Architectural history on the page
In
the daily bustle through the city streets, in our dash to get from
suburb A to suburb B, it is not often that we stop and become really
conscious of our surroundings – but they do tell a story.
Every major building, from the modern multistorey office towers to the old facades of banks and department stores and even those strangely eccentric Adelaide homes that leap out amid the mainstream sandstone and red brick – is a tale of architectural proportions.
This year UniSA’s Louis Laybourne Smith School of Architecture and Design celebrates 100 years of education and endeavour. Marking the anniversary, the School will mount a major exhibition, Architectural Preludes – One hundred Years of Student Drawings, September 26-October 6, featuring some of the early work of architects who went on to shape our city and make their mark nationally and internationally.
The exhibition provides an insight into the educational experience of young architects from the school’s earliest days as part of the School of Mines and also the history of the school as it moved through different philosophies of architectural design and education.
The Architectural Department was founded in 1906 by Louis Laybourne Smith, a young South Australian engineering graduate of the School of Mines and University of Adelaide, whose yearning for formal academic study in architecture led him to initiate his own course. It began as a group of colleagues who instructed one another in subjects including the history of architecture, building construction, and drawing. But, with assistance from his private practice partner Walter Hervey Bagot, Laybourne Smith’s vision of a dedicated architecture course was realised. Despite returning to private practice in 1914, Laybourne Smith remained Head of the School until 1951 when Gavin Walkley took over. He, in turn, remained Head until 1975.
The school was created very much in the British mould. This meant education revolved around architecture in the classical style and drawings focused on the aesthetics of proportion, with detailing and fully rendered images in three dimensions.
Accreditation for graduates from the school was a key issue in the early
days as the industry sought to gain
professional status and by 1910 the satisfactory completion of the
Testimonies of Study became a requirement for SA architects to be admitted
into the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), then the only
industry body operating in Australia.
By 1929 the Federal Council of Australian Architects established the Australian version of RIBA in the Royal Australian Institute of Architects – a first step in the move away from colonial sensibilities and a sign of the waning of British influence over architectural education. This was quickly followed by a romance with the American Beaux-Arts (Fine Arts) system of design education. Based firmly on the French Ecole des Beaux-Arts model, this system of teaching had the architect as artist firmly at its core.
This is reflected in student work of the period with designs of grand
monuments, Renaissance in flavour, with a clear emphasis on the role of
architect as well-to-do
professional providing services to the wealthy.
But as they say, war changes everything and WWII and its aftermath brought a new sense of the practical to architectural education – designs for military training centres and day care centres for children of mothers working in wartime manu-facturing were the order of the day. But despite the advent of modernism the Beaux-Arts influence did not fully recede until the 1960s and 1970s.
Postmodernism promulgated populist architecture from the 1980s and by the 1990s the Institute had become the University and computer aided design had made a powerful impact on student work. Feared as a threat to hand drawing it has found its place as an augmentation, rather than replacement to important fundamental drawing skills.
The exhibition offers a unique unfolding of the history of architecture education in the state – in drawings, plans and designs on display and in the impact that some of these students were to make to architecture in Australia.
Adelaide architect Keith Neighbour, who was principal architect on the Hilton International Hotel in Victoria Square, will open the exhibition. Some of his own student work will be on display.