8 minute read
Lust for Lifestyle: Modern Adelaide Homes 1950–1965
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). 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.
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Words by Stuart Symons Photography courtesy of State Library of South Australia
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
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04 optimism of this generation radiates through personal photographs of family occasions and holidays, their inclusion in the exhibition enriching the stylized blackand-white architectural photos that are as alluring as those of Wolfgang Sievers or Max Dupain. Of the 15 houses profiled, several may be familiar to enthusiasts of this period: Langdon Badger’s house of 1957–58, designed by Badger with architectural drawings by Lawson, Cheesman, Doley and Partners (Unley Park’s answer to Philip Johnson’s Glass House), Robin Boyd’s 1956 Walkley House in North Adelaide and Peter Muller’s 1964 Michell House in Medindie. But what makes this exhibition such a revelation are the homes created by Adelaide’s architects and landscape designers who have been largely lost to history, along with their buildings: Don Thompson, Dickson and Platten, Brian Vogt, E. Caradoc Ashton (later trading as Woodhead) and Chappel himself. Concepts of access and accessibility, economy and excess, the house as a place for working, and living in the garden are all explored through the design of these houses and the stories of the people who lived in them. There are some cracking anecdotes included, too: the time Kym Bonython knocked on the door of Günter Niggemann’s house in Tennyson (Lawson, Cheesman and Doley, 1953) and bought it on the spot, hours before Niggemann departed Australia by ship. The luxury car collection – comprising an Aston Martin, a Ferrari, a Lamborghini and a Mercedes – accessed via a concealed driveway at the Billam House in North Brighton (John Chappel, 1963–64). And the exclusive, strictly wordof-mouth visits to Pam Cleland and Fred Thonemann’s Waterfall Gully home and garden (Don Thompson/John Chappel, 1952–65) enjoyed by A-listers including the Rolling Stones, Liberace, Sir Robert Helpmann and Rudolf Nureyev. Archival media clippings documenting these houses are also featured – highlighting the interdependence of the media and architects as advertisements of the new – alongside original floorplans, sketches, drawings and recent video interviews. James Curry, the State Library and contributors such as the University of South Australia’s Architecture Museum have created one of Australia’s most compelling exhibitions of modernist architecture – one that should raise appreciation of, and help reduce the demolition or irreversible vandalism of, this vulnerable era of buildings. Lust for Lifestyle: Modern Adelaide Homes 1950–1965 is on at the State Library of South Australia until 24 July 2022. slsa.sa.gov.au
03 House at Palmer Place, North Adelaide for Gavin Walkley by Robin Boyd (1956; photograph taken in 1959 by IngersonArnold Studios).
04 House at Montacute for Robert Clark by John Chappel (1961).
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Furminger
ONE TO WATCH
Builder-turned-architect Chris Furminger’s architectural sensibility is grounded in his knowledge of the making process and a fascination with material experimentation.
Words by Sheona Thomson Photography by David Chatfield
In January 2020, when architect Christopher Furminger established his Brisbane practice, he was oblivious – as we all were – to the upheaval that lay ahead for the world. Yet, despite the pandemic-driven challenges affecting the building industry, his innovative architecture has been making an impression. Before training as an architect, Chris worked as a builder and carpenter on a range of projects in Brisbane and Ipswich, including modular housing for Hutchinsons Builders. As an architecture student at the University of Queensland, he continued to work as a builder, but realized that he needed more direct experience, which led to three years of working with Plazibat Architects. Then, in 2017, John Ellway introduced Chris to James Russell, thinking their skill sets would go together well. At James Russell Architects (JRA), Chris contributed as a designer and builder, and JRA’s experimental approach to materials and construction methods became a touchstone for Chris, who used those formative experiences to refine his builder’s nous toward innovative and novel outcomes. Chris registered as an architect while working at JRA. As he started taking on his own projects, establishing his practice was a natural progression. Around this time, Chris also won the Dulux DIAlogue on Tour scholarship to travel to Singapore and Portugal, which included the opportunity to experience the influential and elegant work of architects he had long admired, Alvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura. Chris does his early thinking through hand drawing and collage before moving to three-dimensional modelling. “Collage is my favourite medium,” he says. “There is too much dogmatism about how a building should look.” As a concentrated representation of an idea rather than a realistic depiction, collage stretches the imagination toward possibilities, rather than settling with convention. A beautifully evocative collage of River House expresses Chris’s fascination with imagining how a building can “lock into the landscape” almost like a future ruin: it’s a provocation to consider what would endure after other layers have faded away. “River House is that, in a nutshell. All you read is form and shadow.” River House also shows Chris’s willingness to experiment with materials in both bold and restrained ways. “I like to have at least one inherent structural component as a keystone concept of a project,” he says. Located in Chelmer, River House is an entirely surprising reframing of an existing dwelling, achieved through the orchestration of a new formal and material language. “We experimented with concrete tilt-up panels and commercial building materials and systems for the project,” Chris explains. The efficient material is used to significant effect, bringing a monumentality to the house in its context and setting up new journeys and landscape connections within the site.
01 Brisbane-based architect Chris Furminger established his practice in 2020.
02 River House reworks an existing weatherboard house located in Chelmer.
03 Concrete tilt-up panels create a new entry sequence.
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Exploiting the tilt-up system, Chris incorporated plumbing into the concrete panels as part of the casting. “This required a lot of coordination and shop drawings, but it was an inventive way to minimize trades on site,” he says. “It’s just one efficient building material with no need for any applied finish apart from sealing. Taps and showerheads come directly out of the panels.” Describing his practice as “10 percent builders and 90 percent architects,” Chris intended to take on one building project per year, although it’s tough to build right now, with COVID-induced shortages in material and labour supply consuming time and effort from everyone in the industry, from contractors and designers to clients. One building project that is steadily progressing is his own home in the hilly inner suburb of Red Hill. Named the Double North House, it comprises two lightweight buildings organized around a courtyard. Chris is experimenting with “structural windows,” combining hardwood mullions and fixed glass to interlock interior with exterior, drawing daylight and views into the dwelling. While his knowledge and experience of materials and making enrich his architectural sensibility, Chris also expresses a great love of landscape. “We think the landscape is just as, if not more, important than the building. To live on that edge between outside and inside or spend time under a tree is better for me than being in a room.” furminger.co 05
04 River House plays with scale, shifting from monumental facade to modest domestic rooms.
05 The practice explores the importance of the threshold between architecture and landscape.
