Adelaide’s romance with New York style
by Charlotte Knottenbelt
When compared with larger cities, Adelaide may not be known for its skyscrapers, but the rise of the multistorey building during the 1920s and ‘30s had a major impact on the city’s identity.
From the Gothic-inspired seven storey Lister House on North Terrace (now known as Tobin House and used as UniSA student accommodation) to the Savings Bank Building on King William Street (immortalised via piggy banks distributed to baby boomers at birth), the multistorey buildings in many ways marked a coming of age for Adelaide during the interwar years.
Funded by a divisional research performance fund grant, a group of researchers from UniSA’s Louis Laybourne Smith School of Architecture and Design is currently looking at just what kind of an impact the buildings had. The team, including Dr Christine Garnaut, Dr Julie Collins, and doctoral candidates Alexander Ibels and Susan Collins, is delving into the school’s architecture archive for records on the evolution of Adelaide’s interwar tall buildings.
“At the time there were two ways that a city could go,” says Dr Garnaut. “Either follow the New York example, where skyscrapers were used to clearly define the CBD, or pursue the Parisian trend for a more sprawling city centre of low-rise buildings.
“In line with the cities in the eastern states, Adelaide tended towards the New York high-rise style. There was a sense that tall buildings helped differentiate the city from the suburbs,” Dr Garnaut says.
“Before World War One there were a lot more residential two storey buildings in the city, particularly on North Terrace, but many of those buildings were demolished to make way for the tall buildings.
It’s interesting now to see the pendulum swinging back – at least in some areas – in favour of inner-city residential dwellings.”
The research team hopes that the project will not only raise awareness of an important era in South Australian architecture, but also of the materials held in the nationally significant architecture archive.
Dr Garnaut says a recent exhibition of the archive’s architectural drawings of Adelaide’s tall buildings attracted considerable attention at the SA State History Conference, where they also presented a paper on their research.