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(b Holywood, County Down, Ireland, Jan 26, 1922).

Australian painter, printmaker, book designer, lecturer, collector, gallery director and publisher of limited edition artists’ books, of Irish decent. He worked as a draughtsman before entering war service in the British Admiralty from 1940 to 1949, including five years in Colombo, where he made sketching trips to jungle temples with the Buddhist monk and artist Manjsiro Thero. Between 1949 and 1951 Adams worked as an exhibition designer in London and studied wood-engraving with Gertrude Hermes in her evening class at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design). In 1951, after moving to Melbourne, Adams began a 30-year teaching commitment at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), where he instructed many of the younger generation of Australian printmakers, including George Baldessin and Jan Senbergs. A brief return to Britain and Ireland in 1957–8 provided experience with Dolmen Press, Dublin, which published his first book of engravings, ...

(Edward Cambrian)

(b Sydney, Feb 25, 1904; d Newcastle, NSW, Dec 8, 1979).

Australian architect. After graduation from the Sydney Technical College in 1929, Ancher travelled in Europe. He formed a partnership with Reginald Prevost in Sydney, 1936–9, and in 1946 established Sydney Ancher and Partners. Ancher’s most influential work, principally his early houses, combines the visual characteristics of the International Style with a sensitive response to Australia’s geography (see Sydney school). These glass-walled houses have flat or concealed low-pitched roofs, and sheltered terraces and courtyards that extend the open-planned interiors, providing convenient areas for outdoor living. Their white geometric forms contrast with and complement their bush settings, for example numbers 1, 2 and 4 Maytone Avenue, Killara, Sydney (1946–8). In later years Ancher experimented with broken roof forms and bright colours: his own houses at Coffs Harbour (1958), and Camden (1972), both NSW, illustrate these characteristics that were, in part, derived from a closer interest in the Australian rural vernacular....

(Hamilton)

(b Sydney, Oct 29, 1933).

Australian architect. He graduated from the University of Sydney in 1956 and from the Graduate School of Design, Harvard, in 1958. He established his practice in Toronto in 1962 and received early acclaim for the design of Scarborough College (1963), University of Toronto. This was followed by major commissions throughout North America, including Gund Hall (1968), Harvard, Cambridge, MA. Andrews’s North American buildings are characterized by heroic forms, usually in reinforced concrete, determined by the functional programme. Circulation patterns and geometry are the primary ordering devices in complexes of bold articulated units such as Scarborough College, University Student Residences (1965), Guelph, Ont., and the Port Passenger Terminal (1967), Miami.

These interests dominate the buildings he designed after his return to Sydney in 1969. The Cameron Offices (1976), Canberra, demonstrates his concern for the user and his belief that buildings are not independent entities but parts of the larger whole that is the city. However, the very containment of the urban enclave constituted by the Merlin Hotel (...

(b Bendigo, Victoria, Aug 16, 1865; d Melbourne, June 22, 1933).

Australian architect. He served articles with William Salway (1844–1902) in Melbourne and practised alone from the late 1880s to the early 1930s, with a circle of clients and friends drawn from varying levels of Melbourne society. As well as a commitment to the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, he aimed to create an Australian idiom and saw architecture as an art rather than a profession. His talent for sketching and his flair for writing on architecture were also recognized at an early stage in local building journals.

His earliest designs show the influence of H. H. Richardson, whom he greatly admired, but the Viennese Secession may have influenced the Springthorpe Memorial in Kew cemetery, Melbourne (1897). His well-known houses at 32, 34 and 38 The Eyrie, Eaglemont (1902–3), are free and decorative adaptations of a half-timbered, roughcast and Marseilles-tiled idiom fused with an Arts and Crafts approach, which he continued to develop in examples such as the Norman Macgeorge house at Alphington (...

(b Ireland, April 26, 1791; d Stanley, Tasmania, Dec 4, 1852).

Australian architect of Irish birth. He trained in the London office of the architect Charles Beazley and worked for five years for John Rennie, before spending eight years in architectural and engineering work in Ireland. In 1826 he was appointed Civil Engineer for Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), and he arrived at Hobart Town in 1827. He served as colonial architect as well as civil engineer for eleven years, during the first nine of which he was responsible for all government buildings, including military and penal works. His design for the Ordnance Stores, Hobart (1834), shows the austere and megalomaniac stamp of late 18th-century Neo-classicism, but only the less important sections were built, in 1834–8. His Customs House, Hobart (now Parliament House), begun in 1835 and completed by James Blackburn, shows the influence of the Greek Revival, and his monument to Lieutenant-Governor David Collins (1837–8) is Greek in the manner of John Soane. His churches show Regency and Tudor characteristics and are less sophisticated. Archer’s finest engineering work was the bridge on the Midland Highway at Ross, designed on principles derived from Rennie’s work, and enhanced by the fantastically carved voussoirs executed by convict stonemasons....

(b London, 1832 or 1833; d Christchurch, New Zealand, Feb 22, 1883).

New Zealand architect of English birth. In 1862, after a lengthy apprenticeship in Melbourne, Australia, Armson arrived in New Zealand. He spent two years (1862–4) in the engineering department of the Otago provincial government, Dunedin, and from 1866 to 1870 he practised in Hokitika on the West Coast. Christchurch, where he finally settled in 1870, nurtured the most productive phase of his career. Inspired by Victorian London’s palazzo-style clubs and Venetian Gothic office blocks, Armson transformed the commercial heart of Christchurch. In Hereford Street alone he designed 12 substantial buildings, but only the Fisher Building (1880), a wedge-shaped structure in Italian Gothic, survives. Elsewhere in Christchurch the former Library (1875), Boys’ High School (1879), Girls’ High School (1880), Anderson’s Shops, Borough Hotel and Butterworth’s Warehouse (1881) demonstrate his versatility in handling historicist vocabularies, while the Loan and Mercantile Company’s Store (...

(Ross)

(b Dunedin, 1898; d Toronto, 1982).

Canadian teacher, writer and historian of New Zealand birth. He studied architecture in New Zealand, and after service in World War I, he went to the University of Liverpool in 1919 as the Lord Kitchener National Memorial Scholar. He then emigrated to Canada (1923) and began to teach at the University of Toronto, where he spent almost his entire professional life. Arthur was an ardent supporter of the Modern Movement but also promoted an awareness of Canada’s historic colonial buildings, which were derived from the English Georgian style: the simple lines and sparing ornament typical of such buildings dating from the late 18th century, as described in his book The Early Buildings of Ontario (1938), seemed to anticipate the goals of modern architecture. He was the architect for the restoration in 1937 of St Andrew’s Church, Niagara-on-the-Lake, and became a pioneer of the conservation movement in Ontario. His survey of Toronto architecture, ...

(Charles)

(b Christchurch, July 15, 1940; d Wellington, Jan 16, 2015).

New Zealand architect. He studied at the University of Auckland School of Architecture (1961–3) and joined Structon Group Architects, Wellington, in 1963, becoming a partner in 1965. In 1968 he formed Athfield Architects with Ian Dickson (b 1949) and Graeme John Boucher (b 1944). An innovative designer who has continually questioned the orthodoxy of Modernism, Athfield established his reputation with small-scale domestic buildings during the 1970s. Additive plans, fragmented forms and allusions to the traditions of New Zealand colonial architecture characterize designs such as Athfield house, Wellington (begun 1968), and Cox house, Wellington (1975). Often clinging to precarious sites, his houses respond directly to the landscape. Athfield works closely with clients, often involving them in the construction process. In 1976 he won first prize in the International Competition for the Urban Environment of Developing Countries, Manila, Philippines, with a community-based project for rehousing Manila slum dwellers....

(b San Biagio di Callalta, nr Treviso, May 19, 1939; d Melbourne, Aug 9, 1978).

Australian sculptor and draughtsman . After spending his childhood in Italy, he moved to Australia (1949). From 1958 to 1961 he was at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He travelled to London in 1962, where he studied printmaking at the Chelsea School of Arts. He then travelled to Milan and studied sculpture under Marino Marini at the Accademia di Belle Arti. After his return to Melbourne, he had his first one-man show of sculptures and etchings at the Argus Gallery in 1964. Many of his etchings of this period and later included circus characters and were inspired by the films of Ingmar Bergman and Luis Buñuel. Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), for example, has the violent distortion of the human figure characteristic of Baldessin’s series Stars and Sawdust and Stars and Sawdust II (1963; T. Baldessin priv. col., see 1983 exh. cat., pl. 9). His early sculptures also had distorted and tormented figures, as in ...

(b Almerclose, Scotland, Oct 17, 1827; d Sydney, Dec 17, 1904).

Australian architect of Scottish birth. He studied at the School of Design in London and emigrated to Sydney in 1854. After working for Edmund Blacket, he joined the New South Wales Colonial Architect’s Office as a clerk of works in 1860; in 1862 he was appointed Colonial Architect, responsible for all public buildings in the state except railway structures and schools. The period 1860 to 1890 was one of expansion, and under Barnet’s leadership more than 1000 new public buildings were erected. Strongly influenced by the work of Charles Robert Cockerell, Barnet developed an identifiable ‘house style’ with imposing Italianate designs that were well suited to their official status. His major works in Sydney, including the Australian Museum (1864), the arcaded General Post Office (1866–86), the Lands Department (1876–90) with an onion-domed clock–tower and the Customs House (1885) in trabeated classical style, were landmarks that changed a provincial town into a Victorian city. On a smaller scale, his court houses and post offices are still distinguished features of many country towns. An outstanding organizer, he designed and built the huge Garden Palace (...

Australian architectural partnership formed in 1926 by Edward A(rthur) Bates (b 1865; d 1931), Charles P. Smart (d 1950) and Osborn McCutcheon (b 1899), successors (after a number of changes in the composition and name of the firm) to Reed, Henderson and Smart, the firm originally set up by Melbourne’s most prominent 19th-century architect, Joseph Reed. The earliest building of note for the partnership was the AMP Society building (1928), which was awarded the Street Architecture Medal of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects. Its first major building outside Victoria was the MLC Assurance building, Sydney (1935) and it was not until after World War II that the practice evolved to become one of the two largest corporate offices in Melbourne and pioneered curtain-walling in Australia with the MLC building in Perth (1955) and ICI House (1958...

(Jamieson)

(b Christchurch, Aug 13, 1925).

New Zealand architect. He trained at the University of Auckland School of Architecture (1943; 1946–8) and worked in Christchurch from 1952. He was an intuitive designer with a strong belief in the symbolic value of traditional forms. The bold sculptural forms of his Christchurch–Lyttelton Road Tunnel Authority Building (1964) had a liberating effect on New Zealand architecture of the 1960s and indicated a rejection of orthodox modernism. This freedom from convention characterized his subsequent work, from the Manchester Unity Building (1965), Christchurch, a vigorously modelled multi-storey office building, to his Queen Elizabeth II Park, Pool and Stadium Complex (1971–4), Christchurch, in which structure and services are clearly expressed as brightly coloured sculptural forms.

Beaven’s admiration for European vernacular housing is revealed in Habitat (1971), Wellington, a medium-density housing cluster. The design of the Chateau Regency Hotel (1975), Christchurch, was directly inspired by the city’s Victorian Gothic architecture and subverts the expectations of the conventional style of an international modern hotel. He worked closely with his builders, and his designs continued to develop during the construction process, a factor that contributes to the vigour and ebullience of his work. From ...

(Fielder)

(b Melbourne, 1892; d April 17, 1986).

Australian architect. He was the first recipient of Melbourne University’s diploma in architecture, which had been instituted in 1906 but not brought immediately into operation: he completed the course in 1913 and the diploma was granted two years later. In 1916 he entered the office of American architect Walter Burley Griffin, as his first Australian assistant. While with him, Billson designed his own father’s house (1918) in Toorak in a chunky manner reminiscent of Griffin’s American work and much influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright; and the Margaret Armstrong house (1919), Caulfield. A year later Billson and a fellow employee, Roy Lippincott, were successful in the competition for the Arts building (completed 1926; for illustration see Auckland), University of Auckland, New Zealand. Lippincott left for New Zealand late in 1921, and Billson resigned from Griffin’s office in 1922 but remained in Melbourne. In 1922 Billson and Lippincott received an honourable mention for their entry in the ...

(b Upton, Essex, 1803; d Melbourne, March 3, 1854).

Australian architect of English birth. He was employed in London as an inspector for the commissioners of sewers for Holborn and Finsbury, until his transportation to Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), with his wife and daughter in 1835, after forging a cheque. He was immediately employed in the Department of Roads and Bridges and was responsible for a great proportion of the colony’s road building, surveying and engineering work. When the department was merged into the Department of Public Works (1839), he began designing important government buildings; he was also able to operate privately in partnership with James Thjomsonn, as both architects and building contractors.

Although his buildings show the influence of John Claudius Loudon, Blackburn was also a powerful and innovative designer in his own right and was the first major exponent of the Picturesque in the Australian colonies (e.g. the Italianate extension of Rosedale of ...

(Thomas)

(b London, Aug 25, 1817; d Sydney, Feb 9, 1883).

Australian architect, of English birth. He was the son of James Blacket, a London cloth merchant, and he initially worked in his father’s office and in a linen mill in Yorkshire before becoming a surveyor for the Stockton and Darlington Railway, where he must have obtained a knowledge of building. Blacket also sketched and measured old buildings in his spare time. In 1842 he moved to Sydney, where he obtained an appointment as a ‘valuator’ and perhaps also as an inspector of buildings. He received his first architectural commission in 1843 (All Saints, Singleton; destr.) and went on to become one of the leading architects in New South Wales in the mid-19th century. Appointed Diocesan Architect by 1847, he is known particularly for his Gothic Revival churches, mostly traditional in manner, of which he designed more than 50. Among them are simple country churches (e.g. at Berrima, Picton, Greendale and Wollombi); elegant city buildings (e.g. at Sydney: St Philip’s, ...

(b Middlesex, c. 1760; d New South Wales, 1804).

Australian architect of English birth. He was probably no more than a master-builder’s assistant by 1785 when he was sentenced to transportation. In January 1788 he arrived with the first fleet in the new colony of New South Wales at Port Jackson, Sydney, and as an experienced brickmaker he was immediately put in charge of the brickworks at Brickfield Hill, producing the first bricks for the colony three months after arrival. He became Australia’s first architect when Governor Arthur Phillip put him in charge of permanent building projects, including the first Government House (completed 1789; destr.), erected on a hill overlooking Sydney Cove. This two-storey building was the first in the colony to have architectural pretensions; built of brick with stone dressings and a hipped roof, it had glazed sash windows brought from England and a projecting gabled frontispiece, the central doorway surrounded by glazed sidelights and a semicircular fanlight. Although simple, the building embodied the principles of Georgian design in which Bloodworth was well grounded. Later extended and constantly under repair, it served as Government House for 56 years. Other buildings designed by Bloodworth in ...

(b London, Nov 13, 1905; d Hobart, Jan 1, 1985).

Australian architect of English birth. In 1918 Blythe obtained a scholarship to attend the London County Council School of Building (later known as the Brixton School of Building). Blythe’s family moved to Tasmania in 1921, where he continued his architectural training at the Hobart Technical College (HTC) while articled to local architect William Rudolph Waldemar Koch. Between 1925 and 1930 Blythe worked for the Electrolytic Zinc Company and the Public Works Department (PWD), Tasmania. In 1927 Blythe received an honourable mention for his Beaux-Arts inspired entry in the Australian Canberra War Memorial Competition.

Towards the end of 1930 Blythe returned to London. In 1933 he was awarded second place in the Building Centre Cottage Competition and in 1934 he returned to Tasmania to a position with the PWD. Between 1935 and 1949 Blythe designed all the principal PWD buildings in Tasmania. Of particular note are the many schools that Blythe designed, including the Ogilvie High School (...

(b Le Mans, Nov 1, 1908; d Brisbane, Australia, July 7, 1995).

French architectural historian, active also in America. Bony was educated at the Sorbonne, receiving his agregation in geography and history in 1933. In 1935, converted to art history by Henri(-Joseph) Focillon, he travelled to England under a research grant from the Sorbonne, after which time he became Assistant Master in French at Eton College (1937–9 and 1945–6). He returned to France in 1939 as an infantry lieutenant in World War II in the French Army, was taken as a prisoner of war and spent the years 1940–43 in an internment camp in Germany. After the war he returned to England, first to Eton, then as Lecturer in the History of Art at the French Institute in London (1946–61), Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art (1948–58), and Slade Professor of Fine Art at St John’s College, Cambridge (1958–61). From 1961 to 1962...

Term apparently coined by Robin Boyd in Australia’s Home (1952) and loosely applied to highly ornate architecture in a classical idiom that was fashionable in the eastern states of Australia between the late 1870s and early 1890s. The style was made possible by, and is to some extent an expression of, the financial boom that followed the discovery of gold in 1851. The climax of the boom was in the 1880s in Victoria, where the richest goldfields were located. The buildings most commonly associated with the Boom style are the richly decorated Italianate villas and speculative terrace houses of Melbourne. The English picturesque Italianate fashion had been introduced to Australia by the early 1840s but only reached its sumptuous apogee in Victoria in the late 1880s. The architecture is characterized by asymmetrical towers, balustraded parapets, polygonal bay windows and round-arched openings and arcades, though the terrace houses often lack the more elaborate features. The buildings were usually stuccoed and enriched with mass-produced Renaissance-style elements in cast cement. They frequently incorporate cast-iron filigree verandahs, prefabricated in sections. A typical stuccoed villa is ...

(b Melbourne, 1926; d Melbourne, Nov 2000).

Australian architect. He began his architectural career at the age of 15 as office boy to Best Overend; in 1950, while completing his architectural thesis at Melbourne University, he was briefly employed by Harry Seidler. He entered practice as a protégé of Robin Boyd in association with Peter McIntyre. All three experimented in 1953 with the parabolic concrete ‘Ctesiphon Arch’ (see Boyd family §(1)), the patent for which was held by a local building contractor. Meanwhile Borland and McIntyre, together with John and Phyllis Murphy, in 1952 won the competition for the Olympic Swimming Pool, Melbourne, and in 1953 formed a partnership that continued for three years. The pool was enclosed in a dramatic structure. Raked tiers of stands on either side were tied together at their highest points by elongated lozenge-shaped roof trusses. The structure was stabilized by ties running from the same points down to anchors in the ground. After ...