian Modern in the late 1940's was strongly dependent on a close relationship with a semi-rural or completely rural native landscape. if there can be said to be a shift in the attitude to landscape during the 1960's and 70's it is probably more of a gradual extension or re-insertion of a modified natural landscape into areas of the city previously defined as the preserve of the colonial European landscape; tree-ferns and tan bark replacing the roses. A tradition of landscape design using indigenous plants and materials which commenced perhaps with Edna Walling around 1950 continued through her friend and sometime employee Ellis Stones to his friend and sometime employee Gordon Ford who died in 1999. Walling, born in England in 1892 had trained under the eminent landscape designer Gertrude Jeckyll and her earlier designs as exemplified by the gardens in Bickleigh Vale at Mooroolbark invoked a sort of generalized rural idyll but after 1950 when she decided to use only indigenous plants she effectively founded an extremely influential 'school' of Australian landscape design which was developed a propagated by Stones not least via his involvement with the landscape architecture course at RMIT and the project housing firm Merchant Builders and their associated landscaping branch Tract Consultants. The joint involvement of these landscape designers and many of the significant Melbourne architects of the time [particularly Borland and Boyd] with the urban-peripheral artists' colonies in Eltham [where Alastair Knox was a key figure] and Warrandyte with their proclamation of the virtues of the natural landscape strongly influenced the spread of a positive attitude to the indigenous landscape during the late 1950's and 1960's.

Firstly, the seemingly endless growth of global industry which had underpinned the previous two decades finally began to falter. Investment began to be switched [once again] out of industrial production into other more promising sectors. For example speculative investment in the built environment once again became interesting as it had on various occasions previously, but not since the war. Globally the middle-class hope of significant social change faded as older established power structures again re-asserted themselves. As early as the mid 1960's the old ally the United States had involved itself in an Asian war of colonial liberation which did not concern it and because of our 'special relationship' Australia which had recently re-introdued compulsory military training for 18 year old boys, also became embroiled in the Vietnam war. The possibility of being drafted against your will into the army and sent to a foreign country you probably couldn't find on the map to be shot fighting in a war you knew nothing about and had no stake in, had considerable mood altering potential. The student activism of the 1960's motivated by determined optimism and characterized by a certain humour became the campus massacres of students by the army at Kent State and other universities in the United States in the early 1970's. The reality of political change in Australia when it finally came proved, despite the euphoria of the times not to be quite the renewing experience we had hoped for. By mid decade Gough had been sacked and replaced by the conservative and depressingly familiar Liberal Government of Malcolm Fraser who, no matter what credibility he has gathered in latter years on the world stage, at that time revealed himself as thoroughly reactionary in all but perhaps foreign policy. By mid decade also we had the first global oil crisis with the first appearance of the notion that the world might run out of fossil fuel by the weekend. Throughout all of this we were on an unending drip feed of information regarding the imminence of nuclear annihilation. The relative optimism of the 1960's pleasant if naive, was quickly dispersed.

How does the development of architecture relate to all this?

1971 - Robin Boyd dies. Probably the major shaper of the local discourse throughout the previous two decades had progressed from a position of sunny optimism about the revolutionary potential of architecture to encapsulate a regional identity "For the first time in the story of Victorian architecture the great majority of designers have a common goal, Victorian architecture. Until recently all larger works were influenced more by the latest architectural periodicals from overseas than by local conditions but lately the architects in smaller works at least are producing a discernible type "

to, shortly before his death, one of deep pessimism about the present reality and future of architecture in this respect.

" The idea of an Australian cultural identity is a nineteenth century idea, Australia jumped from being a dependent colony to being a subscriber to the international culture of the late twentieth century without an intervening period of national cultural identity. the problem of the world conscious Australian is not to search for Australia's identity but to escape from it."

Significant particpants in the development of the field of Melbourne contemporary architecture during the late 1960's and 1970's include several who have already been mentioned. Perhaps primary among these are Kevin Borland, Daryl Jackson and Graeme Gunn. But during the 1970's two architects who have not yet been mentioned made important contributions. These are the two Peter's Crone and Corrigan:

Firstly, as in the past, existing trajectories continued. There is no sudden rupture between successive periods.

The interest in architecture as a social art already mentioned as having developed during the 1960's was if anything even more characteristic of the 1970's. The emphasis on structuralist matrices of interdependent variables and the possibility of the existence of deep structures unifying and rendering intelligible links between apparently disparate phenomena was accompanied by, perhaps partly resulted in, a growing belief that architecture might viewed at least as appropriately as an outgrowth of sociology as an art complete in itself. This led, world-wide, to interesting re-appraisals of the nature of the architectural response to the provision of housing. In Australia it produced an interest in various configurations of medium-density housing perhaps most notably cluster housing whose manifesto was probably the little known 'A Mansion or No House' edited by Gunn, Yencken and Paterson. Gunn and Yencken were at this time also both heavily involved with the Project Housing company Merchant Builders which came to exemplify a positive attitude to the Australian landscape and consequently made heavy use of the landscape design talents of Ellis Stones - not least in the award winning developments Winter Park and Elliston [named after Stones]

Further examples of this tendency to prioritise social and planning aspects of the built environment can be seen in the annual awards made by the RAIA Vic Chapter at the time. During the 1970's [starting in 1972] the Victorian Chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects instituted the Robin Boyd Environmental Award which was awarded to:

1972 Bronze Medal to Merchant Builders for contributions to Housing Development. Awards of Merit to The Melbourne Times for Responsible Community reporting and to Ruth and Morrie Crow community activists for 'contributions to planning literature and issues in Melbourne'.

1975 'Community Design Award' Citation to Fitzroy Fun Factory for Playground at the School for the Deaf in St Kilda Road Prahran.
Robin Boyd Environmental Award Bronze Medal - Post-humously to Ellis Stones the landscape designer for his work. Citations to Australian Government for its environment protection and conservation initiatives 1974-5, Interplan P/L for the City of Melbourne Startegy Plan.

1976 Robin Boyd Environmental Award - Bronze Medal to The Interim Committee on the National Estate David Yencken Chairman. Citations to Dr E. Graeme Robertson for his work in documenting and recording ornamental cast iron and the Koonung-Mullum Freeway Action Plan.

1977 Robin Boyd Environmental Award - Bronze Medal to Miss May Moon for her work as founder and secretary for 27 years of the Save the Dandenongs League. Citation to the residents of the Golf Links Estate Croydon for implementation of a private street scheme. etc etc.

The notion of cultural identity as an architectural issue had perhaps been central to the discourse since the twenty seven years old Robin Boyd put it there in his book Victorian Modern in 1947. In Melbourne during the late 1960's and early 1970's, A particular style of concrete block architecture emerged which seemed to encapsulate something of the restrained conservatism of the town. The materials palette for this approach to architecture probably originated with Grounds' early Bay Region influenced houses on the Flinders Peninsula south of Melbourne. Robin Boyd certainly utilized the approach from time to time in his own work. Graeme Gunn, a former employee of Grounds Romberg and Boyd, led the way with his Richardson House which won the RAIA Bronze Medal in 1966 and the Molesworth Street Townhouses which won the Bronze Medal in 1970. Other architects adopted the general approach as a glance at Norman Day's book 'Modern Melbourne Houses' makes very clear. Later in the decade for example, came a string of accomplished suburban concrete block modernist houses from Peter Crone and finally Sir Roy Grounds' Arts Centre especially the National Gallery of Victoria [first built of the trio] seemed to sum up this aspect of our regional identity. At more or less the same time however a fairly rough-hewn domestic architecture of the rural fringe was developing with Kevin Borland as the main protagonist. Borland first achieved prominence for his joint authorship of the Swimming Pool design for the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games but along with Boyd, Grounds and others had maintained contact with the 'artists colonies' which had established themselves on Melbourne's north-eastern rural fringe. Borland, also closely linked to Boyd and Grounds in his early days at least, produced a string of distinguished informal timber and galvanized iron houses through the 1960's and 1970's around Melbourne's rural periphery, see for example the Colvin House [197?] and the award winning Crossman Flats [1972] but perhaps the epitome of this mode of regional architecture is to be found in his work over nearly a decade at the Margaret Lyttle School Preshil in suburban Kew. Graeme Gunn also showed himself capable of distinguished work in this rough hewn mode with the Yencken House Baronda on the New South Wales south coast. Of great significance at the time although now largely forgotten was Morrice Shaw's mud and shingle house for the potter Leon Saper at Cottle's Bridge 1965.

But new tendencies also appeared

By mid decade the new impulse to post-modernism is beginning to seriously assert itself. Charles Jencks, at the time considered an important architectural critic and theoretician, dates the advent of post modern architecture to the destruction by explosion of the award winning modernist, Pruitt-Igoe Mass Housing Project in St Louis in 1972.

Anxious to defend postmodernism against claims that it is just an irresponsible free-for-all, whose lack of political commitment plays straight into the hands of those who want to maintain the status quo at any price, Jencks stakes out nobler aims. Postmodernism he claims in ' What is Postmodernism?' (1986) aims at a realisation of 'the great promise of a plural culture with its many freedoms'. Whereas modernism was a univalent formal system which suffocated dissenting voices in an attempt to impose general principles of taste, Jencks associates postmodern architecture with eclecticism and openness.

Modernist architecture is regarded as having brutalised people in its attempt to rationalise, to impose a strict and systematic order on, their ways of living. Unfortunately for the idealists humans are not entirely rational, ordered or disciplined. Their tastes are variable and mostly non-justifiable, and they are prone to fits of folly. For these reasons postmodern architecture, with its proclivity for crazy pastiche, its wacky blending of styles, its disrespect for monastic regularity and tolerance of historical referentiality is deemed more human than the rigours of modernist purism.

Robert Venturi, the other architectural theorist most associated with the fate of postmodernism, also equates it with a medley of styles and approaches:

" Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral language of orthodox modern architecture.I like elements which hybrid rather than 'pure', compromising rather than 'clean', distorted rather than 'straightforward', ambiguous rather than 'articulated', perverse as well as impersonal, boring as well as 'interesting', I'm for messy vitality over obvious unity. I include the non sequitur and proclaim the duality. " 'Complexity And Contradiction' (1988).

These were the ideas which arrived in Melbourne in the mid 1970's and Peter Corrigan was their first and most important proponent. The impact at the end of the decade, of the new position on especially Daryl Jackson, who substantially revised his approach is striking.

Finally
As I noted some time ago, the decade of the seventies marked a shift from the optimistic expansive sixties to a rather more pessimistic period of contracting employment and of investment switching ever faster out of manufacturing into the built environment. this promoted the first post-war cycle of city centre speculative building boom and bust. The corporate image of the city became important blah blah