Lust for Lifestyle: Modern Adelaide Homes 1950–1965
This Adelaide exhibition offers a spectacular insight into the emergence and evolution of modernism in South Australia, charting the architects who designed the state's legacy of modern houses, and the well-heeled clients who commissioned them. Words by Stuart Symons Photography courtesy of State Library of South Australia
EXHIBITION
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01 Perspective sketch of a house on The Esplanade, North Brighton, for R. J. Billam by John Chappel (1963). 02 House at Cross Road, Unley Park, designed by owner Langdon Badger, architectural drawings by Lawson, Cheesman, Doley and Partners (1958). 02
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EXHIBITION
In 1956, Adelaide’s architectural imagination was flying. Bates Smart McCutcheon’s MLC Building was rising above Victoria Square as the city’s first International Style highrise, and as one of Australia’s first buildings to use full curtain wall construction. Robin Boyd’s Walkley House, with its striking glass box design, defied its heritage surroundings in conservative North Adelaide. And Adelaide’s own young meteors – including Brian Claridge, Newell Platten, Keith Neighbour and John Morphett – publicly announced their challenge to orthodoxy with an exhibition of 12 temporary modernist buildings and art in Botanic Park at the Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ Sixth Australian Architectural Convention. Emboldened by increasing public acceptance of modern design, The Advertiser appointed young architect John Chappel as the newspaper’s official architecture correspondent that year. Over the following three decades, Chappel wrote weekly columns, accompanied by glamorous depictions of contemporary residential architecture, that stirred consumer aspirations for the good life of a modern family home. The State Library of South Australia’s exhibition Lust for Lifestyle: Modern Adelaide Homes 1950–1965 is the direct beneficiary of Chappel’s remarkable archive, accumulated over those 30 years – a trove of photographs and plans occupying 2.5 metres of archival storage that documents his own projects and those submitted by 97 architecture firms, most of them local, seeking coverage in his weekly reports. Lovingly curated and meticulously researched by James Curry (School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Adelaide) and the State Library, the exhibition is a spectacular immersion into some of Adelaide’s finest modernist houses, and offers an insight into the lives of their well-heeled and socially mobile owners and the new breed of pace-setting architects. In one of five short films that accompany the exhibition, James lays out his intent: “The exhibition is structured around an argument. It’s not just a list of buildings. We wanted to say more than ‘Adelaide had modern architecture as well.’” The result is an eye-popping exploration of the ways that modern living was depicted during the era, inspiring many of Adelaide’s social elites to leave or demolish their traditional family home to commission or move into a modern, architect-designed home. The display of homeowners who made that leap is a dazzling who’s who of mid-century Adelaide society, including the Michell wool family, interior design and furniture impresario Langdon Badger, pioneering lawyer Pam Cleland, intellectual Robert Clark, Austrian consul Tony Nelson, and speedway, jazz and art-collecting bon vivant Kym Bonython. The postwar confidence and
