Importing Expertise: Australian-US Architects and the Large-scale, 1945–1990

Abstract

After World War II, Australia turned – politically, socially and culturally – more and more to its strongest ally across the Pacific, the United States of America. In architecture, this turn was not only aesthetic but also based on the deliberate gaining of expertise to achieve large-scale projects like factories, skyscrapers and international chain hotels. Australian architects actively sought out American corporate firms, forming associations that would help their practices capture ever-larger commissions as part of Australia’s galloping US-styled post-war urbanisation. This acquisition of ‘expertise’ was one way, a relatively uncritical but focused business strategy and it was a habit that continued into the 1970s.

While many Australian architects were designing buildings for Pacific nations and Australian presence in Southeast Asia was growing, no Australians were designing or building in the United States outside the completion of the Australian Chancery in Washington DC (1968). The exception was Canadian-Australian architect John Andrews, whose ‘expertise’ and reputation were key to his 1969 return to Australia. This paper charts the trans-Pacific relationship between Australian and American architecture during the Cold War as one part of a much longer connection that had been proceeding since the early nineteenth century.

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the very helpful suggestions made by the referees, who reviewed this paper. Thanks also to John Andrews, Roger Poole, John Fowler, Robert Bruce, Howard Tanner and the late Barry Patten for their recollections.

Notes

1. The phrase “all the way with LBJ,” famous in Australia, comes from a speech given by Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt (1908–1967) in front of the US President Lyndon B. Johnson in Washington DC in late June 1966. The speech was reported in the Australian on 1 July 1966. The key sentence was quoted as: “And so, sir, in the lonelier and perhaps even more disheartening moments which come to any leader, I hope there will be a corner of your mind and heart which takes cheer from the fact that you have an admiring friend, a staunch friend that will be all the way with LBJ.” The last phrase, much quoted thereafter, was to typify Australia’s increased involvement in the Vietnam conflict and also was the target of anti-war demonstrations in subsequent years.

2. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1960).

3. Peter Vernon, “Shopping Towns Australia,” Fabrications 22, no. 1 (2012): 102–21.

4. For example, the notion of colonies as a setting for global practice underpins the overall thesis of G. A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c. 1840–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). See also Julie Willis, “Architectural Movements: Journeys of an Inter-colonial Profession,” Fabrications 26, no. 2 (2016): 158–79.

5. Tall Buildings, Australian Business Going Up: 1945–1970, Jennifer Taylor, ed. (Sydney: Craftsman House, 2001).

6. Leisure Space: The Transformation of Sydney, 1945–1975, Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan, eds. (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2014).

7. Other important overviews of the US-influenced development of the motel in Australia include Simon Reeves, “Australia’s First Motels,” The Australian Motor Owners Journal 10, no. 2 (2009), 11–15; and “Australia’s Early Motel Boom,” The Australian Motor Owners Journal 11, no. 1 (2010), 15–20. See also Philip Goad, “A Short Stay: The Motel and Australian Architecture,” in Motel, ed. Amor Connors (Melbourne: Melbourne School of Design, The University of Melbourne, 2014), 9–14. Exhibition catalogue.

8. See Shirley Daborn, “A City within the Suburbs: Gender, Modernity and the Suburban Shopping Centre,” PhD diss., University of New South Wales, 2009; Peter Vernon, “American Know How and the Myer Emporium: The Architecture of an Australian Department Store and its American Influences, 1901–1968,” MPhil diss., University of Melbourne, 2010; and Janina Gosseye and Peter Vernon, “Shopping Towns Australia, 1957–1967: From Reformist Figure of Collectivity to Profit-Driven Box of Gold,” in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 33, Gold, ed. Annmarie Brennan and Philip Goad (Melbourne: SAHANZ, 2016), 10 pp.

9. Scholarship on American influences on nineteenth-century Australian architecture is substantial, ranging from works such as Myra Dickman Orth, “The Influence of the ‘American Romanesque’ in Australia,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 34, no. 1 (March 1975): 3–18, to recent works such as Paul Hogben, “Explaining the Equitable’s Australian Buildings,” in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 33, Gold, ed. Annmarie Brennan and Philip Goad (Melbourne: SAHANZ, 2016), 10 pp. A publication that addresses a range of papers dealing with Australian-US connections is The Pacific Connection: Proceedings of a Seminar at the University of Melbourne, Miles Lewis, ed. (Melbourne: Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, 2009).

10. For example, Jack Hennessy (1887–1956), of Hennessy & Hennessy has been described as establishing “Australia’s first international practice.” See Noni Boyd and Julie Willis, “Hennessy & Hennessy,” in The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture, ed. Philip Goad and Julie Willis (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 325–26.

11. For example, Australian architects who practised in Australia and Asia in the nineteenth century included London-born William Salway (1844–1902), who worked mainly in Melbourne, but also in Hong Kong, 1868–1876 and Geelong-born Arthur Purnell (1878–1964), who worked in Guangzhou from 1900 to 1910 before returning to Melbourne.

12. This paper draws upon previous research by the author but here it has been reframed within a different argument and to different ends. See Philip Goad, “Moderate Modernism, 1945–77,” in Bates Smart: 150 Years of Australian Architecture, ed. Philip Goad (Fishermans Bend: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 162–75, 198–210, 212–3; “BHP House, Melbourne,” in Tall Buildings, ed. Taylor, 261–81; and “SOM in Australia,” in The Pacific Connection, ed. Lewis, 204–19.

13. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Architects, USA, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1950, Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 18, no. 1 – catalogue of an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art from 26 September to 5 November 1950. This was MoMA’s first exhibition of work by a contemporary architectural firm.

14. Key immediate post-war SOM buildings included the Cincinnati Terrace Plaza Hotel (1948), Mt Zion Hospital, San Francisco (1948–1950), H J Heinz Vinegar Plant, Pittsburgh (1949–1952) and most importantly, Lever House, New York (1951–1952) designed by Gordon Bunshaft in the New York office, a building which came to epitomise glazed curtain-wall high-rise office design of the 1950s.

15. Carole Herselle Krinsky, Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; New York: The Architectural History Foundation, 1988), 18.

16. Michael F. Page, An Architectural Apex (South Yarra: Buchan Laird International, 1990), 98.

17. Page, An Architectural Apex, 98.

18. For example, staff members Max Deans, Ian McCowan, Llew Bawden and Craig Laird, who worked for SOM in Portland, Oregon.

19. The firm had already designed a vast oil refinery complex for Shell at Geelong (1952–1954) and was the logical choice for its new headquarters.

20. John B Rodgers graduated in architecture from Princeton University in 1926 and undertook coursework at the Bauhaus, Dessau in 1930. He was a partner of Rodgers & Priestley, Architects, Chicago and New York from 1934 until 1942. Rodgers and his partner, William Turk Priestley, were fluent in German and both served as translators to German architect Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe when he emigrated to the United States in 1937.

21. The expertise gained at Shell House led to further high-rise commissions for BLB in Melbourne most notably the freestanding ACI House, Bourke Street (1964–1966), and the Melbourne Stock Exchange, Collins Street (1968), both of which employed curtain wall façades of prefabricated concrete window units.

22. For example, in the first 10 years of the N.C.D.C.’s operation, the following projects were completed: Kings Avenue Bridge (1962); Commonwealth Avenue Bridge (1963); Lake Burley Griffin (1963); Royal Australian Mint (1965); Australian Defence Offices, Russell (1959–1966) and the National Library of Australia (1968).

23. Designed by Richard M. Ure in 1952 and opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 16 February 1954, the Australian–American War Memorial’s octagonal column was topped by an eagle with wings upswept in a victory sign.

24. Page, An Architectural Apex, 114.

25. See Philip Goad, “The Influence of the Case Study House Program in Australia,” UME, 14 (2002): 28–9.

26. In his trip (29 December 1950–14 March 1951), McConnell made visits to the following Heinz plants and/or warehouses in the following chronological order: Berkeley; Tracy; Pittsburgh; New York [warehouse]; Montreal [warehouse]; Leamington; Wallaceburgh; Pittsburgh; Chambersburgh; Medina; Fremont; Pittsburgh; Harlesden [UK]; and Standish [UK]. Each visit lasted one or two days. “Report on the visit of J H McConnell to the United States of America and Europe, January–March 1951, Relative to the H J Heinz Co. Expansion Program,” 72 pp., typewritten carbon copy [S270/3/1], 3–4. Held by Architecture Museum, University of South Australia. I am especially grateful to the Archive’s curator, Julie Collins, for giving me access to this material.

27. In the post-war years, Heinz expanded its operations, opening or expanding plants in Australia (1951–1955), Holland (1957), United Kingdom (1957), Venezuela (1960), Japan (1962) and Italy (1963).

28. For example, McConnell met Heinz staff responsible for engineering, transportation and warehousing and quality control.

29. McConnell, “Report,” 62.

30. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill also designed one of the warehouses at the Medina plant, and the sales office and warehouse in New York. McConnell, “Report,” 56, 63.

31. Interestingly, Hassell & McConnell’s Heinz Factory, Dandenong (1951–1955) was built before the huge Heinz factory at Kitt Green, UK (1957), designed by J. Douglas Mathews & Partners in collaboration with SOM, which was to become the largest food processing plant in Europe.

32. For example, Balm Paints, Clayton (1958), Dandenong Bakeries, Dandenong (1963), McPhersons Ltd, South Melbourne (1964) and the Lower Yarra Crossing Authority building, Melbourne (1974).

33. Another architect who brought US expertise to Hassell & McConnell was Adelaide-trained architect John Morphett (1932–2016), who left the firm in 1955 to pursue graduate studies at MIT (1956–1957), then worked for The Architects Collaborative (TAC) in Boston, before moving in 1960 to TAC’s Rome office to head the design team for the University of Baghdad. He returned to Adelaide in 1962 and re-joined Hassell, McConnell & Partners. In 1970, on Jack McConnell’s retirement, Morphett restructured the office along the lines of Walter Gropius’s TAC concept of an interdisciplinary collaborative practice. He retired from the firm in 1997.

34. Cross-Section 99 (January 1961); “Plans Ready for £19m Project,” Age, 10 August 1960; Robert Freestone, Urban Nation: Australia’s Planning Heritage (Collingwood: CSIRO Publishing, 2010), 201.

35. Cedric Turner quoted in John Gunn, High Corridors: Qantas 1954–1970 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988), 120.

36. SOM had also achieved earlier international attention for Gordon Bunshaft’s Istanbul Hilton Hotel, Istanbul (1951–1955), designed in association with Turkish architect Sedad H. Eldem.

37. The reason for the shape was to ensure that rooms on the inner curve of the horseshoe would not be too close to the street and as a precaution against overlooking from new buildings which might be built on sites around the hotel in the future. See Buzz Kennedy, Sydney’s Own: 25 years of the Sheraton Wentworth (Double Bay: Focus Books, 1991), 42.

38. The awning’s sub-contractor was Ralph Symonds Ltd and its fabricators, Metafab P/L developed special heat pressure techniques to laminate and bond copper sheets to huge sheets (15.25 × 2.75 m) of plywood. The awning was so large and even too big for trucking through Sydney’s street that it had to be delivered and assembled in sections. Kennedy, Sydney’s Own, 41. Industrialist Ralph Symonds was a key player in a number of major post-war structures involving plywood and the bonding of metals to plywood as a roofing material, such as “Alumply,” used on the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne (1956–1959). Symonds also worked closely with Jørn Utzon in the early 1960s on the development of huge wing-like plywood mullion for the Sydney Opera House, a concept that did not reach fruition following Utzon’s resignation in 1966.

39. The original interiors have seen been entirely removed and the interior refurbished. Pers. comm. Howard Tanner, 20 November 2008. Tanner also recalled that architect and architectural historian James Broadbent worked briefly for Borkenhagen in Sydney. See also Graham Jahn, Sydney Architecture (Sydney: Watermark Press, 1998), 169.

40. Paul Hogben, “Double Modernity: The First International Hotels,” in Hogben and O’Callaghan, Leisure Space, 72.

41. George Gordon Fuller, “A Design System Applied to International Terminal Hotels in Australia: With Emphasis on Capital City Requirements,” MArch diss., University of New South Wales, 1966. See Hogben, “Double Modernity,” 68 and note 74.

42. Special issue of Building, March 1967, devoted to the design and construction of the Wentworth Hotel.

43. The result was that between 1952 and 1959, MLC built BSM-designed office buildings in Geelong (1953), Ballarat (1954), Brisbane (1955, extended 1959), Wollongong (1956), Adelaide (1957), Perth (1957), North Sydney (1957), Newcastle (1957), Shepparton (c. 1959) and Canberra (1959).

44. In essence this meant that given the “dry” nature of the design, interior fit-out and external cladding could occur at the lower levels, while the steel frame was simultaneously being erected at the upper levels.

45. A detailed account of the MLC projects in Australia in the 1950s can be found in Allan Ogg, “MLC Buildings,” in Taylor, Tall Buildings, 164–73.

46. See Goad, “Moderate Modernism,” 164. See also Philip Goad and Julie Willis, “Invention from War: A Circumstantial Modernism for Australian Architecture,” Journal of Architecture 8, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 41–62.

47. The MLC commissions were boosted by BSM’s appointment in 1951 of structural engineer Harvey Brown, who was instrumental in the firm’s development of lightweight fire-resistant construction for high-rise buildings.

48. Alan Ogg, Architecture in Steel: The Australian Context (Red Hill: Royal Australian Institute of Architects, 1987), 166.

49. Ogg, Architecture in Steel, 167. Evidence of an immediate post-war trip by McCutcheon is noted in Building, Lighting and Engineering, 24 September 1957, 39. Evidence of McCutcheon’s travel diaries was unable to be found neither in the BSM office archives, East Melbourne nor in any institutional archives holding in Melbourne. The author believes that substantial new information would be revealed from such records.

50. A similar corporate model was also being adopted at the time by other large Melbourne firms including Leith & Bartlett; Godfrey, Spowers, Hughes, Mewton & Lobb; Buchan, Laird & Buchan; and Stephenson & Turner.

51. Alan Ogg makes this same point about the technical originality of the MLC series of buildings in relation to SOM. See Ogg, Architecture in Steel, 168.

52. The Crown Zellerbach building was designed by SOM’s San Francisco office in association with Hertzka & Knowles. For a description of the design sources and comparison of contemporary office tower examples, see Goad, “ICI House, Melbourne,” in Taylor, Tall Buildings, 174–89. BSM’s Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (RACV) Building, 94 Queen Street, Melbourne (1958–1961) bears the closest formal relationship to the tower and slab composition of SOM’s Lever House. But in the Melbourne example (designed within BSM by Hugh Banahan), the curtain wall was banished in favour of punched-out windows and externally differentiated functional volumes, indicative of a rooftop restaurant, offices and residential rooms below, with its smart glazed podium housing reception rooms and club bar. Local issues such as the building’s urban setting, its client brief and its local designer encouraged original responses within the context of a universal language of high-rise office building in the post-war decade.

53. Interview with Robert Bruce, 21 January 2002; 14 January 2009.

54. Interview with Robert Bruce, 21 January 2002. Distinguished German architectural draftsman Helmut Jacoby (1926–2005) was responsible for the perspective drawings of the AMP Building. Jacoby’s renderings were much in vogue from the late 1950s until the late 1970s in US architectural circles. For example, he completed the famous renderings for Walter Gropius and The Architects Collaborative’s design for the University of Baghdad (1957–1969) and was the author of influential books on architectural rendering including Architectural Drawings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965); Architectural Rendering (Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1971); and New Techniques of Architectural Rendering (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981).

55. Associate architects for the Crown Zellerbach building with SOM were Hertzka & Knowles.

56. Margo Grant Walsh joined SOM in 1960 and after 13 years had risen to Associate Director of Interior Design before leaving in 1973 to join Gensler in Houston. She then set up Gensler’s New York office in 1979 and from where she helped to establish Gensler as one of the world’s largest and commercially most successful design firms.

57. However, BSM did not lose touch with SOM on his numerous trips to the United States, Osborn McCutcheon had been impressed by a multidisciplinary urban design group that was operating within SOM’s Washington office. At the same time, McCutcheon’s son Andrew was developing expertise in social planning complemented by overseas study through a 1968 Churchill Scholarship. UDPA Planners (Urban Design and Planning Associates) was formed in 1969 as a joint venture firm between BSM and Rankine & Hill in Sydney, an engineering firm with civil, transport and urban infrastructure divisions. It was Andrew McCutcheon’s connections with the Federal Labor government after 1972 that led to large numbers of planning commissions in Canberra. Town planning offices were set up in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, where UDPA was associated with the firm of Bligh, Jessup, Bretnall & Partners and Vallentine Laurie & Davies. Many planning commissions were completed, including the Lower Yarra River Study, town plans for Gladstone in Queensland, Holsworthy, Darlinghurst and the Tamar Valley regional master plan and city plan for Launceston in Tasmania. The project that kick-started UDPA’s formation and which was its largest and arguably its most significant was the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Plan. Colin McPherson, “Biography of the Life and Career of Sir Osborn McCutcheon,” Research Report, Department of Architecture and Building, University of Melbourne, 1983, 61. Interviews with Robert Bruce, 21 January 2002; Andrew McCutcheon, 16 January 2009.

58. Interview with Roger Poole, 4 February 2002.

59. A detailed account of the commission, design and construction of BHP House, Melbourne (1967–1972) can be found in Goad, “BHP House, Melbourne,” 260–81.

60. Interview with Barry Patten, 17 December 1996.

61. Hal Iyengar, “Structural and Steel Systems,” in Technique and Aesthetics in the Design of Tall Buildings, ed. David P. Billington and Myron Goldsmith (Houston, TX: American Society of Civil Engineers, 1983), 57–61. Khan applied the principle of the stiff exterior tube to both steel (John Hancock Centre) and concrete (One Shell Plaza) construction.

62. Interview with Barry Patten, 17 December 1996.

63. The team comprised architects Barry Patten, Lew Morgan, Frank Englisch and Bob Dorian who all drew and designed at varying degrees of scale and detail, and Robert Peck who acted as project architect or “scribbler” (Barry Patten’s term), taking the notes and managing the process. Interview with Barry Patten, 17 December 1996.

64. Interview with Barry Patten, 17 December 1996.

65. Telephone interview with John Fowler, 28 November 1996.

66. Architects Perkins & Will designed the Standard Oil of Indiana Company Building, Chicago. Engineer was E. Alfred Picardi. From this building, Fowler gained a number of erection ideas for BHP House. Telephone interview with John Fowler, 30 December 1996.

67. Telephone interview with John Fowler, 28 November 1996.

68. The lightweight concrete floors laid onto the steel decking achieved interaction between the outer skin and the central core. These sheet-like floors acted like stiffening membranes.

69. Telephone interview with John Fowler, 28 November 1996.

70. Such as the innovative concrete raft foundations, the floor system of deep castellated steel beams covered with steel Bondek sheeting, and the steel façade – a 10-mm-thick skin of welded steel over 50 mm of concrete insulation fire protecting and housing the main steel frame.

71. Maeve Slavin, Davis Allen: Forty Years of Interior Design at Skidmore Owings and Merrill (New York: Rizzoli, 1990).

72. Interview with Barry Patten, 17 December 1996.

73. English-born Tony Wolfenden was trained as a product designer. After working in Toronto, he moved to Australia in 1962 and worked for Bates, Smart & McCutcheon (BSM) for almost five years. In that office he designed furniture and interiors for their design architects Alan Ralton, Hugh Banahan and Lew Morgan. Morgan left BSM and moved to Yuncken Freeman, and Wolfenden was hired for the Victorian State Government Offices commission, specifically to work on all major items of furniture, graphics and interiors design. Interview with Tony Wolfenden, 28 November 1996.

74. “The Top Corner,” Architect, May/June 1969, 12.

75. Kevin Borland, “Borland on BHP,” Architect, March/April 1973, 11.

76. David Jacobs, “Bunshaft of SOM,” Architect, March/April 1973, 18–20.

77. It should be pointed out however that while BHP House was for Yuncken Freeman a direct connection with SOM, the firm’s reputation in Melbourne had already been well established before 1969 and before BHP House was completed with such buildings as the Sidney Myer Music Bowl (1956–1959), Royal Insurance Building (1964–1966), Scottish Amicable Building (1966), Flagstaff House (1968–1970) (Yuncken Freeman’s own office), Eagle House (1971–1972) and the Victorian State Offices (1962–1970). It could be argued therefore that the direct connection with SOM allowed the firm to refine its already considerable skills.

78. “The Merit Row: Where It’s At or Where it Should Be,” Architecture in Australia, December 1975, 51.

79. Interview with Barry Patten, 17 December 1996.

80. See the extensive correspondence to and from Robin Boyd from the Grounds, Romberg & Boyd office while Boyd was in the United States from 1956 to 1957. See Gromboyd Letters, copy held by the Robin Boyd Foundation, Melbourne. I am grateful to Tony Lee for access to this document. Most of the originals of these letters are held within the Gromboyd Files, Frederick Romberg Collection at the RMIT Design Archives, RMIT University, Melbourne.

81. Robin Boyd, “We’re Building Monuments to the Cultural Cringe,” Australian, 10 October 1964.

82. For example, the Y.W.C.A. Hostel, Suva, Fiji, 1969–1970 (Daryl Jackson Evan Walker Pty Ltd), the Papua New Guinea Banking Corporation Headquarters and PNG Development Bank, both in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, 1977 (James Birrell), and high schools on Guadalcanal, New Georgia and Malaita, Solomon Islands, 1980 and Espiritu Santu, Vanuatu, 1984 (Don Gazzard). For a comprehensive overview of Australian architects practicing in the South Pacific, see Jennifer Taylor and James Conner, Architecture in the South Pacific: The Ocean of Islands (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2014).

83. Amit Srivastava, “Hijjas Kasturi and Harry Seidler in Malaysia: Australian-Asian Exchange and the Genesis of a ‘Canonical Work,’” Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 30, Open, ed. Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach (Gold Coast: SAHANZ, 2013), 191–205.

84. See Philip Goad, Architecture Bali: Architectures of Welcome (Balmain: Pesaro Publishing, 2000).

85. Peter Scriver, “Edge of Empire or Edge of Asia?: ‘Placing’ Australia in the Expanding Mid-twentieth Century Discourse on Modern Architecture,” Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 26, Cultural Crossroads, ed. Julia Gatley (Auckland: SAHANZ, 2009): 1025–43; and Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava, “Building a New University in Cold War Australia: The Colombo Plan and Architecture at UNSW in the 1950s and 1960s,” Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 28, Audience, ed. Antony Moulis and Deborah van der Plaat (Brisbane: SAHANZ, 2011), cd-rom, 18 pp.

86. “Australian Architects Chosen for New Embassy Buildings,” M/134, 19 September 1973, Parliamentary Transcripts, Commonwealth of Australia. The following projects were announced: Australian Embassy, Saigon, Vietnam; Australian High Commission, Suva, Fiji (Daryl Jackson Evan Walker Pty Ltd); Australian High Commission, Singapore (Godfrey & Spowers); Australian High Commission, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (Joyce/Nankivell Associates); Australian Embassy, Bangkok, Thailand (Ancher, Mortlock, Murray & Woolley); and Australian Embassy, Paris, France (Harry Seidler Associates).

87. This statement begs further research, especially in terms of Australia’s involvement in the South Pacific. For example, no scholarship exists on the architectural programme of the Australian-based shipping and merchant company such as Burns Philp, which operated in the South Pacific from 1883 to 2006.

88. Jane Loeffler, The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America’s Embassies (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 167–86.

89. For the most comprehensive document on John Andrews’ work to 1982, see John Andrews and Jennifer Taylor, Architecture: A Performing Art (Guildford: Lutterworth, 1982).

90. Sir William Holford, Observations on the Future development of Canberra (Canberra: Government Printing Office, 1958); William Holford and Partners, Statement of Policy and Preliminary Landscape Report (Canberra: William Holford and Partners, Sylvia Crowe and Associates, National Capital Development Commission, 1964).

91. J. F. Kennedy’s 1962 directive “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture.” See Judith Helm Robinson, et al., Growth, Efficiency and Modernism: GSA Buildings of the 1950s, 60s and 70s (Washington, DC: US General Services Administration, 2003), 42–5, 86–7.

92. For a description of Andrews’ office practices, see Philip Goad, “The Translation of Practice: The Offices of John Andrews in Toronto (1962–74) and Palm Beach (1969–90),” Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 31, Translation, ed. Christoph Schnoor (Auckland: SAHANZ, 2014), 691–701.

93. The full transcript of Sir Leslie Martin’s Gropius lecture entitled “The Built Form” was published as “The Design of Education for Design” in Tenth Urban Design Conference, Harvard Graduate School of Design: Education and Environment, Part 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 1966), and then in large part as “The Grid as Generator,” in Urban Space and Structures, ed. Leslie Martin and Lionel March (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 6–27.

94. Andrews had previously consulted to the South Australian Government on the planning and design of Monarto (c. 1972–1975), a project for a satellite low-energy new town outside Adelaide. See David Nichols, Jane Grant and Paul Walker, “What’s it all about, Monarto?” in Landscapes and Ecologies of Urban and Planning History, Proceedings of the Twelfth Australasian Urban History /Planning History Conference, Wellington, 2014, ed. Morten Gerdje and Emina Petrovic (Wellington: Australasian Urban History/Planning History Group and Victoria University of Wellington, 2014), 255–69. For ASER, Andrews formed an association with the Adelaide firm Woodhead Hall McDonald Shaw. Interview with John Andrews, 26 November 2014.

95. Judith Brine, “The Plan of Adelaide and the ASER Scheme,” Australian Planner 22, no. 4 (1984): 5–10.

96. For famous critiques of the Bonaventure Hotel, see Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989); and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), which combined aspects of two earlier Jameson essays: “Post-modernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 111–25; and “Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July/August 1984): 59–92. For a more recent critical interpretation of the work of John Portman, see Charles Rice, Interior Urbanism: Architecture, John Portman and Downtown America (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

97. Tom Liegler, “ASER Project: Convention Centre Design Brief Program,” 1 January 1984.

98. Fred Lawson, Conference, Convention and Exhibition Facilities (London: Architectural Press, 1981). This book is held in the Andrews Archive, Orange, NSW.

99. Elizabeth Farrelly, “Amid the Frivolity, A Serious Interloper,” Sydney Morning Herald, 25 March 1989, 44.

100. Lund Hutton Newell Paulsen Pty Ltd and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Architects, “Development Plan for the State Government Precinct,” unpublished report, August 1974.

101. See Jeffrey Cody, Exporting American Architecture 1870–2000 (London: Routledge, 2003); Annabel Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

102. Very few Australian architects however in the period 1950–1980 worked directly for SOM in the US. This was probably due to restrictive visa issues. Robert Bruce (Sydney) and Daryl Jackson (Melbourne) worked in SOM’s San Francisco office in the 1960s. John Courtney (from Sydney) worked in the New York and Washington DC office of SOM from 1964 until 1972 before joining the World Bank in 1976 where he remained until 1995 as a Senior Urban Planner on urban infrastructure projects in the developing world.

103. Even the ever sceptical Robin Boyd, who in 1957 had visited Lever House, met Bill Hartmann who at that time ran the Chicago office and was impressed by SOM’s “outstanding success story (from three partners to four partners with over 600 people in the Chicago office alone, in 21 years), but undoubted, unquestionable architectural art as well.” Robin Boyd was in the United States as Visiting Bemis Professor at MIT in 1957. He made a six-week tour organised by Dean John E. Burchard from March 1957 visiting most of the prominent contemporary architects, including William Hartmann at SOM in Chicago. According to Boyd, “Hartmann seemed amused at the news (to him) of Sir Arthur Stephenson’s knighthood. He liked him as a golfing partner. He didn’t seem much overcome with enthusiasm for John Buchan, who has been courting them for some sort of deal over the Eastern Market building.” See Boyd to Gromboyd, 7 March 1957, quoted in Geoffrey Serle, Robin Boyd: A Life (Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 1995), 168. It is clear from this letter that Buchan’s SOM connections extended to the Chicago office and also that the Stephenson & Turner office had SOM connections. This latter connection requires further research.