Bates Smart, 150 Years Of Australian Architecture

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BATES SMART 150 Years of Australian Architecture

Philip Goad




Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the vision and financial support of Bates Smart. For this I would especially like to thank Bates Smart's Chairman, Roger Poole and his fellow directors, Jim Milledge, Jeffery Copolov and Philip Vivian. For their expertise and eloquence, I would like to acknowledge my fellow authors: Professor Miles Lewis, George Tibbits and Dr Julie Willis. Their helpful suggestions, cogent advice and patience during the book’s completion made the task of editing and production an enjoyable one. There are many Bates Smart staff to thank. Chief among them has been the stalwart of the process, Peter Fisher. Others include Robert Bruce, Jacqui Lomas, Allan Lamb, Jackie Johnston, Tracey Roche, Christine West, Jeanine Chialvo and a host of others in both the Melbourne and Sydney offices who have supplied information, clarification and other forms of support. Ex-Bates Smart staff and collaborators who supplied invaluable information, source material, editing advice and made themselves available for interview included: Don Bates (LAB Architecture Studio); Richard Bell; Max Bladen; Brendan Byrnes; Peter Dalzell; Robert Dunster; Struan Gilfillan; John Hitch; Tim Hurburgh; Peter Johnson; Ken MacDonald; Andrew McCutcheon and James Pearce. I would especially like to thank the organisations and individuals that assisted in the research and preparation of material and images for this publication: AMP Limited Archives, Sydney; Brian Andrews; ANZ Records Management and Archives; The Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne Archives; Mary Lewis and the Picture Collection, La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria; John Maidment and the Architecture Library, University of Melbourne; Melbourne Church of England Girls Grammar School Archives; Museum Victoria; National Trust of Australia (Victoria); Public Records Office Victoria; Royal Children’s Hospital Archives; Royal Historical Society of Victoria; Dr Mark Richmond and Jason Benjamin, University of Melbourne Archives; Rowena Shew; and Peter Staughton. To John Ross of Thames and Hudson whose calm control of this project has been admirable there must go many thanks. To the team he assembled to enable the book's production, I am in awe. It was a pleasure to work with Bala Starr whose accuracy and diligence in editing was a delight. In her graphic design, Kate Scott, assisted by Bill Nicholson, surpassed all our expectations in outlasting the graphic wants of editor, authors and directors! Credit also to Samantha Slicer from Gollings Photography for the development and detailing of the cover image. In its scope, this project was large and many dozens of people have assisted in the realising and making of this book. But there are also many to whom we were not able to talk through force of circumstance and time. Apologies to these people in advance. If there are errors or people who we have omitted in this book, the fault is entirely mine. However it is hoped that a book such as this reflects the ethos of a firm that has transcended the personal desires of the one or two, and that instead it might come to represent the work of a great many people over a great many years, and like the complex nature of any city, hold keys to a broader reading of what has made the history of a nation’s architecture. Philip Goad July 2004.

First published in 2004 by Thames and Hudson Australia Pty Ltd Portside Business Park, Fishermans Bend, Victoria 3207 www.thamesandhudson.com © BatesSmart. Text: Philip Goad. Miles Lewis. George Tibbits. Julie Willis. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Any copy of this book issued by the publisher is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a simmilar condition including these words being imposed on a subsequent purchaser. ISBN 0 500 500 142 Commissioning Editor: Philip Goad Edited by: Bala Starr Design: Kate Scott Design assistant: Bill Nicholson Front cover image: Samantha Slicer, Gollings Photography Production: Publishing Solutions, Pty Ltd, Victoria, Australia Printed in China

Chapter title pages Introduction: Orica House, 1 Nicholson St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1955–58 1 Queen’s Hall, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. Joseph Reed, 1854–70 2 Reading Room, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne. Bates, Peebles & Smart, 1906–13 3 Buckley & Nunn, men’s store, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1933 4 Mutual Life and Citizens Assurance Co Ltd (MLC), North Sydney. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1957 5 Metropolitan Fire Brigade Headquarters, East Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1975 6 Children’s Court of Victoria, Melbourne. Bates Smart, 1999


Contents

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Preface Philip Goad

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Introduction Philip Goad

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Chapter 1 George Tibbits Joseph Reed and foundation 1853–90

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Chapter 2 Miles Lewis A house divided 1890 –1918

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Chapter 3 Julie Willis Designed reinvention 1918 – 45

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Chapter 4 Philip Goad Moderate modernism 1945 –77

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Chapter 5 Philip Goad Reflection and transformation 1977– 95

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Chapter 6 Philip Goad Becoming Bates Smart 1995–2003

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Practice timeline and Directors’ biographies

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Awards list

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Select project list

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Bibliography

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Index

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Source material


Preface Philip Goad


A book detailing the contribution of the architecture firm, Bates Smart, and its antecedents that date back to Joseph Reed's arrival in Melbourne in 1853, is long overdue. Ever since 1950 when David Saunders first penned the achievements of the firm's founder, numbers of Australian academics, historians and students have attempted to document the prodigious and diverse output of this practice. In deciding to commemorate one hundred and fifty years of continuous practice, the Directors of Bates Smart initially produced a handsomely illustrated brochure listing buildings completed by the firm in central Melbourne. They also began to plan a major retrospective exhibition, to be held in 2003. However the exhibition idea was soon rejected because the Directors felt that, like their buildings, a more permanent contribution was in order. So it was that the commissioning, writing, editing and production of this book took on, over a short number of years, the proportion, scale and quality of a major building. As a result, there have been many discussions had and many opinions expressed, many people, and many hands involved in what should rightly become a landmark book. The project’s chief initiator was recently retired director, Robert Bruce, whose enthusiasm for the firm's history and whose tireless persistence was instrumental in pushing the project through its various stages of development. Bruce and practice manager Jacqui Lomas approached me in 2000 to edit and write part of the book, and together we devised a list of authors who might contribute. It was an easy task. I was extremely fortunate to have, at the University of Melbourne, colleagues who were ideally suited to be part of a project team:

George Tibbits who had been a student of Saunders's and whose knowledge of the classical tradition in early Melbourne architecture and of the history of the University is without parallel; Professor Miles Lewis whose encyclopaedic expertise in the culture of building and design, and its relation to the development of Melbourne is similarly unmatched; and Dr Julie Willis whose grasp of architecture's stylistic eclecticism and the emerging corporate professionalism of Australian architectural practice during the interwar period is also without peer. Thanks to the extraordinary office archives of Bates Smart and the substantial holdings on the firm at Melbourne University Archives, our task in writing was made relatively painless. In fact it was thoroughly enjoyable. The main problem was that at times there was too much information, too much work to discuss, too many people to whom one might talk about the firm and its achievements. From the very beginning however, the project had another key player - Peter Fisher. Employed by the firm, Fisher's responsibility was to liaise with me as editor, as well as each of the authors sourcing information on request, to monitor the project's progress, then later to source all of the book's illustrations, and act as the main contact point between Bates Smart, graphic designer Kate Scott, and the editing team appointed by John Ross for publisher Thames and Hudson (who had assumed control of Craftsman House during the project). This was a monumental task. The entire project would never have made it to completion without Fisher's dedication, patience and meticulous attention to every component of the process.

At all stages, the Directors, Jim Milledge, Jeffery Copolov, and Philip Vivian, under the chairmanship of Roger Poole, were supportive, critical and deeply interested in the project's content and design. Copolov, in particular, in the final stages of the book’s production spent hours with Fisher and designer Kate Scott developing the vast and diverse display of material. His unerringly accurate eye for line and detail has lent this publication another layer of visual coherence. The sophisticated and elegant design solution employed by Scott required an adaptive framework, from initial concepts to final resolution, incorporating a wide range of materials and styles associated with assembling such a broad period of architectural work. In the end, the aim of this book is to show how a group of architects gave shape to their city and in effect to the rest of the country through their artistic and professional expertise. Too often the history of Australian architecture has been written through the works of individual practitioners treated as heroes or prophets in the wilderness. This book goes towards redressing that half-truth and instead, indicates that for the most part, the fabric of the Australian city, its public and commercial buildings, its churches, its universities, its schools and its houses have been the result of hard-fought and carefully managed collaborative practice. In Australia, the contribution of Bates Smart over one hundred and fifty years is, in effect, the chronicle of a nation's architectural history - but realised through the combined works of a single architectural practice.

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INTRODUCTION Philip Goad


The history of an architecture firm is never a straightforward task. Most monographs on architecture deal with individuals and their work, and these inevitably follow the model of art historical monographs that trace artistic genius and examine works either from a chronological or thematic basis. This book is not like that.

538 Bourke St, Melbourne. Bates Smart, 2002–

First Church of Christ Scientist, Melbourne. Bates, Peebles & Smart, c. 1919–21

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Federation Square, Melbourne. Bates Smart (in assoc. with Lab Architecture Studio), 1997–2002

While this history does follow a chronological sequence and does begin (as myth would have it) with an individual, Joseph Reed, it ends one hundred and fifty years later with Bates Smart, a firm that involves numerous people, has offices in two states, operates from within an entirely different mode of practice, and has been responsible for a diverse range of projects that includes some of the largest commissions in Australia.

The way of architectural history


Yet, in truth, as this book shows, Joseph Reed did not start on his own. He had senior assistants (though not partners) virtually from the outset. His firm produced buildings across Victoria and New South Wales. As Reed & Barnes, the office developed specialisations that would remain an intrinsic strength of the present-day firm, and the practice from the mid-1850s would commence some of the largest and most important buildings in the colony (the earliest through Reed’s skill in architectural design competitions). Vision, scale, professionalism and a corporate philosophy behind the production of a building design were what characterised the firm at its inception and these qualities continue to characterise the firm today. What is important about the architecture from Joseph Reed to Bates Smart is not just the prodigious output, but the lasting effect of this architecture, primarily on one city: Melbourne, the capital of the southern state of Victoria, and today, with a population of over four million people, the second most populous city in Australia. From the immediate post-gold-rush years after 1851, which dramatically transformed the city’s humble and illegal beginnings as a private settlement in 1834, until the present day, the contribution of this firm and its subsequent incarnations, surviving two of the most severe economic depressions experienced by the country (1893 and 1929–31), has been twofold.

Victoria Gardens Beijing, Chaoyang, Beijing, China. Bates Smart (original concept design Denton Corker Marshall), 2003–05

Chancery Building, Australian Embassy, Washington DC, US. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1965–69

Firstly, the history of this firm largely describes a major portion of the history of an Australian city, something that no Australian architectural history has yet achieved. Second, it broadly describes one hundred and fifty years of Australian architectural history, a history not prescribed by the rise and fall of artistic individualism but one that charts frequently, it must said, an establishment course, and at other times, one that coincides with startling clarity with the conventional peaks that invariably define notions of aesthetic ‘progress’ and the avant-garde.

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The nature of a corporate architecture firm, which under Reed & Barnes the office became, is the begetting of corporate clients to support such an enterprise. From the outset, the firm gained the confidence of a string of clients ranging from the Melbourne Public Library, the University of Melbourne, numerous church bodies, and financial institutions, to a select number of high-profile residential commissions. Patronage was broad as were the types of commissions gained, and the habit tended to be that some clients would return to the firm with more work years sometimes even decades later, such was the professional goodwill developed by the firm. An inevitable corollary to this, at times, was that the firm frequently occupied an essentially orthodox aesthetic position.

Competition design, Wulumuqi Lu, Shanghai, China. Bates Smart, 2004

During periods of economic hardship and even times of prosperity, the future was assured by a ‘steady as she goes’ approach to the way that buildings looked yet not necessarily regarding the way in which they were constructed. Innovations such as those that resulted in the dome of the Public Library or the development of high-rise buildings in the 1950s were predicated on the natural outcomes of circumstance rather than necessarily having some basis in aesthetic zeitgeist. The business of architecture was a reality not a nuisance, and the acceptance of this as a given parameter from the 1850s through to the present day has meant economic worldliness and a practice never without work—yet also a practice never earning the title of professional pariah for the quality of that work.

Second Church of Christ Scientist, Camberwell, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1936–37

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First Church of Christ Scientist, Melbourne. Bates, Peebles & Smart, c. 1919–21

The way of corporate practice


Over its one hundred and fifty years, the location of the firm has not been static. With changes in fortune, personnel and, in many respects, the opportunities of each era, the office has literally moved with the times. The location of its premises and their designs were considered crucial to the imaging of the firm, its morale, and its ability to reinvent itself periodically to ensure economic, as well as aesthetic, survival. In many respects, this capacity for reinvention also lies behind the periodic name-changes of the firm, as if survival has also meant the necessity of not being linked to any one personality or group of partners for too long. In some cases, the parting of ways was acrimonious, yet in others, and this accounts for some of the extraordinary stability of the firm’s structure, change was only initiated through the retirement or death of a partner. Added to this has been the extraordinary continuity of family associations with the firm; witness (and it must be said almost always through sons) the ongoing links with generations of the Smart, Bates, McCutcheon and Pearce families. Additionally, a remarkable number of architects over the decades trained or worked with the firm, left to travel, join other practices or to set up their own, and then ultimately returned. Francis Smart, Anketell Henderson, WB Tappin, EA Bates, Osborn McCutcheon, Robert Dunster, Struan Gilfillan and Llew Morgan were just a few notable names to do so. Others like Harold Dumsday stayed with the firm for all of their working life, in Dumsday’s case from around 1893 until his death in 1941.

Wilson Dilworth, Kew, Vic. Bates Smart, 1997

The Royal Exhibition Building, Carlton, Vic. Reed & Barnes, 1878–80

A key characteristic of the firm and a key element in its survival has been the realisation within the firm that its practice specialisations have given it an edge over its corporate competitors. They have enabled it to develop even greater expertise through that decision to specialise, and hence ensure ongoing work within various aspects of practice. In many respects, this aspect of the firm has not been emphasised in previous histories, and especially its increased status after 1945 when the office was formally restructured into specialist sections such as mechanical engineering, structural engineering, interior design, quantity surveying and, later, urban planning. Thereafter, some of the partners also became associated with specialist aspects of design and certain types of projects. Complementary rather than similar talents were sought. Selwyn Bates, for example, was partner-in-charge of all bank projects, while others became associated almost solely with hospitals. The firm’s current expertise in interior design has been a major aspect of its postwar practice but only recently has the head of that section been granted directorial status.

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The scope of this book is thus, in many ways, ambitious, and this will also be its limit. The sheer amount of work produced by the firm has meant that not all buildings will be covered in detail. Some buildings may not even be mentioned within the body of the text. The same limit must be expressed with respect to people. The number of staff employed over the decades has been extraordinary. So also has been their cumulative contribution. There will consequently be the names of dozens of people missing, many names that make up teams of people working on a single project, perhaps even important names to whom authorship of a building design might be attributed.

Arncliffe apartments, Green Square, NSW, 2003–

The firm has seen numerous unsung heroes as well as giants within the profession. The name Osborn McCutcheon was synonymous with Bates, Smart & McCutcheon from 1926, when he became a senior partner, until 1977 when he retired. McCutcheon was a man who garnered national respect from his peers and yet regular admonition from his secretary for sharpening pencils with his teeth. There were quiet talents like Norman Peebles, responsible for the Conservatorium of Music (1909), or Alan Ralton, who from the late 1930s to his untimely death in 1962 designed the firm’s churches and schools. Hugh Banahan was a designer with BSM from the late 1950s until the early 1970s and was responsible for many of the firm’s office and institutional buildings that affirmed, not rejected, the idea of the city. There was Harvey Brown, said by many to be a genius, who headed the structural engineering section of the office in the 1950s and was responsible for BSM’s innovations in high-rise building design and hence its rise to national prominence in the 1950s. But even relatively speaking, these were well-known names; there were many others whose contributions to the firm were not in design but in specification writing, management, detailing, and the gaining of clients.

NSW Police Headquarters, Parramatta, NSW. Bates Smart, 2003

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Crown Promenade Hotel, Southbank, Melbourne. Bates Smart (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson), 2003

The way of visions realised


Given the enormity of the task, only a few people have gone before and endeavoured to write a history of the firm. The most notable of these was David Saunders who in 1950 and 1981 produced the best overviews of the Reed years, but never in one complete published volume. In his various books, Robin Boyd always included the firm’s work but never a continuous overview of the firm’s history, and only ever a select number of buildings that accorded with his tastes. The most concise history of the firm on a day-to-day basis has been Peter Dalzell’s extremely valuable and unpublished BSM history of 1987. Other scholars like Peter Brew, David Dunstan, Conrad Hamann, Carlotta Kellaway, Miles Lewis, Colin McPherson, Anne Neale, Jennifer Taylor, George Tibbits, Christopher Wood and the authors of numerous conservation analyses have contributed valuable insights into particular moments of the firm’s buildings, personalities or presence within the city.

ICI House, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1955–58

545–563 Station St, Box Hill, Vic. Bates Smart, 2003–

Then there is the silent presence of Mary Turner Shaw who in a sense ‘wrote’ the entire history of the firm with her reorganisation of the archival system of Bates, Smart & McCutcheon in the 1950s. Since that time, her systems and their various revisions have meant that the history of the firm will have a future and not die the death of many architectural firms through wanton neglect. Added to this was the lodging of the firm’s substantial collections of drawings and office files with the University of Melbourne Archives. To its credit, the firm has been proud of its past, and this has guaranteed interest in the recording and in the dissemination of its achievements. The current history contained within this book, like others, will have its deficiencies, but it is the first attempt to describe the complete history of the firm, and it is sincerely hoped that it will encourage further, more detailed documentation of various aspects of the firm’s output.

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1 JOSEPH REED AND FOUNDATION 1853–90 George Tibbits


St Ives

CORNWALL Wendron Sithney

Botallick Penzance

Falmouth Constantine

Helston Mount Bay

ENGLISH CHANNEL 2

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Joseph Reed in England

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1 Biographical outline compiled from GC Boase, Collectanea Cornubiensis, Netherton & Worth, Truro, 1890, p. 792; HM Humphreys (comp.), Men of the Time in Australia: Victorian Series, 2nd edn, Melbourne, 1882, pp. cxxvii–viii (127–8); ‘Mr Joseph Reed’, obituary, Argus, 30 April 1890; D Saunders, ‘Joseph Reed, architect, Melbourne 1852–90: his life and work and the practice he established’, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, Melbourne, 1950; International Genealogical Index; and unpublished research by Christopher Wood, to whom I am indebted. Boase gives the birth as 3 December 1823, nearly ten months after the baptism, so the year should be 1822. When Reed returned from an overseas trip in October 1863 he was recorded as being forty (i.e. turning forty-one in December) which confirms a birth year of 1822. Of modern biographies the fullest is D Saunders, ‘Joseph Reed 1822–1890’, in H Tanner (ed.), Architects of Australia, Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1981, pp. 59–65. 2 Drawings for Wightwick’s grammar school at Helston and vicarage at Sithney are in the British Architectural Library of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Reed’s map is in the archives of the Truro Historical Society and has been seen by Christopher Wood. 3 Peter Kerr knew Thomas Kemp in Barry’s office before coming to Melbourne: Argus, 15 January 1892. Kemp also worked for Thomas Grissell, contractor for the Houses of Parliament, through whose office he may have known Knight, whose father was a stone and marble merchant and possibly a subcontractor on the vast project. A fourth architect, Henry Bowyer Lane, who came second in the University of Melbourne competition early in 1854 and worked in the Public Works Department, was also known to Charles Barry: Lane to Henry Ginn, Chief Secretary’s Papers, 12 April 1853, A 53/3673. 4 Royal Commission appointed to enquire into the Public Works Department, Legislative Assembly, Parliament of Victoria, ‘Report and minutes of evidence of the Royal Commission appointed to enquire into the Public Works Department’, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, vol. 3, 1873. The questions (qq. 654–7) concerned the practice of facing buildings with stone.

In the 1850s in Melbourne Joseph Reed (1822–1890) established a successful and enduring architectural practice, firstly alone and then with a partner, Frederick Barnes (c. 1823–1883), as Reed & Barnes. Just before Barnes’s death, the practice became Reed, Henderson & Smart, and after Reed’s death in 1890 a succession of later partners and an amalgamation maintained a continuity of practice down to the presentday firm of Bates Smart Pty Ltd. Reed’s name is linked to many of the major buildings of nineteenth-century Melbourne and because of the quality and prominence of these buildings, he was one of a few architects whose name was not entirely forgotten. Reed was probably born on 3 December 1822 at Trenarth, Constantine, in Cornwall and was baptised in the parish of Constantine on 23 February 1823. He was the son of Nicholas and Amy Tonken Reed (née Hichens or Hitchins). His father owned land in the area of Constantine and died in about 1844. Reed was named for his grandfather who lived at Wendron where he died about 1838. Reed’s parents were married at nearby Sithney on 26 December 1810 and he had a sister, Mrs JN James, who by c. 1890 was a widow living at Botallick on the west coast of Cornwall. Reed went to the grammar school at Helston, a small town about 8 kilometres from Constantine, and was educated under Derwent Coleridge, the son of the great but tragic Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. At the age of seventeen in 1840, Reed made a very detailed and finely drawn map of the Parish of Sithney, about

4 kilometres from Helston, for the Tithe Commissioners. Reed acquired his professional training in London where he was ‘in the employment of Mr Bellamy in the offices in connection with the building of the houses of parliament’. It is assumed this refers to Thomas Bellamy, but whether Reed did his articles with Bellamy or with another architect before working for Bellamy is not known. Reed then became clerk and architect to George Henry Boscawen, the 2nd Earl and 5th Viscount of Falmouth, whose Romantic mansion of Tregothnan had been built in 1816–18 to a design by William Wilkins for the earl’s father who had died in 1841. George Boscawen, who did not marry, died on 29 August 1852 without an heir and the estate and the viscounty (the earldom lapsed) passed to a cousin who terminated all the projects Boscawen had started. It was then that Reed emigrated in 1853.1

Early contacts The brevity of facts about Reed in Cornwall and London invites speculation about his early architectural contacts and his arrival in Melbourne. Reed’s schooling in Helston suggests a possible early contact with the architect George Wightwick (1802–1872). Among Wightwick’s buildings were the grammar school at Helston (1834, when Reed would have been ten years old) and the vicarage at Sithney (n.d.). Wightwick was an eclectic architect who designed auditorium-type Gothic churches, Classical public buildings and Italianate terraces, genres that Reed developed in Melbourne. Wightwick’s office

was in Plymouth. He had moved from London in 1829, having been the architectural helper and companion to the aged Sir John Soane. Given Wightwick’s connection with Helston and Sithney, it is possible that the talented young Reed may have been recommended to him, and from Wightwick’s office came the map of Sithney.2 That Reed was already a talented draftsman by the time of his survey suggests that he must have been receiving some training locally before being accepted into Bellamy’s London office. If indeed the Mr Bellamy who Reed worked for was associated with Charles Barry’s Houses of Parliament, Reed may have had contact with young architects in Barry’s office. Some of them came to Melbourne just before Reed did and three of them formed the partnership of Knight, Kemp & Kerr. Reed claimed that Knight and Kemp took him into their office for a short time between when he arrived and when he opened his own office. From this ‘Barry network’ in Australia, Reed may have heard of the opportunities in Melbourne at the time the Tregothnan estate projects were terminated.3 However, a later biographical detail suggests that Reed was not very familiar with the Westminster Houses of Parliament.4 While that was the major project in Barry’s office, his practice, which was eclectic in the way Reed’s practice was to be in Melbourne, also produced many renowned buildings in the Classical style, the style in which the Melbourne group was highly skilled, and all of them, including Reed, may have worked on those buildings. The coved ceiling skylights of Reed’s splendid Queen’s Hall in the Melbourne


JOSEPH REED AND FOUNDATION 1853 – 90

1 Joseph Reed (1822–1890), the founder of the practice from 1853. A partner until his death in 1890 2 Map of Cornwall, showing Reed’s place of origin and localities of first work 3 Bourke St, at the intersection of Elizabeth St, Melbourne, 1853. The General Post Office (with clock tower) is on the left. Drawing by E Thomas, original lithograph by JB Philp 4 Engraving of proposed Public Library, Swanston St, Melbourne. Joseph Reed, 1854–70. View from the forecourt showing main entrance with portico

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1 Victorian Arcade and Academy of Music, the Bijou Theatre, Bourke St, Melbourne. Reed & Barnes, 1876. The theatre and part of the arcade were destroyed by fire in 1889 and replaced with a new Bijou Theatre designed by George Johnson 2 Provident Diggers in Melbourne, Victoria 1852. Original watercolour by ST Gill 3 The new Princes Bridge, view from the south side of the Yarra River, Melbourne, 1853. Original lithograph by JB Philp

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Public Library (later the State Library of Victoria) are reminiscent of those above the central hall, the saloon, of Barry’s Bridgewater House, London (1847) as are the coved ceilings in Knight & Kerr’s Legislative Assembly and Council Chamber of the Parliament of Victoria of 1856.

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5 H Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600–1840, 3rd edn, J Murray, London, 1995, p. 1014. Country Life, 24 May 1956. 6 Peter Kerr seems to have been in a similar position when he worked on Dunrobin Castle for the Duke of Sutherland (between 1845 and 1847) whose London architect was Charles Barry. 7 The frieze of Reed’s Bank of New South Wales, Collins St, Melbourne, suggests an interest in the architecture of Sydney Smirke who had, like Vulliamy, trained in the office of Robert Smirke. 8 Boase, p. 792. 9 Humphreys gives Reed’s arrival date incorrectly as 1857, and the error is repeated in A Sutherland (ed.), Victoria and its Metropolis: Past and Present, vol. 2, McCarron, Bird, Melbourne, 1888, p. 530. The introduction to William Kerr suggests that before he left England, Reed knew someone who knew Melbourne affairs and Melbourne officials.

Concerning the Tregothnan estate and work for the Earl of Falmouth, Reed may have been employed on work there through the important London-based architect Lewis Vulliamy (1791–1871). Vulliamy enlarged Tregothnan House, designed Nansawn Lodge and the rectory at nearby Lamorran, for the 2nd Earl of Falmouth, all between 1842 (when George Boscawen succeeded to the title) and 1848.5 He was a highly regarded eclectic designer whose palette of idioms included the Classical style, having been trained by Sir Robert Smirke and at the Royal Academy where he won the Silver Medal in 1810, the Gold Medal in 1813 and the academy’s travelling scholarship in 1818. It seems unlikely that Reed would have supplanted, or even succeeded without an introduction, such a renowned architect as Vulliamy. Instead, and more likely, Reed worked as Vulliamy’s agent on work to do with the Tregothnan estate and the earl’s Cornish interests.6 Reed may also have worked in Vulliamy’s London office as well as at Tregothnan. Some of Vulliamy’s work, such as Dorchester House designed in 1848, seems in tune with the Classical style that Reed’s Melbourne office was to produce.7 Reed’s Cornish biographer records that he ‘Went to Melbourne, Australia as an architect 1853’.8 It is assumed he arrived

about July 1853. The claims that Reed left England after the death, on 29 August 1852, of the Earl of Falmouth, and after arriving presented a letter of introduction to the town clerk, William Kerr, shortly before joining with Knight and Kemp in Melbourne in the Government House competition, which closed on 1 August 1853, suggest a July or slightly earlier arrival date. The fact that he won the competition for the Melbourne Public Library, for which entries had to be submitted by the start of November, means that he had certainly arrived before November.9 However, none of the inward passenger lists of 1852 and 1853 contain any record of a Joseph Reed, architect, builder or surveyor, arriving by ship. Perhaps he went first to Sydney or Adelaide. Reed, it seems, was not a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects at the time he emigrated. This was not uncommon as hardly any of his contemporary immigrant Melbourne architects were members. It is puzzling though why Reed did not become a member because Thomas Bellamy had been a founding member of the institute. Perhaps already Reed put competitive business interests above professional association. Reed was also a musician and was admired for his commitment and love of performing, for his collection of violins and for musical gatherings at his Melbourne home.10 His talent in music, as with architecture, must have been developed early in his life, at home and at school in Helston. He would have already been a proficient musician when he arrived in Melbourne. Music must have gained him a ready acceptance into

the best of domestic society in Melbourne from where important business contacts could be cemented or made. Reed was associated with three buildings connected with music: an ‘orchestra’ (1859), a type of bandstand in the Botanic Gardens for a fête in aid of the Melbourne Lying-in Hospital (Women’s Hospital); a piano factory for Joseph Wilkie (1863) in Queen Street; and the Victoria Arcade and Academy of Music, the Bijou Theatre, designed for Joseph Aarons (1876) in Bourke Street.11 There may have been other architectural services for musical purposes that are no longer known. Though the details of Reed’s life in Cornwall and London remain obscure, it seems unchallengeable that when he arrived in Melbourne at the age of thirty he was already inducted into architecture as an art, into practice as a business, had the technical foundations as a skilled and creative eclectic designer in Classical and Gothic idioms, and was knowledgeable in the advanced architecture of the late 1830s and 1840s by designers such as Barry, Vulliamy, Bellamy, Smirke and others.

Early years in Melbourne At the time of Reed’s arrival, Melbourne was already overrun by the great influx of gold-rush adventurers. It had the character of a country town full of contrasts, though one undergoing rapid expansion and change. Crowds of people, mostly young men, would have been everywhere and accommodation would have been scarce, overcrowded and expensive. Most of the young men would have been on the move, to or from the gold-fields. While the great


JOSEPH REED AND FOUNDATION 1853 – 90

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increase in population generated large numbers of new buildings—many of poor quality—in the township and its emerging suburbs and at the inland gold diggings, the utilitarian architectural character of pre-gold-rush Melbourne would have been everywhere evident to Reed. Most buildings were plain brick or timber structures of one or two storeys and the small number of communal or public buildings were modest in scale and architecturally plain and stylistically outdated. Monumental civic architecture did not then exist in Melbourne and even buildings housing the highest state functions had a domestic and private character. Reed and his contemporaries were to change all that. Wholesale and warehouse buildings were concentrated near the Yarra River in the south-west grid of the town. On the high ground above the river towards the western end of the town were the governor’s offices and scattered around were various government offices, all tucked away in small ordinary domestic buildings. In this area there were many boarding houses receiving new immigrants. Scattered through this part of the town were many small factories and industrial works. At the western end of Collins Street was a large immigration depot of wooden barracks in which destitute new arrivals found temporary shelter and nearby a ‘home’ for children orphaned on the voyage to Melbourne. This was the bottom end of town. A retail shopping and commercial area had developed in Collins and Bourke streets on either side of their intersections with Elizabeth Street where the town’s small post office was located. The shopping strip was

a rowdy area for lucky strike diggers to show off their wealth. Here also banks later built their impressive headquarters. Reed eventually established his office in this area in Elizabeth Street. The eastern hill of the township towards Spring Street was a more homogeneous residential area than any other part of the town, and also more respectable. A small legal and professional enclave had developed in the north-east of the town in the vicinity of the original Supreme Court. It was in this area that Reed first opened an architectural office. Among the public buildings in the town, in whose later rebuilding Reed and his competitors were to be professionally involved, the oldest was the small Customs House (1838–41) facing the Yarra River. The seat of government, centred on the authority vested in the colonial governor, was in a retardataire domestic Regency building (1844). Municipal governance was more ambitiously housed in a dour new town hall (1849–53), at the corner of Swanston and Collins streets, then just completed on Reed’s arrival. The few other prominent government buildings dealt with law and order. There was a police and courthouse complex (1847–48) next to the town hall, and, dominating the high ground to the north-east of the town, a large, forbidding bluestone gaol (1841–44) and Supreme Court (1842–44), in a faintly Regency Gothic style. The most celebrated public work when Reed arrived was the recently opened elegant single-span stone Princes Bridge across the Yarra, completed in 1850. The bridge was symbolically associated with the arrival and hysterical celebration of the

news from London of the separation of the Port Phillip District from the colonial administration in New South Wales and the official creation of the Colony of Victoria. There were also a few public buildings not associated with government. Two were the philanthropic Melbourne Hospital (1846–48) facing Lonsdale Street near Swanston Street, and a benevolent asylum (1850 and later) outside the town on the hill that is now North Melbourne. Another of these buildings was the Mechanics Institute in Collins Street, just up the hill from the town hall. As a centre of cultural activity in the town, this institution was still a strong force in enlightened literary and intellectual life when Reed arrived. The churches of the town were also modest in size and scale and, like the government buildings, drew their architectural inspiration from a very old-fashioned palette of Regency Gothic and Classical precedents. Outside the town, in the rapidly expanding suburbs, were pockets of wealth where villas and mansions stood in garden estates. Reed eventually lived in one of these out-of-town pre-gold-rush estates in Hawthorn. Among the new arrivals, some anticipated commercial and professional opportunities. In addition to architects, there were many builders and craftsmen among the newcomers and their skills were to be essential in realising many ambitious building projects embarked upon with gold-rush wealth. In this volatile situation, architectural competitions served both a social and a professional purpose. On the one hand, they enabled those needing architectural services to choose an architect on the basis of a submitted design rather

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10 ‘Mr Joseph Reed’, obituary, Argus, 30 April 1890. David Saunders recounts that CP Smart recalled that as a very young man he visited Reed at home and remembered ‘a huge living room with violins all round the walls’: Saunders, ‘Joseph Reed, architect, Melbourne 1852–90: his life and work and the practice he established’, p. 18. The probate inventory of Reed’s estate lists 25 violins, 3 violas, 2 cellos and 1 double bass, a string orchestra, valued at £244. Despite the claim (in Reed’s obituary, Argus, 30 April 1890) that some violins were by Stradivarius, reinforced by inference because his wife’s son by a second marriage was named Joseph Reed Stradivarius Boase, none surely could have been, unless the probate valuer was gravely misled. Reed might have been called Stradivarius because of his passion for violins! 11 The Bijou was burnt down in 1889, a year before Reed died, and was replaced by the ‘new’ Bijou by George Johnson (1840–1898).


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1 Geelong Town Hall, Gheringhap St, Geelong, Vic. Joseph Reed, 1855. Building after completion of first stage 2 Engraving of proposed Geelong Town Hall. View from Gheringhap St as illustrated in the Geelong Advertiser, 1853 3 Competition entry drawing for the Wesley Church, Lonsdale St, Melbourne. Joseph Reed, 1856. View from Lonsdale St

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12 For a list see M Lewis, Australian Architectural Index, University of Melbourne. Some buildings have not been identified, others have been demolished. The Napier St and George St houses survive though altered. I am indebted to Miles Lewis for access to his extensive research collection. 13 Argus, 22 October 1859. 14 C Nettleton, Melbourne Views of Streets, 1862–1879. P Yule, The Royal Children’s Hospital: a History of Faith, Science and Love, Halstead Press, Rushcutters Bay, NSW, 1999. A Galbally, Redmond Barry: an Anglo-Irish Australian, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1995. Reed also provided architectural services to Barry’s companion, Louisa Barrow. 15 Royal Commission, p. 36. Pritchard designed Clarendon Terrace, East Melbourne, in the giant Corinthian style. It is an intriguing possibility that he may have contributed to the introduction of the giant Corinthian order into the design of the Melbourne Public Library, a style that became a tradition in the succeeding Reed practices (Collins Street Baptist Church, Melbourne Town Hall, Trades Hall). 16 ‘Bank of NSW—storage’, University of Melbourne Registrar (correspondence), UM 312, 1933/311, University of Melbourne Archives. 17 ‘Bank of NSW—storage’. 18 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. The date is 22 June 1858. 19 At his death on 7 January 1884, Barnes was sixty so he would have been born sometime during 1823: Argus, 7 January 1884, p. 1. On embarkation in London he was recorded as being twenty-six and so would have been born in about 1825 or perhaps 1824. 20 Register of Wills, series 27, record no. 141, Public Record Office. At the time of his death in 1884, he had a married niece who was living in Melbourne and who in turn had a married daughter.

than the risky business of having to choose an unknown newly arrived architect before a design was developed. On the other, from the newly arrived architects’ point of view, competitions made it possible for professional talents to be displayed through what everyone hoped would be an anonymous and unprejudiced process. Subsequent events suggest that Reed knew how to exploit this situation to his advantage.

Success through competition It was through three competitions, among a number of which Reed entered, that he established his reputation in practice. His first success was in early 1854 for his design for the Melbourne Public Library in Swanston Street. The second, announced in May 1856, was his design for the Bank of New South Wales in Collins Street. The third was Reed’s successful design in the competition for the Wesleyan Church in Lonsdale Street, also in 1856. In another competition, for the Geelong Town Hall (1855), the competition design was only partly built. In some other competitions, such as one for the Melbourne Royal Exchange (1854), Reed was not successful. The Public Library commission introduced him to Justice Redmond Barry, president of the trustees and chancellor of the University of Melbourne. In these early years of Reed’s practice, the buildings won in competitions, both in their scale and prestige, deflect attention from the humble early works of the practice. These ranged between small buildings, such as a little house at 16 Napier Street,

Fitzroy, to larger buildings like the three houses at 182–186 George Street, East Melbourne, both from 1856. There were other houses, such as Frogmore (1856) that once stood in Caulfield and was one of the earliest Italianate houses in Melbourne, some hotels, and some small commercial buildings, including the one that housed Reed’s office for the rest of his professional life in Melbourne, the Liverpool and London Insurance Company’s building, begun in August 1855.12 One interesting design was the Gothic monument, which still survives, in the Melbourne General Cemetery to commemorate the major contractor WC Cornish (who built Reed’s Bank of New South Wales).13 Redmond Barry also became a residential client. In October 1855 he bought land in Carlton at the corner of Rathdowne and Pelham streets and Reed designed a house for the site that Barry called Carlton Gardens. Barry lived there for twenty years, selling the property at the end of 1875 to the Melbourne Hospital for Sick Children. Surprisingly little is known of the house Reed designed and of any additions Barry made to it. For many years the house was assumed to be the one illustrated as the hospital after it acquired the site. However, Barry’s house was altered for the hospital, firstly to a design by the architects Smith & Johnson in 1876 and then by William Salway in 1887. Recently, Mary Lewis in the State Library of Victoria La Trobe Library proposed that the original house is in a panoramic photograph taken in the 1860s. It was a long, chaste singlestorey dwelling with a transverse gable roof. Perplexingly, when the hospital moved to the site the house was considered an improvement on the hospital’s previous

building, a three-storey house. This suggests Barry may have expanded the original house. An interior photograph of the hall, also taken after the hospital had moved in, shows an impressive architectural space. Presumably this was by Reed to Barry’s order because on one wall is a cast plaster tondo (roundel) by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen, of whose work Barry was a great admirer and which he probably acquired in 1862. Everything was demolished in 1912.14 Through Redmond Barry, Reed’s connections and the scope of his architectural work were greatly extended. He may have found a supporter in Dr Godfrey Howitt, a contact from Barry, in whose Collins Street house Edward La Trobe Bateman was a guest. Barry and Howitt, and perhaps also Bateman, seem to have been instrumental in securing for Reed the commission in 1858 of architect to the newly created University of Melbourne (thereby supplanting FM White who had designed the Quadrangle). They were also probably responsible for Reed’s commission to design the Royal Society building in 1859, where other architects seem to have been supplanted. Reed’s propensity for creating a network of supporters, a lifelong feature of his business acumen as an architect, was therefore evident from the time of his arrival. His ability, and determination, to use connections and work behind the scenes also emerged in the Bank of New South Wales competition, a harbinger of accusations of dark conspiracies in later competitions. Though Reed’s design for the Lonsdale Street Wesleyan Church


JOSEPH REED AND FOUNDATION 1853 – 90

1 Bank of New South Wales, Collins St, Melbourne. Joseph Reed, 1856. Wood engraving of Collins St elevation as featured in The Illustrated Melbourne Post, April 1862 2 Sir Redmond Barry (1813–1880). Initially an important residential client, it was through Barry that Reed’s connections and scope of work were greatly extended 3 Sir Redmond Barry house, corner Rathdowne and Pelham streets, Carlton, Vic. Joseph Reed, 1855. Interior view

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in 1857 was immediately controversial among Methodists because its Gothic style roused fears of ‘popery’, it revealed his flexibility and broadmindedness in designing in that style for preaching purposes. This was important to those Protestant congregations in which the Word was supreme above ritual, and Reed’s architectural inventiveness brought later commissions, each different from the other. Indeed Reed was at the forefront of a movement among some Protestant Nonconformist groups in both England and Australia who engaged in a creative search for appropriate church designs and styles. Church ritual for High Church Anglicans, under the severe influence of ecclesiology, and for Catholics, guided by Pugin, circumscribed church design and kept those groups to a narrow set of precepts which excluded various distinctive features found in Reed’s churches, such as a freer open interior with galleries, suitable for preaching, a neglect of sanctuaries for the ritual of consecration, and an eclectic architectural vocabulary.

Enlisting others From the time of Reed’s arrival when he began entering competitions, he employed others to help him prepare the submissions. The nature of that help is not known, whether it was for tracing, drafting and colouring, for specifications, or even for help in designing the building. John James Clark (1838–1915) recalled in 1873 that he ‘was with Mr Reed at the time he first came into business’ and that he ‘assisted on two or three competitions that he worked through’.15 It seems Osgood Pritchard

(fl. 1850–59) also worked for Reed in these early years. When the Bank of New South Wales façade was taken to the University of Melbourne in 1933, a file note recorded: ‘The design is attributed to Joseph Reed, who was, I believe, assisted by one Pritchard’.16 In Clark’s 1873 recollections he credited Pritchard as having been his teacher, and perhaps some of Clark’s association with Pritchard occurred while both worked on Reed’s bank commission. A third architect associated with Reed in these early years is Frederick Barnes (1824–1884), later to become Reed’s partner in Reed & Barnes in 1862. As with Pritchard, Barnes’s name is linked with the 1856 Bank of New South Wales project as having witnessed the contract drawings.17 Barnes also signed as witness the 1858 drawings of the Melbourne Public Library.18 Barnes was the same age as Reed.19 He arrived in Melbourne on the ship Lady Peel, which also brought JG Knight. It sailed from the Port of London on 6 October 1851 and arrived in February 1852. In the ship’s passenger list both are described as builders, though by the time of his death in 1884 Barnes called himself an architect. Barnes may have managed projects for Reed, as distinct from designing them, in the same way that Knight managed the big Parliament House project designed by Peter Kerr. At the time Barnes came to Melbourne, he left two brothers and two sisters in London.20 There is also the name Hertslet associated with Reed at the beginning of his practice in Melbourne but about whom nothing is known. In March 1854 two tender notices were published by Hertslet & Reed of 208 Russell Street.21 This was after Reed had won the competition for

the Melbourne Public Library. The address is that of Reed’s first office in practice before he moved to 48 Collins Street west and then to 9–11 Elizabeth Street.22 What is known of Reed’s personality and character has come from recollections of young architects working in the firm just before his death and which were collected by David Saunders in 1950. One, WSP Godfrey, was quoted by Saunders saying, ‘I can think of no other way to describe his manner than like that of an Australian terrier; liable to snap up at you (he was a small man) with sudden violence, then forget all that he had said and be helpful and kind’. Another articled pupil in the late 1880s, Robert Solly, spoke of Reed as ‘practical and decisive, an aggressive little fellow, but very kindly’, emphasising that ‘Reed was practical’.23 In his obituary he ‘was esteemed by all his acquaintances, to whom his kindly, cheerful disposition was especially acceptable’.24 In his evidence to the 1873 Royal Commission he seemed not that familiar with details of a project but more with the general context of a project, as if he were involved with the overall conception rather than the detailed working out and execution of the work. He did seem, however, to be thoroughly familiar with architectural style and sensitive to appropriate details. Reed left no writings on architecture. His ideas on architecture must be inferred from press reports which claim to state his ideas and from evidence he gave at the Royal Commission. Much of Reed’s evidence, some of which seems wild and extravagant, concerned his and other architects’ opposition to public buildings being designed within the Public

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21 Melbourne Herald, 17 March 1854, p. 1; Argus, 23 March 1854, p. 3. Miles Lewis has discovered a Lewis C Hertslet in London who was a member of the board of the Melbourne and Colonial House Investment Company whose aim was to provide ‘Melbourne and other districts of the Australian Colonies with cottages and houses suitable to the wants of all classes of their population ...’ Perhaps the impetus for Reed to come to Melbourne was because this company expected to establish a thriving business and his partnership with Hertslet evaporated with the failure of the scheme. Perhaps the company provided Reed with the introduction to the town clerk, William Kerr. 22 Saunders, ‘Joseph Reed, architect, Melbourne 1852–90: his life and work and the practice he established’, p. 5. In 1861 a WL Campbell worked in the office. Campbell witnessed a contract; he may have been the father of William Campbell who served articles and then worked for Reed, Henderson & Smart between 1883 and 1888. ‘Bank of NSW—storage’. 23 Saunders, ‘Joseph Reed, architect, Melbourne 1852–90: his life and work and the practice he established’, p. 18. The diary kept by JH Stanton, clerk of works at Kolor (1868) near Penshurst by Reed & Barnes, confirms that Reed had an eye for quality construction, expected to get it in accordance with what was specified, was quite familiar with services, as well as being concerned with good detailing and design. Reed, with the owner, established the precise location of the house, and perhaps he did this with every job. Reed was also generous: he gave Stanton £5 on the way to Penshurst. The two went by ship to Warrnambool and buggy inland. Box 391/3, MS 7057, State Library of Victoria (SLV). 24 Argus, 30 April 1890.


Works Department rather than being made open to competition. In making his claims for architectural competitions, Reed’s arguments express self-interest, a desire to force into the private sector the well-funded government commissions. However, architectural values were concealed beneath the surface. Reed held to an hierarchical conception of architectural projects. Buildings for the state, especially those that represented the state in their function and size, were at the apex. Architecture in these higher reaches was an art—‘look upon our principal buildings as works of art’—and could only be achieved by talented architects forced to compete against one another. For Reed, important public projects and competitions offered the individual architect the prospect of greatness which lesser commissions from individuals did not:

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25 Royal Commission, p. 20, q. 528. 26 Argus, 6 July 1867, p. 7. 27 Royal Commission, p. 21, q. 553. 28 Royal Commission, p. 20, q. 533. 29 Royal Commission, p. 20, q. 530. 30 The Modernist discourse that condemns decoration on buildings of Reed’s era does not distinguish between implied decoration and applied decoration. To use a musical analogy, the choice of the key of A major implies there will be a great brightness of tone from stringed and brass instruments, as does the choice of Corinthian imply a richness of effect; the choice of C major implies the use of the white keys on the piano and none of the black ones, and to introduce the black keys creates discord, as jarring as would applied decoration introduce discord into a Reed building.

In England, architecture is pursued by men of good position, and it is looked upon as an honorable profession, and men make a name in it; but it is only through great public buildings. Private individuals can rarely give architects an opportunity of making a worldwide renown.25

Joseph Reed and style Reed believed in the relationship between climate, location and architectural style. He made a climatic analogy when talking about his introduction of polychrome brickwork. Victoria shared with northern Italy characteristics of clear light and seasons as well as having poor building stone but good clay for bricks such that, by analogy, the architecture of Lombardy and

the Veneto offered a stylistic source for the development of architecture in Melbourne.26 More broadly, Reed was a pragmatist in matters of planning, form, style and decorum. Each building was a distinctive design and spatial response with its own persuasive stylistic character. He was also a pragmatist in matters of materials and argued for economy in determining the type and amount of materials to be used in a building. He argued that in the Public Works Department’s design for the solid stone General Post Office (GPO) there was much more stone than was necessary, whereas in his design of the Melbourne Town Hall a brick carcass was faced in stone: ‘The Town Hall is built as substantially as any building need be, and with sufficient stone in relation to its surface, and whoever acts to the contrary puts more stone than is necessary, and is wasting stone.’27 In commenting on the brief for the Law Courts competition in 1873 he implied that an architect should choose structural materials according to the situation rather than because of some principle or specialisation: In the competition for the Law Courts one of the conditions I see is that there shall be iron roofs everywhere. Now it seems to me that is an unnecessary thing, and must have emanated from the brain of some iron man ... and I seek a reason for it, and I find in the [Public Works] Department Mr Merrett, a very able man, who has become almost a man of bolts and washers by being confined to the business of ironwork; no doubt he would influence such an opinion as that in the conditions of the Law Courts.28

Reed contended that great buildings must be designed by individual architects and that the architect must be identified with the whole process of design, construction and supervision. Against this opinion he exaggerated the anonymity and collegiality within the government’s Works Department to make a point that without the incentive of individual recognition, an architect’s talent would ‘rust and die’. The buildings also lost their social standing: in the Works Department ‘every building is a “daughter of the regiment” and belongs to everybody—it is a waif and stray, a larrikin’.29 At a deeper level he held that variety is at the core of architectural design and practice. His exaggerated attacks were against uniformity and in favour of variety. He wanted those who would listen to believe that a collective, cooperative approach to design would produce an anonymous uniform house style, in contrast to the rich variety that would result from adopting his competitive, individualist approach to design. The irony is that Reed’s persona as a public architectural figure ensured an anonymity for those who worked for him, to an extent that never afflicted the very talented individual architects in the Public Works Department. Reed used traditional architectural formulae in an inventive but straightforward way. The intention was always to emphasise the form of the building, and details and decoration were subservient to the overall form. The decoration was consistent with and generated by the style of the building rather than being applied for mere effect.30 Some buildings, because of the form and style chosen, are chaste to the point of being


JOSEPH REED AND FOUNDATION 1853 – 90

1 Public Library, Swanston St, Melbourne. Joseph Reed, 1854–70. This drawing of the application of the Ionic order to the building represents Reed’s skill at applying different styles to his buildings 2 Public Library, Swanston St, Melbourne. Joseph Reed, 1854–70. Drawing of the application of the Corinthian order to the building. This scheme was the closest to the realised building

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JOSEPH REED AND FOUNDATION 1853 – 90

1 Public Library, Swanston St, Melbourne. Joseph Reed, 1854–70. Plan drawing of the published master plan by Reed, c. 1859, showing the library and museum complexes occupying the entire block from Swanston to Russell streets 2 A watercolour view by Nicholas Chevalier, showing the library building and a separate domed Russell St building, illustrating the master plan 3 Swanston St elevation after the completion of the portico in 1870

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almost without decoration, such as the design for the Menzies Hotel (1867). Others, though rich in their decorative effect, such as the Melbourne Public Library (1854–70), have their decorative character firmly rooted in the order of architecture chosen for the building. The choice of the Corinthian order for the library included as part of the order the decorative details. Many of the Classical buildings use the orders as represented structure, the entablature being used to divide floor from floor and terminate the building vertically, whereas the columns or pilasters frame the form horizontally and visually strengthen the corners. The pier and arch motif, especially for window openings, is used to create horizontal continuity in a façade. Windows are also highlighted as separate elements in a wall by being framed by a variety of window surrounds inspired by Renaissance architecture. Surface treatment and texture is the result of different types of rustication or ashlar work. Each building, though varying greatly in character, emphasised regularity and evenness of expression and avoided exaggeration. The Gothic designs similarly emphasise form over detail and use details, such as plate tracery and the vocabulary of English Decorated, to achieve continuity and evenness of character. Reed’s architectural library at the time he began practice, as background information that might help with an understanding of his designs and their sources, is not known. In June 1967 a small collection of books was given to the University of Melbourne by Bates, Smart & McCutcheon that dated back to the time of Joseph Reed and Reed & Barnes. A number of the books were

published before Reed came to Melbourne and because of that they may have been brought with him. They were printed between 1847 and 1850. Other books in the collection of a later date would either have been sent out to Reed or acquired on his visit to Europe in 1863. The earliest of the books are on Gothic architecture. A striking characteristic of the practice of Joseph Reed, Reed & Barnes, and its successors was the ability to retain the architectural stewardship of a number of sites which were developed over many decades. The site granted to the trustees of the Melbourne Public Library in 1853 is the first of these, but others are the University of Melbourne in Carlton, and the Trades Hall site at the corner of Victoria and Lygon streets, Carlton.

Melbourne Public Library Reed’s first great competition success came when the trustees of the Melbourne Public Library selected him as the winner early in 1854. Subsequently, over many decades to the present day, the site, bounded by Swanston, La Trobe, Russell and Little Lonsdale streets, has been intensively developed by many building campaigns and parts have been occupied by a number of different institutions: the Public Library, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Industrial and Technological Museum, and the Natural History Museum, as well as, in 1866–67, the Intercolonial Exhibition (dem.).31 Reed’s practice and its successors were involved in designing all the buildings for all these groups. The first building was the Melbourne Public Library

facing Swanston Street and the trustees announced the competition results on 16 January 1854. Reed was placed first and WH Burgoyne second. Some large projects, such as the library, were built in stages and remained in various states of incompleteness in between. Also, in some competition projects the winning design was considerably reworked. This seems to have been the case with the library because an illustration of Reed’s competition design differed from what was eventually built. The illustration is of a smaller and more compact building with an Ionic temple portico, whereas the library as built is both much larger and in a monumental Corinthian style. A master plan by Reed, dating from before May 1859 when it was described in the press, covered the whole block with two huge detached complexes, the one facing Swanston Street being the library and its offices and the other, facing Russell Street, being an art gallery and museum, the latter having a large circular central space crowned by a dome and with the exterior treated in the same monumental Corinthian manner as the Public Library on Swanston Street.32 The library facing Swanston Street, the only part of Reed’s master plan carried out, was built in stages between 1856 and 1864 but with the portico not being added until 1869–70. The central vestibule section was built first, in 1856–58, then the south section in 1859–63, then the north side in 1864–65, with the portico being added in 1869–70. The pavilion ends were built much later, the south wing in 1886 while the north one was only finished in 1961, which must make it the last monumental Corinthian design

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31 The development of the whole block is set out in Allom, Lovell, Sanderson Pty Ltd in conjunction with the Heritage Group, Public Works Department Victoria, State Library and Museum of Victoria Buildings: Conservation Analysis, Allom, Lovell, Sanderson Pty Ltd & the Heritage Group, Public Works Department Victoria, Melbourne, 1985. 32 For the Ionic scheme presumed to be based on the competition design see H 3948, Picture Collection, SLV. De Gruchy & Leigh published an illustration of the greatly expanded Corinthian design, which included an array of sculpture: H 3949, Picture Collection, SLV. Miles Lewis has identified a number of possible sources for the exterior form and character of the Corinthian design: projects for Grosvenor House, London, 1827, illus. in Country Life, CLIV, 15 November 1972, one by Sir Robert Smirke and one Thomas Cundy the Younger. The Reed master plan is described in the Argus, 12 May 1859, suppl. A drawing of the plan survives, and the overall scheme is presented in a watercolour view by Nicholas Chevalier, which shows the Swanston St building and the separate domed Russell St building: H 27931, Picture Collection, SLV. Mary Lewis has drawn my attention to a watercolour view from Russell St of a design by an unknown architect. It is not of the complex envisaged by Reed in the master plan (it has no dome) and it is in a decorative columnar style (in the scenic manner of Baroque quadratura artists such as Andrea Pozzo). The scheme may date from the 1880s or later.


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JOSEPH REED AND FOUNDATION 1853 – 90

1 Public Library, Swanston St, Melbourne. Joseph Reed,1854–70. The portico and new south wing beyond, completed in 1883 2 The tall Ionic columns within the interior of the Queen’s Hall

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1 Bank of New South Wales, Collins St, Melbourne. Joseph Reed, 1856. Collins St elevation, the façade was relocated to its current site at the University of Melbourne after the building’s demolition in 1932

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33 A Neale, ‘Decorative art and architecture: Owen Jones and Bateman in Australia’, in J Willis et al. (eds), Papers from the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 1998, SAHANZ, Melbourne, 1998, p. 270. 34 Australian Builder and Practical Mechanic (AB), 23 April 1856, p. 63; Argus, 31 May 1856, p. 6; AB, 5 June 1856, p. 115; Argus, 31 May 1856, p. 6. Vickers’s English connections were Tory conservatives and Reed may have appeared as an individualist and a utilitarian, including being laissez faire in ideas of architectural commitment, whom Tory conservatives would have most disliked and feared. The dispute perhaps reveals something of the social and political polarisation among groups at the time. 35 The interior was recalled in a brief article about the bank in 1933, see Journal of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, XXXI, 2, May 1933, p. 30. A superb photograph taken of the façade before 1890 accompanies the article. 36 Illustrated in H-R Hitchcock, Early Victorian Architecture in Britain, New Haven, 1954, vol. 2, 7 & 9. 37 Reproduced in HH Paynting & M Grant (eds), Victoria Illustrated 1834–1984, James Flood, Harold Paynting Charity Trust, Melbourne, 1985, p. 176. The photograph also shows the truly imposing scale of the bank building in relation to the surrounding street architecture. 38 ST Gill, Victoria Illustrated 1857 & 1862, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1971, notes opposite plate 76. It is further stated that the bank’s solicitor was asked to advise whether action should be taken against Reed for damages ‘caused by his negligence and want of skill’. For this present study, the source for Newnham’s information has not been rediscovered in the Westpac Archives. 39 Royal Commission, p. 22, qq. 587–95.

in Melbourne. Internally, on the ground floor, the large, plainly ordered rooms on either side of the entrance hall were for various collections of coins, seals, medals and illustrations of various branches of the fine arts and ethnographic objects (and surely a temporary use because of the master plan’s intended art gallery and museum complex facing Russell Street). The striking feature is the library on the first floor, named the Queen’s Hall, which runs the full length of the double-height first floor, with a gallery or mezzanine around it. Though somewhat altered today, the library interior is still a space to be marvelled at, not only for its architectural finesse but also for the functional integration of natural light and a system of ventilation into its spatial planning. Whereas the tall Ionic columns in the Queen’s Hall contradict the use of Corinthian columns on the outside, their choice would be consistent with an Ionic exterior, if that were indeed the intention of the competition entry. Edward La Trobe Bateman decorated the interior in about 1861.33 The great impact on the public of Reed’s Queen’s Hall in the Melbourne Public Library was similar to that in the parliamentary domain with the creation in 1856 of the interiors of the Legislative Assembly and Council Chamber of the Parliament of Victoria, designed by Knight & Kerr.

Bank of New South Wales Reed’s next competition success was the head office of the Bank of New South Wales in Collins Street. Unlike the Public Library, his success in the competition came at a great cost, both because of the way his

design was chosen and because of grave problems with the building’s construction and structure. It must have been a severe test for Reed. A competition for the bank was held early in 1856 and the result was announced towards the end of May. The building was to cost £22 000, a very large sum. The names of only two contestants are known, Reed and Charles Vickers, awarded the first and second prizes. Innuendoes from the time of the competition hint that backdoor dealings and unfair influences tainted the idealism of anonymity and unprejudiced selection. Vickers was seen as a victim displaced by Reed.34 The organisation of the two-storey façade was in the traditional tripartite form of a central section flanked by slightly projecting pavilion ends which contain the entrances. The façade reflects the room arrangements and social hierarchy within the building. The banking chamber was on the ground floor and the manager’s residence on the first.35 Reed’s design echoes sources from the British Renaissance Revival of the 1830s–40s. It shows affinity with the lavish street architecture of buildings such as the piano nobile stage of a proposal for Carlton Club House, Pall Mall, London (Sydney Smirke, 1847), and the Army and Navy Club House, Pall Mall, London (Parnell and Smith, 1848–51).36 Its origins, though it is not a copy of any building, are in north Italian Renaissance architecture, such as Jacopo Sansovino’s renowned Library of St Mark, facing St Mark’s Square, in Venice. The architectural decoration of the friezes, which have cherubs carrying floral garlands was executed by Charles Summers who recorded his contribution by carving

‘Charles Summers, sculptor, 1857’ into the stones, features discovered in 1887 when restoration work was carried out, and again in the early 1930s when the façade was taken down to be sent to the University of Melbourne. The sculptural arrangement proposed for the façade was left incomplete because of growing dissatisfaction with the architect over costs which had risen to some £37 000. The unfinished façade can be seen in the earliest photograph of the bank, believed to have been taken in June 1860.37 Reed was soon in more trouble. By 1861 internal structural problems had developed and the bank had to move to a rented building.38 Years later, in 1873, Reed was taunted about this professional fiasco and, in declining to take any personal blame for it, said that ‘at the time there was no iron to be had in the colony. Some stone arches and columns were removed by order of the management, and timber substituted; dry rot got into it, and the thing failed’.39 Over the years the condition of the façade must have gravely deteriorated. In 1885–86 extensive restoration was needed, undertaken by the architect William Salway (1844–1902), who had served articles in Reed & Barnes from 1864. It is something of a surprise that Reed was not asked, though the decay of the façade may have further cooled the bank’s attitude towards him. The decision in 1932 to demolish the bank set in train the movement to preserve the façade at the University of Melbourne.


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Wesley Church

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40 Argus, 26 September 1857. 41 Argus, 27 April 1860. 42 RTM Pescott, ‘The Royal Society of Victoria 1854–1959’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria, new series, vol. 73, February 1961, pp. 1–40. C Kellaway, ‘Research into the Royal Society of Victoria’, National Trust of Australia (Victoria). Allom Lovell & Associates Pty Ltd, Royal Society of Victoria Building, Conservation and Management Plan, Melbourne, 1994. 43 Argus, 19 May 1859, p. 3. The contract was awarded to Matthew Taylor and the building was to cost £2750. 44 The University of Melbourne Building Committee, minutes, 5 October 1858, University of Melbourne Archives. Reed accepted on 22 October 1858. 45 Reed’s and the partnership’s association is summarised in G Tibbits, The Planning and Development of the University of Melbourne: an Historical Outline, University of Melbourne, 2000, reprint 2001.

Wesley Church, at 148 Lonsdale Street (Wesley Methodist Church) was the first Gothic church by Joseph Reed and was again a successful competition entry, though in being realised the competition design was altered. Tenders were called in September 1857.40 The choice of Gothic for the style of the church caused a serious controversy among Methodists. The design reveals Reed’s ability to explore the issues of church design for Nonconformist congregations and plan freely and imaginatively for preaching purposes, adapting the Gothic vocabulary for picturesque expression on the outside and for a large congregation within. The gallery, which runs around the interior of the spacious nave, and the slender columns supporting the gallery, are novel features. The project had an unhappy ending, with a dispute between the builder, Forsyth, and Reed, described in the judgment as ‘the well-known architect’, an indication of his already high profile and standing in Melbourne.41 At issue was a claim by the builder that the original tender was too low because certain items were omitted from the bill of quantities. Reed argued that the items were not usually specified in the bill of quantities. Against an initial demand of £2000 damages, the jury awarded the builder only £364 18s 6d.

Royal Society The Royal Society building by Reed, simple as its appearance is today, also has a difficult history. A strangely conducted competition brought Reed into the picture.

This had been preceded by indecision over the choice of a designer and a design. It was a situation into which Reed suddenly appeared as the favoured architect and he seems to have been a player behind the scenes. The Philosophical Institute of Victoria, which was formed in 1855 (and became the Royal Society of Victoria in 1859), resolved to build on a somewhat ambitious scale.42 The architect Arthur Johnson provided plans without charge which were discussed in March 1858, but without result. Another architect, John Millar, about whom nothing is known, also sent in plans. A competition was then held which attracted a large number of entries, and perhaps Reed was among them, though there is no evidence. After several months of further indecision, a design by Richard Lambeth (fl. 1858–71) was selected. A wide range of estimates of its likely cost disturbed the members and the scheme was set aside. It was then, in April 1859, that Joseph Reed was chosen to design the building, the first part of which was to be a meeting hall. Speculation about support and manipulation for Reed rests on the presence in the Royal Society of Redmond Barry and Godfrey Howitt. Reed offered his services on an honorary basis, and at the end of the year was rewarded for his design and generosity by being elected a life member of the Royal Society. Tenders were called on 19 May 1859.43 To save £350 the brick exterior was left unfinished because the society had to trim its budget. It was not designed and rendered until 1880. The interior was initially a single rectangular space suitable for meetings and lectures and was divided by moveable partitions for other purposes.

This single space was later modified towards its present arrangement of rooms. Firstly, in 1869 Reed & Barnes was asked to subdivide the single space of the lecture hall to create a room for a library on the ground floor and a first-floor section for a secretary’s room and a council room, and improve the acoustics of the remaining space of the lecture hall. Secondly, in 1879 the firm was asked to create a full first floor for two office rooms, thereby containing the lecture hall to part of the ground floor. The final substantial change to the building came well after the time of Reed and Reed & Barnes. In 1953–54, the old building was extended to the south, in a carefully matching style externally, to create rooms for the Australian College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

University of Melbourne In October 1858 Reed was appointed architect to the University of Melbourne.44 Commissions from the university continued through the successive practices of Reed & Barnes, Reed, Henderson & Smart, Reed & Smart (at the time of Reed’s death) and finally Reed, Smart & Tappin, up until 1909. Such a long connection reveals the faith that the university had in Reed, his partners and office, and the architectural and technical quality of their work. The sustained length of association is unique in the Melbourne architectural profession.45 However, at the beginning, Reed’s appointment came at a difficult time. The first building, the Quadrangle designed by FM White, was constantly being changed by the university even as it was being built.


JOSEPH REED AND FOUNDATION 1853 – 90

1 The Royal Society of Victoria, corner Exhibition St and Victoria Parade, Melbourne. Joseph Reed, 1859. View from Victoria Parade 2 Gate lodge, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Joseph Reed, 1860, central room, 1873–85, west and east rooms. The building as it stands today 3 Wesley Church, Lonsdale St, Melbourne. Joseph Reed, 1856. Detail view from Lonsdale St 4 Site plan of church and surrounding minister’s residence, school and master’s residence

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Unfairly, White lost the support of the University Council.46 At the same time, the university grounds were being landscaped. This was to a design by Edward La Trobe Bateman who, presumably, was introduced to the university by Godfrey Howitt in whose house he was living. Bateman’s landscape design transformed the university site into a park of picturesque contrasts and featured an ornamental lake. The Quadrangle was approached up an avenue and was like a grand mansion in a gentleman’s estate, and other buildings faced the lake or other features in the park.47

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46 G Tibbits, ‘Draft manuscript on the old Quadrangle’, work in progress. 47 J Foster, ‘The university landscape’, in Open to View: Historic Gardens and the Public, proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of the Australian Garden History Society, November 1988, pp. 27–31. G Tibbits, A Neale & G Pascoe, The System Garden, also known as the Botanical Garden, University of Melbourne, Australian Centre, University of Melbourne, 1998. 48 Neale, Papers from the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand, 1998, pp. 269–76. Anne Neale has not found any evidence of Bateman knowing Reed before the two met in Melbourne, but argues for Bateman’s influence on Reed in Melbourne. Bateman also decorated the interior of the Great Hall and rotunda of the 1866–67 Intercolonial Exhibition designed by Reed & Barnes, built behind the Public Library. That decoration was said to be similar to Bateman’s earlier decoration of the interior of the National Museum at the University of Melbourne, designed in 1863 by Reed & Barnes. 49 JM Freeland, The Making of a Profession, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1971, pp. 26–34. 50 He sailed as a cabin passenger and was listed as an architect aged forty. The voyage took 140 days.

The first design at the University of Melbourne that Reed was commissioned to prepare was a gate lodge. It is possible that Bateman may have participated in or even designed the small building, only a part of which was built, the central room of the present lodge (1860). The rugged window details of this room suggest the hand of Bateman. In the 1870s, Reed was again involved in designs for the completion of the gate lodge, adding the west and east rooms (1873–75) to the central room. The connection between Reed and the architect, designer and illustrator Edward La Trobe Bateman (1815–1897), who came to Melbourne in 1852, is of special interest. Before coming to Melbourne, Bateman had been in partnership with the older Owen Jones (1809–1874). Jones, now known for his colour decoration of the interior of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace and for his influential book Grammar of Ornament (1856), had worked in Vulliamy’s office, but before Reed’s time. Bateman influenced Reed and had a desk in Reed’s Melbourne office, though he seems to have maintained

his independence from Reed’s practice. He decorated the interiors of a number of Reed buildings, the first of which was the Melbourne Public Library. He also influenced the architecture of the firm. The earliest influence of Bateman on Reed is believed to have been on the Wesley Church project, and in particular the revised design for the minister’s residence. Subsequent influences or ‘partnerships’, or designs that are by Bateman but were under Reed’s (Reed & Barnes) name include the house for Clement Hodgkinson (1861) at 157 Hotham Street, East Melbourne, Barragunda at Cape Schanck (1865) for Godfrey Howitt, and Heronswood (originally Hearnwood) for Professor WE Hearn at Dromana (c. 1864 and later). In September 1867 Bateman was seriously injured in an accident at Chatsworth House in the Western District where he was laying out the grounds for the pastoralist George Moffat. His right hand was so badly damaged that he had to master drawing and writing with his left hand. After protracted lawsuits because of the accident, Bateman left Melbourne in 1869. In his later years he was a landscape gardener on the estate of the Marquis of Bute near Glasgow, where Reed again met him in the late 1880s and invited him to tour with Reed and his wife.48 In 1856, Reed became the first elected member, as distinct from one of the founding members, of the newly created Victorian Institute of Architects (VIA). Reed seems to have had little part in the affairs of the institute, even though the president and driving force was JG Knight with whom

Reed had been associated in the 1853 competition for the Government House shortly after arriving in Melbourne.49

Reed & Barnes 1862–83 The early years of the 1860s were a watershed in Reed’s architectural practice. From late 1862 and during 1863 Reed was overseas. He returned to Melbourne on 24 October on the Sussex which had sailed from Plymouth early in June.50 While the reason for the overseas trip is not known, it had two important effects, one before he left and the other after he returned. Before leaving, he entered into partnership with Frederick Barnes who had worked in his office since at least 1856 and who was in charge during his absence. Reed’s few references to Barnes suggest that he dealt with project management, quantity surveying and costing, and the preparation of technical and detailed drawings and specifications. The extent to which he was involved in the design of any of the buildings in the practice remains unresolved. Reed’s and Barnes’s talents perhaps complemented each other’s as a cooperative partnership.51 After Reed’s return, the variety and character of designs changed, reflecting his travels in England, France and Italy. The most conspicuous result was the introduction of coloured brick architecture, claimed to be Lombardic, which became such a striking and influential feature of the practice in the later 1860s. Presumably he was influenced in this by the English empathy for the Veneto created by Ruskin’s writings and by books such as GE Street’s Brick and Marble Architecture in the Middle Ages: Notes of a Tour in the North of


JOSEPH REED AND FOUNDATION 1853 – 90

1 Portrait of Frederick Barnes (c. 1823–1884). Barnes entered a partnership with Reed in 1862 until 1883 2 Barragunda, Cape Schanck, Vic. Reed & Barnes, 1865 3 Clement Hodgkinson house, Hotham St, East Melbourne. Joseph Reed, 1861 4 Heronswood (originally Hearnwood), Dromana, Vic. Reed & Barnes, c. 1864

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Italy (1855). His time overseas raises the issue of who designed various buildings begun while he was away, most notably, those at the University of Melbourne. It is presumed that he was involved in their design before he left. From the mid-1860s the partnership engaged in many large and complex projects and competitions, and the office must have expanded beyond the size it had been before Reed left for overseas.52 There is another aspect of Reed’s professional life after he returned, though in no way connected with his trip, which was something of a personal crisis for him and the repercussions continued for years afterwards. This was the competition in 1864 for the design of a Government House. The success of Reed & Barnes in the competition, then their failure to realise the project and instead, by the end of the 1860s, seeing a completely new design prepared and carried out within the Public Works Department, seems to have affected Reed’s judgment. Of the earliest buildings from the new partnership, the most significant is the noble and elegant Roman tetrastyle prostyle Corinthian portico of the Collins Street Baptist Church. What part of the earlier chapel of 1845 designed by John Gill that survived the rebuilding or remodelling program of 1861–62 is in doubt, probably nothing, and it is likely that the entire chapel is by Reed and Reed & Barnes.53 The new chapel, a preaching hall simply and elegantly membered, was opened in January 1861 and included a gallery supported by cast iron columns and an exterior which features giant Corinthian pilasters matching the style and character of the portico.

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Three buildings at the University of Melbourne were started during Reed’s time overseas. Tenders were called for the National Museum on 10 January 1863, then on 9 February tenders were called for the Medical School (with fresh tenders being called on 24 April), and some months later, on 23 July, tenders were called for the erection of a head gardener’s cottage, which stood just to the north of the present Union Theatre. Both the National Museum and the Medical School were distinctive though quite dissimilar buildings in the university landscape. The Medical School had a U-shaped plan, with a front section and two wings separated by a courtyard, and was in the form of a Palladian villa with a porticoed façade facing the lake and its back to Swanston Street. Its elegant Classical idiom made a strong contrast with the Tudor oriented design of the Quadrangle by FM White. The National Museum, though on university land, was not a university building and had been commissioned by its director, Professor Frederick McCoy, who was also the foundation Professor of Natural Science in the university. The Reed & Barnes design proposed a double quadrangle arrangement with towers in the centre of each of its four façades. As it turned out, only the eastern wing was built and its towered façade survived until the late 1960s. From the university lake, the museum was a symmetrical composition about a central tower, had gabled pavilion ends, tall pointed Gothic windows, and a prominent slate roof. Internally, it was a remarkable space which included a galleried first floor and clerestory windows which lit the central open area

down to the ground floor. The galleried interior was the forerunner of a similar approach taken in the Exhibition Building and the McCoy Hall, off Russell Street in central Melbourne. As did the Melbourne Public Library, the museum revealed Reed’s extraordinary skill in the spatial organisation of a building. The museum was constructed of straw-coloured brick and timber and it was a significant early example in Melbourne of the Gothic Revival being used for a non-religious purpose. It has been compared with the Oxford Museum by Deane & Woodward, but both in planning and appearance it bore only the most superficial resemblance to that model. It probably has no specific design source. The building became a centre of recreational and scientific life in Melbourne with many thousands of visitors coming to it each year, attracted by its museum displays and the landscape pleasures offered by the university grounds. The AMP Society building in Sydney was the first interstate commission secured by Reed & Barnes. In 1862 the society bought land in Pitt Street and, after some delay in acquiring it, Reed & Barnes was engaged to design the building. The Sydney architect Edmund Blacket was the firm’s agent to supervise construction after tenders were accepted in February 1863.54 By that time, Reed must have left Melbourne for England and it is assumed, on no evidence, that the design was prepared before he left, otherwise Barnes or some unknown architect working in the office prepared it. It was an exceptionally strong and beautiful building with ground floor rusticated arches and bold piers of smooth-faced channelled

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51 Royal Commission, q. 682: ‘When we began to investigate the matter, Mr Barnes and I, that for that sum we could hardly put the plainest brick walls around the accommodation asked for ...’; and q. 735: ‘Mr Barnes did it by taking out the quantities ... I believe the sheets and quantities are still to be seen’. 52 William Salway was in the office until 1867, having served articles between 1860 and 1864. There were a number of articled pupils at that time: Frederick Gibbins c. 1865, and employed for ten years to c. 1875; Anketell Matheson Henderson 1869–72, later to be a partner from 1883 to 1890. He was the son of the Rev. Anketell M Henderson, pastor of the Collins Street Independent Church. 53 The dimensions of the Gill building, given in JM Freeland, Melbourne Churches 1836–1851, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1963, p. 135, do not match the present dimensions of the chapel. A Reed notice in the Argus, 16 December 1857, called for tenders for building part of a new Baptist chapel at the rear of the existing one in Collins St east. 54 G Blainey, A History of the AMP 1848–1998, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW, 1999, pp. 30–2. Illustrated in M Herman, The Architecture of Victorian Sydney, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1956/1964, p. 30.


1 Engraving of National Museum, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Reed & Barnes, c. 1863 2 Government House competition design, Melbourne. Reed & Barnes, 1864. Despite winning the competition, a completely new design was realised late in the 1860s by the Public Works Department 3 Menzies Hotel, corner William and Bourke streets, Melbourne. Reed & Barnes, 1867–68

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rustication supporting a decorated entablature. Above this, running through the first and second floors, were fluted giant Corinthian columns which also carried an entablature crowned with a balustraded parapet. The end terminations to the four columns were smooth-faced pilasters. The building was completed for occupation by October 1864. As with the Bank of New South Wales, but not to be repeated thereafter, Charles Summers was engaged to create a sculptural group above the parapet, though none of the work was to be done in situ. The group of four figures, of whom the centre standing one was the Greek goddess of fortune, Tyche, beside a cornucopia, was created in Melbourne, cast in zinc, and transported to Sydney under Summers’s accompanying supervision. The firm did no other buildings in Sydney. However in the 1870s and 1880s it had Bank of Australasia commissions in New South Wales towns, though they were initiated from Melbourne. Regrettably, there seems to have been no further joint projects with Charles Summers. The 1864 Government House competition is now buried and forgotten under the many other successful designs completed by Reed & Barnes.55 To Joseph Reed, however, their success in the competition, with a design described as being in the French Baronial style, and their failure to see it built, caused lasting frustration. It seems to have been a frustration which had repercussions everywhere, stirring or affecting other architects, insinuating itself into the media, slurring the reputation of the Public Works Department, defaming its head William Wardell and some of its greatest architects

such as Arthur Johnson and John James Clark (who as a boy had worked in Reed’s office in the 1850s), and others such as Arthur Smith and Samuel Merrett.56 Reed’s intemperate response, even vendetta, needs to be seen in the context of his conception of architectural importance. As was the case in French architecture, Reed considered that architecture for the state offered the architect the opportunity to create works of art that carried the prospect of greatness. In Reed’s hierarchical conception of architecture, the Government House would have been at the apex, and the prize was snatched from him. His version of events seems devoid of context, particularly in light of the immense constitutional crisis from late 1864 onwards which engulfed Victorian politics and Governor Sir Charles Darling.57 Darling, for whom the Government House was intended, was caught up in a bitter political dispute between the two houses of parliament and was recalled, then reinstated, and finally resigned in April 1867 to leave the colony. It is hardly surprising that the successful competition design did not go ahead. But Reed’s enmity lasted for more than ten years, well into the 1870s. In architectural circles the outcome of the competition was an increase in pressure on the government to hold competitions among private architects for government buildings.58 In the press, and particularly in the Age, which ran editorials critical of Wardell and the Public Works Department, some of the points suggest Reed as an éminence grise.59

Towers and arcades

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The Government House design of Reed & Barnes is interesting for two reasons related to Reed’s overseas travels. The style, especially its arcaded elevations, introduced features which recurred in other designs, such as the chateau-like Menzies Hotel (1867–68) at the corner of William and Bourke streets, and the pair of houses, Alcaston House (1868–69) for Garrard and James, at the corner of Spring and Collins streets. It showed a new level of architectural sophistication. The other feature, also related to Reed’s travels, is the campanile-like tower which stands alone at some distance from the main house. This is the first sign of Reed’s interest in Italian-inspired towers that were to be such a prominent feature in his designs for St Jude’s, Carlton, but where the tower was not built, and at the Independent Church, where the magnificent tower marks the corner of Russell and Collins streets. The two churches were conceived and built at virtually the same time, starting in 1866, though both have quite different histories of conception and erection. The Anglican church of St Jude’s, the smaller of the two, has an aisleless nave and chancel plan and was built in two stages, because of the slowness in raising the money, but was left without its tower. The foundations were started in about July 1866 and the chancel, vestry (dem.) and part of the nave were built. In this partly completed state, the church was opened with a service on Sunday 3 March 1867. The remaining portion of the nave, which included a corridor and gallery over it, was started

55 The Government Gazette of 13 May 1864 invited architects to submit designs. A perspective appeared in the Illustrated Melbourne Post, 20 August 1864, and the project is reproduced in D McCaughey et al., Victoria’s Colonial Governors, 1839–1900, Melbourne University Press at the Miegunyah Press, Carlton, Vic., 1993, p. 191. 56 Reed’s own words and opinions are recorded in the Royal Commission of 1873. 57 For a summary see FK Crowley’s entry on Darling in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 4, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1972, pp. 19–21. 58 Freeland, The Making of a Profession, p. 34. 59 Editorials, Age, 8 June 1872, 28 October 1872, 8 August 1873.


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JOSEPH REED AND FOUNDATION 1853 – 90

1 AMP Society Building, Pitt St, Sydney. Reed & Barnes, 1862. Pitt St elevation with Charles Summers’s group sculpture above the parapet 2 Baptist Church, Collins St, Melbourne. Reed & Barnes, 1861–62. Collins St elevation 3 Alcaston House, corner Collins and Spring streets, Melbourne. Reed & Barnes, 1868–69. The first Alcaston House before the building of the same name that stands on this site today

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1 St. Jude’s Anglican Church, corner Palmerston and Lygon streets, Carlton, Vic. Reed & Barnes, 1866–67. This engraving shows the design of the tower, which was never completed 2 The Independent Church, corner Collins and Russell streets, Melbourne. Reed & Barnes, 1867. Drawing of the modified second proposal, designed in the Gothic style 3 The completed building featuring polychrome brickwork and rounded Romanesque arches 4 The interior of the church, showing the auditorium and horseshoe gallery where the Gothic style was abandoned in favour of Lombardic Romanesque for acoustic purposes

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in June 1869 and the re-opening service was on 11 September 1870. Its polychrome brickwork, imposing gabled form and the plain though boldly expressed Gothic pointed arches, which include cast iron colonnettes, make it an outstanding composition. The unrealised tower would have been a striking urban feature when seen diagonally from Neill Street below.60

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By contrast, the Collins Street Independent Church, now St Michael’s Uniting Church, has a more complex and interesting history in the evolution of its creative design.61 There was a competition in which behind the scenes play was important in securing the commission for Reed & Barnes. The eventual spatial organisation and massing of the church was the result of an active client and architect relationship, and, in the end, the building made an innovative contribution to Nonconformist church architecture. Its polychrome brickwork was not only admired but was also influential, and its massing, with its two street façades on either side of the corner tower, is one of the most dramatic features of nineteenthcentury street architecture in Melbourne.

60 Call for tenders in Argus, 23 June 1866, 31 May 1869; and John Pigdon was the builder. The intended tower was similar to the one built at the Independent Church. The practice continued to serve the congregation and Reed, Smart & Tappin designed the Sunday-school building in 1891. 61 The history of the design and its significance is revealed in C Wood & M Askew, St Michael’s Church: Formerly the Collins Street Independent Church, Melbourne, Hyland House, South Yarra, Vic., 1992, ch. 4 & ch. 5.

The building committee of the Independent Church, formed on 28 February 1866, decided to hold a limited competition among seven invited firms of architects. Two were chosen from the five who offered designs, one being Crouch & Wilson, who submitted two designs, and Reed & Barnes, who sent one design, a large polychrome brick cruciform Gothic church with a prominent corner campanile tower, similar to the one eventually built. One of the Crouch & Wilson designs was initially favoured, but with reservations. This offered

the opportunity for Reed & Barnes to submit a modified proposal in the Romanesque style. This in turn prompted Crouch & Wilson to amend their design to include a corner tower, a response to the striking feature of the Reed & Barnes submission. All the designs were then set aside and Reed & Barnes was invited to prepare a further modified plan. Not only do these twists and turns indicate collusion between factions of the building committee and the two competitors, but they also show the irony of Reed & Barnes’s willingness to try and supplant another competitor as against their aggressive indignity after their winning Government House design was set aside. It was a situation that was to be repeated in the competition for the Eastern Market in 1871. During May and into June 1866, meetings at Reed & Barnes’s office saw the design further modified to incorporate the ideas of the pastor, Reverend Anketell M Henderson, on the acoustic ambience desired within a preaching church. The plan and internal volume were modified so as to create a church in the form of an auditorium with a horseshoe gallery, rather like a theatre interior, a change that saw the Gothic style abandoned in favour of Lombardic Romanesque. This change has been wrongly interpreted as a non-functional stylistic change of dress, a choice on appearances. Rather, the change was a creative and functional response to the internal volume being conceived as an acoustic auditorium with a horseshoe gallery, wherein voluminous round arches on slender iron supports more functionally satisfy an acoustic purpose, whereas tighter Gothic pointed arches

would have compromised it. The choice of open round arches for acoustic purposes predetermined the abandonment of Gothic in favour of Romanesque. The design was agreed to on 15 June and tenders were called, with thirteen responses, but the proposed prices further delayed work. Reed & Barnes prepared two less expensive options, one with the tower taken only to the roofline, with the possibility that it might be completed later, and the other with no tower or corridors at the rear and sides of the auditorium. The first option was chosen and a building contract was signed with John Young, the chosen contractor, on 9 October 1866. The foundation stone was laid at a ceremony on 22 November 1866. Unlike at St Jude’s with its unrealised tower, the Independent congregation was able to decide early in 1867 to build the tower as proposed in Reed & Barnes’s Lombardic Romanesque design. By August, the building was completed and opened for public inspection. On Sunday 25 August 1867, morning, afternoon and evening services were held.

Melbourne Town Hall At the time that the building contracts for St Jude’s and the Independent Church were fulfilled, Reed & Barnes had secured the design of the Melbourne Town Hall, the most important public building in central Melbourne. It is a Classical design using giant Corinthian (composite) columns and pilasters, corner and central pavilions crowned by mansards, and raised on a substantial and beautifully designed


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1 Melbourne Town Hall, corner Collins and Swanston streets, Melbourne. Reed & Barnes, 1867. The original interior of the Town Hall, with vaulted ceiling, organ, Corinthian pilasters and decoration before its destruction by fire in 1925 2 The original proposal was symmetrical set around the principal axis of Swanston St and the secondary axis of Collins St 3 The completed first stage of the main building and after the addition of the clock tower (the Alfred Tower) in 1869

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62 The Melbourne Town Hall was contemporary in the later 1860s with a large number of town halls in England, many of which were in secular Gothic. Designs using a giant Corinthian order were few, such as at Leeds (1853–58) and Bolton (1866–73), and so make the Reed & Barnes design rather special in this genre. Some are illustrated in C Cunningham, Victorian and Edwardian Town Halls, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981. 63 R Magee, ‘The French Second Empire influence in Victorian architecture 1856–1900’, research report, BArch, University of Melbourne, 1980. It is thought Reed familiarised himself with some of the latest French architecture on his 1863 visit. 64 Argus, 17 August 1867. The design was illustrated in Building Times, 1 October 1869. 65 Royal Commission. 66 Tenders called for a tower in Argus, 25 April 1870. 67 The two-stage tower, to appear integral with the membering below, had to overcome the visual separateness of the attic storey of the corner pavilion and the strong horizontal line of the continuous Corinthian entablature that unified the street façades of the original design. The solution contains the architectural solecism of the pilaster of the first stage of the tower standing over a ‘void’ in the architectural ordering of elements below. 68 The council chamber, opened in March 1884, was also from the Reed, Henderson & Smart practice. For the social significance of Reed & Barnes’s Melbourne Town Hall, see G Tucker, ‘The Melbourne Town Hall: the City’s Meeting Place?’, Victorian Historical Journal, vol. 63, nos 2 & 3, 1992. 69 The development of the complex is deftly described in C Kellaway, Melbourne Trades Hall Lygon Street Carlton: The Workingman’s Parliament, Victorian Trades Hall Council, Melbourne, 1988.

bluestone base.62 The building is one of a select number from this time which introduce through the mansards a French Second Empire flavour.63 Two designs for a smaller building preceded the finalisation of the present larger building and each had French Second Empire features. Notwithstanding the decorative implications inherent in the Corinthian order, the architectural character of the town hall is more severe than that of the earlier Melbourne Public Library. Tenders were called on 17 August 186764 and shortly after construction started, the corner foundation stone was laid on 29 November by HRH Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, then making the first visit to Australia by British royalty. The pragmatism of Reed & Barnes in having the Melbourne Town Hall built as a brick carcass faced with stone was the subject of discussion at the 1873 Royal Commission into the Public Works Department. Reed was incensed that the parliamentarians called it ‘veneering’ whereas he considered it economical construction (in contrast to his charge of the wasteful use of stone in the solid stone construction at the GPO).65 As originally proposed, after it was decided to place the town hall on the corner of Collins and Swanston streets, the design was symmetrical around a principal central axis to Swanston Street and a secondary axis to Collins Street, with a simple set of transverse steps from Swanston Street to the main entrance. The hall within had its axis parallel to Swanston Street but further to the east than the Collins Street axis. A picturesque roofline included curved

mansard roofs, small ones over the corner pavilion ends of each façade, and a large one over the entrance axis and the Collins Street axis, a feature of importance in the introduction of French Second Empire architecture to Melbourne. This four-square composition was subsequently muted by two important changes; the first was the addition to the design of the clock tower (the Alfred Tower) above the corner pavilion at the street intersection, and the second being the massive pedimented portico at the Swanston Street entrance. The clock tower, by emphasising the corner, encouraged the elevations to be read as if they were symmetrical around the corner with the vantage point for viewing the composition being diagonally across the intersection.66 The transition from pavilion corner to the tower is brilliantly handled, with the faceted corner of the tower (between two pilasters) softening or melting the positive emphasis of the giant pilaster below, even though its membering is architecturally incorrect.67 The great portico of 1887, attributed to Frederick Smart when the practice had become Reed, Henderson & Smart, though admired for its own compositional qualities, contradicted the corner emphasis introduced by the tower.68 The original and splendid hall, which had a balcony all round, Corinthian pilasters and decoration, and a barrel-vaulted ceiling, was destroyed by fire in 1925 and was replaced by the present larger and plainer hall (and the mansard towers to Collins Street were also lost). A predilection for the giant Corinthian order in extensive public building compositions emerged some years later

in the development of the Trades Hall building, facing Lygon Street and on Victoria Street. The first part of this complex development of additions was designed in 1873, the foundation stone being laid on 26 January 1874 and the building opened in 1875. This first part was a simple two-storey block in which the arched windows were presented as piers and arches, and each floor was defined by a trabeated screen of pilasters and a continuous entablature (a portion can still be seen from Lygon Street). A small pediment on the principal axis to Victoria Street marked the ground floor entrance, flanked by coupled pilasters (on both floors). Subsequent building programs, and there were about seven of them between the 1880s and the 1920s, added a series of giant Corinthian sections which buried the original design and changed the architectural character of the complex into the magnificent Roman Corinthian pile that it is today.69 Several interiors, the council chamber (1884), the old ballroom (1884), and the new council chamber (1890, burnt 1962 and rebuilt), attracted public attention. The source is in the Roman Revival that flowered in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s. This is a design stream within which is Reed’s Public Library (1854), remarkable for being such an early example, whereas the later parts of the Trades Hall, in the same stream, are remarkable for their lateness, for the persistence they reveal in the pursuit of the Roman architectural dream, the octostyle entrance portico being added between 1917 and 1922 (Bates, Peebles & Smart) and the Victoria Street wing in 1925 (which covered the façade of the 1870s elevation).


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1 Scots Church, corner Collins and Russell streets, Melbourne. Reed & Barnes, 1872 2 Collins St view c. 1872, looking towards Swanston St after the completion of both churches. The Alfred Tower on the Town Hall can be seen in the distance down Collins St 3 Scots Church, corner Collins and Russell streets, Melbourne. Reed & Barnes, 1872. Detail drawing of stained glass window facing Collins St

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Working with Gothic The third major central city project of the 1860s and 1870s by Reed & Barnes was the Scots Church at the corner of Collins and Russell streets. As with its two near neighbour predecessors, the Independent Church and the Melbourne Town Hall, it also featured a tall tower and a striking spire. By contrast it was in the English Decorated idiom, a variant of Gothic and the Gothic Revival. Tenders were called in September 1872 and the builder David Mitchell was given the contract. Striking as the composition and detailing is from the street and as one of the trio of towers in the streetscape, it is the interior which reveals the planning flexibility of the office. The nave, which incorporates a rear gallery, is wide and tall, the aisles narrow and low, the transepts broad, so as to create a large open Gothic space, a preaching space. A slightly sloping floor and a shallow apse enhance this function for elders of the Church.70 Its architectural character tends towards the austere, though its detailing, the contrasting textures of its stonework, the timber fittings and the stained glass all enliven the composition and the internal space. In addition to Scots Church, the practice undertook a number of commissions for the Presbyterians over several years. Three churches were the Presbyterian Church at Koroit (1870), at Horsham (1873), and at 603 Toorak Road, Prahran (1875, with later additions in 1888 attributed to FJ Smart). Some designs for the Presbyterians are in a severe idiom, in stone with chaste unadorned windows that have shallow

pointed segmental arches in brick, a rather forbidding Reed & Barnes ‘Celtic style’ appropriate to Scottish and Irish Church interests. Buildings designed for Scotch College, on the corner of Grey and Lansdowne streets in East Melbourne, were in this manner. As an idiom it probably dates back to the time of Edward La Trobe Bateman’s influence on Joseph Reed in the late 1850s. Reed’s earliest connection with the college was in 1859 when tenders were called for ‘outbuildings’ and then for the erection of part of Scotch College.71 The major addition by Reed & Barnes was in 1873 when a large classroom block and the principal’s residence were built.72 This dour Celtic idiom was also used in the earlier Norman Romanesque Wesleyan Church (now the Church of All Nations) in Palmerston Street, Carlton (1869). It also appeared in the Bishop’s Palace at Ballarat for the Catholic Church, begun in 1876.73 The largest, and mercifully the least stylistically oppressive, of this genre of stone buildings for the Presbyterians is Ormond College, affiliated with the University of Melbourne. Like all the very large projects, Ormond College was designed and built in stages. The front wing was begun in 1879 and was opened in March 1881, though there was financial doubt over whether the great tower could be included.74 Another and even more engaging creation was the picturesque Presbyterian Ladies College, East Melbourne (1874), regrettably demolished. It was decidedly more picturesque and French in character.75

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Professional differences In 1874, Reed & Barnes became embroiled in a dispute that divided the profession, engaged the public, and saw both Reed and Barnes leave the Victorian Institute of Architects.76 It had its origins a few years earlier when the Melbourne City Council announced in 1871 a competition for a design for the Eastern Market site at the corner of Bourke and Stephen (now Exhibition) streets. The entry by the architect John Flannagan was awarded first prize and his design incorporated a particularly appealing feature, shops facing the streets. The project stalled because of fears that the wholesale market would be moved from the site. Another competition was announced in 1874 and among the conditions to competitors issued by the council was Flannagan’s novel proposal for shops facing the streets. The incorporation of Flannagan’s idea from 1871 in the conditions of the 1874 competition stirred opposition, and the Victorian Institute of Architects (VIA) advised its members not to take part. At the time, the institute had only recently been re-formed and its president between late-1871 and late-1873 was Joseph Reed. He was succeeded in February 1874 by Sir Redmond Barry, an honorary member, chancellor of the University of Melbourne, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. It was around Barry, both as president and a long-time supporter of Reed, that the controversy developed after Reed & Barnes was announced winners, having ignored the advice of the institute not to enter. Flannagan protested, claiming they had influenced the City Council to hold the new competition after

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70 The Reed & Barnes apse of 1872 was replaced in 1929 by the present wide apse designed by Henry Kemp. 71 Argus, 20 October 1859, 10 November 1859. 72 Tenders called in Argus, 10 February 1873. The two buildings are illustrated in A Sierp, Colonial Life in Victoria: Fifty Years of Photography, 1855–1905, Rigby, Adelaide, 1972, p. 114. 73 Tenders called in Argus, 30 May 1876. Illustrated in W Jacobs et al., Ballarat: a Guide to Buildings and Areas 1851–1940, Jacob Lewis Vines Architects & Conservation Planners in assoc. with the City of Ballarat, South Yarra, Vic., 1981, p. 73. 74 Tenders, Argus, 26 July 1879. RS Ekins was the builder. S Macintyre (ed.), Ormond College Centenary Essays, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1984. The building program has been described by C Anderson in Joseph Reed’s Ormond College—an Architectural History 1881–1893, Ormond College, University of Melbourne, c. 1992, a copy of which is in the Ormond College library. The south-west wing (and a temporary dining hall) is by Reed, Henderson & Smart, and dates from 1882 to 1885. The east side, called the Victoria Front, is also by Reed, Henderson & Smart, from 1887 to 1889; and the dining hall and kitchen are by Reed, Smart & Tappin, from 1890 to 1893. 75 K Fitzpatrick, PLC Melbourne: the First Century 1875–1975, Presbyterian Ladies College, Burwood, Vic., 1975. Illustrated opposite p. 15. 76 Freeland, The Making of a Profession, pp. 34–6.


1 Presbyterian Ladies College, East Melbourne. Reed & Barnes, 1874 2 The Bishop’s Palace, Sturt St, Ballarat, Vic. Reed & Barnes, 1859–73 3 Scotch College, corner Grey and Lansdowne streets, East Melbourne. Reed & Barnes, 1859–73 4 Trades Hall, corner Lygon and Victoria streets, Carlton, Vic. Reed & Barnes, 1873–1925. Lygon St elevation drawing 5 The completion of many stages of work resulted in the building that faces Lygon St today

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1 North extension to Quadrangle, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Reed & Barnes, 1874–75. Corner of main building in the background with the University Press building in the foreground 2 Ormond College, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Reed & Barnes, 1879–93. Interior view of the Dining Hall 3 Original pictorial view of Ormond College designed and built over many stages 4 Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Reed & Barnes, 1879–82. Drawing of cross-section through the main hall

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1 The Eastern Market, corner Bourke and Exhibition streets, Melbourne. Reed & Barnes, 1878. The completed Reed & Barnes building 2 Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Reed & Barnes, 1879–82. View of completed building 3 The Eastern Market, corner Bourke and Exhibition streets, Melbourne. Reed & Barnes, 1878. Engraved drawing section through the building showing the covered section of the market under a series of piers and arches

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failing to gain the commission over Flannagan by using his idea of street shops, and after offering to cut their fees. Both Reed and Barnes resigned, but the VIA refused to accept their resignations in favour of expelling them. The issue ran in the press in the second half of 1875.77 The controversial Reed & Barnes design was proceeded with and featured the shops facing the streets. It was a two-storey castrum plan with low, three-storey towers at the corners and on the central axis of the street façades where large arches gave access into the covered sections in the centre of the market.78 As in the Trades Hall, the wall and arched windows formed a series of piers and arches and a trabeated frame of pilasters and entablatures marked the different levels.79

Expanding the university By the early 1870s, the expansion of the Quadrangle at the University of Melbourne was being considered. Chancellor Barry’s idea was to extend it to the north. It was a strategy that generated heated division. Barry was forced to push rather sternly against the opposition, and even chastised Reed for advocating that the money be used to start the south wing. Barry was a realist and appreciated that the political context of the government grant required that it be used to create rooms for teaching. The layout of the north extension not only increased space but also introduced new conceptions of uses and facilities. The most important of these was a recognition that some student services had to be provided. As a result, the north extension included,

on the ground floor, a large central room for students, called the Students’ Hall. On the first floor was a spacious university library, divided into three compartments by pairs of columns over which were timberlined gabled ceilings reflecting the three gables of the roof. In the later 1870s, another significant commission came from the university. This was for Wilson Hall, without doubt the architectural jewel of the nineteenth-century University of Melbourne. Both its architectural quality and its ceremonial purpose made it the soul of the university. When it was burnt down in January 1952, much more than just a building was lost in the flames. While its replacement by Bates, Smart & McCutcheon as successors to Reed’s practice dramatically symbolised the modern postwar era of the university, an intangible part of the university’s spirit was lost with old Wilson Hall and was lamented for decades afterwards. A separate ceremonial and architecturally impressive building, like Wilson Hall, was not part of the original conception of the university. Instead, a small hall, intended to be an Aula Magna, was to be part of the unrealised south wing of the Quadrangle. Events in Sydney changed attitudes in Melbourne about what might be a suitable ceremonial hall. In 1861, Redmond Barry visited Sydney University and was so impressed by its recently completed Great Hall that he formed an ambition for Melbourne to have a similarly imposing building. The opportunity for Melbourne to build a hall came late in 1874 when a bequest of £30 000 was offered by Samuel Wilson, a wealthy pastoralist. Strangely,

the university was slow in using the bequest. Perhaps the strongest and strangest reason for the delay was indecision over the choice of a site. There was also concern over how best to have the building designed: by an architectural competition or by a direct commission. This was eventually resolved by the decision at the end of 1875 to appoint Joseph Reed to design a hall in the Tudor Perpendicular style, which had buttresses and pointed arches, rich triangular gables in the Pisan manner, and inside an elaborate hammerbeam roof. The university even vacillated over naming the hall after Wilson, which was eventually only agreed upon in June 1877. A final delay was caused by the tendering process so that building work was not started until June 1878, nearly four years after the bequest was made. In October 1879, Wilson was invited to a ceremony to lay a memorial stone. The new Wilson Hall was used for the first time in 1882. An architectural setting had been created for the symbolic and ceremonial display of the institution’s public role. Thereafter it became the centre of ceremonial life in the university until its destruction in 1952. The new hall, designed by Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, stands above the old hall’s foundations, still visible in the basement area under the new building.

International exhibition The climax of the practice of Reed & Barnes came with the design of the Melbourne International Exhibition Building. An architectural competition was announced in December 1877 and it attracted eighteen entries. Reed & Barnes entered under the

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77 For example, Argus, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31 August 1875; 4 September 1875; 25, 30 November 1875; 4, 13, 14 December 1875 (M Lewis, Australian Architectural Index, University of Melbourne). 78 Tenders were called on 22 October 1877 and the contract was awarded to James Nation & Co. A description from 1888 on the contemporary vibrancy of the market, which persisted up to its demolition, is given in M Lewis et al., Melbourne—The City’s History and Development, City of Melbourne, 1994, p. 74. 79 One of the tragedies of modern Melbourne was the demolition of this market to make way for a hotel.


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1 The International Exhibition Building, Carlton, Vic. Reed & Barnes, 1878–80. South elevation drawing 2 Interior decoration of the central dome as it appears today 3 Illustration of the main building and the vast complex of temporary structures built for the International Exhibition of 1880 4 Pictorial view of building within Carlton Gardens 5 Illustration of the interior and wall detailing under the central dome. The Royal Exhibition Building, as it is known today, recently became the first Australian building listed on the World Heritage List and Victoria’s first World Heritage place

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1 Bank of Australasia, corner Collins and Queen streets, Melbourne. Reed & Barnes, 1876. Original building view from corner of Collins St. Additional floors were added in 1929–31 by KA Henderson and upper recessed floors later 2 Bank of Australasia, 437 High St, West Maitland, NSW. Reed & Barnes, 1868. Original building view. The branch was the first bank branch outside of Sydney 3 Crathre, corner Gipps and Powlett streets, East Melbourne. Reed & Barnes, 1874. Gipps St view 4 Canally, 160 George St, East Melbourne. Reed & Barnes, 1864. Entrance to the building as it stands today 1

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pseudonym ‘Advance’ and was declared the winner in May 1878, though not without drawing negative comments, including: a charge that the scheme did not comply with the competition conditions, that it was an extravagant design, and that Reed had influence with the exhibition commissioners. Economies during construction pared down the original design and simplified the details and ornament. Again, as with all the previous major designs Reed was associated with, clarity of planning and spatial organisation raise the building beyond any utilitarian purpose. The main building, most of which survives today, has a cruciform plan, consisting of a long east-west nave and clerestory and short north-south transept and clerestory, within which is a first-floor gallery, as had the old National Museum of 1863 at the University of Melbourne, and above the central crossing of the arms, an impressive dome. The termination of each arm was marked by a great arched entrance flanked by squat towers. The regularity of the structure expressed on the exterior by buttresses enabled the repetition of identical bays around the whole building. The stylistic sources and presumed models for the design are complex, including those for the Florentine dome, and encourage imaginative and poetic allusions. Joseph Reed gave the lead: A somewhat unique character has been given to the design by the introduction of boldly projecting buttresses, in place of the conventional pilasters prevailing everywhere. This idea was suggested by a study of specimens of 15th century architecture to be found in Normandy,

and more particularly displayed in the Church of St Peter at Constance, certain ecclesiastical ruins at Caen, some picturesque chateaux, occurring elsewhere in the same province, and the Church of St Stephen in Paris.80

Diversity in style and form Over the two decades that Reed & Barnes produced competition designs for major civic and religious buildings, there was a continuous substratum of other works, mostly in suburban Melbourne and country towns, which included banks, churches, warehouses, residences and other buildings. Some were quite large and in highly visible locations. This must have been the ‘bread and butter’ work that supported the firm. Each of these areas of design exhibits rich variety in style and form. The firm designed many banks, beginning in the 1870s, after a long period of quiescence after the problems associated with the Bank of New South Wales. The major source of commissions was the Bank of Australasia under the direction of ES Parkes (1834–1887).81 A small number of designs were produced for other banks, a notable example being the Ballarat Savings Bank, 48 Sturt Street. It was designed in 1872 and is a fine example of the conservative, though sensitive, application of the Colosseum motif of a continuous series of piers and arches defining the wall and window openings, and a trabeated screen of pilasters with entablature to define each floor (and the west end first floor has a Venetian window (Serlian motif).82 The largest of the banks for the Bank of Australasia was the two-

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storey head office (1876) at the corner of Collins Street and Queen Street. It is vigorously detailed with overlays that create deep recesses, ruled rustication on the ground floor in the French manner and a bold cornice to the first floor. Additional floors were added in 1929–31 as well as internal alterations, done by Kingsley A Henderson. The finest of the country branches is at West Maitland, New South Wales (1868), a design whose contrasting features show an affinity with Kolor, Alcaston House, and the unbuilt Government House (1864). Some of the country banks, such as at Yackandandah (1878), were noble and severe Classical compositions, while others, though intended to be modestly imposing, were not much larger than some of the cottages near them. They were possibly the training ground in design for supervised younger members of the firm.83 The houses—villas and mansions—present the greatest variety and are evidence of remarkable inventiveness and design facility. There is the Gothic house (1861) for Clement Hodgkinson at 157 Hotham Street, East Melbourne; the nearby Virginia (1864) at 116 Wellington Parade, a two-storey house framed by giant Corinthian pilasters; some bichrome and polychrome brick mansions such as Canally, also known as Koorine (1864) at 160 George Street, East Melbourne; the extraordinary Euro-Reko (1866) that was in St Kilda; and the villa of Rippon Lea (1869, but later greatly expanded) in Elsternwick for Frederick Sargood. By contrast, there is the richly but sensitively decorated Renaissance design of Eildon (1871) at 57 Grey Street, St Kilda (very near where Barnes lived), and the classically ordered and carefully detailed

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80 Argus, 2 October 1880. Taken from A Willingham, ‘A permanent and extensive Exhibition Building’, in D Dunstan (ed.), Victorian Icon: the Royal Exhibition Building, the Exhibition Trustees in assoc. with Australian Scholarly Publishing, Kew, Vic., 1996, pp. 51–66, in which many sources of influence are mentioned. This type of buttress, with a scroll on top, also features on the Spring St façade of Alcaston House (1868–69) and the Roman Catholic Sacred Heart Church, St Kilda (1884). 81 R F Middlemann, ‘Parkes, Edmund Samuel (1834–1887)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 5, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1974. 82 Illustrated in W Jacobs et al., Ballarat: a Guide to Buildings and Areas 1851–1940, Jacob Lewis Vines Architects & Conservation Planners in assoc. with the City of Ballarat, South Yarra, Vic., 1981, p. 43. 83 A & K Henderson Collection, MS 9317, SLV.


1 Kolor Homestead, Penshurst, Vic. Reed & Barnes, 1868 2 Rippon Lea, 192 Hotham St, Elsternwick, Vic. Reed & Barnes, 1869. North-west view to the original house from the driveway 3 St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Glen Eira Rd, Caulfield, Vic. Reed & Barnes, 1870 4 Church of Holy Trinity, corner Chapel and Dickens streets, Balaclava, Vic. Reed & Barnes, 1882–83. As illustrated in the Australasian Sketcher, May 1882

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Crathre House (1874) on the north-west corner of Gipps and Powlett streets, East Melbourne; in the Western District there is the gem of picturesque design, Kolor of 1868, near Penshurst, built in bluestone for Daniel Twomey, and the Gums of 1876 near Carramut for William Ross, and many more demolished or still standing. Among other building types, all now demolished, there was the distinctive Menzies Hotel (1867), the Victoria Club (1876) next to the Melbourne Town Hall in Collins Street, and warehouses for Sargood, King & Sargood (1863) in Flinders Street. Another one was designed for the firm in New Zealand in the same year, and also in New Zealand, a lunatic asylum in Auckland (1864). The Gothic designs include St Mary’s, Glen Eira Road, Caulfield (1870) a bluestone church with plate tracery and without decoration, and the beautiful, indeed exquisite, Church of the Holy Trinity, corner Chapel and Dickens streets, Balaclava (1882–83). ES Parkes, Reed’s patron at the Bank of Australasia, was a leading parishioner at the Holy Trinity and to whom is dedicated a stained glass window and reredos. The intended spire was not built, but the design includes a circular baptistery capped by a conical roof and circular clerestory windows.84 By the start of the 1880s, while some of the major projects such as the Exhibition Building and Ormond College were underway, Frederick Barnes was taken ill and had to retire from the practice. He died on 5 January 1884 at his home at 35 Grey Street, St Kilda. He was sixty and was recorded as an architect and as having been in Victoria for thirty-two years,

confirming his arrival date as 1852. The cortege started from his house for the St Kilda cemetery two days later at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. In his will dated 15 April 1882, he was particularly generous to Reed. Barnes instructed his executor, Alfred Harber, husband of Barnes’s niece Eliza, who lived in South Yarra, that: ... I give and bequeath unto my partner Joseph Reed all my share and interest in the partnership business hitherto and now carried on between him and myself in Elizabeth Street in the City of Melbourne as Architects under the style or firm of Reed and Barnes together with my share of and in the partnership books drawings plans designs/maps specifications papers documents instruments and office furniture and effects for his own absolute use and benefit save and except that my share in all monies due to the said partnership at the time of my decease for work done and work in progress up to the time of my decease shall be taken and [put as] part of my estate.85

Reed, Henderson & Smart Barnes’s retirement from the practice must have caused Reed considerable anxiety. Well before Barnes’s death, Reed had already sought out new partners, and by January 1883, a year before Barnes’s death, Reed, Henderson & Smart had come into existence.86 Before that, though, he had sounded out Tappin & Gilbert in Ballarat and had a partnership deed drawn up, but then called it off.87 Presumably the inheritance by Reed of Barnes’s share in the partnership was part of a negotiated retirement

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arrangement with Barnes. At the time the new partnership was being negotiated, late in December 1882, one of the partners, Francis Smart, mentioned in a letter that ‘Barnes ... is broken down in health & Reed would see that he is pensioned off’.88 This letter and another, written shortly after, give some detail of how the partnership came about. It was negotiated through ES Parkes, the superintendent (general manager) of the Bank of Australasia, with whom Reed presumably had discussed his desire to form a new partnership, and Parkes knew Henderson well enough to broach the subject.89 In the light of later events, it is interesting that Henderson refused to join with Reed unless his partner Smart also became a partner. After some initial resistance by Reed, the three formed the partnership on equal terms. To Smart, it offered the prospect that ‘we take up the running of their business & sooner or later it may drop into our hands’. He also strongly suggests that Reed already, and for some time, played an entirely passive role: ‘Altogether it means to Reed that we manage the ship[,] he hunts up more passengers, loaf[?] sketches, stops a leak &c & draws half of ... not the buildings’. The new partnership was fortunate in receiving a sequence of new commissions from the University of Melbourne. These included a new Medical School, a group of houses for professors, and new buildings for Natural Philosophy, Biology and Chemistry. Each had a distinctive character and style. The burst of new buildings came after a rather bleak period of financial stringency in the university during the late 1870s and into the 1880s. The building

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84 M Lewis (ed.), Victorian Churches: Their Origins, Their Story and Their Architecture, National Trust of Australia (Victoria), Melbourne, 1991, p. 84. 85 Register of Wills, series 27, record no. 141, Public Record Office. Barnes left money to two unmarried sisters in London, a brother in Southampton, the widowed sister-in-law of a deceased brother living in London, two nephews in London, the widow of a deceased friend (a George McCrea, surveyor) in Ireland, his niece Eliza Harber and to her daughter, Mrs Henry Cuddy. 86 Public notice, Argus, 1 February 1883, p. 7. Reed & Barnes have entered into partnership with Henderson & Smart; the business is to be known as Reed, Henderson & Smart. 87 FJ Smart to CH Pyne, 28 December 1882, in Saunders, ‘Joseph Reed, architect, Melbourne 1852–90: his life and work and the practice he established’, p. 14. 88 Smart to Pyne. Smart’s wife Ella was Pyne’s sister. 89 Edmund Samuel Parkes (1834–1887) was born in Devon and was married in Penzance, Cornwall, and his west country origin and marriage may have been important in his relationship with Reed. Smart saw the encounter through architectural eyes when he wrote: ‘Mr Parkes, the general manager of the Bank of Australasia is a client who brings a great amount of work into R & B’s office ...’


1 New Medical School, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Reed, Henderson & Smart, 1884. View of the first stage 2 Natural Philosophy building, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Reed, Henderson & Smart, 1886. View of the western end of the building 3 The Nanson House, now University House, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Reed, Henderson & Smart, 1884. The building as photographed in 2003 4 Biology building (now Baldwin Spencer building), University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Reed, Henderson & Smart, 1887–88. The view north across the lake to the Biology School 1

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program coincided with the appointment of a number of new professors who, significantly for the design of buildings, introduced new approaches using laboratory teaching in the sciences and medicine. The New Medical School of 1884, as the first of the group of new buildings was originally called, was built for Anatomy and Pathology. Being next to the Old Medical School, the first design was in a Classical style intended to harmonise with the old 1863 Reed & Barnes building. But this Classical design was dropped in favour of one in the Gothic style. It followed the plan of the rejected Classical design, which in turn followed that of the Old Medical School. So the present building in the Gothic style has a U-shaped plan, a front section and two wings separated by a courtyard, echoing the arrangement of the first Medical School of 1863. The choice of Gothic reflects the triumph of that style for many buildings by the 1880s. Given the appearance of the building today, it comes as a surprise that it was originally designed as a one-storey building and remained like that for more than twenty years after it was begun in 1884. Not all the original 1884 Gothic design was immediately built. Because of a shortage of funds, the Anatomy and Pathology Museum, the stone-faced south wing, was first built to only half its intended length. The second stage completed the museum, which had remained half-built for some fifteen years, its east end closed by a temporary wall. The drawings were prepared by Reed, Smart & Tappin and are dated 17 August 1899. The next stage

was in 1908 and caused a radical change to the building. The work involved adding a first floor to the west front and to the north wing, remodelling the west façade as a two-storey composition that included some rectangular openings in place of pointed arches, the introduction of an external stone stair within the western loggia or arcade, and the creation of a replacement first-floor lecture theatre. By the 1880s, the number of professors in the university had increased and some of these new professors also wished to live in the grounds. The registrar was also pressing for a house in the grounds. As well, the need for more rooms for the expanding administration and student services encouraged the idea of using some of the old apartments in the Quadrangle for other purposes if the professors were moved from there. The design of the new houses, all two storey and built of red bricks with yellow brick dressings, and with slate roofs, is credited to Anketell Henderson. It is also probable that he suggested their locations. Three were built, starting in 1882, and then another five, in 1887. The first to be built was for the registrar and his two-storey house was placed at the back of the university (west of the earlier 1860s house for the head gardener). The next was for the Professor of Mathematics, EJ Nanson, who moved from his apartment in the Quadrangle to the new house in 1884. The third of this group was for the Professor of Medicine and was built near the medical precinct, where the Redmond Barry building now stands, and faced the lake. The location of these three houses, in light of where the five later ones were built, might

seem to have been an ad hoc choice, all being placed along Tin Alley and at the back of the university. However, it might have been intended that all eight be along Tin Alley, a strategy that was compromised by the decision to build a new Biology School also on Tin Alley. A new planning strategy emerged and the next five houses, which were begun in 1887, were placed at the front of the university on the west side of the South Lawn, as a border to that side of the site, but with a buffer of open space separating them from Royal Parade. The houses were sited well away from Royal Parade because of the smelly and dusty pig, cattle and horse markets on the other side of Royal Parade, and were designed to face the South Lawn. The Nanson house, now University House, is the only one of the eight that remains. Planning for a new building for Natural Philosophy adjacent to the north-west corner of the Quadrangle began in 1886. A very important feature introduced into the design was that of teaching laboratories in which students were expected to work through laboratory exercises and experiments. It is a tradition in science teaching which continues to this day but which in the 1880s was a radical advance in orienting university teaching towards research. A design was prepared by Reed, Henderson & Smart, again under Henderson’s direction, for a building to be built in stages. As it turned out, the stages were spread over decades, being progressively realised in 1889, 1891, 1919 and 1923. Parts of the complex were demolished in the 1970s when the remaining sections became the present Conference Centre.


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4

3


1 St. Paul’s Anglican Cathedral, corner Swanston and Flinders streets, Melbourne. William Butterfield, 1880–. Watercolour pictorial image. Joseph Reed was appointed honorary architect to complete the building from 1888 2 The partnership of Reed, Henderson & Smart carried out much of the interior detailing of the cathedral

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1


JOSEPH REED AND FOUNDATION 1853 – 90

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2


1 Joseph Reed (1822–1890), founding director of the practice, portrait in later life 2 The memorial card of Joseph Reed, illustration of Stradivarius with his violin collection

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The Biology building, now the Baldwin Spencer building, was once one of the most romantically sited buildings in the university. In its day, the building was a first for Melbourne, for its internal features are claimed to have influenced laboratory design at King’s College, London. Such distinction was due to its eponymous creator, the extraordinary Professor Walter Baldwin Spencer (1860–1929), who arrived in Melbourne on 30 March 1887 at the age of twenty-seven to take up the foundation Chair of Biology. Within a few months of his arrival, Baldwin Spencer had gained a government grant to build in stages a new biological school. By October, the building had been designed by Reed, Henderson & Smart, the site selected, the contract signed and construction begun on the first stage. This was for the eastern section, which comprised a large lecture theatre, a galleried museum with a spiral stair that is expressed on the outside as a circular turreted feature, and staff offices. The contract for the second stage was signed in July of the next year and was for what is now the central section, which contains on the first floor the recently recreated large laboratory space featuring its original decorative trussed ceiling. The architecture of the building has a special claim for interest. The architect, Anketell Henderson, was a rationalist who creatively adapted traditional architectural motifs so as to express the structure and planning of a building in a direct and simple manner. The buttresses and groupings of windows match the internal structure of trusses and beams and the internal

planning of spaces. The gables match the alignments of major spaces within, and the circular turret contains a stair between the levels in the museum. The very tall ceilings are the result of ideas about public health and the circulation of air (and the flèche on the east roof is the vent to the lecture theatre), while the large windows, perhaps too large for present-day comfort, were essential features for good scientific work practices in the days before powerful artificial lighting. The ground floor offices on the east side had their own architectural expression, but that is now almost obliterated by later changes. Chemistry laboratories were added to the north side of the neat and contained Palladian villa that was the Old Medical School of 1863. The plans for the expansion of Chemistry were prepared by Reed, Henderson & Smart, presumably under Henderson’s direction, and the drawings survive in the University of Melbourne Archives, dated 27 January 1887. The addition was in a simplified Renaissance style, sympathetic to the style of the old Palladian Medical School, and extended along Tin Alley.

Banks and churches During the 1880s, the partnership was also engaged with the continuing commission from the Bank of Australasia for the design of a large number of bank branches. While most were in Victoria, some were in Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia, and a local architect at each place would have been appointed to supervise the building work. The program would have

received a check with the sudden death in 1887 of ES Parkes, head of the bank in Melbourne, and the agent who brought Henderson and Smart into the partnership with Reed. One of the largest branches, at King William Street, Adelaide, shares with the rationalist Exhibition Building the use of an elevational structural grid based on the rather severe Greek trabeated idiom of rectangular antae (piers) rather than Roman pilasters. The approach anticipates stark structural Modernism. The important work of the later 1880s linked directly to Reed’s name is St Paul’s Cathedral. The architect was William Butterfield in London who began work on the design in 1880. Leonard Terry, diocesan architect and partner in Terry & Oakden, was appointed supervising architect in Melbourne under the direction of the Cathedral Building and Finance Committee. While the building was being erected, the relationship between Butterfield and Terry deteriorated to the point where Butterfield refused to work with the Melbourne architect and resigned in 1888. Into this difficult situation, Reed was appointed honorary architect to complete the building as Butterfield intended.90 The firm also undertook Catholic work, as had the Reed & Barnes partnership. Their 1884 design for Sacred Heart, corner Grey and Neptune streets, St Kilda, is the first Catholic church in Victoria to use an Italian Renaissance style and is ‘of critical importance as the example which ... turned the Roman Catholics in Victoria away from the Gothic Revival and towards Renaissance and Baroque designs executed in red brick with


JOSEPH REED AND FOUNDATION 1853 – 90

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cement dressings’.91 An imposing streetscape comparison is the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception in the Convent of Mercy, Nicholson Street, Fitzroy (1887–89).

End of a career In the partnership of Reed, Henderson & Smart, Reed must have had little to do with much of the design and building work of the practice, certainly from the mid-1880s to his death in 1890. During part of that time he was away overseas. His absence was brought about by what must have seemed a surprise to many at the time, his marriage. This took place on 26 March 1885 at the Lutheran church in East Melbourne where he married Hannah Elliot Lane. Strangely, on the marriage certificate Reed is recorded as being fifty-three years old, whereas by then he was sixty-three. Perhaps vanity, and he seems to have been somewhat vain, induced Reed to understate his age so dramatically so as to appear nearer in age to his wife, who was thirty years old.92 The ‘error’ about his age is repeated on his death certificate, which states he was fiftyeight, rather than sixty-eight. The information on the death certificate presumably came from his wife who must have been innocent of the deception. In the mid 1880s, Reed and his wife left on an extended trip to England and Europe and were away for about eighteen months. Reed returned to a deteriorating situation. Investments in land had soured in the late 1880s though he was obliged to meet continuing calls on the investments. The details of the investments are listed in Reed’s probate documents and by the time

of his death, they were worthless, but still with outstanding calls. On the other hand, he had a substantial debt with the Bank of Australasia. His main assets were in furniture and his share of the partnership (he had no real estate). Another deteriorating situation was his health, which was conveyed with pathos in his obituary: Mr Reed has been ailing for some months past, his health having been evidently impaired through troubles encountered in consequence of unsuccessful land speculations which he entered into about two years ago [c. 1888] but he was not personally conscious that he was seriously affected in health, and delayed too long in placing himself under permanent medical care. Two months ago [c. late-February] he tried a change of air, going to Mount Macedon for a time, but without the desired effect, and six weeks since he returned to his residence, where it was found that he had lost the power of properly assimilating food, and eventually he died of inanition ...93 The serious collapse in his health and his retreat to Macedon occurred at the time of a dispute in the office, which resulted in Anketell Henderson rather abruptly leaving the partnership only a few months before Reed’s death. And so, with the misfortune of his investments, his rapid decline in health, and the collapse of his business partnership, the remarkable architectural career of Joseph Reed came to an end with his death on 29 April 1890. Before his marriage and for most of his professional life in Melbourne, Reed had lived in Anderson Street, South Yarra.94 After

his return from overseas, he rented the large house and grounds later known as Invergowrie, Coppin Grove, in Hawthorn, but called Amoe at the time Reed and his wife lived there. Among his assets were a copy of Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament, a reminder of his long connection with Bateman, and forty-one German books in one collection and seven in another. This suggests he may have read or spoke German, though their contents are not known. The probate inventory of the office in Elizabeth Street lists eight rooms, and in the first, clearly the principal office because of its furnishings, was a library of books listed as 4 volumes, 20 volumes and 40 volumes. Perhaps it was some of these books that found their way, by the gift of Bates, Smart & McCutcheon in 1967, into the library at the University of Melbourne. What also survives is the remarkable legacy of architectural drawings and documents, going back to Reed’s early days in Melbourne, now in the University of Melbourne Archives and in the La Trobe Library. Reed is buried in the Boroondara (Kew) General Cemetery, where also is his wife Hannah Elliot Boase and her son from her second marriage. On the headstone there is a reminder of the importance of Frederick Barnes. Reed is inscribed as ‘late of Reed & Barnes’, an association that in temporal affairs had ended six years earlier but lived on in the emotional realm of Reed’s life. The practice of Reed, Henderson & Smart was to Reed, it seems, both a coming together and a continuation of two separate architectural practices.

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90 Lewis, Victorian Churches, p. 48. 91 Lewis, Victorian Churches, p. 85. 92 WSP Godfrey, an articled pupil just before Reed’s death, remembered ‘a quaint vanity of Reed’s in having made a number of silk handkerchiefs with the names of the principal Melbourne buildings he had designed autographed on them’. Saunders, ‘Joseph Reed, architect, Melbourne 1852–90: his life and work and the practice he established’, p. 18. 93 ‘Mr Joseph Reed’, obituary, Argus, 30 April 1890. 94 In March 1885, about two weeks before his marriage, Reed auctioned furniture from the Anderson St house. Argus, 14 March 1885 in M Lewis, Melbourne Mansions Database, University of Melbourne.



2 A HOUSE DIVIDED 1890-1918 Miles Lewis


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The Reed legacy

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In 1889 the firm of Reed, Henderson & Smart was riding high. It had built an enormous amount in Melbourne, including most of the major public buildings that were not under the aegis of the Public Works Department—the Public Library, Melbourne Town Hall, Trades Hall, the Exhibition Building, and much of the University of Melbourne. To this list could be added some very important churches, a significant number of institutions and schools, and some very important houses such as Rippon Lea. Although residential work was not a major element of the practice, some of the firm’s former employees were at the cutting edge of Melbourne domestic architecture in the Queen Anne and related modes.

1 D Saunders, ‘Joseph Reed, architect, Melbourne 1852–90: his life and work and the practice he established’, BArch history thesis, University of Melbourne, 1950, p. 19. 2 WSP Godfrey, in Journal of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects (RVIAJ), January 1923, pp. 147–8. 3 Saunders, p. 20. 4 Obituary, RVIAJ, January 1911, p. 213. The obituary refers to ‘Mr Davey’ but it clearly refers to Devey, as indicated by Felstead, infra. It also refers to Charles Hansom as the inventor of the Hansom cab, but it was his brother who invented the cab, so it may be that Irwin had worked only for Joseph, as indicated by Felstead. 5 Saunders, pp. 18, 20. Saunders reports it as ‘Carlton’. 6 AEH Carleton file, envelope 4, box 85, RVIA Records, MS 9454, State Library of Victoria (SLV). 7 WSP Godfrey, in RVIAJ, January 1923, p. 148. 8 Denis V Healey file, envelope 14, box 87, RVIA Records, MS 9454, SLV. 9 Saunders, p. 21. 10 Saunders, pp. 18, 20. 11 Saunders, p. 21.

A year later the firm’s founder was dead, the partnership had broken up, some important clients had deserted with Henderson, and an economic depression was setting in. Reed’s own speculations had turned bad, and he left a widow not particularly well provided for.1 From late in 1894 the firm was to have nearly two years without any significant work, and again in 1905–08. By 1907 it was doubtful whether the firm could survive at all. In many ways there are two histories—one of the period to 1889 and another of the period from 1907 when the firm was reconstituted. Between the two is a difficult space of sixteen or seventeen years. Yet, when one examines this interregnum, it becomes clear that these architects were far from inactive, and that their work was in some respects more innovative than it had been in the previous, less challenging decade.

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The legacy of the Reed era was not merely a proud name and a record of important commissions. It was an efficient office with trained staff, some major institutional clients with ongoing needs, and a body of records that would help to give the firm the inside running on commissions to alter and extend their earlier buildings. The ongoing clients— those either with major work in progress, or who regularly offered commissions— were the University of Melbourne, Ormond College, Trades Hall, St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral, the Melbourne Public Library, and the Commercial Bank of Australia. Henderson’s departure, however, would have left a gap. He was especially interested in planning and construction, and it had been his practice to check, and usually to modify, every plan before it left the office. His specifications stood as models for many years.2 There were seven articled pupils at the time of Reed’s death, and in 1950 David Saunders was able to gather the reminiscences of one of them, WSP Godfrey. The senior draughtsman, he recalled, was Samuel Deakin, ‘a fine old Englishman’, who specialised in the Gothic, with CA Irwin as the second-string Gothicist.3 Irwin may in fact have been a consultant rather than an employee, and he was responsible for the pulpit and interior wooden furnishings of St Paul’s Cathedral, as well as the woodwork of the Metropolitan Gas building.4 According to Godfrey, the leading Classicist was Gemell, backed up by Carleton,5 though in fact Carleton cannot have been in the office until about 1893.6 Godfrey remembered other pupils and draughtsmen

of the time as Bates, Campbell, Frankenberg, Hamilton, Harrison, Hyndman, Kernot, Ogg, Peebles, Wales and Ward.7 However some of these, such as Hyndman, had departed even before Henderson, and Godfrey can have encountered them in the office only briefly. On the other hand, Godfrey fails to mention Denis Healey, though elsewhere he admitted knowing him in the office from 1890, when Healey’s pupillage began.8 Drawings were done on Whatman paper or linen, though tracing paper was not unknown, and all working drawings were coloured. Specifications were written in the first instance by a senior member of staff and then two copies done by juniors.9 The clerks of works, who were trained by the firm and had their own room, were Watts and Biddle.10 There was also an accountant-cum-receptionist with a partitioned cubicle beside the little gate that led into the office area, and one of these had managed to retain the 1% which was charged to contractors for the drawings, and amassed the enormous sum of £1800, before being discovered, convicted and imprisoned.11 The firm was remarkable for the number of architects who trained with it, left to join other practices or to found their own, but ultimately returned. Smart and Henderson were already in this category, and WB Tappin and EA Bates were to be so. Smart had been articled to Reed & Barnes, left to join the new architectural branch of the Education Department until 1878, then joined Henderson in practice, until the two returned to the fold in 1883. In April 1890


A HOUSE DIVIDED 1890 – 1918

1 Anketell Henderson (1853–1923), a partner of the firm from 1883 until his departure in 1890 2 Francis J Smart (c. 1852–1907), a partner of the firm from 1883. Smart was elected president of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects in 1907 until his death in August of that year

WB Tappin, who had worked for Reed & Barnes about twenty-five years earlier, joined Reed and Smart in partnership, and Reed was able to plan a well-earned holiday in the country. However it never eventuated for, on 29 April, he died at his house Amoe (better known as Invergowrie), in Hawthorn.12 The continuity with the past was now truly severed.

The Henderson schism The break-up of the firm was sudden and it engendered bad blood, mostly over the division of the clientele. On 13 December 1889 the partnership was corresponding with the University of Melbourne, and by February 1890 it had split.13 Henderson gave a dinner to all the staff, probably in an attempt to win over those who might usefully join him and/or might help him capture former clients—or if this were not his objective, it was certainly how Reed interpreted it. WSP Godfrey, who attended, was reprimanded by Reed for disloyalty.14 In March 1890 it was announced that the practice of Reed & Smart was continuing at the existing office, and Henderson was opening a practice at a new address.15 A deed of separation was prepared, and it seems to have provided that Henderson take over the work of the Bank of Australasia. There also seems to have been some provision for him to pay a percentage to the old firm on certain jobs—perhaps those he obtained from former clients of the practice. Whatever these provisions were, they were not enough to avert contention over who would have the ongoing work at the university and Trades Hall.

Henderson had been the partner in charge of the university’s new Science buildings, and when he left the firm he asked to be appointed in his own right as architect for the completion of the project. However the University Council decided that Reed’s appointment as University Architect was a personal one, and that he should complete the job but be asked to retain Henderson to supervise the completion of the laboratories. Reed refused to do this, and his firm continued in control. Then when Reed died, the university—having already ruled that the appointment was a personal one—was obliged to declare it vacant. Henderson applied for the position, but it was given to Reed, Smart & Tappin.16 It appears that Henderson’s appointment in 1890 as co-examiner in architecture within the engineering course17 was by way of compensation for his defeat at the hands of Reed & Smart.18 In June and July 1890, Professor Allen’s wife, Julia, was writing to the registrar of the university, because her chimney was smoking. She believed that a ‘Gray’ vacuum cowl (an Adelaide product) would be more effective: ‘Mr Henderson told me this privately—But as he is out of favour at present, I suppose his name must be suppressed’. The result was that Reed & Smart installed the wrong cowl, a ‘Torpedo’, which, she said, made matters worse: ... for the chimney now smokes in two winds + only used to in one. If Reed & Smart have a Gray Cowl for experimenting, could they please try it! I saw Mr. Henderson yesterday + he is quite positive about the Grey [sic] one—

But, of course, I cannot go against Messrs R + S, so if they know of another than the Torpedo, I shall be glad.19

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At every level, it seems, the embarrassed clients were treading gingerly around the outskirts of a festering professional dispute. There was similar ill feeling over Henderson being given ongoing work at Trades Hall. When he was engaged for additions to the building, Reed, Smart & Tappin wrote to protest, but the building committee favoured Henderson, and the opinion of the Trades Hall Council’s lawyers was that they were not legally bound to employ Reed, Smart & Tappin.20 However a committee was set up to deal with the matter, and it proved more complicated. Henderson presented it as a fait accompli, for he said that having received his instructions he had progressed so far as to have the plans approved by the official referee under the Building Act. He claimed the right to complete the work, but was prepared to allow Reed, Smart & Tappin an amount of 1 1/2%, which was provided in the deed of separation on his retirement from the firm. This deed cannot be found, but it seems likely that it was an allowance that Henderson would pay them upon any existing commission that he took with him. Reed, Smart & Tappin, however, claimed that it had purchased all right, title and interest in all the plans, and should be paid the usual commission on the total, which might amount to £800 or £1000. Henderson admitted that the work he had done so far was worth only £80 or £90, and the

12 Saunders, p. 28. 13 Information from George Tibbits, based upon correspondence held by the University of Melbourne. 14 Saunders, p. 19. 15 Fink’s building, corner of Elizabeth and Flinders streets: Australasian Builders’ and Contractors’ News (ABCN), 8 March 1890, p. 824; Building, Engineering & Mining Journal (BEMJ), 15 March 1890, suppl., p. 4. In May, Henderson moved to 352 Collins St: BEMJ, 31 May 1890, suppl., p. 4. 16 Lewis, ‘The teaching of architecture’, p. 28, ref. Faculty of Engineering, minutes, 15 July 1890, University of Melbourne Archives. 17 Lewis, ‘The teaching of architecture’, p. 29, ref. University Council, minutes, 24 February, 3 March, 5 June 1890; 2 March, 4 May 1891; University of Melbourne Archives. 18 The same was probably true in 1891 when he had to compete against six other applicants for the newly created position of Lecturer in Architecture, and was chosen over the recommended candidate, Hillson Beasley—who in due course went to the Working Men’s College (now RMIT University). See Lewis, ‘The teaching of architecture’, pp. 27–8, ref. University Council, minutes, 2 November 1891, University of Melbourne Archives. 19 JM Allen to James, 25 June 1890, 13 July 1890, University of Melbourne Registrar (correspondence), UM 312, 1890/5, University of Melbourne Archives, courtesy George Tibbits. 20 ABCN, 19 July 1890, p. 39.


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21 ABCN, 26 July 1890, p. 55. 22 C Kellaway, Melbourne Trades Hall Lygon Street Carlton: The Workingman’s Parliament, Victorian Trades Hall Council, Melbourne, 1988, p. 8. 23 Kellaway, p. 9. 24 RVIAJ, November 1905, p. 176. 25 Trethowan summarises this as the distortion of architectural conventions by omitting capitals from pilasters, and simplifying window mouldings: B Trethowan, A Study of Banks in Victoria, 1851–1939, for the Historic Buildings Preservation Council, B Trethowan, Melbourne, 1976, p. 45. 26 A & K Henderson Collection, SLV. These figures are compiled from the index, and despite some omissions seem to be reasonably accurate. Much less can be gleaned from the typescript ‘Bank buildings of Reed, Henderson & Smart’, as the entries are undated. 27 ABCN, 18 October 1890, p. 286; BEMJ, 22 November 1890, suppl., p. 3. 28 B Niall, Georgiana: a Biography of Georgiana McCrae, Painter, Diarist, Pioneer, Melbourne University Press at the Miegunyah Press, Carlton, Vic., 1994, p. 323, n. 36. 29 BEMJ, 17 November 1888, p. 7; See also Melbourne City Council (MCC) application 4269, 21 December 1889; also sketches for mantelpieces published in BEMJ, 12 December 1891, p. 253. This was their second house for Quick in this vicinity, assuming that the previous one in Domain Rd, near Walsh St, had gone ahead: MCC application 3687, 20 November 1888. 30 ABCN, 11 May 1889, p. 453; 17 August 1889; 26 October 1889, p. 394 (excavation well advanced); BEMJ, 22 June 1889, p. 1; 17 August 1889, p. 3; 5 July 1890, p. 3 (approaching completion). MCC application 4064, 13 August 1889. 31 ABCN, 14 September 1889, p. 453; BEMJ, 14 September 1889, p. 235; 9 November 1889, p. 390. 32 Tenders called in BEMJ, 13 June 1891, p. 1; ABCN, 8 August 1891, p. 111. 33 BEMJ, 27 December 1890, p. 464 (exterior and interior views).

committee then resolved to engage Reed, Smart & Tappin.21 The work the firm did at this time appears to have been the new council chamber and committee rooms at the rear of the first floor. This has since been rebuilt following a fire in 1962.22 The work of the Trades Hall continued in their hands, and Bates, Peebles & Smart was responsible for further additions in the early twentieth century.23 There is no indication of such a struggle over the banks, and it is clear that the deed of separation provided for Henderson to take at least the work of the Bank of Australasia. This was logical, for he had been responsible for their branches in Victoria and in other colonies, whilst he was in the partnership,24 and had developed a rather distinctive style.25 In the A & K Henderson records, there are files for fortyfive branches of the Australasia begun between 1874 and 1889, which must have been transferred to him in their entirety. Another thirty-six were begun by him in the decade 1890–99, including some in New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia,26 and this is probably not the total, for it does not include—for example—the branch at Minyip for which Henderson called tenders in October – November 1890.27 This stream of work must have been a godsend during the Depression. Henderson was probably given the work of the Commercial Bank of Australia (CBA) as well, for three files begun in 1887–89 are in the records, though no new jobs were begun by him before the turn of the century. The financial problems of the CBA probably prevented it building much during the decade, and what it did build was by other architects.

Hyndman & Bates The spawning off and then the ultimate reabsorption of Hyndman and Bates are the best indications of the old firm’s capacity to regenerate from its own offspring. The pair had not departed with any of the illfeeling that was to surround the Henderson schism, nor with any significant number of the firm’s clients. They were simply a pair of keen young architects striking out on their own. RG Hyndman and EA Bates entered partnership in June 1888, and by August had their first commissions, apparently through personal connections. Hyndman’s grandmother, Georgiana McCrae, wrote of him having a house to design in Kyneton, and one at Riddell’s Creek for Judge Chomley, Dromkeen.28 The first significant tender advertisement in their name is in the following November for the house of the sharebroker WH Quick in Walsh Street, South Yarra.29 The first major city commission was the warehouse and offices of EL Yencken in Flinders Street in 1889–90,30 and this was followed by their gaining first prize in the competition for the parsonage, parish office and verger’s quarters at St Mark’s Church, Fitzroy,31 construction of which began in 1891.32 In 1890 they designed the Bellarine Hotel at Point Henry near Geelong,33 and undertook additions to the YWCA building at the corner of Flinders Lane and Spring Street.34 They appear to have designed a house for the Hon. James Balfour at Culcairn, New South Wales;35 another in Camberwell for AJ Fuller36 (both Balfour

and Fuller being associates of the land boomer, Matthew Davies); and a number of other houses of an advanced red brick Queen Anne/Free Style character. In 1890 they also designed a house in Toorak for AE Wallis, of the Bank of Victoria, the records of which are slightly confused.37 A certain amount is known about the staff they engaged, especially Alfred Carleton, who was with them as a draftsman from 1889 to about 1891.38 The rather splendid perspective of their Yencken building was done by HW Sedgefield, the contract drawings were traced by Sprague,39 and the clerk of works on the site in 1890 was JH Williams.40 James Richardson seems to have been employed in about 1894 to 1901. Louis Bradshaw was with them in about 1900 to 1901, possibly much earlier, and was successful in student design competitions. Rodney Alsop, who later had a distinguished career of his own, became an articled pupil in 1901, and remained with the firm until at least 1905.41 One client Hyndman & Bates may have captured from their former employers was the general manager of the Commercial Bank of Australia (and later historian) Henry Gyles Turner. His house, Bundalohn, 6 Tennyson Street, St Kilda, had been designed by Reed, Henderson & Smart in 1884 and extended in 1888–89,42 and Hyndman and/or Bates may well have worked on it whilst in the office. It has been claimed that they were responsible for extensions to the house,43 and they certainly went on to design Turner’s country property at Dandenong, also called Bundalohn.44 Turner may have been increasingly reluctant


A HOUSE DIVIDED 1890 – 1918

1 A young Edward A Bates (1865–1931), who entered a partnership with RG Hyndman in June 1888 to form the firm of Hyndman & Bates. Hyndman and Bates were both working at the firm of Reed, Henderson & Smart when they decided to strike out on their own. Bates later returned to form the partnership of Bates, Peebles & Smart in 1907 2 Flinders Building, warehouse for EL Yencken, Flinders St, Melbourne. Hyndman & Bates, 1889–90. The warehouse, as appeared in the Building & Engineering Journal on 5 July 1890, shows unmistakeable American influences

2 34 ABCN, 3 May 1890, p. 995 (report), p. 1005 (tenderers); BEMJ, 3 May 1890, suppl., p. 5; 12 July 1890, p. 240 (illustration). 35 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. This must be the house on Balfour’s property Round Hill. A Lemon, The Young Man from Home, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1982, is not specific about the date, but reproduces, facing p. 116, a photograph taken at the property in the 1880s, prior to its construction. 1890 seems probable as Balfour was in financial difficulties soon afterwards. 36 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives; BEMJ, 17 January 1891, suppl., p. 5. 37 Letter file 3/2, though incorrectly indexed under ‘Wallace’ (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Collection, acc. no. 68/13, University of Melbourne Archives), gives the Toorak address, but Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection according to the index, refers to a house for AE Wallis in Chesterfield and Mayfield streets, Malvern. In fact a house, Chesterfield, was built at the Malvern address for Wallis by Philip Treeby: ABCN, 15 November 1890, p. 567; BEMJ, 9 May 1891, p. 179. 38 AEH Carleton file, envelope 4, box 85, RVIA Records, MS 9454, SLV. 39 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 40 Building & Engineering Journal (BEJ), 5 July 1890, p. 232. 41 Alsop witnessed the contract signatures for the RJ Alcock house in 1905. 42 Argus, 29 March 1884, p. 15; 31 December 1888, p. 2. It is credited to Hyndman & Bates in Selby, The Old Pioneers Memorial History of Melbourne, Old Pioneers Memorial Fund, 1924, p. 247, doubtless in confusion with the second Bundalohn or on the basis of their alterations—if any—to the first. 43 Trust Newsletter, June 1975. 44 BEMJ, 7 March 1891, p. 1; 13 June 1891, p. 5; 6 August 1892, p. 54 (sketches); ABCN, 17 December 1892, p. 296 (drawings).

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45 M Cannon, The Land Boomers: the Complete Illustrated History, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1995, pp. 233, 316–18, 393. 46 BEMJ, 7 December 1889, p. 5: unidentified bank. 47 ABCN, 4 January 1890, p. 649. 48 BEMJ, 5 February 1898, p. 5. 49 BEMJ, 29 September 1900. 50 ABCN, 27 June 1891, p. 508; 25 July 1891, p. 66. 51 ABCN, 22 March 1890, p. 884; BEMJ, 28 November 1891, p. 235. 52 ABCN, 4 July 1891, p. 6; 18 July 1891, p. 48; BEMJ, 4 July 1891, suppl., p. 3; 15 August 1891, p. 5. MCC application 5239, 9 October 1891, for Mrs Balcombe: hotel, warehouse and five shops. 53 BEMJ, 9 July 1892, p. 14. 54 BEMJ, 20 August 1892, p. 72. 55 MCC application 6135, 5 July 1894, for HW Staughton. 56 Illustrated, BEMJ, 5 July 1890, p. 232. 57 BEMJ, 5 July 1890, p. 232. 58 Hyndman & Bates, ‘Specification &c ... Warehouse & Offices, Flinders Street West, E. L. Yencken Esq, Flinders Street E’, June 1889, passim. 59 ABCN, 17 June 1892, p. 253. 60 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives; BEMJ, 12 October 1895, suppl., p. 2. 61 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives; BEMJ, 12 March 1896, p. 69; 12 October 1897, suppl., p. 2; 13 Nov 1897, suppl., p. 2. 62 BEMJ, 4 December 1896, p. 4. 63 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives; BEMJ, 23 October 1897, suppl., p. 2; 30 October 1897, p. 339; letter file 45/3, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Collection, acc. no. 68/13, University of Melbourne Archives. 64 MCC application 7581, 17 July 1899; letter file 15/4/4, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Collection, acc. no. 68/13, University of Melbourne Archives.

to deal with Reed, Smart & Tappin, given that Smart was by 1892 in severe financial difficulties, leading to a secret composition in which the CBA was his main creditor. The CBA itself was to suspend payment in the following year, and only just managed to survive the Depression.45 This connection with Turner doubtless resulted in the engagement of Hyndman & Bates for CBA branches, possibly at Footscray (1889),46 and certainly at Collingwood (1889–90),47 Maffra (1898),48 and Yea (1900).49 It was to prove even more significant in connection with the Melbourne Public Library. In 1891, Hyndman & Bates joined Henderson in a competition entry for the Melbourne Opera House, for which they obtained second prize.50 This is one of many indications of a sort of loose freemasonry that existed between the numerous former employees of the Reed practices. However Hyndman & Bates worked with other architects as well, entering the CBA competition in association with Smith & Ogg and, though they were unsuccessful, their design was published.51 In 1891, they were joint architects with Smith & Johnston for the Colonial Bank Hotel in Little Collins Street.52 Their own design for the adjoining Colonial Bank was prepared in 1892.53 During the 1890s they designed a number of other hotels, country branch banks and small churches and, in 1892, they undertook extensive renovations to Reed’s masterwork, the Independent Church in Collins Street,54 and extended the Eastern Arcade, off Bourke Street.55 Hyndman & Bates’s stylistic sources were advanced, but mixed. The EL Yencken warehouse, known as the Flinders building,

showed unmistakeable American influence. Above a ground floor of display windows and rusticated piers, two pairs of broad giant arches rose through a further three storeys of the façade, whilst between them a row of seven much narrower arches rose through only two storeys, with a singlestorey pillared dwarf gallery on top. Both the austerity of the elevation and its American character were tempered by steep triangular gables at either end, of Queen Anne or Aesthetic Movement inspiration.56 The Building & Engineering Journal said guardedly that it would be ‘a departure from the usual stereotyped business premises so prevalent in this city’, but made no attempt to particularise in what the departure consisted.57 Something rather similar is found in their Colonial Bank Hotel. It also has oversailing giant arches, but the bulk of the detailing is Queen Anne in character, to harmonise with the adjoining City of Melbourne building. There is nothing explicitly American about it, but there is a vaguely French-looking corner turret with a conical roof, related to the similar turrets in their domestic work. Technically, the Yencken building was probably their most interesting work. It included an iron-framed entrance stair in which the treads were of bluestone and the risers of iron, with framing panels of glass. More standard, but still of some interest, were the Hayward’s prismatic pavement lights; the Clark’s revolving shutters; the McCardel’s patent lightning conductors; the Forbe’s [sic] patent composition used for damp-proofing; the double straps of tarred hoop iron bond in the brickwork; and the

fireproof flooring of concrete on arched corrugated iron, especially in those critical areas where the heavy Traegerwellblech iron was used.58 During 1892 the firm undertook a rather unusual commission, for ‘orchard homes’ at J McKell’s Eshcol irrigation settlement in the Goulburn Valley. The houses were to be put up as the allotments were sold (on easy terms over ten years), but at the time of the report in June 1892 one had already been built for the manager, JB Campbell. The interest in the buildings is that they are almost Edwardian in character, small and weatherboarded, but with fairly low-pitched gables, terracotta finials, and Queen Anne aprons beneath some of the window-sills.59 The firm’s commissions dwindled during 1893 and they had almost no work in 1894–95. Late in 1895 they called tenders for another house at the corner of High and Thomas streets, Prahran, for Simon Staughton, perhaps an investment.60 In March 1896 they designed Dr JA Scott’s house, Braid, in Auburn Road, Hawthorn, but the contract was not let until late 1897.61 Only in that year did something like normal conditions resume, and it was then that they acquired a valuable client in Samuel Gillott. In 1897–98 they were responsible for large brick stores on the south bank of the Yarra,62 and for the malt house of the Black & White Whisky factory, Ballarat.63 This seems to have been little more than a reworking, in a more modern style, of a scheme already prepared by the local architect William Brazenor. In 1899 Hyndman & Bates designed three shops in Swanston Street for Samuel Gillott and Joseph Thompson,64 and the Royal


A HOUSE DIVIDED 1890 – 1918

1 Yarra House, house for William Cain, Caroline St, South Yarra, Vic. Unattributed, but possibly by Reed & Barnes, 1881–82. The house now forms part of the Melbourne Girls Grammar School campus, and is known as Phelia Grimwade House 2 Eastern Arcade, Bourke St, Melbourne. Hyndman & Bates, 1892. Drawing of Bourke St elevation

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1 Edensor, house additions for Samuel Gillott, Brunswick St, Fitzroy, Vic. Hyndman & Bates, 1899. Interior view of the drawing room, as illustrated in Victorian Representative Men at Home, 1904 2 Drawing of Brunswick St elevation. This Beaux-Arts quasi-Baroque style was usually confined to public buildings 3 Bundalohn, house for Henry G Turner, Tennyson St, St Kilda, Vic. Reed, Henderson & Smart, 1884; extensions, Hyndman & Bates, 1888–89. Illustrated in Victorian Representative Men at Home, 1904 4 The grand main stair of the house. Illustrated in Victorian Representative Men at Home, 1904 1

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Oak Hotel, Victoria Street, Abbotsford, for Gillott alone.65 Gillott was a major property investor, a leading solicitor, and president of the Law Institute in 1900. He was elected to the Melbourne City Council in 1896 and was mayor for two terms from 1899. During this time he entertained with great expense the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York, who were visiting for the Federation celebrations, with the result that his office was upgraded to Lord Mayor and he was knighted. Meanwhile Gillott had also been elected MLA for East Melbourne, became an honorary minister in the Turner government from 1900, Attorney-General in the Peacock ministry in 1901–02, and Chief Secretary and Minister for Gaming in the Bent ministry from February 1904. Few however would have predicted his imminent fall from grace.66 In 1899 Gillott engaged Hyndman & Bates to make extensive additions to his house Edensor in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy (originally by Crouch & Wilson in about 1875), and in 1904 a further three shops and a hotel at 65–73 Swanston Street.67 The additions to Edensor are truly notable, in a Beaux-Arts quasi-Baroque style usually confined to public buildings, and which even in that context reached Australia only with Thomas Pye’s Land Administration building, Brisbane, of 1901–05.68 This coup would probably have brought more kudos to the architects had it not been for the unfortunate fate of their client. In May 1906 Gillott was publicly attacked for condoning illegal off-course gambling, and in July it was revealed that he had lent money to Caroline Pohl, otherwise known as Madam Brussells, Melbourne’s leading brothel-

keeper, and moreover had had financial dealings with her going back to 1877. Gillott soon resigned from the government and from parliament, and took an extended trip to England.69 In 1901 the firm remodelled 206–208 Flinders Lane,70 but Hyndman died in that year and Bates continued, without changing the name of the practice, but with a relatively small output over the next six years—a sprinkling of houses and a few commercial buildings. In 1902 there was an extension of the Royal Arcade to connect with Elizabeth Street,71 and fairly extensive work on the Citizens’ Life Assurance buildings, Collins Street.72 Bates was also engaged once more by the trustees of the Independent Church to design an office building next to the church in Collins Street.73 Although the scheme reached application stage, it did not proceed, for Professional Chambers was built on the site to the design of Ussher & Kemp in 1907–08. In 1904, however, Bates designed a hall/school for the trustees, to the north of the church.74 In 1907 he designed the four-storey factory of Davies, Doery & Co. in Flinders Lane.75 It also appears that during this period Bates undertook the AMP offices at Lydiard Street, Ballarat, of 1905,76 and also at Warrnambool, though the documentary evidence for this is imprecise.77

The red brick school The local fashion for polychrome brick had been almost single-handedly created by Joseph Reed, and it was to be Reed’s former employees and associates who led

a red brick revival. One was William Salway, who had served articles with Reed & Barnes until 1867, when he departed for Asia. In 1868 he established a practice in Hong Kong, which still exists today as Palmer & Turner, the oldest architectural practice in the Far East. Salway himself, however, did not remain long in Hong Kong, but travelled onwards, and then returned to Melbourne in 1876. His later work, especially at Raheen— one of the major red brick buildings—shows the influence of his time with Reed & Barnes. Reed, Henderson & Smart themselves designed many of these red brick houses, as did the ongoing practices of Henderson, and of Reed & Smart, and then Reed, Smart & Tappin. So did their former pupils Hyndman & Bates, and WM Campbell. In 1881–82, Yarra House was built in South Yarra for the merchant and city councillor William Cain, just possibly by Reed & Barnes.78 It is an Italianate house with a tower, but it is in red brick, and one would be tempted to regard this as fortuitous if it were not for a report in the Argus in 1884: There is too much, perhaps, stucco about Melbourne ... A reaction, however appears to be setting in into favour of brickwork. There is one house in South Yarra, belonging to a member of the City Council, which is built in the modern Italian style of architecture, and the bricks uncovered. It has a very striking and pleasing appearance. Houses of the Queen Anne style of architecture, internally and externally, appear likewise to be becoming fashionable.79

65 BEMJ, 26 June 1897, p. 2; 10 June 1897, p. 3; letter file 4/1, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Collection, acc. no. 68/13, University of Melbourne Archives. There is a report that Hyndman & Bates’s Royal Oak Hotel in Kew is nearing completion: BEMJ, 23 October 1897, p. 330. This is probably a mistake, as the 1899 directory lists no Royal Oak in Kew (though there are others in the city, Cheltenham, North Fitzroy and Richmond). 66 D Dunstan, ‘Sir Samuel Gillott 1837–1913’, in GC Bolton et al. (eds), Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 9, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1983, pp. 257–8. 67 MCC application 9271, 18 March 1904. 68 Allom Lovell & Lewis, Treasury Buildings Group, I, pp. 63 ff. 69 Dunstan, p. 258. 70 Letter file, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Collection, acc. no. 68/13, University of Melbourne Archives, quoted in EL Errey, ‘Victorian architectural ornament’, 2 vols, PhD, University of Melbourne, 1972, p. 227. 71 MCC application 8507, 3 January 1902, for Howard Spensley. 72 BEMJ, 31 May 1902, p. 4; 9 August 1902, p. 244. 73 MCC application 8717, 9 July 1902. 74 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives; MCC application 9469, 10 October 1904. The application describes it as a school, but the drawings are for a hall, and it seems to be on the site of the earlier hall, diagonally in from the corner, behind the church. 75 MCC application 420, 8 April 1907; Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 76 Letter file 21/1, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Collection, acc. no. 68/13, University of Melbourne Archives. 77 RVIAJ, November 1908, p. 151. 78 O Slater, ‘A brief history of South Yarra West’, draft, p. 10. Slater attributes it to Joseph Reed, but is unable to say from where he got this information. MCC application 8972, 20 October 1881, gives no architect, and the owner, William Cain, is his own builder 79 Argus, 3 February 1882, p. 2 (tenders for the house); 16 August 1882, p. 3 (tenders for fencing and stabling). See also T Lane & J Serle, Australians at Home, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, p. 335.

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1 Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Grey St, St Kilda, Vic. Reed, Henderson & Smart, 1884. This Renaissance/Baroque style was seen in many churches for the Roman Catholics 2 St Neot’s, house for WH Quick & later ST Staughton, Domain Rd, South Yarra, Vic. Hyndman & Bates, 1889–90. Drawing showing the additions of a large billiard room for ST Staughton in 1890 3 Knowsley, house for Edward Latham, Studley Park Rd, Kew, Vic. William Salway, 1883. The red brick house now known as Raheen shows the influence of Salway’s time with Reed & Barnes

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The report is interesting for the label ‘modern Italian’ which it attaches to the style of the house; for the identification of this with a concerted reaction against stucco; for the exceptionally early reference to the ‘Queen Anne’; and for the fact that the two stylistic developments are seen to be related.

Queen Anne influence The first definitely attributable example of the red brick ‘modern Italian’, is Bundalohn, St Kilda, of 1884.80 It is essentially of red brick, with relieving bands of cream, and it has a tower with a pyramidal roof of the vernacular Italian type, rather than a parapet or balustrade. But it also has elongated windows onto the staircase, which suggest Queen Anne influence.81 Of great importance, however, is Knowsley in Studley Park Road, Kew. Edward Latham’s house, Knowsley, now known as Raheen, seems to have been designed late in 1883, and was built in 1884–85. The brackets in the hall closely resemble those at Rippon Lea— which Salway might just have been able to work on before his departure from Melbourne. He was certainly in Reed’s office immediately before, during the time when the pioneering polychrome houses Canally and Euro-Reko were designed, and this fact may explain the surviving hint of polychromy at Raheen. Although the house is of red brick, there are little highlights of black brick in the form of intermittent dark headers at frieze level, and a small diaper in each spandrel of the loggia arcading.82 There were soon to be many other examples of Renaissance design in red brick, most of which are not houses, such

as the new red brick Renaissance/Baroque churches of the Roman Catholics, beginning with the Sacred Heart in Grey Street, St Kilda, by Reed, Henderson & Smart, of 1884.83 None of these Italianderived domestic examples were referred to as Queen Anne, but in 1884 a writer in the Argus said that in the last three or four years there has been a reaction against the ‘shams’ in building of the last two centuries, including stucco, graining and gilding, and that leading architects are now tending to dispense with stucco so far as their clients will permit them. In particular, Frank Madden’s house, Mooroolbeek, Kew, of 188384 (also now demolished) is identified as looking thoroughly English, and in the style of the reign of Queen Anne. Madden’s house was the work of Reed, Henderson & Smart, and appears to have been the first building in Australia to be specifically referred to as ‘Queen Anne’. It was of red face brick that was not even tuck-pointed, with a massive porch of Oamaru freestone, and it was said to have an interior of a similar style85 (though this is hard to imagine). Shortly afterwards the firm designed JC Stewart’s house in Barkers Road, Kew (later known as Mildura, then Urangeline, and now part of Carey Baptist Grammar School), in a similar style.86 The firm’s house for EL Yencken, Redcourt at 506 Orrong Road, is perhaps of special significance, for it is claimed to have been the first tiled house in Melbourne87— meaning of course, the first in the revival of terracotta roof tiling, for tile roofs had certainly been used in the 1850s and 1860s. If the roof was indeed tiled, and given that the tenders were called in July 1887,88 it upsets the general picture that the

Marseilles tiles were first shown at the Centennial International Exhibition of 1888–89, and as a result taken up in examples like the McCracken house, Essendon, by Oakden, Addison & Kemp. Two later Queen Anne houses by Hyndman & Bates are Malham, 9 Selbourne Grove, Kew,89 and St Neots, 246 Domain Road, South Yarra, both of 1889–90.90 Malham is not radically removed from the Italian tradition, but has the tall windows with margin glazing of the Queen Anne, banded chimneys and an eclectic pedimental composition above the entrance. St Neots is Queen Anne in its red and brown-red brick, with the same tall windows and margin glazing, but it has a steep roof and halftimbered gables, placing it towards the medieval end of the spectrum. Its history is confusing, for it appears to have been begun for WH Quick, but acquired by ST Staughton when construction was underway,91 after which Quick built himself another house in nearby Walsh Street, also by Hyndman & Bates. Staughton added a positively giant billiard room, as well as a cellar at the very last minute—as is indicated by the flaps clipped to the contract drawing to show it.92 Two even more interesting Queen Anne houses by Reed, Henderson & Smart are Cabana, 4 Stawell Street, Kew, of 1889–90; and Shenton in Kinkora Road, Hawthorn, of 1890. Cabana was the house of the artist Arthur Loureiro, and there is a suggestion that special consideration was given to the aesthetics of the design, which is attributed specifically to FJ Smart. It was said to be ‘attractively built in the Queen Anne style modified to suit the Australian

80 Argus, 29 March 1884, p. 15. 81 Although the modern Italian soon passed out of vogue, another example, of a sort, is Lloyd Tayler’s Pladda in St Kilda of 1889, which again is of red brick, with a pyramid-roofed tower, but much more lushly detailed than Bundalohn. In about 1884 William Salway designed two brick buildings that are Renaissance rather than ‘modern Italian’ or vernacular in style. The Larcher’s dairy residence at 45 Moor St, Fitzroy, is a relatively modest arcaded red brick house of terrace form, which is neither very remarkable nor even securely attributed. 82 As late as 1890 in the stables at Airlie, South Yarra, Salway used header bricks painted black, alternating with cream brick stretchers, whereas in the extensions to Raheen of about 1889, which seem likely to be Salway’s work, no contrasting bricks are used. See M Lewis, ‘Raheen, 94 Studley Park Rd, Kew’, mimeographed report, Melbourne, 1985, passim. 83 Coolart at Somers of 1897 is what might be regarded as an essay in red brick French Renaissance, on the basis of the mansard roofs, though the exotic verandah detailing is more innovative. It has been attributed to Reed, Smart & Tappin, but this seems to be incorrect. The Register of the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) attributes it to the non-existent firm Reed, Henderson & Tappin. There is in fact no evidence to suggest that Reed, Smart & Tappin or any cognate firm was responsible. 84 Argus, 14 March 1883, p. 3. 85 Argus, 6 December 1884, p. 4. 86 Reed, Henderson & Smart called tenders for a house for Stewart in Barkers Rd in the Argus, 25 July 1883, p. 3. The building did not proceed at this point, but they called tenders for the present house in the Argus, 18 April 1884, p. 2, and the contract was signed in May: Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. If the design were unchanged between 1883 and 1884 it should probably be regarded as the earliest Melbourne essay in the Queen Anne, ahead even of Mooroolbeek. 87 P Burkitt, ‘History of the home and the families that lived there’, manuscript, c. 1964, on National Trust file 1561, Larnook. 88 BEMJ, 21 July 1887, p. 2. 89 For Benjamin Crosthwaite: BEMJ, 23 November 1889, p. 5. 90 BEMJ, 17 November 1888, p. 7; MCC application 3687, 20 November 1888, both for WH Quick.

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1 House for JC Stewart Esq., Barkers Rd, Kew, Vic. Reed, Henderson & Smart 1883–84. The house after its completion, later known as Mildura and Urangeline. The building now forms part of Carey Baptist Grammar School 2 West elevation of the house. 3 Thanes, House for GW Selby, Alma Rd, St Kilda, Vic. Reed, Henderson & Smart, 1885. The house shortly before its demolition in the Argus, 7 January 1938 4 Bona Vista, Kensington Rd, South Yarra, Vic. Reed, Henderson & Smart, 1884. Examples of the red brick domestic style, which adopted round corner towers and conical roofs 1

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environment’.93 This is indeed the case. The house is modestly Queen Anne in style, with the windows (but for a pair which have been altered) tall and in some cases multipaned, and topped with shallow arches in darker brick with a drip mould over them. However each keystone extends in a mannered way from the arch, through the mould and up into the frieze level above. The anomalous feature, which is doubtless the Australian modification, is the standard cast iron verandah and balcony extending over more than half the façade. The other house, Shenton, was that of the coal merchant John Shenton Gordon, and was perhaps the first local Queen Anne house specifically in the manner of Richard Norman Shaw. It is in red brick with segmental cream brick heads to some windows, and there are tall brick-banded chimneys of a very Shavian character, and an open timbered projecting gable. Far more novel in the Melbourne context than modern Italian or Renaissance buildings were those houses that were also of red brick, but which had round corner towers and conical roofs. These foreshadow the similar but squatter corner pieces of Edwardian houses and, in more general terms, adumbrate the development of the diagonal axis in planning. There is little in the way of contemporary description to indicate what style they were supposed to exemplify, and whilst French chateau associations tend to come to mind, it is probably more realistic to look at the London houses of James McLaren, which are likely to have come to the attention of Melbourne practitioners. McLaren’s source

4

was his native Scotland, but his Scots prototypes in turn derived from France and the Lowlands. In 1877 McLaren was building in what Alistair Service calls ‘a free Jacobean Scottish Baronial style’, though a house by him at Fulham of 1878 is Nesfieldian except for the cylindrical tower, surrounded near the top with a belt of stucco relief, and with a conical roof.94 It was this rather French-looking element that appeared in Melbourne houses, though it may have reached them by way of the United States, where it was also largely imitated. Local houses that fall broadly into this category include Redholm, Kensington Road, South Yarra, of 1884, by Albert Purchas (or more probably his son Guyon); and Bona Vista by Reed, Henderson & Smart, in the same street and in the same year. A variant form was Thanes, GW Selby’s house in Alma Road, St Kilda, by Reed, Henderson & Smart in 1885—another two-storey red brick house with a prominent round bay at the corner surmounted by a candle snuffer roof. A variation, now with a polygonal corner tower and in what was described as a Flemish Renaissance style, was WM Campbell’s Ramornie at 52 Pakington Street, Kew, of 1890. In about 1891–92 Hyndman & Bates designed stables for Belmont, Whitehorse Road, Balwyn, for the Hon. Robert Reid, MLC, and managed to include a round tower with a conical roof—an unlikely element for a stable, but sufficient to bring it within this group. This was combined with a halftimbered gable, and a large semicircular archway of an almost Romanesque character.95

Homeden, the house of Judge HE Hodges, is an anonymous member of this group, but the A & K Henderson drawings include work for Hodges,96 so that it seems likely to have been designed by Henderson (either before or after his departure from the partnership). According to a description in 1892: Homeden, the picturesque Early-English home of Mr. Justice Hodges ... is one of the best examples of that style of architecture—bold and well broken up, with a most luxurious interior. These picturesque buildings have made bright notes of red colour, so sadly wanted as a relief in the sombre greens of Australian landscape. The builders have done much towards beautifying our suburbs, although it is questionable whether Early English, with its red brick and red tiles, is as suitable in our warm summer climate as the square white stuccoed house of the ‘gin-case’ order of architecture, with broad verandahs and balconies round three sides.97 One of the most remarkable designs in this evolutionary chain is Hyndman & Bates’s house for E Edmonds Smith at 33 Castle Street, Eaglemont, of 1890.98 It is single-storeyed and was actually referred to as a bungalow, still somewhat unusual at this time, and in fact looks like a Federation or Edwardian house.99 It is one of a small number of such precocious designs that appear in the 1890s from the pens of various architects like Arthur Fisher. Hyndman & Bates’s house for EW Outhwaite in Malvern Road, Toorak, of December 1890, was similarly advanced, though this was not quite so obvious because it was two-storeyed.

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91 Hyndman & Bates, ‘Specification, &c ... Brick Residence at South Yarra for [WH Quick Esq. DELETED] S. T. Staughton Esq’. The cover identifies it only as a two-storey house in Domain Rd for Staughton, dated March 1889. Hyndman & Bates did additions to it for Samuel Staughton in 1890. 92 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 93 Table Talk, 3 April 1890, p. 8. 94 A Service, ‘James McLaren and the Godwin legacy’, in A Service (ed.), Edwardian Architecture and its Origins, Architectural Press, London, 1971, pp. 100–4. 95 ABCN, 17 June 1893, p. 253. 96 No. 61 in the index to the A & K Henderson drawings is held by Peter Staughton. 97 Ixion, ‘A Saunter’, Australasian, 30 July 1892, p. 232. 98 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 99 According to a modern report the house includes an enormous ballroom with two musicians’ alcoves, woodwork shipped from England, and a stained glass window from France in the foyer. It also has its own sociological interest, for Smith, a merchant and ship owner, lived there his lover Awaba, from the South Pacific, and the house was named after her. S Griffiths, in the Age, 18 November 1995, p. 1s. 100 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 101 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 102 Another proto-Edwardian house by the firm was that at Dandenong for Samuel Gillott in 1894. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 103 BEMJ, 1 March 1890, p. 12. 104 BEMJ, 1 March 1890, p. 3. A later tender, for what were presumably the same shops, shows that they were for D Connor: BEMJ, 5 April 1890, p. 5; ABCN, 26 April 1890, p. 977. 105 Apparently near the Russell and La Trobe streets corner: ABCN, 5 April 1890, p. 916; 26 April 1890, p. 977; MCC application 4451, 9 May 1880.


1 Homeden, house for Judge HE Hodges, Lansell Rd, Toorak, Vic. Reed, Henderson & Smart, 1889. The luxurious interior of the house as illustrated in Victorian Representative Men at Home, 1904 2 The street elevation as illustrated in Victorian Representative Men at Home, 1904 3 Lineda, house for AJ Fuller, Balwyn, Vic. Hyndman & Bates, 1891. South elevation of the house 4 Stables at Belmont, house of the Hon. Robert Reid, Whitehorse Rd, Balwyn, Vic. Hyndman & Bates, 1891–92. North elevation of the stable building combining the round tower with conical roof, half-timbered gable and large, Romanesque-inspired semi-circular archway

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106 Allom, Lovell, Sanderson Pty Ltd in conjunction with the Heritage Group, Public Works Department Victoria, State Library and Museum of Victoria Buildings: Conservation Analysis, Allom, Lovell, Sanderson Pty Ltd & the Heritage Group, Public Works Department Victoria, Melbourne, vol. 1, 1985, p. 28, ref. W Perry, The Science Museum of Victoria: a History of its First Hundred Years, Science Museum of Victoria, Melbourne, 1972, pp. 33–4. 107 Allom, Lovell, Sanderson Pty Ltd in conjunction with the Heritage Group, Public Works Department Victoria, p. 39. 108 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. At the Centennial Exhibition of 1888–89 in Melbourne, the Expanded Metal Lathing and Fencing Company Limited had a machine at work in the annex producing expanded metal according to the patent of JF ‘Goulding’ (the American inventor, Golding), from whom the company had acquired the Australasian rights. See ABCN, 24 August 1889, p. 186. By early September 1889 their own factory building was ready, with four machines installed, and was expected to be working by the end of the month. The company had ordered two further machines, one of them from Wright & Edwards that was designed to mould the material into profiles suitable for uses such as cornices. See ABCN, 7 September 1889, p. 222; and ABCN, 24 August 1889, p. 186. The machines were to be paid for by the sale of the patent rights for New South Wales. See ABCN, 7 September 1889, p. 222. In December a promotional display was mounted at a meeting of the Architectural and Engineering Association. See ABCN, 21 December 1889, p. 597. 109 Saunders, pp. 25–6. 110 La Trobe Library Journal, IX, 36, December 1985, p. 99. 111 RVIAJ, March 1931, p. 45. 112 ABCN, 10 May 1890, p. 1016. 113 Allom, Lovell, Sanderson Pty Ltd in conjunction with the Heritage Group, Public Works Department Victoria, p. 39. 114 ABCN, 6 December 1890, p. 426. 115 ABCN, 21 November 1891, p. 414; BEMJ, 21 November 1891, p. 3. 116 BEMJ, 28 June 1890, p. 3; ABCN, 24 October 1891, p. 331. Puzzlingly, a tender was accepted for a villa at Highfield almost a year later, ABCN, 13 May 1891, p. 401, so one must presume that it was a separate building. 117 G Butler, Camberwell Conservation Study 1991: Significant Sites: Volume Four, Alphington, Vic., 1991, pp. 244–5.

It was in red brick, with half-timbered gables, a bull’s-eye window, and roofs were a relatively low pyramidal form.100 Their house for AJ Fuller, Lineda, Balwyn, of 1891, was another advanced design very much in what was to become the Edwardian mode, single-storeyed, with a terracotta tile roof, a shingled gable, a bull’s-eye window, and an angled square window bay at one corner.101 Alfred Carleton, who witnessed the contract, was apparently the draftsman responsible, and was probably the designer within the office most responsible for this major stylistic shift, for it is consistent with his later independent work.102 After 1893, red brick was almost universal, but the movement that brought about this change, in the period 1883–93, was the joint initiative of a number of individual architects. One would have to name James Birtwistle; Alfred Fitts; Guyon Purchas; Oakden, Addison & Kemp; Philip Treeby; and many others. But a surprising amount of this pioneering red brickwork was done by Reed, Henderson & Smart, AM Henderson, Hyndman & Bates, William Salway and WM Campbell, all members or descendants of the Reed milieu. It seems clear that the practice, which had introduced Lombardic polychromy, was also the one mainly responsible for its displacement by red brick.

Reed, Smart & Tappin It was announced on 1 March 1890 that Joseph Reed and Francis J Smart, of the late firm Reed, Henderson & Smart, would continue in business under the style of

Reed & Smart,103 and on the same day, as if to show that they meant business, tenders were called for a terrace of shops at Warragul.104 The partnership operated in this form for only two months before Tappin joined in April, and it called tenders for only one other job, but it is the link between the old firm and the new. Moreover the job itself was significant—the erection of a technological museum and sculpture galleries at the Melbourne Public Library105—for it demonstrated that they had retained one of the major ongoing clients, and one certainly worth keeping. In 1889 the Gillies government had promised £90 000 to be spent on the library, museums and gallery buildings.106 The buildings that resulted were those later known as the McCoy Hall, La Trobe Gallery and Stawell Gallery, completed in 1892.107 The McCoy Hall was of some technical interest, for it used the new patent expanded metal lathing as the basis for the ceiling plaster.108 WSP Godfrey in his reminiscences drew no distinction between the three partnerships that so rapidly succeeded each other. It was, so far as one can tell, the same firm continuing in the same premises, with the same office arrangements. The staff must have contracted during the Depression, but around 1893 Harold Dumsday joined as a trainee draftsman. Dumsday was to remain with the firm until his death in 1941, notable especially for the meticulous records which he kept in the period 1905–32,109 as well as for the obsessively detailed—not to say excessively boring—journal of his home life, now held by the State Library of Victoria.110 Denis V Healey, who was later to be a prominent Roman Catholic architect,

was an articled pupil in the early 1890s, finishing in 1895.111 Given that there was almost no work by that time, his fee must have made a useful contribution, but few of the regular staff can have survived the contraction of work between 1894 and 1896. After that time, things were slightly better, most of all because of the work on the cathedral at Bendigo, for which a local office was established in that town. From the outset of the Reed, Smart & Tappin partnership, work continued at the University of Melbourne, at the Melbourne Public Library, and at the Melbourne Trades Hall. In May 1890, the firm called tenders for the completion of the south-west corner of the library, that is, the end pavilion of the façade, completed in 1892.113 In December 1890 tenders were called for the council chamber and other additions to Trades Hall.114 In November 1891 they called tenders for the Warragul shire hall.115 The range of work undertaken by the firm was at first so great that it is impossible to report here more than a selection of it. Apart from the domestic work already discussed, one of the more notable houses was Holyrood of 1890,116 which was built for the Colonial Investment & Agency Co., an enterprise associated with the land boomer Matthew Davies, and which is now St Dominic’s Priory, at 816 Riversdale Road, Camberwell.117 This is another red brick, asymmetrical house in the Queen Anne, or what was described at the time as the ‘English Domestic’ style.118 Another house for the Colonial Investment & Agency Co.


A HOUSE DIVIDED 1890 – 1918

1 Holyrood, house for the Colonial Investment & Agency Co., 816 Riversdale Rd, Camberwell, Vic. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1890. Street elevation as illustrated in The Australasian Building and Contractors’ News, 24 October 1891 2 Edzell, house for JC Stewart, Edzell Ave, Toorak, Vic. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1891. The house as it exists today, viewed from the Yarra Boulevard 3 One of the most important examples of the red brick, asymmetrical Queen Anne style as illustrated in the Building and Engineering Journal, 17 September 1892 2

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1 Flinders St, looking west from the intersection of Exhibition St, Melbourne, c. 1895, showing the large commercial warehouses that dominated Flinders St at this time. The Sargood warehouse in the foreground, the Mutual Store, the large building mid-way, and the EL Yencken warehouse in the distance. The undeveloped site on the left of the image is currently the location of Flinders Street Station 2 Mutual Store, Flinders St, Melbourne. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1891. The building as published in The Building and Engineering Journal, 5 September 1891 3 Metropolitan Gas Co. building, Flinders St, Melbourne. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1891. The building as drawn by Alfred Smart and published in The Building and Engineering Journal, 17 September 1892

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118 ABCN, 24 October 1891, p. 331. The commission is explained by the fact that FJ Smart was an associate of Matthew Davies and a director of the Colonial Investment & Agency Co. 119 BEMJ, 14 March 1891, p. 1. 120 BEMJ, 14 March 1891, p. 1; 9 May 1891, p. 5. See also the perspective, 17 September 1892, p. 114, and the plans and photographs in Arts & Crafts, September 1896, p. 45. 121 ABCN, 31 May 1890, p. 1076. 122 Saunders, p. 25. 123 Saunders, p. 24. 124 ABCN, 27 December 1890, p. 498; BEMJ, 24 January 1891, p. 3; MCC application 4917, 2 April 1891. See also the perspective illustration, BEMJ, 17 September 1892, p. 114. 125 ABCN, 2 July 1892, p. ii. 126 ABCN, 14 March 1891, p. 195; BEMJ, 18 April 1891, p. 3; 6 June 1891, p. 5; 5 September 1891, p. 112 (perspective); MCC application 5039, 19 June 1891. A brick delivery branch building was added in 1898: MCC application 7117, 15 February 1898; Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 127 ABCN, 18 March 1893, p. i; 20 October 1894, p. 419 (perspective); BEMJ, 18 March 1893, p. 10; 17 March 1894, p. 85 (report?). 128 M Lewis (ed.), Victorian Churches: Their Origins, Their Story and their Architecture, National Trust of Australia (Victoria), Melbourne 1991, p. 126. 129 The vestry was excluded from the first contract, but carried out in 1900. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. The stained glass was commissioned from William Montgomery, who won a competition for it. See ABCN, 17 March 1894, p. 85. 130 G Tibbits, The Planning and Development of the University of Melbourne: an Historical Outline, University of Melbourne, 2000, reprint 2001, p. 39. 131 ABCN, 30 May 1891, p. 420; 26 September 1891, p. 250; Tibbits, p. 37. 132 BEMJ, 2 April 1892, p. 3. 133 BEMJ, 7 May 1892, p. 3. 134 Tibbits, pp. 41, 39. 135 MCC applications 9679, 23 October 1905; 9804, 24 November 1905; 9805, 25 November 1905.

was at Hopetoun Park, Box Hill, in 1891,119 and the most important of all, was the JC Stewart house, Edzell, Edzell Avenue, Toorak, of 1891.120 Although it had been Reed’s personal responsibility, Reed, Smart & Tappin continued after his death with the supervision of St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral, finally consecrated on 22 February 1891.121 Butterfield’s original design had been intended to point as near east as the city grid allowed, but the Church had shrewdly rotated it to point northwards, so that a sufficient amount of land was left on the east side for commercial exploitation. On this site, the Metropolitan Gas Company building was erected, apparently on a building lease, for the title remained in the hands of the Church.122 The choice of style and height was that of the board, and the detailed design was by Samuel Deakin. However Reed himself seems to have been substantially involved in the first plans, for his widow tried to recover fees from the Cathedral Erection Board for sketches that he had done for the building before his death.123 In December 1890, tenders were called for the building,124 and in July 1892 for the fittings.125 One other commercial building followed: the Mutual Store, Flinders Street, of 1891.126 The Roman Catholic work of the firm during the 1890s is largely attributable to Tappin, but the Thomson Memorial Church, Terang, is Presbyterian and can be seen as a descendant of Reed & Barnes’s Scots Church, Collins Street, however much part Tappin may have played in it. Tenders were called in May 1893.127 It is a noble building,

unusual in the fact of having its spire completed in the first building campaign, and also in the French overtones of the design such as the cluster of pinnacles about the spire and the semicircular pseudo-apse.128 In a Presbyterian church an elaborate chancel was scarcely necessary, and it must have been for purely stylistic reasons that an oversized vestry was provided in the form of an apse.129 In 1894, the flow of work dried up almost entirely. The year closed with a competition victory for a church in Townsville, but it did not proceed. For almost two years no tenders were called, and one must assume that staff were retrenched or put on reduced hours. Many architectural firms had already folded by this time, individual architects had gone bankrupt or made secret compositions—FJ Smart amongst them— and a considerable number had emigrated to Western Australia either temporarily or permanently. It was the Catholic work that had kept Reed, Smart & Tappin in business so far, and it was to be the Catholic work that would breathe new life into it two years later.

The University of Melbourne Henderson had been the partner responsible for the work at the University of Melbourne, and had been very successful, for example, with the Biology (now Baldwin Spencer) building,130 hence the university’s desire to keep him in charge of laboratory design after the break-up of the partnership. But this was not to be. Reed, Henderson & Smart had just completed the first stage of the Natural

Philosophy building (now known as Old Physics) in 1889, and in 1891 Reed, Smart & Tappin—without Henderson—proceeded with the second stage131 (demolished in modern times to create the present Deakin Court). In 1892 they called tenders for fittings to the Chemistry132 and Biology buildings,133 both of which had been designed by Reed, Henderson & Smart five years earlier.134 There was a further spate of construction in 1905–06, with three separate contracts for animal houses, additions to Biochemistry and Vegetable Pathology, and the Agricultural and Analytical Laboratory.135 Reed, Henderson & Smart had in 1884 built the New Medical School, next to the original medical building, to accommodate the Department of Anatomy and Pathology. It was a single-storey U-shaped building in the Gothic style, within which the Anatomy and Pathology Museum, in the southern arm, had been truncated during the first building campaign for lack of money. In 1899–1900 Reed, Smart & Tappin completed this wing to a modified design,136 and they also built physiology laboratories off Swanston Street.137 In 1908 they added an upper floor over the west front (the base of the U), which necessitated cramming a stone stair within its recessed loggia, thus producing the rather odd form of the building today known as the Elisabeth Murdoch building. At the same time interior spaces were modified, an upper floor was added to the brick north wing, and a separate brick structure was built to the east to house Bacteriology.138


A HOUSE DIVIDED 1890 – 1918

1 Engineering School, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1899. The utilitarian red brick design of the Engineering School seems advanced, more suggestive of a building of the 1920s, unlike the other stone-clad buildings at the university 2 Master’s residence, Ormond College, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1892 3 Biology building (now Baldwin Spencer building), University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Reed, Henderson & Smart, 1887–88. Despite the departure of Henderson, who had been responsible for the work at the University of Melbourne, the firm continued to complete further stages and new building works

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136 Tibbits, p. 31; MCC application 7627, 1 August 1899. It is unclear whether rooms for macerating, built in 1892, were part of this complex: MCC application 5638, 11 October 1892. 137 MCC application 5638, 25 September 1899. 138 The latter was later extended by Gawler & Drummond, and is now incorporated into the Ian Potter Museum of Art on Swanston St. Tibbits, pp. 32–3; MCC application 7664, 25 September 1899. 139 Tibbits, pp. 42–3; MCC application 7665, 25 September 1899. 140 Tibbits, p. 43 141 MCC application 9803, 24 November 1905. 142 Tibbits, p. 43. 143 ABCN, 31 May 1890, p. 1076. 144 BEMJ, 28 November 1891, p. 3. Readvertised BEMJ, 6 February 1891, p. 3; ABCN, 2 January 1892, p. 5; 13 February 1892, p. 126. The latter does refer to the completion of the Quadrangle, but not to the master’s residence. MCC application 5387, 4 May 1892, for ‘college’; 5414, 26 March 1892, for master’s residence. Perspectives of the dining hall and the master’s residence appear in BEMJ, 25 February 1893, p. 75, and in the Illustrated Australian News, 1 June 1893, p. 17. 145 ABCN, 18 June 1892, p. 422; BEMJ, 18 June 1892, p. 3; MCC application 5590, 26 August 1892, for the swimming baths. 146 Saunders, p. 23. 147 B Andrews, Australian Gothic: the Gothic Revival in Australian Architecture from the 1840s to the 1950s, Melbourne University Press at the Miegunyah Press, Carlton, Vic., 2001, p. 66. 148 Caselli became so imbued with the Hansom manner that it is scarcely possible in his later work to say whether Caselli was carrying out a Hansom design, or simply designing in a Hansom way. 149 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives.

In 1899 the Engineering building was constructed at the south-east corner of the university site,139 in a businesslike red brick rather than the sandstone of the principal university buildings, and with mainly rectangular openings and only a few overtly Gothic touches. Although the use of red brick itself was no longer exceptional in the wider world, the overall design seems very advanced, more suggestive of a building of the 1920s than one from the turn of the century.140 In 1905–06, the Mining and Metallurgy School, the second building for the Faculty of Engineering, was built to the north of the original structure.141 George Tibbits sees this as a somewhat crude imitation of the original building,142 and this may be attributable to the facts that Tappin was now dead, and Smart distracted by other affairs, as he was elected president of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects (RVIA) in the following year.

described by Godfrey as moustached, suave and a florid draftsman, while CP Smart called him ‘a fine draughtsman, an artist by bent—he often painted—an absent-minded dreamer and a poetic speaker, a very nice fellow’.146 His obituary refers to his talents as a landscape and a portrait painter, and to prose and poetry evincing ‘a high order of intellect’. He was also an unusually correct Gothic Revivalist, considering that he was the product of a Victorian country town, and the explanation for that is to be found in his indirect connection with English Gothicist Charles Hansom. In 1870, at the age of sixteen, Tappin was articled to the Ballarat architect Henry Caselli, with whom he remained for the next five years.147 Caselli was not a particularly gifted designer, but much of his work consisted of the supervision of designs sent out by Hansom in the 1850s.148

Although it was an autonomous institution, it is appropriate to mention here the ongoing work at Ormond College. In May 1890 tenders were called for the ‘completion’ of the college,143 while eighteen months later Reed, Smart & Tappin were again ‘completing’ the college, as well as constructing the master’s residence.144 In 1892 they were altering the gymnasium and erecting swimming baths.145

Tappin was apparently with Reed & Barnes from 1875 until he returned to Ballarat probably in the late 1870s. The partnership of Tappin, Gilbert & Dennehy was formalised in about 1883 following a period of loose association between the three men, and had subsequently undertaken much prominent work in Melbourne, including the Hibernian Hall in Swanston Street of 1884–86.149 By 1886 they were designing in a very successful Queen Anne manner, as at Queen Bess Row, Hotham Street, East Melbourne, and they had an extensive Roman Catholic clientele in Melbourne, rural Victoria, and parts of New South Wales. When Tappin joined Smart, he in effect brought with him the Melbourne

Tappin’s Catholic connection WB Tappin’s accession to the firm at the time of Reed’s death was highly fortuitous, but it seems that negotiations had in fact been underway for some time. He was

branch of Tappin, Gilbert & Dennehy and much of the Ballarat connection as well (including the promising but ultimately unfulfilled commission for the Anglican cathedral).150 Most of Tappin’s work was Gothic, and the break with the style that was initiated by the firm was not originally at his instigation. But he was certainly open to different styles, and he did have his reservations about the way the Gothic was currently being used.151 His own interests were relatively broad, and his winning design for the Anglican cathedral in Ballarat was said to be early French Gothic.152 It is clear that the practice benefited substantially both from Tappin’s Catholic connections and from his established name in Ballarat. In August 1890 tenders were called for the Convent of Mercy at Hotham (North Melbourne),153 in September for the Roman Catholic school at Brunswick, and in October for the steam laundry at the Loreto Convent, Ballarat.154 In February 1891 tenders were called for additions to the Convent of Mercy, Ballarat,155 and for the first portion of what was probably the Monastery of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour in the same town.156 However the latter may be the Redemptorist monastery on the north side of Lake Wendouree which, together with its church, was reported in October 1891 to be under construction.157 The foundation stone of the latter was laid on 24 November 1891, and the first stage was completed in February 1893.158 In June the decoration of St Patrick’s Cathedral,


A HOUSE DIVIDED 1890 – 1918

1 William Brittain Tappin (1854–1905). CP Smart described him as ‘a fine draughtsman, an artist by bent—he often painted— an absent-minded dreamer and a poetic speaker, a very nice fellow’. Partner from 1890 until his death in 1905 2 Thomson Memorial Presbyterian Church, Terang, Vic. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1893. Detail 3 Front elevation of the church, which was completed including the spire in one stage of construction, unusual for this time

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Ballarat, was advertised,159 as well as the extension of the convent at Ararat.160 It seems that they also did some work on St John’s, Clifton Hill,161 but the commission which really showed that the firm had been clasped to the Catholic bosom was that for the base and railings for the O’Connell statue outside St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne.162 In 1891 the firm was engaged to design extensions to the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Hawthorn.163 The additions they proposed were about twice the size of the original church by Crouch & Wilson.164 The nave was to be elongated and transepts, a full-width sanctuary, side chapels, and a sodality room with an organ chamber above were to be added. The money was not available to carry these out fully in the first instance. A small campanile was proposed at the north-east corner for decorative effect, though it was rationalised by using the lower part to accommodate a second staircase to the organ loft. A late Gothic style was chosen, allegedly to harmonise with the existing building, and the tracery was Flamboyant, reflecting an interest in matters French that was fairly typical of Tappin.165 The pace of the Roman Catholic work was not quite so frenetic once the economic depression set in, but it continued, nonetheless, notably with the Convent of Notre Dame de Sion, Sale, in 1892, and St Paul’s Church, Coburg, of 1894.167 In 1894 the firm won the competition for the Roman Catholic church in Stanley Street, Townsville,168 but it did not proceed immediately. It was built in 1900–02 under the supervision of the architect AV Poland,

and was then damaged in 1903 by cyclone Leonta, but repaired.169 It is referred to as a cathedral in Tappin’s obituary,170 which is incorrect but prescient, for it became the cathedral when the Catholic diocese of Townsville was created in 1930. The status of the chapel at St Dominic’s Priory, North Adelaide, of 1892–93, is less clear, for it is commonly attributed to WB Tappin himself, rather than to the firm of Reed, Smart & Tappin.171 The revival of the firm during the closing years of the Depression was entirely the result of the work from the Roman Catholic Church. A small sign was the commission for a presbytery at Footscray, for which tenders were called in September 1896,172 but the major stimulus was the Sacred Heart Cathedral, Bendigo, followed shortly by St George’s Church, Carlton. The cathedral was made possible by the bequest of Bendigo’s first priest, Father Backhaus,173 who had invested shrewdly in property in Bendigo and the surrounding district. He died in 1882 and his will required the income to accumulate for twenty years before any use was made of the capital, but Bishop Reville was too impatient to wait for this, and borrowed money, against the security of the will, from local mining magnate George Lansell. The design had apparently been selected in competition,174 and foundations were being tested as early as April 1896.175 The contract for the first section was signed with the builder Thomas Cockram & Son in October, and the design was first publicly reported in November, but the foundation stone was laid only on 25 June of the

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following year. The first contract was intended to take three years, and the whole building was to be finished in seven or eight years,179 but things turned out differently. This first stage comprised the full length of the nave and aisles and two of the four columns of the crossing,180 and it took five years to complete. The second stage was to be for the liturgical east end of the church, including a tower rising about ninety metres.181 The dimensions were exceeded only by those of St Patrick’s, Melbourne, and as the latter had no towers at this stage, the Bendigo building promised to outdo it. The contractor had about twenty men on site in November 1896, but expected to increase this to fifty.182 The tender documents had sought alternative prices for carrying the building out in Barrabool stone with Waurn Ponds dressings, or with Harcourt granite and Oamaru dressings, and the former was chosen. Waurn Ponds stone was used internally as well, but the internal columns made of it were condemned by one Jennings, adviser to the bishop, and had to be replaced, for which a six months’ extension of the contract time was allowed to the builders, who were not at fault.183 The opening of the incomplete structure took place on 28 September 1901,184 and the work was not resumed until 1953.185 The style of the building was Early English, and according to a contemporary report: ‘The spirit of the whole design will correspond to that of some of the famous abbey churches of Great Britain, the cathedral character being obtained by the treatment of the west front, the large central tower, and the importance of the chancel’.186

150 From the dissolution of the partnership on 1 May 1890 the business was ostensibly carried on by Gilbert at offices in Melbourne and Ballarat, but their chief assistants CG Kempson and WP Conolly left to form their own partnership. Dennehy is next heard of in Sydney in 1894, and Gilbert continued to practice in Ballarat in association with George Clegg, but with little or none of the Roman Catholic work in which Tappin specialised. The partial exception is Nazareth House orphanage in Mill St, designed in 1889 but completed in 1891, apparently still under Tappin, Gilbert & Dennehy. See ABCN, 10 May 1890, p. 1024; ABCN, 31 May 1894, p. 1087; BEMJ, 21 April 1894, p. 4; Jacobs Lewis Vines, Architects, Ballarat Conservation Study, vol. 2, Jacobs Lewis Vines, South Yarra, Vic., 1978, pp. 384–5. 151 WB Tappin, ‘Ecclesiastical art’, Proceedings of the Second Australasian Catholic Conference, Melbourne, 24–31 October 1904, pp. 441–2. 152 Argus, 11 September 1886, p. 10. 153 ABCN, 30 August 1890, p. 2136; BEMJ, 6 September 1890, p. 43. 154 BEMJ, 25 October 1890, p. 5; 15 November 1890, p. 3. 155 Tenders for an unnamed monastery are called in ABCN, 14 February 1891, p. 108, but on 11 April 1891, p. 217 it is named. 156 ABCN, 14 February 1891, p. 108; 11 July 1891, p. 26. 157 BEMJ, 3 October 1891, p. 156 (illustration). 158 W Ebsworth, Pioneer Catholic Victoria, Polding Press, Melbourne, 1973, pp. 268–9. 159 ABCN, 13 June 1891, p. 460. 160 ABCN, 13 June 1891, p. 460. 161 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives: there is no architect’s name on the contract drawings of 5 October 1891, but they are witnessed by TJ Evans. 162 BEMJ, 20 September 1890, p. 3. 163 ABCN, 11 July 1891, p. 26; BEMJ, 20 February 1892, p. 75 (perspective). 164 See Lewis, Victorian Churches: Their Origins, Their Story and Their Architecture, p. 73. 165 BEJ, 5 March 1892, p. 95. 166 ABCN, 17 September 1892, p. ii; BEMJ, 24 November 1892, p. 3. See also the perspective illustration: BEMJ, 25 February 1893, p. 75.

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1 Church of the Immaculate Conception, additions, 345 Burwood Rd, Hawthorn, Vic. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1891. Perspective image as published in The Building and Engineering Journal, 20 February 1892 2 Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Bendigo, Vic. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1896. Drawing of the original design. The construction of the first stage was expected to take three years, and the whole building up to eight years to complete. The incomplete first stage opened in 1901, and work by Bates, Smart & McCutcheon did not recommence until 1953

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A HOUSE DIVIDED 1890 – 1918

1 St George’s Roman Catholic Church, Rathdowne St, Carlton, Vic. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1896. Longitudinal section of the church through the central aisle and large dome, which was never built 2 A completed pictorial view of the church, pivotal for changing tastes of the Roman Catholic Church to red brick and non-Gothic styles 3 Convent of Notre Dame de Sion, Sale, Vic. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1892. Illustrated rendering completed by Alfred Smart from Building & Engineering Journal, 25 February 1893 4 Loreto Convent Chapel, Ballarat, Vic. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1898–1902 3

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167 ABCN, 24 March 1894, p. i; 1 December 1894, p. 231 (report), BEMJ, 24 March 1894, p. 3. 168 ABCN, 1 December 1894, p. 235. 169 Information from Dorothy GibsonWilde of Townsville, February 2002. 170 RVIAJ, May 1905, pp. 60–2. 171 GM Moore, ‘Antipodean Gothic’, vol. 2, MA, University of Melbourne, 1984, p. 98. 172 BEMJ, 19 September 1896, p. 6. 173 AE Owens, ‘George Henry Backhaus (1811–1882)’, in NB Nairn et al. (eds), Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 3, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1969, pp. 66–7. 174 ‘... the drawings are very large competition ones mounted on stretchers ...’: Reed, Smart & Tappin to R Butler, Public Works Department Victoria, 10 April 1896, in Central Board of Health, Victoria, ‘Extracts from file held by the Department of Health, lent by Mr Waldron to AJR [Alan Ralton]—23/2/54’, typescript, Bates Smart Archives. 175 Ebsworth, p. 192. Ebsworth also refers to a competition. 176 For £31 385: MT Shaw, Builders of Melbourne: the Cockrams and their Contemporaries, 1853–1972, Cyprus Books, Melbourne, 1972, p. 36. 177 BEJ, 14 November 1896, p. 347: a photograph of the design appears on 11 January 1902, p. 12. 178 Ebsworth, pp. 192–3. 179 BEJ, 14 November 1896, p. 347. 180 Shaw, p. 40. 181 BEJ, 14 November 1896, p. 347. 182 BEJ, 14 November 1896, p. 347. 183 Age, 12 December 1898, cutting held by Central Board of Health, Victoria, ‘Extracts’. 184 Ebsworth, p. 194. 185 Shaw, p. 40. 186 Ebsworth, p. 193, quoting an unnamed Bendigo paper. 187 BEJ, 19 December 1896, suppl.; 30 January 1897, p. 2; 6 February 1897, p. 3 (award of contract); MCC application 5638, 11 October 1892. 188 According to Ebsworth, p. 269, completed in May 1889, but reported as ‘recently completed’ in BEMJ, 7 January 1899, p. 4. 189 Moore, p. 80. 190 Andrews, p. 98. 191 BEMJ, 2 June 1900, p. 6. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, with the west wing of 1902, and the entrance covered way, 1903.

At the end of 1896, tenders were called for St George’s Roman Catholic Church in Rathdowne Street, Carlton.187 This was a pivotal building, for it swung the tide of Roman Catholic taste to red brick and to non-Gothic styles, a move which had been initiated by Reed, Henderson & Smart twelve years earlier. The revival of red brick in the design of houses has been discussed, but its arrival was more dramatic in the case of churches. In 1884 Reed, Henderson & Smart had designed the first significant High Renaissance church in Victoria, the Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church in Grey Street, St Kilda. Until now all the mainstream churches had favoured the Gothic, or at least some style with medieval connotations, while some Nonconformists had adhered to the Classical styles and the temple form. Almost nobody had dabbled in the Renaissance before the design of Sacred Heart. The result of this was not immediate, but after the building of St George’s, the Gothic was eclipsed in Catholic work by the red brick Renaissance and Baroque, and in due course by red brick Byzantine, Romanesque and other styles. The Redemptorist monastery at Wendouree, Ballarat, begun in 1891, seems to have been completed in 1898–99.188 The story of the Loreto Convent chapel at Ballarat (otherwise the Church of the Immaculate Conception) of 1898–1902,189 is more complex. A chapel had been begun in 1897, to cost about £5000, but in 1898 the convent received a visitor, the Countess Elizabeth Wolff-Metternich, a descendant of St Elizabeth of Hungary. She stayed until the end of the year, and on her departure endowed the chapel with £12 000. Tappin

reworked the chapel design, externally rather after the fashion of his Bendigo cathedral, but internally, as Brian Andrews rightly observes, more after the Rococo Gothic manner of Strawberry Hill.190 In 1900 the Convent of the Good Shepherd at Abbotsford was begun,191 followed by a presbytery at Essendon,192 and in 1901 a school and a presbytery for the Rev. RS Benson of St Joseph’s, South Yarra.193 In 1902 they added a bluestone chapel to St John’s Church, Clifton Hill,194 and a brick chapel at Nazareth House, Ballarat (the orphanage designed originally by Tappin, Gilbert & Dennehy).195 They also built a church at Morwell for the Rev. EJ Coleman.196 In 1903 Cathedral Hall, in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, was built,197 and the contract was signed for the first stage, or basement level, of the Anglican cathedral at Ballarat.198 Nothing much happened in 1904, perhaps due to Tappin’s absence overseas in the early part of the year, but there was a final spurt of Roman Catholic activity in 1905, the year of his death, all of it in South Melbourne. This included new schools for St Peter & St Paul’s Church,199 the Christian Brothers home200 and a primary school in Beaconsfield Parade.201 Tappin is credited with the decorative scheme of the chapels at the east end of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne,202 carried out by C Firth in 1900–01, but it is not entirely clear whether this was a personal or honorary engagement, or a regular commission of the firm. He was now a recognised authority on ecclesiastical design, and in October 1904 delivered a paper on ecclesiastical art to the Second Australasian Catholic Conference in

Melbourne. He had recently returned from a trip to Europe which he undertook once the Ballarat cathedral drawings (1903) were complete,203 and on his return he also gave an account of his travels to the RVIA, at the end of which FJ Smart ‘manipulated a limelight lantern’ to project views of a number of architectural and other subjects.204 It was a lengthy talk and a highly evocative one, but by no means uncritical. At Genoa, for example: We had to visit the famous Campo Santo, or cemetery, which possesses the largest number of the most debased sculptures to be found, I think, anywhere in the world. Our guide introduced us with a confident air of pride, he brought us out with tears at our worse than brutal indifference. Even the check pattern, carefully worked in marble on the trousers of a mourning son, did not move us to admiration, nor the elegant lace elaborately imitated in the shawl of a weeping wife.205 Returning to Melbourne his feeling was one of depression at what felt like a half empty city, with none of the ‘cheerfulness and social feeling’ of European towns: ‘As to our parks and gardens, they are simply ghastly’.206 He was to die in the following year.

Hard times The revival of the firm under the patronage of the Roman Catholic Church was followed within a few months by a sequence of commercial commissions, mainly in the vicinity of Flinders Street. In March 1897 tenders were called, in association with HH Kemp, for the Beath, Schiess & Co. Factory


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1 Redemptorist Church and Monastery, Wendouree, Ballarat, Vic. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1891. Elevation from in the Building and Engineering Journal, 3 October 1891 2 Convent of the Good Shepherd, Abbotsford, Vic. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1900. The south elevation of the convent scheme, the west wing and entrance covered way were completed in 1902 and 1903 3 St Dominic’s Priory, North Adelaide, SA. WB Tappin, 1892–93. Attributed to Tappin, this is an example of the wide range of Catholic projects he completed in Victoria and South Australia 2

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1 Shops for Sanders & Levy, Swanston St, Melbourne. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1900. Swanston St elevation drawing 2 Burnewang, house for H Holmes, Elmore, Vic. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1901–02. Regarded as one of the grandest country homesteads of the twentieth century, Burnewang, a mixture of Jacobean and Elizabethan in style, had its water pumped by steam from the river and was said to contain silver fittings 3 Ball & Welch building, 180–188 Flinders St, Melbourne. Reed, Smart & Tappin, 1899. The new building for Ball & Welch in Flinders St signified a centralisation of the commercial activities of the company from its building in Carlton. Illustrated in the Traveller, 2 September 1899 4 Norman G Peebles (–1923). The former chief draftsman, Peebles joined as a partner of the firm in 1906 following the death of Tappin in 1905. He retired in 1922


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No. 1, in Hosier Lane (between Flinders Lane and Flinders Street, west of Russell Street).207 This was followed in 1898 by a block of shops and offices in Flinders Street for AES Payne,208 and two warehouses in Flinders Lane for Stevenson & Son (resulting from a competition success).209 In 1899 came the Ball & Welch building at 180–188 Flinders Street,210 in 1900 a block of three three-storey shops in Swanston Street for Sanders & Levy 211 and in 1901 the McNaughton, Love & Co. warehouse in Watson Place, off Flinders Lane.212 There then followed a minor commission for an iron and wood store building at the Maples furniture store in Clarendon Street, South Melbourne: this is of interest because it was in association with Isidor Beaver, though for unexplained reasons.213 The Ball & Welch building was described at the time as ‘distinctly modern in tone, with something of an American tinge about it’.214 The Americanness derived in the first instance from the giant order arcading, which was characteristic also of the American-influenced red brick Romanesque warehouses in this part of town such as Sulman & Power’s Royston House, Flinders Lane, but in this case the finish was cement and the language essentially classical.215 The firm’s old clients were also reactivated. The University of Melbourne began a major building campaign. A certain amount of painting and repair work had already been done at the Melbourne Public Library in 1896,216 and in 1899 tenders were called for a building for the National Museum, on the Russell Street frontage of the site.217 This

work, however, was set aside when the government withheld funding, and only carried through in 1906 to create Baldwin Spencer Hall.218 The alterations to the Richmond power station for the Brush Electrical Engineering Co., in 1901, are of some technical interest. A power station in Electric Street was built for the New Australian Electric Company in 1891 to the design of CA D’Ebro,219 and this work appears to be an extension of that building to accommodate a new ‘NN’ engine and 500 kW indicator alternator. The machinery was being supplied by the Brush Electrical Engineering Co. of the Falcon Works, Loughborough, England, which supplied schematic plans for the foundation and general arrangements.220 Domestic work included a house in Carlton in 1896,221 a villa for GW Anderson at Warragul in 1900,222 doubtless a spin-off from the Warragul shire hall commission, and Dr Cussen’s house in Lyons Street, Ballarat, 1901.223 There were presbyteries for the Roman Catholic Church, including that of St Patrick’s, Ballarat, also in Lyons Street, of 1903.224 There was the Hotel Somerville for Henry Gomm, also in 1903.225 Most notable was the homestead Burnewang at Elmore, for H Holmes, in 1901–02.226 The contract for Burnewang was signed late in 1902 with G Davey of Bendigo, and it was to be one of the grandest country homesteads of the twentieth century. The main block measured 89 by 50 feet (26.7 x 15.0 metres) and the rear wing 68 x 35 feet (20.4 x 10.5 metres), and it was of red brick with Waurn Ponds stone and cement dressings, and a Marseilles tile roof. It was

two-storeyed, and the style was said to be a mixture of ‘Jacobin’ (doubtless meaning Jacobean) and Elizabethan. Much of the periphery was surrounded with 2.1metre wide verandahs and balconies with curved fronts hung in red pine shingles, the lower part with brick piers, but the balcony roof carried on ‘terracotta cylinders filled with concrete’, it was claimed for the first time in the state. This must be interpreted as an intermediate stage between the Art Nouveau terracotta columns of Guyon Purchas’s Purrumbete, Camperdown, of 1901, and Gerard Wight’s Oak Dene, Kyabram, of 1907, where glazed terracotta sewerage pipes are filled with concrete to created banded columns reminiscent of Philibert de l’Orme’s ‘French order’. There was much of technical interest about Burnewang. It made extensive use of fibrous plaster, which was still a novelty, depending upon how the term was used, The water supply was pumped by steam from the river, the bathroom fittings were reportedly of silver, and the sewage was disposed of in one of the earliest documented septic tanks in the state: All the drainage is taken by underground pipes about 300 feet down the eastern slope of the hill (away from the river), and there passes into what is termed a ‘dark’ tank—that is, impervious to air and light— where a certain black microbe which cannot stand air and light sets busily to work. After remaining a certain time here, the sewage passes into a second tank over a pebbly channel, which aerates the water, and there a microbe of another

192 BEMJ, 8 September 1900. 193 BEMJ, 27 July 1901, suppl.; 16 November 1901, suppl. 194 BEMJ, 19 July 1902, p. 5. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 195 Jacobs Lewis Vines, pp. 384–5, ref. Ballarat City Council Building Permits Book, 1902. 196 BEMJ, 16 August 1902, p. 5. 197 BEMJ, 18 August 1903, p. 4. Original drawings are held in the Roman Catholic Diocesan Historical Commission collection. 198 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, contract date 11 June 1903. 199 BEMJ, 24 January 1905, p. 2. 200 BEMJ, 2 May 1905, p. 2. 201 BEMJ, 13 June 1905, p. 2. 202 Andrews, p. 55. Andrews identifies the source of the patterns as W & G Audsley, Polychromatic Decoration as Applied to Buildings in the Mediæval Styles, of 1882. 203 Saunders, p. 23. The building had been begun by Tappin, Gilbert & Dennehy in 1886–89, but recommenced only in 1903–04: Jacobs Lewis Vines, Architects, pp. 238–9. It was probably the completion of this work that allowed Tappin to travel, and it may well have been a completely new scheme for the cathedral complex. 204 WB Tappin, ‘Notes on foreign travel’, RVIAJ, September 1904, p. 130. 205 Tappin, RVIAJ, p. 104 206 Tappin, RVIAJ, p. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives; BEMJ, 23 March 1897, p. 2; 27 April 1897, p. 3 (contract letter); MCC application 6821, 21 April 1897. This is described as a warehouse, but the façade elevation shows ‘Factory No. 1’. Shaw, ‘Bates, Smart & McCutcheon historical survey’, p. 8, refers to a clothing factory for Beath, Schiess & Co. in Collingwood at this time, but this seems to an error, as the Beath, Schiess & Co. factory at 108–112 Sackville St was designed by Oakden, Addison & Kemp in 1888: ABCN, 18 February 1888 (and it bears the date on the façade).

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208 BEMJ, 14 May 1898, p. 4; MCC application 7187, 11 May 1898. The tender notice reports this as the site of the Coal Creek building, and the building application as being near the Mutual Store. 209 BEMJ, 18 June 1898, p. 182; MCC application 7291, 2 September 1898. 210 The Traveller, 2 September 1899. 211 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives; BEMJ, 29 September 1900. This is probably the same project as in MCC application 8058, 1 October 1899, for Sanders & Levy at 49–153 Swanston St, which must have been deferred for some reason. 212 MCC application 8340, 24 July 1901. 213 BEMJ, 2 February 1901 suppl., the associated architect is incorrectly given as JG Beaver. 214 The Traveller, September 1899. 215 The building also relates to American examples like Louis Sullivan’s Ryerson building, Chicago, 1884. 216 BEMJ, 19 December 1896, suppl. 217 BEMJ, 30 September 1899; Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 218 Allom, Lovell, Sanderson Pty Ltd in conjunction with the Heritage Group, Public Works Department Victoria, pp. 31, 50. 219 ABCN, 22 August 1891, p. 151. 220 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 221 For J Reilly, in Lygon St: MCC application 5638, 11 October 1892. 222 BEMJ, 4 August 1900, p. 6. 223 BEMJ, 2 February 1901. 224 Jacobs Lewis Vines, Architects, pp. 344–5, citing plans lodged, Ballarat City Council Building Permits Book, 10 March 1903. 225 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 226 BEMJ, 7 December 1901; 14 September 1903, p. 155. 227 BEMJ, 14 September 1903, p. 155. 228 Royal Victorian Institute of Architects Council, minutes, 1890–1905, SLV, p. 280. 229 RVIAJ, March 1907, p. 7. 230 ELT Armstrong & RD Boys, The Book of the Public Library, Museums, and National Gallery of Victoria, 1906–1931, Melbourne, 1932, pp. 5–6.

colour starts business, after which the escaping sewage assumes the form of comparatively pure water.227 Almost nothing is known about the staffing and operation of the office in these years. Harold Dumsday was still there as draftsman. Denis Healey, having completed his articles in that bleak year, 1895, may well have participated in the revival of Catholic work which followed, for he resurfaced in Sydney only in 1898. Carleton left by 1897, if not earlier. In 1900, when Vasco Loureiro won the RVIA sketching competition,228 he was reported as a late employee of Reed, Smart & Tappin, and he must certainly have been a son or other connection of the former client Arthur Loureiro. Smart took an overseas tour in 1901, and Tappin a year or two later. The last public tender was called by Reed, Smart & Tappin in June 1905. In 1906 their activities seem to have been confined to the completion of the various jobs current at the University of Melbourne, and in 1907 there is no work at all on the public record. The old firm was little more than a shell, and not such as would inspire the confidence of a major client such as the Melbourne Public Library, where major extensions were contemplated.

Fusion The death of Tappin in 1905 left the firm in the hands of FJ Smart, who was probably more concerned with his public profile than with the practice, for he was elected president of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects for 1907–08.229 The Public Library project was about to proceed, but after Smart had died on 10 August 1907, the

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trustees became nervous, and consulted NG Peebles, the former chief draftsman, as to whether he had the expertise to carry out so great an undertaking.230 He responded by entering a new partnership. Of Smart’s sons, RA had been trained as an architect, but now had a position in the Public Works Department, which he declined to leave, so CP Smart, who was trained as an engineer, returned,231 as Smart, Tappin & Peebles. Soon afterwards this partnership became Bates, Peebles & Smart, by taking in EA Bates, surviving partner of Hyndman & Bates, and himself a former pupil in the firm of Reed, Henderson & Smart. CP Smart wrote on 16 December 1907 that ‘In compliance with the wishes of the Trustees we have entered into negotiations for taking another partner into our firm’.232 This was a move more likely to inspire confidence at the library, since Hyndman & Bates were the architects patronised privately by HG Turner, the chairman of the trustees. Smart, Tappin & Peebles seem to have done virtually no work.233 It is difficult to be certain, because the practice of calling public tenders declined after the turn of the century, but the only known references are to new confessionals at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Hawthorn,234 and to the construction of the chapter house of the proposed Anglican cathedral, Ballarat, in 1907–08.235 Even the drawings for this had been prepared by Reed, Smart & Tappin in the previous year.236 There must have been other minor and maintenance work for established clients, but it is doubtful whether any other new building of substance was undertaken. In January 1908 they exhibited work at the RVIA exhibition,

1 Charles Pyne Smart (1882–1950), CP Smart’s father, Francis, had managed the firm solely throughout 1905 until Peebles joined the partnership in the following year. CP Smart, trained as an engineer, returned to form the partnership of Smart, Tappin & Peebles in 1906. This name change saw the removal of Reed’s name from the firm’s title sixteen years after his death 2 Edward A Bates (1865–1931), returned to the firm as the surviving partner of Hyndman & Bates in 1907. Following the death of FJ Smart in 1907 the firm was renamed as Bates, Peebles & Smart 3 Buckley & Nunn store, Bourke St, Melbourne. Bates, Peebles & Smart, 1911. Part elevation drawing and façade section of the new store

but it was all material from the previous incarnations of the firm, such as the Independent Church, Wilson Hall, and the Exhibition Building.237 During 1908 they amalgamated with Hyndman & Bates (that is, with the surviving partner, EA Bates), to form Bates, Peebles & Smart.238 The precise basis of the arrangement is unknown, but it was in effect a takeover by Hyndman & Bates, which was by now far the larger and more successful practice. In 1908, Bates, Peebles & Smart designed the Robert Reid & Co. warehouse, Flinders Street,239 and they built a number of city warehouses from 1910 onwards.240 In 1910 they added a floor to the building at 206–208 Flinders Lane, which had previously been remodelled by Hyndman & Bates.241 In 1911 they were responsible for the new Buckley & Nunn building fronting Bourke Street, leaving the rear building that had only recently been remodelled.242 In 1912 they designed the Leviathan Store at the corner of Bourke and Swanston streets, subsequently replaced.243 They also appear to have designed the ‘professional and residential premises’ at 14–16 Collins Street244 known as Chanonry, which is somewhat of a puzzle, as there had been only three city blocks of flats up to this time, and one would expect such a building to be better known. However, the last really substantial commission of this period was Carlyon’s Hotel, Spencer Street, of 1913.245 Some fairly minor work was done outside central Melbourne. The Hoffman kiln and machine shed of the Glen Iris Brick and Tile Co. at Thornbury was executed in 1912. This is an unlikely project for the firm, or perhaps


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231 Saunders, p. 23. 232 Quoted in D Saunders, ‘The reinforced concrete dome of the Melbourne Public Library, 1911’, Architectural Science Review, 2, March 1959, p. 40. 233 Burchett records no building applications in their name in the City of Melbourne. 234 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 235 Jacobs Lewis Vines, Architects, pp. 238–9, citing plans lodged by Smart, Tappin & Peebles, Ballarat City Council; and letter files, group 1, 29 C/2, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Collection, acc. no. 68/13, University of Melbourne Archives. See also Building, 5 December 1908, p. 89. 236 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 237 RVIAJ, January 1908, pp. 177–8. 238 RVIAJ, November 1908, p. 151. 239 MCC application 953, 6 July 1908, for Robert Reid & Co., 332–340 Flinders St; RVIAJ, November 1908, p. 151. 240 MCC application 2299, 14 November 1910, 84–86 Elizabeth St, three-storey brick warehouse for Henry Newman & Co.; 2996, 6 November 1911, 234–236 Flinders Lane, brick warehouse for George A Jury; 3417, 21 June 1912, Little Bourke St, corner Browns Alley, brick store for EM Pearce; 5026, 29 June 1914, Browns Alley, two-storey brick warehouse for Philip H Pearce & Son. EM Pearce was a partner in PH Pearce & Son. 241 Letter file, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Collection, acc. no. 68/13, University of Melbourne Archives, quoted in Errey, p. 227. 242 Building, 13 March 1911, pp. 23, 25. 243 MCC application 3572, 22 August 1912, corner Bourke and Swanston streets, brick warehouse for Nathaniel Levy and the trustees of Lewis Sanders. The building for Levy & Sanders is not the present Leviathan Store building, as supposed by Errey, p. 245, for that was done by A & H Peck in 1937. 244 Building, 12 October 1911, pp. 25–6. The application makes no reference to residential accommodation: MCC application 2944, 14 November 1911, for a brick office building. 245 MCC application 4445, 23 October 1913, nine-storey brick hotel for Thomas Carlyon, 140–146 Spencer St.

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1 Chanonry, professional and residential premises, 14–16 Collins St, Melbourne. Bates, Peebles & Smart, 1911. Collins St elevation drawing 2 Hoffman kiln and machine shed, Thornbury, Vic. Bates, Peebles & Smart, 1912. Plan drawing of the eighteen-chamber kiln and the common long, roundended form 3 Section and elevation drawing

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for any architect, an absolutely classic eighteen-chamber Hoffman kiln of the then common long, round-ended form.246 There were alterations to a house in Camberwell in 1913247 and a new house in Essendon in 1914.248 A school for the Church of England Diocesan Mission was built in Cumberland Place (off Bouverie Street, Carlton) in 1912,249 an infant school for St George’s Roman Catholic Church in Drummond Street in 1913,250 and another school—probably primary—for St George’s in 1916.251

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246 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives; letter file 54/1, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Collection, acc. no. 68/13, University of Melbourne Archives. 247 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives; letter file 53/6, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Collection, acc. no. 68/13, University of Melbourne Archives: the E Bellair house, Mangarra Rd, East Camberwell. 248 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives; letter file 53/9, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Collection, acc. no. 68/13, University of Melbourne Archives: the CR Walker house, McCarron Rd, Essendon. 249 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 250 MCC application 3872, 4 January 1913, for a brick infant school. 251 MCC application 5963, 25 January 1916, for a brick school. 252 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives; MCC application 1661, 11 November 1909, for the first section of the Conservatorium. 253 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 254 G Tibbits, ‘The Conservatorium of Music and Melba Hall, now the Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne, history and conservation guidelines’, draft typescript report to the University of Melbourne, 1996, passim. See also Tibbits, The Planning and Development of the University of Melbourne: an Historical Outline, p. 23.

The University Architect had been FJ Smart, but after his death the firm of Bates, Peebles & Smart was engaged to design a building for the Conservatorium of Music,252 which had been housed to date in the old National Museum building. It was to be in the form of a T, with a wing along the Royal Parade frontage, and an axial hall behind, but only the northern part of the Royal Parade wing proceeded, and was completed in 1910. The contract was signed with the builders, Swanson Brothers, on 9 November 1909,253 and the reinforced concrete floor slab and beams were subcontracted to John Monash’s Reinforced Concrete and Monier Pipe Construction Co. Pty Ltd.254 This is noteworthy because it was only shortly before this time that the Monier company had been eliminated from the Public Library contract, as the result of an outcry spearheaded by Donald Swanson. The style is an unusual amalgam of Arts & Crafts and Art Nouveau. The coprosma leaf decoration

is undoubtedly the creation of the modeller, Otto Waschatz, and compares with work such as that at the Winchelsea shire hall. The building was not completed by Bates, Peebles & Smart. The hall was executed by the Public Works Department in a simplified form in 1913–14, and the north wing, added by Gawler & Drummond in 1926–27, in sympathy but not accord with the original design.255 The change of architects for the third stage of the conservatorium reflects the fact that the university had at last broken with the practice founded by Reed. Bates, Peebles & Smart appear to have done their last work for the university on the old Union building in 1911.256 George de Lacy Evans was commissioned in 1913 to prepare a university master plan.257 He was known to John Monash, then a member of the University Council,258 and Monash may well have been anxious to see the last of Bates, Peebles & Smart, after the humiliation of his removal from the Public Library commission. Bates became president of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects in 1908259 and was re-elected in the following year.260 He clearly enjoyed public office, and in 1908, as spokesman for an RVIA committee, he publicly criticised the proposed new Melbourne Building Regulations, which were to limit building heights to 66 feet [20 metres] in streets only 33 feet [10 metres] wide.261 Little is known of the constitution of his office, except for the fact that Harold Coates became an assistant in 1914.262

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Domed Reading Room The vision of a great domed reading room for the library was developed by the trustees of the Public Library in 1906. The form of the room is often attributed to the chief librarian, ELT Armstrong, and the effect of his trip overseas at this time. In fact the trip came much later, but Armstrong certainly supported the idea and probably initiated it. He later claimed that: ‘Mr Peebles ... drew the original plans for the Reading Room, from rough sketches submitted by the Chief Librarian’.263 In April 1906, HG Turner, as chairman, had stated that the trustees wished to erect a ‘great central reading room ... octagonal [in] design, like the Congressional Library at Washington’.264 On 30 May, Reed, Smart & Tappin forwarded a plan of the existing wings with the ‘new octagonal library’ inserted in place of the rotunda and exhibition hall.265 In 1907, the Premier of Victoria, Sir Thomas Bent, responded to the importunities of the Public Library trustees and promised £10 000 for the commencement of a new building,266 to cost a further £50 000 over the next few years.267 When the reconstituted firm of Bates, Peebles & Smart was established, the trustees cancelled all previous arrangements and appointed them as their architects. An attempt was made by Sir Thomas Bent to have their fees for the new building reduced to 3%, but when told that this was contrary to the usage of the RVIA he withdrew the proposal.268 By February 1908 it was reported that Bates, Peebles & Smart was preparing plans for the work.269


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1 Buckley & Nunn store, Bourke St, Melbourne. Bates, Peebles & Smart, 1911. The completed building shortly after opening 2 Bourke St, looking west from Swanston St, Melbourne, c. 1913. Looking down what is now the Bourke St mall, the completed Buckley & Nunn store on the right and the General Post Office beyond 3 Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Bates, Peebles & Smart, 1910. View from Royal Parade 4 Front elevation, described as an amalgam of Arts & Crafts and the Art Nouveau, the building was completed later by the Public Works Department in a simplified form

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1 Reading Room, Public Library, Swanston St, Melbourne. Bates, Peebles & Smart, 1906–13. Modelled on the octagonal form of the Library of Congress in Washington, the Swanston St elevation of the additions to the original Joseph Reed building 2 View from across Swanston St. On completion the dome (if only for a short time) was the largest reinforced concrete structure in the world measuring 34.75 metres in diameter and approximately the same in height

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A proposal was made that the library, museum and galleries should transfer to a new site on the Domain, leaving the existing site for the expansion of the Melbourne Hospital, and this received general approval from the library trustees. However, when it was determined to redevelop the hospital on its existing site, the proposal lapsed. During the year the old wooden rotunda and lending library buildings were demolished to clear the site.270 It was then that Armstrong was given six months’ leave on health grounds, and asked by the trustees to inspect libraries abroad.271 He is said to have then determined upon a domed reading room like those of the British Museum and the Library of Congress. In fact, however, not only did he know the trustees’ views already, but also he seems to have been able to take with him Peebles’s drawings for a polygonal structure. The circular space seems also to have been seen as appropriate for introduction of the Dewey Decimal Classification scheme, which was then a matter of some controversy in the library. It implied a continuous sequence of book stacks, and it is significant that one of the architect’s drawings is an unlabelled plan in which the subject matter of each bay is described in Dewey terms, beginning with 010–099, General Works, beside the entrance and completing the circuit with 900–999, History, with the back door falling, appropriately enough, between Science and Useful Arts. E Morris Miller, then a junior assistant in the library was also travelling from February 1908, on unpaid leave. He met up with

Armstrong in Edinburgh, and unsuccessfully argued against a round scheme and tried to persuade him to visit what he considered to be the more advanced rectangular library buildings in Germany272—a rectangular plan probably implying a non-Dewey system, for Miller was one of its opponents. Armstrong, however, showed Peebles’s initial plans to various librarians, including Sir Edward Maunde-Thompson, head of the British Museum, who expressed great interest, and queried only the adequacy of the ventilation and natural lighting. The outcome was that the skylights were enlarged beyond what Peebles thought strictly necessary.273 Peebles obtained a design for a dome in reinforced concrete from John Monash, of the Reinforced Concrete and Monier Pipe Construction Co., whose position in the matter may have been enhanced by the fact that he had been a contemporary of Armstrong’s at Scotch College. In May 1908 Monash submitted a tender of £18 692 for the work. Later, when the architects queried the price, he argued for it by comparison with steel, and quoted costs per square for other concrete roofs he had constructed.274 This prime cost sum of £20 769 for the concrete work was incorporated as a condition of tendering.275 There had already been concerns amongst Melbourne builders, led by JW Swanson, about the increasing use of prime costing within contracts,276 removing significant elements of the building from competition, hamstringing builders, and presumably elevating prices. However Monash had been at pains to foster the general impression that Monier Co. had in effect the sole rights to build in reinforced concrete,

and it seems, from a later report, that his position was reinforced by his relationship with the Portland cement manufacturer, David Mitchell.277 It would have been natural to assume that Monier Co. must do the work. However this was a monopolistic proposal which would remove about 30% of the job from competition, and it attracted the wrath of GA Taylor, editor of Building, and that of competing concrete interests. On 12 February 1909, Taylor fulminated: The specification for the Melbourne Public library, to cost about £70 000, has the amount of £44 255 included for a number of prime cost items ... no less a sum than £20 769 has to be included for reinforced concrete work ... Reinforced concrete is a construction that any intelligent builder can carry out provided proper specifications were prepared. There is no patent that can tie the best methods of reinforced concrete to any one firm. Taylor prudently stated that ‘we do not for one moment consider the architects in charge of the Public Library would countenance an allegiance to any particular firm’ but argued that the proceeding in this case ‘lends colour to the allegations that a monopoly in reinforced concrete is being conserved in the interests of a certain firm’.278 In fact it would be hard to come to any other conclusion, and Peebles, when interviewed by Building, did little to refute it:

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255 Tibbits, ‘The Conservatorium of Music and Melba Hall, now the Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne, history and conservation guidelines’, passim. See also Tibbits, The Planning and Development of the University of Melbourne: an Historical Outline, pp. 48–9. The involvement of Gawler, at the Conservatorium and elsewhere, was connected with the fact he had been appointed Assistant Lecturer in Architecture in 1914 (when fifty-one students suddenly enrolled in the diploma course, as compared with three in the previous year). See Lewis, ‘The teaching of architecture’, p. 59. But the bulk of the university’s work was henceforward entrusted to the Public Works Department Victoria, which was then rather under-employed due the assumption of many of its responsibilities by the Commonwealth body. See Tibbits, The Planning and Development of the University of Melbourne: an Historical Outline, p. 55. On 5 October 1914 the University Council decided to find out whether the Premier of Victoria wished the university building work to be carried out by the Government Architect (there never having been any understanding that Evans’s appointment would extend beyond his initial task). Nevertheless it was resolved to submit the work to competition, and only in August 1915, and to the chagrin of the winners, Eggleston & Oakley, was a final decision made in favour of the Government Architect. See competition files, box 53, RVIA Records, MS 9454, SLV. 256 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Drawings Collection, University of Melbourne Archives. 257 Tibbits, The Planning and Development of the University of Melbourne: an Historical Outline, pp. 52–3. 258 Tibbits surmises that the two were acquainted, which was indeed the case, for one of the early works of the Monier company had been the porch of Chastleton, Toorak, designed by Evans. 259 RVIAJ, November 1908, p. 151. 260 RVIA Council, minutes, 1906–30, p. 30; Building, 12 March 1909, p. 19. 261 RVIA Council, minutes, 1906–30, p. 30; Building, 12 March 1909, p. 19. 262 RVIAJ, September 1929, p. 80. 263 Armstrong & Boys, p. 53. 264 Allom, Lovell, Sanderson Pty Ltd in conjunction with the Heritage Group, Public Works Department Victoria p. 39, ref. Argus, 23 April 1906.



A HOUSE DIVIDED 1890 – 1918

1 Reading Room, Public Library, Swanston St, Melbourne. Bates, Peebles & Smart, 1906–13. The controversial octagonal plan of the reading room, designed in conjunction with the introduction of the Dewey Decimal Classification scheme 2 A detail structural drawing of the reinforced concrete girders and columns as originally proposed on the Monier system 3 The area underneath the Reading Room during construction. This room is now the current location of the Trescowthick Information Centre

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A HOUSE DIVIDED 1890 – 1918

1 Reading Room, Public Library, Swanston St, Melbourne. Bates, Peebles & Smart, 1906–13. The floor plan of the Public Library site with the Reading Room addition 2 Aerial view of the library and completed dome

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‘Not one single firm has been “tied up”.’ ‘Regarding reinforced concrete that was open. There were only three firms who could do the work.’ ‘Who are they?’ asked our representative. Mr Peebles replied: ‘The Reinforced Company, the Expanded Steel people’. ‘And the third?’ asked our representative. Mr Peebles replied that at the moment the name had slipped his memory.279 On 17 February 1909 the trustees received a deputation from the Master Builders Association. One of the trustees was Sir Thomas Bent (no longer premier of the state), and he successfully moved: ‘That tenders be called for the whole building in one contract, the architect to submit specifications, as might be necessary, to safeguard the interests of the trustees’.280 Monash apparently felt personally slighted, as well as concerned by the implications for his business of the further erosion of the Monier monopoly, and he wrote a petulant letter to Peebles, who responded unctuously: The idea of a man of your vast intellect and attainments, unimpeachable honor and social standing being in any way affected or disturbed by fancied humiliation at the puerile calumnies of a few of the members of the Master Builders’ Association is simply preposterous, as is also your anxiety with regard to the future of your business affairs.281

This did not prevent Peebles from becoming friendly with the successful tenderers, the Swanson Brothers, who subsequently commissioned work from him. The tender of JW & DA Swanson for £66 914 was accepted in June,282 and work commenced immediately.283 Swansons proposed not to use the Monier system, but that of the Trussed Concrete Steel Co. (Truscon), and work commenced immediately. Most of the reinforced concrete drawings, which date from about 1909 and are anonymous or are signed ‘JAL’, look as though they must be of local origin, though whether drawn by a staff member of Bates, Peebles & Smart, or by the local Truscon representatives Elliott McLean & Co., is not apparent. However the engineering drawings for the dome itself are different in format, date mainly from the second half of 1910, and bear the signature of Nic K Fougner, chief engineer of the Trussed Concrete Steel Co. of Westminster. Saunders has noted a drawing of 30 June 1910 which is endorsed ‘Rec’d & forwarded 1st July 1910. W.W. Harvey’, and he surmises that Harvey, then in London, was the ‘engineer acting on behalf of the architects’, referred to in a later report. This is supported by a letter from Harvey to Bates, Peebles & Smart of 25 October 1910 in which he says ‘I have pointed out that this [arrangement of the ring bars] is very well suited for the intermediate ribs it brings the bars inside the line of thrust at the angular rib ...’284

A comparison of Monash’s original drawings shows that his dimensions for the concrete were kept virtually unchanged, but the Monier reinforcement was replaced by Truscon’s Kahn bars. These were an odd conception, consisting of a basic rolled bar of T-section, with slits run along the flanges so that strips could be bent out from them and wrapped around the adjoining reinforcement. The reinforcement is said to have been imported from the US,285 but this may be a misconception, for though the Kahn system was American in origin, it was marketed by a separate British company that, as was common at the time, would have had rights throughout the British Empire. Whether the reinforcement was actually made in Britain or in America is in fact unclear. The concrete was hand-mixed by a crew of twenty men, hoisted up the central tower with a winch, discharged into chutes leading to the final location, and there placed by hand.286 Saunders devotes some thought to the reason why Bates, Peebles & Smart decided to use the Kahn system, but the evidence suggests that it was not their decision. Rather it was Swanson Brothers who chose the Truscon company, and the price formed a part of their successful tender. On 26 October 1909, the foundation stone was laid by the Governor of Victoria, Sir Thomas Gibson-Carmichael. Another controversy flared during the course of the contract, for the state government wished Victorian marble to be used for the entrance and staircase, specifically the Buchan marble from near Orbost. But because of

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265 Saunders, Architectural Science Review, p. 39. On p. 41 Saunders reproduces what he believes to be the plan in question. 266 Armstrong & Boys, p. 5. 267 Building, 18 February 1908, p. 15. 268 Armstrong & Boys, p. 6. 269 Building, 18 February 1908, p. 15. 270 Armstrong & Boys, p. 8. 271 Armstrong & Boys, p. 9. 272 EM Miller, ‘Some Public Library memories, 1900–1913’, La Trobe Library Journal, IX, 35, April 1985, pp. 75–6. 273 ‘The State Library building’, La Trobe Library Journal, II, 6, October 1970, p. 32, quoting ELT Armstrong, ‘Fifty years of the PLV’, manuscript, SLV. 274 Saunders, Architectural Science Review, p. 41. 275 Building, 12 February 1909, pp. 17, 19, 21, 22. 276 Building, 18 February 1908, p. 15. 277 Building, 12 February 1911, p. 45. 278 Building, 12 February 1909, p. 17. 279 Building, 12 February 1909, p. 22. 280 Building, 12 March 1909, p. 44. 281 G Serle, John Monash: a Biography, Melbourne University Press in assoc. with Monash University, Carlton, Vic., 1982, p. 166, quoting Peebles to Monash, 25 May 1909. 282 Building, 12 June 1909, p. 26. See also MCC application 1403, 16 June 1909, for the Reading Room and stack room. 283 Armstrong & Boys, p. 10. 284 Saunders, Architectural Science Review, p. 42. 285 Saunders, ‘Joseph Reed, architect, Melbourne 1852–90: his life and work and the practice he established’, p. 24. 286 Saunders, ‘Joseph Reed, architect, Melbourne 1852–90: his life and work and the practice he established’, p. 24.


1 Reading Room, Public Library, Swanston St, Melbourne. Bates, Peebles & Smart, 1906–13. The interior of the dome after its completion. The roof lights were covered in by the Public Works Department in 1959 and were only re-instated to their original form with new high quality glazing in 2003

uncertainty about the viability of the as yet untried quarry, and the quantity available, ‘Australian’ marble was specified. Swanson Brothers now proposed to use marble from New South Wales, not because of any practical problem at Buchan, but because they thought the cost ‘unreasonably high’.287 Ultimately the Victorian stone from the Buchan quarries was used,288 but what price adjustment was made is not known.

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In May 1911 the form of the dome itself was becoming dramatically visible to the public: Already the huge shape is outlined by the necessary timbers, and hundreds of loads of concrete materials are being stored in readiness for commencement. As soon as sufficient material is in hand, the work of mixing and filling will commence, and will continue day and night without interruption until the whole dome is completed.289 According to Smart the mixing was all done by hand, and:

287 Building, 13 March 1911, p. 19. 288 Armstrong & Boys, p. 11. 289 Building, 12 May 1911, p. 44 290 CP Smart in Concrete and Constructional Engineering, April 1914, quoted in Saunders, ‘Architectural Science Review, pp. 44–5. 291 Building, 12 June 1911, p. 50. 292 Armstrong & Boys, p. 18. 293 Armstrong & Boys, pp. 21–2. 294 ‘The State Library building’, p. 34. 295 Allom, Lovell, Sanderson Pty Ltd in conjunction with the Heritage Group, Public Works Department Victoria, p. 59, ref. Saunders, Architectural Science Review, p. 46. 296 RVIA Council, minutes, 1906–30, p. 91, 24 February 1914; p. 93, 24 March 1914: the drawings were to be held by the RVIA Council in trust. See also RVIAJ, May 1914, p. 49. 297 RVIAJ, March 1914, p. 36.

For the purpose of placing the concrete a platform was erected above the central lantern light and carried by the centering below. An electrically operated hoist conveyed the mixed concrete from the basement of the building to this platform where it was dumped ... and immediately shovelled by hand through hoppers in the floors of the platform discharging into the heads of chutes by means of which it was conveyed by gravity to the point required on the dome.

On completion, the timber centering was left in place for four months and then gradually eased off by slackening wedges on top of the timber trusses, after which the dome deflected just under five millimetres.290 George Taylor of Building magazine, who had been so hostile when the Monier monopoly was at issue, was now full of enthusiasm, and wrote of the dome as ‘The Greatest on Earth’.291 In 1912 the closing phases of construction were entered, and tenders were accepted for the electric light installation, lifts, and the chairs and fittings.292

of plaster fell from the roof and knocked a visitor unconscious, and when he recovered sufficiently to look for his assailant he was barely restrained from assaulting the chief librarian.294 There were also problems of leakage in the concrete skylight frames, and these defects resulted in drastic action by the Public Works Department, which in 1959 lined the inside of the dome with fibrous sheets, and exterior in copper, blocking the lights and destroying much of the original interior character.295 In 2003 the original skylighting was reinstated.

Possession was taken of the completed Reading Room in October 1913, and on 14 November it was opened by the Governor-General, Lord Denman. The dome was (if only for a short time) the largest such structure of reinforced concrete in the world, 34.75 metres in diameter and the same in height.293 It was far excelled, however, by the 54-metre trussed concrete roof already completed at the Dennys Lascelles Austin wool store in Geelong in 1910–11. Even as a dome, and indeed as an architectural concept, it was very soon completely eclipsed by Max Berg’s Jahrhunderthalle or Centennial Hall at Breslau in Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) of 1912–13, a saucer dome of 64.55 metres diameter.

Hiatus

The plan was less than ideal in terms of staff accommodation. The heating was by means of furnaces which warmed air drawn in by fans from the roof, and often failed to work properly. The books in the open stack were difficult for the public to reach and required ladders. On one occasion a piece

Other than the completion of the Public Library, Bates, Peebles & Smart seem to have built little between 1914 and 1917, but as happens at such times their temper turned nostalgic. In 1914 they donated to the new Industrial and Technological Museum of Victoria the drawings of Joseph Reed’s Bank of New South Wales in Collins Street,296 and those of the front of the Public Library.297 Discussion also began about the possibility of removing the bank façade itself and re-erecting it elsewhere, something that was in fact to happen at a later date. All the indications were that the mighty architectural practice, which had faltered repeatedly over the past fifteen years, was in the conscious throes of reducing its operation. In 1914, the Great War had begun. It would be almost ten years before some measure of prosperity once again returned to the firm.


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3 DESIGNED REINVENTION 1918-45 Julie Willis


1 House for Frederick Heath, corner Hopetoun and Toorak roads, Toorak, Vic. Bates, Peebles & Smart, 1918–19. Ground-floor plan 2 Front (north) elevation of the house showing features of the firm’s domestic design style in this period: restrained two-storey hipped roof forms, roughcast wall finishes and plain timber detailing

In the ensuing years after World War I, Bates, Peebles & Smart (BPS) would face continued upheavals that would not settle until the appointment of Osborn McCutcheon as a partner of the firm in 1926. The fortunes of the firm were to rest principally on the shoulders of McCutcheon, who had begun his architectural career with the firm as an articled pupil in 1918. As McCutcheon reached maturity as an architect, war closed in once more. However, instead of thwarting the ambitions of the firm, McCutcheon’s appointment to the US Army Corps of Engineers—and the firm’s continuation of practice during these years—led to a revolution in the firm’s outlook and focus.

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Surviving the war (I) With the completion of their last major commission, the Reading Room of the Melbourne Public Library, in 1913, Bates, Peebles & Smart had few prospects for important and prominent commissions. War soon loomed on the horizon as if to further frustrate the struggling firm and the long-term outlook was bleak.

1 RS Demaine, ‘The development of architecture and the institute in Victoria over the past decades’, Architect, 2, 1, January – February 1986, p 21. 2 B Rayworth, ‘A question of style: inter-war domestic architecture in Melbourne’, MArch thesis, University of Melbourne, 1993, p. 7.

The staff, considerably reduced from its heyday, consisted of the three partners, five draftsmen, two articled students and an office boy. This would soon be reduced further, with the enlistment of both articled students, Robert Demaine and Alec Hall. Like most architecture offices, the partners had clear roles in the practice. Edward A Bates was the senior partner and the driving force behind the office, guiding the firm’s work and securing commissions. He was

also prominent within the profession (including being a past president of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects— RVIA). Charles P Smart was a structural engineer and responsible for the more technical aspects of the firm’s work. Norman G Peebles was the principle designer. Bob Demaine described partners Bates and Smart as ‘“Gentlemen” in the strictest sense of the term’, and Peebles as ‘one of the most extraordinary people [he had] ever met’.1 Peebles was a superb draftsman, yet sadly, by the mid-1910s, his health was in serious decline and he retired due to ill health in 1922. The firm would not see a large-scale commission for many years. However, as wartime had severely restricted such works, Bates, Peebles & Smart were not alone. Many firms found themselves with few commissions in hand in the late 1910s. During these lean years, a number of small projects, ongoing works, and a handful of new residential commissions sustained Bates, Peebles & Smart. Domestic works quickly became the mainstay of the firm. Like most architects of the day, the firm undertook work for clients in an ongoing capacity—rather like having a family lawyer or doctor. Much of this work included minor alterations, painting, decorating, and particularly during World War I as reticulated amenities became standard and/or compulsory in various suburbs, connections to mains water, sewerage and electricity. Minor and major works would be undertaken over many years, from repairs to extensions, and in difficult times the firm relied on such

clients to sustain the practice. The firm also managed to hold on to a number of institutional, commercial and other clients in much the same way, often doing work over many decades on the same site or multiple sites for the same firm. Such business relationships were not always to last. By World War I, the University of Melbourne had been lost as a client, although they oversaw GJ Sutherland’s design and construction of the Architectural Atelier in 1918. The domestic designs undertaken by the firm in the late 1910s and into the 1920s were generally conservative reflections of architectural trends of the time. The red brick designs of the Federation period had lost favour and instead bungalow forms, which might incorporate elements from a range of styles, became common. Although these forms were less elaborate than prewar work, with a move away from highly picturesque compositions towards a more restrained arrangement, Australian architecture did not immediately embrace the Modern architecture being developed in Europe. Throughout the 1920s, architects looked to styles of the past for their inspiration, with an emphasis on taste, strength and simplicity.2 The domestic designs of Bates, Peebles & Smart from this period were usually simply massed bungalows topped with hipped roofs, to which decorative features were sparingly applied. Designs used a range of details, including those drawn from the Californian Bungalow, Swiss Chalet, Neo-Grèc, English Domestic Revival and Spanish styles. This


DESIGNED REINVENTION 1918 – 45

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1 Netherby, house for Oliver B McCutcheon, Studley Ave, Kew, Vic. Bates, Peebles & Smart, 1915–17. Original working drawings of floor plans 2 Studley Ave elevation of the house, showing the strongly massed roughcast walls, square piers, plain chimneys and timber detailing, as illustrated in Real Property Annual, 1917

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DESIGNED REINVENTION 1918 – 45

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1 Henry Meeks Pavilion, Austin Hospital, Heidelberg, Vic. Bates, Peebles & Smart, 1918. The front view of the surgery, operating theatre and pathological rooms. Like many of the civic projects of the time, the practice used English Free styles and as shown in this building’s Edwardian Baroque feature arch. Illustrated in Real Property Annual, 1918 2 House for Donald Swanson, East St Kilda, Vic. Bates, Peebles & Smart, c. 1916–17. The front entrance to the house showing terrace and the grand neoBaroque loggia, as illustrated in Real Property Annual, 1917 3 Swallow & Ariell biscuit factory, Rouse St, Port Melbourne. Bates, Peebles & Smart, 1920. Rouse St view of factory in the 1960s

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agglomerative effect was not uncommon at the time, with architects seeing various styles as a palette from which to create something new. Derided subsequently as base eclecticism, the technique produced everything from the unusual to the sublime. A number of large houses were designed by the firm during World War I, including: the JW Riall house, Park Street, St Kilda (1915–17); the Donald Swanson house, East St Kilda (c. 1916–17); Netherby, the Oliver B McCutcheon house, Studley Avenue, Kew (1915–17); the H Hatcher house, Dendy Street, Brighton (1915–16); the Frederick Heath house, corner Hopetoun and Toorak roads, Toorak (1918–19); Foxhanger, the (first) HG Balding house, the Quadrant, Malvern (1918–20); and the Mrs FM Smart house, Elsternwick (c. 1918-–19). Many of the designs used a similar architectural language of strongly massed roughcast walls, with square piers, plain chimneys, tiled roofs and simple timber balustrading. The designs echoed the modes favoured by some of Melbourne’s best-known domestic architects of the time, including Rodney Alsop, Harold Desbrowe-Annear and Walter Butler. However, the Bates, Peebles & Smart designs were not especially inventive and were insufficiently progressive to help reinvent the firm as domestic specialists. Many of the commissioned houses were for clients with whom the firm had some prior connection. The Oliver B McCutcheon house was one of the larger Bates, Peebles & Smart houses of this period. Built for the

uncle of the then sixteen-year-old Osborn McCutcheon, the house was a restrained two-storey design, with a hipped roof and plain timber details. Oliver McCutcheon was a solicitor and in partnership with his brother, Walter (Osborn’s father). W & OB McCutcheon had been connected professionally with Bates Peebles & Smart over some years prior to the commission. As solicitors they regularly engaged the firm to report on potential properties for their clients.

domestic modes, which owed so much to the English Domestic Revival and the garden city movement, could not be applied to larger scale buildings as their roots lay firmly in various vernacular housing traditions. Instead, civic projects needed a different language, one that drew upon larger scale precedents and, with the Gothic and Classical revivals having already enjoyed consideration in the nineteenth century, attention was given to Edwardian Baroque and English Free Style.

The Swanson house, designed for the builder of the Reading Room at the Public Library, was a striking single-storey composition set in a formal garden. Unlike many BPS houses of the time, the Swanson house had a strictly formal and symmetrical plan that stepped back to form two wings at the rear. Fronted by a grand loggia, the house sat imposingly on a large terrace. The neo-Baroque entry loggia consisted of two large semicircular arches flanking the entrance that was defined by two strongly rusticated piers. The design for this house had more in common with the commercial and institutional work the firm was undertaking around that time in its use of strong neo-Baroque features, while still employing plain roughcast walls and plain hipped roofs.

Such a civic language would be used in the design of various projects, including a hospital ward. Bates, Peebles & Smart designed two wards at the Austin Hospital in Heidelberg towards the end of the war, the Charles Moore Pavilion (1917) and the Henry Meeks Pavilion (1918). All were relatively small free-standing buildings (as was standard for hospital designs at the time) and were charitable endowments. The Moore Pavilion was a four-bed ward, which included verandah accommodation, allowing patients access to the health-giving aspects of fresh air and sunlight. The Meeks Pavilion was a surgery and operating theatre, with a pathological laboratory with a separate entrance. Featured in the Real Property Annual in 1918, it was a conservative brick building, with a simple gable roof, cement rendered quoining and an Edwardian Baroque feature arch fronting the operating theatre, which allowed the theatre to be top-lit.3 Despite this early hospital work and the proliferation of hospital projects in Australia from the late 1920s, the firm did only a handful of

The firm continued to use these two basic modes of design: a simple bungalow-based domestic idiom; and a neo-Baroque style, which was usually reserved for commercial and institutional designs. This split in architectural language between domestic and civic projects was not confined to the practice of Bates, Peebles & Smart. The

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3 ‘Henry Meeks Pavilion, Austin Hospital, Heidelberg’, Real Property Annual, 1918, p. 41.


1 Osborn McCutcheon (1899–1983). A portrait of McCutcheon soon after becoming a partner in 1926 2 First Church of Christ Scientist, 336 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne. Bates, Peebles & Smart, c. 1919–21. Cross-section through the church showing the theatre arrangement of the central meeting space, top-lit by a dome 3 View of the church at the corner of St Kilda Rd and Dorcas St

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hospital-related works up until World War II, including alterations and additions at the Tweddle Hospital for Babies, Footscray (1929–33). The firm also undertook some commercial work. Emerging from the war, this work comprised mostly factory and warehouse commissions, including the Swallow & Ariell biscuit factory in Port Melbourne in 1920. These works were bread-and-butter projects to the firm and, while professionally competent, garnered no critical or popular attention.

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A new student: Osborn McCutcheon

4 C McPherson, ‘Biography of the life and career of Sir Osborn McCutcheon’, research report, Department of Architecture and Building, University of Melbourne, 1983, p. 5. 5 ‘Articles of apprenticeship’, 1 July 1918, between Walter Bothwell McCutcheon, Walter Osborn McCutcheon and Messrs Bates, Peebles & Smart, Bates Smart Archives. 6 McPherson, p. 8.

In 1918, before it was clear that the war would soon end, Bates, Peebles & Smart took on a new articled pupil. This pupil would eventually become the leading partner of the firm and would be responsible for reinventing the firm’s reputation. Osborn McCutcheon had originally considered doing medicine, but halfway through his final year of school in 1916 decided on architecture as his future career. Colin McPherson suggests that it was McCutcheon’s prize-winning designs for school certificates that prompted the interest in architecture, however this interest in drawing would have been greatly enhanced by the concurrent construction of his uncle’s new house in Kew.4 In 1917, on completing his secondary education, McCutcheon took lectures in architecture at the Working Men’s College. Such lectures were expected to be complementary to articled instruction in an architect’s office (and did not lead to an RVIA-recognised qualification), but McCutcheon had not yet

joined an office. He may have delayed taking up indenture because of the uncertainties of the war, with conscription referenda held in 1916 and 1917 (neither of which were successful). At that time there was not the pressure on young men from comfortably well-off families to settle on their future career immediately. Young Osborn was allowed the luxury of time to consider his choice of career. It was not until the middle of 1918 that McCutcheon was articled to a firm of architects. It is unlikely, given the family’s previous contact with Bates, Peebles & Smart, that Walter McCutcheon considered any other firm for his son. The articles of apprenticeship were dated 1 July 1918 and, for a premium of £200 (£50 a year, for four years), Bates, Peebles & Smart would instruct Osborn ‘in the profession of an architect’.5 As was usual, the agreement was a three-way contract between Osborn, his father and the architects. Walter undertook to feed, clothe and ‘provide him with all manner of necessities including medical attendance and care in sickness’, and Osborn was to attend the office between 9.30 am and 5.00 pm, ‘except such reasonable intervals as may be allowed to him for refreshment’. He was also to be allowed time to attend the Diploma of Architecture course at the University of Melbourne, the fees for which his father would pay. Osborn was not to wilfully damage or injure the architects or their property, embezzle their money or disclose ‘any secrets of the architects or

make known any business of the architects which may come to his knowledge’ and was to ‘acquit and demean himself as an honest and faithful apprentice’. This he did, as in July 1922 the articles were deemed to have been completed to the architects’ satisfaction. The formal agreement with the firm signalled a settling of McCutcheon into his chosen career path. Not only did he have an articled position, which he would attend for the next four years, but he was to undertake the Diploma of Architecture—the RVIA-recognised qualification. This switch from the Working Men’s College to the university indicated an increased level of seriousness to his pursuit of an architectural career—no longer was Osborn just getting a feel for architecture and what it might entail through the comparatively disorganised Working Men’s College course. Set on track to become an architect, why then McCutcheon chose to enlist with the AIF in early October 1918 is unclear. He had not rushed to enlist when he turned eighteen nor had he been called up, as the conscription bills had failed in Australia. By then, the war was turning in favour of the British and, during the second half of September, troops in Europe were successfully attacking and breaking the Hindenburg line. By 1 October, they were pounding the last of the German trenches and both Germany and Turkey were seeking truces. Whatever McCutcheon’s motivation for enlistment, peace was declared less than six weeks later and McCutcheon was discharged on Christmas-eve 1918, without seeing action.6


DESIGNED REINVENTION 1918 – 45

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McCutcheon’s architectural education, while more serious than attending a few lectures, was mostly to be had within the context of a working office. Articled students learnt mostly through practice, observation and contribution to the firm’s work. The processes of creating and documenting a building were then far different. Although the drawings were painstakingly drawn and coloured and there were few methods of copying, except, of course, by hand, comparatively little time was spent on the design of the building. The sketch plan held less importance and, while the office may have done numerous details, the contract plans were often limited to a few sheets (often just one if it were a house). Articled students spent their time assisting on projects, drawing details and tracing, but there was also time for office games, both within the office and with others (something that was a long tradition in architecture).7 Such a relaxed pace of learning and working was to soon fade away, especially as architectural education increasingly became the province of the universities and technical colleges.

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7 Demaine, pp. 20–1; and McPherson, p. 8. 8 This commission may have been the result of a competition. Brief histories of the firm written late in the 1930s noted the First Church of Christ Scientist to have been awarded first prize in an open competition. See (attrib. H Dumsday), ‘The firm’s history’, typewritten paper, c. 1936, Bates Smart Archives. 9 ‘First Church of Christ Scientist, 336 St Kilda Road, South Melbourne’, M Lewis (ed.), Victorian Churches: Their Origins, Their Story and Their Architecture, National Trust of Australia (Victoria), Melbourne, 1991, p. 87. 10 ‘First Church of Christ Scientist, 336 St Kilda Road, South Melbourne’, p. 87.

The cessation of hostilities in Europe did not return the architecture profession nor Australian society to prewar normality immediately. For Bates, Peebles and Smart the pace of work picked up quickly with the commissioning of much alteration and new work in 1918 and 1919 as Melbourne experienced a minor building boom after the war. Slowly the office swelled again to its prewar size as the articled students, Bob Demaine, Alec Hall and Osborn McCutcheon, returned from service.

First Church of Christ Scientist The firm would land a key commission soon after World War I, the First Church of Christ Scientist in St Kilda Road, Melbourne (c. 1919 – c. 1921). This was a large building on a prominent site.8 Built for the Americanfounded sect that followed the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, the church was a Baroque Revival design that used elements of the Neo-Grèc, Byzantine and Greek Revival in its detail.9 Like other denominations that centred on preaching, the First Church of Christ Scientist used a flat-floored theatre arrangement. A stage was the focus of services, rather than an altar, and there were no depictions or iconography of religious figures at all, in accordance with the beliefs of the church. The main meeting space was on the first floor, accessed from stairs flanking the space (or the hydraulic lift) and was top-lit by a dome (a feature which was also part of the mother church in Boston). The whole effect was to place emphasis on the community of the congregation. A large Sunday-school, with an adjoining library, was on the lower floor and had its own separate entrance. The design, said to be principally that of Harold Dumsday,10 was a carefully executed example of the firm’s civic mode, but its blocky massing and conservative style won it few accolades.

Key clients The firm had several major clients during this time, including the Australian Mutual Provident Society (AMP), the Buckley & Nunn department store, and the Bank

1 Competition design, Methodist Church, Canberra. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1926. The winning competition design. Elevation drawing showing the church and Sunday-school 2 Australian Mutual Provident (AMP) House, 419–429 Collins St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1926–31. Arched entrance study 3 Alternative study, indicating placement of the company’s sculptural motifs and decoration 4 Britannic House, London. Edwin Lutyens, 1925. Extensively studied by McCutcheon on his overseas study tour, the building was of great influence in the design of AMP House, Melbourne

of Victoria. All of these clients had buildings on multiple sites, thus ensuring a steady stream of work and, potentially, a new building. For Buckley & Nunn, whose buildings on Bourke Street had been done by the firm between 1910 and 1912, Bates, Peebles & Smart undertook alterations and built a new factory on Little Bourke Street in the early 1920s. The firm also had associations with assurance companies that had been in place for a number of years and they were contracted by the National Mutual Life Association and the National Trustees Executor & Agency Co. to oversee work being undertaken by other architects on properties owned or mortgaged to such companies. The firm also completed a range of commercial commissions, including: factory premises for Messrs Davies & Doery in Flinders Lane (1922 and 1926); a factory in Sturt Street, South Melbourne (1923) for the Standard Box Manufacturing Co.; and a number of projects for the Young Women’s Christian Association, particularly at their Seaford site between 1919 and 1927. Much of this work was conservative in nature and few of the buildings had any sort of public prominence either through their design or siting. The firm had plenty of work in the early 1920s, but much of it was routine or ordinary and unlikely to help pull the firm out of its design doldrums. Around them, the architectural profession in Melbourne was beginning to undergo serious change. The establishment of the Diploma of Architecture at the University of Melbourne, as well as the Architectural Atelier in 1919, and the advent of formal registration for


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architects in Victoria in 1922 indicated a profession seeking to formalise itself. Offices too were undergoing change, with a more businesslike attitude and stricter organisation. A number of the brightest young architects had returned from the war to begin their own practices in Melbourne, many having passed through the Architectural Association in London. Amongst these were Arthur Stephenson and Leighton Irwin (who had worked, prior to enlisting with the AIF, with Bates, Peebles & Smart). They brought with them new design, technological and organisational skills and it was not long before the new firms of Stephenson & Meldrum and Irwin & Stevenson were proving to be a serious threat to the established client base of older firms and securing major new clients, such as hospitals. Norman Peebles, who had been unwell for some time, retired from Bates, Peebles & Smart in 1922 due to ill-health and died the following year. Instead of seeking a new partner—perhaps desirable, as Peebles had been their chief design architect—the firm became Bates & Smart. In hindsight, the firm desperately needed new design talent. Although both Bates and Dumsday designed buildings, the results were nothing special and the firm was rapidly losing the students who should have provided the next generation of architects for the firm. Whether it was a lack of opportunity for partnership, or that the firm seemed terminally in decline hence prompting an exodus, the firm lost a number of its

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brightest employees around this time. Both Alec Hall and Bob Demaine had completed their articles with the firm after demobilisation by 1921, and both had departed for other situations by 1923. Hall set up on his own (but was later to be a partner with Frank Stapley) and Demaine joined the fledgling firm of Stephenson & Meldrum. Fred Sale, noted by Demaine as a ‘draughtsman of great talent’,11 also left the firm to form a partnership with Jack Keage. Osborn McCutcheon, having completed his articles in 1922, departed to travel overseas, which he was to do for more than three years. The vastly depleted firm, with its ageing senior partner (and only architect) EA Bates, attracted little new work in the years that followed. While projects that had been ongoing from previous years continued, the firm undertook only a handful of new buildings between 1924 and 1926, including a few houses and some work in country Victoria for AMP. From all appearances, the firm was on the brink of collapse. McCutcheon had been a brilliant student, both in the office and at the university, where he sailed through his subjects without difficulty.12 He had departed for the United States soon after the completion of his articles with the intention of gaining some experience of advances in design and technology.13 His grand tour was to take in the United States, Britain and Europe over a period of some three-and-a-half years. Arriving in San Francisco, McCutcheon obtained employment with one of the city’s

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leading firms, Bakewell & Brown. Bakewell & Brown had been architects for the BeauxArts styled San Francisco City Hall (1912–15) and they were among California’s major domestic architects of the 1920s. McCutcheon spent around eighteen months in the employment of Bakewell & Brown, during which time he met many of San Francisco’s notable architects, including Willis Polk and Bernard Maybeck.14

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Joined by his parents, McCutcheon travelled across the United States by car, before leaving for Britain. In London, he obtained employment with Yeates, Cooke & Barbershire, where he spent a further year, before travelling extensively on the Continent. Whilst in London, McCutcheon did not take the opportunity to study at the Architectural Association or apply to the Royal Institute of British Architects for membership. But he did spend time in the RIBA library, compiling a list of buildings by Edwin Lutyens, and of which he toured a large number just before leaving England. Almost all of 1925 was spent in Europe, with McCutcheon exploring France, Spain and Italy by car.15 Of all this experience, it appears that McCutcheon was most interested by the work of Lutyens and the Spanish Mission and Spanish Colonial styles of the Californians, as it was the geometry and details of Lutyens and the stripped-back qualities of the Spanish Mission that significantly influenced his domestic work after his return to Australia. 11 Demaine, p. 21. 12 McCutcheon did not fail a single subject during his diploma study—a rare feat amongst architecture students of the time at the university. 13 McPherson, p. 9. 14 McPherson, p. 9. 15 McPherson, p. 10.


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1 Australian Mutual Provident (AMP) House, 419–429 Collins St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1926–31. The original design, with simple, modern massing and deep entablature in Renaissance Revival style 2 Early design studies by McCutcheon for the composition and design of the building 3 Another design study with the entrance at the recessed corner of the building below an additional featured tower

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Bates, Smart & McCutcheon It is not clear exactly when McCutcheon returned from his sojourn overseas, but a new deed of partnership was drawn up between Bates, Smart and McCutcheon and signed on 18 January 1926. The list of ongoing projects at the time of the new deed showed a firm with only a handful of buildings underway. McCutcheon, the brilliant student, well-connected gentleman and well-travelled architect, must have seemed an attractive option as a partner. McCutcheon was however a young architect without extensive experience—indeed he had never worked for another architect in Melbourne. The other ‘young’ architects going into partnership in Melbourne at the time were nearly ten years McCutcheon’s senior (and with much greater experience), and many others would not form partnerships until the late 1930s, including Bob Demaine and John Scarborough. The new partnership must have been attractive to both sides. However, it was also a gamble. McCutcheon’s precociousness needed to translate into architectural maturity for the firm to get back on its feet, let alone flourish. Work did not immediately pick up for the firm—McCutcheon’s income was actually negative for a few years16—although there were signs of improvement through 1926 and 1927. Some entertainment-based work came Bates, Smart & McCutcheon’s way, including additions to the Hippodrome at Wirth’s Park near Princes Bridge and the nearby Trocadero dance hall. For the latter, the firm designed a mock windmill to mark the entrance and the dance hall became

known thenceforth as the Green Mill. Further work for Wirth Bros and for Hoyts’s cinemas was done over succeeding years, but this was hardly the serious architecture with which the firm had been associated in the past. Clearly, the firm’s beleaguered reputation was not attracting the clients it wanted. To rebuild its client base, new strategies would need to be devised: the first was to actively pursue commissions through competition; and the second was to apply a new attitude and method to the design of buildings.

Church competition, Canberra Bates, Smart & McCutcheon (BSM) was to win the first of a series of competitions in 1926, with their design for the new Methodist church in Canberra. The firm had prepared two designs, both including a large church, Sunday-school and sundry accommodation. The first was a Spanish Mission design and was clearly McCutcheon’s preference as the massing remained the same for both schemes, retaining the comparatively low-pitched gable of the Spanish Mission. This Spanish Mission scheme also had carefully rendered perspectives, while the second scheme, a Gothic Revival design, did not. This latter design was, like the first, an austere composition and possessed a similarly Modern cast. The Gothic Revival was clearly closer to the Canberra Methodists’ heart, as it was the successful submission. This strategic win, in the nation’s capital just prior to parliament’s occupation of its new home, should have generated publicity, prominence and praise for the firm. Instead, with the costs estimated at some £35 000—

a sum far beyond the fundraising capabilities of the parish at the time—the project was delayed and ultimately never built. In 1927, a less ambitious project was built to house the congregation, on another site and by another architect, for £3000.17

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Designed reinvention McCutcheon had taken over Norman Peebles’s position in the firm as chief design architect and he set about trying to improve the quality of the designs emanating from the firm. In this task, he had two assistants, one of whom was a very competent English draftsman, HG Egremont, and the other, during 1927, was Brian Lewis (later the first Chair of Architecture at the University of Melbourne). Mundane projects were given more design attention. For instance, the façade of a warehouse for the British Australian Tobacco Co. in Swanston Street was rendered in an Egyptian style.18 McCutcheon was also to attract clients to the firm. Amongst these was McCutcheon’s old school, Wesley College, for whom the firm did additions between 1927 and 1928. The contact was not to last. With the large donations made to the school by the Nicholas family in the 1930s, Harry Norris was engaged instead as the school’s architect. McCutcheon also took on work for members of his family, with one of the first houses he did with BSM for his maternal aunt, Frances Osborne. Her Orrong Road house was a Spanish Mission design with wrought iron detailing and round-headed windows. A gated courtyard,

16 McPherson, p. 19. 17 K Charlton, Federal Capital Architecture: Canberra 1911–1939, National Trust of Australia (ACT), Canberra, 1984, p. 54. 18 McPherson, p. 13.


1 Australian Mutual Provident (AMP) House, 419–429 Collins St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1926–31. Sketch design of the large ground-floor chamber 2 The building was completed with a recast Modernist appearance. The removal of the deep entablature gives a sense that the building is taller than its eight storeys

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a feature that McCutcheon was to frequently use in other domestic designs, mediated the entrance. He would later design a house for his cousin, Paul McCutcheon, and would undertake an increasing number of important house commissions up to World War II.

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In the later 1920s, the number of projects undertaken by the firm expanded significantly, with a range of domestic and commercial works underway. The firm had been a long time between large publicly significant projects, the last being the First Church of Christ Scientist (c. 1919–21). However, they would design several key buildings in the next decade that would attract considerable attention. The first of those was the new AMP building on the corner of Market and Collins streets in Melbourne, the design of which was begun early in 1928.

AMP Building 19 McPherson, p. 15. 20 McPherson, p. 16. McPherson, though citing Brian Lewis, claims the building contract had already been signed and the stone ordered when McCutcheon changed his design for AMP because of the recent publication of the Lutyens building. A review of Britannic House appeared in the Architectural Review in May 1925, but AMP could not have been designed before 1927. Although McCutcheon’s appreciation for the Lutyens building may have manifested itself in AMP, the changes to the design must have been based more in dissatisfaction with the original concept than the sudden arrival of a published building to emulate. For the Lutyens design, see ‘Britannic House, London’, Architectural Review, LVII, May 1925, pp. 185–201. 21 McPherson, p. 17; and JA Allan, ‘The AMP building, Melbourne’, Australian Builder, December 1950, p. 676. 22 Allan, p. 676.

Bates, Smart & McCutcheon had a long association with the Australian Mutual Provident Society, apparently begun when Hyndman & Bates supervised the construction of AMP’s first Melbourne building, designed by Sydney’s Sulman & Power, around 1904. Since that time, the firm had designed the various Victorian offices of the society, undertaking many alterations and new buildings in country towns, including Horsham (1915–16), Geelong (1918), Wangaratta (1924–25) and Maryborough (1925–27). When AMP decided in 1927 to replace its Melbourne

headquarters, it held a limited competition amongst six firms,19 with BSM’s restrained Renaissance Revival design declared the winner. BSM’s long history with AMP must have held them in good stead with the client (indeed BSM had arranged the purchase of the new site and the demolition of the buildings on it before the competition was held), but also given them an understanding of the ideals that AMP wished to promote through its new public face. The original design was a conservative commercial palazzo, with a heavily rusticated base, quoined shaft and attic, surmounted by a deep entablature. In its overall composition, it was not unlike Harry Norris’s recently completed Nicholas building (1925–26). The commercial palazzo, although a conservative treatment of an office building, was very popular amongst city buildings in the 1920s. However, between the original competition design and the final built design, McCutcheon made a number of important variations. Perhaps knowing that the building was of key importance to the firm’s prominence in Melbourne architecture, McCutcheon recast the design towards a more modern look, while still retaining details of the Renaissance Revival. One of the first elements to go was the deep entablature, replaced by a more restrained cornice, broken by the piers that supported it and crowned by a squat block of masonry. McCutcheon was also influenced by a recent building designed by Edwin Lutyens: Britannic House (1925) in London.20 Lutyens had used deeply inscribed banded rustication and this feature was also used in the window

surrounds to suggest quoins and voussoirs in the ashlar masonry. McCutcheon used this device in a similar way, both on the base and window surrounds in the central panel of AMP’s tripartite façade. McCutcheon incorporated a mannerist window detail, also featured in Britannic House, to anchor the four corners of the façade. Lutyens had capped his building with a mansard roof, which sat upon an ornate giant order. Yet McCutcheon, having already rejected the dominant cornice, and presumably Lutyens’s more decorative solution, instead continued the plain masonry to the top of the building. The effect gives a sense that the building is taller than its eight storeys and a rather distant cousin to American skyscraper designs. AMP included some innovations in its servicing, particularly the first instance of radiant panel heating in Australia. This system, designed by Smart, was based on developments in England, although unfortunately the panels were located behind the plastered ceiling, rather than at floor level.21 Smart also designed massive steel beams to span the large ground floor chamber, to enable a columnfree space. The building coupled modern construction methods of reinforced concrete and steel, with a conservative overlay— freestone and granite cladding, bronze doors and blackwood panelling. Even the counters in the main chamber followed this, being built of concrete and brick, but clad in ‘yellow-tinted marble with bronze grilles above’.22


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1 Australian Mutual Provident (AMP) House, 419–429 Collins St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1926–31. Interior of the corporate dining room 2 The interior lift lobby 3 The exquisite detail and quality of the interior extended throughout, including the boardroom with its carved blackwood panelling and details 4 The completed main chamber. Massive steel beams enabled a column free space. The building was awarded the RVIA Street Architecture Medal in 1932

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The care and attention that McCutcheon and Smart had paid to the design of this building certainly paid off. On its completion in 1931, the Journal of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects (RVIAJ) described the building as ‘an individual and rather fresh interpretation of the conservative theme’, despite making a number of criticisms of the design.23 It was elsewhere described as being solid, imparting a feeling of security that reflected the strength of AMP and that the building was ‘regarded as an unusually fine example of sincerity in architecture’.24 The culmination of this praise was the award of the RVIA’s 1932 Street Architecture Medal. The prize, the Melbourne profession’s most prestigious even though only in its fourth year, was awarded to excellent examples of civic (or street) architecture that had been built within the previous three years. The award choices reflected 1920s ideas of good architecture, with traditional formulae and language still predominant. The win by AMP signalled McCutcheon’s role in reinvigorating the practice, and represented a triumphal turnaround for the firm. The conservative Renaissance Revival design of the Melbourne AMP office evidently pleased the client, as BSM went on to design the firm’s new building in Sale in 1929. It too was a restrained Classical design, which was described as being ‘designed in a bold and dignified type of modern Renaissance. Full height detached columns … give an appearance of considerable depth and solidity to this façade’.25 The simply massed building, with

its pared-down details, was capped with a hipped cordova tile roof and the statuary group that was the society’s emblem. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon’s other major client at this time was the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney (CBC). Despite McCutcheon’s link to the bank (his grandfather had at one time been managing director of the bank in Melbourne),26 the firm had previously undertaken work for the Bank of Victoria, which was taken over by the CBC in 1928. Between 1928 and 1930, BSM undertook a large amount of work for the bank, renovating a number of branches in the city and suburbs, as well as work on bank-owned properties such as shops and factories. This work included the entire rebuilding of the Collins Street headquarters of the bank in Melbourne, behind the nineteenth-century façade, which was seen to be a fine example of Renaissance Revival. The new building behind, which ran the entire block from Collins Street to Flinders Lane, was to be a modern office for the bank, incorporating a main banking chamber, for which ‘a fine architectural effect will be obtained by a double row of marble columns, ornamental walls and [a] richly coffered ceiling’.27 In order to maintain banking services during construction, the project was done in stages, something that was repeated when it was replaced in the 1970s with another new bank building designed by BSM.

Depression Work dropped off dramatically around 1929 with the onset of the Great Depression. The firm was in a reasonable position to survive

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an economic downturn, with substantial works for AMP and CBC still underway. A few clients were in a position to commission houses and these formed almost the only new projects taken on by the firm between 1930 and 1932. The Depression, as it did for most architectural firms in Melbourne, marked a point of distinct change for BSM, not least of which was due to the death of Edward Bates, at the age of sixty-two, in 1931. Bates, for so long the figurehead of the firm, past president of the RVIA and chair of the Architects Registration Board of Victoria from its inception until his death, was a significant loss to the firm. It required McCutcheon to take on Bates’s role as well as his own, but it also allowed much-needed change to occur. Two tasks needed immediate attention: the client base and the management of the office. With little work in the office during the Depression, the opportunity was taken to reorganise, ‘updating filing and office administration systems in preparation for the years that would follow’.28 By this stage, the office was not a large one compared to other practices in Melbourne; in fact it seemed to have shrunk from its pre-World War I size. Whereas other firms had expanded, taking on numbers of registered architects, typists and, in the largest firms, specialist librarians, BSM had remained a small, close-knit office, heavily dependent on the partners and their various skills.29 Despite BSM’s undoubted success with the AMP building, without a program of expansion, the firm could not possibly hope to compete with other offices or capitalise fully its newly found momentum.

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23 ‘The new AMP building, Melbourne’, Journal of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects (RVIAJ), XXIX, 4, September 1931, pp. 82–97. 24 ‘Street architecture: value of RVIA competition’, Age, 28 August 1934, Bates Smart Archives. 25 ‘Australian Mutual Provident Society: new branch premises at Sale’, letter file 37/1, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Collection, acc. no. 68/13, University of Melbourne Archives. 26 McPherson, p. 2. 27 Untitled description of Commercial Banking Company of Sydney premises, Collins St, Melbourne, letter file 50/1, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Collection, acc. no. 68/13, University of Melbourne Archives. 28 McPherson, p. 19. 29 Edward Bates, until his death, handled almost all the correspondence. On the rare occasions when Charles Smart had a personal interest in the project or Harold Dumsday penned the letter, they noted through initials their authorship. It appears as though McCutcheon took on Bates’s role, and did not note authorship, after 1931. This practice continued until at least 1936 and probably until World War II. It appears as though not a single drawing noted its draftsman and rarely its date or drawing number in the project series in the interwar period. This was encouraged in no small part by the lack of a standardised title block on each drawing, something that was not to appear until after World War II.


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McCutcheon would manage to cultivate a new client base and continue to enter competitions, winning a number and being well placed in others and these strategies would ensure the firm’s growing reputation. BSM’s attention to detail, both in the building’s design and the client’s requirements, would result in a series of finely executed projects that, while not necessarily at the cutting edge of architectural design, strove for good design while respecting the client’s wishes. However Smart’s and also McCutcheon’s relative lack of experience of other architectural offices meant that their reorganisation of the office procedures would not yet bring them fully up to date.

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30 ‘List of members to June 1929’, Journal of the Victorian Architectural Students Society of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, IV, III, September 1929, p. 31. 31 R Tonkin, ‘Buckley & Nunn’, Architect, 3, 44, November 1976, p. 19. 32 ‘RVIA Street Architecture Medal, year 1934: report of the examining jury’, RVIAJ, XXXII, 4, 1934, p. 73; also ‘Street architecture: value of RVIA competition’, Age, 28 August 1934, Bates Smart Archives.

As the firm had done with Peebles’s retirement, it did not immediately seek a new partner to join on Bates’s death. Instead, the firm retained the existing title, which was to remain in place until the firm became Bates Smart in 1995. It was perhaps because of the lack of any suitable candidate. The firm took on few students between the wars, Allan Love being an exception in the late 1920s.30 Love did not stay (becoming instead a partner in Scarborough, Robertson & Love in 1936) and the Depression made it difficult to take on new students. Just as the firm had needed McCutcheon in the 1920s, BSM would soon need to bring in new blood. McCutcheon had taken on the post of director of the School of Architecture at the Melbourne Technical College in 1930, a part-time position he was to hold until 1939. Throughout the 1930s he would become

increasingly involved in the profession, including membership of the RVIA Council, 1930–45; RVIA Honorary Secretary, 1933–39; RVIA President, 1940–42; membership of the RVIA Board of Architectural Education, 1933–42 and 1953–57; and President of the Building Industry Congress, 1934–36.

Buckley & Nunn The commission for AMP had helped to sustain the firm through the Depression. Buckley & Nunn similarly provided ongoing work. From 1929, BSM undertook extensive internal remodelling of the interior of the existing Bourke Street buildings, including adding two floors and installing the elegant and modern black glass and chrome lifts in the western building. In the same year, Buckley & Nunn purchased the building next door, 294 Bourke Street, from Hugo Wertheim Pty Ltd. The store occupied Wertheim’s for a number of years, before deciding in 1933 to almost completely remodel the building into a specialist men’s store. While the side walls would be retained, the floors would be moved to be level with the existing Buckley & Nunn buildings and the façade would be entirely reconstructed.31 As they had for all previous works, BSM was again commissioned for the new work. Perhaps Buckley & Nunn had been particularly taken with the jazz Moderne interior that BSM had designed a few years earlier, as the men’s store was strikingly rendered in black faience with bold chevron mouldings and three decorative panels depicting the Buckley’s man-about-town

in different guises. It was as though the language of the interior was inverted to become the façade of the building. The overall arrangement of the façade—a central decorative panel (in this case almost entirely glazed) around which a solid frame (a stylised column and beam) was placed— was a common façade arrangement amongst modern Melbourne buildings of the time. However the bold use of colour and austere detailing set the building apart from much contemporary work. Only Harry Norris’s bright blue Majorca building in Flinders Lane (1928–29) could compare to the use of colour in the men’s store, yet even its whimsical Spanish detailing was nowhere near as progressive as the crisp jazz styling of Buckley & Nunn. Buckley & Nunn men’s store won the RVIA Street Architecture Medal in 1934, the second win for BSM, who were the first firm to gain two of the prizes. The design was also the first Street Architecture Medal winner that was determinedly progressive in its design. The jury commended the building’s ‘note of colour, sparingly and judiciously employed’ and stated that: Whilst being a distinct departure from the ‘traditional’ and thus following the modern trend in design and thought, the façade gives evidence not only of good taste and suitability of purpose, but also an appreciation of those subtle and elusive qualities—dignity and individuality.32


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1 Commercial Banking Company of Sydney (CBC), corner Wellington and Victoria streets, Kerang, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1929–30. One of the many country branches the firm completed for CBC from 1928 to 1930 2 Buckley & Nunn, 294–312 Bourke St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1933. A postcard produced at the time featuring the completed men’s store adjacent to the original store building 3 Buckley & Nunn, alterations and additions, 306–312 Bourke St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1929. Drawing showing the addition of the two new floors to the building

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1 Buckley & Nunn, men’s store, 294 Bourke St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1933. The completed façade was strikingly rendered in black faience with bold chevron mouldings and three decorative panels featuring the Buckley’s man-about-town in different guises 2 Buckley & Nunn, alterations and additions, 306–312 Bourke St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1929. The remodelled entrance and showcases 3 Buckley & Nunn, men’s store, 294 Bourke St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1933. The Bourke St entrance to the store 4 Buckley & Nunn, alterations and additions, 306–312 Bourke St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1929. The new store lifts included elegant and modern black glass and chrome finishes

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1 Howard G Balding house, Moonga Rd, Toorak, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1935. The enclosed front garden as a courtyard to the house. Bay and French windows maximised natural light and allowed access to random paving that fringed the house within the courtyard 2 Detail of stepped entrance 3 Restrained interior design of the living and dining rooms reflected the good taste of the house’s architects and clients 4 Frank Watts house, Streeton Cres, Ivanhoe, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1934–37. West elevation drawing 4

1930s houses Despite these large and well-received projects, BSM’s mainstay remained domestic projects and, in the 1930s, the firm designed a series of houses for prominent clients. The design of these houses owed much to the West Coast domestic architecture that McCutcheon had seen and admired (and presumably also followed in journals), the work of Edwin Lutyens and, particularly, the Colonial Revival. In short, the houses were very much within the ‘Rule of Taste’: ‘[a] desire for architectural discipline, grace, balance, reserve, simplicity … [and] affinity for the house in the landscape’.33 A consistent palette was utilised: brick walls (often painted white), multi-paned windows and tiled roofs with carefully placed embellishments of Spanish wrought iron work, feature lozenge or round windows and brick grilles. Garden walls, steps, pergolas and courtyards were also used to good effect. As shadow lines had been important in some of the larger work, many of the details were employed to create opportunities for strong shadow lines, shadows being one of the few acceptable forms of bold ‘decoration’ in Modern architecture. Although a number of houses had been designed and built from the late 1920s and through the Depression, the finest examples were designed from 1934 onwards, beginning with the Frank Watts house in Ivanhoe. Like Donald Swanson, the Watts brothers were builders with whom BSM had a good working relationship, so much so that the firm was commissioned to design

their respective homes. The Frank Watts house was a large single-storey design of simple gable forms, which incorporated Spanish and Colonial Revival details, most notably a pepper pot ventilator tower over the carriageway. The long L-shaped arrangement of the plan formed a semi-enclosed private area, overlooked by a terrace and French windows to the sunroom. The entire composition was the epitome of restrained, ageless, good taste. A series of houses would follow, all undertaken with the same degree of care and attention to detail. As a result, the houses were expensive to design and expensive to build, and were known in the firm as ‘specials’.34 It is not surprising that the firm would increasingly decline to undertake such projects after World War II when their focus had shifted to commercial work and straitened times made fine materials, expansive plans and intricate design work a standard impossible to maintain.35 The houses built by the firm in the late 1930s included the Howard G Balding house, Moonga Road, Toorak, 1935 (the second house the firm had undertaken for this client); St Mirins, the James Cook house, Baxter, 1935 (Cook had married McCutcheon’s cousin); the John Grimwade house, St Georges Road, Toorak, 1937 (BSM also did alternations to the Russell Grimwade house in 1936); the EA Watts house, Quandolan Close, North Ivanhoe (1938); the JW Lee Atkinson house, Orrong Road, Toorak (1938); JO Manton house, St Georges Road, Toorak (1939); and the celebrated James Shackell house, St Georges Road, Toorak (1940).

The Balding house was a two-storey design dominated by a pyramid roof form at the apex of which was the main chimney. On a relatively tight urban site that faced west, the design maximised northerly aspect and family privacy by enclosing the front garden as a courtyard. The sloping site was used to its best advantage, with the entrance and garage, courtyard and rear garden stepping gracefully down and around the house. Bay and French windows on the ground floor allowed maximum light into the restrained interior and access to the random paving that fringed the house within the courtyard. The Lee Atkinson house, also on a constrained urban site, was similar to the Balding design. It used the same elements of enclosed front-yard, courtyard surround, random paving and a protected rear garden, applied to a restrained and simply massed two-storey house. Subtle details were different: the multi-panelled windows had a more modern, horizontal emphasis and the eaves were replaced by a two-part parapet. St Mirins owed more to the Frank Watts house than either the Balding or Lee Atkinson houses. Set on a large piece of land, the design adopted a single-storey spreading form that cranked around on itself to form a protected terrace at the rear. McCutcheon again used a carriageway to further delineate between the public and private sides of the house. Delicate brick details evoked Classical details, with bands of bricks slightly recessed on the building’s corners to suggest quoins and a recessed pattern under the eaves line to suggest dentils.

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33 C Hamann, ‘Paths of beauty: the afterlife of Australian colonial architecture, part 1’, Transition, 26, 1988, pp. 31–2. 34 McPherson, p. 22. 35 McPherson, p. 23


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1 JW Lee Atkinson house, Orrong Rd, Toorak, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1938. Using the same elements as the Balding house, the Lee Atkinson house made use of an enclosed front garden and courtyard surround. Detailing gave a more horizontal emphasis to the multi-panelled windows and two-part parapet 2 The rich interior of the den with wood panelling to the walls and simple but sophisticated furnishings 3 James Shackell house, St Georges Rd, Toorak, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1940. The modern, but formal house was exquisitely detailed. The entrance porch featured custom designed door screen and signatured recessed entrance mat 4 The street faรงade to the house, fine horizontal lines to the brickwork detailing on a block fronted mass, flanked by garden walls to form private outdoor spaces

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The group of finely worked houses reached its prewar zenith in the James Shackell house. A block-fronted mass faced the street, flanked by garden walls that shielded the more private sides of the house. Fine horizontal lines in the brickwork denoted parapet and base to the building while precisely incised windows in a not-quite regular pattern broke up the façade in a clearly functional manner. Colonial or Georgian detailing was still the prime generator of the design, but such references were minimised in the expanse of an unadorned wall. The parapeted block was turned back to face the rear garden to create a sheltered terrace, but the bulk of the rear façade had the hipped roof coming down to eaves, creating a more intimate and welcoming aspect. Most of the first-floor windows were shuttered, the shutter louvres forming a design motif that was repeated in the internal Venetian blinds in the ground floor windows and between the coupled pergola posts on the rear terrace. The rear garden stepped down in a series of gradually less formal terraces. Modern, yet formal, the Shackell house was a meticulously detailed design within its bold forms. Within the context of the late 1930s, these houses stepped a fine line between Modernism and tradition. This was not the radical Modernism that was subsequently greatly admired. BSM instead sought progression within a well-mannered language. Their considered approach to domestic projects found favour with clients, but the coming war would spell an end to such careful work. The sense of a new era after World War II swept away any

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sense of seeking architectural evolution through the frame of past styles or mediation between the traditional and progressive.

Second Church of Christ Scientist Early in 1936, BSM was commissioned to design a church in Camberwell for the second established congregation of Christian Scientists in Melbourne. McCutcheon was to derive much pleasure from this project as it offered ‘an opportunity to work with clients who wanted good modern architecture’ and that they ... held an attitude which, happily, was appropriate for a church which had itself discarded much of the trapping of the older Christian faiths and had accepted in other parts of the world a fresh interpretation of what a church might be, and which lent such emphasis to light and joyousness and a spiritual calmness.36 The resultant design was an austere pile of interlocked boxes, clad in cream brick. Carefully detailed (McCutcheon called it ‘disciplined and controlled’ 37 ), the brickwork had deep raked joints and subtle recessed bands across the length of the façade. At ‘chosen points’, including doors, stairs and the organ screen, sculptural medallions, screens and metalwork were used to give focus and direction. The main auditorium, which was situated on the first floor with the Sunday-school underneath as it had been in the First Church in St Kilda Road, was similarly top-lit. However, instead of the usual dome, McCutcheon employed an industrial saw-toothed roof, concealed from beneath by giant curved louvres.

The design, with its bold forms and severe brickwork, owed much to the Dutch work of Willem Dudok, by then finding much favour in Australia as a new direction in Modernism, seen particularly in the celebrated MacRobertson Girls High School, South Melbourne, by Seabrook & Fildes (1934) and the soon-to-becompleted Heidelberg Town Hall, by Peck & Kempter and AC Leith & Bartlett (1937). In 1938, the design snared BSM their third Street Architecture Medal.

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The Street Architecture Medal jury saw the building as: ... illustrat[ing] the architectural dignity which may be achieved with simplicity of massing, well proportioned voids and the judicious placing of appropriate enrichment. Elimination rather than decoration tends to characterise accepted standard of good architecture today and this building reveals a particularly happy balance between these two considerations.38 For the first time, the Street Architecture Medal had been awarded to a building that was clearly associated with European Modernism. It was also significant that the Second Church of Christ Scientist was located on a suburban, rather than a city site as previous winners had been. The 1938 award marked a distinct change of focus for the Street Medal, as the buildings that followed it (Heidelberg Town Hall, 1939 and Sanitarium Health Food Company factory, Warburton, by EF Billson, 1940 would also have strong European Modernist inspiration).

36 O McCutcheon, ‘Second Church of Christ Scientist, Cookson Street, Camberwell’, memorandum, 21 March 1979, Bates Smart Archives. 37 McCutcheon. 38 ‘RVIA Street Architecture Medal: award for 1938’, RVIAJ, XXXVII, 2, April 1939, p. 37.


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1 Second Church of Christ Scientist, Cookson St, Camberwell, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1936–37. The main auditorium, with metalwork organ screen and giant curved louvres across the ceiling 2 The building from Cookson St is composed of series of austere interlocked boxes clad in cream brick. The building was awarded the RVIA Street Architecture Medal in 1938 3 The intricate metalwork detailing of the entrance doors and sculptured medallions

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1 Second Church of Christ Scientist, Cookson St, Camberwell, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1936–37. Stairwell detail, the spiritual calmness of the modern design was reflected throughout the building 2 Alan J Ralton (1906–1962). Ralton became a partner in 1937 3 Mutual Life and Citizens’ Assurance Co. (MLC), corner Martin Place and Castlereagh St, Sydney. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1937. Detail view of the corner tower

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The three Street Architecture awards that Bates, Smart & McCutcheon received were for markedly different commissions that shifted from the Modern Revivalist, through Moderne to Modern. Not only did they document the shifting architectural language of the time and of the firm, they marked the firm’s return to a leading position within Melbourne architecture.

A new partner: Alan Ralton Whilst these projects had been ongoing, the office had moved from its longestablished home of York Chambers in Queen Street in 1935 to a floor of the AMP building at 419 Collins Street. The firm’s occupation of buildings that it had designed was something that would occur again in the future and was a particularly good advertisement for prospective clients. The firm’s expansion would include taking on a new partner in Alan J Ralton in 1937. Ralton, who had been regarded as one of the brightest stars at the Architectural Atelier (he narrowly missed winning the prestigious Grice Medal for his work there, instead awarded to Cynthea Teague), had won the 1935 RVIA Robert & Ada Haddon Travelling Scholarship. In the same year, he received an award from the Carnegie Trust for research into architecture and the two awards supported travel abroad for a period of two years, including a year spent working in London offices. Ralton’s travelling companion on his departure from Melbourne was H Selwyn Bates, Edward Bates’s architect son and on the return journey, Ralton brought home his new wife, Frances—McCutcheon’s sister—whom he had married in England in 1935.

Ralton joined the partnership upon his return to Melbourne and added considerable weight to the design skills of the firm. It was not unusual for architectural partnerships to be made up of men connected in some way by blood or marriage, but it had been more common in the nineteenth and early twentieth century than in the late 1930s. However, the firm was to continue with its closely connected partnership until after World War II, with Selwyn Bates joining the firm after his return from an extended period of study and work in London in the late 1930s.

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emblem (they formed ‘capitals’ to the elongated piers running up the façade) and the effect was to give a greater prospect of anonymity for the building.40

MLC Building

A brochure celebrating the opening of the building stated that the ‘description [of the building] as the most beautiful and impressive structure in Australasia is fully warranted’.41 This eulogy was perhaps a little enthusiastic, as even McCutcheon saw the building as only partially escaping the ‘rigidity of previous architectural thinking’.42 Nevertheless, the entire structure and its internal fit-out were meticulously designed to encompass the client’s needs and ambitions.43

The firm’s brilliant success with large buildings continued into 1937. BSM had entered into the open competition for the new Mutual Life and Citizens Assurance Company’s (MLC) headquarters in Martin Place, Sydney, a competition that was to attract more than seventy entries. From a short-list of six, BSM’s entry, a vertically emphasised stripped Classical design with its corner tower (a feature insisted upon by the clients, but hated by McCutcheon 39 ) and prominent inclusion of MLC’s sculpted emblem, was declared the winning scheme. BSM’s previous work with assurance companies must have given the firm a clear idea as to what the client would want from a design, with the aspect of corporate identity being a necessary inclusion. The second-prize winners, Scarborough, Robertson & Love, had produced a very competent design, which had included comparatively small instances of MLC’s

As McCutcheon reached his prime as an architect, what is striking about this body of work is its diversity in terms of architectural language. The houses of this period formed a unified group in their tasteful neo-Georgian Modernism, but the civic commissions looked to other styles and movements for inspiration. Each of those projects responded directly to the needs and wishes of the client, producing buildings individually tailored to their situation. BSM evidently excelled in the level of service and detailed consideration of the design for each client, including the domestic commissions. What might be seen as a thread of conservatism in their design work was a reflection of their catering to client visions. Indeed, where the client was consciously progressive, such as the congregation of the Second Church of Christ Scientist, this was strongly reflected in the resultant building.

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39 McPherson, p. 24. 40 See ‘Sydney architectural competition: success of Victorian architects’, RVIAJ, XXXIV, 6, January 1937, pp. 179–81. 41 ‘Progress’, brochure on the MLC building, Sydney, c. 1938, Bates Smart Archives. 42 McCutcheon. 43 The assessors for the Sydney MLC building competition included prominent Melbourne architect Kingsley Henderson. Henderson apparently had or was to form some attachment to MLC, as A & K Henderson were responsible for the (now demolished) Melbourne MLC building on the corner of Collins and Elizabeth streets that was completed around 1938. The Melbourne MLC building was very similar in design to the Sydney building, although lacked the fine sense of detail that BSM invested into the façade. It is not clear which building was designed first, but it is likely that the Melbourne design just predated the Sydney competition, as Henderson is thought to have refused further MLC commissions so as not to compromise his firm’s long-standing business with MLC’s competitor, T & G. This conclusion has been drawn following information supplied by Peter Staughton, Melbourne. 44 Demaine, p. 21.


1 Mutual Life and Citizens’ Assurance Co. (MLC), corner Martin Place and Castlereagh St, Sydney. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1937. The winning competition design 2 The meticulously designed and detailed interior of the main chamber. The brochure produced to celebrate the building’s opening claimed it was ‘most beautiful and impressive structure in Australasia’

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1 Mutual Life and Citizens’ Assurance Co. (MLC), corner Martin Place and Castlereagh St, Sydney. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1937. The completed building 2 Managing director’s office 3 View of the lift lobby 4 Typical office floor of the building

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Smart and McCutcheon had built up the office from the doldrums of the mid-1920s to a robust and highly successful firm by the late 1930s. By all measures, BSM, with its three Street Architecture medals, several major competition wins and a string of wealthy domestic clients, was again one of the major architecture firms of Melbourne. Its expansion, signalled in part by Alan Ralton’s partnership, was beginning and the firm was poised to capitalise further on its success when World War II intervened.

Surviving the war (II) World War II, much like the Depression, had a devastating effect on many architectural practices. Although many managed to stay open for a year or two beyond 1939, soon the high rate of enlistment, dwindling work and the need to expend effort elsewhere took its toll. If these factors hadn’t already shut offices, war in the Pacific from 1942 proved the deciding factor. Just a handful of architectural practices continued during World War II. Mostly, they were engaged in work that made a direct contribution to the war effort, such as Stephenson & Turner who were building the Royal Melbourne Hospital, soon to be occupied by the United States Army, and the Yaralla Military Hospital in New South Wales. The United States, realising the strategic importance of a large land-mass in the southern Pacific, moved quickly to establish army and air bases from 1942. All of a sudden, the war, which had seemed so

distant, was threatening Australian shores and mobilisation was required quickly to thwart any designs Japan had on the country. The Americans brought with them their expertise, firstly, in the form of the engineering firm Sverdrup & Parcel, and then as the US Army Corps of Engineers. The Americans soon realised that they would need Australian help to construct the multitudes of buildings needed for the campaign and turned to Australian architects and engineers for assistance. The Corps of Engineers of the US Army Forces in Australia for the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) was created at the beginning of February 1942. The Architectural Section of the US Army Corps of Engineers commenced a week later when Osborn McCutcheon accepted the position of chief architect with the firm of Sverdrup & Parcel, then under contract as Architect-Engineer to the US Army. A drawing office was established in the top three floors of Temple Court in Collins Street, Melbourne’s architectural heartland. McCutcheon took with him Alan Ralton and, together with a group of talented architects who would come to later dominate the Melbourne architectural scene, they set about tackling the enormous task of sheltering personnel and aircraft, building hospitals and creating military bases in far-flung corners of Australia. Despite the departure of McCutcheon and Ralton to the US Army Corps of Engineers Architectural Section, BSM remained open under the direction of CP Smart. Joining them for the duration of the war was Bob

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Demaine, who had closed his own practice (established since 1937), and a student, Ailsa Trundle. BSM undertook the unusual task of attending to five other architectural practices during this time, supervising and completing work under other firms’ names to enable a continuation of practice.44 The war would mark another turning point for Bates, Smart & McCutcheon. Far from being a debilitating blow to the strengthened practice of the 1930s, it forged the firm into one of Australia’s leading postwar architectural practices. McCutcheon’s wartime experience gave him valuable insight into the highly organised administration of building work by the Corps of Engineers and exposed him to the ruthless rationalism demanded by wartime restriction. They were skills that were to become absolute requirements for the new postwar world.

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4 MODERATE MODERNISM 1945-77 Philip Goad

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Postwar reformation

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1 C McPherson, ‘Biography of the life and career of Sir Osborn McCutcheon’, research report, Department of Architecture and Building, University of Melbourne, 1983, p. 18. 2 Bates Smart Archives, 8.8.2 (1963), 6.6 (1962). 3 P Dalzell, ‘BSM—1945 onwards’, transcript of talk given at BSM, 5 May 1987, p. 1. 4 Dalzell, p. 1. 5 Stephens house, Nepean Highway, Portsea, Victoria (1946); McPherson house, Toorak and Myoora roads, Toorak, Victoria (1948); Raynes Dickson house, Lower Plenty, Victoria (1948). 6 R Boyd, Victorian Modern, Melbourne, 1947, pp. 67–8. 7 P Goad, ‘This is not a type: Robin Boyd’s “Victorian Type” and the expression of the Modern house c. 1933–1942’, Architecture Australia (Discourse V), June 1988, pp. 56–64. 8 There is some confusion over the correct spelling of the house name. Andrew McCutcheon spells it as ‘Kackeraboit’. Osborn McCutcheon spells it ‘Keraboite’ on the back of the photographs of the house during Walter Gropius’s visit. The spelling used in the text is that which appears on the contract drawings. 9 K McDonald, The New Australian Home, Melbourne, 1954; ‘House by Bates, Smart & McCutcheon’, Architecture and Arts, November 1957, p. 42. 10 G Serle, Robin Boyd: a Life, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1995, pp. 158–9.

When Osborn McCutcheon returned formally to the firm in late 1945, World War II was hardly over. Melbourne was recovering from rationing and wartime restrictions and the work of the office was modest in scale and output: a few single houses, some hospitals and town-planning projects. Yet by 1960, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon (BSM) would have become the pre-eminent corporate practice in postwar Australia, a status achieved primarily through expertise in the design of the curtain-walled skyscraper. The 1950s signalled a complete change to the structure of the firm and the nature of its architectural designs. The office reconfigured its entire working procedures and this would lead to major changes in Australian corporate architecture practice. McCutcheon was at the pinnacle of his career in the late 1950s, and held sway in terms of office direction and public profile until his retirement in 1977. However, the firm’s expansion after 1955 was such that design responsibility was evenly spread across its partners and associates. Between 1955 and 1977, the diversity of work in type and style handled by BSM was significant. The firm not only designed skyscrapers in almost every state capital city but also numerous hospitals, schools, university buildings and public buildings, including Australia’s first purpose-built embassy. Critical to that diversity and the success of the firm in this period was the embrace of two seemingly contradictory phenomena. The first was McCutcheon and Ralton’s prewar philosophy of an inclusive approach to the application of Modernist architectural

principles. The second was the effect of war with its enforced radicalisation of not just technique but also organisational procedures. It was a recipe that promised a design aesthetic of rigorous planning and constructional efficiency combined with the humanistic concern for materials and texture: a moderate Modernism.

Wartime lessons In January 1944, with war not yet over, Osborn McCutcheon resigned from his position in the US Army Corps of Engineers to take up an appointment as Controller of Planning and Chief Technical Adviser on Housing to the Australian Commonwealth Government.1 In doing so, he became a key figure in the newly created Commonwealth War Housing Trust which had grown out of the War Workers Housing Trust (WWHT) that had been formed earlier in 1941. McCutcheon had been deputy chairman of the WWHT. Its initial function had been to provide housing for Australian workers, especially munitions workers who were being relocated to newly decentralised factories. In his new administrative role, McCutcheon was responsible for establishing technical branches of the Commonwealth Government in all housing organisations, the formation of research sections, and the direction of technical policies. During his term with the Commonwealth body, all state housing authorities were reviewed and the first six War Housing Bulletins were produced. It was an invaluable experience that broadened McCutcheon’s newly earned organisational and management skills, and gave him exposure to future contacts

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in government and industry. When war ended in late 1945, McCutcheon resigned from the Housing Trust and rejoined BSM. Four years of wartime service, two of which he had been in charge of housing at a national level, had an enduring effect on McCutcheon personally, and also on the approach he would take to managing the firm in the following decades. It also had an effect on the manner in which the firm would approach the design, supervision and construction of its buildings. Almost immediately, in 1945, McCutcheon invited Phillip Pearce and Douglas Gardiner to join BSM as partners.2 Both men had worked closely with McCutcheon in the Architectural Section of the US Army Corps of Engineers. Pearce had graduated from the Architectural Atelier in the same year as McCutcheon, and had been a partner in Purnell & Pearce, the firm responsible for the Moderne-styled Southern Stand at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (1937). Gardiner hailed from Sydney and had worked there for architects Emil Sodersten and then Hennessy, Hennessy & Co. prior to his wartime service with McCutcheon. Work in the office increased during 1945 and soon the space in the AMP building at 419 Collins Street, which BSM had shared with Bob Demaine and his assistant Ailsa Trundle during the war, became too small.3 The firm took the bold step in 1946 of occupying the entire fifth floor of Yencken House at 390 Little Collins Street. McCutcheon masterminded the move and laboured endlessly over the design and construction management of the new office with its ‘radical open plan’.4


MODERATE MODERNISM 1945 – 77

1 Soldiers returning from war, march down Bourke Street as illustrated in The Argus, 1945 2 The cover of Wartime Housing bulletin, No. 6, produced by the War Workers’ Housing Trust of which Osborn McCutcheon had been deputy chairman. The bulletins were produced to comment on research and technical policy for the housing of workers in newly formed decentralised factories, in particular munition workers 3 Crackers, house for Osborn McCutcheon, Mt Eliza, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1951. Walter Gropius came to the house in 1954, the visit organised by Frederick Romberg and Robin Boyd

Houses and hospitals While McCutcheon threw himself into reorganising the office, there was little immediate work for the firm to do in the late 1940s. A series of modest houses of varying styles in Portsea, Toorak and Lower Plenty reflected the building restrictions and material shortages of the day.5 Of these houses, it was Broome Hill, designed for Dr Stephens at Portsea (1946), which suggested a shift in the firm’s approach to domestic design, away from the genteel period house styles of the 1930s to an unadorned, generously glazed version of Robin Boyd’s Victorian Type.6 Flat-roofed weatherboards, white painted window joinery and simple box forms were the essential ingredients of this low-key regional idiom.7 However, it was McCutcheon’s own house, Kerackaboite (named after the local creek), or ‘Crackers’ as it became known8, that was to signal the major aesthetic break with his prewar values towards domestic design. In a bold move, McCutcheon decided to move his family from suburban and respectable South Yarra to a twenty-acre bush site at Mount Eliza. It was a significant change from inner Melbourne to the outer fringe, but lead to completely new activities, such as sailing, which was to become a major recreational pursuit for the rest of his life. Completed in 1951, McCutcheon designed a ‘solar house’ at Mount Eliza;9 Crackers was then one of the largest postwar houses built in Victoria. A long slim rectangle of single-room width, the north wall was completely sheathed in glass with huge sliding doors and banks of operable glass louvres above. The house was split

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by a covered open-air breezeway, an early and distinctly enlightened separation of the children’s wing from the living and parents’ wing. Inside, the northern half of the living wing was entirely open with a generous gallery-like passage connecting all the rooms and large sliding panels that closed off the rooms as required. The house had a simple low-pitched skillion roof with broad eaves and exposed rafter ends, and was clad in vertical rebated cedar boards painted dark plum blue. Professional admiration was great for this house, so much so that Frederick Romberg and Robin Boyd organised a reception at Crackers to introduce McCutcheon to Walter Gropius, former director of the Bauhaus and Harvard Graduate School of Design, who was then visiting from the US as keynote speaker at the RAIA convention held in Sydney in May 1954.footnote10 The non-residential works in the office in the late 1940s were mainly hospitals. The first of these, and the most important, was Footscray and District Hospital (1947–53), a commission that the office had gained in 1941 but had been put on hold during World War II. The project was restarted and McCutcheon undertook a European study tour, looking especially at hospitals in Scandinavia.11 The final design was striking with its horizontal bands of alternating and uninterrupted glass and brick. While more generously glazed than its 1930s counterparts by Stephenson & Turner, the overall aesthetic of the BSM design owed much to pace-setters in the type like the Mercy and Freemasons hospitals with their simplified massing and cantilevered balconies.12 The most

significant aspect of the two hundred and fifteen bed five-storey Footscray Hospital was that it was the first major postwar hospital built in Victoria and the first fully air-conditioned hospital commissioned by the Hospitals and Charities Commission.13

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In 1950, Harold Strachan, having just completed a postwar rehabilitation course in interior design, joined BSM. Working with McCutcheon, his first job was ‘to produce the colour schemes, furniture design, fabric selection and artworks for the Footscray and District Hospital … As McCutcheon’s favourite colour in those days was any shade of grey, it wasn’t long before the hospital was affectionately known on site as the “Footsgrey” Hospital’.14 Strachan’s presence at BSM was critical. From 1950, he was placed in charge of BSM’s interior design section that was to become one of the strongest and most resilient sections of the firm’s practice. The firm’s partners’ wartime experience with developing a system of prefabricated pre-packaged field hospital units influenced other work for the Hospitals and Charities Commission. As with postwar shortages in housing where one solution was to turn to prefabrication,15 so it was with country hospitals. On his 1950 study tour, McCutcheon investigated the expertise of English firms in prefabricating steel buildings.16 After selecting Trusteel, a firm that manufactured standard two-storey houses in prefabricated steel units, McCutcheon arranged that they modify their designs to suit the layout for a hospital and nurses’ hostel,17 manufacture the components in England, and then ship them to Australia.18

11 Of particular interest to McCutcheon on this tour was Hjalmar Cederström’s Southern Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden, 1945. Undated speech notes, p. 14, McCutcheon personal file, Bates Smart Archives. 12 J Willis, ‘Machines for healing: (an) aesthetics in Australian hospital architecture 1930–1950’, in J Willis et al., FIRM(ness) Commodity De-light?: Questioning the Canons, papers from the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 431–6. 13 BSM was one of the original seven architectural firms selected by the Victorian Charities Board in the 1940s to develop the state’s hospitals. 14 Dalzell, p. 3. 15 See P Goad, ‘The Modern house in Melbourne 1945–1975’, PhD, University of Melbourne, 1992, pp. 3/16–3/29. 16 RVIA Bulletin, June 1950, p. 14 17 In most cases, the nurses’ hostel was a modification of Trusteel’s standard two-storey house. McPherson, p. 36. 18 McPherson, p. 36.


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1 Crackers, house for Osborn McCutcheon, Mt Eliza, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1951. Interior view of living room. 2 Broome Hill, house for Dr Stephens, Portsea, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1946. This house showed a shift from the former genteel period in the 1930s to unadorned, generously glazed simple box forms 3 Crackers, house for Osborn McCutcheon. Floor plan showing the long single room width rectangular form and gallery passage 4 The northern external wall, totally sheathed in glass with operable louvres above

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1 Footscray and District Hospital, Eleanor St, Footscray, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1947–53. The street façade of the hospital, with strong horizontal bands of alternating glass and brickwork. The hospital was similar to Stephenson and Turners’ simplified massing and cantilevered balcony style 2 Trusteel project team of BSM, 995 Bourke Rd, Camberwell, Vic. This project office was created to manage the Trusteel hospital projects 3 Harold Strachan (1918–c. 1985). Joining BSM in 1949, he initiated the firm’s interior design section. Over the next five decades, this section was responsible for the interior finishes, furniture and furnishings of the firm's major buildings 4 Wodonga Hospital, Wodonga, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1951. One of the Trusteel projects during construction, showing the prefabricated steel building units being erected on site

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19 RVIA Bulletin, April 1951, p. 15. Other branch offices of BSM were also set up during this busy time at Bond St, near Flinders Street Station in central Melbourne and 24 Eastern Rd, South Melbourne, where the office was a co-tenant with a newly formed quantitysurveying firm, Rider Hunt & Partners. See Dalzell, p. 3. 20 Alex Smith and Sydney G Wood were made associates of the firm in 1950. See RVIA Bulletin, December 1950, p. 15. 21 RVIA Bulletin, April–May 1952, p. 9. 22 RVIA Bulletin, April 1951, pp. 10–11. John H Butler joined BSM in 1951 to take charge of its Eildon office. See RVIA Bulletin, August 1951, p. 12. 23 In March 1951, Jennings established a new subsidiary, Prebilts (Australia) Pty Ltd to make prefabricated and transportable houses at Springvale. Most of the initial production was intended for Eildon. See D Garden, Builders to the Nation: The AV Jennings Story, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1992, p. 98. 24 For example, YFGS designed the Eildon Theatre (1952) that was originally designed as a permanent brick and steel structure but had to be abandoned due to cost. A standard prefabricated steel warehouse held in stock was substituted as the basic structure, and adapted to include an auditorium of 420 seats. Sloping walls inside the auditorium were lined with mountain ash panelling to a height of 3.3 metres (10 feet) and above this, the external wall and roof sheeting were expressed, sprayed with asbestos to provide thermal and acoustic insulation, and coloured to a deep atmosphere blue. See RVIA Bulletin, June–July 1952, p. 10.

The idea seemed sound but the practicalities of the project would prove extremely difficult. First, there was the procedural problem where a local architect would design the hospital as a series of single-storey units to create a ten- to eighteen-bed hospital with administration, operating room and outpatients units. BSM would then detail all the building’s services as these had to be in place before the concrete slab was poured in readiness for the prefabricated steel units. Then there was the timber cladding that also had to be imported. Despite the establishment of a separate office to handle the Trusteel work at 995 Burke Road, Camberwell, with new staff, including Douglas Norman, Bill Woodburn and Mary Turner Shaw,19 the project was a failure. Of the thirteen country hospitals planned, only three (Bacchus Marsh, Wodonga and Koo-Wee-Rup at Westernport) were erected using the Trusteel units. The system had taken too long to develop, delivery was slow, and by 1951, the availability of local materials had begun to supplant the potentials of mechanised production.

Planning for the future McCutcheon, Gardiner and Pearce were not the only ones to return from war service after 1945. Selwyn Bates, the youngest son of Edward A Bates, rejoined the firm, as did others like Sydney Wood, Alex Smith, Malcolm Smart and Tony Armstrong among a host of others.20 War had enabled the firm to reinvent itself. When Charles Smart died in 1949, he had been a partner in the firm for forty-three years having succeeded

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his father Francis Smart who himself had been a partner for twenty-four years. Selwyn Bates was made a partner that year, and for the next ten years until 1960, there was an unchanged partnership team. McCutcheon was the undisputed head, supported by Selwyn Bates, Douglas Gardiner, Phillip Pearce and Alan Ralton. While the firm had begun to consolidate its postwar presence in Melbourne with hospital commissions, it also gained numerous town-planning commissions for locations in metropolitan Melbourne and country Victoria, such as Cobram, Cranbourne, Morwell, Sandringham and Yinnar. One of the most important was Eildon (1951–52), the new township required for accommodating workers employed on the five-year project to extend the Sugarloaf Reservoir (now Lake Eildon) and construct its new dam, then the largest earth dam in the southern hemisphere.21 BSM was commissioned by the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission to design the new township on the banks of the Goulburn River. It was to consist of a permanent core to accommodate 1500 people in separate houses, with a temporary settlement for Utah Construction, the dam builders, which could house an additional 3000 workers in demountable houses and hostels.22 Appointed in conjunction with the firm were Yuncken Freeman Bros, Griffiths and Simpson (YFGS), who already had experience in the ‘Operation Snail’ prefabricated housing scheme (1947).

The Eildon project had unusual parameters. There was a need to plan for maximum size at the first stage, then allow for shrinkage as the construction of the dam was completed. In addition, only a year had been allowed for completion of the project, so some of the buildings had to be imported from England and Sweden, some standardised, and on-site work reduced by every practicable means. The project had very similar time and budget constraints to those that had been experienced in wartime. BSM coordinated the entire project with military ease. Two builders were involved: Clements Langford erected the permanent housing which was prefabricated and imported largely through the Operation Snail program; AV Jennings Construction supplied and erected the temporary housing and hostels through their Prebilts prefabricated construction scheme, specially initiated for the Eildon project.23 Jennings also built the town centre’s permanent buildings that were jointly designed and supervised by BSM and YFGS,24 and also acted as coordinating contractor. On 27 June 1952, the firm celebrated its centenary with a staff dinner at the Australia Hotel in Collins Street. It was an auspicious moment in the history of the practice. In the early 1950s, a rare opportunity arose with the design of an office building for HC Sleigh in Queen Street, central Melbourne. Until 1950, with the exception of the Russell Street Post Office and Telephone Exchange (1948–54), there had been virtually no new construction in the central city since the early 1940s. When completed in 1955, the HC Sleigh building however showed little


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1 Douglas Gardiner (1905–2001). A partner from 1945 until he retired in1969 2 Phillip Pearce (1905–1982). A partner from 1945, Pearce was responsible for research into the application of regulations limiting the height of Melbourne’s city buildings that led directly to the erection of ICI House, Melbourne 3 Eildon township, Eildon, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1951–52. Sketch of town centre consisting of prefabricated temporary housing and hostels. The town was to accommodate 1500 people permanently, in separate houses, with a temporary settlement of 3000 workers 4 Aerial view of the township, built for workers on the project to extend the Sugarloaf Reservoir (now Lake Eildon), then to be the largest earth dam in the southern hemisphere

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1 HC Sleigh building, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1955. Street elevation of heavily gridded façade 2 The cover of the brochure produced for the centenary of the practice in 1952. A dinner was held at the Australia Hotel to celebrate the auspicious occasion 3 Selwyn Bates (1909–1989), the youngest son of former partner Edward Bates. After joining the firm in 1939, he became a partner in 1949 until he retired in 1979

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of the wartime interests in prefabrication or advances in building construction. Unlike JA Le Gerche’s Gilbert Court (1955) that boasted an all-glass curtain wall façade to Collins Street and a side lane, the HC Sleigh building was an infill structure with double-hung aluminium windows and a demure gridded façade bordered by terracotta faience.25 It was a building that seemed, aesthetically, to belong in the 1930s.26 However, that situation was soon to change. BSM was on the brink of developing two major specialisations of its future practice: the postwar skyscraper and the postwar university.

Wilson Hall On the afternoon of 25 January 1952, disaster struck the University of Melbourne. A fire raced through the roof of one of its prized historic buildings, destroying all of its ceiling structure and severely damaging its west wall.27 The near destruction of Wilson Hall, designed by Reed & Barnes and completed in 1879, was considered a tragedy. Leading architects deplored the loss of a structure that many considered a classic example of the Gothic Revival. Robin Boyd said that: ‘It was really the only worthwhile piece of architecture in the University hotch-potch’.28 Almost immediately, discussions began as to the future of the burnt-out shell of Sir Samuel Wilson’s donation to the university. An immediate public appeal for funds was launched a few days later but it was still not certain what would happen to the site. Sir Russell Grimwade, chairman of the university’s building committee suggested

that the walls and foundations of the original building could not be sacrificed, and that while limiting the rebuilt hall to a similar design and size, he suggested that the seating capacity could be increased by 30% by a new gallery built at the northern end.29 The Melbourne University Architectural Graduates Society responded in the press, arguing for a new hall to be completed in conjunction with a new postwar master plan for the university, and gave as an example the contemporary design that had been commissioned to replace Coventry Cathedral.30 However, at a special meeting of the University Council on 18 February 1952, it was decided unanimously to rebuild the hall in its original form and in its original Gothic Revival style.31 It was a decision met with approval from the public and much of the university community.32 The University Council discussed the options of restoration with an advisory panel nominated by the RVIA33, and BSM was commissioned to investigate the ruins and prepare a quantity survey for restoration and rebuilding. Eight months later, on 21 October 1952, there was a shock announcement in the Melbourne press.34 The University Council had changed its mind and had decided to replace the hall with a new £200 000 building. A detailed cost analysis had revealed that restoration costs (£440 000) exceeded available finances and also that the needs of the university were such that a replacement hall built in the same style and on the same site could not cope with the university’s current and projected student population. The council were clearly shocked to be forced into such a decision

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and even offered to return money to donors who found themselves unsympathetic with the proposed course of action. At the time of the decision, BSM had already prepared sketch plans and interior views for a new building, and Sir Russell Grimwade described these interiors as ‘quite delightful’, but ‘we were not pleased with the exterior. The architect is being given time to put it right’.35 Citing Glastonbury Abbey as an example, local architect Roy Grounds suggested in November 1952 that in view of a new building being designed, its site should be somewhere else so that the ruins could be preserved and with a floor of turf, and grown with creepers, ‘properly tended, the Wilson Hall ruin could vie with the finest of carefully and expensively created ruins in those greatest gardens of eighteenthcentury England’.36 By March 1953, the site indeed had not been chosen despite confirmation that a new building would be constructed.37 It was this council decision that reignited the earlier controversy. Most vocal in the attack on the university’s decision was its own Professor of Architecture, Brian Lewis. Quoted numerous times in the local press, Lewis argued strongly for the hall’s restoration,38 deploring the removal of the oak doors and their despatch to Montsalvat at Eltham, removing his donation to the Wilson Hall rebuilding fund in favour of the new International House being planned in Royal Parade, Parkville; and threatening an injunction to halt any demolition.39 Twenty-five of the university’s professors sent a letter to the University Council through its Chancellor, Sir Charles Lowe, protesting against destruction of the burnt-out shell

25 Cross-Section, no. 18, April 1954. 26 However, in overall compositional terms, one could argue that the façade of Sleigh House is a heavier and materially less sophisticated version of Arne Jacobsen’s office for A Jespersen & Son, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1953–55. 27 ‘£250 000 fire at university’, Age, 26 January 1952. The cause of the fire was unknown. Possible reasons put forward included faulty electrical installation as the fire had apparently burned unnoticed for some time between the roof and the ceiling. Another contemporary description of the hall and its fire includes: ‘The Wilson Hall, Melbourne’, The Australian Builder, February 1952, pp. 82–6. 28 ‘University leaders say loss is tragedy’, Age, 26 January 1952. 29 ‘New Wilson Hall fund opened’, Age, 30 January 1952. 30 B Talbot, ‘What style of new Wilson Hall?’, letter to the editor, Age, 31 January 1952. 31 ‘Wilson Hall to be rebuilt in original form’, Age, 19 February 1952. 32 ‘Plan for restoring Wilson Hall’, Age, 20 February 1952; ‘New Wilson Hall in three years’, Age, 20 February 1952. 33 The RVIA advisory panel on Wilson Hall consisted of Eric Hughes (President, RVIA), Balcombe Griffiths and Lloyd Orton. ‘New Wilson Hall to hold 1700’, Age, 13 March 1952. 34 ‘Wilson Hall has gone’, Argus, 21 October 1952; ‘Wilson Hall to be Modern’, Age, 21 October 1952; ‘Modern design for Wilson Hall: cash inadequate’, Sun, 21 October 1952. 35 ‘Wilson Hall to be Modern’, Age, 21 October 1952. 36 R Grounds, ‘Wilson Hall as sanctuary’, letter to the editor, Age, 14 November 1952. 37 ‘Three courses on Wilson Hall’, Herald, 12 March 1953; ‘Wilson Hall to cost £200 000’, Argus, 17 March 1953; ‘£200 000 Wilson Hall may be on old site’, Herald, 17 March 1953. 38 ‘Professor says “restore Wilson Hall”’, Herald, 20 April 1953; ‘Spare that hall’, Argus, 21 April 1953; ‘Views differ on Wilson Hall’, Argus, 21 April 1953. 39 ‘Hall demolition brings attack’, Age, 20 April 1953; ‘Professor cancels Wilson Hall donation’, Sun, 21 April 1953; ‘Gothic doors for art gallery’, Age, 18. April 1953; ‘Law may be invoked in bid to save Wilson Hall’, Herald, 21 April 1953 40 ‘Restored Wilson Hall unlikely’, Sun, 22 April 1953.

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1 The demolition continued on site after the final decision to build a new modern Wilson Hall.The workers remove the original foundation stone, as shown in The Age, 22 April 1953 2 The change of decision by the university to build a modern Wilson Hall as shown in The Age, 21 October 1952 3 Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1952–56. The controversial mural by Douglas Annand ‘The Search for Truth’ and dais furniture designed by industrial designer Grant Featherston

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41 “‘Save Wilson Hall” plea to minister’, Argus, 22 April 1953; ‘Graduates move to save Wilson Hall’, Age, 22 April 1953; ‘Public is angry at Wilson Hall decision, he says’, Argus, 23 April 1953. A deputation of the Master Masons Association of Victoria also lodged their concerns over the demolition. See ‘Concern at loss of Wilson Hall’, Herald, 22 April 1953; ‘Injunction move to save Wilson Hall’, Age, 23 April 1953; ‘Wilson Hall should call halt’, Sun, 23 April 1953. 42 ‘Union halts Wilson Hall demolition’, Herald, 23 April 1953; Sun, 24 April 1953; Argus, 24 April 1953. 43 Letters to the editor of the Age: JC Miller, 23 April 1953; JG Mackinolty, student representative on University Council, 25 April 1953; and LG Cahn, architect, 29 April 1953. Cahn suggested that a contemporary design was most appropriate citing, as good examples, the Malmo City Theatre, Forest Crematorium at Stockholm and the Zurich Congress Hall. Farrago reported that ‘The only comment from architectural students on Professor Lewis’s attempt to save the old hall from demolition has been to pin up in his study a caricature of the professor rebuilding Wilson Hall with bricks and mortar’, and that most students would agree with their student representative on council, John Mackinolty, who voted for a modern and better equipped building. ‘Students quiet on hall’s fate’, Farrago, 29 April 1953. See also ‘Let us be Modern, architects say’, Farrago, 6 May 1953. 44 JDG Medley, ‘Spanners in the works of democracy’, Age, 2 May 1953; letters to the editor of the Age: B Lewis (9 May 1953), JH Butler (13 May 1953), B Lewis (14 May 1953); ‘Wilson Hall to be demolished’, Age, 19 May 1953; ‘Chancellor calls for end to criticism’, Age, 19 May 1953; ‘Wilson Hall plan lost: council will rebuild’, Sun, 19 May 1953. 45 In February 1952, the Health Commission withheld approval for the design of the interior of Wilson Hall on the basis that the plywood panelling proposed for three walls and the ceiling might constitute a serious fire risk. ‘Fire fear halts Wilson Hall’, Argus, 25 February 1953; ‘Plywood, walls hitch in Wilson Hall plans’, Sun, 25 February 1953. 46 ‘The old and the new Wilson Hall’, Herald, 6 July 1953; ‘Wilson Hall in Modern style’, Age, 7 July 1953; ‘New hall “not like shopping centre”’, Age, 7 July 1953. 47 J Bourke, memorandum for the acting vice-chancellor, 23 June 1953, Bates Smart Archives, box 1389, 646.

and suggested that any new building should be on a different site.40 Melbourne businessman, OA Mendelsohn and architect John Buchan began a ‘Save Wilson Hall’ campaign.41 On 23 April 1953, the Building Trades Federation instructed its members to stop demolition work on Wilson Hall.42 Letters to newspapers continued to fuel debate while University of Melbourne students continued to be in favour of a new building.43 The debate continued with even former vice-chancellor Sir John Medley being drawn into print and defending publicly the University Council’s decision, and making further calls for an end to public criticism as a decision was finally made in a 15–2 vote of University Council on 18 May 1953 to build a new hall on the Wilson Hall site.44 Despite the heated public debate, arguably one of the most controversial and public discussions on architecture in twentiethcentury Victoria, and initial problems with the plywood panelling proposed for the interior,45 the design and documentation of Wilson Hall proceeded. When published in mid-1953, the new Wilson Hall was a simple rectangular prism with a hovering flat cap roof. Twenty-four quatrefoils from the old hall were to be incorporated into the south wall; the building was to be brickwork over a rigid steel framework, with interior walls and ceiling of polished timber, treated for fire resistance.46 On being shown the designs in June, Joseph Burke, Professor of Fine Arts, was particularly taken with the interior and the idea of the academic procession silhouetted against a great eastfacing wall of glass, and in a memorandum

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argued that it would be the best building in the university.47 His only two reservations were that the building needed something similar to a portico before a Greek temple, or the west façade of a Gothic cathedral.48 Robin Boyd in a detailed article gave the new Wilson Hall design, which had finally emerged from its ‘fog of controversy’, its most fulsome praise to date and also its most perceptive critical review:

The Search for Truth, a massive and controversial mural also by Douglas Annand—a giant male nude reaching upward with his feet in intellectual clay (‘elegant lobster salad’ according to Annand 53), arms aloft to an eye-like sun of knowledge.54 The furniture on the dais such as the chancellor’s throne was the work of noted industrial designer Grant Featherston.55

It is a polished—unstintingly polished— eclectic composition … In the current world scene of architecture this hall may be classified with the style developed by Scandinavia and Switzerland, at the opposite end of the mathematically disciplined glasshouse school.49

Outside, Wilson Hall had a massive glazed wall to the east and a series of elms planted at the time of construction, in combination with steps and brick terracing, all designed by landscape consultant John Stevens. To the north, a textured brick wall was relieved by a bronze bas-relief sculpture by Tom Bass, located directly above the main glazed entry doors. To the west, a translucent vertical egg-crate west window diffused western light onto the dais within. To the south, there were textured bricks sprinkled with Gothic bosses and decorative details retrieved from the Reed & Barnes building, and a protruding copper bulge that housed the university organ.

Documented by Walter Gherardin (also job captain) and Robert Dunster, then fresh out of university and recently employed by BSM,50 construction began in October 1954. The new Wilson Hall was finally opened on 22 March 1956. Despite the early controversy, the final building was indeed one of the most crafted and well-decorated box buildings of the 1950s. Inside the foyer, a curved ceiling swept low overhead before one passed through a glass wall enhanced by an intricate stained-glass screen designed by Douglas Annand (1903–1976).51 One then entered what Boyd described as ‘the most beautifully fitted jewel-box’52 of the hall’s main volume. The ceiling was panelled with Swedish birch plywood in an off-centred brickwork pattern that folded down the wall and stopped short of the floor where glazing to the west revealed the South Lawn. Ahead was

Wilson Hall had introduced an important theme that was to become an intrinsic part of BSM’s future practice: the incorporation of works of art and the ornamental and textural celebration of surface. The artworks in Wilson Hall were the result of collaboration between architects, artists and sculptors and illustrate McCutcheon, Annand and Bass working together to create integrated art and architecture. For McCutcheon and his partners, the melding of art and science, and importantly landscape design could realise a humanised Modernism.


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1 Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1952–56. The ground floor plan of the hall 2 The glass façade of the eastern wall 3 The interior perspective of the proposed new university hall 4 Interior view of the hall after completion, described by Robin Boyd as ‘the most beautifully fitted jewel-box’

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48 J Burke, letter to Osborn McCutcheon, 24 June 1953, Bates Smart Archives, box 1389, 646. 49 R Boyd, ‘Impressive plan for Modern Wilson Hall’, Age, 7 July 1953. 50 Interview with Robert Dunster (former partner, BSM), 3 May 2002. 51 The glass screen was specially commissioned by the Victorian Women Graduates Association in 1956. Annand’s design consisted of a free-form arrangement of coloured glass shapes with heavy black leading borders, gilding, and biomorphic and insect-like forms in delicate calligraphy. See A McDonald, Douglas Annand: the Art of Life, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2001, p. 69. 52 R Boyd, The Australian Ugliness, FW Cheshire, Melbourne, 1960, p. 220. 53 Boyd, The Australian Ugliness, p. 220. 54 Anne McDonald notes that the inspiration for Annand’s mural was derived from a figure on the façade of Otto Banninger’s Protestant church in Zurich-Wollishofen, Switzerland (1936). She also notes the furore in the local press over the mural, where it was described as ‘Mr Pigface’ and ‘a Frankenstein monster, a sculptured devil come to haunt the hallowed ground’. See McDonald, p. 59. 55 T Lane, Featherston Chairs, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1988, pp. 38–9. 56 Boyd, The Australian Ugliness, p. 9. 57 Boyd, The Australian Ugliness, p. 218. 58 Boyd, The Australian Ugliness, p. 221. 59 The design for Wilson Hall has a range of Scandinavian sources informing its surface treatment, interior design and formal arrangement. Critical models were the textured brickwork of the Great Hall at Ärhus University, Denmark (1942–46), by CF Møller; the plywood interior, glazing detail and mural foyer of the Concert Hall, Gothenborg, Sweden (1932–35), by Nils Einar Eriksson; and the Concert Hall of the Radiohuset, Copenhagen, Denmark (1936–42, opened 1945), by Vilhelm Lauritzen. Support for this argument was confirmed by an interview with Robert Dunster, 3 May 2002. I am also grateful to Daniel Khong for supplying me with images of the Lauritzen building beyond those published in historic sources. 60 Interview with Robert Dunster, 3 May 2002. 61 Cross-Section, no. 18, April 1954.

The firm could exploit its newly acquired organisational and technical skills, its ethic of efficient scientism, and combine it with elements that involved material tactility and fine art. For architectural commentators with a functionalist bias like Robin Boyd, this middle road of humanising, even decorating, the ‘glass box’ presented a dilemma. Here was a building that had a finely veneered interior and outside, four completely different elevations, each façade elaborated with pattern, different fenestration, or attached bas-relief sculptures. He summarised his feelings on Wilson Hall in The Australian Ugliness (1960), the book that launched the term ‘Featurism’: the ‘subordination of the essential whole and the accentuation of separate selected features’.56 Boyd described Wilson Hall ambivalently as ‘the crowning jewel of Australian Featurism’:57 The new building was a success, but not as modern architecture … this building frankly elevates features to the major emotional role. All its ornament—including the giant mural … is truly contemporary to the 1950s. It is ornament applied with imagination … and in many cases with such sophistication that few people viewing it recognise it as ornament.58 For BSM, the commission for Wilson Hall held no such critical doubts. The design was an assured hybrid of Scandinavian sources59 reconfigured for a local situation and conditioned by local technological and material limits. More importantly for Melbourne architecture, Wilson Hall represented the first relaxation into ‘something that wasn’t essential’,60 it wasn’t

like the houses, hospitals or factories that were necessary to postwar recovery. In short, it was the clearest signal that the firm and Melbourne had finally emerged from the penny-pinching years of wartime and postwar austerity.

MLC and the skyscraper While BSM was occupied with Wilson Hall, a prewar client resurfaced with a series of commissions that was to radically change the fortunes of the firm. In early 1954, Cross-Section announced the extensive program of new private office buildings for Mutual Life and Citizens Assurance Co. Limited (MLC) in nearly every Australian capital and some provincial cities.61 Planning had however begun two years earlier. The result was that between 1952 and 1959, MLC built BSM-designed office buildings in Brisbane (1955, extended 1959), Wollongong (1956), Shepparton (c. 1959), Ballarat (1954), Geelong (1953), Adelaide (1957), Perth (1957), North Sydney (1957), Newcastle (1957), and Canberra (1959). The key to many of these buildings was their innovation in construction: the introduction of lightweight structure that was unprecedented in Australian city buildings. The initial concept was to replace the normal concrete encasing of steelwork with floors of pressed steel panels fire-protected with 50 mm of granolithic surface finish and gypsum-plaster suspended ceilings beneath, and steel columns, also gypsumplastered. The idea was that the system be ‘dry’ and essentially prefabricated.

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Each building was planned on a modular grid to facilitate the maximum use of prefabricated elements including precast concrete floor units, wall panels, barrier spandrels and demountable office partitions, a system that demanded constant and accurate scheduling of work by the various trades. In essence this meant that given the ‘dry’ nature of the design, interior fit-out and external cladding could occur at the lower levels while the steel frame was simultaneously being erected at the upper levels. The MLC projects therefore represented the aesthetic and technological development of a new typology.62 It was the latest in the honing of a new language for the postwar office building, of which BSM by 1961 were to become Australia’s most proficient exponents.63 BSM in effect attained the status of an Antipodean Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM), the corporate architectural firm par excellence. While BSM’s prewar 1920s commercial palazzi, various 1930s Moderne structures and numerous houses followed largely conservative British and American stylistic trends, the firm’s work took a very specific direction after 1945. Its output and architectural aesthetics began to parallel that of progressive American postwar corporate practice and the reason for this was war.


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1 Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1952–56. The translucent vertical egg crate window on the western wall and four giant cement relief sculptures by Tom Bass 2 Annand creating the mural during construction 3 Mutual Life and Citizens Assurance Co Ltd (MLC), St Georges Tce, Perth. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1957 4 Mutual Life and Citizens Assurance Co Ltd (MLC), corner Edward and Adelaide Streets, Brisbane. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1955 5 Mutual Life and Citizens Assurance Co Ltd (MLC), King William St, Adelaide. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1957

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62 A detailed account of the MLC projects in Australia in the 1950s can be found in A Ogg, ‘MLC buildings’, in J Taylor (ed.), Tall Buildings, Australian Business Going Up: 1945–1975, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2001, pp. 164–73. 63 A list of BSM’s high-rise projects between 1955 and 1961 reveals the staggering success of Osborn McCutcheon’s teamed office system and the firm’s ability to produce high quality high-rise buildings. The list includes: MLC building, Brisbane (1955), with Conrad and Gargett; HC Sleigh building, Queen St, Melbourne (1955); MLC building, Perth (1956), with Hawkins and Sands; MLC building, Adelaide (1957), with Cheesman Doley Brabham & Neighbour; MLC building, North Sydney (1957), with Hennessy Hennessy & Co.; Hume House, Melbourne (1957); ICI House, Sydney (1957); Canton Insurance Co. building, Melbourne (1958); AMP building, Lonsdale St, Melbourne (1958); ICI House, Melbourne (1958); MLC building, Canberra (1959); Mobil (Vacuum Oil Co.), Melbourne (1960); Prudential Assurance Ltd, Melbourne (1960); South British Insurance, Melbourne (1961); RACV, Melbourne (1961); and APM building, Melbourne (1961). 64 Architecture and Arts, November 1957, p. 41. 65 PS Reed, ‘Enlisting Modernism’, in D Albrecht (ed.), World War II and the American Dream: How Wartime Building Changed a Nation, National Building Museum & MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, pp. 2–41. The immediate postwar text, P Sheppard’s Prefabrication in Building, London, 1946, is a vivid example of war-influenced discussion of building construction and design. I am grateful to Martin Fowler for bringing this book to my attention. 66 J Davidson, ‘Building for war, preparing for peace: World War II and the military industrial complex‘, in Albrecht (ed.), pp. 184–229. 67 D Albrecht, ‘Introduction’, in Albrecht (ed.), p. xvi. 68 Bates Smart Archives, 8.8.2 (c. 1963). 69 On the death of Charles Smart, most of the structural work in the BSM office was handled by Cyril Hudspeth and Associates (later to become John Connell and Associates). 70 The height limit in Sydney was broken in 1962 by Peddle Thorp & Walker’s AMP building (1959–62) on Circular Quay.

Architecture of mobilisation From 1942 until 1944, McCutcheon had been Chief Architect of the Corps of Engineers of the US Army Forces for the South West Pacific Area.64 With him in the Corps of Engineers was another BSM partner since 1937, Alan Ralton. War was a time of revelation for McCutcheon as the development of repetitive building systems and programs of mobilisation were crucial to the efficiency of the wartime enterprise. Systematisation, standardisation and the speed of industrial production65 formed the core relationship between architects and wartime industry. Methods and processes of prefabrication, dry systems of construction, and the coordination of teams of specialists combined with efficient systems of delivery were paramount. War was a time when the Modernist dream of the machine was realised, when the construction industry was forced to match the pressures of military mobilisation at a scale not experienced by any previous conflict.66 Lewis Mumford had aptly stated in 1934 that ‘War is the health of the machine’.67 Indeed the mechanisation of World War II was the impetus for an entirely new aesthetic of postwar architecture that US firms like SOM, architects of numerous wartime projects, would take up with alacrity. It was a Modernist aesthetic not of cubist abstraction but one of system building, repetition and modular planning, and of which the glass curtain wall modulated by aluminium framing (a material refined in application by its use during World War II) was found to be the thinnest, lightest and most efficiently erected skin.

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Critical to the erection of these buildings were changes sought by BSM to existing building regulations and the adoption of the ‘dry’ system of construction. The driving forces in the office behind each of these issues were McCutcheon and Harvey Brown. In 1951, Brown, a structural engineer, had joined the firm as an associate partner 68 to restart the structural section of the office that had languished after Charles Smart had died in 1949.69 As leader of the firm’s structural engineering section, Brown was instrumental in the firm’s development of lightweight fireresisting construction for large institutional and city buildings. Soon to join Brown at BSM were Max Bladen, Don Hayes, Ken MacDonald and others. By the mid-1950s, BSM also had a building services (mechanical engineering) section staffed by Alan Scott and Brendan Byrnes. In a few short years, BSM had become a multidisciplinary practice. Of all the MLC projects, it was MLC in North Sydney that was to be the most impressive exposition of BSM’s newly acquired expertise. While the MLC buildings in Adelaide and Brisbane explored issues of climate control with attached ‘egg-crate’ brises-soleil (MLC Adelaide was also Australia’s first fully air-conditioned curtainwalled office tower), the Sydney building was at the time the largest office building in Australia. Presenting a huge façade to the street (almost 100 metres in length), the building was completely integrated in its design from interiors, external landscaping and modular construction to the tinted glass

and ribbed aluminium spandrel panel curtain wall that appeared like a vast weightless mosaic. Despite its H-plan (effectively two side-core slabs joined together) and its radical appearance as a decentralised major office complex in North Sydney, this building still respected the 150-foot height limit that had been imposed in Sydney in 1912.70

Hume House In February 1957, BSM’s steel-framed and limit-height Hume House was being constructed on the corner of William and Little Bourke streets in central Melbourne.71 The importance of this building was that it became, as Clare Newton has documented: ‘a full-scale model in which techniques were tested and adapted, altered or rejected for the more important ICI building’.72 ICI House was also under construction in 1957 and its ‘gargantuan Sydney cousin’, the MLC Insurance Co. building in North Sydney, was completed by October that same year.73 Key figures in the design and documentation of Hume House were McCutcheon, engineer Harvey Brown, Jeffrey Howlett and Swiss-trained architect Ric Bonaldi who had emigrated to Australia in 1949 and joined the firm in 1955.74 Like MLC in North Sydney, Hume House had a curtain wall of glass on four sides despite half the west façade being of concrete and also despite Hume’s main product being concrete pipes and hence their initial preference for a concrete building! Technical highlights of Hume House included its side-core planning to maximise open office floor space, steel piles, prefabricated precast concrete tubs as a flooring system,


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1 Harvey Brown (1906–1988). Joining BSM in 1948, Brown, a structural engineer, was integral in the development of lightweight construction and off-site fabrication methods of structural components 2 Sydney Wood (1905–1973). Joining BSM in 1950, Wood specialised in health projects within the practice 3 Mutual Life and Citizens Assurance Co Ltd (MLC), 105 Miller St, North Sydney, NSW. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1957. Interior office view 4 Hume House, corner William and Little Bourke streets, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1957. Documented to be a full-scale model for testing techniques and methods for the ICI House building 5 Mutual Life and Citizens Assurance Co Ltd (MLC), 105 Miller St, North Sydney, NSW. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1957. The building, with a façade of over 100 metres, was the largest office building in Australia

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1 Mutual Life and Citizens Assurance Co Ltd (MLC), 105 Miller St, North Sydney, NSW. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1957. Detail section through the façade showing components of assembly in standardised systems 2 Typical floor plan of the building showing the two office towers linked by a central services core 3 Detail view of the glass curtain wall from street level 4 BSM Office, 366 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1957–58. The completed building

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high-tension bolts for column/beam connections, precast gypsum blocks which acted as fireproofing to the steel beams, reconstructed granite panels used as facing and formwork for the lift core (a Swiss innovation recommended by Bonaldi),75 and curtain wall detailing that became a working model for ICI House. While Hume House proceeded without orthodox building permits because of its innovations in structure and fireproofing, a controversy of a different manner arose on its completion. A free-form sandstone sculpture nicknamed ‘The Thing’ was removed from the building’s forecourt amidst a controversy stirred up by the press as to the questionable merits of contemporary art.76 In both matters, the firm was not deterred. In the next decade, the undaunted pursuit of technical refinement in high-rise building design was matched with a conscientious patronage of abstract sculpture. Art and science were not seen as inseparable but signals of a new corporate imagery within the Australian city.

solid over 4-feet high to all parts of the office. This meant location of persons was easy (and nobody could really hide!)’.79 It was to become the BSM office address for the next fourteen years and the focus of McCutcheon’s vision for the firm as a series of teams of specialists all housed within a multidisciplinary office. McCutcheon was an advocate of integrated thinking and integrated systems.80 There were seven departments: architects, structural engineers, services (which included mechanical, electrical and hydraulic engineers), cost estimating, interior design, accounting, and general clerical and filing. Within the architects’ section, there were teams led by partners that focussed on various building types such as industrial (Gardiner); ecclesiastical, domestic, institutional (Ralton and Alex Smith); commercial work such as banks (Bates); hospitals (Sydney Wood and Peter Dalzell); and high-rise towers and prestige commissions such as Wilson Hall (McCutcheon).

The new office

ICI House, Melbourne

Evidence of BSM’s prodigious output and commercial success was indicated by the erection of a purpose-built architectural office at 366 St Kilda Road77 opposite the Shrine of Remembrance.78 By February 1958 the firm had moved into the fully airconditioned building designed for their exclusive use and with parking underneath for thirty-six cars as well as a caretaker’s flat. It was ‘clear and light with garden courts, and the new indoor plants, tropical monstera and philodendron, and nothing

In the early 1950s, MLC was not the only corporation looking for a rebranding of its architectural image. In 1951, Imperial Chemical Industries of Australia and New Zealand (ICIANZ) under the chairmanship of Kenneth Begg decided to build two new headquarters buildings, one in Melbourne (1955–58) and one in Sydney (1956). BSM was engaged for both buildings.81 The intention of building an exclusive £3 000 000 headquarters building in Melbourne was

to bring together under one roof 1500 occupants from eight scattered offices (all ICIANZ groups and departments) and thus give the company a visible presence in the city. 82 A site was acquired in St Kilda Road opposite the Shrine of Remembrance. City planner EF Borrie advised that planning restrictions would beset the location and limit development.83 He suggested instead that an East Melbourne site would be more appropriate. In March 1952, ICIANZ purchased land on the corner of Albert Street and Nicholson Street, East Melbourne.84 During its construction and upon its opening on 11 December 1958 85 ICI House received generous publicity in the architectural press in Australia 86 and some notice internationally.87 For its builders, sub-contractors and suppliers, ICI House was cause for a virtual bonanza of advertising publicity. For Robin Boyd, arch-critic but at times uncritical champion of the Modern, the glazed curtain wall, in his words in 1960, ‘promises a way to end Featurism’ but in the same breath he added that ‘it also promises, if industrial development continues in a straight line, the eventual elimination of the artistarchitect’. Boyd approved of ICI House. It was non-Featurist and for him ‘demonstrated that even in a frantically Featurist society a non-Featurist building can be a popular success’.88 Boyd was referring specifically to the 20 000 visitors to the building in the first week of the opening of ICI House. Nearly £2000 was raised for charity by curious visitors to Melbourne’s new corporate monument.

71 Cross-Section, no. 52, February 1957; Cross-Section, no. 60, October 1957. 72 C Newton, ‘Peering through new glasses: Hume House as a model for the ICI building, Melbourne’, in A Leach et al. (eds), Formulation Fabrication: the Architecture of History, papers from the Seventeenth Annual Conference of SAHANZ, Wellington, New Zealand, 2000, pp. 197–204. 73 Cross-Section, no. 60, October 1957. 74 Bates Smart Archives, 8.8.3 (1963). 75 Newton, ‘p. 202. 76 On its removal, the sculpture was donated to the University of Melbourne and now sits in the garden of University House. 77 The premises at 366 St Kilda Rd were occupied by the practice of Walter Burley Griffin in 1924. Griffin modified the buildings, but his alterations were changed again in 1934. See J Turnbull & PY Navaretti, The Griffins in Australia and India: the complete works and projects of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, Miegunyah Press, Carlton, Vic., 1998. 78 Cross-Section, no. 64, February 1958. The design architects for the new office were McCutcheon and his partners, with design development by Llew Morgan (source: Struan Gilfillan) 79 L Pitkethly, letter to the BSM directors, 2 September 1988, Bates Smart Archives, 8.14. Pitkethly was the office secretary and McCutcheon’s private secretary from January 1953 until 1977. She remained with the firm until 1988. 80 R Dunster, personal communication, November 1997. 81 The firm already had the commission to design ICI’s research laboratories at Deer Park in Melbourne’s far-western suburbs, a project that was complete by December 1956. See Cross-Section, no. 50, December 1956. The laboratories at Newson Rd, Ascot Vale, were designed by the ICI Architects Department in association with BSM. 82 A Glenn, Things to be Remembered, Diana Gribble, Melbourne, 1991, p. 100; M Lewis, Melbourne: the City’s History and Development, 2nd edn, City of Melbourne, 1995, p. 136. 83 Glenn, p. 100. 84 ‘Australia’s first skyscraper ... ICI House, Melbourne’, Architecture Today, December 1958, p. 31. 85 ‘ICI House, Melbourne’, RVIA Bulletin, December 1958, p. 17.

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1 BSM Office, 366 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1957–58. Perspective view of the new modern office 2 Plan of the new office showing the departmental layout of the multi-disciplinary practice 3 Meeting room 4 The garden courts with succulent plantings 5 Director’s office 6 Interior view of the open plan office

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1 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) House, Circular Quay, Sydney, NSW. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1956. The entrance with sculptural element by Tom Bass 2 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) House, 1 Nicholson St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1955–58. From left, Harvey Brown, Douglas Gardiner, Osborn McCutcheon and Selwyn Bates with the model of the proposed building 3 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) House, Circular Quay, Sydney, NSW. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1956 4 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) House, 1 Nicholson St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1955–58. View of the completed building from Lonsdale St


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1 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) House, 1 Nicholson St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1955–58. View from Spring St 2 Typical floor plan showing offset services core providing open plan office floors 3 Ground floor plan of the building showing the integral garden design 4 Spandrel cross section detail 5 The Gerald Lewers sculpture 6 The main entrance from Nicholson St through the John Stevens landscaped garden

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1 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) House, 1 Nicholson St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1955–58. The staff cafeteria 2 The original interior of the bank fronting Albert St 3 Interior view of typical open plan office 4 Australian Mutual Provident Society (AMP), 406 Lonsdale St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1958. The distinctive façade, maximising floor space while exploring ideas of surface modulation on the ‘street wall’ 5 Hubert Banahan (1920-1993). Banahan’s distinctive design concerns impacted on the changing aesthetic at BSM


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From its opening, ICI House (1955–58) was hailed as the most accomplished glass tower in Australia in the 1950s.89 As one of the earliest freestanding fully glazed curtain wall skyscrapers in the country, it represented the most refined example of BSM’s efforts in the 1950s to perfect high-rise office design.90 Raised on pilotes (actually built-up columns of steel faced with marble and Italian glass mosaic tiles) and rising to twenty-two storeys, the blue glazed linear slab of open-plan offices, with its lift core expressed as clearly separate, broke the city’s 132-foot height limit and changed forever Melbourne’s previously consistent skyline. It was the provision of the open space at ground level as a garden—designed collaboratively by BSM, sculptor Gerald Lewers and landscape architect John Stevens—that enabled the height limit rule to be broken. While the design is often cited as having SOM’s Lever House, New York (1952) as its precedent, ICI House is, like Wilson Hall, an original amalgam—in this case, Wallace Harrison et al.’s United Nations Secretariat (1945–52),91 and Niemeyer and Costa’s Ministry of Education and Health, Rio de Janeiro (1936–39), with its one wall of brises-soleil and its other face a sheer curtain wall of glass.92 A critical factor in the realisation of ICI House had been the long and protracted discussions, almost three years, with the City of Melbourne Town Planning Authority. The Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works granted the permission for the land to be used as the site for an office building. The architects then put forward their proposal for a tower-type structure, which exceeded

the height limit. In July 1955, a special award was granted under the provisions of the Uniform Building Regulations.93 ICI House was thus the signal for a high-rise Australian city. However ICI House was not without its problems and these did not escape publicity. Exactly two years after its official opening, several of the 5 x 3 feet glass panels on the west wall cracked and fell to the pavement.94 A timber canopy was immediately erected over the footpath to protect pedestrians. It had been thought that the building’s specially imported ceramic glass would overcome the problems of uneven stresses due to solar penetration that was believed to be a potential problem.95 By 1962 however, Cross-Section were prepared to describe ICI House as ‘deciduous‘.96 Perhaps chastened by this experience, directly after the construction of the two ICI buildings in Melbourne and Sydney, BSM moved away from glass to stone and precast concrete panelled façades for high-rise buildings during the 1960s.97 It was a move that reasserted Melbourne’s 1920s metropolitanism and which responded to the next cyclical stage of postwar corporate re-imaging. The forms of the high-rise city however were not jettisoned. One surface had replaced another, urbanity and panel technology were married to replace the heroic scientism of the glass curtain wall. Just two years after its construction, ICI House, Melbourne, marked the virtual closing of a chapter in tall building history in Australia.

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Surface and mass In 1958, BSM completed a new limit-height office building for AMP at 406 Lonsdale Street in Melbourne. While not a large or overly prestigious commission, what marked this thirteen-storey building was that it was one of the very few office blocks built in Melbourne during its office-building boom between 1955 and 1958 that was built strictly for investment purposes.98 The other anomaly was its façade. Unlike virtually all the other office-building commissions in the office, its façade was not a glazed curtain wall. Cross-Section described this ‘filing cabinet with the open drawers’ as having its design rationale derived from a minimum-finish maximum floor-space design, and from the fact that the ‘open drawers’ were in fact bay-windowed offices taking advantage of the building regulations that allowed limited projections over the street.99 This was indeed true but it also indicated a return in many respects to prewar notions of surface modulation in terms of city building design, and the notion of a ‘street wall’. Chief designer on this commission was Hubert Banahan, who had joined BSM in 1957 and, with other young architects Jeffrey Howlett and Donald Bailey,100 had worked with McCutcheon as part of the design team on ICI House. Over the next ten years, the influence of Banahan’s distinctive design concerns was to be felt as the aesthetic of the BSM office shifted. Banahan’s interests were in formalism rather than repetition, in complex rather than simplified surfaces, in responding to the city as an organism to be complemented rather than radically recast.

86 For example: ‘Preview: ICI House, Melbourne’, Architecture and Arts, May 1957, pp. 26–7, 39; ‘ICI House, Melbourne’s first skyscraper’, Architecture and Arts, November 1958, pp. 24–7; Architecture Today, December 1958, entire issue; ‘ICI House, Melbourne’, Architecture in Australia, September 1959, pp. 80–3; ‘ICI House, Melbourne, Australia’, Architect and Builder, February 1961, pp. 10–17. While ICI House has been regarded as epitomising corporate imagery within the 1950s Australian city, its heavy publicity tended to overshadow similarly active corporate activity in the suburban outskirts of all Australian cities, in particular architect-designed industrial complexes such as Stephenson & Turner’s GMH factory, Dandenong (1956), and D Graeme Lumsden’s Aspro/Nicholas factory, Chadstone (1956, now demolished). 87 ‘Verwaltungsgebäude der ICI in Melbourne’, Bauen + Wohnen, February 1960, pp. 60–1. 88 Boyd, The Australian Ugliness, p. 108. 89 ICI House has since been recognised as an historic building. It is classified by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) and has been listed on the Register of Historic Buildings in Victoria. In 1989, the undercroft was glazed-in by BSM to become a large exhibition foyer and all upper floors refurbished. The garden was sympathetically renovated by Tract Consultants and the foyer was given a new sculpture, Inge King’s Joie de Vivre (1989–90). 90 The design team was led by McCutcheon and assisted by Jeff Howlett, Don Bailey, Harvey Brown and Max Bladen. Max Wilson and recent graduate Struan Gilfillan were the site architects under project architect Phil Relf. ‘Forward contracts’ were let for the structural steel supply from Sydney to ensure its availability on site by the time a builder was appointed (source: Struan Gilfillan). 91 This is supported by Osborn McCutcheon’s professed admiration of Wallace Harrison. See undated speech notes, McCutcheon personal file, p. 14, Bates Smart Archives. 92 A full account of the history and design of ICI House, Melbourne, can be found in P Goad, ‘ICI House, Melbourne’, in Taylor (ed.), pp. 164–73.

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1 South British Insurance, corner Queen and Bourke Sts, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1962. Perspective view 2 The entrance and foyer of the building, which featured a totally illuminated ceiling and landscaping to the street 3 Guardian Assurance, corner Queen and Collins Sts, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1961. Interior office layout 4 View from Collins St

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1 Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (RACV) Building, 94 Queen St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1958–61. Interior stair to club entrance 2 Internal courtyards featured commissioned artworks 3 View of the completed building from Queen St showing glazed podium and rooftop restaurant

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93 ‘Australia’s first skyscraper … ICI House, Melbourne’, Architecture Today, December 1958, p. 31; Cross-Section, no. 59, September 1957. Sprinklers had to be installed as a condition of this provision above the original height limit of 132 feet, which had coincided with the maximum length of a fire ladder. To go above this height limit required agreements of the fire chief as well as the Building Regulations. Colouring the regulation issue was the potential determination of future CBD building types. ICI House was a test case for most of these issues regarding fire and building regulations. 94 Glass panels in fact fell from all four glazed walls of the tower. See ER Ballantyne, Fracture of Toughened Glass Wall Cladding, ICI House, Melbourne, report 06.1-5, CSIRO Division of Building Research, Melbourne, 1961. 95 Cross-Section, no. 98, December 1960. The problem was in fact nickel sulphide ‘stones’ which formed in the panels under extreme temperatures and then caused the panel to ‘dice’ and hence fail. See Ballantyne. 96 Cross-Section, no. 111, January 1962. 97 The phase of urban building and shift in design trends during the 1960s in Melbourne has not been critically explored by historians. Some suggestions for analysis are proposed by Peter Brew in ‘Hugh Banahan’, Transition, no. 48, 1995, pp. 64–9. 98 D Saunders, ‘Office blocks in Melbourne’, Architecture in Australia, June 1959, p. 92. 99 Cross-Section, no. 65, March 1958 100 Jeffrey Howlett joined BSM in January 1956 as a senior design architect. He left the firm in late 1960 after winning the design competition for the Perth Town Hall (1960–63) with Don Bailey. J Howlett, from interview with Charles Mann, Jeffrey Howlett, Architectural Projects, School of Architecture, University of Western Australia, Perth, 1992, p. 3. Joining the new firm of Howlett and Bailey in Perth was Lindsay Waller, who, during 1956–57 had been the project architect in Perth for BSM on the construction of the MLC building (1955–57). See G London, ‘Council House, Perth’, in Taylor (ed.), p. 229.

A whole series of BSM buildings in central Melbourne that included the Prudential Assurance building (1960), Guardian Assurance building (1961), Sleigh Corner (1962), and South British Insurance building (1962), employed brick, precast panel or reconstructed stone facings and invariably included mixed public functions like shops and banking facilities at ground level. A characteristic aspect of these high-rise buildings was the inclusion of carefully designed garden landscapes and artworks by Australia’s leading sculptors. Parking structures were often neatly inserted into the composition, creating the rationale for a podium and breaking down the scale of the tower. Of particular note was the firm’s RACV building in Queen Street, Melbourne (1958–61).101 The curtain wall was banished in favour of punched-out windows and externally differentiated functional volumes—indicative of a rooftop restaurant, offices and residential rooms below, with a smart glazed podium housing reception rooms and club bar. All of these buildings celebrated issues such as the corner, the street wall, the repetitive modulation of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century façade, and the material textures of the nineteenth-century city.102 The city was recognised as a richly knitted fabric of differing scales, styles, materials and spatial interrelationships. Outside the central city and across the Yarra River, Mobil House (1959–61) and the APM building (1960) continued to indicate BSM’s shifting aesthetic in terms of high-rise building design and the firm’s ability to impart difference rather than formulaic repetition.103 By 1965, with

Manufacturers House at 370 St Kilda Road, a sophisticated Banahan design of sliding planes, colour shifts, and tectonic monumentality, BSM had mastered yet another idiom for the corporate office building. While BSM was not alone in Australia in this move away from the scientific sureness of the curtain wall, they were among the first of the leading firms to change their approach to the city. Few of their buildings however gained peer recognition in the early 1960s and it would not be until 1965 that BSM would, on a truly grand scale, and due primarily to the consolidation of sites, combine this new interest in material texture with a freestanding tower. An exception to this rule however was the delicately detailed black steel, white and grey glass of the New Zealand Insurance building at 491–493 Bourke Street, Melbourne (1961),104 which won the RVIA Victorian Architecture Medal in 1964. In praising the building, CrossSection also signalled the changed mood of office-building design in Melbourne: The NZ Insurance bldg (Melb.) is a gem of its kind—the cool, formal apogee of glass curtain wall design—a phase that once achieved, held the interest for a short time only. The architects B. S. & M. have of course proceeded since then into more assertively imaginative designs, though not always as pure in concept at the NZ Insurance—already old-fashioned enough to be recognised as a classic.105

Buildings for universities Wilson Hall was not the only building completed by BSM at the University of Melbourne in the 1950s. In 1954, the firm

produced a master plan for a series of buildings along Royal Parade in Parkville. One of these buildings was a new school of biochemistry. The location of the L-shaped block followed Professor Brian Lewis’s 1951–52 university master plan for a new medical precinct of Modernist slab blocks marching north from Grattan Street, each perpendicular to Royal Parade.106 The Russell Grimwade School of Biochemistry was the first in this series of similarly formed buildings along Royal Parade, and construction commenced in late 1956.107 The steel-framed building, initially three then extended to five storeys, had lightweight floors of prefabricated metal units, a north face of aluminium window-frames and sunhoods, and window spandrels faced with grey-anodised ribbed aluminium.108 It was a building that blended the structural and material innovations of BSM’s high-rise work with skins of textured brick and low-key decorative elements near entry points to contextually soften the bold prismatic forms. Another commission at the university involved a variety of works dating from 1950 to the existing 1880s buildings of Queen’s College, culminating in Eakins Hall (1962–64) designed by Robert Dunster with Alan Ralton. This large contemporary dining hall with its dynamic folded timber ceiling was designed to begin the enclosure of a quadrangle. It was in some ways ‘a poor man’s version of Wilson Hall’,109 yet its construction of solid concrete blocks chosen in three to four colour shades was intended to simulate an all-stone building.


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1 Mobil House & Australian Paper Manufacturers (APM), Southbank, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1959–61 & 1960. View from the Yarra River 2 New Zealand Insurance (NZI), 491–493 Bourke St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1961. Reception and office layout 3 The building in the foreground of the Bourke St view. Awarded the RVIA Victorian Architecture Medal in 1964

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1 Russell Grimwade School of Biochemistry, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1956 2 Eakins Hall, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1962–64. Interior view of dining hall 3 Monash University masterplan, Clayton, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1958–68. The site as it developed over the first decade 4 The 1962 development plan. Following the development of the initial master plan, it was developed further to cater for additional student numbers 1

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101 As was typical of many of these commissions, a number of staff were involved as specialists. Phillip Pearce was partner-in-charge, Jim McMeekin was job captain, Robert Dunster was responsible for sub-contracts, Hugh Banahan was the designer-in-charge, and Llew Morgan was responsible for the interiors. Interview with Robert Dunster, 3 May 2002. 102 Other Melbourne buildings that expressed similar design concerns at the time included CML, corner Collins and Elizabeth streets, Melbourne (1962–63), by Stephenson & Turner; Royal Insurance Group building, 430–444 Collins St, Melbourne (1962–65), by Yuncken Freeman; and the Scottish Amicable building, 128–146 Queen St, Melbourne (1966), by Yuncken Freeman. 103 Project architects for Mobil House were Frank Turner and John Allaway (source: Struan Gilfillan). 104 Architecture in Australia, March 1965, pp. 142–3. The project architect on New Zealand Insurance building and also on Manufacturers House on St Kilda Rd was Ric Bonaldi. 105 Cross-Section, no. 139, May 1964. 106 G Tibbits, The Planning and Development of the University of Melbourne: an Historical Outline, University of Melbourne, 2000, reprint 2001, pp. 87–93. 107 Cross-Section, no. 52, February 1957. Project architects for the Russell Grimwade School of Biochemistry were Alan Ralton and James McMeekin (source: Struan Gilfillan). 108 Russell Grimwade School of Biochemistry, photographs and presentation texts, Bates Smart Archives. 109 Interview with Robert Dunster, 3 May 2002. 110 J Rickard, ‘Monash: the Universityin-a-hurry’, in FW Kent and DD Cuthbert (eds), Making Monash: a Twenty-five Year History, Monash University Gallery, Department of Visual Arts & the Department of History, Monash University, Clayton, Vic., 1986, p. 8. 111 C Hamann, ‘Recollections of a plan: architecture at Monash‘, in Kent and Cuthbert (eds), p. 37. 112 Other BSM staff on the project included Max Bladen, Don Hayes, John Cole and Richard Butterworth (source: Struan Gilfillan). 113 Hamann, p. 65. 114 Hamann, p. 36. 115 Information provided by Andrew McCutcheon.

A new commission at the end of 1958 drew upon the combined master-planning and architectural skills of the BSM office but at a far greater scale. In November 1958, a final site was chosen for the new Monash University. It was expected that the university would be planned and construction far enough progressed by 1964 for teaching to begin in March of that year. With no time for a design competition, BSM was appointed by the end of 1958 to produce a master plan for the farm-land site at Clayton in Melbourne’s south-east.110 By March 1959, BSM had produced a first master plan that has been described by Conrad Hamann as ‘a giant amphitheatre towards the Australian bush’.111 The plan was essentially a horseshoe of buildings oriented with its open side facing east towards playing fields with the Dandenong Ranges as a distant backdrop. Outdoor spaces were to be car free with connection by pedestrian ‘streets’. By April 1959, the east-west oriented horseshoe, with one of its sides lying parallel to Wellington Road, was elaborated by a huge paved forum inside the horseshoe and by residential colleges forming each end of the horseshoe. Yet by September 1959, the complex collection of teaching and research buildings began to be spatially squeezed due to the increased student population above the size anticipated in the initial master plan. Individual buildings grew in number and scale, the grand amphitheatre shrank in size, and the encroachment of roads and car parks began to compromise BSM’s plan. A further complication was that the opening date was brought forward from 1964 to 1961. As Hamann points out, this put enormous pressure on the architects.

There were not years to refine the master plan. It had to take a little over one year and BSM also had to design a number of the first campus buildings. Key BSM staff on the Monash project that at one point numbered over thirty included McCutcheon, Banahan, Struan Gilfillan and Robert Stafford.112 An unusually wet winter caused excavation delays, and ‘Monash went about construction in pressured haste and with constant money shortages‘.113 It seemed that ‘Monash saw itself as the first “planned” Australian university, but its final architecture and layout are more the recollections of a plan’.114 However, a unique aspect of the Monash campus and its planning was the development of a native plant reserve built and planned by the Professor of Botany, Jock Marshall. Its plants were propagated and used to landscape both the Monash and Peninsula School sites.115 Despite these difficulties, Monash University was opened on 11 March 1961. BSM continued to design several buildings, and indeed with the exception of the high-rise Menzies Wing buildings by Eggleston MacDonald and Secomb, the early architectural character, materials palette, and spatial quality of the campus was largely provided by the BSM buildings for the Science and Engineering faculties. The Central Science (1959–61), Physics Wing (1959–61), Hargrave Library (1960–62), and Engineering blocks (1960–64) all followed a similar vocabulary of taut prismatic volumes clothed in glass and suspended veneered skins of brick and split-face blockwork or precast concrete panels. The result was a set of low-rise buildings connected by bridges of glass and stick-like

verticals, where the spaces between the blocks imparted a sense of restrained urbanity. This approach was not Georgian Revivalism on a huge scale,116 but a studied neutrality, a collection of typologically urbane cloisters yet without the material ruthlessness of Peter and Alison Smithson’s Hunstanton School in Norfolk (1949–54). Instead the influence of new British and Scandinavian universities and SOM’s US Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs (1957–60) appeared to inform BSM’s various buildings at Monash from 1959 to 1974, with a spatial understanding that predated British architect Leslie Martin’s seminal spatial studies that would be influential at the University of Melbourne in its 1970 master plan.

Buildings for private schools A similar mannered asymmetry in master plan, deferral from emphatic axes, and studied neutrality in the resolution of architecture informed BSM’s master plans and building designs for three new private boys’ schools on Melbourne’s periphery. After Wesley College had finally decided in 1959 not to sell its main Prahran campus and instead build only a junior school campus at its forty-eight acre Syndal site,117 BSM was commissioned to produce a master plan and design all the buildings. McCutcheon, an old boy of the school, gained the commission for the firm, and between 1960 and 1963, Alan Ralton for a brief time, and then primarily John Hitch (who joined BSM in 1962 shortly after Ralton died earlier that year), carried out most of the design work with building commencing in 1965 and continuing until 1972.


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1 Central Science, Monash University, Clayton, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1959–61 2 Engineering Blocks, Monash University, Clayton, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1960–64 3 Hargrave Library, Monash University, Clayton, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1960–62. The early architectural character of the campus, largely provided by BSM, showed simple prismatic forms clothed in glass and suspended masonry skins

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116 Hamann, p. 37, describes the overall effect of Monash in its early phase as: ‘Georgian Revivalism so pervasive in Australian architecture, had found expression on a huge scale here’. He also goes on to cite affinity with JM Richards’s ideas on anonymity in Modern architecture as outlined in JM Richards, ‘The condition of architecture and the principle of anonymity‘, in JL Martin et al. (eds), Circle, Faber and Faber, London, 1937, pp. 184–90. This accords with Hamann’s other historical writings where much of Australian Modern architecture is aligned with an empathy for the Colonial Georgian architecture of early Australia. While this may on occasion be true, this thesis does not always necessarily follow in form, urban design, and spatial arrangement for all postwar Modern architecture of a subdued palette. At Monash, I would counter such an opinion with the almost exaggerated neutrality of the architecture suggestive of the institutional master plans of Mies van der Rohe, the General Motors corporate campus in Detroit (1948–56) by Eero Saarinen, and school architecture in Scandinavia of the late 1950s. 117 G Blainey, J Morrisey & SEK Hulme, Wesley College: the First Hundred Years, President and Council, Wesley College, in assoc. with Robertson and Mullens Ltd, Melbourne, 1967, pp. 227–8. 118 Blainey et al., p. 229. In 1960, the school had initially chosen a site on the banks of the Yarra near Melbourne High School. In 1962, the choice of a site near Como in South Yarra was finalised. 119 J Hitch, unpublished memoirs, 2001. These have been kindly lent to the author by John Hitch. 120 H Abeyaratne, From Fantasy to Fact: the Foundation of the Peninsula School 1957–1967, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1989, pp. 11, 22–3, 44. 121 BSM during this period also completed the Napier building (1965) for the Faculty of Arts at the University of Adelaide, South Australia.

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Situated on the highest point of the landscaped site, the collection of classrooms, administration buildings, gymnasium, library and assembly hall were grouped around a courtyard with the fly tower of the hall being the prominent and only vertical emphasis of the scheme.

Protestant independent boys’ school for nearly half a century, was the BSMdesigned language laboratory, believed to be the first of its type in a school in Victoria, where in an early foray into multimedia teaching, boys sat at specially designed carrels with headphones and speakers.

Before the Syndal campus had begun construction, BSM completed an earlier project for Wesley College. In late 1963, the school’s new boat-house for its rowing crews was opened.118 Hugh Banahan did the sketch designs, and the building’s design development and construction was overseen by John Hitch.119 Its design was a striking example of a pragmatic response to site constraints: strict overhead easement restrictions imposed by the SEC and foundation problems as the river-bank soil could only support half a ton per square foot. The solution was to float the entire building on a structural rafter. The result was a small but elegantly spare building of expressed concrete, freestone facing, brick veneer, and a flat roof hovering over glass. It was this same relaxed master-planning and subdued palette of materials, texture and tectonic clarity that informed the building designs of the Peninsula Church of England Grammar School at Mt Eliza, 1958–73, and the Yarra Valley Church of England School at Ringwood, 1964–72. At Peninsula, McCutcheon had been involved from the outset in 1958 when discussion took place as to the potential of the 38-acre site of the former Mt Eliza Golf Club.120 Master plans were done, building commenced and the school officially opened in 1961. A particular innovation at Peninsula, the first new

Educational commissions like Wesley, Peninsula and Yarra Valley ensured ongoing work for the firm. Master plans could be consolidated, and mini-urbanisms of Modernist restraint began to accumulate over time. The firm also gained larger commissions for the increased expansion of two major tertiary commissions.121 In each of these, by contrast, the language of the architecture tended towards the more robust, structurally and materially expressive language of late Modernism. Yet both projects were different. The first at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) attempted to knit a new development into an existing urban fabric and was arguably misunderstood by an emerging generation of younger architects.122 The second, at Footscray Institute of Technology, indicated a different approach to master-planning at BSM, one concerned with systems design and a plug-in approach to building growth.

Buildings for RMIT At RMIT, the firm were asked in 1965 to master plan a major redevelopment of its central city site.123 As part of this project, BSM also designed the George Thompson School of Foundry Technology a few streets away on the corner of Cardigan and Queensberry streets. This building, with substantial design input from Hugh Banahan, would seem at first to counter the

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neighbouring context of nineteenth-century terrace houses with its vivid red brick volumes of the foundry workshop presented at Cardigan Street, and three-storey slab office block facing Queensberry Street. Yet the negative glazing strips, the rhythm of light monitors as faux parapets, and the street-hugging walls indicate empathy with an existing urban morphology of tall narrow volumes, party walls and parapets. Unlike Romberg & Boyd’s Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar in Lygon Street, Carlton (1962) where the identity of three nineteenthcentury shops was essentially masked and represented as a white ‘Mediterranean’ wall, the volume of BSM’s foundry school is articulated into lines and planes. It is a complementary rather than dismissive inversion of the formal characteristics of context. A similar strategy was followed in the 1965 RMIT master plan, whereby an ambitious large-scale response to the site was followed with the assumption of a seven-year building program. Rather than see the fortress-like forms of the grey concrete block multi-level ‘wall’ of buildings to Swanston Street as a damaging and totalising form of architecture, one might regard BSM’s plan as a positive Kahnian critique of Percy Everett’s streamlined Moderne buildings 5, 6, 7 and 9 (1937–55)124 and as a response to the precinct’s historical associations with the bluestone and courtyard spaces of the city watch-house and the Old Melbourne Gaol in the same block. A sheltered inward-looking precinct was desired, seeking acoustic separation from the city with the ‘wall’ of services (stairs, elevator banks and toilets)


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1 Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Casey Wing, Swanston St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1967–69 2 Rear courtyards between the building forms 3 George Thompson School of Foundry Technology, corner Cardigan and Queensberry Sts, Carlton. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1965 4 Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Casey Wing, Swanston St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1967–69. Perspective view of courtyard space 5 Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) master plan, Swanston St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1965. The masterplan followed a seven-year program where the buildings responded to the bluestone and courtyard spaces of the Old Melbourne Goal nearby

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122 Peter Brew argues a positive case for the BSM buildings and reflects on the changes made to the BSM master plan of 1965 when Sydney architect John Andrews was commissioned to design the new Building 8 in Swanston St, thereby halting the line of BSM’s grey concrete block buildings along Swanston St. See P Brew, ‘Hubert Banahan at BSM’, Transition, no. 48, pp. 67–8. Brew’s argument is compelling but overlooks the changes in masterplanning ideals within BSM itself. Their 1971 master plan represents a major shift from their previous approach and in many respects conditioned the future choice of an architect such as John Andrews for Building 8. 123 BSM’s 1965 master plan followed three others by the RMIT Council (1961, 1963 and 1964). See S Murray-Smith & AJ Dare, The Tech: a Centenary History of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1987, pp. 394–5. 124 A comparison with EH Rembert’s 1938 master plan for Sydney Technical College is also relevant when examining BSM’s 1965 RMIT master plan. 125 The high-rise tower proposal was inspired by the plans for the redevelopment of the New South Wales Institute of Technology in Sydney. See Murray-Smith & Dare, p. 395. 126 N Bertram, ‘Institutional imagings: site and desire in Swanston Street’, in L van Schaik and N Bertram (eds), Building 8: Edmond & Corrigan at RMIT, Schwartz Transition Monographs, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 32–3. BSM’s 1967 master plan can also be compared to Robin Boyd’s 1965 proposals for a ‘Melbourne 2000’. See ‘Melbourne 2000’, Architecture Today, vol. 8, no. 1, 1965, pp. 9–10. 127 Murray-Smith & Dare, pp. 438–9. 128 John Andrews’s RMIT Union building on Swanston St (1977–82) presented a completely different concept of building to the street: a serrated glass block façade that allowed for vertical expansion. Edmond and Corrigan’s extension to this building, known as RMIT Building 8, was designed and constructed between 1991 and 1994. 129 Murray-Smith & Dare, p. 439.

forming a buffer to internal pedestrian streets in the air. Casey Wing (1967–69) was built first, followed by Gillespie Wing (1970–71) and then Building A (1975–76) on the corner of Swanston and Franklin streets. BSM amended their master plan in 1967, with a proposal for a twenty-six storey high-rise tower set within its own forecourt on the corner of Latrobe and Swanston streets.125 The intent appeared to be the reverse—to open the campus up to the city. This shift is reflective of a new phase in Melbourne for isolated tower and plaza designs and is concurrent with SOM and BSM’s AMP tower set back from the street, the newly projected BHP House and, as Nigel Bertram points out, Leith & Bartlett’s winning entry in the 1965 Civic Design Competition for a town hall plaza and city square in La Trobe Street.126 Yet the critical difference was that BSM’s corner plaza was in fact planned to be elevated above the street similar to the much criticised Princes Plaza at the other end of Swanston Street. In 1971–72, BSM produced another master plan for RMIT initiated by changes in state education policy separating tertiary from non-tertiary teaching. The institution was intent on reflecting this change with a shift in image.127 The new master plan was concerned with permeability and transparency, and what appeared to be a series of flat floor plates with fixed vertical circulation points but no clear indication architecturally of what form the final building might take. This was the second move in the master plan towards openness, and a tactic that regrettably saw BSM lose the commission for the future extension of an open ‘wall’ along Swanston Street

to Sydney architect John Andrews.128 As Murray-Smith and Dare have observed, the mood for change at RMIT overlooked BSM’s contribution where, for over ten years, they had provided good value for money in terms of space provision, even to the extent of the steel frame construction which allowed interior concrete block walls to be shifted as needs changed; it was even possible for entire floors to be removed to create double height volumes.129

Buildings and masterplans BSM’s 1972 master-planning ideas at RMIT were however realised in a different commission—at the new Footscray Institute of Technology. BSM’s 1971 campus plan forecast an entirely new complex to accommodate student growth of 4000 students by 1985. The overall concept was a series of buildings turning its back to the noise of Ballarat Road and stepping down toward the Maribyrnong River as a series of flexible teaching spaces connected by internal pedestrian streets. The unifying theme was a systems notion of plug-in spaces, repetitive construction and servicing, a series of two column-bay square platforms of waffle slab construction, each of which was connected to the next by precast planks which could be used for additional plumbing or mechanical services. BSM contributed buildings to this master plan over the next decade, and while the firm also contributed substantial buildings at La Trobe University and Prahran College of Technology,130 as a commission, Footscray Institute of Technology represented architecturally the next phase in their approach to buildings for education.

Buildings for people Ever since the 1850s, the firm had not only serviced corporate clients and educational institutions, but also the broader community. From the 1950s to the mid-1970s, BSM maintained that service but now the language of postwar Modernism and advanced technology lent a consistent vocabulary of new forms, new materials and new structural techniques to traditional typologies. Ecclesiastical architecture had long been an intrinsic part of the firm’s output. In the postwar years, that client base continued. In 1953, BSM was recommissioned as architects for the continuing work on Reed, Smart & Tappin’s Roman Catholic cathedral at Bendigo, with Alan Ralton taking a leading role in the project. The major work to be done was the reconstruction and fit-out of the cathedral interior, the central tower and spire. Twenty years later in 1973, the interior was complete, and then work commenced to finish the exterior. The need to reduce the weight of the spire and the time needed for its construction led to the use of a steel frame with precast concrete facing.131 The firm gained other work for the Roman Catholic Church in Bendigo during the 1960s, including St Joseph’s Parish Church at Quarry Hill (1964), a building that employed the same planar elegance as the Wesley boat-shed, and the Bethlehem Home for the Aged (1965) in the grounds of the convent of the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary. A monastery at Shepparton for the Marist Brothers was also designed in 1965.


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1 Footscray Institute of Technology, Ballarat Rd, Footscray, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1971. View of central courtyard 2 View along Ballarat Rd 3 Methodist Church, High St, Frankston, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1968–69. Altar with split-face concrete block behind

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1 Sacred Heart Cathedral, Short St, Bendigo, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1953–73. The main work completed in this phase was the reconstruction and fitout of the interior. Following this, the exterior of the building, including the spire, were completed - over a century since the initial work began by the firm 2 St Joseph’s Church, Quarry Hill, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1964. The building employed the same planar elegance seen in other institutional work 3 Interior view of the church

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1 Le Pine Funeral Homes, Box Hill, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1963. Courtyard and reflection pool 2 Le Pine Funeral Homes, East Kew, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1963. Interior of chapel 3 Flat arched entrance colonnade 4 Municipal Offices, Royal Avenue, Sandringham, Vic. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1962–65. Interior of main council chamber 5 The building displayed a contemporary measure of municipal modernity

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1 Sleigh Corner, corner Queen and Bourke Sts, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1962 2 Australian Mutual Provident Society (AMP), Market St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1964–66. The new building next to the firm’s first AMP building in Melbourne of 1931 3 Manufacturers’ House, 370 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1965

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130 School of Humanities and the School of Education, La Trobe University, Bundoora, 1972–74. See ‘Humanities education’, Architecture Australia, September 1978, pp. 44–5. For a critical review of the overall architectural qualities of La Trobe University, see J Burke, ‘La Trobe: a review’, Architecture Australia, September 1978, p. 66. ‘Prahran College of Technology, Prahran, Victoria, 1975—campus plan and buildings’, project data sheets, Bates Smart Archives. 131 ‘Bendigo spire’, Architect, March 1977, p. 23; ‘Sacred Heart Cathedral, Bendigo AD 1897–1977’, Architecture Australia, June/July 1977, p. 78; ‘Bendigo RC Cathedral’, Architecture Australia, August/September 1977, pp. 47–50, review by P Staughton, pp. 51–66. 132 D Pickup, Changing Tides: History of Wesley Uniting Church, Frankston 1860–1990, Magenta Press, Melbourne 1990, pp. 45–7. 133 Not so however the firm’s earlier barn-like additions to Moorabbin Town Hall (1961) which, though much larger a commission complete with clock tower, lacked finesse. 134 J Pacini, It’s Your Honour: an Account of the First Fifty Years of the Peninsula Country Golf Club, Peninsula Country Golf Club, Frankston, 1975, pp. 1, 54. The architect Christopher Cowper was a keen golfer and member of the Peninsula Country Golf Club. See pp. 6–7. Influential golf club members from the 1930s included Norman Brookes, Len Buxton, GJ Coles, AW Coles, Major-General HW Grimwade, and (later Sir) Russell Grimwade. 135 Hitch. 136 Interview with Robert Bruce, 21 January 2002. 137 Interview with Robert Bruce, 21 January 2002.

BSM also continued its long association with the Methodist Church. In addition to the Syndal commission for Wesley College, the firm was responsible for the Methodist Home for Children (Orana), 1955, at Wattle Park, in suburban Melbourne; a youth centre for the Central Methodist Mission in Prahran, 1955; and, in 1968–69, the Frankston Methodist Church in High Street, Frankston, another restrained cubic composition of split-face concrete brick but with an interior where reinforced concrete columns and beams spanned 13 metres to provide a broad unbroken floor space. Osborn McCutcheon, a parishioner of the Frankston church, had also been involved in the 1953 kindergarten additions next door, and was instrumental in the firm gaining the commission for the new church.132 BSM also designed buildings that provided for the next stage in life’s spiritual journey. In the 1960s, they were commissioned to design a number of funeral parlours for Le Pine, the Melbourne firm of funeral directors. While some were stylish alterations to existing buildings such as Le Pine in Burke Road, Camberwell, others were new free-standing structures such as at Box Hill and East Kew (1963) where a similarly non-denominational idiom of subdued concrete blocks and flat-arched colonnades was employed. The firm also gained a small number of municipal commissions in the early 1960s. Of these, the Sandringham municipal offices in Royal Avenue, Sandringham, 1962–65, was the outstanding project. BSM also completed public change rooms at Sandringham beach, and also a library for the council, but it was the taut off-white

planar forms of the council offices that challenged the Guggenheim-inspired forms of Oakley & Parkes’s Brighton Civic Offices (1959–61) in the neighbouring shire as a contemporary measure of municipal modernity.133 A somewhat different commission for the firm on the Mornington Peninsula was Peninsula Country Golf Club on Skye Road in Frankston, 1963–67. The golf club had sold its former course and clubhouse (1924) designed by Cowper Murphy & Appleford and decided to build afresh on a different site with a new course designed by Sloan Morpeth and new clubhouse designed by BSM.134 The result was an appropriately unassuming low-rise building in sandcoloured concrete block, with an interior design that was Danish in feeling, and an expansive view across the tea-trees to Port Phillip Bay. Yet in other respects, this project was typical of the office, gained through the connections and networking of its chief partner, Osborn McCutcheon (who was not even a club member!).135

International partners After the string of high-rise buildings in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it appeared that after the credit squeeze of 1961 there might be a lull in building generally. However that was not the case. BSM had plenty of work, occupied with completing office buildings like a new Sleigh House (1962) in Bourke Street; Australian Society of Accountants building, 49–51 Exhibition Street (1964); and Manufacturers House at 370 St Kilda Road (1965); continuing health care commissions at the Western General

Hospital, Footscray (1945–72) and Royal Talbot Centre in Kew (1961–73); and longterm educational commissions for RMIT and Monash University, and private schools at Peninsula, Syndal and shortly Yarra Valley School. If anything, the three years between 1961 and 1963 offered the firm only a brief time for reflection, and especially so as in 1963, the office gained the joint commission for the new Melbourne headquarters of AMP. On the suggestion of Sir Robert Law-Smith, an influential member of the Victorian board of AMP, it was decided that the architects of a new development on a large consolidated site fronting Bourke, Little Collins and William streets in Melbourne should be the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM).136 They were then already designing the Qantas Wentworth Hotel in Sydney (1962–66). The American firm required an Australian partner and Osborn McCutcheon was approached, as his firm had designed previous AMP headquarters and the most recent AMP annex building in Market Street in 1964–66. Resistant initially, McCutcheon, on travelling to San Francisco and meeting the firm’s representatives, agreed to a joint venture. Design was to be handled in San Francisco with all documentation past the design development stage and supervision of construction to be the responsibility of BSM. Designers in the SOM office for the AMP project were Chuck Bassett, Richard Foster, and Mark Goldstein who would be responsible for the distinctive angled fins on the L-shaped St James building.137 Helmut Jacoby was responsible for the perspective drawings.


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1 Australian Mutual Provident Society (AMP) Square and St James Building, 527-555 Bourke St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon (in assoc. with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill), 1965–69. Original foyer 2 View to Clement Meadmore’s forecourt sculpture ‘Awakening’ 3 William St elevation drawing

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1 Chancery Building, Australian Embassy, Massachusetts Ave, Washington DC, US. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1965–69. Interior of main assembly hall 2 View of the building after completion of the second stage 3 Interior perspective of the main assembly hall 4 South elevation drawing of first stage

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Among the junior assistants on the design team were two young Australian architects. After working for Paul Rudolph in New Haven, Melbourne architect Daryl Jackson spent three months in 1964 on the project working on the low-rise St James building. The other Australian, Robert Bruce, from Sydney, was in the SOM office from 1964 until 1967, and worked on the design of the tower, making models in plywood and cardboard, before working for eighteen months within the joint venture design team on the Bank of America building in San Francisco. Once construction of the complex began in Melbourne, Bruce remained partially involved with the AMP project 138 and met McCutcheon a number of times during his various trips to the United States during the Australian chancery project in Washington. On returning to Australia in November 1967, Bruce, then twenty-nine years old, was offered and accepted a design position at BSM. Other BSM staff such as Ric Bonaldi, Frank Turner and Max Bladen, all involved with the structural and services engineering aspects of the AMP project, also made visits to the SOM office which was then located in the SOM-designed Crown Zellerbach building (1959) in San Francisco. Harold Strachan also visited to collaborate with SOM interiors expert Margot Grant. The design of the AMP Square project (1965–69) was unusual in Melbourne, a rare and early example of an L-shaped public plaza enclosed by a free-standing tower and a perimeter block. The twenty-six storey tower with its square plan was surrounded on two sides by the six-storey St James building that formed an arcade of shops at ground level around the south and west

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sides of the plaza. Both buildings were faced in polished panels of reconstructed granite and their russet tones and muscular masonry forms were complemented by Clement Meadmore’s forecourt sculpture, Awakening.139 The complex was an influential example of monumental corporate office design. The graphic neutrality of its façades and forbidding plaza, often in shade, challenged the density of the Melbourne grid. The tower’s footprint, a square set back from the corner, provided the model of the tower as temple. Yuncken Freeman’s BHP House (1967–72) on the opposite corner was to follow the same urban design principle and become the third skyscraper at the intersection with an SOM pedigree.140 This combination of tower, public space, counterpointing piece of abstract sculpture, and flanking buildings on a massive island site was indicative of the power of corporations to consolidate land in the 1960s and erase the nineteenthcentury city entirely.

International prestige In 1964, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon were appointed architects of the chancery building for the Australian Embassy in Washington DC. This was a prestigious commission, the first purpose-built Australian embassy building since Australia House had been constructed in London in 1913–18.141 Given the firm’s small number of commissions in Canberra, this was a high honour indeed. The chancery had an excellent site in Washington DC, on Scott Circle and Massachusetts Avenue. Its

design was governed by the city’s height restrictions that were intended to protect views of the Capitol and a strict brief that required provision of fall-out shelters and high security, and contextual respect for the city’s dominant architectural style, Beaux-Arts Classicism. Led by McCutcheon and Banahan in its design, the firm responded with an abstract palazzo-like form, in effect, an updated version of McCutcheon’s prewar design for the AMP headquarters in Collins Street. Clad in offwhite Tennessee marble with bronze-tinted glass in bronze anodised frames, the chancery was an elegant classical cage with a ground floor giant order colonnade indicating the public areas on the two lower floors, and a mid-level loggia encircling the seven-level mass and indicating the ambassadorial and diplomatic suites on the fourth floor.142 Façades of perfect symmetry and order were presented to each street. In appearance, the building echoed the marble-faced monumentality of prewar Italian Rationalism but more especially, it followed the stylistic idiom adopted by the US embassy building program of the late1950s, a subdued Classical Modernism that admitted precious material facing and the judicious inclusion of national regalia.143 Completed in 1969 and overseen on site by Robert Dunster, the Australian chancery was further complemented by the use of Australian timbers, carpets, curtains, furniture and an extensive collection of contemporary Australian art chosen by the painter Sir William Dargie and four architects from BSM (Sir Osborn McCutcheon, Hugh Banahan, John Hitch and Robert Bruce).144

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138 For example, Robert Bruce had to interview the expatriate Australian sculptor Clement Meadmore while still in the United States. 139 Trust News, vol. 20, no. 9, 1992, p. 17. 140 Shell House, 1960, was designed by Jack Rogers of SOM in association with Buchan Laird and Buchan. BHP House was designed by Melbourne architects Yuncken Freeman with structural and design input from Fazlur Khan of the Chicago office of SOM. See P Goad, ‘BHP House, Melbourne’, in Taylor (ed.), pp. 261–81. 141 Australia House, Aldwych, London (1913–18), was designed by Scots architect Marshall McKenzie and his son AGR McKenzie. 142 The main hall of the chancery seats over 200 people. The upper floors contain some 250 offices. BSM office brochure, c. 1975, Bates Smart Archives. 143 See JC Loeffler, The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America’s Embassies, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1998, pp. 167–86. 144 Hitch. Artworks for the chancery included: an aluminium screen by Vince Jomantas; the Australian coat of arms by Tom Bass; and paintings and sculpture by Charles Bush, Lindsay Edward, Roger Kemp, Andrew Sibley, Fred Williams, Inge King, Graeme King, Clifford Last, John Perceval, Tate Adams, George Baldessin, Jock Clutterbuck, Murray Griffin, Jan Senbergs and Tay Kok Wee.


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1 Collins Place, 35–55 Collins St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon (in assoc. with IM Pei), 1970–80. View of the completed buildings from the Yarra River as shown in Constructional Review, 1981 2 Model of the proposed towers showing the formation of the ‘Great Space’ between the two towers at street level and the central atrium within the hotel tower 3 Sketch of the Great Space centre of the complex

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Peer recognition On 26 May 1966, the President of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, Gavin Walkley, presented Osborn McCutcheon with the RAIA Gold Medal for 1965.145 For McCutcheon, then aged sixty-seven, it was a well-deserved and timely honour. 1966 also marked forty years for McCutcheon as a partner of BSM. He had achieved a great deal, not only building his firm to become one of the most respected in the country, but also making substantial and critical contributions to the profession as a whole. In 1962, McCutcheon had initiated meetings among a few firms of Melbourne architects to discuss job-handling procedures.146 At first administered from the BSM office in St Kilda Road, these meetings produced information and documents valuable to the wider profession, and by April 1964, they had developed into the Practice Group of the RVIA, with a membership of seventy-five firms, and similar groups were set up in other states. This initiative was a testament to McCutcheon’s professional generosity. From the mid-1950s onward in the BSM office, McCutcheon, Phillip Pearce and Richard Butterworth147 had, in response to the extraordinary quantity of work in the office, new building techniques and contractual methods, formulated many practices and procedures to maintain office efficiency.148 Many of these BSM-developed procedures would later be adopted as standard practices by the RAIA, forming the basis of many of the current RAIA Practice Notes and it was also this initiative that would lead to the eventual formation of the federally managed RAIA Practice Group in 1971 (later to be known as the National

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Practice Committee). McCutcheon’s achievements, like his practice, were diverse and broad ranging in their effect. Further honour came with a knighthood, also in 1966, but it did not signal imminent retirement. Sir Osborn McCutcheon was about to embark on yet another phase of his career, and continue to foster the broad base of his firm’s activities, and as always, acknowledging the support of his partners as he did so.

A finale of four towers The series of three major high-rise building projects that followed AMP St James were different from others that had gone before. All were erected on the south side of Collins Street and initiated at a time just before the heritage movement began to develop in Melbourne, and all three were either complete or already under construction before the formation of the Collins Street Defence Movement in 1976.149 The fifteenstorey CBC Bank, 250 Collins Street (1968–73),150 and the headquarters of the Commonwealth Bank in Melbourne, 367 Collins Street (1969–75), both involved Robert Bruce as the major designer.151 Common to both these towers was a setback from Collins Street,152 and a strong horizontal emphasis that indicated graphic trabeated construction; with glazing set back deeply from the face of the building. These were clear expressions of structure.153 At ground level, each tower broke the line of the ‘street wall’ in favour of the current Melbourne City Council building regulations for mini-plazas. Common too was the multi-level banking chamber in each which took advantage of pedestrian movement between

Flinders Lane and Collins Street. Each acknowledged an understanding of Melbourne as a city with its own network of lanes and arcades, but now captured within the space of the building itself. The third Collins Street project also took advantage of its site to encourage mixed use at ground level, but it was a different scale altogether. It was a project that due to its extraordinary size (three and a half acres of CBD) became the catalyst for a major rethinking of future development procedures in the central city of Melbourne. Collins Place at 35–55 Collins Street was in 1975 the largest single building project in Australia. Intended to be a microcosm of the city, the development included an international hotel, two 180-metre high office towers, sixty shops, twenty professional suites, and three cinemas, all tied together by the ‘Great Space’, a one-acre sunken plaza comprising a six-storey volume and covered by a glazed space frame, the first of its kind in Australia.154 BSM gained the project through Osborn McCutcheon’s entrepreneurial yet accommodating style. BSM had initially undertaken for the ANZ Banking Group a feasibility study of the corner site that was up for sale. Nervous about development, AMP, who was also looking at the location generally for development potential, had consulted New York planner, Vincent Ponti.155 His blunt recommendation was that the east end of Melbourne’s CBD was ripe for office development. The die was cast. The site bounded by Collins Street, Exhibition Street and Flinders Lane was redeveloped as a joint undertaking by the ANZ Banking Group and AMP Society.

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145 ‘Gold Medal Award, 1965’, Architecture in Australia, July 1966, pp. 73–4. 146 ‘Gold Medal Award, 1965’, Architecture in Australia, July 1966, p. 74. It is known that Stephenson & Turner, Buchan Laird & Buchan, and Yuncken Freeman, were among the large architectural firms involved in these practice-based discussions. For a detailed account of these meetings and the implications for the RAIA, see McPherson, pp. 40–2. 147 Richard Butterworth left BSM in 1964 to join the institute on the formation of the RVIA Practice Group that year. In 1971 he was appointed to the position of director of the newly formed RAIA Practice Group. See McPherson, p. 42. 148 Dalzell, p. 4. 149 All were also clad in different forms of reconstituted stone, a finish perfected by the firm’s architects and engineers following AMP St James. 150 The CBC Bank and tower were built on the site of bank premises originally designed by Reed and Barnes, and then refurbished by BSM in 1927–31. 151 Interview with Robert Bruce, 21 January 2002. Hubert Banahan was also closely involved in the design of the Commonwealth Bank headquarters building in Collins St while Struan Gilfillan was involved throughout the project from planning approval to final construction. 152 At the time, the set-back was a Melbourne City Council requirement for which additional height to the building was allowed. 153 The firm’s designs for the ninestorey 240 and 250 Victoria Parade, East Melbourne (1974, for Compac Ltd), and the eighteen-storey Fawkner Centre, 499 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne (1974, for T & G Mutual Life Society), both designed to maximise rental opportunities, also employed a similar graphic trabeated façade treatment. 154 ‘Forecourt space frame, Collins Place’, Architecture Australia, October/November 1977, pp. 56–7. 155 Interview with Robert Bruce, 21 January 2002.


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1 Collins Place, 35–55 Collins St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon (in assoc. with IM Pei), 1970–80. Section through the commercial and hotel tower 2 Ground level plan of the site showing the tower forms within the public plaza 3 The Great Space centre of the complex 4 Detail interior view 5 Interior view of the banking lobby 6 The atrium space within the former Regent Hotel

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1 Commonwealth Bank, 367 Collins St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1969–75. Perspective view of the proposed building 2 CBC Bank, 250 Collins St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1968–73. Main banking lobby entrance 3 Boardroom interior view 4 Completed building from Collins St 5 Commonwealth Bank, 367 Collins St, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1969–75. Interior of the completed banking chamber

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1 Max Bladen (1928–). A Partner at BSM from 1955 until 1984 2 Robert Dunster (1931–). Dunster managed the Sydney office of UDPA and returned to Melbourne to head the team on the Collins Place project 3 Urban Design and Planning Associates (UDPA), Belconnen Hospital Proposal, Belconnen, Australian Capital Territory. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1974–75. Model of the proposed 800-bed hospital 4 Urban Design and Planning Associates (UDPA), Sydney Cove redevelopment, The Rocks, NSW. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1972. Sketch proposal of the redevelopment 1

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156 Place Ville Marie, Montreal, Canada (1955–66), was designed by Harry Cobb within IM Pei’s office. An office and retail complex, it comprised a forty-eight storey cruciform tower and podium and was at the time the largest office complex in the world. Significantly, and perhaps of relevance to the Melbourne project, Cobb’s original scheme for Place Ville Marie was for two towers above a podium. See IM Pei: a Profile in American Architecture, Harry N Abrams, New York, 2001, pp. 61–2. While the New York office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill was originally the preferred firm by McCutcheon, BSM was not averse to working with Pei’s office, and this was especially so after McCutcheon’s overseas visit and ANZ’s Charles Rennie’s admiration for the interiors of Pei’s CIBC (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) building in Toronto (1967–73). Interview with Roger Poole, 4 February 2002. 157 BSM office brochure, c. 1975, Bates Smart Archives. 158 Collins Place also had underground tunnels planned into its circulation system. Pedestrian tunnels were planned and ready to be constructed to link Collins Place to Nauru House and also to the parliament precinct. Interview with Robert Dunster, 3 May 2002. 159 Interview with Robert Bruce, 31 January 2002. 160 Interview with Roger Poole, 4 February 2002. 161 Dalzell, p. 8. 162 Another BSM design in this vein was the office building at 478 Albert St, East Melbourne (1982). 163 Interview with Robert Bruce, 31 January 2002. See also ‘New offices at St Kilda Road, Melbourne’, Architecture Australia, April/May 1976, p. 62.

The project was designed in association with IM Pei & Partners in New York. Harry Cobb was Pei’s design director with Shelton Peed as the prime design associate allocated to the Melbourne commission. Robert Dunster, having recently returned from Washington after overseeing the completion of the Australian Embassy, ran the job for BSM in Melbourne. On a study tour in the late 1960s, McCutcheon had been impressed with Pei’s Place Ville Marie in Montreal, Canada (1955–66), which had consolidated a number of sites and provided a mixed-use concept for the entire development.156 In Melbourne, the intention was to refer to ‘the traditional Melbourne devices, the arcade, the covered street, and the mid-block shortcut past shopping … used to relate the three street frontages to one another, providing alternative diagonal routes’.157 These diagonal routes, created by the diagonal placement of the pair of skyscrapers and the huge open space at ground level, were direct challenges to the orthogonal qualities of Melbourne’s grid plan and laneway system.158 While the project was an aesthetic success in terms of its material quality and was contemporaneous with similar developments across Canada and the United States, in urbanistic terms, Collins Place represented the dramatic consequences of the consolidation of numerous sites in the CBD where the final complex could change entirely the quality and scale of an existing streetscape. For BSM, Collins Place (1970–80) was important on many levels. During its design and construction, the office grew to number

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over 240 people, making it one of the largest architectural practices in the nation. The other important aspect was the interior fit-out of Collins Place. While the Pei office was responsible for the lobbies and banking chamber of the first tower on Exhibition Street, BSM did all the office floors above and the bank’s boardroom floor and cafeteria. In the second tower, BSM was responsible for overseeing all of the hotel fitout for IM Pei, as well as numerous office tenancies such as CRA which concerned the office developing expertise in workstation design as well as being closely involved with Sir Roderick and Lady Carnegie on the artwork commissioned for the tenancy: Fred Williams’s Pilbara series of paintings.159 The large interior fit-outs at Collins Place during the late 1970s for clients such as Arthur Andersen meant that BSM began to shape itself as a modern office fit-out practice. By the sheer fact of circumstance, BSM was placed at the beginning of the desire by corporations for ‘custom-designed’ fit-outs where they would be closely involved in developing a design personality for the interior and its clients. The number of BSM staff who worked on the Collins Place project was large, and those who played a significant part included Jim Lyons, Peter Mills, Harold Strachan, and later Roger Poole who, under Robert Dunster’s directorship, acted as the main design coordinator between BSM and the Pei team of Harry Cobb and Shelton Peed on the interior fit-out.160

A new 366 St Kilda Road In 1972, BSM celebrated its 120th anniversary with a grand dinner at the National Gallery of Victoria. As if in prophecy of the political, economic, as well as aesthetic uncertainty of the 1970s, McCutcheon also correctly forecast inevitable growth for the next thirty years to 2002, as well as ‘instability in technology, knowledge and education, social structure, mores and morals, and political frameworks’.161 There was also more immediate change. At the end of 1972, the office moved out of its purpose-built office in St Kilda Road. The site was redeveloped by MLC as a six-storey investment building designed by BSM. Located next to Manufacturers House, the image of this new building was in complete contrast to its neighbour. Instead of the small scale and intense vertical panels of different material and colour, the building’s presentation to St Kilda Road was one of emphatic horizontality. Designed by Banahan and Bruce, bands of grey bush-hammered concrete spandrels alternated with grey tinted, reflective continuous glazing. Like the designs for the CBC building and Commonwealth Bank in Collins Street, these were buildings of demure strength.162 366 St Kilda Road was massed to specific town-planning restrictions that imposed not only height limits and set-backs but also the preservation of a vista from Bank Street, South Melbourne, to the Shrine of Remembrance.163 It was this requirement that dictated the four-level section to the north, and also the decision to maximise site coverage, hence resulting in huge floor areas. During the building’s construction,


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1 Robert Bruce (1938–). Bruce recently retired as a director of Bates Smart in 2002 2 Struan Gilfillan (1933–). A partner in 1970, Gilfillan retired in 1994 3 Mutual Life Citizens Society (MLC), 366 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne. Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, 1972–74. View of the completed building which replaced the former BSM office on the same site 4 Portrait of Osborn McCutcheon. Retiring in 1977, McCutcheon had been with the firm for 51 years

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BSM moved their office to a mattress factory in Sturt Street, South Melbourne,164 and a branch office was also opened at 22 Albert Road, South Melbourne, to house the recently formed subsidiary UDPA Planners. In 1974, when 366 St Kilda Road was complete, BSM decided to take the entire third floor (2175 square metres) as their new office. The practice had reinvented itself once again.

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164 L Pitkethly, letter to the BSM directors, 2 September 1988, Bates Smart Archives, 8.14 (1988). 165 Architect, no. 21, 1972, p. 7. 166 McPherson, p. 61. 167 Interview with Robert Bruce, 21 January 2002. UDPA Planners was a partnership distinct from BSM, and its brief was to undertake all branches of planning work. The managing partners were Sir Osborn McCutcheon, Robert Dunster and Robert Bruce, and from Rankin & Hill, John Rankine and Allan Hayes. The permanent director was Andrew McCutcheon. 168 In Queensland, UDPA was associated with the firm of Bligh Jessup Bretnall & Partners and Vallentine Laurie & Davies.

Between 1970 and 1975, BSM’s staff profile had also changed. Sydney Wood retired in 1970 and that same year, Robert Dunster, Struan Gilfillan and Robert Bruce became partners. It would be these three who would give constancy and stability to the next twenty years of practice. 1970 also saw interior designer Harold Strachan and Harry Furey being made associates. In 1971, Peter Dalzell was made an associate, as were Robert Stafford, Bernard Jansen, Jim Lyons, planner Andrew McCutcheon and cost planner Emanuel Wineglass in 1972165 There were also new staff who would have an impact on the practice. Tom Dickins and Michael Wirt joined the office in 1970, Peter Mills in 1971, Tim Hurburgh, Fulvio Facci and Allan Lamb in 1973, and Roger Poole in 1974. In 1975 BSM became a proprietary company. Its eight directors were now Sir Osborn McCutcheon, Phillip Pearce, Selwyn Bates, Harvey Brown, Max Bladen, Robert Dunster, Struan Gilfillan and Robert Bruce. New associates in that year were Tim Hurburgh, Roger Poole and Peter Thomas. In the space of four years, BSM’s personnel and office image were transformed, as if in readiness for a new type of practice and future that were ahead.

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UDPA– a new office initiative In 1970, when Dunster, Gilfillan and Bruce became partners, Osborn McCutcheon stepped back somewhat from the front line of the office’s architectural activities. He was now active in a different way, devoting a great deal of his time to an important new initiative of the office, a planning arm. On his numerous trips to the United States, McCutcheon had been impressed by a multidisciplinary urban design group operating within SOM’s Washington office. At the same time, his son Andrew was developing expertise in social planning, complemented by overseas study through a 1968 Churchill Scholarship.166 UDPA Planners (Urban Design and Planning Associates) was formed in 1969 as a joint venture firm between BSM and Rankine & Hill in Sydney, an engineering firm with civil, transport and urban infrastructure divisions.167 It was Andrew McCutcheon’s connections with the Federal Labor Government after 1972 that led to large numbers of planning commissions in Canberra. Other BSM staff who were active in UDPA’s operation included Robin Edmond, Howard McCorkell, Harcourt Long, Ian Godfrey, Dennis Sweetnam, Lecki Ord, and Martin Pearce, son of Phillip Pearce. Town-planning offices were set up in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.168 Many planning commissions were completed, including the Lower Yarra River Study, the town plan for Gladstone in Queensland, and the Tamar Valley regional master plan and city plan for Launceston in Tasmania. The project that kick-started UDPA’s formation and which was its largest

and arguably its most significant was the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Plan. This was a controversial project involving the Rocks, a fragile, if run-down, historic precinct tucked in next to the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Circular Quay and central Sydney, all under the control of the NSW Maritime Services Board. After ambitious proposals proffered for the Rocks in the early 1960s razed the site in favour of high-rise development, UDPA’s recommendations for major parts of the precinct to be kept and others developed under strict guidelines proved groundbreaking. The success of the scheme was that in the end, its recommendations were eventually adopted by the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Authority. In 1975, when the Federal Labor Government was swept from power, an incoming Liberal Government under Malcolm Fraser stopped all government funding of planning. At the same time, Rankine & Hill resolved to remove themselves from the joint venture for business reasons, and UDPA soon folded. Despite its brief history, UDPA at its peak had a staff of thirty-three and its peripatetic success would serve as an influential local example of multidisciplinary teams involving planners, engineers, economists and architects.


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Ending an era, starting another The five years after 1970 were uncertain times for BSM. Just as the political climate was changing, the mood of development in the central city began to stall. While BSM had the apparent luxury of Collins Place, the largest commission in the state, McCutcheon busied himself not just with UDPA but also cultivating clients like the Commonwealth Bank, sowing seeds for the firm’s future. BSM also had ongoing work for the Footscray Institute of Technology. Yet projects like the typologically and historically referential community centre and mosque at Preston (1975) for the Islamic Society of Victoria, and the huge and unbuilt mega-structural proposals in Canberra like the 800-bed Belconnen Hospital (1974–75) and the Tuggeranong government office complex (1975) highlighted the extremes of contemporary practice and design concerns at the time. The corporate architecture firm, generally, would be challenged by a younger generation of architects impatient with the mannered politeness of moderate Modernism’s postwar transformations of the city. The positive qualities of these transformations wrought by firms like BSM, Yuncken Freeman, Stephenson & Turner, and others would be rejected outright. It would be the same for the houses of Guilford Bell, Neil Clerehan, and McGlashan & Everist. The weight of tradition, patronage and its associated aesthetic would need rejection. The subtle nuances of volume,

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scale and surface as engendered by a firm like BSM in a city such as Melbourne and at institutions like RMIT and Monash University would be overshadowed by different emphases, both aesthetic and political. In 1977, Sir Osborn McCutcheon retired from the firm. He had been with the practice since 1926. That same year, Phillip Pearce also retired, having been a partner for thirtythree years since 1945. 1977 also saw the completion of Bendigo’s Sacred Heart Cathedral, designed in 1896–1901 by Reed, Smart & Tappin, which had only partially been constructed until work recommenced in 1953. This was the culmination of twentyfour years of work in turn by Alan Ralton until his death in 1962, then Frank Turner and Ken White. 1977 was thus the end of an era. McCutcheon and his postwar partners had built the firm into one of the largest in the country and with an enviable reputation for work that ranged across commercial, hospital, educational and institutional buildings. From their experience in town-planning projects in the immediate postwar years, they had branched into full-scale urban planning. The firm had also developed expertise in interior design, structural and mechanical services. In many respects, BSM had outshone its prewar competitors in Melbourne, Stephenson & Turner, in terms of diversity of commission, and its major postwar competitor, Yuncken Freeman, in terms of diversity of aesthetic approach. The firm’s resilience had been built on its history of preparedness to develop expertise in a range of building types, and not be bound

by arbitrary aesthetic rule. This was not an extreme position, nor one guaranteed to endear the practice to an avant-garde account of architectural history. However, in terms of the adoption of new technologies and new programming, the exemplary setting of corporate practice habits, and the respect for architectural heritage, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon had made a permanent mark on the face of Australia’s postwar built environment. McCutcheon’s moderate Modernism had engaged seamlessly with a corporate world geared for postwar modernisation.

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5 REFLECTION AND TRANSFORMATION 1977-95 Philip Goad


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1 L Pitkethly, letter to the BSM directors, 2 September 1988, Bates Smart Archives, 8.14 (1988). 2 There were also a small number of specialised commissions including the ‘low-key gem’, the EM Dauber Child Minding Centre, John Street, Fitzroy (1977), and the Appleby House, Ringwood (1978). Of the Dauber Centre, Lecki Ord observed that ‘Many architects would find it hard to believe that such a small and human building came out of the BSM office—it is the antithesis of those buildings on which the firm’s reputation has been based’. See L Ord, ‘EM Dauber Child Minding Centre Vic.’, review, Architecture Australia, August/September 1977, p. 76. 3 N Day, ‘Collins Street conservation’, Architect, September 1976, pp. 8–9; R Tonkin, ‘The National Trust in Collins Street’, Architect, April 1979, pp. 19–20. 4 Interview with Robert Bruce, 31 January 2002. 5 Architect, August 1979, p. 10. BSM was commissioned in 1974 to do a feasibility study as to whether the building could be refurbished as a nurse-training centre. The contract was let in 1977 and the project completed by May 1978. See also Architecture Australia, October/November 1979, pp. 24–5.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were difficult years for the large corporate architecture firms in Melbourne that had grown exponentially during the previous two decades. The economic downturn and dismissal of the federal government in 1975 meant that established practices like Yuncken Freeman, Stephenson & Turner and Godfrey & Spowers experienced dramatic downsizing. They were not alone. At Bates, Smart & McCutcheon (BSM), Lorna Pitkethly recalls that these were ‘dreadful times of retrenchment when I was given a list of about twenty names and then later another thirty, and asked to notify all those on the list to attend a fateful meeting in the main conference room’.1 Yet unlike other firms, BSM survived and indeed gained from an enforced shift in its focus as an architecture firm. In turning to institutional clients like hospitals, government bodies and private schools, in completing professionally vast amounts of interior fit-out work at Collins Place and Melbourne Central, and by highlighting new expertise in heritage, BSM, in typically chameleon fashion, managed to re-emerge revitalised.2 In the 1980s, staff turnover was relatively high as were the rapidly changing ideas in architectural aesthetics. The sureness of BSM’s moderate Modern position was challenged and arguably broadened by a wave of aesthetic counter-orthodoxy. By the early 1990s, as construction activity resumed in earnest, BSM was building again in central Melbourne and winning important commissions. By the turn of the century, the firm would have moved offices twice, joined forces with other architecture

practices to work on some of the largest projects in Victoria’s history, opened a new office in Sydney, recast its design image and in 1995 changed its practice name to Bates Smart. It was to be a complete transformation.

The rise of heritage In the early 1970s there was a strong reaction to the destruction of Melbourne’s central city and inner suburban nineteenthcentury building stock. Architects, planners and academics formed persuasive action groups to halt or limit development resulting in the formation of bodies like the Carlton Association and, in 1976, the Collins Street Defence Movement.3 An early success was the saving from demolition of Tasma Terrace (1887–88), designed by Charles Webb, which was then leased to the National Trust for use as its headquarters. Through Robert Bruce’s involvement with the Government Buildings Advisory Council, BSM was appointed in 1975 to restore the row of six three-storey houses at 2–12 Parliament Place, make internal changes to connect the houses, and to completely redecorate and furnish one of the terraces in the manner of the 1880s.4 Dr Miles Lewis of the University of Melbourne researched the external colour scheme, and it became the first example in Melbourne of the use of an original exterior colour scheme in a National Trust restoration. BSM also added a glazed gallery and a landscaped plaza to the rear of the historic terrace. The intention was to make clear the break between old and new by introducing complementary but not imitative additions.

Completed in 1978, the project earned professional recognition. The firm soon gained more work in a new environment that was sensitive to the scale and texture of Melbourne’s nineteenth-century city. In 1978–79, in another award-winning project, BSM under Tim Hurburgh’s guidance converted the heritage-listed Reed & Barnes-designed Primary School No. 112 (1876–77) into the Kathleen Syme Education Centre, a training facility for nurses at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Carlton.5 Other important restoration and refurbishment work carried out by the firm over the next twenty years included the 1985–86 restoration and conversion of the Metropolitan Meat Market, North Melbourne (1879–80), overseen by Robert Bruce and Allan Lamb to become the Meat Market Craft Centre; the conversions of the Buckley & Nunn department store in 1980 and the Coles Bourke Street store in 1984 into David Jones by Struan Gilfillan and Robert Bruce; the refurbishment of ICI House in 1989 undertaken by Robert Bruce, Jeff Copolov and Paul Purcell; the 1986 restoration of the red brick mansion Raheen, Kew (1885); the 1991 refurbishment of the former BHP House at 140 William Street, Melbourne; in 1995, in association with the Government Architect, the restoration and refurbishment of JJ Clark’s Treasury building in Spring Street; in 1995–97, the refurbishment and adaptation of eight Federation period buildings at the decommissioned Caloola Asylum into administration and teaching facilities for the Sunbury campus of Victoria University of Technology;


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1 Tasma Terrace, 2-12 Parliament Place, Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon 1975–78. Street elevation of the terraces, which became the first example in Melbourne of the use of an original exterior colour scheme in a National Trust restoration 2 Meat Market Craft Centre, Courtney St, North Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1985–86. View of gallery space 3 Interior view of restored main hall

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1 Victoria University of Technology, Sunbury campus, Sunbury, Vic. Bates Smart, 1997. Front view of the restored former Caloola Asylum, the building was refurbished into administration and teaching facilities 2 ICI House refurbishment, 1 Nicholson St, Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1989. The executive floor reception completed for ICI 3 Main office area on the executive floor 4 Melbourne City Council administration offices, Melbourne Town Hall, Swanston St, Melbourne. Bates Smart, 1995. View through historic section of the town hall to the new interior of the main reception 5 Old Treasury Building restoration, Spring St, Melbourne. Bates Smart (in assoc. with Government Architect), 1995–97. View of restored interior

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1 St Hilda’s, BSM Office, 1 Clarendon St, East Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1981–83. The refurbished boardroom showing the approach of complementing the historic interior shell with simple modern furnishings and fittings. RAIA award for the restoration in 1983 2 The Albert St view of the historic St. Hilda’s mansion, once used as a missionary training college 3 Perspective view of the proposed new addition to the back of the St Hilda’s building, the new extension was to form two levels of studio space for the office 4 Ripponlea restoration, 192 Hotham St, Elsternwick, Vic. Bates Smart, 2002–03. The restored ballroom

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1 Budget Rent-A-Car, North Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1980. The Budget Rent-A-Car building and Eastern Hill Fire Headquarters buildings both gained peer recognition in 1981 and both responded to program and urban context in their careful choice of form, materials and colour 2 Metropolitan Fire Brigade Headquarters, Gisborne St, East Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1975–78. Detail view of the materials palette comprising board-formed concrete, silver-grey glass and red spandrel panels and metalwork 3 View of the new headquarters building in Gisborne St, next to the Queen Anne style Eastern Hill Fire Station (1892–93) 4 Perspective drawing of the proposed headquarters 5 Roger Poole (1942–). Becoming a director in 1981, Poole is the current chairman of Bates Smart

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in 1997, the refurbishment of two heritagelisted buildings in Berlin for the Australian Embassy (1997–2002); the exterior refurbishment of MLC, North Sydney; in 1999, the adaptive re-use of Walsh Bay Wharf 8/9 in Sydney; in 2001, the restoration of another of the firm’s best known works, the house and garden at Rippon Lea; and in 2000–03, the adaptive re-use of Jones Bay Wharf 6, Sydney.6 The firm’s heritage expertise in the late 1970s and changes in the fortune of the practice determined a new move for the BSM office. In 1981, BSM moved temporarily from 366 St Kilda Road into another of its designs, the Fawkner Centre at 499 St Kilda Road. The firm was a tenant again, but this time with only a two-year lease. The reason for the move was that BSM had purchased St Hilda’s at 1 Clarendon Street, East Melbourne, and had begun the process of its restoration and refurbishment, as well as adding new studio space at the rear of the site. Designed by Ward & Carleton in 1907, St Hilda’s was a large mansion that had been built as a missionary training college. In April 1983, BSM moved into its new premises at St Hilda’s. It was a sign that BSM meant more than just big buildings. Given the mood of the day, it was clear that the firm had embraced the idea that historic buildings had a use and businesses could occupy them.7 BSM left St Kilda Road after twenty-five years of practice there. The message was that new directions were ahead for the firm. 1983 was also the year that Sir Osborn McCutcheon died. Since his retirement in 1977, McCutcheon had acted as a

consultant to the firm. The contribution that he had made to BSM during his fifty years as partner was extraordinary. Yet changes to the firm’s leadership structure had moved quickly after his departure in 1977. In 1978, Roger Arnall and Peter Mills were made associates, as was Ron Robinson in 1979. That same year, the position of associate director was introduced and appointed were Peter Dalzell, Brendan Byrnes, Tim Hurburgh and Roger Poole. In 1981, Arnall and Mills became associate directors and Graham Roberts and Mike Wirt were appointed associates. The result of all of this change was that in 1981, Hurburgh and Poole joined Robert Dunster, Max Bladen, Struan Gilfillan and Robert Bruce, then Roger Arnall in 1983, as the new team of directors who would shepherd the firm through the 1980s.8 This was a new team of directors which included the relatively recent appointments to the firm of Roger Poole and Tim Hurburgh, both American-trained at MIT and Harvard University respectively. This decision caused ripples amongst the large office cohort, indicative of an underlying tension within the firm that was unavoidable in BSM’s push to reconsolidate after the departure of McCutcheon’s productive yet dominating presence.9 But it was also a decision that affirmed the view that architectural design still was the prime requirement for leadership of the practice. With such changes occurring in the BSM hierarchy, there were also inevitable departures. As Peter Dalzell relates, the late 1970s witnessed the retirement of Frank Turner and the resignation of John Hitch, Andrew McCutcheon, Emanuel Wineglass, Hugh Banahan, Harold Strachan, Jim Lyons and Peter Thomas.10 In 1982 Brendan

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Byrnes resigned from the firm and in 1984, Max Bladen retired as director. Such were the changes at BSM during the early 1980s that the work of the firm appeared, like its staffing profile and its office premises, to diversify rapidly.

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Program and context One of Roger Poole’s first substantial tasks on arriving at BSM was to lead the design of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade headquarters in Gisborne Street, Eastern Hill (1975–78).11 Responding to a context of nineteenth-century buildings of red brick, grey cement render and bluestone, the materials palette of the new building included board-formed concrete, silver-grey glass, and terracotta red spandrel panels and metalwork. The new building was designed on a strict grid to allow for future growth over the site and at all levels, from basement car parking and ground-floor fire-fighting facilities to first-floor living quarters and upwards from the second floor for administrative offices.12 The parapets and floors of the new building aligned with those of the adjacent red brick Queen Anne-styled Eastern Hill Fire Station (1892–93). The rhythm and set-back of the column bay and infill panels also echoed the repetitive arcading of the old building. Instead of timber doors for the fire-carts, Melbourne’s new fire engines were visible behind ten large glazed folding garage doors. Even the graceful Italian Romanesque watch-tower of the old fire station found its echo in the skeletal frame of the new hose tower.

6 In association with Peddle Thorp Walker. 7 Interview with Robert Bruce, 31 January 2002. BSM was able to purchase St Hilda’s from the Victorian State Government relatively economically. It had been purchased by the government as part of a freeway reservation that was eventually disbanded. See also Architecture Australia, May 1984, pp. 38–40. 8 P Dalzell, ‘BSM—1945 onwards’, transcript of talk given at BSM, 5 May 1987, p. 9. 9 Interview with Tim Hurburgh, 19 July 2002. 10 Dalzell, p. 10. 11 The MFB Eastern Hill commission arose through feasibility studies that BSM undertook for the EA Watts-founded development company COMPAC. An initial proposal for the site involved a redevelopment plan with the fire station located beneath a high-rise office development. Interview with Robert Bruce, 31 January 2002. 12 Interview with Roger Poole, 4 February 2002; 3 September 2003.


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Another commission in a small-scale nineteenth-century context was the office building and service facility in North Melbourne (1980) for high-profile businessman Bob Ansett’s company, Budget Rent-A-Car. Poole was again in charge of a design that responded to the neighbouring scale of low-rise buildings. Three storeys in height and stepping back in its mirrored glass form away from the street to form a minor plaza, the complex also had another freestanding tower, in this case a giant signpost advertising Budget.

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13 Architecture Australia, December 1981, pp. 58–63. 14 Recent projects by the firm at the Royal Women’s Hospital include a perinatal and ultrasound facility, outpatient, examination and consultation rooms, kitchen, cafeteria, workshops and stores. Further work included the conversion of an existing ward floor to new laboratories including molecular biology, endocrine, radiation, tissue perforation and culture laboratories. 15 Interview with Jim Milledge, 19 September 2003. 16 In the 1990s, the firm was master planner for the hospital and architect for its new 30-bed maternity unit, hospital brasserie, hospital chapel and basement car parking. More recently, a 10 operating-room theatre suite, a 3 operating-room and 3 endoscopy-room day-procedure centre, 30-bed intensive care unit, private consulting rooms, emergency department and an additional 60 medical/surgical beds were designed by the firm. 17 Interview with Robert Bruce, 31 January 2002. 18 Architecture Australia, May 1984, pp. 41–3. The architectural mood of the firm in the mid-1980s is typified by the special feature on BSM’s recent projects in Architecture Australia, May 1984, pp. 36–49. Included are an office statement by Tim Hurburgh and an appreciation by University of Melbourne academic Jeffrey Turnbull. 19 Architecture Australia, May 1984, pp. 46–7.

Both buildings gained peer recognition in 1981 and they appeared to contrast strongly with another award-winner that year, the polychrome brick Expressionist forms of Edmond & Corrigan’s Resurrection Church in suburban Keysborough (1976–81).13 In many respects, the low-key contextual response of the BSM work and its politeness suggested a different polemic. Yet in other respects the three works were similar, each attempting to grapple intimately with program and urban context in their careful choice of form, materials and colour. While the Edmond & Corrigan work had developed its own signature swipe at architectural pretensions in its celebration of the ugly and the ordinary, BSM’s work held a demure and respectable line. For decades, this position had sustained the firm, allowing it to withstand passing fashion, rarely drawing attention to itself but always mindful of the greater structure of the city. Civic decorum was adopted over radical change. The corporate model after all was stability in the face of adversity. The presence of a personal style was not desired nor was it considered a necessary function of practice.

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A changing practice Since the late 1940s, hospitals and buildings for health care had been a mainstay of BSM’s professional reputation. In the late 1970s, such work, together with the interiors for Collins Place, ensured the firm’s survival. For example, at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Carlton, BSM completed the main thirteen-storey building (1971), the AJ Cunningham administration wing on Swanston Street (1975–77), and the Kathleen Syme nurse training facility in Faraday Street (1978) as part of the refurbishment of a Reed & Barnes school. In 1988, they completed the staff cafeteria and kitchen block, in an entirely new idiom. With Tim Hurburgh’s design input, this new portal steel-framed building on Cardigan Street represented the firm’s new excursion into more expressive representation: coloured brick and rendered panels, glass block and pastel-coloured interiors, and a jaunty roofline that made clever use of glazed roof lights to express the structure beneath.14 Hurburgh had been involved in other large BSM health care commissions like the firm’s proposal for the relocation of the Queen Victoria Hospital to Clayton to form the massive new Monash Medical Centre (unbuilt). BSM also continued to make additions and upgrades to the Footscray Hospital, now renamed the Western General Hospital, a project with which they had continuous involvement for more than forty years, and which brought Jim Milledge to the office in 1984 as a project architect to work with Ted Doufas and Michael Markham.15 Further continuing commissions were gained for the William Angliss Hospital, Ferntree Gully (1987);

Cabrini Private Hospital, Malvern (1998–2001);16 a major redevelopment of the Ballarat Base Hospital (1995); and the new Mildura Base Hospital (2001). BSM’s experiments in the 1980s with the ‘pleasures of architecture’ (a term that has since become a euphemism in Australia for acceptance of American-influenced ideas of post-modernism inspired by the work of Robert Venturi, Charles Moore and Robert Stern) were spread across a diverse range of the firm’s output. By 1980, it could be argued that many Melbourne architects had gone post-modern, and BSM was swept along in the process. Robert Bruce describes the period in retrospect as ‘unsettling for everyone’.17 For Ellsmere Court, a cluster development of twelve houses in Princess Street, Kew (1983–84), BSM explored a contemporary version of the so-called Melbourne Domestic Queen Anne: red bricks, turret roofs, bay windows and picturesque massing.18 The Wallace office project, a small speculative development in Palmerston Crescent, South Melbourne (1982–83), was a giant version of a Serlian window transformed into a verandah.19 By contrast, commercial projects like 478 Albert Street, East Melbourne (1982), and the ICL building, Queens Road (1984), were office buildings that continued Late Modern themes explored in the 1970s with broad expanses of glass and emphasised horizontality. Other projects that involved Roger Poole or Tim Hurburgh as directors-in-charge like Owen Dixon Chambers, Lonsdale Street (1989), and Esanda House, Spring Street (1985), employed stepped forms in plan and elevation. The office building for Price Waterhouse-Coopers,


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1 Tim Hurburgh (1943–). A director from 1981–99, Hurburgh was responsible for a range of health care and institutional projects 2 Western General Hospital, Eleanor St, Footscray, Vic. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1984. New outpatients building wing 3 Royal Women’s Hospital & AJ Cunningham Wing, Swanston St, Carlton, Vic. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1971 & 1975–77. Hospitals and buildings for healthcare had been one of the mainstay’s of the firm’s survival since the 1940s. This work again became a core service during the downturn of the 1970s 4 Royal Women’s Hospital, stores building, Cardigan St, Carlton, Vic. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1988. Cardigan St elevation 5 The building represented the firm’s new excursion into more expressive representation with coloured panels, use of glass bock and pastel coloured interiors

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1 Wrist Pastoral & Veterinary Institute, Mount Napier Rd, Hamilton, Vic. Bates Smart, 1996. Detail view of buildings and material treatment 2 WA Chemical Laboratories (CSIRO), Curtin University, Brand Dr, Bentley, WA. Bates Smart & McCutcheon (in assoc. with Brand Deykin & Hay), 1993. Detail view of faรงade 3 Wrist Pastoral & Veterinary Institute, Mount Napier Rd, Hamilton, Vic. Bates Smart, 1996. View of the institute complex on its rural site

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4 Kirkbrae Presbyterian Home for the Aged, 794 Mount Dandenong Rd, Kilsyth, Vic. Bates Smart, 1995. Interior view 5 Cabrini Hospital, operating theatre and new theatre block, 183 Wattletree Rd, Malvern, Vic. Bates Smart (in assoc. with Health Science Planning Consultants), 2002 6 Broome Hospital, Robinson Rd, Broome, WA. Bates Smart (in assoc. with Brand Deykin & Hay), 1997. Main entrance 7 Cabrini Hospital, 183 Wattletree Rd, Malvern, Vic. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1994. Exterior view of new additions 4

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1 ICL Building, 20 Queens Rd, Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1984. Queens Rd view of completed building 2 Melbourne Central Building, Elizabeth St, Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon (in assoc. with Kisho Kurokawa), 1983–92. View of the tower building completed by the firm in its city context. Many interior fit-outs were also carried out in conjunction with the project 3 South Pacific Centre, Docklands, Vic. Bates Smart & McCutcheon (collaborative design), 1988. Perspective view of the 150 storey high tower proposed for the Docklands. This proposal was one of the first suggestive ideas of the revitalisation of the Docklands area. Ten years later proposals were underway for the Grollo Tower of a similar scale

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1 Price Waterhouse Centre, 215 Spring St, Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon (in assoc. with Reed Mussen Styant-Browne), 1988. View of the building from Spring St 2 View of the atrium interior 3 Interior view to meeting room 4 The introduction of CAD systems and computers into the office began in the early 1980s. Pictured is Philip Barnes and Jim Milledge, overseen by Robert Dunster, undertaking training on the first two machines for the office, purchased with a plotter for the extraordinary amount of $250,000 5 Roger Arnall (1944–). Representing the firm’s consolidation of its multidisciplinary practice, Arnall was the firm’s second engineering director until 1991

Spring Street (1988), was faced in grey/mauve and green panels with a giant glazed ‘keystone’ at its entry. This project was a joint venture with architects Andrew Reed & Associates. It was to be one of the first of a number of important design associations with other architectural practices that were to characterise the firm’s major projects from the late 1980s to the end of the 1990s. A project that summed up the mixed messages of 1980s architecture culture in Melbourne was a hypothetical scheme for the city’s Docklands. As a contribution to Australia’s bicentenary in 1988, architect/poet Alex Selenitsch invited a number of architectural firms to collaborate with artists for the exhibition Collaborative Designs: Working Together in Architecture held at the Meat Market Craft Centre. A team from BSM that included Robert Bruce, Jeff Copolov, Peter Dredge, Tim Hurburgh and Roger Poole joined with set designer Henry Smith and sculptor Anthony Pryor. Their proposal, titled South Pacific Centre, was modelled by Pryor as a 3-metre high giant bronze, steel and glass sculpture. It was to be the world’s tallest building, 150-storeys high and located on the axis at the west end of Bourke Street, in the water. The project was meant to echo the dizzy and exuberant heights of Marvellous Melbourne of the 1880s, and be predictive of a future Melbourne that would grow along the banks of the Yarra River and through into the Docklands.20 The proposal, a fully self-contained high-rise city with entire landscapes on many levels and sprouting antennae at its climax, was an Antipodean version of Rem Koolhaas’s skyscraper

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projects in his book Delirious New York (1978). The towering form of South Pacific Centre was indeed prophetic.21 It predated by almost ten years Denton Corker Marshall’s Grollo Tower (1996) and today, Melbourne’s Docklands are being developed in earnest. While South Pacific was never built, the sculpture did have a future. For years it sat in the lobby of St Hilda’s, an extraordinary memento of one of the firm’s grandest visions for Melbourne. Another unbuilt project of the same period was the competition-winning proposal for a new headquarters for BP Australia on Melbourne’s Southbank (1989), another prophetic proposal in terms of the site’s future development, this time sporting side lift-cores, vast floors connected by open stairs, a huge timepiece, struts, and a multitude of punched openings along its soaring height. Ultimately however BSM’s revival of its commercial practice was earned through its experience on large-scale building projects where documentation was followed by major interior fit-out commissions. After Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa had completed the conceptual guidelines for the gigantic Melbourne Central project (1983–92) commissioned by KumagaiGumi, BSM was invited to work, with Kurokawa, on the chisel-formed fifty-five level office tower with its ear-like antennae while the Hassell Group designed the podium shopping centre.22 Director-incharge was Struan Gilfillan, assisted by Frank Englisch, Jim Milledge and Charles Bricknell. BSM completely replanned the tower’s core and designed and

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documented all the interiors. Clad in anodised aluminium and dark solar glass, this project recalled BSM’s collaboration in the 1960s with SOM on AMP St James, where the expertise of the firm was demonstrated by its professionalism, manpower, and ability to document a large project to a high level of detail resolution. A key aspect of the Melbourne Central project for BSM, especially in terms of the project’s profitability, was the integration (overseen by Jim Milledge) of computeraided design into the documentation of the repetitive floor plans, where tenants like Esso Australia required fit-outs of 25 000 square metres.23 The introduction of computer-aided design (CAD) into the BSM office in the early 1980s was due largely to the efforts of one of the directors, Robert Dunster, the ‘boffin’ of the office.24 Dunster had researched the Eagle system and two terminals and a plotter were purchased for what at the time seemed an extraordinary amount of money, $250 000. However it was to be an investment that would pay itself off rapidly. Dunster, Milledge and Philip Barnes from the firm’s engineering section were trained for eight hours a day for six weeks. They in effect became ‘caddies’ but in doing so, began to transform the documentation capabilities of the office. In 1986–87, Milledge, travelling in the United States, visited a series of offices, looking at the various CAD systems employed. What he found was that BSM was relatively up to date in terms of the system they had adopted but that American practices were much more advanced in terms of the integration of CAD into the entire process.25

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20 J Zimmer (ed.), Anthony Pryor: Sculpture and Drawings 1974–1991, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1999, p. 152; interview with Tim Hurburgh, 19 July 2002. 21 Roger Poole in the Herald, 26 June 1989, made predictions about Melbourne’s growth along the Yarra, advocating central and inner-city housing, the development of the Docklands, as well as a tower similar to South Pacific. See Zimmer (ed.), p. 152. 22 N Day, ‘Melbourne Central’, Architecture Australia, July/August 1992, pp. 45–9. 23 BSM was involved with moving the Sydney and Sale offices of petroleum giant Esso to Melbourne Central, however its involvement with BP, in a tower proposal at Southbank (which was never proceeded with), made it difficult for the firm to proceed with a tower design for Esso at Southbank. In the end, that commission went to architects Peddle Thorp Learmonth. Interview with Jim Milledge, 19 September 2003. 24 Interview with Jim Milledge, 19 September 2003. 25 Interview with Jim Milledge, 19 September 2003.


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1 Macquarie Bank, 101 Collins St, Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1992. Main stair 2 Herbert Geer & Rundle, 385 Bourke St, Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1990. Office workstations 3 BP Australia, Melbourne Central, Elizabeth St, Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1990. Office Interior 4 BP Australia proposal, Southbank, Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1989. Elevation view of the competition winning building 5 Sketch view of the interiors for the building

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For Milledge, with his interests in office production, here was a clear goal: the updating of the office’s documentation procedures through the integration of CAD at all levels, which would ensure profitability, especially in terms of interior fit-out commissions. It was a strategy that worked. While the building industry in Melbourne collapsed after 1987 and was still in the doldrums by 1991, BSM emerged unscathed and ahead of its competitors, with unparalleled expertise in interior architecture and design.

Survival through interiors The firm’s success in the 1980s and early 1990s was due in large part to the fact that it was one of the very few architectural firms in Australia that offered interior design services. The numbers of significant interior design commissions are too numerous to mention, save that BSM recognised the growth potential of interior design, and the office’s considerable pool of talent was brought to bear on this specialised area of practice. Llew Morgan, who had previously worked in the late 1960s on the black steel Miesian and SOM-inspired BHP House, 140 William Street, for Yuncken Freeman, was closely involved with that same building’s refurbishment and internal refit in 1991. The lessons and benefits of custom-designed interior fit-outs, brought home in commissions like 140 William Street, had however been evident since the early 1980s. Morgan, and others such as Bernard Jansen, were mentors to staff like Milledge and also to brilliant young interior designer Jeff Copolov who had joined

the firm in October 1983.26 Fresh from designing sets for television, Copolov worked together with Morgan for six years. Roger Poole, as director, was responsible for gaining many of the interior commissions. Morgan was expert in briefing and space planning and Copolov and the office’s other chief interior designer Cathy Stonier would be involved in sketch design, design development and documentation. Paul Purcell oversaw documentation and construction. They made a formidable team. The approach followed a classic Modern palette. It was rational, ordered, employed a highly considered kit of parts, and showed a clear understanding of the limits of the modular workplace. Also recognised was the need for high quality, fully customdesigned tenancy fit-outs to have a long life. BSM gained tenancy commissions for most of Melbourne’s largest law and accounting firms as well as Australia’s most prominent corporations, completing work for CRA, BP Australia, ANZ Bank, Telstra, Minter Ellison, Arthur Andersen, Arthur Young, Coopers Lybrand, and many others. The quantity of work was so great that an annex to the main office at St Hilda’s was set up across the road at 224 Clarendon Street, East Melbourne, and overseen by Llew Morgan and Bernard Jansen. By 1990, BSM was the market leader in office fit-outs in Melbourne. The firm not only designed the spaces, partitions and servicing but they also often designed the lighting and furniture, and were instrumental in choosing or commissioning artworks for these complete rebranding exercises for the nation’s corporate community.

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An important interior design commission, which was to assist in the eventual formation of the Sydney office of the firm, was the fit-out of nine floors for the law firm of Clayton Utz (1991–92) at 1 O’Connell Street, Sydney. Constricted by the skyscraper’s oddly shaped external form, Copolov’s design for Clayton Utz holds clues to the continuing success of the firm’s interior design work: a carefully considered kit of parts that would define office partitioning, standard wall panelling and sections, colour and materials, and be capable of upgrading in the future without the loss of the overall design concept; in other words, an attempt to provide a timeless, forward-looking backdrop to the office environment that was not going to date and would also accommodate works from the company’s existing and future art collection like the Arthur Boyd painting in the boardroom on level thirty-five. At Clayton Utz, Copolov’s palette of whites, grey and charcoal was applied to materials, furniture and panelling, with auto-lacquer giving elegant gloss but hard-wearing sheen. On a typical floor, variety and visual interest were given to office partitions by interchangeable inserts of coat cupboards, continuous door-heads, and full-height glass panels. The aim was an assured and completely coordinated interior that was integrated from the stone floor and feature stairway of the reception area to the standard desk within a typical office. Architecture was brought into the service of branding, and BSM’s office interiors became associated with elegance, polish and, importantly, economic longevity.

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26 Interview with Jeff Copolov, 12 September 2003; interview with Jim Milledge, 19 September 2003.


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1 Clayton Utz, 1 O’Connell St, Sydney. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1991–92. Reception area 2 County Court refurbishment, corner Lonsdale & William streets, Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1990. Foyer and registry reception 3 Clayton Utz, 1 O’Connell St, Sydney. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1991–92. Interior corridor detail 4 ANZ Bank, Collins Place, 35–55 Collins St, Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1980. Executive level lounge 5 Price Waterhouse, 188 Quay St, Auckland, New Zealand. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1989. Reception area 6 Interior view of meeting room 7 Boston Consulting, 101 Collins St, Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1994. Reception

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Distinction through diversity

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Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, BSM secured a large number of small- to medium-scale institutional building commissions. Working with the directors were outstanding young designers including Peter Dredge, Ivan Rijavec, Michael Markham, Carey Lyon, Lindsay Davis, Jennifer Hocking, Tom Kovac, Hamish Lyon, Stephen O’Connor, Anne McIntyre, Peter Brew, Stephanie Flaubert and Mark O’Dwyer. Many of these young architects used their time well at BSM before leaving to join other firms or setting up their own practices. It was also during this time that other long-serving BSM staff like Allan Lamb, Dennis Martin, Jim Chrisp, Andrew Raftopolous, Ted Doufas and Paul Purcell gained greater design and administrative responsibilities. A distinctive quality of the firm’s work in these years was the respect for urban context. In many respects, the humanistic intentions of BSM’s urban works of the 1930s and its postwar university buildings like Wilson Hall invite comparison with the contextually and often historically referential buildings of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Three buildings from this period indicate the characteristic diversity of the firm’s output since 1982.

27 Springvale Necropolis, undated project sheet, Bates Smart Archives. 28 P Brew, ‘Australians don’t need piazza, they should be home watching TV’, in D Evans (ed.), Aardvark: the RMIT Guide to Contemporary Melbourne Architecture, RMIT Department of Architecture, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 7–13.

The first was the Coronial Services Centre in Kavanagh Street, South Melbourne (1987–88). Designed with major input from Ivan Rijavec and overseen by Tim Hurburgh, it had a three-storey high thickened ‘urban wall’ as its public face, and was punctured by windows, terraces and undulating walls that indicated the most public function of

the building, the coroner’s court-rooms. Combining court, administration and laboratory/mortuary functions, this building represented, using a non-symbolic Modernist language, a literal deconstruction of the institution to a smaller, more informal scale. The second building, the entrance building (1991), which Hurburgh and Peter Dredge added to the 1960s cream brick slab of the Royal Children’s Hospital in Parkville, took a different approach. There, a glazed curtain wall four-storey slab block with an atrium space between was placed in front of the existing building facing Flemington Road. It was as if the language of the corporate office block (a miniature MLC North Sydney) had been given a new lease of life, reprogrammed as an institutional building combining retail, health and administrative functions. At ground level, retail facilities, new to the changing role of the hospital, included a McDonalds restaurant, a bank, a pharmacy and a mini-supermarket, all providing a new face to the Flemington Road entrance. The third building involved the revisiting of historic typologies. Like an unearthed monumental urban artefact, BSM’s design for the Necropolis crematorium and chapel complex at Springvale (1991) was indebted to Italian architect Aldo Rossi’s seminal urban text The Architecture of the City (1966, first English printing in 1981), which argued for the rethinking of the city in terms of building types being open to different uses over time. BSM’s cylinder is the ghost of former building types—from Roman tombs to Asplund’s Stockholm City Library, to bases for gas containers. The 6-metre

high cylindrical structure was ‘set in a bowl of earth’.27 Adding to the building’s serious function, skull-like white panels hover above the processional entry points. Designed by Roger Poole and Stephen O’Connor to be the centre of a greater urban plan, the crematorium stands in a ring of tall trees, in turn surrounded by chapels, becoming the first (and focal) piece in an ideal city of the dead. Buildings such as these, and many others produced by the firm like the distinctive additions (1984–87) made to the Footscray Hospital, indicated the firm’s willingness to experiment and redirect its aesthetic profile (unusual for a corporate architecture firm at any time), and also to find some measure of stability within its stable of young designers. In Melbourne, it was also a time of intense intellectual discussion about the nature of the city and the emergence of a new critique of the generation who had been so critical of the corporate architecture firms of the 1960s.28 At the same time, a new set of office towers by Denton Corker Marshall, Harry Seidler, Daryl Jackson and the Hassell Group, and Godfrey Spowers, recast Melbourne’s skyline. Throughout these years, BSM was quietly formulating its own critique, not of the local culture but of its own practice. Change was imminent, but it would not occur in earnest until after 1995.

Institutional renaissance From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, Australian universities began to build apace. The competition for international students, research prestige, and a place in the increasingly lucrative tertiary education


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1 Casey Plaza Lecture Theatre, RMIT University, Swanston St, Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1988–91. View of the wedge shaped lecture theatre building between the towering walls of the Casey and Gillespie wings 2 Detail view of the entry to the building with steel frame and baked enamel steel cladding 3 Entry Building, Royal Children’s Hospital, Flemington Rd, Parkville, Vic. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1991. The language of the corporate office building was reprogrammed as an institutional building incorporating retail, health and administrative functions 4 The interior curved entrance wall at street level 5 Side elevation view showing the intermediate atrium space between the old and new buildings

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1 Necropolis Crematorium and Chapel Complex, Princes Hwy, Springvale, Vic. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1991. Detail view of entry and brick cladding 2 Aerial view of the building, the centre of a greater urban plan, the cylindrical building was set in a bowl of earth 3 Entrance elevation of the complex 4 Coronial Services Centre, Kavanagh St, South Melbourne. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1987–88. Rendered northwest and southeast elevations 5 Interior view 6 The building represented a literal deconstruction of the institution to a smaller, informal scale 1

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1 Evan Burge Library & Education Centre, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Bates Smart, 1996. The single clerestory-lit barrel vaulted hall of the central library and reading room 2 Student Union Building refurbishment, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Bates Smart, 1997–98. View of the extension to union building with a dynamic two level verandah 3 Howard Florey Institute of Experimental Physiology & Medicine, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. Bates Smart, 1996 4 Engineering Building 8, Monash University, Clayton, Vic. Bates Smart, 1996. The strong expression of the steel entry portal 5 Computer & Information Technology Building, Monash University, Clayton, Vic. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1993

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market meant that more and more dollars were being spent on capital works for university campuses. High quality teaching and research spaces wrapped in a signature design became a magic recipe. BSM was part of that trend as the firm had been in the 1950s and early 1960s with the building of Wilson Hall and the Russell Grimwade School of Biochemistry at the University of Melbourne, and their major work, the master planning of Monash University and design of its Science and Engineering buildings. In the 1990s rise of the university, there were similarities to the 1950s, though with altered emphasis. The shift of many technical colleges to university status meant that a corollary to the status change was the desire to reform their visual image and public presentation.29 There were also pragmatic reasons. Many buildings and campuses, built more than twenty-five years ago, were now run-down and burdened with out-of-date facilities. In Victoria, one of the earliest signs of change and upgrading of image occurred at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. In Howard Raggatt and BSM’s refurbishment of Building 9 (1986), Melbourne’s city grid was realised as a metaphor for an interior fit-out with all services exposed, and like the city grid, it possessed notable public spaces (student seats and corridor junctions) where the grid collided with the existing fabric, in this case, the original plan of the Percy Everettdesigned building. There was also BSM’s 300-seat wedge-shaped and steel-framed Casey Plaza Lecture Theatre (1988–91), embedded within the firm’s earlier

megastructural 1965 and 1968 master plans. Key BSM staff involved included Tim Hurburgh, Chris Johnstone and Steve Erasmus.30 Clad in white baked-enamel steel cladding, the building’s skewed form was a dramatic piece of architectural sculpture (determined also by its function as a theatre) placed between the towering walls of the Casey and Gillespie wings.31 At Monash University, Clayton, Bruce and Gilfillan with Chrisp, Dredge and David Grutzner undertook similar graft-like additions, upgrading and inserting new buildings including the Medical School extensions (1993), Engineering School (1992) and Engineering Building 8 (1996), and the Computer and Information Technology building (1993). This latter building, an extension of two and three storeys, contributed to the making of muchneeded courtyard spaces and included laboratories, teaching rooms and offices, as well as a 300-seat lecture theatre. The building’s notable aspect was its corner, an expressive meeting of two tectonic idioms (a cream brick skin and the concrete frame) with a cylindrical form thrusting vertically upward. The result was an architectural exegesis on the scale and elements of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye (1929). The firm, primarily through Hurburgh and O’Dwyer, also undertook work at the University of Melbourne, making sense of the labyrinthine circulation and catering spaces of the architecturally hybrid Student Union building in 1995, and later adding a dynamic concrete and steel double-level verandah (1997–98), a tactic which enlivened and gave sun protection to the face of the building fronting North Court.

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Nearby, the firm also made a different type of addition in a different type of urban setting. The Evan Burge Library and Education Centre (1996) at Trinity College was a two-storey complex containing six flexible teaching spaces and a 150-seat lecture theatre at ground level with a 23 000 book library on the first floor. In the tradition of French Enlightenment architect Etienne Louis Boullée, this library is a single clerestory-lit barrel-vaulted hall. On the building’s west side, a two-storey colonnade built on rough façade stonecoloured blockwork reflects the sandstone context of its ivy-clad nineteenth-century neighbours and the cream brick of the postwar residential block, Jeopardy. Further down Royal Parade and also on the university campus, BSM designed a fourlevel addition (1996) to the Yuncken Freeman-designed Howard Florey Institute of Experimental Physiology and Medicine (carried out by Hurburgh, Lamb and Martin). Different again in image and materials, this building in its form and language was a response to the postwar run of slab blocks forming the medical precinct along Royal Parade. Clad in white metal panelling, the addition adopted the structuralism of its neighbours but added a floating magenta box to signify entry. In all of these projects for tertiary institutions, BSM’s aesthetic response was carefully tailored to the existing landscape and urban context of each campus. At RMIT, the intention was to place a striking white object within a background of grey slab blocks; at Monash, the aim was to complement the studied neutrality of the firm’s 1960s Modernist vocabulary with

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29 P Goad, ‘The rise of the university’, New Directions in Australian Architecture, Pesaro Publishing, Sydney, 2001, p. 29. See also J Brine, ‘University buildings’, Architecture Australia, July/August 1992, pp. 22–3. 30 D Evans (ed.), Aardvark: the RMIT Guide to Contemporary Melbourne Architecture, RMIT Department of Architecture, Melbourne, 1992, p. 19. 31 Another BSM commission for RMIT but located at its TAFE campus in Dawson Street, Brunswick, was the Melbourne Institute of Textiles Stage 6 Building. Tim Hurburgh and Mark O’Dwyer designed this building. When those two left BSM, they were encouraged to take the project with them.


1 Raheen, additions, Studley Park Rd, Kew, Vic. Bates Smart & McCutcheon, 1983–93. Exterior view of the 1885 mansion 2 Interior view of kitchen 3 View over pool 4 Exterior view of the completed new building

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monumental signature moments, episodic events like a bridge, a corner, or an entry; and at the University of Melbourne, new work was knitted carefully into an historic fabric of disparate age and style.

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Remaking Raheen

32 Jeanne Pratt had been working with architect/interior designer Annie Douglas, who suggested that she consult BSM for further advice, and the firm suggested possible strategies, names of architects and tentative proposals. However, with a house in Diamond Head, Hawaii, and an apartment on New York’s Upper East Side, the Pratts had an eye for an international architect. Jeanne Pratt loved Collins Place and went to talk to Harry Cobb of IM Pei. She even considered Philip Johnson for the commission. In the end, it was decided that an Australian architect should be chosen. 33 Interview with Robert Bruce, 2 September 2003. Even when the project had been finished, another year was taken up with the complete landscaping of the grounds by Sydney historian James Broadbent and landscape architect Michael Lehany.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon completed a small number of important and exclusive residential projects. Significant amongst these was the restoration of and additions (1983–93) made to the red brick nineteenthcentury mansion Raheen (1884–85, 1889) for the Pratt family in Kew. This was the first project in which Sydney architect Glenn Murcutt collaborated with BSM and he worked closely on the project with friend and colleague Robert Bruce. The client for Raheen was Jeanne Pratt, wife of businessman and owner of Visyboard Industries, Richard Pratt. She had long wanted to buy Raheen from the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne. While her husband wanted a modern house, his wife developed the idea of restoring the Boom Style house and adding a freestanding modern steel and glass extension.32 Following an extensive search and after seeing Glenn Murcutt’s house design for artist Sydney Ball in Glenorie, New South Wales, the Pratts decided that Murcutt was to be the architect in association with BSM. Robert Bruce and Allan Lamb oversaw the meticulous restoration of the grand rooms and ballroom of Raheen, inviting experts such as Dr Miles Lewis, Jessie Serle and Terence Lane to contribute advice and expertise as required. Achieved in stages, the complex took almost ten years to

complete.33 The historic interiors were painstakingly restored with advice from Terence Lane. Heritage Victoria gave permission for the servants’ wing to be demolished so that the new building would be hidden from Studley Park Road. After a series of schemes, the final design for the intricately detailed three-level glass and steel pavilion revealed an admiration for the technological precision of Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre and an enthusiasm for creating an adjustable, climatically responsive building. Bates Smart engineers provided all the structural and services engineering for the project as well as documentation services. The success of the commission was vindicated for BSM when, through the auspices of Richard Pratt, then chancellor of the newly formed Swinburne University, they gained a commission for the university’s new Lilydale campus, which led to further work at the Prahran campus.

Imminent change While the firm’s trajectory in the 1980s and early 1990s had become increasingly diffuse both in terms of aesthetics and the range of commissions required for survival in difficult economic circumstances, it was becoming clear that modes of architectural practice and patronage in Australia were changing. The rise of the design-construct package, the need to form joint venture partnerships to manage large-scale projects, the increasing phenomenon of architects who might complete the exterior of the building but not be chosen for interior fit-out commissions, the technological

upgrading (through computers) of the documentation process, and the competitive environment that surrounded the setting of architectural fees were just a few of the complicating factors of architectural practice in the 1990s. In the midst of such testing times, BSM gained a series of projects that would test the firm at all levels: an Australian embassy, a casino and hotel complex that would become at the time the largest building project in the nation, the definition of a new university campus, and the creation of one of Australia’s largest pieces of urban design to commemorate the centenary of Federation. Such commissions would reveal the firm at its typical best: adaptable in design and process, happy to collaborate and engage with complex programs, heritage and new work simultaneously, and with the inventions of interiors not seen since Melbourne’s boom years of the 1880s. These projects also straddled a period of major change within the history of the firm. In 1995, the firm’s eighteen-year foray into formal diversity, open experiment and its accompanying design and practice uncertainties was about to change.


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In 1995, the firm changed its name to Bates Smart. For seventy years, from 1926 until 1995, the name McCutcheon had been associated with the practice. The directors felt that the consolidation of the name was an important strategic move. To step outside of the considerable shadow of McCutcheon was important. In 1992, the ampersand had been dropped from the firm name, a change announced at the office party launch of Brian Sadgrove’s poster commemorating fourteen decades of BSM.1 In 1995, the new practice title was made even shorter in line with the tendency, especially amongst large professional practices to contract, streamline, or abbreviate corporate titles. At the same time it was felt that retention of the names Bates and Smart maintained a valuable link with the firm’s early history.

1 Interviews with Robert Bruce, 31 January 2002, 2 September 2003; Tim Hurburgh, 19 July 2002; Roger Poole, 4 February 2002. 2 Gilfillan had joined the firm in 1957, but left in 1958, then rejoined in 1960. See P Dalzell, ‘BSM—1945 onwards’, transcript of talk given at BSM, 5 May 1987, pp. 4–6. 3 Interviews with Robert Bruce, 31 January 2002; 2 September 2003. 4 Interview with Robert Bruce, 2 September 2003. Project architect at Lilydale was Philip Vivian. 5 TAFE stands for Technical and Further Education and refers to the old technical college form of education that emphasised specialisation in trade skills, separate from that of the university, the more conventional vocational form of tertiary education. 6 Architect, June 2002, p. 19.

The change to the firm’s name had been presaged by changes to the firm’s list of directors in the early 1990s. Roger Arnall’s retirement in 1991 as a director and as director-in-charge of the engineering section signalled the firm’s decision to change its multidisciplinary profile. There was increasing difficulty in marketing the complete architecture and engineering package as part of a commission. Bates Smart decided to sell the engineering section to Arnall and Tom Gorog as the risk was seen as being too great to retain this section of the office. The engineering practice was reborn as Addicoat Hogarth & Wilson and exists today. Robert Dunster retired as a director in 1992 after almost

forty years of continuous employment with the firm. Struan Gilfillan retired in 1995, after thirty-five continuous years with the firm.2 Replacing these two BSM stalwarts were James (Jim) Milledge in 1992 and Jeffery Copolov in 1996. As with all of the changes to the firm’s profile, such personnel moves were carefully planned and implemented. In 1995, the firm opened a new and permanent branch office in Sydney, a move that McCutcheon had resisted for years before the setting up of UDPA. The name change was also relevant to the Sydney initiative because, as Robert Bruce recalls, no one in Sydney could remember to add McCutcheon to the firm’s name.3

The project, produced under the new name ‘Bates Smart (in association with Glenn Murcutt)’, helped express the firm’s commitment to Modernist principles. The result was Building LA (1996), a large general purpose complex ‘containing all the functions of a miniature campus’4—a 180-seat lecture theatre, offices, library, classrooms, computer laboratories, student union and café. The building, placed heroically in the landscape, was an exercise in structural and formal clarity—a big shaded glass and steel box (the main cafeteria and gathering space) flanked by brick offices and lecture theatres detailed in brick the way Murcutt and his confreres in 1960s Sydney used to do.

Building track record

Also for Swinburne University, but located on their Prahran campus in inner Melbourne and without Murcutt’s involvement, Bates Smart designed two buildings that continued the tectonic clarity of the earlier Swinburne project. The program for the Arts/Multimedia building (2000–01) consolidated a number of TAFE5 courses into a single facility with the intention of focusing the creative arts components of the university’s activities. The four-level building in concrete, steel and glass was designed as a series of Spartan warehouselike flexible spaces for painting, sculpture and printmaking, and included a groundfloor gallery and multi-purpose performance studios. Even more robust in structural and material expression was Bates Smart’s award-winning Gymnastics Victoria and National Institute of Circus Arts building (2001).6 Inside were two full-height

The immediate task of the renamed firm was to create an identifiably new track record. The directors realised that the name change suggested a new focus and that this would be best expressed by the nature and appearance of the firm’s recently completed design work. One opportunity was the commission for a new building at Swinburne University, a former technical college given new status as a university. Bates Smart had a challenging task—to create the first building of a new campus at Lilydale in the Yarra Valley, north-east of Melbourne. Sydney architect Glenn Murcutt collaborated with Bates Smart on the design, with Robert Bruce as project director. Murcutt and Bruce were old friends, having studied together at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

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1 Jim Milledge (1951–), a director of the firm since 1992 2 Jeffery Copolov (1958–). Copolov, becoming a director in 1995, was the firm’s first interior design director 3 Becoming Bates Smart. The creation of a new identity after consolidating the practice name in 1995 4 Arts/Multimedia Building, Swinburne University, Prahran Campus, High St, Prahran, Victoria. Bates Smart, 2000–01. Main entrance 5 Building LA, Swinburne University, Lilydale Campus, Melba Hwy, Lilydale, Victoria. Bates Smart (in assoc. with Glenn Murcutt), 1996. 6 NICA Building, Swinburne University, Prahran Campus, Green St, Prahran, Victoria. Bates Smart, 2001. Green St view of the building

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1 Junior School, Ivanhoe Grammar School, Ridgeway Campus, The Ridgeway, Ivanhoe, Victoria. Bates Smart, 1996–97. Exterior view of classrooms 2 Enterprise Centre, Ivanhoe Grammar School, Plenty Campus, Bridge Inn Rd, Mernda, Victoria. Bates Smart, 2001. Exterior view 3 Exterior view into library interior 4 SMAART Centre, Junior School, Firbank Grammar School, Outer Cres, Brighton, Vic. Bates Smart, 2002. Interior view 5 Exterior view of new classrooms

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(14-metre high) studios for rhythmic gymnastics and circus arts at the eastern end, and 7-metre high studios for men’s and women’s gymnastics at the western end. Outside, the building is a giant steel-framed, metal clad and glass louvred warehouse/shed straddling a precast concrete plinth. An escape stair is the single dramatic gesture that sweeps across the shed’s surface like the sweep of the acrobats within. The same attention to urban context and appropriate choice of architectural language informed Bates Smart’s commissions from Melbourne private schools throughout the 1990s. The firm’s extensive experience with master-planning at Peninsula Grammar School, the Syndal campus of Wesley College, and the Yarra Valley School in the 1960s, was broadened with similar commissions for Presbyterian Ladies College (PLC), Burwood (1991); Melbourne Church of England Girls Grammar School, South Yarra (1992); Scotch College, Hawthorn (1996); and Ivanhoe Grammar School, Ivanhoe campus (1995), Plenty campus (1996). Multiple building commissions at almost all of these campuses (as well as at others) followed. The Creative Arts Complex at Melbourne Girls Grammar School (1998), overseen by Robert Bruce and designed by Philip Vivian, is representative of the quality of all of these educational projects. An addition that involved the location of a music school beneath an existing quadrangle and hockey field with links to the lower levels of the campus, the three-level structure acknowledges the school’s red brick, is aligned with the south wing of the historic

Merton Hall building, and clamped to it, is a cantilevered glass and steel balcony that recalls the historic glass and steel verandah of the quadrangle. Other notable school commissions include the Enterprise Centre at the Plenty campus of Ivanhoe Grammar (2001); the Junior School at the Ridgeway campus of Ivanhoe Grammar (1996-7); Language Centre and Lecture Theatre at PLC (1998); and the firm’s recent work for Firbank Anglican Girls School in Brighton where Roger Poole directed the design of the Aquatic Centre (1996), the Science Centre (2000) and the Turner House Junior School additions (2002) with Allan Lamb and Sarah Embling. The firm’s educational projects demonstrate Bates Smart’s commitment to the architecture of the precinct, or the city, with interest in the human scale of the spaces between and their circulation links in the overall organism of a community of buildings. In these university and school complexes, Bates Smart has contributed to a tradition in Australia where some of the most urbane and carefully controlled sequences of public outdoor spaces can be found in private and institutional enclaves, and where Australian urbanism most closely reflects the orthodox ideals of European urbanism.7

Another Australian embassy Bates Smart gained its second commission for an Australian embassy in 1997. Won through limited competition, it was another project that reinforced the stature of the firm’s reputation and demonstrated newfound ease in working with prestigious

institutional commissions. As a result of Germany’s reunification, the Australian embassy was required to move from Bonn to Berlin. Government decisions prompted the purchase of two pre-World War I historic buildings in former East Berlin. These were restored and adapted for embassy and residential functions by Bates Smart in collaboration with associated German architects Braun & Schlockermann. The project was designed in Melbourne by Tim Hurburgh, Jeffery Copolov and Allan Lamb.8 The Chancery building with its grand majolica façade has bold and dark glazed interventions at ground and attic level. An inner courtyard separates the Chancery from the second building, a former apartment block which faces Markisches Ufer and the Spree Canal. A highlight of this sensitive adaptation was to be the projected insertion of a rust red sculptural meeting-room/link structure that would have sat in the courtyard. However it was eventually replaced by a fully glazed roof over the courtyard. The documentation was overseen by Allan Lamb, Mary Noonan and Luisa Watson, the final result was an elegant and historically sensitive intervention, bestowing suitably sober authority on Australia’s official presence in a new Berlin.

Creating Crown The project in the mid-1990s that was to dramatically alter the trajectory of the firm’s commercial success, reinforcing the importance of large-scale urban design and the commercial viability of sophisticated interior design, reinforcing the firm’s

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7 Other examples of such long-term urban-focused work in Victoria include the work of McGlashan Everist at Geelong College; Mockridge Stahle & Mitchell and later Swaney Draper and Peter Elliott for Melbourne Church of England Boys Grammar School; Crone Ross Architects for Trinity Grammar School, Kew; Daryl Jackson for Methodist Ladies College, Kew; and Peter Elliott for RMIT University and the University of Melbourne. 8 Bates Smart also completed the design of the fit-out for the temporary Australian Embassy (1999) on the sixth floor of the Checkpoint Charlie building in Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. Bates Smart also worked in association with Braun & Schlockermann on this project.


1 Australian Embassy, Wallstrasse 76–79, Berlin Mitte, Germany. Bates Smart (in assoc. with Braun & Schlockermann), 1997–2002. Exterior view of the Chancery building, the original majolica façade was restored with new glazed interventions at ground and attic level 2 The façade to the apartment building which faces Markisches Ufer and the Spree Canal 3 The restored entrance to the inner courtyard between the two buildings 4 Crown Entertainment Complex, Southbank, Melbourne. Bates Smart (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson & Daryl Jackson Pty Ltd), 1993–97. The entire complex from the northbank of the Yarra River, with the hotel tower on the left

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coordination expertise was the Crown Entertainment Complex. In 1993, Bates Smart won a limited design competition for the project, and then invited Perrott Lyon Mathieson (PLM) to join them as architects for the controversial commission for the Crown Casino and all of its ancillary functions. At the time it was the largest single building project in Australia. The project was huge, involving an integrated hotel and casino/entertainment complex running along 500 metres of the Yarra River frontage in central Melbourne. The project was to cost over $1.5 billion and be complete in three years and five months. It would involve 500 000 square metres of building, and 250 000 square metres of interior fit-out. Included as part of the program were a 39-storey, 500-room 5-star hotel, a 2500-seat multi-purpose ballroom, a 500-seat showroom, 34 shops, 17 bars, 35 restaurants, cafés, and fast-food outlets, a casino with 350 tables and 2500 slot machines, a 14-screen cinema complex and several nightclubs. The project also included the design and construction of the award-winning river promenade. Due to the project’s size and complexity, the consortium was encouraged to take on another joint venture partner, Daryl Jackson Pty Ltd. Bates Smart was jointly responsible for the external design of the complex, with Roger Poole and Peter Dredge taking a lead in the hotel tower design. Through Jeffery Copolov’s leadership, Bates Smart became responsible for direction of all of the hotel interiors (except the main foyer and atrium), the gaming interiors, the internal retail street

and public spaces, and many of the restaurant, bar and retail interiors.9 With Roger Poole as chair of the joint venture, the project started with seven people and, at its height, employed over 180 architects and interior designers working on the project at a separate office in Queensbridge Street, South Melbourne. The eight key design and administrative personnel from within the joint venture included Roger Poole, Jeffery Copolov and Peter Dredge (Bates Smart); Brian Mathieson and Hamish Lyon (PLM); and Daryl Jackson, Bob Sinclair and Lyndon Hayward (Daryl Jackson Pty Ltd). From the outset, the experience was one of rapid learning and equally rapid invention. Lloyd Williams, client and head of the development group, immediately put his architects on a plane to Las Vegas where they saw dozens of casinos in a few days and were told to observe what not to do. With the exception of some parts of a few Steve Wynn-designed casinos, there was no model for emulation to be found in Las Vegas. As Jeffery Copolov recounts, the major difference was that in Melbourne, there was going to be one, and only one, casino.10 It was a monopoly. In Las Vegas, there were over one hundred casinos. The town was a giant resort, gauche in taste and appearance, where each casino shouted for attention. Melbourne was different. The joint venture architects argued that the experience of gaming should be a five-star one, based on luxury and comfort, with the building responding to the local style and urbanity of Melbourne. It was not to be themed, or cast architecturally as a fun park.11

With the whirlwind, seven-month completion of the temporary casino at the World Trade Centre on Spencer Street, Copolov as senior interior designer set to work with limited client input, devoting maximum effort to warmth, richness and attention to detail. Williams had set the benchmark of a five-star gaming experience and the result was a smash hit financially and with the locals. As design proceeded on the series of buildings on the opposite side of the Yarra, the joint venture team was sent off periodically to look at five-star hotels in Bangkok, Hong Kong and Singapore. These were intense research trips where expectations of the prospective ‘high-roller’ gaming population were better appreciated. Williams was after the ‘best’ hotel and the ‘best’ gaming facility in the Asian region. Completed in 1997, the Crown Complex, one of the world’s largest casinos and Victoria’s only such facility, represented a massive undertaking for the firm. Just as with Collins Place and Melbourne Central, the firm’s expertise in linking architectural to interior design was allowed full expression. Under the guidance of Roger Poole and Jeffery Copolov, and assisted by interior designers Jackie Johnston, Paul Hecker, Cathy Hall, Fiona Ennis and Kerry Phelan, the interior fit-out was undertaken with the enthusiasm and verve reminiscent of Morris Lapidus’s famous maxim of ‘Too much is never enough’ but done always with an eye to taste, aesthetic invention, and with the key that ‘beyond the glitter is an incredibly systematised rigour’.12 Everything from furniture, fabrics, carpets, light fittings,

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9 Synman Justin & Bialek were the architects responsible for the nightclub area but under Copolov’s supervision. Interview with Roger Poole, 4 February 2002. 10 Interview with Jeffery Copolov, 12 September 2003. 11 Interview with Jeffery Copolov, 12 September 2003. In the initial winning bid for the casino, the interiors were to be themed according to the five continents. However the end of the project had distilled this idea as much as possible in favour of assured taste and unpretentious volumes, colours, and materials. The intention was quality, glamour and attention to detail. 12 Interview with Jeffery Copolov, 12 September 2003.


1 Crown Entertainment Complex, Southbank, Melbourne. Bates Smart (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson & Daryl Jackson Pty Ltd), 1993–97. View of the complex along the Southbank promenade at night 2 The extraordinarily lavish interiors of the Monte Carlo room 3 Velvet Bar, one of the bars completed as a part of the project 4 The 2500 seat Palladium ballroom

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1 Crown Towers Hotel, Southbank, Melbourne. Bates Smart (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson & Daryl Jackson Pty Ltd), 1993–97. Hotel room detail 2 Interior detailing of finishes and furnishings 3 Interior view of the hotel spa 4 Details throughout the hotel and complex, such as the day bed in the hotel suites, were considered 5 Interior view of hotel suite 6 Foodcourt, Crown Entertainment Complex, Southbank, Melbourne. Bates Smart (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson & Daryl Jackson Pty Ltd), 1993–97 1

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1 Crown Entertainment Complex, Southbank, Melbourne. Bates Smart (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson & Daryl Jackson Pty Ltd), 1993–97. The opulent gaming areas were key elements to the experience of the casino 2 VIP Slots Lounge, Star City, 80 Pyrmont St, Pyrmont, New South Wales. Bates Smart, 2003. Reception entrance to the Star Lounge 3 Glo Bar, Star City, 80 Pyrmont St, Pyrmont, New South Wales. Bates Smart, 2002. Interior view of the bar with the 100-metre long spiral chandelier formed with 2-metre acrylic rods

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13 The dandelion chandeliers also had to have enough globes to sustain their appearance even if a number of the tiny globes had blown while being easily maintained and meeting Crown’s demands of exacting quality. 14 Interview with Robert Bruce, 2 September 2003. Byron Harford’s relationship with BSM (soon to become Bates Smart) lasted one year.

wall and floor finishes was overseen by Copolov and custom-designed for extraordinarily lavish interiors like the Monte Carlo Room, Palladium Conference Room, the huge ballroom and function rooms, and their corresponding lounge and pre-function areas. The ‘dandelion’ chandeliers were designed by artist/designer Stephen Hennessy and Copolov. Not only were these lights exquisite and spectacular in their form and finish but they had also to be highly efficient housings for safety and surveillance equipment, concealing fire sprinklers and cameras within.13 Moorish-inspired screens were spray-painted gold and fabricated from laser-cut aluminium or hardboard. At the top levels of the hotel, there were entire apartment suites where every single detail was designed by the joint venture firm. In the spa and massage areas were interiors of luxury and opulence not seen since Melbourne’s boom years of the 1880s. At the river promenade retail levels, Bates Smart also designed many of the complex’s boutique bars like Fidel’s Cigar Bar and the highly successful food court. The remarkable aspect of the Crown commission was not just its scale, the speed of the fabrication and construction, the high level of craft (all of it designed and executed in Melbourne), but also the hugely complex logistics of coordination and management of the project. Not only this but Copolov, acting for the consortium team, was also intimately involved in the more that $6 million spent on commissioned artworks for the hotel and casino interiors.

Further and significant interior and commercial fit-out designs in Melbourne and Sydney followed from the success of the Crown experience. This included shops for PTO, the ‘female youth culture stores’ in South Yarra, Chadstone and Doncaster (2000), the stylish LIP café bar in Fitzroy Street, St Kilda (2000), the office and lobby interiors for Grant Thornton, 383 Kent Street, Sydney (2003), and, most importantly, an ongoing involvement in the gradual upgrading and refurbishment of the interiors of the Star City casino and hotel in Pyrmont, Sydney (2000–). This last complex, designed by the Cox Group, had been completed only three years before. But, given the success of the Melbourne casino, Bates Smart was called in to develop strategies and improve upon the vapid and inappropriate theming of the Sydney equivalent, working to de-theme its carnival aspects, and in essence to add style, warmth and a more sophisticated environment for the gaming experience. Recent changes to the Star City casino, designed under Jeffery Copolov’s direction, include the Lagoon Bar, the Glo Bar with its 100-metre long chandelier made from 2metre long acrylic rods suspended from a 6.8-metre high ceiling, and the VIP Lounge where timber panelling, faux brass screens, blocks of multiple silk panels, a stunning light fitting designed by Stephen Hennessy and the introduction of colours like red, pink and gold have added much-needed warmth to an otherwise undifferentiated barn-like interior. The success of these and other minor incursions has earned Bates Smart ongoing commissions aimed at completely upgrading the building’s interior.

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The Sydney experiment The decision to set up a Sydney office of Bates Smart arose through a series of circumstances. With the success of the Clayton Utz fit-out (1992) at 1 O’Connell Street, the facility planning for moving Esso to Melbourne, the request in the mid-1990s from Siemens Plessey for Bates Smart to undertake redevelopment proposals for their huge sprawling factory in North Ryde, and further fit-out work for the National Australia Bank in central Sydney, the directors felt that exploratory work should be done to gauge the possibility of creating a permanent office in Sydney. James Pearce travelled there in December 1994 to supervise current work but also to explore future opportunities for the firm. In the same year, BSM had been part of a joint bid with Peddle Thorp and Conybeare Morrison on behalf of the Kerry Packer (Consolidated Press) backed consortium competing for Sydney’s casino commission. The team for the bid included Sydney architect Byron Harford (formerly of Tonkin Zulaikha), who had gone to Peddle Thorp to work on the casino bid. Although the bid was unsuccessful, Bates Smart appointed Harford as a non-equity director of the newly created Sydney office in 1995, as Harford had managed to gain the commission for Foxtel Studios earlier that year.14 That same year, Jim Milledge had been working two days per week for six months in Sydney, primarily on the Siemens Plessey project. There was the prospect, if that job came off, that even more work


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1 Keith Matheson, 231 Lambton Quay, Wellington, New Zealand. Bates Smart, 2004. View of interior from the street 2 Interior view of the store 3 Bruce Oldfield Retail Store, Crown Entertainment Complex, Southbank, Melbourne. Bates Smart (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson & Daryl Jackson Pty Ltd), 1993–97 4 Sports and Entertainment Limited, 243 Liverpool St, East Sydney, New South Wales. Bates Smart, 2003 5 Azura Jewellery, Chadstone Shopping Centre, Chadstone, Victoria. Bates Smart, 2002 6 PTO Retail Store, Chapel St, South Yarra, Vic. Bates Smart, 2000. Interior fitout and branding of the female youth culture stores


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1 Clemenger BBDO Pty Ltd, 474 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne. Bates Smart, 2004. Main reception and waiting area 2 Lounge and library 3 Grange Securities Ltd, Level 33, 264 George St (Australia Square), Sydney. Bates Smart, 2004. Reception 4 Forum Real Estate, Address Street, St Leonards, New South Wales. Bates Smart, 2003. Interior 5 Interior view of main business and service area 6 Clayton Utz, 1 O’Connell St, Sydney. Bates Smart, 2004. Reception 7 Commissioned artworks still feature strongly in contemporary Bates Smart interiors


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1 Artist Services, Fox Studios, Randwick, New South Wales. Bates Smart, 1999. Office interior 2 Foxtel Headquarters & Playout Centre, Wharf 8, Pyrmont, New South Wales. Bates Smart, 1996. Entrance foyer 3 Interior of the office headquarters, which contained offices, high-tech studios, control rooms and editing suites 4 Computer Science & Engineering Faculty, University of NSW, Anzac Parade, Kensington, New South Wales. Bates Smart, 1999–2001. The main circulation space within the building with the giant sunscreen panels beyond the glazing 5 The completed building showing the existing 1960s brutalist building refurbished as a part of the project

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would come into the Sydney office. In mid-1996, Milledge volunteered to move to Sydney to join James Pearce and commence a three-year plan to formally establish the Sydney office of Bates Smart.15 The experiment proved to be a fruitful one. Spectacular office space was found on the 42nd floor of the 1970s structurally expressive Qantas building, with a sublease until mid-1997. Joining Milledge and Pearce from Melbourne were Stephanie Flaubert and Chris Proctor, who had then picked up urban design and infrastructure work at Homebush Bay that was related to the 2000 Olympic Games. After Proctor left the Sydney office, Philip Vivian, who had joined BSM in 1994 and had urban design experience from Columbia University, moved to Sydney in 1997 on Roger Poole’s suggestion to assist in the growing quantity of work. Vivian gained further infrastructure work (roads and bridges) at City West Link Road and Cow Pasture Road for the Sydney office. That same year the Sydney office moved to 263 Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst, in the inner suburbs of East Sydney above the showrooms of furniture importers De De Ce. Close to the city, in the heartland of Sydney’s design and advertising belt, it was a clear sign that Bates Smart was intending to stay in Sydney and make its presence felt. The first real job of the Sydney office (overseen by Pearce and Flaubert) was the successful conversion of a previously empty wharf building at Pyrmont in Sydney’s harbour into the Foxtel headquarters and Playout Centre (1995). In a commission that

took only six months, from briefing to the opening of the centre, offices, conference rooms, high-tech studios, control rooms, editing suites and playout racks were inserted as lightweight metal and fibre cement boxes within a robust shell. More work (with increasingly larger budgets) quickly followed and three projects in the late 1990s were critical to the ongoing success of the Bates Smart Sydney office: Toyota National Sales and Marketing Headquarters, Woolooware Bay (1998); School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales (1999); and the $35 million upgrade and refurbishment of the historic timber Pier 8/9 in Sydney’s Walsh Bay (1999–2000). The Toyota headquarters was an office building that included areas for corporate entertainment and showrooms on a greenfield site at Woolooware Bay, looking north across Botany Bay. The three-level building, 20 metres wide and almost 100 metres long, has an external steel frame structure, extensive sun shading to the north, east and west façades, and a distinctive three-storey high glass atrium to the entry. The columnfree external perimeter allowed workstations and offices to be placed at any point on the façade. Overseen by Jim Milledge and designed by Stephanie Flaubert, the building was managed in the Sydney office by James Pearce and Jacqui Urford, and paralleled the clean Modernist lines of design work emanating from the Melbourne office at the same time. The School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW, also overseen by Milledge and designed by Flaubert, involved

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the refurbishment of a 1960s building and the addition of a six-storey sliver of structure that resolved circulation and servicing, as well as sun-shading and glare through the hanging of a giant grillage screen of offset panels from the top of the building. Managed by project architect Belinda Kerry, this otherwise undistinguished Brutalist building was completely transformed by clever landscaping at ground level, the new veil-like façade, a strong set of colours deployed internally, light-filled interiors, and a giant piece of introduced artwork. At Pier 8/9, overseen by Philip Vivian and Jim Milledge, offices for Murdoch Magazines (amongst other businesses) were placed within an historic timber pier structure, the Central Stevedores 1912 wool store. Two new mezzanine steel floors were inserted, skylights located in the central Dutch gable, new frameless glass windows inserted, operable external aluminium louvres placed over new openings, giant sliding timber doors were restored and made operable, and the original timber floor was removed, numbered and relaid over a new concrete slab. The approach was to leave much of the original timber structure unpainted while combining sympathetically with it a new and uncompromising steel and glass aesthetic.16 The result was an exemplary piece of high quality design combined with the thoughtful adaptive reuse of an historic building.

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15 Interview with Jim Milledge, 19 September 2003. 16 Bates Smart’s refurbishment of Pier 8/9 at Walsh Bay was undertaken at the same time as a similar pier at Woolloomooloo where the results were arguably less successful in terms of respect and the highlighting of the historic integrity of the original pier/warehouse structure.


1 Toyota National Sales and Marketing Headquarters, Cnr. Captain Cook Dr & Gannons Road, Caringbah, New South Wales. Bates Smart, 1998–2000. Sunshading detail, which featured on the north, east and west facades 2 Elevation view of the external steel frame structure and sunshading to the building 3 The three-storey high glass and steel atrium entrance to the building

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Parting ways At the end of 1998, the firm’s smooth transition to Bates Smart was given special nuance by the departure of director Tim Hurburgh. The collegiate approach of the other directors contrasted with Hurburgh’s robust individualism. Having been with the firm for twenty-seven years and now possessing different views that had developed over time on the nature of the firm’s future, Hurburgh decided that it was time to set up in practice on his own. He remained as a design consultant on the Australian Embassy project in Berlin,17 and the parting of ways was orchestrated so as to be beneficial to all concerned. Part of the reason for Hurburgh’s departure lay within different philosophies on how to run Bates Smart. The spectre of small, virtually autonomous, offices existing within the practice was proving not to be conducive to the overall partnership. This phenomenon was being exacerbated by the tensions that arose from the financial consequences of this individualism. The key problem however was that the office had lost a strong sense of a unified design identity associated with the firm. On this last matter the continuing directors agreed. Something had to be done. Clarifying the rather diverse design reputation of the firm was seen as the key to the future success of Bates Smart. With Hurburgh gone, Bates Smart abandoned the individual project responsibility of directors in favour of a collegiate team of

directors who had a common design vision for the firm, a shared vision of future practice development, and a conviction that the firm needed to be identifiable in its architecture, its office branding, and in the appearance of its office. What was critical however was that a new partner was required to lead the Sydney practice. As a director, Jim Milledge had been instrumental in formalising the set-up of the Sydney office in the mid-1990s, and in early 2000 after Tim Hurburgh had left the firm, he moved back to Melbourne. In early 2000, Philip Vivian took over the running of Bates Smart’s Sydney office.18 Later that year he would also be invited to become a partner.

Federation Square A project which straddled this sometimes strained period in the reorganisation of the hierarchy of Bates Smart was Melbourne’s Federation Square (1997–2002). This huge project, involving the roofing of the Flinders Street railyards and the construction of a series of major public buildings above, was Australia’s largest capital works undertaking to celebrate one hundred years of federation as a nation. In 1997, having won through the first stage of the international competition, Peter Davidson and Donald Bates of the then London-based firm of LAB Architecture Studio, were required to link up with a major Melbourne-based architecture firm. On the advice of academic and critic Professor Haig Beck, Davidson invited Bates Smart in 1997 to be joint venture partners in a bid to win the final stage of the competition.19 Bates Smart, busy working on the Crown Complex

and seeking new challenges, agreed and Tim Hurburgh, then chairman, offered staff to help LAB in the final run to submission. James Murray and Sophie Annapliotis went to London to assist in the refinement of the project, and Hurburgh also made a trip, en-route from site meetings for the Berlin embassy.

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Despite a mad scramble to finish the drawings, and the disaster of the final model arriving smashed to pieces after its flight back from London the day before the interview in June 1997, the team of LAB Architecture Studio and Bates Smart was announced as winners on 26 July 1997. The jury had been stunned by the daring fragmentation of LAB’s design, an apparently non-hierarchical collection of slivered forms laid across the vast site, with the spaces between echoing the intimate scale of Melbourne’s nineteenth-century lane-scapes. On the urging of the jury, LAB and Bates Smart had presented the model in repaired form after the formal presentations had been made. Even though the competition had then been won, the project was made doubly complex by the addition of the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection of Australian art to be located on the site, a building that was destined to become NGV Australia: the Ian Potter Centre. The design team worked for a few months at St Hilda’s in East Melbourne before permanent space was found by LAB at 325 Flinders Lane, and it was there that the Federation Square project was subsequently designed and documented,

17 Interview with Tim Hurburgh, 19 July 2002. Mark O’Dwyer, an associate of the firm, and a few Bates Smart employees followed Hurbugh. By mutual agreement, only a select number of clients such as the RMIT TAFE School of Textiles and Australia Post were lost by the firm. 18 Other staff in the Sydney office then included Stephanie Flaubert, James Pearce, Vince Alafaci and Jacqueline Urford. 19 Interview with Donald Bates, 28 August 2003.


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1 Federation Square, Cnr. Flinders St & St Kilda Rd, Melbourne. Bates Smart (in assoc. with Lab Architecture Studio), 1997–2002. The interior galleries of the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia 2 The dramatic interior spaces within the building 3 The façade of the crossbar building 4 The Screen Gallery on the lower level of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) 5 The tactile and folded contours of the facade

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1 Wilson Dilworth, 85–87 High St, Kew, Vic. Bates Smart, 1997. A commercial building project, which reflected the refined, finely detailed aesthetic of the firm 2 360 Collins St, Melbourne. Bates Smart, 1998. The new glass and steel entry structure completed as a part of the building’s upgrade 3 Children’s Court of Victoria, 477 Little Lonsdale St, Melbourne. Bates Smart, 1999. Courtroom interior 4 Little Lonsdale St façade and the formally composed steel and glass pavilion of the entrance foyer

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and all meetings were held. Two reasons for the move were LAB’s desire for very large areas of modelling space, preferring a workshop/laboratory environment to that of a corporate office, and Bates Smart’s practice of separating large joint ventures from its core office to avoid disruption to its other commissions.20 Select Bates Smart staff moved down to Flinders Lane, including Fulvio Facci, who was to manage site supervision for the entire project, and later Roger Chapman and Andrew Francis. Tony Allen, employed by the joint venture, was brought in as an independent project director to manage the process.21 In 1998, preceeding Tim Hurburgh’s departure, Robert Bruce took over as the director within Bates Smart responsible for Federation Square.

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Completed in late 2002, the design of Federation Square had remained firmly within LAB’s purview. But as with AMP St James, Collins Place and Melbourne Central, Bates Smart’s major involvement in design development and documentation contributed to the professional and timely completion of one of the nation’s most complex and innovative urban projects.

Continuing track record 20 Interview with Donald Bates, 28 August 2003. 21 Interview with Donald Bates, 28 August 2003; Robert Bruce, 2 September 2003. Tony Allen, an architect originally from Sydney, was previously an associate of Ancher Mortlock Murray & Woolley, brought to Melbourne as a project architect to oversee the refurbishment of the State Library of Victoria. 22 The National Gallery of Victoria on St Kilda Road was refurbished from 1996 until 2003 to the designs of Italian architects Mario Bellini Associati in association with Melbourne-based firm Metier III.

During the late 1990s Bates Smart continued to consolidate its revitalised image. A key project amongst many in these years was a new building completed in December 1999 in Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne for the Children’s Court of Victoria, an institution that had previously been located in substandard facilities

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in Queensbridge Street, South Melbourne. Following a limited competition, Roger Poole, Steven Javens and Andrew Raftopolous designed a formally composed glass and steel pavilion, airy and open within the sombre precinct of nineteenthcentury Classical Revival legal and government offices. The building’s abstracted palazzo form fitted seamlessly into the historic fabric and, internally, its clear separation of criminal and family court functions through skylit first-floor lobbies and the provision of semi-private outdoor courtyard spaces at ground level represented a refreshing and nonthreatening approach to the design of a court environment. This building, modest in size but iconic in impact, is one of the signature buildings of the reinvented Bates Smart. The theme of carefully controlled urban additions informed other central city projects like the proposed tower for Church Place (1997), a redevelopment of the AMP St James site that was to have comprised a seventy-storey tower and atrium wintergarden, including shops, restaurants, residential apartments and offices. The 275-metre tower, capped by a glass crown would have been Melbourne’s tallest structure. In 1998, Bates Smart upgraded the multi-storey office building, 360 Collins Street, at ground level with a new glass and steel entry structure that hugged the street line and in rhythm and scale reinstated the grain of the nineteenth-century streetscape. An independent but contemporary commission for the Victoria Archive Centre, North Melbourne (2001), a major new storage facility for the Public Record Office

and the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), provided the NGV’s temporary home while both Federation Square and the St Kilda Road galleries were being completed.22

Residential rise Residential design has been a part of the firm’s repertoire ever since its inception. Commissions for commercial and institutional clients sometimes led to houses, and the reverse also occurred where a single house led to larger projects. One of these was Raheen, which had led to work at Swinburne University. The former was more often the case. Bates Smart’s house design for public events entrepreneur Ron Walker arose through his desire to enjoy the standard of detailing of the Crown suites, and retain the character of his much-loved 1930s house. In the stripped Classicism of his Toorak house (1997–99), one can see echoes of the firm’s 1930s practice, oscillating diplomatically between tradition and modernity. Other houses though, in Melbourne and Sydney, reflected the firm’s commitment to the studied neutrality and timeless quality of orthodox modernism. As in the past, some of these houses were designed by directors of the firm for their own use, and in effect became test cases for interiors or technologies used in the firm’s larger projects.


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One of these was Jeffery Copolov’s house for his family in Albert Park (1998–2001). Designed in association with Reno Rizzo, Copolov took full control of the interior where the interior aesthetic and set out was determined by the modular dimension of a rectangular switch plate. From this followed the spacing of the walnut-stained timber linings and doors, in fact everything was scaled from this tiny detail. The palette of limestone, glass, marble, china-white walls, walnut-stained timber and bronze anodised window frames provided Copolov’s kit of parts which was then applied to an assured open planned house of airy volumes, an entire corner that opens up to the garden, and a floor of recycled timber. Meticulously crafted, this house reveals Copolov’s attention to detail, attention that crosses into the firm’s attitude to the completion of their interiors for largescale office fit-outs, hotels, hospitality projects, and apartment projects like The Breakers (2000) at Lorne, on Victoria’s west coast, a residential development of eleven free-standing two-storey houses overlooking the Great Ocean Road.

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23 Bates Smart worked with Mirvac and also its in-house design firm, HPA Architects.

Bates Smart also became involved in the late 1990s in Melbourne’s boom in residential apartment construction, winning awards for two developments that typified the city’s new preoccupation with the type— the refurbishment of warehouse or factory stock into housing, and the high-rise apartment block. Two award-winning projects stand out. The firm’s conversion of an existing three-storey brick nineteenthcentury warehouse in Rooney Street, Richmond (1995) to house offices and

three apartments involved a simple division internally with the insertion of new ground floor concrete slab and precast concrete dividing walls. Projecting boldly from the robust brick shell were generously scaled window bays and balconies, equally robust but in galvanised steel and glass. Similarly contextual but with an entirely different materials palette was The Melburnian at 250 St Kilda Road (2001). This commission, won through limited competition entry and designed by Poole, Copolov and Raftopolous, was another joint venture, with Bates Smart responsible for design, and collaborating in all later stages with HPA, the in-house architects for the Mirvac development group.23 This 250apartment project was located on the site of the former Prince Henry’s Hospital, opposite the gardens of Melbourne’s King’s Domain and on the city’s best known treelined boulevard. The complex was broken down into three major components: a long low building on St Kilda Road with an eaves profile that recalled Roy Grounds’s nearby National Gallery of Victoria (1960–68); a row of modern-day terrace houses to the north; and two north-facing tower slabs, scaled to read as giant monumental markers and overlooking a central courtyard garden. Combining luxurious apartments, affordable one and two-bedroom apartments, four-level townhouses, retail spaces, a swimming pool and gymnasium, The Melburnian represents the largest development to date in the recent transformation of St Kilda Road from a street of speculative offices to a high density residential zone. The mix of formal

typologies, materials and textures, surface modulation and formal treatment has resulted in an altogether picturesque outline that belies the development’s generous scale. Multi-residential projects in Sydney have involved high densities, mixed use and complex urban solutions due to the nature of the topography and non-orthogonal patterns of roads and streets. For the unbuilt Bay Street apartment project (2001) at Rockdale overlooking Botany Bay, a boomerang-shaped eleven-storey residential slab block straddled a public library and entertainment complex, as well as a pedestrian street that reconnected the development back into the existing network of streets. The Five Dock Development proposal, Five Dock, Sydney (2002–04) involves mixed use with multiple clients: a supermarket to be owned and managed by the client; a public library owned and managed by the local council; and 103 residential units carefully scaled by Modernist white brises-soleil and penthouses set back and expressed as dormers, all designed across, over and within a masonry podium that reflects the brick and stucco context of the surrounding Federation period neighbourhood. A large development project for Multiplex in North Arncliffe, Sydney (2001–04) involves the transformation of an industrial site into a mixed-use development. Residential, retail and commercial space is distributed between three slab blocks of eight, fourteen and seventeen levels, with each tower given distinctive surface and

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1 The Breakers, Deans Marsh Rd, Lorne, Victoria. Bates Smart, 2000. Exterior view of the townhouses in the landscape 2 Copolov House, Albert Park, Victoria. Jeffery Copolov & Reno Rizzo, 1998-2001. Interior view 3 The Melburnian, 250 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne. Bates Smart (in assoc. with HPA Architects), 2001. Site plan showing the low garden tower along St Kilda road and the high rise east and west apartment towers overlooking the courtyard garden below 4 View along Grant street showing low-rise street terraces and placement of the two high-rise towers on the site 3

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1 Proximity Apartments, Arncliffe St, North Arncliffe, New South Wales. Bates Smart, 2001– 04. 2 Five Dock Square, Garfield St, Five Dock, New South Wales. Bates Smart, 2002–04.View showing masonry commercial podium, reflecting the surrounding Federation period neighbourhood 3 Over the podium, the carefully scaled residential units are composed with set back penthouses 4 Bates Smart Office, 243 Liverpool St, East Sydney, New South Wales. Bates Smart, 2003. Reception area. Employing a similar kit of parts enabled the firm to complete its corporate branding across both offices 5 Philip Vivian (1964–). Vivian, since 2000, is the director of the Sydney office

material modulation, and a memorable skyline. The development, containing over 290 apartments, is visually and urbanistically grounded by a four level podium that ensures a village-like scale and density at ground level. Similarly, in Church Street, Parramatta, Bates Smart’s eightyeight apartment development for Estate Properties (2002–) will become the tallest building in the city for over a decade, and includes the retention of an historic fire station and the placement of shops and parking in a double-level podium. The tower, reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s tower projects for Rio de Janeiro, sits boldly over the existing building. In Maroubra, also in Sydney, Bates Smart won a competition in 2002 for fifty-three apartments that involved the retention and restoration of an historic corner hotel and the addition of two complementary wings with contrasting steel detailing and operable louvre facades. The apartments, completed in 2004, are a two-storey ‘cross-over’ typology that allows all apartments natural cross-ventilation and ocean views. More recently in South Sydney, near the emerging Green Square urban regeneration area, Bates Smart have been involved in the urban design and master planning of over 1000 apartments for Estate Properties. Called Sydneygate (2003–), the design comprises five perimeter blocks that create a regional park that assists with stormwater management, as well as a public square with cafes and restaurants. Another largescale Sydney project is the 400-apartment development for the Winten Property Group on the site of the former Airport Hilton in

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Arncliffe (2003–). Again perimeter block planning plus a seventeen-level tower assist in creating a residents’ park and a throughsite link. In each of these schemes and especially so in those planned and being constructed in Sydney where the growth of residential apartment development in the last five years has outstripped all other Australian urban centres, there is the recognition that the city is a complex organism that necessarily involves mediation with its existing urban grain, the demands of speculation and ever constricting planning controls. The challenge in these locations is to differentiate quality and Bates Smart have responded in virtually all cases with an ethos of building the city rather than creating one-off sculptural objects.

Looking to the future The contraction of the firm’s name to Bates Smart in 1995 proved to be the first stage of the post-1977 transformation of BSM. There was more to come. Further reflection on office technologies like the rise of digital design and documentation, and the limitations of the multi-compartmented St Hilda’s as an office encouraged the directors to sell the Clarendon Street property in East Melbourne.24 It was decided that the firm would move to new (and rented) premises, and an entire rebranding exercise of the practice image would be undertaken. In 1996, Jeffery Copolov had been made a director, responsible especially for interior design. In 2000, Philip Vivian, who was Pertheducated, Columbia University-trained,

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and then running the Sydney office, became the newest Bates Smart partner. The firm’s directors were now Robert Bruce, Roger Poole, Jim Milledge, Jeffery Copolov and Philip Vivian. All were agreed that the design philosophy of the office was now rooted in a clean Modernist approach that reflected the humanistic concerns of the postwar BSM office and with a new major focus on interior architecture. The office would continue to embrace the latest in structural and material technologies, and the long tradition of responsible and responsive urban design but also recognise the critical role of the interior environment as a positive and necessary part of core architectural business.

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A critical step in the second stage of the change to Bates Smart was the design of the new Bates Smart office (2001), on the sixth floor of Orica (formerly ICI) House. Designed by Jeffery Copolov, the directors acted as clients for what became a glossy black-floored and white walled and ceilinged studio with a skyline backdrop of Melbourne’s central business district. Jim Milledge oversaw the move from St Hilda’s to Orica House while Allan Lamb was the project architect. From a heritage-listed building to a brand-new office fit-out in one of the firm’s seminal Modernist works, the transformation of the firm was now complete. In March 2001, Bates Smart moved into their new premises. A special feature of the fit-out was the complete removal of the suspended ceiling system, which revealed the original 1958 prefabricated concrete flooring systems and all associated services. 24 Interview with Robert Bruce, 31 January 2002.


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1 Maroubra Bay Hotel & Apartments, Marine Pde, Maroubra, New South Wales. Bates Smart, 2002– 04. View from Marine Pde 2 Warehouse conversion, Rooney St, Richmond, Victoria. Bates Smart, 1995. The galvanised steel and glass projecting window bays and balconies within the existing brick shell 3 Bates Smart Office, 1 Nicholson St, Melbourne. Bates Smart, 2001. Reception. A feature of the fit-out was removal of the suspended ceiling to expose the original prefabricated concrete floor system and services 4 Boardroom. The interior representing Bates Smart’s clean Modernist aesthetic applied in the refurbishment to one of the firm’s iconic buildings 5 Director’s offices are glass pods situated on the corners of the studio


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1 The current directors of Bates Smart. Roger Poole (chairman), Jim Milledge, Philip Vivian and Jeffery Copolov 2 Jones Bay Wharf, Pier 19-21, Pirrama Rd, Pyrmont, New South Wales. Bates Smart (in assoc. with PTW Architects), 2002– 03. The display suite built for the proposed refurbishment of the wharf 3 The insertion of glazed office areas into the original structure 4 View of the internal refurbishment and additions to the 1919 wharf

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Sydney recast

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After Milledge’s return to Melbourne in 2000, the Sydney office also recast itself. Stephanie Flaubert resigned to pursue her furniture and other design interests. James Pearce returned to Melbourne after six years of pioneering work for the firm, and Philip Vivian set about consolidating an office of architects and interior designers which numbered forty late in 2003. That same year the Sydney office moved from 263 to 243 Liverpool Street as the building they were renting was being refurbished. As with the office’s move in Melbourne to Orica House, the shift two doors down in Liverpool Street gave the firm the opportunity to employ the same kit of parts to complete its new office fit-out. The same white studio palette with walnut-stained joinery and full height glazed offices for the firm’s partners; an open kitchen to encourage staff interaction sealed the firm’s new corporate branding across the two states.

25 Michael Walters, ‘Pier pressure’, Belle, February/March 2004, pp. 18–22. 26 For example, architects like Thomas Herzog, Sauerbruch Hutton, and Von Gerkan Marg und Partner (Germany); Henning Larsen (Denmark); and the recent work of Theo Hotz, Atelier 5, and Bauart Architeket (Switzerland).

In 2003, Allan Lamb, after twenty-eight years in the Melbourne office, moved to Sydney to lend his considerable experience to the office, especially in new commissions like the refurbishment of the Wilkinson Building for the School of Architecture at the University of Sydney (2002–). By this stage, the Sydney office under the design direction of Philip Vivian had already won a limited competition held by Multiplex and Toga for the refurbishment of the heritage-listed Jones Bay Wharf (2002–03), also in Pyrmont and one of the largest remaining maritime wharfs in Sydney Harbour. Working in association with Peddle Thorp & Walker, Bates Smart planned for the provision of

over 35 000 square metres of commercial and strata title offices, with a marina, café and retail facilities.25 Consolidating their experience with Pier 8/9, Bates Smart made a detailed study of the structural grid and ordering principles of the historic 1919 double level five-storey high structure so that inserting a unit module of office/bathroom/kitchen/mezzanine floors would highlight the architectural qualities of both old and new. Thus each new unit module was differentiated from the pier’s historic iron and timber structure, had harbour views from its mezzanine floors, maintained generous volumes so that the scale of the historic structure could be fully appreciated, and the sleek finishes of glass and steel would provide rich contrast with the original structure. In essence, a glazed sliver had been deftly inserted within the old building, and the contemporary requirements for car parking met by the pier’s unique double level concrete base design.

New century Modernism In the most recent work of Bates Smart, there can be perceived a coming together of design themes from the mid-1990s. It is clear that the firm is now comfortable with the future of what might be called a new century Modernism, an approach also perceivable in the current work of the best corporate architectural firms practising today in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark.26 It is an architecture that is technologically progressive, programmatically responsible, and has recovered interest in the responsible use

of glass and steel and timber as necessary to issues of sustainability. It is an architecture that reflects the need for the workplace to respond to issues of digital technology and environmental control. It is an architecture that is also human in scale and tactile in those spaces where touch, sight and sense are most important, thus an architecture where interiors are given priority and seen as integral to the overall concept and a design phase not to be squandered in favour of easy returns. It is an architecture that understands the city as a complex morphological organism to which any new building must respond. In many respects, there is an echo in such work of the shift that Scandinavian architects like Arne Jacobsen and Arne Ervi made in the mid-1950s towards the embrace of the curtain wall yet without losing the need to maintain the sense of craft, warmth, and texture in materials and finishes, and also the value of the work of art as a complement to the crafting of technology. It seems almost contradictory to speak of a term like Classical Modernism, but there is a sense of quiet timelessness to this work that suggests responsible humility in the promise of the architecture’s longevity, as an accommodating backdrop to human occupation. A critical aspect of the current face of Bates Smart design is the design integration across all major commissions, integration at the level of architectural form, planning,


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interiors and delivery. The directors, Roger Poole, Jim Milledge, Jeffery Copolov and Philip Vivian take an active design interest in each job. There is also a highly reliable and expert team of senior design professionals that includes, amongst others, Fulvio Facci, Allan Lamb, Roger Chapman, Andrew Raftopolous, Jackie Johnston, Shaun Schroter, Andrew Francis, Jacqui Lomas, Guy Lake, Alice Sangster, Luisa Watson, Pang Cheong, Matt Davis, Kendra Pinkus and Alice Pennington—people who think in the same way aesthetically—or as Jim Milledge puts it: ‘in the Bates Smart way’.27 Andrew Raftopolous, for example, casts his expert eye over almost every façade steel detail produced by the firm and Jeffery Copolov does the same with the firm’s interiors. What is at stake is not just consistent imagery but assured quality. Within the series of buildings produced by the firm each year, one or two set new benchmarks for performance—in perhaps, aesthetics, technology or maybe planning, and always with an eye for future implementation and constant relevance to the city rather than one-off objects of architectural showmanship. This is part of the key to the current unanimity in conversation within the work of Bates Smart that operates between interstate offices and across an office staff of diverse age. In many respects, such a design position opposes old-fashioned notions of genius architects in favour of collaboration and team design, one of the most powerful and original tenets of Modernism in twentiethcentury architecture.

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27 Interview with Jim Milledge, 19 September 2003.

Six recent buildings highlight Bates Smart’s consolidated position. At 11 Exhibition Street, Melbourne (2002–04), designed by Roger Poole with Peter Dredge and Andrew Raftopolous, the composition of the firm’s seventeen-level office tower echoes the mannered articulation of RACV and ICI House but with a new inflection, a giant ‘skyscreen’, an uplifted parasol-like cornice with a glazed entry box at the level of Flinders Lane. The new twenty-two -storey Crown Promenade Hotel, Southbank (2003) (in association with Perrott Lyon Mathieson) is an expansion of the Crown Entertainment Complex. Designed with major input internally and externally by Jeffery Copolov and Peter Dredge, and with its curtain wall and ground floor steel and glass details designed by Andrew Raftopolous, this 465room four-star hotel has a series of serenely detailed public spaces culminating in a Janet Laurence sculpture in the 250-seat restaurant. With its curtain wall façade pixilated in different shades of green glass, a floating roof canopy, the dappled light of its swimming pool elevated within the podium, a foyer with a materials palette of copper, brass, bronze and resin sheeting moulded to simulate stone, this hotel exudes the new confidence of the firm’s commitment to an assured modern vocabulary, unafraid to explore the delights of surface in search of comfort and unabashed style. On a different scale and with different intentions but again located firmly within a modern tradition, the Sydney office’s design under Philip Vivian for the award-winning

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Headquarters Training Command at Victoria Barracks, Paddington (2001–02) is a disciplined exercise in modular structure, exposed materials and environmentally responsible design. Winner of numerous professional awards for architectural excellence and sustainable design, the slim rectangular office building clad in glass, oxidised steel battens, and a folded skin of oxidised steel is located within a context of sandstone colonial military buildings whose grace is given by repetitive construction logic and austere detail. While the form of the building responds carefully to the eaves height of its undistinguished neighbour, the key feature of the Bates Smart design is its graphic expression of natural ventilation. During the day, cool air is drawn from the south side of the building through glazed louvres across the underside of the building’s thermal mass (its exposed floor slabs) towards the building’s warmer north face where thermal flues and wind deflectors, integrated between a series of marching double columns, act as chimneys to encourage efficient and accelerated air movement. The result is an efficient day-lit plan, a healthy building, and an aesthetic thoroughly contemporary but utterly in keeping with the austere rigours of its historic surroundings.


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1 Wilkinson Building, University of Sydney, Camperdown, New South Wales. Bates Smart, 2002. The refurbished foyer, level 3 2 The refurbished circulation areas 3 Defence Headquarters and Training Command, Victoria Barracks, Oxford St, Paddington, New South Wales. Bates Smart, 2001–02. The northern façade with oxidised steel batten screen and thermal flues between marching double columns to encourage efficient and accelerated air movement 4 The building with a folded skin of oxidised steel on the east and west facades. Awarded the RAIA NSW Chapter Energy Efficiency Award in 2003 3

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1 Crown Promenade Hotel, Southbank, Melbourne. Bates Smart (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson), 2003. The finely crafted steel and glass entrance façade at the main entrance and driveway 2 View of stair in main lobby. The hotel represents the firm’s new confidence in the commitment to an assured modern vocabulary 3 The pool area, which laps to the edge of the glass façade on the first level 4 View of the main lobby from upper floor. The building gained the RAIA Commercial Architecture award in 2004

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1 NSW Police Headquarters, 1 Charles St, Parramatta, NSW. Bates Smart, 2003. View of the entry corner. The two glass towers align with Charles St, while the DNA inspired glass screen artwork by Regina Walters, provide a street scale to the entry 2 The memorial garden located between the two buildings 3 The internal boulevard connects a series of public and private spaces from briefing and meeting rooms to the restaurant 4 The travertine and timber-clad boulevard and reception. The project was awarded the RAIA (NSW) Interior Architecture Award in 2004

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1 Freshwater Place, Southbank, Melbourne. Bates Smart, 2001–05. Display suite of main living area of the apartments 2 Interior view of the lobby in the commercial tower 3 The project involved elements from the entire Bates Smart palette, from complex urban design solutions through to interiors

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Also in Sydney, the New South Wales Police headquarters building at 1 Charles Street, Parramatta (2003) signals the firm’s critical revisiting of its expertise in glazed skyscraper planning, construction and detail. It also highlights the firm’s concurrent expertise in interior design. Designed by Philip Vivian with interiors designed by a team overseen by Jeffery Copolov and Alice Sangster, this $120 million office building establishes a calmly polished corporate image for a government body not normally associated with such a large structure. The building enacted contemporary NSW government policy which encouraged significant development around transit corridors, hence the relocation of a major government agency, decanting from three buildings in central Sydney to this one in Parramatta.28 The brief was always for two towers and Bates Smart employed a connecting core like MLC North Sydney (1957) to meld a nine and thirteenstorey tower into a unified composition. Each tower possesses unencumbered floor plates that enable planning to accommodate teams of police employees and hence three ‘neighbourhoods’ on each floor.29 The linking element at ground level is the street-level podium, defined at its entry by a patterned glazed screen designed by young artist Regina Walters, the design of which has been abstracted from patterns created by DNA detection devices. Taking advantage of the sloping site, the podium is multi-level, hence multivolumed. It is like a mini city with a doubleheight public lobby, press briefing rooms, crêche at ground level, then up a level but

within the same volume, secure areas for staff lobby and lounge areas, restaurant, gymnasium, seminar and meeting rooms another level above but still visible from below. Huge 900mm diameter off-form concrete columns give robust grandeur to the lobby, its scale reminiscent of Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer’s Ministry of Health and Education building, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1937–43). But it is the warmth of the travertine floors, natural timber linings, pendant light fittings, moss green Bertoia chairs, soft couches and rich deep rugs that evince an air of Scandinavian comfort.30 Add to this the fact that this very large building with its double layer of attached aluminium sun-blades (all derived from aluminium curtain wall technology) and green tinted glass has achieved a four and a half star energy rating and that the whole podium can be naturally ventilated, the NSW Police H.Q. demonstrates Bates Smart’s conscientious refinement of the speculative office building model. While the heavy black steel frame that encases the lobby is for bomb protection, and reflects new measures introduced for a public building following the Bali bombing of 2002, its visual weight lends further evidence to Bates Smart’s search for an appropriate language of civic decorum at ground level31 for what was the largest Bates Smart job to date in Sydney.32 Another Sydney commission that follows similar themes is the competition-winning scheme (2004) for a thirty-five storey tower to be constructed over the Harry Seidlerdesigned Mid City Centre in George Street. The design team, led by Philip Vivian with Matt Davis as project architect, proposed

a 19-metre clear span floor plate connected to a side core on the north to minimise heat gain. East and west façades incorporate solar shading while the south façade maximises views across the city. A new podium façade integrates the Mid City Centre retail and office lobby façades on both George and Pitt streets. This façade, a detached screen of sandstone piers set within horizontal concrete beams, creates an abstract yet highly modelled composition in sympathy with the vertical masonry piers of the flanking historic Strand Arcade and Dymocks buildings. Street architecture has been matched with sachlich skyscraper modelling, a signal of the return of respectable Modernism to the Australian city. At Freshwater Place on the last remaining riverfront site on Melbourne’s Southbank, Bates Smart are architects for what is essentially an entirely new urban neighbourhood—an Australand development of high-rise towers and lowrise blocks that includes office, residential, retail and hospitality functions. Following a limited design competition Roger Poole, Shaun Schroter and Andrew Raftopolous are overseeing design, while a team of architects and interior designers under Jim Milledge and Jeffery Copolov carry out a complex realisation process. The project is vast, sculptural, and combines elements from the entire Bates Smart palette. Critical to the development are the series of spaces at ground level that involve a network of arcades and open spaces, and which culminate in the open urban plaza that will be known as Freshwater Square.

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28 The Parramatta building replaced the NSW Police central headquarters building that was originally located in College Street, Sydney. 29 Interview with Philip Vivian, 13 September 2003. 30 The character of the interior of the NSW Police H.Q. also harks back to noted BSM interiors of the 1950s and 1960s like Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne (1952–56); RACV, Queen Street, Melbourne (1957–59); and Eakins Hall, Ormond College (1964). 31 Added to this sense of appropriate monumentality is the landscaping around the podium, which includes a memorial garden/reflecting pool to fallen policemen. 32 The project involved 33 900 square metres of fit-out, one of the largest such commissions undertaken by the firm.


1 Freshwater Place, Southbank, Melbourne. Bates Smart, 2001–05. The development will form the new Queensbridge Square precinct between the buildings and the Yarra River. View of the low-rise apartment façade fronting the square 2 Perspective view of Freshwater Place, currently under construction. View from the opposite side of the Yarra River

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The treatment of the buildings as an ensemble of elements each with rigorously modulated façades scaled to read at a variety of distances, culminates in the palazzo-like form of the low apartment block facing the Yarra River. This is urbanistically and formally, a decorous Modernism. It is an ambitious project such as this that demonstrates the scale and capacity of the Bates Smart practice, and also that its designers feel that they can create such spaces and be confident that there will be life within and from without the buildings. The scale of Freshwater Place is such that it constitutes a small city. Pundits might have predicted that Collins Place would fail as an urban experience. They have been proved wrong. Freshwater Place has a similar dimension to it—the visions that urbanity might be instantaneously created here are brave. But as ever, Bates Smart are there in the fray of contemporary practice and working at the large scale, yet talking always of the need to respond to human scale, and managing consistently to achieve such a necessary aim.

Visions realised The changing profile of Bates Smart over the last ten years reflects the changing nature of corporate architecture practice in Australia. The role of joint ventures to compete, gain commissions and achieve quality in large scale building commissions, the importance of interior design work as responsive to a changing workplace, and the ability to respond to changing market demand in Melbourne and Sydney,

the boom in medium and high-density apartment design has meant a necessary dismantling of the multidisciplinary aspect of the practice that was built up by Osborn McCutcheon in the decades after World War II. Important too have been the changing role of personality within the firm, and the collective goals of each brace of directors throughout the firm’s history. In April 2002, Robert Bruce retired as a director, having been with the firm for thirty-five years, a significant and supportive influence upon the firm’s many changes, and always mindful of its significant past. In 2003, Bates Smart celebrated one hundred and fifty years of continuous architectural practice in Melbourne. The firm has experienced years of relative prosperity and survived every depression since its founding. Part of that resilience has been founded on the nature of collaborative practice rather than reliance on a single individual to maintain professional goodwill. The firm’s contribution to the face of Australian architecture has been extraordinary, but perhaps more so has been the commitment to remain close to its clients by not spreading expertise too thinly across the globe, thus never risking reduction in quality. Many of the firm’s clients have been resoundingly faithful, returning year after year, even decades later to renew their relationship. Throughout, the work has been quietly accomplished, and at almost all stages of the firm’s history, the partners have understood that quality which lies behind the firm’s presence in Melbourne.

While in the nineteenth century, the firm adopted the modernity of that century, an enlightened eclecticism, in the twentieth century, for the most part, the modernity of a humanised functionalism has meant sustained technological and programmatic updating. When Joseph Reed arrived in Melbourne, he could not have foreseen the longevity of his practice. To speak of visions realised would have sounded pompous. Yet those clients who first built Melbourne and commissioned its institutions and its offices thought otherwise. Visions, it seems were a necessary preoccupation and aspiration. Ever since that time Reed’s firm, its numerous inheritors, and now in its current form, Bates Smart, has worked patiently and professionally to realise those visions.


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2

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4


5

6

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1 11 Exhibition St, Melbourne. Bates Smart, 2002 –04. Building view from the corner of Exhibition street and Flinders Lane 2 Synchotron project, design submission, Blackburn Rd, Clayton, Vic. Bates Smart, 2003 3 Australian National University (ANU), John Curtin School of Medical Research, competition entry, Canberra, ACT. Bates Smart, 2003. Entry elevation view of the proposed building 4 Goldsbrough Square, 515 Little Bourke St, Melbourne. Bates Smart, 2004– 5 Rhodes Waterside, Rhodes Peninsula, Rhodes, NSW. Bates Smart, 2003– 6 161 Clarence St, competition design, Sydney. Bates Smart, 2004 7 538 Bourke St, Melbourne. Bates Smart, 2002– 8 Mid City Centre, George St, Sydney. Bates Smart, 2004– 9 Residential development, 1–19 Colombo St, Mitcham, Vic. Bates Smart, 2003–. Early model of proposed buildings 10 55 Queens Rd, Albert Park, Vic. Bates Smart, 2004–. Initial sketch proposal 11 Sketch of developed building form

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Practice timeline Directors’ biographies


Partner

1853–1890

Joseph Reed

1862–1883

Frederick Barnes

1883–1890

Anketell Henderson

1883–1907

Francis Smart

1890 –1905

William Tappin

1907–1950

Charles Smart

1907–1922

Norman Peebles

1908 –1931

Edward Bates

1926 –1977

Osborn McCutcheon

1937–1962

Alan Ralton

1945–1969

Douglas Gardiner

1945 –1977

Phillip Pearce

1949–1979

H Selwyn Bates

1961–1970

Sydney Wood

1961–1979

Harvey Brown

1967–1984

Richard M Bladen

1970 –1992

Robert Dunster

1970 –1994

K Struan Gilfillan

1970–2002

Robert Bruce

1981–1999

Tim Hurburgh

1981

Roger Poole

1984–1991

Roger Arnall

1992

James Milledge

1995

Jeffery Copolov

2000

Philip Vivian

1850

1860

1870

1880

1890

1900

1910

1920

1930

1995 Bates Smart

1926 Bates Smart & McCutcheon

1922 Bates & Smart

1907 Bates Peebles & Smart

1906 Smart Tappin & Peebles

1890 Reed Smart & Tappin

1883 Reed Henderson & Smart

1862 Reed & Barnes

1853 Joseph Reed

Name of firm Year

1940

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010


Joseph Reed Born 1822–1890 Partner 1853–90

Frederick Barnes Born c. 1823–1884 Partner c. 1862–83

Anketell Matheson Henderson Born 1853–1923 Partner 1883–90

Francis J Smart Born c. 1852–1907 Partner 1883–1907

William Brittain Tappin Born 1854–1905 Partner 1890–1905

Joseph Reed arrived in Melbourne in 1853 and established an architectural firm, firstly alone, then in partnership with Frederick Barnes, as Reed & Barnes, c. 1862–83, and finally with AM Henderson and FJ Smart, as Reed, Henderson & Smart, 1883–90. After Reed’s death his name was retained in subsequent partnerships until 1907. Reed was born near Constantine in Cornwall in December 1822 and went to school in nearby Helston. His architectural connections are not known other than that he claimed to have worked in London in the office of a Mr Bellamy, assumed to be Thomas Bellamy, and did architectural work for the Earl of Falmouth. Within months after arriving in Melbourne he revealed himself to be a creative and highly skilled architect, which suggests a thorough training before he left England, and almost immediately he was publicly acknowledged as a leading architect. His first success was in the competition for the Melbourne Public Library, early in 1854. Subsequently he, and then with partners, designed some of the most important and impressive buildings in Melbourne and elsewhere. During his career of thirty-seven years in Melbourne many younger architects were trained in his office. Reed was also an accomplished musician and was known for his fine collection of stringed instruments and for his support of local music making. The present-day firm of Bates Smart Pty Ltd is a descendant of Joseph Reed’s practice. Reed died in 1890 and is buried in the Boroondara (Kew) Cemetery.

Frederick Barnes went into partnership with Joseph Reed, as Reed & Barnes, in about 1862. It was probably the most important architectural partnership in Melbourne between then and about 1883 when Barnes retired because of ill health. For all the prominence of the partnership and of Joseph Reed, very little is known of Barnes. He was with Reed from at least 1856 when he was a signatory to various contracts for Reed. He was born in London, and arrived in Victoria in early 1852 on the Lady Peel which sailed from the Port of London on 6 October 1851. A fellow passenger was the architect John G Knight with whom Reed was briefly associated in 1853. Barnes was listed as a builder in the shipping manifest and during his long association with Reed was probably responsible for the management of projects rather than for their design. However, Reed was away overseas during 1863 which raises the unresolved possibility that Barnes designed some buildings during Reed’s absence, and if he did he may have designed other buildings at other times. At the time of Barnes’s death he had a brother and sisters and nephews living in England and a niece living in Melbourne. Barnes died in 1883 and is buried in the East St Kilda Cemetery.

Anketell Henderson was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1853, and came to Melbourne with his parents at the age of ten. His father was the minister of the Independent Church in Collins Street, which meant that the young Henderson had some indirect contact with Reed & Barnes, who were the architects for the new church building. He attended Scotch College and matriculated in 1868. In 1869 he was articled to Reed & Barnes, and simultaneously studied for his civil engineering degree at the University of Melbourne, completing it in 1872. In 1878 he commenced independent practice, taking over the office of Arthur Peck, and his first important commission was for alterations to the Independent Church. The Collingwood Coffee Palace in Smith Street, Fitzroy, and the Congregational Lecture Hall in Russell Street, followed in 1879. In September 1879 he commenced a partnership with FJ Smart, until the two rejoined Reed as partners from 1 February 1883. Henderson claimed responsibility for the portico of the Melbourne Town Hall, the south wing of the Public Library, the Metropolitan Gas Company, and branches of the Bank of Australasia throughout the country.

Francis Smart was born in Hobart in 1852, son of Archibald Smart, but came to Melbourne and according to Saunders was articled to Reed & Barnes. He joined the Education Department’s architecture branch at its foundation in 1873, then resigned in 1878 to enter a partnership with AM Henderson. In 1879 he married Eleanor Marian Pyne. In 1883 he became a partner of Reed, Henderson & Smart, and, in 1890, Reed, Smart & Tappin. While with the Reed practices he claimed to have designed or directed Wilson Hall, Ormond College, parts of the Public Library and several churches. In 1890 he was appointed to what had been Joseph Reed’s position on the Cathedral Erection Board of St Paul’s Cathedral. By January 1886 he had become a director of the Colonial Investment & Agency Co. Ltd, one of Matthew Davies’s land boom enterprises, and was later its chairman. The Colonial went into liquidation in July 1892, and in October Smart made a secret composition with his creditors at fourpence in the pound, on a total deficiency of £24 960. He made a visit to England, returning in August 1901, and in March 1903 he was elected a fellow of the RVIA. He was president of the RVIA for 1907–08, but died in office in 1907.

William Tappin was born in Ballarat on 16 May 1854, son of James Henry Tappin, educated in Geelong and Ballarat, and at the age of sixteen articled to the Ballarat architect HR Caselli. After about five years with Caselli he left for Melbourne and joined Reed & Barnes for an unspecified period, before returning to Ballarat and entering into partnership with Charles N Gilbert, apparently in about 1881. During 1881, in association with Richard J Dennehy of Melbourne, Tappin & Gilbert won a competition for a commercial block on the St James’s School site in William Street, Melbourne. Dennehy continued to practice in his own right in Melbourne until at least June 1883, while between at least June 1881 and August 1883 Tappin & Gilbert was calling tenders for work in both Ballarat and Melbourne. The partnership of Tappin, Gilbert & Dennehy reappears in a permanent way from June 1883, working in Melbourne, in some country areas—and occasionally in New South Wales. Gilbert was ostensibly in charge of the Ballarat branch, but also appears to have been practising in Ballarat in the partnership of Gilbert & Clegg from 1884 to 1895. In 1886 Tappin won the competition for the design of St Peter’s Anglican Cathedral, Ballarat.

After the partnership was dissolved in 1890 Henderson practised alone, and was then able to take a role in the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, from which the Reed partnerships had been excluded since the Eastern Market controversy of some years previous. In November 1891 he was appointed as a lecturer in architecture at the University of Melbourne, within the engineering course. He was president of the RVIA in 1897–98, 1898–99, and again in 1910–11 and 1913–14. In 1905 his son Kingsley joined him in partnership until 1921 when the firm became A & K Henderson, Alsop & Martin, and Henderson senior effectively retired and died in 1923.

In 1888 Tappin became an associate of the RVIA. Tappin wrote andspoke regularly on architecture. In 1889 his paper on ‘The elements of architecture’ was reported in the trade journals. In August 1892 he read a paper to the Institute on ‘Life and art’. In July 1904 he read a paper ‘Notes on foreign travel’ to the RVIA, and in October he delivered a paper on ‘Ecclesiastical art’ to the Second Australasian Catholic Conference in Melbourne. Tappin died in 1905.

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Charles Pyne Smart Born 1882–1950 Partner 1907–50

Norman G Peebles Born nd.–1923 Partner 1907–22

Edward Albert Bates Born 1865–1931 Partner 1908–31

Sir WP Osborn McCutcheon Born 1899–1983 Partner 1926–77

Alan John Ralton Born 1906–1962 Partner 1937–62

Charles Smart, son of FJ, after completing his schooling at Haileybury College entered the civil engineering course at the University of Melbourne in 1899. Smart studied for a period of six years, winning both the Argus and Stawell prizes for work in his final honours year. In 1906, he joined the Victorian Railways Department to gain some practical experience. In 1907, Smart gained his Bachelor of Civil Engineering and, in the firm’s hour of need, joined the partnership to form Bates, Peebles & Smart. Specialising in reinforced concrete, Smart was involved in the design for the dome of the Public Library Reading Room and most of the firm’s commercial and industrial commissions. His technical expertise, which he furthered by taking research trips overseas, enabled Bates, Peebles & Smart, later Bates, Smart & McCutcheon, to include the latest developments in construction and servicing in their buildings. Smart was amongst the first to register as an architect under new legislation in 1923 and was later elected a fellow of the RVIA in 1930. During WWII, Smart (with the assistance of Robert Demaine) kept the office open, covering the practices of five other architects as well as that of BSM. He died in 1950.

Norman Peebles is a somewhat enigmatic figure. He is said to have been a pupil in the office of Henderson & Smart, and so presumably joined Reed, Henderson & Smart in 1883. He witnessed the contract drawings for the additions to the Convent of Mercy, Ballarat in 1891. He became the firm’s chief draftsman, and in that capacity drew up the initial plans for the domed Public Library Reading Room and was admitted to partnership in 1907. That same year Peebles was elected a fellow of the RVIA, but retired in 1922 because of declining health, and died in the following year.

Edward Bates was born in Fitzroy in 1865, the son of the Hon. William Bates, member of parliament and Commissioner for Public Works, and educated at Scotch College and the University of Melbourne. He was articled to Reed, Henderson & Smart from 1 June 1883 to 1 June 1887, and then employed by the firm as a draftsman. In 1888 he was admitted as an associate of the RVIA. He entered practice in partnership with RG Hyndman in June 1888. After Hyndman’s death in 1901 he practised alone, and in 1907 he merged his practice with that of his former employer, as Bates, Peebles & Smart, so that they could qualify for the Melbourne Public Library Reading Room commission. Bates was elected vice-president of the RVIA in 1907, then president in 1908, the youngest ever to hold the office, and re-elected in the following year. In 1915 he was to return as vice-president and in that year participated in the Conference of Interstate Architects. He was chair of the Architects Registration Board of Victoria from its establishment in 1923 to the time of his death. In 1931, he claimed special involvement in the Church of Christ Scientist in St Kilda Road and, with WO McCutcheon, the AMP offices in Collins Street.

Walter Paul Osborn McCutcheon was born in Armadale, Victoria in 1899, son of solicitor Walter McCutcheon. Educated at Wesley College, he studied architecture at the Working Men’s College, then at the Melbourne University Architectural Atelier. In mid 1918, McCutcheon was articled to Bates, Peebles & Smart. Later that year, he enlisted with the AIF but too late for active service and was discharged soon after. Completing articles in 1922, McCutcheon travelled overseas, working in San Francisco for Bakewell & Brown and in London for Yeates, Cooke & Barbershire for one year before spending most of 1925 travelling through France, Spain and Italy. Returning to Australia in 1926, McCutcheon was made partner of the newly-named firm Bates, Smart & McCutcheon. Throughout the 1930s McCutcheon was also involved in teaching and professional activities, including part-time director, School of Architecture, Melbourne Technical College, 1930-39, membership of RVIA Council 1930–45, RVIA Honorary Secretary 1933–39, RVIA President 1940–42, RVIA Board of Architectural Education 1933–42 and 1953–57, and Building Industry Congress President 1934–36. In 1942, McCutcheon became Chief Architect, Engineers Headquarters, US Army Services of Supply, South-West Pacific Area. During the same period, McCutcheon was Deputy Chairman, Commonwealth War Workers’ Housing Trust, then from 1944 to 1946, Controller of Planning and Chief Technical Adviser on Housing to the Commonwealth Government, after which he returned full-time to BSM. In 1965, McCutcheon was awarded the RAIA Gold Medal and in 1966 he was knighted. In 1968, he was made Honorary Doctor of Laws by Monash University and in 1969 managing partner of UDPA Planners. In 1970 he was elected RAIA Life Fellow and member of the National Capital Development Commission. McCutcheon was a councillor of the Australian Institute of Urban Studies and RAPI fellow. He retired from the firm in 1977 and died in 1983.

Alan Ralton attended the architecture course at the University of Melbourne, graduating in 1930 as the first Bachelor of Architecture. During his study at the university, Ralton took articles with Alec S Eggleston. Upon graduation, Ralton joined the firm of Irwin & Stevenson, where he drew many of the firm’s fine perspectives and worked on the design for the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1935, he won the prestigious Robert & Ada Haddon Travelling Scholarship and a grant from the Carnegie Trust, enabling him to travel and undertake research overseas for a period of two years. While in England in 1935, Ralton married Frances McCutcheon, sister of Osborn McCutcheon, and on their return in 1937, Ralton was made a partner of the firm. During WWII, Ralton joined McCutcheon at the US Army Corps of Engineers between 1942 and 1944. He was particularly involved in the design of extensions to the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Bendigo, and the Russell Grimwade School of Biochemistry. Ralton died in 1962, after a long illness.


Douglas Babbington Gardiner Born 1905–2001 Partner 1945–69

Phillip Foster Pearce Born 1905–1982 Partner 1945–77

Harold Selwyn Bates Born 1909–1989 Partner 1949–79

Sydney Graeme Wood Born 1905–1973 Partner 1961–70

Harvey Henry Brown Born 1906–1988 Partner 1961–79

Douglas Gardiner was born in Sydney in 1905. He was educated at Newington College, Sydney and graduated in architecture from the Sydney Technical College. His first five years of professional experience were gained in the office of Peddle, Thorp and Walker in Sydney. In 1926, he travelled abroad, working in New York for York and Sawyer, then in London in the office of Joseph Emberton. In 1929 he returned to Sydney, working initially with Emil Sodersten, then with Hennessy, Hennessy and Co. From 1942 to 1945, Gardiner served as an architect to the US Army Corps of Engineers, South-West Pacific Area, and worked with Osborn McCutcheon. In 1945, he became a partner at BSM. Projects with which he was most closely associated include office buildings for MLC in Ballarat, Geelong, Morwell, Newcastle, Wollongong and numerous other locations, hospitals at Footscray, Myrtleford, Yarram and Westernport, Tally-ho Boys Village, and office buildings for the Standard Motor Company, Prudential Assurance Company and HC Sleigh Ltd. Gardiner retired from the firm in 1969 and died in 2001.

Phillip Pearce was born in Melbourne in 1905, son of Sir George Pearce, Senator for Western Australia in the first federal parliament. He was educated at Caulfield Grammar School, Geelong Grammar School. Pearce obtained the Diploma of Architecture from the University of Melbourne in 1927. He travelled overseas from 1929 to 1931, working in London. On his return to Melbourne, he went into partnership in 1939 with Arthur Purnell, their major work being the Southern Stand at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. From 1942 to 1944, Pearce served as an architect in the US Army Corps of Engineers, South-West Pacific Area and from 1944 to 1945 as Senior Planning Officer within the War Homes Division of the Commonwealth Department of Labour and National Service. In 1945, invited by McCutcheon, he joined the firm and was made a partner that same year. In the immediate postwar years, Pearce was closely associated with various town plans including Cranbourne, Eildon, Rockhampton, Sandringham. Later projects with which he was associated include the MLC building, Adelaide; 406 Lonsdale Street and RACV, Melbourne; and RMIT master plan of 1970. Within the firm, Pearce researched into greater flexibility in regulations limiting the height of Melbourne’s city buildings, and hence the concessions in 1955 that led to the erection of ICI House, Melbourne. Pearce was a foundation member of the Australian Planning Institute and the University of Melbourne’s first lecturer in town planning. A fellow of the Royal Australian Planning Institute (RAPI), he was president of the Victorian Chapter, 1960 to 1971, and federal president, 1962 to 1964. In 1969, he became a partner in the firm’s planning arm, UDPA Planners. Pearce became an associate of the RVIA in 1934, was made a fellow of the RAIA in 1954 and a life fellow in 1970. He retired from the firm in June 1977 and died in 1982.

Selwyn Bates was born in Melbourne in 1909, youngest son of architect Edward A Bates. He was educated at Geelong Grammar School and obtained his Diploma of Architecture from the University of Melbourne. From 1935 to 1938, he worked in London in the offices of Howard Leicester, Wimperis Simpson and Guthrie, and Grey Wornum, and was admitted as an associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects. On his return to Melbourne, Bates worked in the offices of Leighton Irwin and Harry A Norris. In 1939, he joined his father’s firm, Bates, Smart & McCutcheon. From 1940 to 1945, he served in the 2nd AIF in the Royal Australian Engineers and was demobilised with the rank of Major. He rejoined the firm, becoming an associate, and in 1949, a full partner of the firm. Bates was closely associated with the firm’s many commissions for the Commercial Banking Co. of Sydney, the Union of Canton building in Queen Street, Melbourne, postwar extensions to Buckley & Nunn’s store, Melbourne, offices for Gilbeys in Moorabbin and central Melbourne, and the ACB factory in Altona. He was partner-in-charge of the hospitals section of the office, and was also closely involved in the schools section. He became an associate of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects in 1947 and a fellow in 1958. Bates retired from the firm in June 1979. He died in 1989.

Sydney Wood was born in Newcastle, England, in 1905 and came to Melbourne in 1911. He was trained in architecture at the Working Men’s College and gained professional experience in the offices of Joy & McIntyre, and PJ O’Connor. From 1941 to 1945, he was a design architect in the Commonwealth Department of Air. In 1950, he became an associate of the firm, and in 1961, a partner. He was closely associated with the firm’s hospital commissions, especially Footscray and District Hospital and Kerang Hospital. Other buildings with which he was associated include the MLC buildings in Brisbane and North Sydney, and the Science and Engineering buildings at Monash University. He retired from the firm in 1970. Wood died in 1973.

Harvey Brown was born in 1906. He was educated at East Maitland Boys High School and subsequently at Newcastle Technical College, where four years of a diploma course in architecture were followed by a fouryear course in structural engineering. He became an associate member of the Institution of Engineers Australia in 1948 and a member in 1966. In 1970 he was made an affiliate of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects. In 1948 he joined BSM and became an associate in 1951. He made a special study of lightweight construction, the development of lightweight high-tensile steel frames, off-site fabrication of structural components, and the then unfamiliar demands of wind loadings on high buildings. These were first exemplified in ICI House, Melbourne, 1958. In 1958 he visited the United States and further investigated design principles and practices of multi-storey buildings. As leader of the structural engineering section he was involved in the structural aspects of all the firm’s major works. It was largely due to his influence that the firm revolutionised its approach to large office and institutional building design. He became a partner in 1961 and retired from the firm in 1979. Brown died in 1988.

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300

Richard Maxwell Bladen Born 1928– Partner 1967–84

Robert Alden Dunster Born 1931– Partner 1970–92

Kenneth Struan Gilfillan Born 1933– Partner 1970–94

Robert Anthony Bruce Born 1938– Partner 1970–2002

Timothy Peter Hurburgh Born 1943– Director 1981–99

Richard Bladen was born in 1928, educated at Scotch College, Melbourne, and after three years in the structural drawing office of Johns & Waygood Limited, graduated in civil engineering from the University of Melbourne in 1954. He joined BSM in 1955 as assistant design engineer, becoming an associate in 1962 and a partner in 1967. In 1958 he became an associate and subsequently a member of the Institution of Engineers Australia, then a member and in 1970, an affiliate of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects. In 1963 he travelled in Europe and the United States of America in 1973 and 1975, and in 1970 visited Hong Kong and Japan studying structural design and construction methods. The firm’s major projects in which he was involved as structural engineer, include the MLC building North Sydney; ICI House Melbourne; various buildings at Monash University; the Australian Chancery, Washington DC; and the AMP St James complex in Melbourne. From 1972 his professional activities within BSM broadened to include general project administration and management of the firm’s architectural and engineering practice. Bladen retired from the firm in 1984.

Robert Dunster was born in 1931. He was educated at Melbourne Grammar School and the University of Melbourne, graduating in architecture in 1954, and in town planning in 1956. Dunster joined BSM in 1954 but after two years left in 1956 to travel and work in Europe, South America, the United States and Canada. In 1958 he returned to the firm. In 1967, as an associate of BSM, he took charge of BSM’s office in Washington DC during the building of the Australian Chancery. In 1970 he became a partner of the firm and managed the Sydney office of UDPA Planners during the preparation of the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Scheme. In 1971 he returned to Melbourne to head the team on the Collins Place project. Projects with which he was most closely associated include Wilson Hall, Eakins Hall at Queens College, Australian Chancery Washington DC, and Collins Place. Dunster retired from the firm in 1992.

Struan Gilfillan was born in 1933. He was educated at Scotch College, and studied architecture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and then at the University of Melbourne, graduating in 1956. In 1957 he joined BSM but in 1958 left for London, where he worked for TP Bennett & Son and also travelled in Europe. Returning to Melbourne in 1960 he rejoined BSM as job captain for the Chemistry School and various Engineering School projects at Monash University. In 1966 he became an associate of the firm and in 1970 a partner. An associate of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects since 1959, he was elevated to fellow in 1970 and life fellow in 1992. Projects with which he was most closely associated include CBC head offices, Wentworth Melbourne Hotel within the Collins Place project, buildings for Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, La Trobe and Monash Universities, Collingwood Mid-Level College and Prahran College of Advanced Education. He was also in charge of the recladding of the MMBW headquarters building, Melbourne. Gilfillan retired from the firm in 1994.

Robert Bruce was born in Queensland in 1938. He was educated at Sydney Grammar School and the University of New South Wales, graduating in architecture in 1960. After working in three Sydney offices between 1954 and 1961, Bruce travelled to London, spending two years with Bryan and Norman Westwood & Partners between 1961 and 1963, then three years in the design department of Skidmore Owings & Merrill in San Francisco from 1964 until 1967 where amongst other projects, he worked on AMP Square and the Bank of America tower. He also travelled widely in Europe and the US. Returning to Australia in 1967, Bruce joined BSM, becoming an associate in 1969 and a partner in 1970. He also became a partner in UDPA Planners. As design principal he was responsible for the overall direction of the firm’s design work from that period. He was directly responsible for the design of the CBC Bank and Commonwealth Bank buildings in Collins Street and the restoration of Tasma Terrace for the National Trust. Other projects with which he was most closely associated include the refurbishment of the Meat Market, St Hilda’s, and Raheen; new buildings at 366 St Kilda Road for MLC; Merton Hall; Ivanhoe Grammar School; and with Glenn Murcutt, the extensions to Raheen and new buildings for Swinburne University at Lilydale and Prahran. He was a member of the Victorian Government Buildings Advisory Council from 1972 until 1983. Bruce was made an associate of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects in 1969, a fellow in 1977, and a life fellow in 2001. Bruce retired from the firm in 2002.

Tim Hurburgh was born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1943. He graduated in architecture from the Tasmanian School of Environmental Design in 1966. After working in private practice from 1966 to 1967, he relocated to Boston to complete a Master of Architecture at Harvard University in 1969. He worked for Colin St John Wilson in Cambridge, England, in 1970, then for the Rouse Company in Maryland, US, from 1971 to 1972. He joined BSM in 1973, becoming an associate in 1975, associate director in 1979, and a director in 1981. He was foundation director of the RAIA (Victorian Chapter) Architectural Services Division in 1977, and served in this role until 1978. A specialist, initially in health care planning and design, Hurburgh was a senior designer with the firm for more than twenty years, and was responsible for a range of health care and institutional projects completed by the firm in that time. Projects with which he was most closely associated include the Cabrini Hospital; additions to the Royal Children’s Hospital, Flemington; RMIT Casey Plaza Lecture Theatre; Coronial Services Centre; Price Waterhouse office building, Spring Street, Melbourne; Foxtel headquarters, Sydney; Australian Embassy in Berlin; and Federation Square, Melbourne. Hurburgh resigned from the firm in 1999.


Roger William Poole Born 1942– Director 1981–

Lindsay Roger Arnall Born 1944– Director 1984–91

James Andrew Milledge Born 1951– Director 1992–

Jeffery Ian Copolov Born 1958– Director 1995–

Philip Avery Vivian Born 1964– Director 2000–

Roger Poole was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA in 1942. He studied architecture at University of Washington, Seattle, where he won the AIA Silver Medal and Urban Design Fellowship. He joined the PhD program in Urban Design & Planning at MIT, Boston and worked with the Joint Centre for Urban Studies (MIT & Harvard), completing master plans for Harvard Medical School and associated hospitals, and for Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Moving between Hawaii and Australia as an associate of ACS Partnership, Poole worked on resort, hotel and apartment projects. After moving permanently to Melbourne, he worked with Perrott Lyon Timlock & Kesa before joining BSM in 1974 as a design architect and urban designer. He became an associate in 1976, an associate director in 1979, a director in 1981 and Chairman of Bates Smart in 1998. He is a member of the Executive Board of the Committee for Melbourne and a Council Member of the Property Council. Early projects included the award-winning Metropolitan Fire Brigade HQ, Eastern Hill and Budget Rent-A-Car offices, North Melbourne. Moving to the Collins Place team as design co-ordinator, Poole worked on the ANZ Tower, then co-ordinated the design of the Wentworth Hotel and Great Space. His subsequent projects have included major office fitouts for Citibank, Rio Tinto and numerous accounting and legal practices. Further projects with Poole’s close design involvement include the Necropolis Crematorium, Springvale, Ballarat Hospital, The Melburnian apartments, master plan and buildings for Firbank Anglican School, Southbank Promenade, and Melbourne Children’s Court. Poole was design architect for the firm’s winning competition entry for the Crown complex, and he subsequently led the joint venture team for the entire project. Poole is currently overseeing projects in Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur, and is director in charge of the Freshwater Place development on Melbourne’s Southbank.

Roger Arnall was born in 1944. After matriculation, he studied at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology while working as a design draughtsman. He graduated in mechanical engineering in 1968. From 1963 to 1965, he worked for the Victorian Public Works Department. He joined BSM in 1966 and gained considerable mechanical engineering experience during the late 1960s while working on most major BSM projects. From 1970, he became project engineer and was responsible for the mechanical servicing of many of the firm’s designs. Projects with which he has been most closely associated include the Mt Alvernia Hospital; HC Sleigh Computer Centre; Commonwealth Bank head office; 240 and 250 Victoria Parade offices; 366 St Kilda Road office for MLC; extensions to the Australian Chancery in Washington DC; Eastern Hill headquarters of the MFB; IBM’s Wangaratta plant, and numerous hospitals completed by the firm. Arnall became an associate of the firm in 1978 and was made a director in 1984. He resigned from the firm in 1991.

Jim Milledge was born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1951. He was educated at the Friends School and graduated in architecture from the University of Melbourne in 1977. Prior to joining the firm, he worked for Philip Lighton Floyd & Beattie in Hobart, Oakley & Parkes in Melbourne, and Macleod Milledge, also in Melbourne. He joined BSM in 1984, becoming an associate in 1986, an associate director in 1988, and a director in 1992. Milledge, with Robert Dunster, was responsible for the integration of CAD and IT systems into the firm in the mid 1980s. He was responsible for the setting up and management of the Bates Smart Sydney office in 1995, and returned to Melbourne in 2000. An architect with broad experience across all building types, Milledge has had close association with the firm’s work in Sydney between 1995 and 2000, with specialist audit reports and studies carried out by the firm, and with projects such as the refurbishment of 55 Collins Street, 140 William Street, 360 Collins Street, the Toyota headquarters in Sydney and Computer Science building at UNSW. More recently he has been involved with 11 Exhibition Street and the PWC Tower of the Freshwater Place development, Southbank.

Jeff Copolov was born in Melbourne in 1958. The son of parents involved in textile design and retail furnishing, Copolov’s grandfather, also an interior designer and architect, strongly influenced his choice of career. He was educated at Melbourne Grammar School and graduated in interior design from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology 1980. From 1980 to1982 he worked for both ABC television and GTV Channel 9 as a television set designer. In 1983, Copolov joined BSM. He was made an associate in 1985 and an associate director in 1988. Copolov took leave from the firm in 1989 to travel widely in Europe and worked with Aukett architects in London. He returned to BSM in 1991 and became a director in 1995, the first in the firm’s history with specific responsibility for interior design. He is a member of the Design Institute of Australia. Intimately involved with the rise of interior design within the firm’s profile for the seamless integration of architecture and interior. Copolov’s skills contributed to the firms numerous Royal Australian Institute of Architects awards for projects including the Price Waterhouse centre, Melbourne; Clayton Utz offices, Sydney; Crown Entertainment Complex, Crown Promenade Hotel, Southbank; The Melburnian, and the New South Wales Police headquarters building, Parramatta. Other projects with which he has been most closely associated include the refurbishment of ICI House, Bates Smart offices, Melbourne and Sydney; Australian Embassy, Berlin; Freshwater Place, Southbank; 11 Exhibition Street and Victoria Gardens apartments, Beijing.

Philip Vivian was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1964. He graduated in architecture from the University of Western Australia in 1987, and with a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design in 1991 from Columbia University, New York. Prior to joining the firm, he worked for Cameron Chisholm and Nicol Architects in Perth, and for Haines Lundberg & Waehler in New York. He joined Bates Smart in 1994, becoming an associate in 1997, an associate director in 1999, and a director in 2000. From 1994 to 1997 he worked on a number of projects in the Melbourne office with Robert Bruce, including Swinburne University, Lilydale (in association with Glenn Murcutt), Melbourne Girls Grammar School Creative Arts Centre, master plan and buildings for Ivanhoe Boys Grammar School, and offices for Wilson Dilworth, Kew. Since 1997 he has been in Sydney and now heads the Sydney office of Bates Smart, where he has been closely associated with the adaptive reuse of Pier 8/9, Walsh Bay and Jones Bay Wharf, Pyrmont; New South Wales Police headquarters building, Parramatta; Headquarters Training Command, Victoria Barracks, for the Department of Defence; mixeduse development at Five Dock; a large residential complex in Arncliffe; and the redevelopment of the Mid City Centre, George Street, Sydney.

301


Awards

302

2004 New South Wales Police Headquarterrs, Parramatta, NSW RAIA New South Wales Chapter Interior Architecture Award Crown Promenade Hotel, Southbank, Vic. (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson) RAIA Victorian Chapter Awards, Commercial Architecture Award Jones Bay Wharf, Pyrmont, NSW (in assoc. with PTW Architects) RAIA New South Wales Chapter Francis Greenway Award for Restoration Walsh Bay, Pier 8/9, Sydney Property Council of Australia (NSW), Rider Hunt Award 2003 New South Wales Police Headquarters, Parramatta, NSW NSW Urban Task Force Development Excellence Award for Regional Commercial Development Parramatta City Council Design Excellence Awards, category award (Non-Residential Building) Victoria Barracks, Headquarters Training Command, Paddington, NSW RAIA National Awards, Colorbond Steel Award RAIA New South Wales Chapter Energy Efficiency Award (Ecologically Sustainable Design) RAIA New South Wales Chapter Architecture Award (Commercial Buildings) RAIA New South Wales Chapter BHP Colorbond Award Federation Square, Melbourne (in assoc. with LAB Architecture Studio) AILA (Australian Institute of Landscape Architects) Victoria & Tasmania Awards in Landscape Architecture, overall winner and award for design excellence RAIA National Awards, Walter Burley Griffin Award for Urban Design Architecture + Cityscape Awards, Dubai, category winner (Urban Design) RAIA Victorian Chapter Awards, Victorian Architecture Medal RAIA Victorian Chapter Awards, The Melbourne Prize RAIA Victorian Chapter Joseph Reed Award (Urban Design) RAIA Victorian Chapter Institutional Architecture Award The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne (in assoc. with LAB Architecture Studio) RAIA National Awards, Award for Interior Architecture Dulux Colour Awards, category winner (Public Spaces & Temporary Structures) RAIA Victorian Chapter Marion Mahony Award (Interior Architecture) The Labyrinth, Federation Square, Melbourne (in assoc. with LAB Architecture Studio) C&CAA (Cement and Concrete Association of Australia) Public Domain Awards, category winner (Sustainable Design) The Melburnian, St Kilda Road, South Melbourne (in assoc. with HPA Architects) Property Council of Australia (Vic.), overall winner Urban Development Institute of Australia National Award for Excellence (Medium Density Development)

2002 Ivanhoe Grammar School, Enterprise Centre, Plenty Campus, Vic. MBA (Master Builders Association) (Vic.) Excellence in Construction, Excellence in New Construction Award The Melburnian, St Kilda Road, South Melbourne (in assoc. with HPA Architects) Urban Development Institute of Australia (Vic.) Award for Excellence (High Density Development) HIA (Housing Industry Association) Victorian Housing Awards, category winner (High Density) RAIA Victorian Chapter Architecture Award (Residential: Multiple) MBA (Vic.) Excellence in Construction, Master Builder of the Year Swinburne University of Technology, Victorian Gymnastics and National Institute of Circus Arts, Prahran Campus, Vic. RAIA Victorian Chapter Commendation (Institutional: New) Property Council of Australia (Vic.) Award for Public Buildings, commendation AISC (Australian Institute of Steel Construction) Victorian Metal Building Award AISC Victorian Premier Steel Construction Award, commendation AISC Victorian Architect’s Award, commendation Victoria Barracks, Headquarters Training Command, Paddington, NSW Bronze Medal, The Architecture Show magazine and the Francis Greenway Society Green Buildings Awards Walsh Bay, Pier 8/9, Sydney RAIA New South Wales Chapter, commendation (Public and Commercial Buildings) 2001 Children’s Court of Victoria, Melbourne Property Council of Australia (Vic.), category winner (Public Buildings) Swinburne University of Technology, Arts/Multimedia Building, Prahran Campus Inaugural City of Stonnington Urban Design Award for Best Non-Residential Development Swinburne University of Technology, Victorian Gymnastics and National Institute of Circus Arts, Prahran Campus BHP Coated Steel Australia Metal Building Award of Merit (Community—Education) Walsh Bay Pier 8/9, Sydney Urban Development Institute of Australia (NSW) Excellence Awards, Urban Renewal Award and President’s Award 2000 Australia Post, Dandenong Letter Centre, Dandenong, Vic. MBA (Vic.) Award, Excellence In New Construction Children’s Court of Victoria, Melbourne RAIA Victorian Chapter Merit Award (Institutional: New) 140 William Street, Melbourne Property Council of Australia (Vic.), overall winner Property Council of Australia (Vic.), category winner (Refurbished Buildings)


1999 Crown Entertainment Complex, Southbank, Vic. (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson and Daryl Jackson Architects) Property Council of Australia (Vic.), overall winner Property Council of Australia (Vic.), award (Hotels, Motels, Resorts & Leisure Related Buildings) 1998 Crown Entertainment Complex, carpets and rugs, Southbank, Vic. (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson and Daryl Jackson Architects) Victorian Design Awards, finalist (Textile Design) Crown Entertainment Complex, Southbank, Vic. (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson and Daryl Jackson Architects) Australian Construction Achievement Award, finalist Fidel’s Cigar Bar, Crown Entertainment Complex, Southbank, Vic. (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson and Daryl Jackson Architects) Victorian Design Awards, finalist (Interior Design) Southbank Promenade, Southbank, Vic. (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson and Daryl Jackson Architects) BDP (Australian Council of Building Design Professions) National Urban Design Award, finalist RAIA Victorian Chapter Merit Award (Urban Design) 1997 Crown Entertainment Complex, Southbank, Vic. (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson and Daryl Jackson Architects) Institute of Engineers (Vic.) Engineering Excellence Awards Swinburne University of Technology, Building LA, Lilydale Campus, Vic. (in assoc. with Glenn Murcutt) MBA (Vic.) Excellence in Public Buildings in Education/Health Facilities 1996 Foxtel Headquarters, Sydney RAIA New South Wales Chapter Merit Award (Interior Architecture), Dulux Colour Award for Commercial/Interiors, Award of Merit Victoria University of Technology, Sunbury Campus, Vic. RAIA Victorian Chapter Merit Award (Conservation) 1995 Cabrini Hospital Medical Centre, Malvern, Vic. RAIA Victorian Chapter Commendation (Institutional Buildings) Old Treasury Building, Melbourne (in assoc. with Office of Building, Department of Planning & Environment) BOMA (Building Owners and Managers Association) (Vic.) Award for Conservation, commendation RAIA Victorian Chapter Commendation (Conservation) 1994 Henry Bolte Wing, Ballarat Base Hospital, Ballarat, Vic. RAIA Victorian Chapter Merit Award (Energy Efficiency) BP Australia, Melbourne Central, Elizabeth Street, Melbourne BOMA (Vic.) Award for Refurbishment/Renovation of Accommodation 1993 Clayton Utz, Solicitors, Sydney, NSW RAIA New South Wales Chapter Merit Award (Interior Architecture) Portland & District Hospital, alterations and additions, Vic. City of Portland Building & Development Award for Best Institutional Building 1988–89 Prce Waterhouse Centre, Melbourne (in assoc. with Reed Mussen Styant-Browne) MBPMA (Metal Building Products Manufacturers Association), BHP Steel Coated Products Division & Metal Building News, Award of Merit, finalist

1988 Brisbane Airport Terminal Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Architecture Kino Cinemas, Collins Place, Melbourne Dulux Colour Award, commendation Price Waterhouse Centre, Melbourne (in assoc. with Reed Mussen Styant-Browne) RAIA Victorian Chapter Merit Award (Commercial: New) Dulux Colour Award, commendation 1986 BSM offices, St Hilda’s, Melbourne BOMA (Vic.) Award for Restoration, Award of Merit Mallesons, Rialto, Melbourne Dulux Colour Award, commendation Meat Market Craft Centre, North Melbourne RAIA Victorian Chapter Merit Award (Conservation & Restoration) 1983 BSM offices, St Hilda’s, East Melbourne RAIA Victorian Chapter Merit Award (Restoration) 1981 Budget Rent-A-Car Offices, North Melbourne RAIA Victorian Chapter Citation (New Buildings) Melbourne Metropolitan Fire Brigade Station, Eastern Hill, Vic. RAIA Victorian Chapter Citation (New Buildings) Collins Place, Melbourne (in assoc. with IM Pei) BOMA (Vic.) Award for New Building, Award of Special Merit 1979 Kathleen Syme Education Centre, Royal Women’s Hospital, Carlton RAIA Victorian Chapter Bronze Medal (Rejuvenated Buildings) 1975 MLC (Mutual Life and Citizens Assurance Co. Limited) office, Melbourne RAIA Victorian Chapter Citation (General Buildings) Berry Street, Richmond, Rehabilitation Plan (UDPA Planners in association with the Berry Street Precinct Residents) RAIA Victorian Chapter Citation (Architectural Projects) 1964 New Zealand Insurance Building, Melbourne RVIA Victorian Architectural Medal and Diploma (General Buildings) 1958 MLC building, Perth RAIA Western Australian Chapter Award for New Building, Award of Merit 1957 366 St Kilda Road, Melbourne Arts & Architecture Award for New Building, Award of Merit 1938 Second Church of Christ, Camberwell RVIA Street Architecture Medal 1934 Buckley & Nunn men’s store, Melbourne RVIA Street Architecture Medal 1932 AMP (Australian Mutual Provident Society) building, Collins Street, Melbourne RVIA Street Architecture Medal

303


Select Project List

1854– 1855 1856 1856 1856 1857– 1858 1859 1859 1859 1859 1860 1860

304

Joseph Reed Melbourne Public Library, Swanston St, Melbourne Geelong Town Hall, south wing, Little Mallop St, Geelong, Victoria House for Justice Redmond Barry, corner Rathdowne & Pelham streets, Carlton, Victoria Bank of New South Wales, Collins St, Melbourne Frogmore, house for William Lyall, Murrumbeena Rd, Caulfield, Victoria Wesley Methodist Church, Lonsdale St, Melbourne Melbourne Public Library, south wing, Swanston St, Melbourne Royal Society of Victoria, corner Victoria & Exhibition streets, Melbourne Gothic monument to WC Cornish, Melbourne General Cemetery, Parkville, Victoria Buildings at Scotch College, St Andrews Place, East Melbourne Orchestra (temporary bandstand), Botanic Gardens, Melbourne Gate Lodge, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria House for Clement Hodgkinson, 157 Hotham St, East Melbourne

1861–62 1863 1863 1863 1863 1863 1863 1864 1864 1866 1866 1866 1866–67 1867 1867 1868 1868 1868 1868–69 1869 1869–70 1869–70 1870 1871 1871 1871 1871–72 1872 1872 1873 1873 1873 1873 1873 1874 1874 1874–75 1875 1875 1876 1876 1876 1876 1877 1877 1877 1877 1877–82 1878–80 1879 1879– 1880 1880 1881 1881–82 1882 1882 1882–83 1883

Reed & Barnes Baptist Church, Collins St, Melbourne National Museum, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Medical School, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria AMP Society Building, Pitt St, Sydney Melbourne Public Library, north wing, Swanston St, Melbourne Warehouse for Sargood, King & Sargood, Flinders St, Melbourne Warehouse for Sargood, King & Sargood, Dunedin, New Zealand Government House, competition design, first prize Canally, house for Rev James Taylor, corner Powlett & George streets, East Melbourne Euro-Reko, house for Peter Davis, Burnett St, St Kilda, Victoria Intercolonial Exhibition, Hall & Octagon, Melbourne Public Library, Swanston St, Melbourne Independent Church (now St Michael's), corner Collins & Russell streets, Melbourne St Jude's Church (first stage), corner Lygon & Palmerston streets, Carlton, Victoria Menzies Hotel, corner William & Bourke streets, Melbourne Melbourne Town Hall, corner Swanston & Collins streets, Melbourne Kolor, house for Daniel Twomey, near Penshurst, Victoria Alcaston house, 2 houses and offices for W Garrard & E James, corner Collins & Spring streets, Melbourne Bank of Australasia, West Maitland, New South Wales Rippon Lea, house for FJ Sargood, 192 Hotham St, Elsternwick, Victoria Wesleyan Church, Palmerston St, Carlton, Victoria St Jude's Church, completion of nave & gallery, corner Lygon & Palmerston streets, Carlton, Victoria Portico, Melbourne Public Library, Swanston St, Melbourne Presbyterian Church, Koroit, Victoria Eastern Market, competition design, corner Bourke & Exhibition streets, Melbourne Ballarat Savings Bank, Sturt St, Ballarat, Victoria Barham House (Eildon), house additions for EB Green, 57 Grey St, St Kilda, Victoria Church of Sts Peter & Paul, South Melbourne Bank of Australasia, corner Collins & Queen streets, Melbourne Warehouse for FT Sargood, Flinders St, Melbourne Scots Church, corner Russell & Collins streets, Melbourne Scotch College, Principal's residence and classrooms, East Melbourne Law Courts, competition design, second place, corner Lonsdale & William streets, Melbourne Trades Hall (first stage), corner Victoria & Lygon streets, Carlton, Victoria Picture Gallery, part of the National Gallery of Victoria, La Trobe St, Melbourne Eastern Market, new competition design, first place, corner Bourke & Exhibition streets, Melbourne Presbyterian Ladies College, Albert St, East Melbourne North Extension to Quadrangle, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria International Exhibition building, grounds of the Melbourne Public Library, Melbourne Gate Lodge (east and west wings), University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Victoria Club, Collins St (next to Town Hall), Melbourne Victoria Arcade & Academy of Music for J Aarons, Bourke St, Melbourne Entrance Gates, Grattan St, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Bishop’s Palace, Ballarat, Victoria Faraday St School, Carlton, Victoria Warehouse for Felton, Grimwade & Co, Flinders Lane, Melbourne Eastern Market, corner Bourke & Exhibition streets, Melbourne Medical School, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Melbourne International Exhibition Buildings, Carlton, Victoria Bank of Australasia, Tamworth, New South Wales Ormond College, College Cres, Parkville, Victoria Bank of Australasia, North Sydney Roman Catholic Convent of the Sisters of Mercy, Nicholson St, Fitzroy, Victoria Three professorial residences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Yarra House, Anderson St, South Yarra, Victoria Bank of Australasia, 394 Collins St, Melbourne Additions, Trades Hall, Lygon St, Carlton, Victoria Holy Trinity Church & Parsonage, corner Chapel & Dickens streets, Balaclava, Victoria South wing, Melbourne Public Library, along Little Lonsdale St, Melbourne

1883–92 1883 1883 1884 1884 1884 1884 1884 1884 1885 1885 1885 1885 1885 1886

Reed, Henderson & Smart Supervision of St Paul's Anglican Cathedral, Flinders St, Melbourne Bank of Australasia, Townsville, Queensland Mooroolbeek, house for Frank Madden, 4 Madden Gr, Kew, Victoria Ormond College, additions, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, corner Grey & Neptune streets, St Kilda, Victoria New Medical School (Anatomy & Pathology), University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Mildura (Urangeline), house for James C Stewart, 349 Barkers Rd, Kew, Victoria Bundalohn, house for Henry Giles Turner, 6 Tennyson St, St Kilda, Victoria Bona Vista, house for Margaret Hobson, 59 Kensington Rd, South Yarra, Victoria Christ Church, new tower, South Yarra, Victoria Ormond College, Wyselaskie Hall, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Bank of Australasia, South Adelaide, South Australia Bank of Australasia, Port Fairy, Victoria Thanes, house for George W Selby jnr, Alma Rd, Caulfield, Victoria Bank of Australasia, Burnie, Tasmania

1886 1887 1887 1887–88 1888 1889 1889

Natural Philosophy Building, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Biology Building, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Five professorial residences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Redcourt, house for EL Yencken, 506 Orrong Rd, Armadale, Victoria Bank of Australasia, Nathalia, Victoria Ball & Welch building, 180–88 Flinders St, Melbourne Medical School, additions, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria

1890 1890 1890–91 1890–91 1890–92 1890–92 1890–92 1891 1891 1891 1891 1891 1891 1891–92 1891–93 1892 1892–93 1893–94 1894 1894 1896 1896–97 1896–01 1897 1898 1898–99 1898–02 1899 1899 1899–00 1899–00 1899–00 1899–00 1900 1900 1900 1900–01 1901 1901 1901 1902 1902–03 1902–03 1903 1904–05 1904–06 1905 1905–06 1905–06 1905–06 1907–08

Reed, Smart & Tappin Shenton, house for JS Shenton, 41 Kinkora Rd, Hawthorn, Victoria Convent of Mercy, Hotham, North Melbourne Holyrood, 816 Riversdale Rd, Camberwell, Victoria Trades Hall, council chamber, Lygon St, Carlton, Victoria Ormond College, completion and master's residence, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Melbourne Public Library, south west pavilion, Swanston St, Melbourne Metropolitan Gas Co building, Flinders St, Melbourne Edzell, house for JC Stewart, 76 St Georges Rd, Toorak, Victoria Mutual Store, Flinders St, Melbourne Natural Philosophy building (second stage), University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Villa, Hopetoun Park, Box Hill, Victoria St Patrick's Roman Catholic Cathedral, decoration, Ballarat, Victoria Church of the Immaculate Conception, additions, Hawthorn, Victoria Warragul Shire Hall, Warragul, Victoria Redemptorist Church & Monastery (first stage), Wendouree, Ballarat, Victoria Convent of Notre Dame de Sion, Sale, Victoria St Dominic's Priory, chapel, North Adelaide, South Australia Thomson Memorial Church, Terang, Victoria St Pauls Roman Catholic Church, Sydney Rd, Coburg, Victoria Roman Catholic Church, competition design, first place, Stanley St, Townsville, Queensland St George's Roman Catholic Church, Carlton, Victoria Coolart, house for Grimwade, Somers, Victoria Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Cathedral (first stage), Bendigo, Victoria Factory for Beath, Schiess & Co, Hosier Lane, Melbourne Mutual Store, delivery building, Flinders St, Melbourne Redemptorist Monastery (second stage), Wendouree, Ballarat, Victoria Loretto Convent Chapel, Mary's Mount, Ballarat, Victoria National Museum (part of Public Library), Russell St, Melbourne Ball & Welch building, 180–188 Flinders St, Melbourne Three shops & studios for Sanders & Levy, 149–153 Swanston St, Melbourne Medical School, Anatomy & Pathology Museum, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Medical School, Bacteriology building, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Engineering School, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Thomson Memorial Church, new vestry, Terang, Victoria Convent of the Good Shepherd, Abbotsford, Victoria House for GW Anderson, Warragul, Victoria St Patrick's Roman Catholic Cathedral, decoration of the chapels, Gisbourne St, Melbourne House for Dr Cussen, Lyons St, Ballarat, Victoria Richmond Power Station, alterations for Brush Electrical Engineering, Richmond, Victoria Warehouse for McNaughton, Love & Co, Watson Place (off Flinders Lane), Melbourne Nazareth House, chapel, Mill St, Ballarat, Victoria Burnewang, homestead for H Holmes, Elmore, Victoria Cathedral Hall, 20 Brunswick St, Fitzroy, Victoria Hotel Somerville for Henry Gomm, Somerville, Victoria Convent of the Sacred Heart, new chapel, Malvern, Victoria National Museum (part of Public Library), Russell St, Melbourne St Peter & St Paul's Church, new school, South Melbourne Animal houses, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Biochemistry & Vegetable Pathology, additions, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Mining & Metallurgy School, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Anatomy & Pathology Building, first floor, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria

1907 1907–08

Smart, Tappin & Peebles Church of the Immaculate Conception, new confessionals, Hawthorn, Victoria Christchurch Cathedral, Chapter house, 50 Drummond St, Ballarat, Victoria

1908 1908–13 1909 1911 1911 1911–12 1912 1912 1912 1912–13 1914 1915 1916 1916–17c 1917 1917 1917–18 1918 1918 1918–20 1919 1919–20 1920 1920–25 1921–23

Bates, Peebles & Smart Warehouse for Robert Reid & Co, Flinders St, Melbourne Reading room & stack room, Public Library, Swanston St, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (first stage), University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Buckley & Nunn, front building, Bourke St, Melbourne Old Union building, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Chanonry, professional residence & chambers for Andrew Stenhouse, 14–16 Collins St, Melbourne Physiology & Chemistry Schools, additions, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Church of Sts Peter & Paul, completion of east end, South Melbourne Hoffman kiln & engine shed for Glen Iris Brick & Tile Co, Thornbury, Victoria Leviathan Clothing, store for Levy & Sanders, corner Bourke & Swanston streets, Melbourne Block Arcade, alterations, corner Collins & Elizabeth streets, Melbourne Netherby, house for OB McCutcheon, 20 Studley Avenue, Kew, Victoria St George's Roman Catholic Church, school, corner Drummond & Pelham streets, Carlton, Victoria House for Donald Swanson, East St Kilda, Victoria Charles Moore Pavilion, Austin Hospital, Heidelberg, Victoria Trades Hall, additions, Lygon St, Carlton, Victoria Henry Meeks Pavilion, Austin Hospital, Heidelberg, Victoria House for F Heath, corner Hopetoun & Toorak roads, Toorak, Victoria AMP Building, Moorabool St, Geelong, Victoria Foxhanger, house for Howard G Balding, The Quadrant, Malvern, Victoria Warehouse alterations for Buckley & Nunn, Staughton Place, Melbourne Factory additions for Swallow & Ariell, corner Beach & Stokes streets, Port Melbourne First Church of Christ Scientist, St. Kilda Rd, South Melbourne Buckley & Nunn, extensive alterations, Bourke St, Melbourne Factory for Buckley & Nunn, corner Little Bourke St & Albion Alley, Melbourne

1923 1924–25 1925 1925–31

Bates & Smart Standard Box Manufacturing Co Premises, corner Stuart & Coventry streets, South Melbourne AMP Building, Wangaratta, Victoria Trades Hall, additions, Lygon St, Carlton, Victoria AMP, Maryborough, Victoria

1926 1927–28 1927–31 1927–32 1929–30 1929–33 1931 1933 1934–37 1935 1935 1936–37 1937 1937–38 1938 1938 1940 1946 1947–53 1951 1951

Bates, Smart & McCutcheon Methodist Church, competition design, 2 schemes, Canberra Wesley College, additions, 577 St Kilda Rd, Prahran, Victoria Commercial Banking Co of Sydney, substantial alterations, 246–50 Flinders Lane, Melbourne AMP Building, 419–429 Collins St, Melbourne Commercial Banking Co of Sydney, Kerang, Victoria Tweddle Hospital for Babies, additions, Barkley & Sydney streets, Footscray, Victoria Memorial for EA Bates, Box Hill, Victoria Buckley & Nunn Men's Store, Bourke St, Melbourne House for Frank Watts, Streeton Cres, Ivanhoe East, Victoria House for Howard G Balding, 8 Moonga Rd, Toorak, Victoria St Mirins, house for James Cook, Baxter, Victoria Second Church of Christ Scientist, Cookson St, Camberwell, Victoria House for John Grimwade, 15 St Georges Rd, Toorak MLC Building, Martin Place, Sydney House for JW Lee Atkinson, 229 (now 773) Orrong Rd, Toorak, Victoria Quandolan, house for EA Watts, Quandolan Cl, East Ivanhoe, Victoria House for James Shackell, 27 St Georges Rd, Toorak, Victoria Broome Hill, House for Dr Stephens, Portsea, Victoria Footscray and District Hospital, Eleanor St, Footscray, Victoria Crackers, house for WO McCutcheon, Mt Eliza, Victoria Bacchus Marsh Hospital, Bacchus Marsh, Victoria


1951 1951 1951–52 1952–56 1953 1953–72 1953–73 1954 1955 1955 1955 1955 1955–58 1956 1956 1956 1957 1957 1957 1957 1957 1958 1958 1958–59 1958–61 1958–73 1959 1959 1959–61 1959–61 1960 1960 1960–62 1960–64 1960–72 1961 1961 1961–73 1962 1962 1962–64 1962–65 1963 1963 1963 1963–67 1964 1964 1964–66 1964–72 1965 1965 1965 1965 1965 1965 1965–69 1965–69 1967 1967–69 1968–69 1968–73 1969–75 1970–71 1970–80 1971 1971 1971–72 1972 1972–74 1974 1974–75 1975 1975 1975–76 1975–77 1975–78 1975–78 1978 1978–79 1980 1980 1980 1980 1980 1981–83 1982 1982–83 1983–84 1983–92 1983–93 1984 1984 1984 1984–87 1985 1985 1985 1985–86 1986 1986 1987– 1987–88 1988 1988 1988 1988–91 1989 1989 1989 1989 1989 1990 1990 1991 1991 1991 1991 1991 1991– 1991–92

Wodonga Hospital, Wodonga, Victoria Koo-Wee-Rup Hospital, Koo-Wee-Rup, Victoria Eildon Township, Eildon, Victoria Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria MLC Building, Geelong, Victoria Western General Hospital, Footscray, Victoria Sacred Heart Cathedral, completion of interior and spire, Bendigo, Victoria MLC Building, Ballarat, Victoria Youth Centre, Central Methodist Mission, Prahran, Victoria HC Sleigh Building, Melbourne Orana, Methodist Home for Children, Wattle Park, Victoria MLC Building, corner Edward & Adelaide streets, Brisbane ICI House, 1 Nicholson St, Melbourne ICI House, Circular Quay, Sydney MLC Building, Wollongong, New South Wales Russell Grimwade School of Biochemistry, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Hume House, corner William & Little Bourke streets, Melbourne MLC Building, King William St, Adelaide MLC Building, St. Georges Terrace, Perth MLC Building, 105 Miller St, North Sydney MLC Building, Hunter St, Newcastle, New South Wales AMP Building, 406 Lonsdale St, Melbourne BSM Office, 366 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne Monash University: Masterplan, Clayton, Victoria RACV Building, 94 Queen St, Melbourne The Peninsula Church of England School, Mt Eliza, Victoria MLC Building, corner Petrie St & London Circuit, Canberra MLC Building, Shepparton, Victoria Central Science, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria Mobil House, Southbank, Melbourne Australian Paper Manufacturers (APM), Southbank, Melbourne Prudential Assurance, corner Queen & Bourke streets, Melbourne Hargrave Library, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria Engineering Blocks, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria Wesley College, Syndal campus, Syndal, Victoria Guardian Assurance, Melbourne New Zealand Insurance, 491–493 Bourke St, Melbourne Royal Talbot Centre, Kew, Victoria Sleigh House, corner Queen & Bourke streets, Melbourne South British Insurance, corner Queen & Bourke streets, Melbourne Eakins Hall, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Municipal Offices, Royal Ave, Sandringham, Victoria Le Pine Funeral Homes, alterations, Burke Rd, Camberwell, Victoria Le Pine Funeral Homes, Box Hill, Victoria Le Pine Funeral Homes, East Kew, Victoria Peninsula Country Golf Club, Skye Rd, Frankston, Victoria Australian Society of Accountants, 49–51 Exhibition St, Melbourne St Joseph’s Church, Quarry Hill, Victoria AMP Building, Market St, Melbourne The Yarra Valley Church of England School, Ringwood, Victoria Union Building, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria Bethlehem Home for the Aged, Bendigo, Victoria George Thompson School of Foundry Technology, corner Cardigan & Queensberry streets, Melbourne Manufacturers’ House, 370 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne RMIT Masterplan, Swanston St, Melbourne Shepparton Monastry, Shepparton, Victoria AMP Square & St James Building, 527–555 Bourke St, Melbourne (in assoc. with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) Chancery Building, Australian Embassy, Massachusetts Ave, Washington DC, US RMIT Masterplan (revised), Swanston St, Melbourne Casey Wing, RMIT, Swanston St, Melbourne Methodist Church, High St, Frankston, Victoria Commercial Banking Co of Sydney, 250 Collins St, Melbourne Commonwealth Bank, 367 Collins St, Melbourne Gillespie Wing, RMIT, Swanston St, Melbourne Collins Place, 35–55 Collins St, Melbourne (in assoc. with IM Pei) Footscray Institute of Technology Masterplan, Ballarat Rd, Footscray, Victoria Royal Women’s Hospital, main building, Swanston St, Carlton, Victoria RMIT Masterplan, revised, Swanston St, Melbourne Sydney Cove Redevelopment, UDPA, The Rocks, New South Wales MLC Building, 366 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne Berry St Rehabilitation Plan, UDPA, Richmond, Victoria Belconnen Hospital, proposal, Belconnen, Australian Capital Territory Community Centre & Mosque, Preston, Victoria Tuggeranong Government Office Complex, Tuggeranong, Australian Capital Territory Building A, RMIT, Swanston St, Melbourne AJ Cunningham Wing, Royal Women’s Hospital, Swanston St, Carlton, Victoria Tasma Terrace, restoration and additions, 2-12 Parliament Place, Melbourne Metropolitan Fire Brigade Headquarters, Gisbourne St, East Melbourne T&G Fawkner Centre, 499 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne Kathleen Syme Education Centre, Royal Women’s Hospital, Faraday St, Carlton, Victoria Budget Rent-A-Car, North Melbourne ANZ Bank, Collins Place, 35–55 Collins St, Melbourne Buckley & Nunn, conversion to David Jones store, Bourke St, Melbourne Kino Cinemas, Collins Place, 35–55 Collins St, Melbourne Wentworth Hotel, Collins Place, 35–55 Collins St, Melbourne St Hilda’s, BSM Office, 1 Clarendon St, East Melbourne 478 Albert St, East Melbourne Wallace office project, Palmerston Cres, South Melbourne Ellsmere Court Housing, Princess St, Kew, Victoria Melbourne Central Building, Elizabeth St, Melbourne. (in assoc. with Kisho Kurokawa) Raheen, additions, Studley Park Rd, Kew, Victoria (in assoc. with Glenn Murcutt) ICL Building, 20 Queens Rd, Melbourne GJ Coles store, conversion to David Jones store, Bourke St, Melbourne Royal Women’s Hospital, staff kitchen and cafe, Cardigan St, Carlton, Victoria Western General Hospital, additions, Eleanor St, Footscray, Victoria Esanda Building, Spring St, Melbourne Brisbane Airport Domestic Terminal, Brisbane (Bligh Jessup Bretnall) Mallesons, Rialto Building, 495 Collins St, Melbourne Meat Market Craft Centre, Courtney St, North Melbourne RMIT University, refurbishment of Building 9, Swanston St, Melbourne Raheen, restoration, Studley Park Rd, Kew, Victoria William Angliss Hospital, Albert St, Upper Ferntree Gully, Victoria Coronial Services Centre, Kavanagh St, South Melbourne Royal Women’s Hospital, stores building, Cardigan St, Carlton, Victoria Price Waterhouse Centre, 215 Spring St, Melbourne (in assoc. with Reed Mussen Styant-Browne) South Pacific Centre, collaborative design, Docklands, Victoria Casey Plaza Lecture Theatre, RMIT University, Swanston St, Melbourne BP Australia, design competition, Southbank, Melbourne ICI House, refurbishment, 1 Nicholson St, Melbourne Owen Dixon Chambers, Lonsdale St, Melbourne Price Waterhouse, 188 Quay St, Auckland, New Zealand CRA, Price Waterhouse Centre, 215 Spring St, Melbourne County Court refurbishment, corner Lonsdale & William streets, Melbourne Clayton Utz, 333 Collins St, Melbourne Entry Building, Royal Children’s Hospital, Flemington Rd, Parkville, Victoria Necropolis Crematorium and Chapel Complex, Princess Hwy, Springvale, Victoria Arthur Robinson Hedderwicks, 530 Collins St, Melbourne BHP House, refurbishment, 140 William St, Melbourne Presbyterian Ladies College (PLC), masterplan, Burwood, Victoria Ericsson Australia, building fit-outs, Melbourne & Broadmeadows Clayton Utz, 1 O’Connell St, Sydney

1992 1992 1992 1992 1993 1993 1993 1993 1993 1993 1993–97 1993–97 1994 1994 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995 1995–97 1995–98 1996 1996 1996 1996 1996 1996 1996 1996–97 1996–97 1997 1997 1997 1997 1997 1997 1997 1997–98 1997–99 1997–2002 1997–2002 1998 1998 1998 1998 1998 1998–2000 1999 1999 1999 1999 1999 1999–2000 1999–2001 1999–2002 2000 2000 2000 2000 2000 2000– 2000–01 2000–03 2001 2001 2001 2001 2001 2001 2001–02 2001–04 2001–05 2002 2002 2002 2002 2002 2002– 2002–03 2002–04 2002–04 2002–04 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003 2003– 2003– 2003– 2003– 2003–05 2003–07 2004 2004 2004 2004 2004 2004 2004– 2004– 2004–

Engineering School, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria Melbourne Church of England Girls Grammar School, masterplan, South Yarra, Victoria Herbert Geer & Rundle, 385 Bourke St, Melbourne Macquarie Bank, 101 Collins St, Melbourne Computer & Information Technology Building, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria Medical School extensions, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria BP Australia, Melbourne Central, Elizabeth St, Melbourne Henry Bolte Wing, Ballarat Base Hospital, Ballarat, Victoria WA Chemical Laboratories (CSIRO), Curtin University, Brand Dr, Bentley, Western Australia (in assoc. with Brand Deykin & Hay) Portland & District Hospital, Bentinch St, Portland, Victoria Crown Entertainment Complex, Southbank, Melbourne (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson & Daryl Jackson Pty Ltd) Crown Towers Hotel, Southbank, Melbourne (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson & Daryl Jackson Pty Ltd) Boston Consulting, 101 Collins St, Melbourne Cabrini Hospital, new chapel and additions, 183 Wattletree Rd, Malvern, Victoria Bates Smart Warehouse conversion, Rooney St, Richmond, Victoria Melbourne City Council administration offices, Melbourne Town Hall, Swanston St, Melbourne Ivanhoe Grammar School, masterplan, Ridgeway Campus, The Ridgeway, Ivanhoe, Victoria Ballarat Base Hospital, Drummond St, Ballarat, Victoria Kirkbrae Presbyterian Home for the Aged, 794 Mount Dandenong Rd, Kilsyth, Victoria Temporary Casino Complex, World Trade Center, Melbourne Old Treasury Building, restoration, Spring St, Melbourne (in assoc. with Government Architect) St John of God Hospital, redevelopment, Myers St, Geelong, Victoria Building LA, Swinburne University, Lilydale Campus, Melba Hwy, Lilydale, Victoria (in assoc. with Glenn Murcutt) Engineering Building 8, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria Howard Florey Institute of Experimental Physiology & Medicine, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Evan Burge Library & Education Centre, Trinity College, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Firbank Grammar School, Aquatic Centre, Outer Cres, Brighton, Victoria Foxtel Headquarters & Playout Centre, Wharf 8, Pyrmont, New South Wales Wrist Pastoral & Veterinary Institute, Mount Napier Rd, Hamilton, Victoria Junior School, Ivanhoe Grammar School, Ridgeway Campus, The Ridgeway, Ivanhoe, Victoria Red Cross Blood Bank, Kavanagh St, South Melbourne Victoria University of Technology, Sunbury campus (former Caloola Asylum), Sunbury, Victoria Australian Grand Prix Building, Albert Park, Victoria Redland Hospital, Weippan St, Cleveland, Queensland (in assoc. with McKerrell Lynch) Broome Hospital, Robinson Rd, Broome, Western Australia (in assoc. with Brand Deykin & Hay) Wilson Dilworth, 85-87 High St, Kew, Victoria City West Link Road Infrastructure, Sydney Church Place, proposal, Melbourne Student Union Building, refurbishment, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria Walker house, Toorak, Victoria Federation Square, corner Flinders St & St Kilda Rd, Melbourne (in assoc. with Lab Architecture Studio) Australian Embassy, Wallstrasse 76-79, Berlin Mitte, Germany (in assoc. with Braun & Schlockermann) Creative Arts Complex, Melbourne Girls Grammar School, Anderson St, South Yarra, Victoria Presbyterian Ladies College (PLC), Language Centre and lecture theatre, Burwood, Victoria 360 Collins St, building upgrade, Melbourne Blake Dawson & Waldron, Grosvenor Place, Sydney Young & Rubicam, Denison Building, 65 Berry St, North Sydney Toyota National Sales and Marketing Headquarters, corner Captain Cook Dr & Gannons Rd, Caringbah, New South Wales Children’s Court of Victoria, 477 Little Lonsdale St, Melbourne Gladstone Hospital, Park St, Gladstone, Queensland (in assoc. with McKerrell Lynch) Artist Services, Fox Studios, Randwick, New South Wales MLC Building, refurbishment proposal, 105 Miller St, North Sydney Arthur Robinson Hedderwicks, 530 Collins St, Melbourne Pier 8/9, Hickson Rd, Walsh Bay, New South Wales Computer Science & Engineering Faculty, University of NSW, Anzac Pde, Kensington, New South Wales The Bell Centre, Preston, Victoria National Australia Bank Investment Centre, corner Pitt & Hunter streets, Sydney Firbank Grammar School, Science Centre, Outer Cres, Brighton, Victoria PTO Retail Stores, South Yarra, Chadstone & Doncaster, Victoria LIP restaurant, Fitzroy St, St Kilda, Victoria The Breakers, Deans Marsh Rd, Lorne, Victoria Star City casino and hotel, redevelopment, 80 Pyrmont St, Pyrmont, New South Wales Arts/Multimedia Building, Swinburne University, Prahran Campus, High St, Prahran, Victoria Rippon Lea, restoration of ballroom and pool, 192 Hotham St, Elsternwick, Victoria Bates Smart Office, 1 Nicholson St, Melbourne NICA Building, Swinburne University, Prahran Campus, Green St, Prahran, Victoria Enterprise Centre, Ivanhoe Grammar School, Plenty Campus, Bridge Inn Rd, Mernda, Victoria Mildura Base Hospital, 13th St, Mildura, Victoria Victoria Archive Centre, 99 Sheil St, North Melbourne The Melburnian, 250 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne (in assoc. with HPA Architects) Defence Headquarters and Training Command, Victoria Barracks, Oxford St, Paddington, New South Wales Proximity Apartments, Arncliffe St, North Arncliffe, New South Wales Freshwater Place, Southbank, Melbourne Glo Bar, Star City, 80 Pyrmont St, Pyrmont, New South Wales Azura Jewellery Store, Chadstone Shopping Centre, Chadstone, Victoria Wilkinson Building, University of Sydney, Camperdown, New South Wales SMAART Centre, Junior School, Firbank Grammar School, Outer Cres, Brighton, Victoria Cabrini Hospital, operating theatre and new theatre block, 183 Wattletree Rd, Malvern, Victoria (in assoc. with Health Science Planning Consultants) 538 Bourke St, Melbourne Jones Bay Wharf, Pier 19-21, Pirrama Rd, Pyrmont, New South Wales (in assoc. with PTW Architects) 11 Exhibition St, Melbourne Five Dock Square, Garfield St, Five Dock, New South Wales Maroubra Bay Hotel & Apartments, Marine Pde, Maroubra, New South Wales Bates Smart Office, 243 Liverpool St, East Sydney Grant Thornton, 383 Kent St, Sydney Sports and Entertainment Limited, 243 Liverpool St, East Sydney Forum Real Estate, Pacific Hwy, St Leonards, New South Wales VIP Slots Lounge, Star City, 80 Pyrmont St, Pyrmont, New South Wales NSW Police Headquarters, 1 Charles St, Parramatta, New South Wales Crown Promenade Hotel, Southbank, Melbourne (in assoc. with Perrott Lyon Mathieson) 161 Clarence St, competition design, Sydney Australian National University (ANU), John Curtin School of Medical Research, competition design, Canberra Monash University, revised masterplan, Clayton, Victoria Residential development, 1–19 Colombo St, Mitcham, Victoria Rhodes Waterside, Rhodes Peninsular, Rhodes, New South Wales 545–563 Station St, Box Hill, Victoria Sydneygate, Green Square, New South Wales Victoria Gardens Beijing Apartments, Chaoyang, Beijing, China (concept design Denton Corker Marshall) Monash University Malaysia, Bundar Sunway, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia Clemenger BBDO Pty Ltd, 474 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne Keith Matheson, 231 Lambton Quay, Wellington, New Zealand Grange Securities Ltd, Level 33, 264 George St (Australia Square), Sydney Clayton Utz, 1 O’Connell St, Sydney Competition design, Wulumuqi Lu, Shanghai, China Balfour Park Masterplan (former Carlton Brewery site), competition design, Broadway, New South Wales Goldsbrough Square, 515 Little Bourke St, Melbourne 55 Queens Rd, Albert Park, Victoria Mid City Centre, George St, Sydney

305


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Niall, B, Georgiana: a Biography of Georgiana McCrae, Painter, Diarist, Pioneer, Melbourne University Press at the Miegunyah Press, Carlton, Vic., 1994.

Willis, J & Hanna, B, Women Architects in Australia 1900–1950, Royal Australian Institute of Architects, Red Hill, ACT, 2001.

Ogg, A, Architecture in Steel: the Australian Context, Royal Australian Institute of Architects, Red Hill, ACT, 1987.

Wood, C & Askew, M, St Michael’s Church: Formerly the Collins Street Independent Church, Melbourne, Hyland House, South Yarra, Vic., 1992.

Owens, AE, ‘George Henry Backhaus (1811–1882)’ in Nairn, NB et al. (eds), Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 3, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1969, pp. 66–7.

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Aarons, Joseph 20 Academy of Music (Reed) 20 Alcaston House (Reed & Barnes) 39, 41, 57 Alsop, Rodney 70 AMP (Australian Mutual Provident Society) Melbourne (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 122, 124, 126, 126, 128, 129, 174, 175, 198, 198, 200, 203, 223 Sydney (Reed & Barnes) 37, 39, 41 ANZ Bank (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 233, 235 apartment buildings Bay Street, Sydney (Bates Smart) 272 The Breakers, Lorne (Bates Smart) 272, 273 Maroubra Bay (Bates Smart) 275, 276 The Melburnian (Bates Smart) 272, 273 Mitcham (Bates Smart) 294 Proximity Apartments, Sydney (Bates Smart) 275 Sydneygate (Bates Smart) 275 APM (Australian Paper Manufacturers) (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 180, 181 Armstrong, Tony 154 Arnall, Roger 231, 223, 246, 296, 301 Austin Hospital (Bates, Peebles & Smart) 118, 119 Australian Embassy Berlin (Bates Smart) 249, 250, 267 Washington (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 202, 203 Australian National University (Bates Smart) 294 Azura Jewellery, Chadstone (Bates Smart) 258 Bailey, Donald 175 Baldwin Spencer, Professor Walter 64 Ball & Welch (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 96, 97 Ballarat Savings Bank (Reed & Barnes) 57 Banahan, Hubert 174, 175, 180, 184, 190, 203, 210, 223 Bank of Australasia Reed & Barnes 39, 56, 57 Reed, Henderson & Smart 64 Bank of New South Wales, Collins Street (Reed) 24, 25, 25, 32, 32 Baptist Church, Collins Street (Reed & Barnes) 37, 41, 41 Barnes, Frederick 25, 36, 37, 53, 59, 65, 296, 297 Barnes, Philip 231, 231 Barragunda (Reed & Barnes) 36, 37 Barry, Sir Redmond 24, 25, 34, 47, 53 Bateman, Edward La Trobe 24, 32, 36, 47, 65 Bates, Donald 267 Bates, Edward Albert 70, 68, 71, 75, 98, 114, 123, 129, 293, 296, 298 Bates, Selwyn 141, 154, 157, 167, 170, 212, 296, 299 Bates, Peebles & Smart Buckley & Nunn 98, 98, 103, 122 bungalows 114, 119 clients 1920s 122–3 Conservatorium of Music 102, 103 First Church of Christ Scientist 120, 122, 137 formed 98 joined by McCutcheon 114, 124, 126 lose University commission 102 Public Library Domed Reading Room 102, 104, 105, 107, 109–10, 109, 110 during WWI 113, 114, 119–20 Bates Smart Berlin Embassy 249, 250, 267 Crown complex 249, 250, 251, 252, 254, 256, 256, 258 departure of Hurburgh 267 Federation Square 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269 Freshwater Place 286, 287, 288, 288 Melbourne office 267, 275, 276 and New Modernism 278 residential design 270, 272 Sydney office 256, 263, 267, 275, 278

Bates, Smart & McCutcheon AMP Building 122, 124, 126, 126, 128, 129, 174, 175, 198, 198, 200, 203, 223 Buckley & Nunn 130, 131, 132, 216 CBC 129, 131, 205, 208 centenary 154 Collins Place 205, 205, 207, 210, 213, 216, 288 computer aided design 231 in Depression years 129–30 Eildon township 154, 155 fit-outs 210 formed 125 HC Sleigh 154, 157, 157, 180 heritage projects 216 houses and hospitals 135–6, 139, 141, 149–54 Hume House 164, 165, 167 ICI 155, 167, 170, 173, 174, 175, 216, 219 international partners 198, 203 McCutcheon retires 213 Methodist churches 122, 125, 198, 193 MLC projects 141, 141, 142, 144, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 210, 212, 212 Monash University 182, 184, 185, 186, 240, 241 NZI 180, 181 office, St Hilda’s 221, 223, 275 office, St Kilda Road 167, 167, 168 office, South Melbourne 210, 212 private schools 184, 190 Raheen remake 216, 242, 242 Ralton joins 145 RMIT 190, 191, 192, 237, 241–2 Second Church of Christ Scientist 137, 139, 141, 145 skyscrapers 148, 162 Sydney office 216 and Trusteel 149, 153, 154 University of Melbourne 53, 157–8, 158, 160, 162, 163, 163, 180, 182, 240, 241 Urban Design and Planning Associates (UDPA) 210, 212 Washington Embassy 202, 203 Wilson Hall 53, 157–8, 158, 160, 162, 163 during WWII 148 Bay Street apartments, Sydney (Bates Smart) 272 Belconnen Hospital proposal (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 210, 213 Bellarine Hotel (Hyndman & Bates) 70 Belmont, stables (Hyndman & Bates) 79, 80 Berlin Embassy (Bates Smart) 249, 250, 267 Bijou Theatre, Melbourne (Reed & Barnes) 20, 20 Bishop’s Palace, Ballarat (Reed & Barnes) 47, 48 Bladen, Max 164, 203, 212, 223, 210, 296, 300 Bona Vista (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 78, 79 Bonaldi, Ric 164, 167, 203 Boston Consulting (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 235 Bourke Street in 1853 19, 21 in 1913 103 Boyd, Robin 157, 158, 162, 167 BP Australia proposal (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 231, 233 Bradshaw, Louis 70 Braid (Hyndman & Bates) 72 The Breakers, Lorne (Bates Smart) 272, 273 Bricknall, Charles 231 Britannic House, London (Lutyens) 122 Broome Hill (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 149, 151 Broome Hospital (Bates Smart) 227 Brown, Harvey 164, 165, 170, 212, 296, 299 Bruce, Robert 203, 210, 212, 212, 216, 223, 224, 231, 242, 249, 270, 275, 296, 300


Buckley & Nunn Bates, Peebles & Smart 98, 98, 103, 122 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon 130, 131, 132, 216 Budget Rent-A-Car (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 222, 224 Bundalohn (Reed, Henderson & Smart/Hyndman & Bates) 70, 74, 77, 78 Burgoyne, W.H. 29 Burnewang (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 96, 97–8 Butterworth, Richard 205 Byrnes, Brendan 164, 223 Cabana (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 77, 79 Cabrini Hospital (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon/Bates Smart) 227, 224 Campbell W.M. 82 Canally (Reed & Barnes) 56, 57, 77 Carey Baptist Grammar (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 77, 78 Carleton, Alfred 68, 70, 82, 98 Carlyon’s Hotel (Bates, Peebles & Smart) 98 CBC Bank, Melbourne (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 129, 131, 205, 208 Chanonry, Collins Street (Bates, Peebles & Smart) 101 Chapel of the Immaculate Conception, Fitzroy (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 65 Chapman, Roger 270, 280 Children’s Court of Victoria (Bates Smart) 270, 270 Chrisp, Jim 236, 241 Church of Holy Trinity, Balaclava (Reed & Barnes) 58, 59 Church of the Immaculate Conception, Hawthorn (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 89, 90 Church Place (Bates Smart) 270 Clark, John James 25, 39 Clayton Utz, Sydney (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 233, 235 fit-out (Bates Smart) 256, 260 Clemenger BBDO Pty Ltd (Bates Smart) 260 Coates, Harold 102 Collins Place (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 205, 205, 207, 210, 213, 216, 288 Collins Street, Melbourne in 1853 21 in 1872 47 Colonial Bank Hotel (Hyndman & Bates) 72 Commercial Banking Company see CBC Conservatorium of Music (Bates, Peebles & Smart) 102, 103 Convent of Notre Dame de Sion, Sale (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 89, 93 Convent of the Good Shepherd, Abbotsford (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 94, 95 Copolov House (Copolov & Rizzo) 272, 273 Copolov, Jeffery 216, 231, 233, 246, 247, 249, 251, 256, 272, 275, 278, 278, 280, 287, 296, 301 Coronial Services Centre (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 236, 238 County Court refurbishment (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 235 Crackers (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 149, 149, 151 Crathre (Reed & Barnes) 56, 57, 59 Crouch & Wilson 42, 75, 89 Crown Entertainment Complex (Bates Smart) 249, 250, 251, 252, 254, 256, 256, 258 Crown Promenade Hotel (Bates Smart) 280, 282 Crown Towers Hotel (Bates Smart) 254, 256 Customs House (1853) 21 Dalzell, Peter 167, 212, 223 Darling, Governor Sir Charles 39 David Jones Store (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 216 Davidson, Peter 267 Davis, Matt 280, 287 Deakin, Samuel 68, 86 Demaine, Bob 114, 122, 123, 125, 145 Dickins, Tom 212 Doufas, Ted 224 Dredge, Peter 231, 236, 243, 251, 280 Dumsday, Harold 82, 98, 126 Dunster, Robert 158, 180, 203, 210, 210, 212, 223, 231, 231, 246, 296, 300 Eakins Hall (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 180, 182 Eastern Arcade, Bourke Street (Hyndman & Bates) 72, 73 Eastern Market competition (Reed & Barnes) 42, 47, 52, 53 Edensor (Hyndman & Bates) 74, 75 Edmond, Robin 212 Egremont, H.G. 125 Eildon (Reed & Barnes) 57 Eildon township (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 154, 155 11 Exhibition Street (Bates Smart) 280, 294 Ellsmere Court (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 224 Embling, Sarah 249 Englisch, Frank 231 Erasmus, Steve 241 Euro-Reko (Reed & Barnes) 57, 77 Exhibition Building (Reed & Barnes) 37, 53, 55, 57, 59 Facci, Fulvio 212, 270, 280 Federation Square (Bates Smart) 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269 55 Queens Road (Bates Smart) 294 Firbank Grammar School (Bates Smart) 248, 249 First Church of Christ Scientist (Bates, Peebles & Smart) 120, 122, 137 Five Dock proposal, Sydney (Bates Smart) 272, 275 538 Bourke Street (Bates Smart) 294 Flannagan, John 47, 53 Flaubert, Stephanie 263, 278 Flinders Building (Hyndman & Bates) 71, 72 Flinders Street, 1895 84 Footscray and District Hospital (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 149, 153, 236 Footscray Institute of Technology (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 190, 192, 193, 213 Forum Real Estate, Sydney (Bates Smart) 260 Foster, Richard 198 Fox Studios, Sydney (Bates Smart) 262 Foxtel Headquarters, Sydney (Bates Smart) 256, 262, 263 Francis, Andrew 270, 280 Freshwater Place, Southbank (Bates Smart) 286, 287, 288, 288 Frogmore (Reed & Barnes) 24 Furey, Harry 212 Gardiner, Douglas 148, 154, 155, 167, 170, 296, 299 Geelong Town Hall (Reed) 23, 24

Gemell (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 72 George Thompson School of Foundry Technology (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 190, 191 Gherardin, Walter 158 Gilfillan, Struan 184, 212, 212, 216, 223, 231, 241, 246, 296, 300 Gillott, Samuel 72, 74, 75 Godfrey, Ian 212 Godfrey, W.S.P. 25, 68, 69, 82 Goldsborough Square (Bates Smart) 294 Goldstein, Mark 198 Government House competition (Reed & Barnes) 20, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42 Grange Securities, Sydney (Bates Smart) 260 Grounds, Roy 157 Grutzner, David 241 Guardian Assurance (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 177, 188 Gums (Reed & Barnes) 59 Gymnastics Victoria (Bates Smart) 246, 249 Hall, Alec 114, 122, 123 Harford, Byron 256 Hayes, Don 164 HC Sleigh building (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 154, 157, 157, 180 Healey, Denis 68, 82, 98 Heath (Bates, Peebles & Smart) 118 Henderson, Anketell Matheson 60, 64, 65, 68, 69–70, 69, 296, 297 Henderson, Kingsley A. 57 Herbert Geer & Rundle (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 233 Heronswood (Reed & Barnes) 36, 37 Hertslet & Reed 25 Hitch, John 184, 190, 203 Hoffman kiln and machine shed (Bates, Peebles & Smart) 98, 101, 102 Holyrood (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 82, 83 Homeden (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 79, 80 Hopetoun Park (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 82, 86 houses Barragunda (Reed & Barnes) 36, 37 Belmont, stables (Hyndman & Bates) 79, 80 Bona Vista (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 78, 79 Braid (Hyndman & Bates) 72 Broome Hill (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 149, 151 Bundalohn (Reed, Henderson & Smart/Hyndman & Bates) 70, 74, 77, 78 Burnewang (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 96, 97–8 Cabana (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 77, 79 Canally (Reed & Barnes) 56, 57, 77 Crackers (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 149, 149, 151 Crathre (Reed & Barnes) 56, 57, 59 Edensor (Hyndman & Bates) 74, 75 Eildon (Reed & Barnes) 57 Ellsmere Court (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 224 Euro-Reko (Reed & Barnes) 57, 77 Frogmore (Reed & Barnes) 24 Gums (Reed & Barnes) 59 Heath (Bates, Peebles & Smart) 118 Heronswood (Reed & Barnes) 36, 37 Holyrood (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 82, 83 Homeden (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 79, 80 Hopetoun Park (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 82, 86 Knowsley (Salway) 75, 76, 77 Kolor homestead (Reed & Barnes) 57, 58, 59 Lineda (Hyndman & Bates) 80, 82 Malham (Hyndman & Bates) 77 Mildura (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 77, 78, 81, 82 Mooroolbeek (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 77 Netherby (Bates, Peebles & Smart) 116, 119 Redcourt (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 77, 81 Rippon Lea (Reed & Barnes/Bates, Smart & McCutcheon/Bates Smart) 57, 58, 77, 21, 221, 223 Shenton (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 77, 79 St Mirins (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 135 St Neot’s (Hyndman & Bates) 76, 77 Thanes (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 78, 79 Virginia (Reed & Barnes) 57 Yarra House (Reed & Barnes) 73, 75 houses in Edzell Road (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 83, 86 in George Street, East Melbourne (Reed) 24 in Napier Street, Fitzroy (Reed) 24 houses for Howard G. Balding (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 135, 135 Redmond Barry (Reed) 24, 25 Jeffery Copolov (Copolov & Rizzo) 272, 273 Edmonds (Hyndman & Bates) 79 Frederick Heath (Bates, Peebles & Smart) 114 Clement Hodgkinson (Reed) 36, 37, 57 J.W. Lee Atkinson (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 136, 139 Oliver B. McCutcheon 119, 120 Outhwaite (Hyndman & Bates) 79, 82 James Shackell (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 135, 136, 137 Donald Swanson (Bates, Peebles & Smart) 118, 119 Frank Watts (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 135, 135 Howitt, Dr Godfrey 24, 34, 36 Howlett, Jeffrey 164, 175 Hume House (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 164, 165, 167 Hurburgh, Tim 212, 225, 231, 249, 267, 296, 300 Hurford, Jacqui 263 Hyndman, R.G. 68, 70, 71 Hyndman & Bates American influence 72 formed 70 Eastern Arcade 72, 73 houses 70 orchard homes 72 Queen Anne influence 70, 72, 77

309


310

red brick revival 70, 75, 79, 80, 81–6 renamed Bates, Peebles & Smart 98 staff 70 ICI Melbourne (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 155, 167, 170, 173, 174, 175 Orica building (Bates Smart) 275, 276 refurbished (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 216, 219 ICI Sydney (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 167, 170, 175 ICL Building (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 228, 224 Independent Church, Collins Street Hyndman & Bates 72 Reed & Barnes 39, 42, 42, 47 Irwin, C.A. 68 Irwin, Leighton 123 Ivanhoe Grammar School (Bates Smart) 248, 249 Jackson, Daryl 203 Jacoby, Helmut 198 Jansen, Bernard 212, 233 Javens, Steven 270 Johnson, Arthur 34, 39 Johnston, Jackie 280 Johnstone, Chris 241 Jones Bay Wharf, Sydney (Bates Smart) 278, 278 Keith Matheson, Wellington (Bates Smart) 258 Kerry, Belinda 263 Kirkbrae Presbyterian Home for the Aged (Bates Smart) 227 Knight, J.G. 25, 36 Knight & Kerr 32 Knowsley (Salway) 75, 76, 77 Kolor homestead (Reed & Barnes) 57, 58, 59 Lake, Guy 280 Lamb, Allan 212, 216, 236, 242, 249, 275, 278 Lambeth, Richard 34 Law Courts competition 26 Le Pine Funeral Homes (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 196, 198 Lewis, Brian 25, 157, 180 Lineda (Hyndman & Bates) 80 Liverpool and London Insurance Company building (Reed) 24, 28 Lomas, Jacqui 280 Long, Harcourt 212 Loreto Convent Chapel, Ballarat (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 93 Love, Allan 130 Lyons, Jim 210, 212, 223 McCorkell, Howard 212 McCoy, Professor Frederick 37 McCoy Hall (Reed & Barnes) 37 McCutcheon, Andrew 212, 223 McCutcheon, Oliver 119 McCutcheon, Osborn 119, 120, 141, 149, 154, 170, 184, 198, 212, 296, 298 Australian Embassy, Washington 203 joins Bates, Peebles & Smart 114, 120, 124, 126 clients 125–6, 130 Collins Place 205, 210 Crackers 149, 149, 151 government work 148 knighthood 205 Lutyens influence 123 overseas 123, 149, 212 partner 114, 125–6 RAIA Gold Medal 205 retires 212, 213 training 114, 122 and UDPA 212 vision for firm 167 wartime 120, 145, 148, 164 MacDonald, Ken 164 Macquarie Bank (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 233 Malham (Hyndman & Bates) 77 Manufacturers’ House (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 180, 198, 198 Markham, Michael 224, 236 Maroubra Bay apartments (Bates Smart) 275, 276 Martin, Dennis 236 Meat Market Craft Centre (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 216, 217 Mechanics Institute 21 Melbourne Central (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 216, 228, 231 Melbourne Church of England Girls’ Grammar School Bates Smart 249 Reed & Barnes 73 Melbourne Hospital 21 Melbourne Public Library see Public Library Melbourne Town Hall Bates Smart 219 Reed & Barnes 26, 42, 44, 44, 47 The Melburnian (Bates Smart) 272, 273 Menzies Hotel (Reed & Barnes) 29, 38, 39, 59 Merrett, Samuel 39 Methodist Church Canberra (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 122, 125 Frankston (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 193, 198 Metropolitan Fire Brigade Headquarters (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 222, 223 Metropolitan Gas Co. (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 68, 84, 86 Mid City Centre, Sydney (Bates Smart) 287, 294 Mildura (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 77, 78, 81, 82 Millar, John 34 Milledge, Jim 231, 231, 233, 246, 247, 256, 263, 267, 275, 278, 278, 280, 287, 296, 301 Mills, Peter 210, 212, 223 Mitcham apartments (Bates Smart) 294 MLC projects (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 141, 141, 142, 144, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 210, 212, 212 Mobil House (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 180, 181

Monash University Bates Smart 240 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon 182, 184, 185, 186, 240, 241 Mooroolbeek (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 77 Morgan, Llew 233 Multiplex, Sydney (Bates Smart) 272, 275 Municipal Offices, Sandringham (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 196, 198 Murdoch Magazines, Sydney (Bates Smart) 263, 265 Mutual Store (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 84, 86 National Institute of Circus Arts (Bates Smart) 246, 247, 249 National Museum (Reed & Barnes) 37, 38, 57, 102 Necropolis Crematorium, Springvale (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 236, 238 Netherby (Bates, Peebles & Smart) 116, 119 New Zealand Insurance (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 180, 181 Norman, Douglas 154 NSW Police Headquarters, Sydney (Bates Smart) 285, 287 O’Dwyer, Mark 236, 241 O’Connor, Stephen 236 Old Treasury Building (Bates Smart) 216, 219 161 Clarence Street, Sydney (Bates Smart) 294 Ord, Lecki 212 Ormond College, University of Melbourne Reed & Barnes 47, 51, 59 Reed, Smart & Tappin 87, 88 Parkes, E.S. 57, 59, 64 Pearce, James 256, 263, 278 Pearce, Martin 212 Pearce, Phillip 148, 154, 155, 205, 212, 213, 296, 299 Peebles, Norman G. 96, 98, 105, 109, 114, 122, 123, 125, 293. 296, 298 Peninsula Church of England School (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 188, 190 Peninsula Country Golf Club (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 198 Pennington, Alice 280 Pinkus, Kendra 280 Poole, Roger 210, 212, 222, 231, 249, 251, 272, 275, 278, 280, 296, 301 Presbyterian Ladies’ College Burwood (Bates Smart) 249 East Melbourne (Reed & Barnes) 47, 48 Price Waterhouse Centre Melbourne (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 231, 231 New Zealand (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 235 Princes Bridge 20, 21 Pritchard, Osgood 25 Proctor, Chris 263 Proximity Apartments, Sydney (Bates Smart) 274 Prudential Assurance (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 180 PTO Retail Stores (Bates Smart) 256, 258 Public Library (State Library of Victoria) Reading Room (Bates, Peebles & Smart) 102, 104, 105, 107, 109–10, 109, 110 Reed 18, 19, 20, 24, 25, 27, 29–32, 29, 31, 36 Reed & Smart 82 Reed, Smart & Tappin 82, 102 Purcell, Paul 216, 233, 236 Raftopoulos, Andrew 236, 270, 272, 280, 287 Raheen original Knowsley (Salway) 75, 76, 77 remaking (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 216, 242, 242 Ralton, Alan 141, 141, 145, 148, 154, 164, 167, 180, 184, 192, 293, 296, 298 Redcourt (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 77, 81 Redemptorist Church and Monastery, Wendouree (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 88, 94, 95 Redland Hospital (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 227 Reed, Joseph 19, 296, 297 architectural library 29, 65 assistants 25–6 background 18–20 Bank of NSW 24, 25, 25, 32, 32 competition success 24–5, 29 death 65 early years in Melbourne 20–4 Geelong Town Hall 23, 24 and government house competition 20, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42 legacy 68–9 offices 24, 25 personality 25–6, 29, 30, 65 Public Library 18, 20, 19, 24, 25, 27, 29–32, 29, 31, 36 Royal Society 24, 34, 35 style 26, 29, 37, 39 travel 36–7, 39, 65 University of Melbourne 24, 29, 34, 35, 36, 55, 57 Wesley Church 23, 24–5, 34, 35, 36 Reed & Barnes 18, 36–59, 65 Bank of Australasia 39, 56, 57 Baptist Church, Collins Street 37, 41, 41 Eastern Market competition 42, 47, 52, 53 Exhibition Building 53, 55, 57, 59 formed 36 Government House competition 20, 36, 37, 38, 39, 42 Independent Church 39, 42, 42, 47 interstate commissions 37, 39, 41 Melbourne Town Hall 26, 42, 44, 44, 47 New Zealand commissions 59 Presbyterian churches 47, 47 Royal Society 24, 34, 35 Scots Church 47, 47 suburban and country works 57, 58, 59 University of Melbourne 29, 34, 37, 47, 51, 52, 53, 60, 157 Wilson Hall 51, 52, 53, 157 Reed, Henderson & Smart Bank of Australasia 64


draughtsmen 68 Henderson schism 65, 68, 69–70 established 1883, 59 University of Melbourne 34, 59–64, 60, 69, 86, 87, 89, 91 Reed & Smart formation 69, 82 Public Library 82 University of Melbourne 34, 37, 69 Reed, Smart & Tappin churches 86, 88–9, 94 formed 82 houses 82, 86 Public Library 82, 102 St Patrick’s Cathedral 89, 94 Sacred Heart Cathedral, Bendigo 89, 90, 192, 213 staff 98 University of Melbourne 34, 60, 69, 82, 86, 87, 88, 97 Rhodes Waterside (Bates Smart) 294 Richardson, James 70 Richmond power station (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 97 Rijavec, Ivan 236 Rippon Lea (Reed & Barnes/Bates, Smart & McCutcheon/Bates Smart) 57, 58, 77, 221, 223 Robert Reid & Co. warehouse (Bates, Peebles & Smart) 98 Roberts, Graham 223 Robinson, Ron 223 Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 178, 180 Royal Children’s Hospital (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 236, 237 Royal Commission into the Public Works Department (1873) 25–6, 44 Royal Exhibition Building (see Exhibition Building) Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 190, 191, 192, 237, 241–2 Royal Oak Hotel (Hyndman & Bates) 72, 75 Royal Society of Victoria (Reed) 24, 34, 35 Royal Victorian Institute of Architects 36, 47, 53, 69, 88, 98, 102, 205 Royal Women’s Hospital (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 216, 224, 225 Sacred Heart Cathedral, Bendigo Bates, Smart & McCutcheon 192, 195, 213 Reed, Smart & Tappin 89, 90, 192, 213 Sacred Heart, St Kilda (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 64–5, 76, 77, 94 Salway, William 24, 32, 75, 77, 82 Sanders & Levy, Swanston Street (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 96, 97 Sangster, Alice 280, 287 Sargood, Frederick 57, 59 Sargood, King & Sargood warehouse (Reed & Barnes) 59, 84 Schroter, Shaun 280, 287 Scotch College East Melbourne (Reed & Barnes) 47, 48 Hawthorn (Bates Smart) 249 Scots Church, Collins Street (Reed & Barnes) 47, 47 Scott, Alan 164 Second Church of Christ Scientist, Camberwell (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 137, 139, 141, 145 Sedgefield, H.W. 70 Shaw, Mary Turner 154 Shenton (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 77, 79 Sleigh House (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 198, 198 Smart, Charles Pyne 98, 98, 114, 145, 154, 164, 296, 298 Smart, Francis J. 47, 59, 68, 69, 69, 72, 77, 86, 94, 98, 154, 292, 296, 297 Smart, Frederick 44 Smart, Malcolm 154 Smart, Tappin and Peebles 98, 102 Smith, Alex 154, 167 Smith, Arthur 39 Solly, Robert 25 South British Insurance (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 177, 180 South Pacific Centre (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 228, 231 Sports and Entertainment Limited, Sydney (Bates Smart) 258 St Dominic’s Priory, Adelaide (Tappin) 89, 95 St George’s, Carlton (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 89, 93, 94 St Hilda’s (BSM office) 221, 223, 275 St Joseph’s Church, Quarry Hill (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 192, 195 St Jude’s Anglican Church, Carlton (Reed & Barnes) 39, 42, 42 St Mark’s Fitzroy (Hyndman & Bates) 70 St Mary’s Catholic Church, Caulfield (Reed & Barnes) 58, 59 St Mirins (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 135 St Neot’s (Hyndman & Bates) 76, 77 St Patrick’s Cathedral (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 89, 94 St Paul’s Cathedral Reed, Henderson & Smart 63, 64 Reed, Smart & Tappin 86 Stafford, Robert 184, 212 Star City, Sydney (Bates Smart) 256, 256 State Library of Victoria see Public Library Stephenson, Arthur 123 Stevedores wool store refurbishment (Bates Smart) 265 Stonier, Cathy 233 Strachan, Harold 149, 153, 203, 210, 212 Summers, Charles 32, 39, 41 Supreme Court 21 Swallow & Ariel biscuit factory (Bates, Peebles & Smart) 118, 120 Sweetnam, Dennis 212 Swinburne University (Bates Smart) 246, 247 Sydney Cove Redevelopment Plan (UDPA) 210, 212 Sydneygate (Bates Smart) 275 Synchrotron project (Bates Smart) 294 Tappin, William Brittain 68, 69, 82, 88–9, 89, 98, 292, 296, 297 Tappin, Gilbert & Dennehy 88 Tasma Terrace (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 216, 217 Thanes (Reed, Henderson & Smart) 78, 79 Thomas, Peter 212, 223

Thomson Memorial Church, Terang (Reed, Smart & Tappin) 86, 89 360 Collins Street (Bates Smart) 270 Toyota National Sales and Marketing, Sydney (Bates Smart) 263, 264 Trades Hall, Carlton Reed & Barnes 29, 44, 48, 53, 69 Reed, Smart & Tappin 82 Trusteel hospital project (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 149, 153, 154 Turner, Frank 203, 213, 223 Twomey, David 59 University of Melbourne 32 Bates, Peebles & Smart 102 Bates, Smart & McCutcheon 53, 157–8, 158, 160, 162, 163, 180, 182, 240, 241 Reed 24, 29, 34, 35, 36, 55, 57 Reed & Barnes 29, 34, 37, 47, 51, 52, 53, 60, 157 Reed, Henderson & Smart 34, 59–64, 60, 69, 86, 87, 89, 91 Reed & Smart 34, 37, 69 Reed, Smart & Tappin 34, 60, 69, 82, 86, 87, 88, 97 see also Conservatorium of Music; Eakins, Hall; Ormond College; Wilson Hall University of NSW (Bates Smart) 262, 263 University of Sydney (Bates Smart) 278, 281 Urban Design and Planning Associates (UDPA) (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 210, 212 Vickers, Charles 32 Victoria Arcade (Reed & Barnes) 20, 20 Victorian Archive Centre 270 Victoria Barracks, Sydney (Bates Smart) 280, 281 Victoria Club (Reed & Barnes) 59 Victoria University of Technology (Bates Smart) 216, 219 Virginia (Reed & Barnes) 57 Vivian, Philip 249, 263, 267, 275, 275, 278, 278, 280, 287, 296, 301 WA Chemical Laboratories (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 226 Wallace office project (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 224 Walsh Bay NSW (Bates Smart) 223, 263, 265 Wardell, William 39 warehouses conversion, Richmond (Bates Smart) 272, 276 Flinders Building (Hyndman & Bates) 71, 72 Robert Reid & Co. (Bates, Peebles & Smart) 98 Sargood, King & Sargood (Reed & Barnes) 59, 84 Washington Embassy (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 202, 203 Watson, Luisa 280 Wesley Church, Lonsdale Street (Reed) 23, 24–5, 34, 35, 36 Wesley College 125 boathouse (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 188, 190, 192 Syndal campus (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 184, 186, 190 Wesleyan Church, Carlton (Reed & Barnes) 47 Western General Hospital (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 198, 224, 225 White, F.M. 24, 34, 36, 37 White, Ken 213 Wilson Dilworth (Bates Smart) 270 Wilson Hall, Melbourne University Bates, Smart & McCutcheon 53, 157–8, 158, 160, 162, 163 Reed & Barnes 51, 52, 53, 157 Wilson, Samuel 53 Wineglass, Emanuel 212, 223 Wirt, Mike 212, 223 Wodonga Hospital (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 153 Wood, Sydney 154, 165, 167, 212, 296, 299 Woodburn, Bill 154 Wrist Pastoral & Veterinary Institute (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 226 Yarra House (Reed & Barnes) 73, 75 Yarra Valley Church of England School (Bates, Smart & McCutcheon) 188, 190

311


Source Material AMP Limited Archives; p.40, 1; p.129, 4; Architectural Review; p.123, 4; Brian Andrews; p.62, 1; p.63, 2; p.91, 2; p.93, 4; p.95, 2, 3; ANZ Records Management & Archives; p.56, 2; Bates Smart Archives; p.18, 1; p.34, 1; p.35, 3; p.36, 1; p.37, 3; p.43, 4; p.49, 5; p.54, 3; p.55, 4, 5; p.57, 4; p.68, 1, 2; p.70, 1; p.78, 1; p.88, 1; p.97, 4; p.98, 1, 2; p.120, 1; p.121, 3; p123, 2, 3; p.125, 2, 3; p.126, 1; p.127, 2; p.128, 1, 2; p.129, 3; p.130, 1; p.131, 1; p.133, 2, 3; p.134, 1, 2, 3; p.136, 1, 2; p.137, 3, 4; p.138, 1; p.139, 2, 3; p.140, 1; p.141, 2, 3; p.143, 2; p.144, 1, 2; p.145, 3, 4; p.148, 2; p.149, 3; p150, 1, 2; p.151, 4; p.152, 1; p.153, 3, 4; p.154, 1, 2; p.155, 3, 4; p.156, 1; p.157, 2, 3; p.158, 1, 2; p.159, 3; p160, 2, p161, 4; p.162, 1, 2; p.163, 3, 4, 5; p.164, 1, 2; p.165, 3, 4, 5; p.166, 1, 2; p.167, 3; p.168, 1, 2; p.169, 3, 4, 5, 6; p.170, 1, 2, 3; p.171, 4; p.172, 1, 2, 3; p.173, 4, 5, 6; p.174, 1, 2, 3; p.175, 4, 5; p.176, 2; p.177, 3, 4; p.178, 1, 2; p.179, 3; p.180, 1; p.181, 2, 3; p.182, 1, 2; p.183, 3, 4; p.184, 1; p.185, 2, 3; p 186, 1, 2; p.187, 3, 4; p.188, 1, 2; p.189, 3, 4, 5; p.190, 1, 2, 3; p.191, 4, 5; p.192, 1, 2; p.193, 3; p.194, 1, 2; p.195, 3; p.196, 1, 2, 3; p.197, 4, 5; p.198, 1, 2; p.199, 3; p.200, 1, 2; p.201, 3; p.202, 1, 2; p.203, 3, 4; p.204, 1; p.205, 2, 3; p.206, 1, 2, 3; p.207, 4, 5, 6; p.209, 2, 3, 4, 5; p.210, 1, 2; p.211, 3, 4; p.212, 1, 2; p.213, 3, 4; images between pp.214–295; Richard Bell; p.153, 2; The Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne Archives; p.76, 1; p.92, 2; Philip Goad; p.34, 2; p.61, 3; p.87, 3; Melbourne Girls Grammar School Archives; p.72, 1; Multiplex Constructions; p.279, 2; Museum Victoria; p.54, 2; National Trust of Australia (Victoria); p.58, 2; The Royal Children’s Hospital Archive; p.25, 3; Royal Historical Society of Victoria; p.44, 1; Rowena Shew; p.41, 3; State Library of Victoria, Latrobe Picture Collection; p.19, 3, 4; p.20, 1; p.21, 2, 3; p.22, 1, 2; p.24, 1; p.25, 2; p.27, 1, 2; p.28, 1, 2; p.29, 3; p.30, 1; p.31, 2; p.33, 1; p.36, 2; p.37, 4; p.38, 1, 2; p.39, 3; p.41, 2; p.42, 1; p.43, 3; p.45, 3; p.46, 1; p.47, 2; p.48, 1, 2, 3; p.52, 1; p.53, 3; p.56, 1; p.57, 3; p.58, 1; p.59, 3, 4; p.64, 1; p.65, 2; p.79, 4; p.83, 2; p.84, 1; p.96, 2; p.102, 1, 2; p.105, 2; p.107, 3; p.109, 2; p.111, 1; p.119, 3; p.148, 1; State Library of Victoria, Latrobe Picture Collection; p.19, 3, 4; p.20, 1; p.21, 2, 3; p.22, 1, 2; p.24, 1; p.25, 2; p.27, 1, 2; p.28, 1, 2; p.29, 3; p.30, 1; p.31, 2; p.33, 1; p.36, 2; p.37, 4; p.38, 1, 2; p.39, 3; p.41, 2; p.42, 1; p.43, 3; p.45, 3; p.46, 1; p.47, 2; p.48, 1, 2, 3; p.52, 1; p.53, 3; p.56, 1; p.57, 3; p.58, 1; p.59, 3, 4; p.64, 1; p.65, 2; p.79, 4; p.83, 2; p.84, 1; p.96, 2; p.102, 1, 2; p.105, 2; p.107, 3; p.109, 2; p.111, 1; p.119, 3; p.148, 1; State Library of Victoria; p.71, 2; p.74, 1; p.75, 3, 4; p.77, 3; p.79, 3; p.80, 1, 2; p.82, 1; p.83; 3; p.84, 2; p.85, 3; p.90, 1; p.93, 3; p.94, 1; p.96, 3; p.117, 2; p.118, 1, 2; p.132, 1; p.133, 4; p.141, 2; The University of Melbourne Archives; p.50, 1, 2, 3; p.52, 2; p.60, 1; p.61, 2, 4; p.86, 1; p.87, 2; p.103, 3; The University of Melbourne Archives, Bates Smart Collection; p.23, 3; p.35, 4; p.43, 2; p.45, 2; p.47, 3; p.49, 4; p.51, 4; p.54, 1; p.73, 2; p.74, 2; p.76, 2; p.78, 2; p.81, 3, 4; p.89, 2, 3; p.92, 1; p.96, 1; p.99, 3; p.100, 1; p.101, 2, 3; p.103, 4; p.104, 1; p.106, 1; p.107, 2; p.108, 1; p.115, 1, 2; p.116, 1; p.121, 2; p.122, 1; p.124, 1; p.131, 3; p.135, 4; p.142, 1; p.151, 3; p.160, 1; p.161, 3; p.176, 1; p.208, 1 Photographers & Renders Chris Atkins; p.221, 4; p.247, 4, 6; p.248, 2, 3; p.272, 1; RH Armstrong; p.163, 3; Kata Bayer, Product K; p.259, 4; p.261, 4, 5; Patrick Bingham-Hall; p.34, 2; p.61, 3; p.87, 3; Reiner Blunck; p. 242, 1, p.243, 2, 3, 4; Florian Bolk; p.250, 1, 2, 3; Tyrone Branigan; p.260, 3; p.261, 6, 7; p.274, 1; p.282, 2; C3D Imaging Pty Ltd; p.292, 3; Peter Clarke; p.266, 2; p.268, 2; Commercial Photographic; p.127, 2; p.128, 1, 2; p.129, 3; p.130, 1; p.134, 1, 2, 3; p.136, 1, 2; p.137, 3, 4; p.138, 1; p.139, 2, 3; p.140, 1; p.141, 3; p.143, 2; p.144, 1, 2; p.145, 3, 4; p.150, 2; p.156, 1; p.165, 4; Emma Cross, Gollings Photography; p.227, 6; p.249, 1, 2; p.286, 1; p.287, 3; D Darian-Smith; p.163, 5; Max Dupain; p.146; p.165, 3, 5; p.166, 2; p.206, 3; p.207, 4, 5; Martin Farquharson; p.226, 2; Peter Fisher; p.57, 4; John Gollings; p.218, 1; p.222, 1; p.225, 4, 5; p.230, 1, 2, 3; p.240, 1, 3; p. 244; p.268, 1; p.269, 4; p.271, 3, 4; p.273, 4; Gollings & Pidgeon; p.286, 2; p. 288, 1; p.289, 2; p.290, 1; Richard Glover; p.274, 2, 3; Tim Griffith; p.235, 7; Peter Hyatt; p.219, 4; p.226, 1, 4; p.236, 1, 2; p.239; 4, 5, 6, 7; p.241, 4, 5; p.247, 5; p. 248, 1; Lucid Metal Architectural Rendering; p.291, 2; WA Jones & Co; p.163, 4; Shannon McGrath; p.259, 6; p.260, 1, 2; Ian McKenzie; p.35, 3; p.190, 1, 2; p.209, 4; Trevor Mein; p.232; 2; p.237, 3, 4, 5; p.238, 1, 2, 3; p.268, 3; p.269, 5; p.275, 5; p.277, 3, 4, 5; p. 278, 1; p.282, 1, 3; p.283, 4; Taras Mohamed, TKN Productions; p.259, 5; Becky Nunes; p.258, 1, 2; Sharrin Rees; p.256; 2, p.257, 3; p.259, 4, p.263, 4, 5; p.265, 5; p.275, 4; p.279, 3, 4; p.280, 1, 2; p.281, 3, 4; p.284, 1; p.285, 2, 3, 4; Willem Rethmeier; p.234, 1, 3; Martin Saunders; p.254, 1, 2; p.255, 4; Wolfgang Sievers; p.159, 3; p.160, 2; p.161, 4; p.162, 1, 2; p.167, 3; p.169, 3, 4, 5, 6; p.170, 1, 3; p.171, 4; p.172, 1; p.173, 5, 6; p.174, 1, 2; p.175, 4; p.176, 2; p.177, 3, 4; p.178, 1, 2; p.179, 3; p.180, 1; p.181, 2, 3; p.182, 1, 2; p.184, 1; p.185, 2, 3; p.186, 1; p.187, 3, 4; p.188, 1, 2; p.189, 3, 4; p.193, 3; p.196, 1, 2, 3; p.197, 4, 5; p.198, 1, 2; p.199, 3; p.200, 1, 2; p.209, 2, 3; Athol Smith; p.170, 2; John Squire; p.194, 1; p.216, 1; p.225, 3; p.228, 3; Ray Stringer; p.34, 1; p.36, 2; p.43, 4; p.49, 5; Mark Strizic; p.213, 3; Ronald Thomas; p.202, 1, 2; Tri-Graphic Pty Ltd; p.190, 3; Martin Washington; p.194, 2; p.195, 3


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