I completed my third year of the course at the end of 1952 (now a qualified draughtsman) and to continue should have gone to RMIT but dad was not doing well on the farm and couldn’t afford to keep me in Melbourne where there were no relatives to stay with. I said that I hated Melbourne and would rather go to Adelaide if I had to go to a big city.
I wrote to the Adelaide School of Mines and Industries (later called ‘the Adelaide Institute of Technology) and got their curriculum for the course in Architecture which appeared to be virtually the same as the RMIT course.
Dad wrote to one of his aunts at 6 Victoria Avenue, North Adelaide, May Coad. She, a widow with a 40 year old single daughter living at home, said I was welcome to stay at their place for a nominal rent.
I felt it was time to become independent and decided that I would have to work and finish my course doing part time studies.
Aunt May had two sons, Donald and Melville both married. Melville had the most gorgeous, elegant, pretty and ladylike wife called Janice, and I fell in love with her.
The husband of Jessie Paddick, another of dad’s aunts, was a retired detective and knowing what made Adelaide tick got me a list of practicing architects in Adelaide. I proceeded to go around them looking for a job. Adelaide was a very dead and backward place in 1953 and architects were not doing well at all. At my 40th interview the architect interviewer said that he would like to take me on but could pay me only four pounds ten shillings a week and that would be more than I was worth to him but he realised that he could not pay me less.
Before I said yes to that job I decided to check on an advertisement I saw in the news-paper where the Electricity Trust of South Australia (ETSA) was advertising for electrical engineering trainees in brackets, (Building Department). This turned out to be a job working as an architectural draughtsman in the ETSA building department with up to nine hours a week off to attend lectures with no reduction in pay and the pay was nine guineas a week.
Nine guineas (an even older type of money than pounds) was nine pounds nine shillings which equals $18.90.
This was too good an opportunity to miss so I applied and got the job.
I wondered why when there were a lot of other applicants but when I got to know Adelaide better I realised that first, the Electricity Trust was dominated by descendants of Scottish migrants (so with a name like McPhee?) and second, the fact that I lived in North Adelaide where the “old families” lived, I understood. My boss’s name was John McDougall.
That is where my first name became Andrew. Although I told them my first name was Kevin, they said “to us you will be Andrew, we can not have someone with a good Scottish name like McPhee called Kevin”. I thought “I like that”. It is interesting that all of the people I now know except my siblings, call me Andrew.
Another Electrical Engineering Trainee (Building), our title was EET(B), Stefan Pikusa and I became good friends and we studied together. Stefan and his parents were Polish refuges from the after-math of the second world war.
It was the policy of government departments to employ a certain number of migrants so we were a multi cultural department which was interesting. My first two friends in Adelaide were Stefan Pikusa and a Hungarian fellow called Gustave.
I went to the Adelaide School of Mines armed with my qualifications to discuss with the Principal what subjects I should take but was told by the receptionist
“oh no, the Principal does not see individual students!”.
After arguing with her she said “all right then, if you insist, write to him and request an appointment”.
I thought “fu…. You. There’s no time to do that” and asked who could I see then?.
She suggested I could try the head of the architectural department, Gavin Walkley. What a bureaucratic lot of pricks, I thought.
I took my credentials to Gavin Walkley with the intention of discussing what subjects I could get credits for and which ones to study this year but after a short discussion he pushed them back to me and said “Sorry, we can’t help you”.
I thought “well fu…. YOU too”.
I went to the front desk of the university and enrolled to do three subjects, Physics A and B and history of architecture 3. I needed to make use of the nine hours the ETSA made available for study.
In Ballarat physics was divided into 1A, 1B, 1C, and 2A, 2B, 2C and 3A etc where the A was mechanical, B was Hydraulics and C was Electrical. The engineers had to do the whole 3 years but architects had to do only two of the three years. In Adelaide they had only physics A, B, and C all a one year subject so the amount of detail they learnt was one third of what we learnt in Ballarat.
In Ballarat when we studied the strength of materials, there were material testing machines with which we would stretch a steel bar to find out how much tensile strength it could stand or crush a sample of concrete to see how much compressive strength it had.
There was equipment so you could measure and therefore prove the acceleration due to gravity and equipment to demonstrate centrifugal force etc.
In Adelaide you just read about it in a book.
The Adelaide University decided that I had done only two thirds of the physics which was incorrect but I redid the subjects which was easy.
Architectural Design in Adelaide consisted of drawing, in minute detail to a scale of 1 to 2, the three classical Greek column capitols, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian taking one term to draw one capital, so I didn’t bother with that subject.
In the School of Mines, Ballarat there was a museum of things students used to do in the 1860’s, drawing these Greek column Capitols was what they did one hundred years before but were still doing in Adelaide.
So I learnt the hard way that subjects with the same name were not necessarily the same subjects.
Gavin Walkley turned out to be the lecturer for history of architecture but he would never know that I was in his class. He used to walk in, turn off the lights and show us slides for two hours and talk in monotone. Many students went to sleep.
There was no real course in architecture in Adelaide, at that time there was no Faculty of Architecture at the Adelaide University. Those who completed the course in Adelaide received a Bachelor of Engineering, in brackets Architecture; BE(Arch). which I thought was insulting to the profession of Architecture; Engineering is actually a branch of Architecture.
In Victoria Architecture was classified and taught as a Fine Art.
Some years later I was astounded to hear that Gavin Walkley had commissioned Robin Boyd, a well known Melbourne architect, to design his own new house in Adelaide.
I said to Stefan “how can we accept that the architect in charge of the education of architects can not even design his own house?”.
Stefan replied “but you have to give him credit for realizing that Robin Boyd can do a better job than he can himself and for having the courage to admit it”.
Stefan was right, I was bitter about how Gavin Walkley just wrote me off when I first went to Adelaide but he dedicated his working life to the profession by being involved in the education of architects and serving on the Architects’ Registration Board. I wondered if he was a member of that board when I applied for registration in 1966; I know Dick Roberts was because he wrote me a letter of congratulations when I was granted registration.
Students – Myself and Stefan Pikusa on the Torrens River, Adelaide 1953
I could see that studying in Adelaide was not going to get me any closer to getting my diploma of architecture so gave it up after one year. Eventually I was to find that the RMIT had a correspondence department and I could complete my DipA by correspondence.
However that was put on hold for a while because I met Heather Slape and my priorities changed.
Working at the ETSA building section was really good. They looked after their students and made sure that they experienced every facet of the building process including making site inspections. The Building Supervisor in our section was Max Lieberman, a migrant from Egypt, who was doing a few little developments as a hobby, instructed us on the commercial as well as the construction aspects of building. Max Lieberman I believe is now quite a large developer in Adelaide.
During school holidays students were sent out with construction teams to give us experience of the outside world, to see how our drawings were working on site and give us some physical exercise which wasn’t always the case.
During one term holiday we were attached to a cable pulling gang whose job it was to pull electrical cables through conduits already installed underground.
After setting up the cable pulling winch over the manhole, we were sitting around and I said “what are we waiting for?” the reply was “smoko time”. After smoko we were still just sitting around and I said “what are we waiting for now?” “lunch time”, was the answer.
My drawing board was in a really good position in the office, The ETSA building department was in a nice 100 year old stone building called Hindmarsh Building in Hindmarsh Square and I sat on the first floor next to a large plate glass window overlooking the Square.
During my time at ETSA I was loaned to the South Australian Mines department to work on the planning of the uranium mining town at Radium Hill. To work there I had to get a commonwealth security pass which entailed being investigated by ASIO (or what ever it was called then) who wanted to know who my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters were.
We worked in a secured office building inside a secured Mines Department complex at Finsbury which was on the North West side of Adelaide and suited me because I lived in North Adelaide. A security officer took away the contents of our rubbish bins every evening and if any of us had to go out of the compound during the day, like to the library to do research, we were taken by an army man in a Land Rover.
In those days engineering offices used tracers who were almost always girls. The engineers did their drawings roughly in pencil and the tracers traced them onto linen in ink. Walking through the drawing office one day I noticed all of the girls in the office crowded around one drawing board. As I squeezed through the oestrogen charged atmosphere I took a look at what they were all so vitally interested in. It was a women’s magazine and the heading of the article of their focus was “Birth Control by a Pill”. BIG news at the time.
I had bought my first car, a 1927 Austin 7 two seater tourer, with soft top. This greatly improved my mobility because in Adelaide all public transport stopped at 11.30 every night.
The first Saturday night that I went to the movies with my two ‘New Australian’ friends, we stood on the footpath, outside the movie house to discuss where we would go for a coffee., In that three or four minutes, everyone had disappeared and the movie house was being locked. It was amazing, after five or six minutes, you could not see a person in the street. One of us said “there’s a café just down here” but that was locked up and in darkness so we made our way to the tram stop which was just as well because we just caught the last tram for the day, it was 11.30 PM. Life really did stop in Adelaide after 11.30.
In Mildura and in Ballarat everyone went to a café after the movies or a dance, that was where you had fun with your friends.
Every time a celebrity came to Adelaide some newspaper or radio reporter would say “and what do you think of our fair city?”
I liked when Peter Ustinoff said “Adelaide is a restaurant built in a cemetery”.
I wished they would ask me, I would say that the water in Adelaide must be seriously deficient in iodine.
It is popular to make derogative remarks about Adelaide but I liked living there and I thought that there were more beautiful girls there than at other cities. However it was a sad place for architects.
The Institute of Architects in about 1955 did a survey and found that only three percent of buildings built in Adelaide were designed by architects.
Aunt May, with whom I stayed, always took summer holidays at Middletown, near Victor Harbour, and during her holidays in 1953 I stayed with great Aunt Jessie and great Uncle Bernard Paddick who lived at 32 Barton Terrace, North Adelaide. Their family at that time consisted of the eldest Flora, (it was the policy of the McPhee families to always call the first born son Donald and the first born daughter Flora) Heather and Jessie. Heather was married to Bruce Robson who was a master at Poultney Grammar College, they had two young sons, David and Christopher, (later they had four more children) and they all lived at 32 Barton Terrace. While there I had my 21st birthday and they gave me a Chinese dinner party. They had befriended two Chinese medical students who prepared a scrumptious meal using genuine ingredients that they were permitted to import from China.
Life while living with the Coads and the Paddicks was elegant, ‘would you like sherry before dinner?’ yes please, ‘sweet or dry?’. Breakfast was always at 7.30 except Sundays when they went to early morning mass at St. Peters Cathedral (Church of England) before breakfast and then had a substantial brunch. I slept in while they went to mass. On other days if I was not out of bed by 7.30 breakfast would be brought in to me on a tray. This was the first time I had my own room, bedside table, dressing table, wardrobe and Valet. The valet was a polished wooden structure on which you hung your coat, trousers and tie and it had a shelf at the bottom for your shoes.
I still kept a friendship going with Harry and Erica Fleming and saw them when I visited my parents during holidays. I was best man at their wedding. During 1953 they came to Adelaide and brought Erica’s little sister, Margaret, with them who was now about 17 and had grown into an attractive young lady. Because they were coming I did some research and found that someone from Melbourne had recently started a night club which was up narrow stairs in an old building on Frome Road. We went there often during that week of their visit and found they had a band so we could dance and buy a cup of coffee, laced with whisky, until daylight.
21 years old, on Glenelg Beach.
My first car – 1927 – Austin 7
The Electricity Trust held an annual ball which was very popular and difficult to get tickets for but we worked there so had no problem.
One Saturday in 1954 Stefan and I went to the dance held at Burnside specifically to get a partner to take to the annual Electricity Trust Ball.
As we stood on the side of the hall surveying the girls on the other side waiting for the music to start Steve said “have you decided on which one you are going to try for”. I said that I had and it was that blonde in the blue dress straight across. So the music started and I headed straight for the blonde, just as I reached her, a flash guy zoomed in from the side and whisked her away. I found myself looking at the biggest and brightest smile from the girl who had been seated behind the blonde and whom I had not seen before. So returning the smile I said, “would you like to dance”.
During that night I had most of the dances with her and found that her name was Heather Slape and she lived at Burnside. I decided that I would ask her to come to the ETSA annual ball but Steve had the next dance with her and asked her first. So I asked another girl who Steve had been dancing with.
I hired a Morris Minor four seat car for the occasion which cost ten pounds ($20.00) for 24 hours. During the evening I became aware that I really liked Heather and could not let this opportunity be missed and for the second half of the ball danced every dance with her and left Steve with the other girl.
After the ball, since it was my car and I had the controls, I dropped off Steve and the other girl first and took Heather home.
It must have been my DNA that decided that Heather was the one because I was driven by some not previously experienced inner irresistible force to make her mine.
We went out together and from then on danced with no one else to the romantic singing of John Winters at the Saturday night Burnside Dance.
Heather’s parents, particularly her father, at first thought that I was not good enough for Heather. Harold, her father said that I was too skinny and weak looking and that when hard times came I would not be able to get work I was amazed that he placed mo value on academic qualifications.
Courting Heather Slape 1954
However when I came back from holidays in Mildura, Heather’s mother and brothers said “next time you go away take Heather with you. She was impossible to live with because she missed you so much”. Heather was 17 years old and I was 21.
Heather’s family consisted of an older brother, Barry a younger brother, John and the youngest a sister called Fay. Her father was called Harold Slape and her Mother Florence (called Florry).
When I stayed there for a meal, usually Sunday mid day, I thoroughly enjoyed the family bantering at these meals which I discovered I was missing while living with a widowed great aunt.
At the Radium Hill project I was given the task of designing the town and the main Mines- Department buildings. The surveyors had set out their survey grid at 45 degrees to North and South because the seam of uranium some hundreds of metres below the ground, ran in a North East direction and they had brought the railway line in parallel with the survey grid. I, as everyone should unless compelled by some forceful constraints like mountains, set out the streets so they basically ran North-South and East-West. That way, it is easy to control the sun penetration into buildings, like keep it out in summer and let it shine in, in winter. This also allowed triangular parks to be established each side of the railway line.
The engineers in charge would not have that. To their engineers’ minds the streets had to follow the surveyor’s grid lines and for no other reason than that the grid lines were on the survey plan.
Similarly when I showed them my design for the Department of Mines office building they said “the plan works OK but you should put some architecture on the building.”
My design had a simple gable roof with a 1.2 m overhang to keep out the hot sun and a complimentary gable over the entrance foyer, was set back from the street with a landscaped entrance and naturally, all designed with good proportions.
The engineers changed the front elevation so that it had a brick parapet wall that stepped from each end to a high parapet in the middle, put it right on the street boundary and provided no sun protection over the windows.
I said to my ETSA. Employers that I apparently wasn’t much use to them and they obviously thought so too and could I go back to my old job.
There was a discovery of brown coal at Lea Creek in the North of South Australia and to exploit it the ETSA had to build a concrete dam on Lea Creek. When concrete dams are built often the engineers add fly- ash, from the powerhouse coal burning boilers, to the concrete which reduces the quantity of cement required with no reduction in strength.
There is however a problem in that the fly-ash causes the concrete to generate more heat than normal as it sets and they have to run cooling pipes through the concrete when it is a large mass like a dam. To find out how much additional heat this process was going to create ETSA commissioned the engineering department of the University of Adelaide to run experiments. These experiments required someone to take the temperature of samples of concrete as they set every 15 minutes 24 hours a day and the ETSA volunteered we part time students to take these readings over night. I won the 8.0 PM till midnight shift and this was every night for two weeks which of course is when young people go out. So after the professor of engineering had set me up, briefed me and gone home, Heather would come to the University laboratory and sit with me. The good thing about it was that I got paid double time for those four hours and I was soon able to afford to buy an engagement ring.
Aunt May Coad had a good back garden where she grew fruit and vegetables from which she provided the domestic needs and made chutneys and preserves with the surplus.
One Sunday in 1953 I was in the garden with her when she doubled up in pain, I helped her into the kitchen and sat her down, she was trying to ask me to get something for her so I guessed it must be medication. I ran into her bedroom and brought all of the bottles of pills in her bedside table but she pushed them aside and was gesturing towards the liquor cupboard so I grabbed the brandy and she nodded. I poured her half a glass which she drank straight down and began to relax. She asked me to phone her doctor to come as quick as he can and to then help her change into her night gown and to get into bed. When I asked if I should take off her stockings she said “oh no!, no man has ever seen me without stockings”. I said “your husband must have”. She replied “my husband never saw me without stockings”.
What a lot people of that generation missed.
Aunt May was in bed for a couple of days then they took her to hospital where she died after another couple of days. She had a blood clot near her heart.
Marjory Coad decided to turn the house into two flats so I looked for other rooms and found a place in Burnside about two kilometres from where Heather lived.
Harry Fleming was now a qualified electrician and moved to Sydney with Erica, now his wife, and their two children. “Harry has fulfilled his ambition and got to Sydney at last” I thought.
Stefan Pikusa was offered a job with Hassell and McConnell, a rapidly rising and progressive architectural practice, which he accepted. A few weeks later they asked Stefan if he could recommend another two promising young men and he recommended Bob Johns and me.
I got on very well with Jack McConnell but not so well with Colin Hassell probably because McConnell was Melbourne trained and Hassell was Adelaide trained. Unfortunately for me McConnell was spending increasing amounts of time in their Melbourne office so I was getting less exposure to him who was a cutting edge architect. Had I had more time with McConnell I think I would have done well within this practice. However my immediate boss, the office ram-rod, Dick Roberts was a dynamic, energetic and forceful man and he taught me a lot especially about how to run an office and how to manage projects. I liked Dick a lot, although he was a hard task master, he was effective and I believe it was his influence that gave me the ability to run my own practice in Alice Springs quite often under difficult circumstances.
Bob Dickson and I worked together on a number of projects there and on one occasion when Bob instructed me to change a design element on a building I considered the change to be unsuitable. I said to him “if your aesthetic sense tells you to do something that is foreign to the integrity of the building design concept then you should review your sense of aesthetics.” He replied “some day, Andrew, someone will take you seriously and punch you on the nose.”
The whole office laughed. Bob took this as an insult, I thought I was giving him constructive criticism as I was taught professionals should do and accept without taking it as a personal insult.
There were some excellent architects in Adelaide who were Adelaide trained but I believe they were good in spite of the BE(Arch.) course and became good architects through educating themselves.
I have lost touch with the architectural scene in Adelaide over the last 30 years but up to 30 years ago every notably good architect had at some time worked for Hassell and McConnell.
Bob Dickson eventually went into partnership with Newell Platten and their office designed many excellent sensitive buildings which today would be called ‘environmentally friendly’.
Keith Neighbour worked with Hassell and McConnell and he and his partner Antonious Lapsys have designed many of the best buildings in Adelaide, like the Hilton Hotel, and in other centres of Australia.
John Morphett who graduated his BE(Arch) with honours won a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, considered the best School of Architecture in the world at the time, and did a post graduate course there. John became the head of Hassell and McConnell (which sometime in the 1970’s changed to Hassell- Architects) until his retirement.
Sometime during the late 1950’s the University of Adelaide established a chair of Architecture but they got their first professor from England which I thought was a cultural-cringe sort of thing to do.
Stefan Pikusa changed to the university course and graduated equal top place with the professor’s son. Stefan left Hassell and McConnell and took up a position of lecturer and later to become the professor of architecture at the University.
At the RMIT, in Ballarat and Melbourne, it was not permitted for the lecturer of a subject to have any-thing to do with the examining of his students in that subject. Exams were set and marked by an independent examiner. Students were not permitted to identify their exam papers except by a given ID number so the examiner never knew whose paper he was marking. If a student put any marks on his exam papers that could identify him he would be disqualified. This was to eliminate any possibility of preferential treatment.
In Adelaide at both the university and the School Of Mines the lecturers set the exams and marked the papers and students put their full name on the exam papers giving every opportunity for preferential or prejudice treatment of the students.
The professor of Architecture at the Adelaide University had two sons who both studied architecture and both were top of their year every year. When Stefan Pikusa (who everyone thought was brilliant) graduated he came equal top with the professor’s second son. Rumours were prevalent that the professor’s sons were given preferential treatment which was probably unfair. If your father was the professor of architecture and you were studying architecture, at home you would surely eat, sleep and live architecture which must give you an advantage over others whose father’s were not architects.
If in Adelaide they followed the same examination procedures as Melbourne there would be no doubt.
Heather and I started a saving plan together so we could marry. We lived off Heather’s wage, which was half of mine, and banked all of mine. This was very frugal living but we were determined.
We married on March 5th. 1955 and lived in half a house with an elderly widow in Wayville.
We continued with our stringent saving plan so that we could buy a block of land and build a house.
To save even more money, since Wayville was close to the centre of Adelaide, we sold the car, now an Austin 8, and bought a Lambretta motor scooter which gave us a fuel consumption of 120 miles to the gallon. The landlady charged us thirty shillings a week rent plus one shilling extra for electricity because we had a refrigerator. A shower cost threepence for five minuted.
Heather and I showered together so we could have a ten minute shower for sixpence.
The first time we did that after five minutes the landlady was bashing on the door of the bathroom shouting “you have been more than five minutes” but when we both walked out in our dressing gowns she was too embarrassed to complain again.
I concluded that people who lived in the city all of their life were insane by the time they were sixty years old.
Few people had a washing machine in those days and neither did we until we had our own house. We did the weeks wash on Sunday mornings by hand in the cement wash tubs. First we had to boil the copper to get hot water, then wash all of the clothes in the same water starting with the white clothes including the sheets, wash them by pushing and squeezing them in the soapy water, then wring the water out of them by twisting and squeezing them, one each end when it came to the sheets, then rinse them in the next tub and wring them out again before hanging them on the line to dry.
While we both worked we shared the domestic chores but once Heather started to have babies she automatically, as was the custom then, became a full time home maker and supportive of my efforts to become a qualified architect and to build a career. After all my success was also her success, we were a unit.
I had been married only a few months when Jack McConnell asked for me to be sent to Melbourne to help that office meet a deadline for the design of a new Balm Paints factory.
They accommodated me in a small hotel on the South bank of the Yarra River, less than a Kilometre from the office.
Jack McConnell was the first architect in Australia to design factories that were not the usual saw-tooth roof corrugated iron monstrosities.
Although he used basically the same materials, like concrete, steel and iron, instead of the structural frame being made of lots of small angle irons welded together to make a messy frame he used large square steel members to make a steel structure that was a bold, clean and aesthetically pleasing architectural statement.
The structure was the architecture as it is in the older Gothic Cathedrals like Westminster Abbey..
He had also designed the new recently opened Heinz canned food factory in Melbourne. These buildings were also functional and comfortable for human activity.
One day McConnell said “I have to go to the Heinz factory to look at a problem. Would you like to come?”. The problem was that McConnell had used an innovative structural idea where the floor beams of the first floor together with the roof beams and columns that joined them formed the homogeneous structure of the entire first floor. These were called verandeel trusses. The people on the first floor actually occupied the space within these giant trusses. This type of truss depends on the design of the welded joint between the columns and the beams to resist the diagonal forces and at one of these joints, the steel of the floor beam had buckled. McConnell had steel experts examine the steel at this joint and it was found that there was a fault in the manufacture of the steel beam.
We looked over the factory and it was exciting for me to see how every detail had been carefully designed so that the whole building was a functional and beautiful space. Even the refrigeration cooling tower at the back was not overlooked because it was at the back. It was a simple, bold and functional expression of its purpose.
I hated being separated from Heather even for the nine hours we were at work every day but now had been separated for two weeks so she came to Melbourne for a long weekend. I caught a train to Ballarat and met Heather’s train from Adelaide which got in about 6.00 AM Saturday morning.
I introduced Heather to my Ballarat family and to the lecturers at the SMB and we got the next train to Melbourne. The hotel was very kind, I had asked them to change me to a double room for three days because my wife was visiting for the long weekend and they gave us the bridal suite for no extra cost.
On the Balm Paints factory we worked long hours and on the day before the deadline we worked all night .
In 1957 we purchased a block of land in Rostrevor a recent subdivision of a farm and our quarter acre block faced Fourth Creek which runs down from Morialta falls. The price was six hundred and fifty pounds ($1,300.00).
The back boundary adjoined the back boundary of the substantial original farm house and we became close friends of the occupants, the Atkinsons.
On the next block to the East lived a Greek family in what used to be the farm implement shed (tractor shed) and before the subdivision they considered that our block was also theirs. When we came to inspect the block, take levels and measure out where the house was going to be built the Greek family would get agitated, none of them could speak English, so I decided that I had better build a temporary fence around our block. The Greeks were not home the day I built the fence but next day when we arrived on the block the Man was shaking the fence, shouting in Greek and shaking his fist at me.
I contacted a friend who could speak Greek and got him to interpret. The Greek man said that this was his land and if I did not take down the fence and stop coming onto his property he would cut my throat.
I got the original owner who had subdivided the farm and through the interpreter he explained how the Greek family did have a lease that had expired but that was all over and he never did own the land and that I now owned that piece of land.
The Greek man was very sorry and invited me into his home where they gave me a glass of wine and a spoonful of jam on a plate to eat with the wine. From then, until they moved, we were friends.
Stefan also lived in Rostrevor at 27 Derwent Avenue and by 1958 had built his new house.
As was often done in those days, especially by migrants, Stefan had built a small temporary house on the back of his block where he and his parents lived until they could afford to build a proper house. So when Stefan moved into his new house, complete with nuclear shelter, he rented his temporary house to Heather and I. This is where Anthony was conceived. Heather had said that she would start a baby as soon as we had the construction of our house underway and I had the concrete raft slab built by then.
I built this house except for electrical, plumbing and glazing, entirely myself which in retrospect was a mistake because it was far too much work for one person to do working only weekends. My older brother Ian tried to run a dried fruit property all by himself thinking that if he could avoid the expense of employing workers he would get ahead financially.
He worked so hard that he became sick and was diagnosed with tuberculosis which not only put him well behind financially but his family suffered. His baby boy died and his two year old daughter, Lorraine, also contracted the disease and was lucky to survive. He was not able to have more children.
I started construction at Easter 1958 and completed stage one a week after Easter 1959. Anthony was two weeks old when we moved in. When I started to build there was no electricity or water to the land and I had to carry the water for making the mortar to lay the bricks in buckets from the creek.
Immediately Heather had confirmation of her pregnancy, because ‘the baby boom was on’ we had to book her into the hospital with the best reputation which at that time was the Adelaide Memorial Maternity Hospital. She chose Dr. Wilber Joint for her Gynaecologist who was considered the top man in Adelaide. I wanted the best for my wife.
On the morning of May 6, 1959 at about 1.30 AM her labour pains started so I took her to the hospital where we waited for about an hour. When the midwife had examined her she told me to phone the hospital at about 4.00 that afternoon and they would tell me how she was going.
This really surprised me. Heather was such a naturally healthy young woman of 22 years, (her 23rd birthday wasn’t until May 12) and she had, with my encouragement, been doing pre-natal exercises and read up on natural birth. I thought she would pop a baby out in no time.
In those days the father wasn’t allowed anywhere near his wife once the hospital had their hands on her until she had given birth and both baby and mum were bathed and well presented.
I went to work and tried to do something.
I couldn’t concentrate, I paced the office floor waiting for 4.00 O’clock.
It was the longest day.
Four o’clock came, I phoned.
They said “congratulations, you have a lovely healthy son”.
“When was he born? “.
Nine o’clock this morning was the reply.
The bastards didn’t even phone to let me know.
I raced around to see Heather and she was distraught, in tears.
She said “I am so desperately tired, I haven’t been able to get any sleep, this place is so noisy”.
Not only was their a continuous stream of stainless steel trolleys rattling along the corridor which was tiled, hospital staff were shouting to each other which echoed along the corridor and there was a steam outlet, probably from a sterilizer, right outside her window that went off like a steam train about every fifteen minutes. I estimated that the noise in that hospital was equivalent to that of a steam railway station, about 90 decibels.
She had asked to be in a share room because her friends said that it is too lonely in a private room.
I complained about the noise so they put her in a private room and of course charged more, but they forgot she was there. She had to ring at every meal time because they forgot to bring it to her. They put an infra red lamp shining on her virgina to help it heal quicker and said it had to stay there for ten minutes. I arrived thirty minutes later to see her sitting in the visitor’s chair, avoiding the lamp, worried that she might be getting too much infra red rays and asked me if I could move it or turn it off. She had been ringing her bell but no one had come. It was a most incompetent organisation and when the baby boom slowed they were the first to close.
We had some trouble with Anthony as a baby because of our inexperience. Although there were a few revolutionaries around who believed in demand feeding babies, we were going to follow the advice of the hospital and feed every four hours.
Heather’s mother also said “make him wait , he will get indigestion if you feed him before four hours are up.”
The poor little boy was so hungry when he did get on the breast coupled with the fact that Heather’s breasts were busting to get rid of the milk, Anthony would gulp down the milk with lots of air and bring the lot up 10 minutes later. Then of course he was even more hungry by the next feed time, it would all happen again and we were upset because he cried so much.
Then our GP said “looking after babies is easy. You just have to give them what they want. The hard part is to know what they want”. We knew what he wanted and when he was fed on demand life was a lot easier.
One of Heather’s school friends married Bob Wearne and we were invited to their place for a barbecue where we met Bob’s brother, Frank and his wife Mignon. Some days later when I was erecting the roof beams on my house Frank arrived to see how I was going. He was very impressed with the design of our house and asked if I could design a house for him. “I have a block of land at Hawthorndene, in the Adelaide Hills, but it has about a 30 degree slope on it”.
“That’s not a problem” I said.
Frank and Mignon were a very lively and likeable couple and they had four baby girls in four years.
Frank spent his developing years working various jobs like wood cutting, cane cutting and shearing but when I met him he was a door to door Electrolux vacuum cleaner salesman, although a good one, he doesn’t want anyone to know that.
I designed his house. The prices he got from builders were all too high. He didn’t have a lot of money, so he said “I will build it myself.”
After building his own house he got a job with John Lander, one of my favourite house builders, and became a very proficient builder. He did a night course on building and became a registered builder.
I found in order to get reasonable contract prices for my logically designed houses I had to find fairly well educated young builders, builders who worked out their prices by taking off the actual quantities of materials and estimating their labour costs properly to arrive at the contract sum. The average house builder in those days did not have to have any qualifications or be registered. When pricing an architect designed house they would price by the square metre and add fifteen per cent because it was different when in fact the cost of labour and materials would quite often be less than an ordinary house of conventional construction.
One of these special builders of mine was John Lander, another was Alan Tossalini. Frank went to work for Tossalini after he qualified as a builder. Later he worked for Baulderstones where he eventually became a project manager of good reputation.
When the house was nearing completion I had arranged to meet an electrician on site at 5.30 and while waiting for him I would work on the hole for the septic tank. He did not turn up on three occasions and on the third occasion I was digging the hole with a great deal of anger and hurt my back, I slipped three disks in my lower spine. Now known as disk protrusions.
My GP sent me to an orthopaedic surgeon who said I had to put a board on my bed and lie flat on my back for six weeks and whatever you do don’t see a chiropractor. These days orthopaedic surgeons say that you should not stay in bed for more than three days or you will start to lose bone density. Fortunately I do not have enough respect for doctors to take them that seriously and found that after getting out of bed for a while my back was much better. While chatting with Mr Atkinson over the back fence he said “my GP has been to America and done a Chiropractic course, why don’t you see him. At least he is a medic and won’t do you any harm”. I saw this Dr. Clive Kneebone and he adjusted my spine so that it was good enough to go to work in a couple of days. He had to adjust my back about once a month until by doing exercises I built up my muscles after which as long as I kept up the exercises I had little trouble for many years.
Soon after completing the house I was approached by Howard Treloar and his wife Barbara who lived about 300 metres up the same road, to get involved with the construction of a local kindergarten. There were a lot of young families in the area with children soon to be at kindergarten age and the council had reserved a block of land just across the creek for that purpose. A committee was formed and Howard and I were charged with the responsibility of raising money and getting the building built. Howard held gambling nights and Barbara and many other young mothers baked cakes and pies and sold them on the street of the shopping centre. It was interesting that the mothers raised more money selling cakes than did the gambling nights.
I had designed two kindergartens at Hassell’s office and knew the ropes.
It was necessary to have approval of the building design from the ‘South Australian Kindergarten Teachers’ Union’ or they would not staff the kindergarten. So I would consult them before starting the design process. They were very helpful and provided a comprehensive brief. When I had completed the drawings I obtained prices from three builders.
Having raised about one thousand pounds ($2,000), Howard and I put together a presentation to use for an application to a bank for a loan. Howard is an accountant and produced a business plan. We needed to borrow about four thousand pounds ($8,000)
We fronted the bank manager’s desk and said “we, The Rostrevor Kindergarten Committee, would like to apply for a loan to build a new kindergarten. Here are the plans approved by the kindergarten Teachers’ Union, here are three tenders for the construction and a business plan showing how we can service the loan.”
The bank manager laughed.
Howard looked distraught and I thought “this is going to be difficult.”
The bank manager said “I will have to get approval from head office but I think I can safely say that your loan will be approved within seven days. I laughed because for kindergartens we usually get a couple of young people saying “If we form a committee and can get some land would you give us a loan to build a kindergarten”. “It is very unusual to be presented with such a complete proposal”.
The Kindergarten was built. Fencing, paths, landscaping and painting were done by working bees of young fathers and mothers.
It must be in the ‘Donald McPhee’ genes to ensure that education is available for our children because :- My father was secretary of the Meringu school committee which started the first school at Meringu,
I was instrumental in getting the Kindergarten started in Rostrevor as described above.
Anthony, my eldest son, got a high School reopened in Fitzroy North in Melbourne in 2002 and is still the chairman of the management board.
After working at Hassell and McConnell for four years I hadn’t seen anything of McConnell for about two years, I happen to mention to a building materials salesman that I was thinking of looking to work in a smaller office where I might get to be responsible for an entire building. Building material salesmen visit every architects’ office so it wasn’t long before I was made an offer by a partnership of two architects who had no staff. Shepherd and Simpson designed modern buildings so I accepted their offer. However I did not get on well with these partners. I thought they were too pedantic and stuck in a rut so their work was repetitive and not creative. To them modern architecture was just another style, they did not conceive that it was an honest expression of the functional and structural solution to a set of design requirements.
Also I was probably not a good employee at this stage of my life. It was when Anthony was a baby and because of our inexperience he cried a lot at night. I would go to work suffering from severe sleep deprivation consequentially a strained relationship between shepherd and Simpson and myself developed.
A member of our social group, Kevin Makin, after listening to me going on about how much better the course in architecture was in Melbourne, decided to go to Melbourne to finish his course in architecture He recommended to his boss to make an offer to me as his replacement. The partnership was Bevan Rutt and Roberts and Bevan Rutt phoned and made an offer which I said I would call in to discuss.
After giving it some thought, I said to Bevan “thank you for the offer but no thanks”.
He lighted a cigarette, sat back and said “would you mind telling me why?”.
“Well, you have a reputation for designing the best Georgian houses in Adelaide and although I appreciate that your designs are authentic and very well done I believe that we, today, should not build using styles from the past” I replied.
He said “you are exactly who we are looking for. Bain Roberts and I love doing our Georgian buildings but we are getting more clients that want modern, contemporary, futuristic or whatever you want to call them, designs and we want you to take care of that part of our practice. I promise you that if you work here you will never have to work on a Georgian design”. I liked the frank open and friendly attitude of this man.
“In that case I accept your offer” I told him.
Bevan Rutt was a well respected member of Adelaide society and was heavily involved with the Lions club and The Guide Dogs for the Blind. Bain Roberts was from an ‘old grazing family’ and architecture was more a hobby for him, although he designed the best Georgian houses in Adelaide.
This job suited me well. I was able to design the modern buildings without interference from my bosses and the work was mostly office buildings, ware-houses, factories and shops but some large houses for those who didn’t want Georgian.
Before long they had to hire a draughtsman to assist me with the modern section of their practice.
By this time I had also built up a private reputation for designing affordable functional, low energy consumption modern houses and had a number of them published in the Adelaide Advertiser, Homes and Building section. Some how a well respected architect, John Chappell, noticed these houses and published them in the Advertiser news paper.
For these buildings I designed and produced the construction drawings at home on weekends.
I believe that good architecture is the product of the logical planning solutions to satisfy the functions that the building is required for and the structure has to be the logical solution to the structural necessities. To express a simple, logical and honest structure is the essence of architectural beauty. I did not use, for example, exposed rafters because it was fashionable to do so, I used this method of construction because it was a simple, logical and economical expression of how the roof of the house is constructed.
Some people adopted honest expressions of structure as an architectural ‘style’ (like exposed rafters) and used them when they were not actually the method of construction.
I hate this type of deception.
Most people when they decide to build first decide on a ‘style’ and try to make the functional aspects of the building fit the choice of style. I do not recognize styles but my architecture will be classified, by others, into a ‘style. For example now in 2007 they call it “RETRO”
Fire place designed like a ‘Pot Belly’ but with open fire. Moulded by my hands using refractory cement.
For all fire places I used a formula : Area of flue = 1/10 of area of opening. Area of throat = 5/4 to 4/5 of flue area. Minimum depth = 450mm.
Heather, Baby Anthony and me at our first house in Rostrevor (Adelaide)
I had a private client in the 1960s, a young accountant with a young family who wanted a Georgian style house. His block of land faced West and he wanted the house to occupy most of the street frontage facing the street which meant facing into the hot Western sun.
I sketched an alternative functional plan that had the house running down the length of the block with the long wall mostly glass facing North onto a private outdoor area. To satisfy his need for the house to look BIG from the street designed a double garage joining to the end of the house with an impressive entrance hall. The garage gave privacy from the street to the private court and the North facing glass allows sun penetration to be excluded in the summer but admitting deep sun penetration during the winter months just by a calculated roof overhang. This is by far the best use of solar energy, there is no need for expensive equipment. The West facing house would be unbearably hot in the summer and cold in the Winter but the North facing house uses solar energy to trap the sun’s warmth during winter months especially if there is a concrete floor to store the energy.
I explained the logic of this alternative design and that it would be more economical to build so for the same money he could have larger rooms.
He said “I understand your logic but I still want a Georgian house and I want the long wall facing the street.” At that time in Adelaide an accountant thought that to be successful he had to live in a Georgian house.
Interior of the open plan Living, Dining and kitchen wing – Rostrevor House, 1958
Probably the largest, but not the best, building I designed for this practice was the office building for the Australian Wheat Board (Grain House) on South Terrace, Adelaide.
The contract was let on April 30 and the client moved in on September 30th. 1963. Bevan Rutt managed the contract administration very efficiently and I learnt a lot from him.
With domestic sized buildings we did our own engineering calculations but when the building was large and two or more stories we consulted engineering specialists who should be able to design more refined structures than we can.
On this building I had my first clash with structural engineers.
When I received the structural information from the firm of consulting engineers Bevan Rutt and Roberts had used for many years, I found I could not fit the air conditioning ducts in the ceiling space because of steel cross bracing they wanted between the floor beams. When I asked “couldn’t you use the concrete floors to brace the building horizontally?”.
They said that they had the philosophy of making the steel frame structurally complete independent of any other building components.
This would mean that the height of each floor would have to be increased by one foot six inches (450mm) at considerable cost and spoil the proportions of my building. So I argued my case and the engineers conceded that it could work if a steel bar was welded along the top of the steel beams so the concrete slab could grip the steel.
House designed for Paul Le Mercier - Adelaide - 1963
During the 1960’s the world of construction was going through a phase of ‘Modular Co-ordination’ and there were committees set up throughout the world that were communicating with each other about the subject.
Metric standard measurement for Australia, England and America was part of this movement.
Modular co-ordination would enable building materials and building components to be manufactured to world standard modules to make construction easier and more economical.
The second largest building I designed while working in this office was the Stenhouse Insurance brokers’ office building in North Adelaide. As an exercise, I designed this building to comply with international modular measurements even though we were still using feet and inches in Australia.
I adopted a system where every measurement was a product of four inches, which is close to 100 millimetres for each building component. A planning grid of 12 feet (3.6 m ) with four feet (1.2 metres) sub modules because most Australian sheet building materials were manufactured in four feet widths.
When every thing was co-ordinated, window mullions and the modular ceiling grid exactly aligned.
Using the same system with office partitioning, any partition that ran into a wall of windows did so at a window mullion.
This building incorporated underneath car parking which was very unusual in 1964.
Many architects did not like the idea of a modular system because they claimed it restricted their designs but it does not restrict freedom of design if you know how to use it properly. In fact it can improve design.
When the building was complete and occupied I made an inspection and found that the General Manager had placed his row of four filing cabinets backing onto a glass wall. I asked him why he hadn’t placed them on his right hand side where they would back onto a blank wall. He said “young man, I have been working with my filing cabinets on my left hand side for 25 years and I am not going to change now”. Well, I said “ if you had told us two months ago we could have placed your office where the Assistant Managers office is and it would have worked for you”.
The new retail premises and warehouse for Taylor Marine Supplies in Adelaide was the first building where I used precast and prestressed concrete construction. I chose this method of building to minimize the ‘site time’ of construction to minimize the disruption of the busy street on which it was to be built.
TAYLORS MARINE 1964 - ADELAIDE
With the election of the Whitlam federal labor government in 1972, the Dunstan State Government in South Australia and a labor government in New South Wales, Australians became aware of the need to save our heritage which was being thoughtlessly destroyed in the hype of rapid development.
Labor had decided that there were votes in supporting heritage type movements, probably the most influential one being ‘the Builders’ Workers’ Union who saved ‘The Rocks area in Sydney from being demolished.
During 1972 architecture students at the university of Sydney went on strike supposedly to get a less constricting educating in architecture. I was busy with my practice in Alice Springs and coping with the change to metric measurements thinking “how can students go on strike, they can harm no one but themselves.” The organisers were encompassing groups with ideas such as the use of passive sola energy (something I always did anyway), better group housing designing and preservation of heritage type structures. When the movement won their cause none of those good things were followed up except for the preservation of heritage buildings.
Unfortunately Australians took it too far and every one wanted to build ‘heritage’ type new buildings which was a giant retrograde step in architecture and our Australian culture generally.
It was not until about 2007 that Australia began to recover from this regression into the past and real architecture and furniture design began to compare with what we were doing in the sixties.
Today in 2007 people are building what they call ‘Retro’ Style buildings which is a copy of the REAL architecturally significant buildings designed during the enlightened period of the late 1950’s and 60’s.
Todays’ “Retro” style buildings are not a genuine result of the logical structural and functional expression of the building but are constructed in an inefficient current building method and dressed up to look like the 1960’s architecture. This offcourse makes it an expensive method of building because it is faked.
***
While all this was happening Heather was busy too and gave birth to another two sons, Matthew and Peter.
Matthew was born on July 19, 1961 and Peter on December 10, 1964.
Because of the unsatisfactory experiences Heather had at the Adelaide Memorial Maternity Hospital she decided to give birth at Calvary Catholic Hospital in North Adelaide. Then most of the nursing staff were nuns, who were very dedicated, professional and best of all according to Heather they ran a very quiet hospital. The nuns spoke in whispers and silently glided around the hospital corridors.
Matthew was a happy, easy to manage baby probably because we were now experienced parents.
On Tuesdays I caught the bus to work so Heather could have the car to go to a social tennis day at a friend’s place who had a tennis court and swimming pool.
They had a great time although I don’t know how because there would be six to eight young mothers each with two or three little kids, some, like Heather with two toddlers and a baby in a pram.
On Fridays I caught the bus so she could have the car to go shopping.
One lovely summer night we were enjoying our court when there was a bashing on the front door.
“There’s a bush fire coming down the creek. All the men are going to try to stop it”.
The creek which ran past our front was heavily timbered with highly flammable eucalypts and we had retained three medium sized eucalypts on our block, two of them in our court.
I said to Heather “get ready to evacuate the boys and a few essentials.
If the fire gets into the canopy it will be very quick.
If you see that happen escape out the back through Atkinsons’.
Don’t try to escape in the car, you won’t make it.
I grabbed a rake, a bag and a bucket and found the fire about one kilometre up the creek where there was a public park. The fire was burning the under brush and had not yet got into the canopy.
There were about 10 men already there and they had found a hose tap in the park and were trying to get water on the fire but the heat was so intense that they couldn’t get close enough. “I presume someone had phoned the fire brigade?” I asked. “yes, they are on their way”.
The creek turned into the wind and the fire slowed.
We rushed in with the hose.
It wouldn’t reach.
Three of us pulled and it stretched to a remarkable degree and we got some water on the base of the fire and slowed it some more.
We could hear the fire brigade, sirens screaming, going down Montacute Road that passed us to the North.
They missed the turnoff at Forest Avenue.
We could hear them going along Stradbroke Road to the East.
They missed that turn off too.
Then they went along Morialta Road to the South of us.
There’s no turnoff from that road.
Bloody hell don’t they have a map I shouted.
The fire has passed where we can get the hose to it.
We are running in with buckets of water.
In about two minutes it will reach a point where the creek turns down wind and then there will be no hope of our stopping it.
The fire brigade arrived,
A fireman running towards the fire with his hose shouts, “get your hose over here you idiots.”
‘It wont reach’.
The brigade put the fire out in no time but only because we had delayed its progress, they got to it just before the creek turned downwind.
While working at Bevan Rutt and Roberts I decided to take up studying again and complete my course. I had had a lot of experience and was doing the job of an architect. The house was complete and Heather was happily settled in being a stay-at-home full time mum.
I enrolled with the RMIT correspondence school to do a couple of subjects and their service to their students was fantastic. However, the following year, when I applied to do the last two subjects I was told that those final year subjects were not available by correspondence and I would have to do them at RMIT.
I passed my final exams by flying to Melbourne and was granted registration in Victoria in early 1966 and in South Australia a couple of months later and in the Northern Territory before the years end.
In 1977 I was elevated to a Fellow of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects.
Also in early 1966 a salesman from a specialist ceiling sub-contractor told me that a partnership, Bullock and Burton, were looking for another partner to open an office in Darwin. They had already established a practice in Adelaide and Alice Springs, where Lance Burton now lived, and he had developed a client base in Darwin.
Heather and I thought about it. We studied slides of Darwin and talked to people who had lived there.
After discussions with Jim Bullock, Lance Burton, their accountant and their lawyer, I signed a partnership agreement effective from July 1st. 1966.
Heather was about three months pregnant with Andrew.
About one month before we were to set out for Darwin, Jim Bullock told me that their Darwin Clients did not want some new partner doing their projects. They wanted the man they knew, Lance Burton.
Would I go to Alice Springs?.
Heather’s brother, John, had been to Alice Springs to an Apex conference so we invited him around with his slides.
Alice Springs was alright with Heather. It was only a little over one thousand miles (1,800 km) away from Adelaide where Darwin was over two thousand miles.
I wrote to the Adelaide School of Mines and Industries (later called ‘the Adelaide Institute of Technology) and got their curriculum for the course in Architecture which appeared to be virtually the same as the RMIT course.
Dad wrote to one of his aunts at 6 Victoria Avenue, North Adelaide, May Coad. She, a widow with a 40 year old single daughter living at home, said I was welcome to stay at their place for a nominal rent.
I felt it was time to become independent and decided that I would have to work and finish my course doing part time studies.
Aunt May had two sons, Donald and Melville both married. Melville had the most gorgeous, elegant, pretty and ladylike wife called Janice, and I fell in love with her.
The husband of Jessie Paddick, another of dad’s aunts, was a retired detective and knowing what made Adelaide tick got me a list of practicing architects in Adelaide. I proceeded to go around them looking for a job. Adelaide was a very dead and backward place in 1953 and architects were not doing well at all. At my 40th interview the architect interviewer said that he would like to take me on but could pay me only four pounds ten shillings a week and that would be more than I was worth to him but he realised that he could not pay me less.
Before I said yes to that job I decided to check on an advertisement I saw in the news-paper where the Electricity Trust of South Australia (ETSA) was advertising for electrical engineering trainees in brackets, (Building Department). This turned out to be a job working as an architectural draughtsman in the ETSA building department with up to nine hours a week off to attend lectures with no reduction in pay and the pay was nine guineas a week.
Nine guineas (an even older type of money than pounds) was nine pounds nine shillings which equals $18.90.
This was too good an opportunity to miss so I applied and got the job.
I wondered why when there were a lot of other applicants but when I got to know Adelaide better I realised that first, the Electricity Trust was dominated by descendants of Scottish migrants (so with a name like McPhee?) and second, the fact that I lived in North Adelaide where the “old families” lived, I understood. My boss’s name was John McDougall.
That is where my first name became Andrew. Although I told them my first name was Kevin, they said “to us you will be Andrew, we can not have someone with a good Scottish name like McPhee called Kevin”. I thought “I like that”. It is interesting that all of the people I now know except my siblings, call me Andrew.
Another Electrical Engineering Trainee (Building), our title was EET(B), Stefan Pikusa and I became good friends and we studied together. Stefan and his parents were Polish refuges from the after-math of the second world war.
It was the policy of government departments to employ a certain number of migrants so we were a multi cultural department which was interesting. My first two friends in Adelaide were Stefan Pikusa and a Hungarian fellow called Gustave.
I went to the Adelaide School of Mines armed with my qualifications to discuss with the Principal what subjects I should take but was told by the receptionist
“oh no, the Principal does not see individual students!”.
After arguing with her she said “all right then, if you insist, write to him and request an appointment”.
I thought “fu…. You. There’s no time to do that” and asked who could I see then?.
She suggested I could try the head of the architectural department, Gavin Walkley. What a bureaucratic lot of pricks, I thought.
I took my credentials to Gavin Walkley with the intention of discussing what subjects I could get credits for and which ones to study this year but after a short discussion he pushed them back to me and said “Sorry, we can’t help you”.
I thought “well fu…. YOU too”.
I went to the front desk of the university and enrolled to do three subjects, Physics A and B and history of architecture 3. I needed to make use of the nine hours the ETSA made available for study.
In Ballarat physics was divided into 1A, 1B, 1C, and 2A, 2B, 2C and 3A etc where the A was mechanical, B was Hydraulics and C was Electrical. The engineers had to do the whole 3 years but architects had to do only two of the three years. In Adelaide they had only physics A, B, and C all a one year subject so the amount of detail they learnt was one third of what we learnt in Ballarat.
In Ballarat when we studied the strength of materials, there were material testing machines with which we would stretch a steel bar to find out how much tensile strength it could stand or crush a sample of concrete to see how much compressive strength it had.
There was equipment so you could measure and therefore prove the acceleration due to gravity and equipment to demonstrate centrifugal force etc.
In Adelaide you just read about it in a book.
The Adelaide University decided that I had done only two thirds of the physics which was incorrect but I redid the subjects which was easy.
Architectural Design in Adelaide consisted of drawing, in minute detail to a scale of 1 to 2, the three classical Greek column capitols, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian taking one term to draw one capital, so I didn’t bother with that subject.
In the School of Mines, Ballarat there was a museum of things students used to do in the 1860’s, drawing these Greek column Capitols was what they did one hundred years before but were still doing in Adelaide.
So I learnt the hard way that subjects with the same name were not necessarily the same subjects.
Gavin Walkley turned out to be the lecturer for history of architecture but he would never know that I was in his class. He used to walk in, turn off the lights and show us slides for two hours and talk in monotone. Many students went to sleep.
There was no real course in architecture in Adelaide, at that time there was no Faculty of Architecture at the Adelaide University. Those who completed the course in Adelaide received a Bachelor of Engineering, in brackets Architecture; BE(Arch). which I thought was insulting to the profession of Architecture; Engineering is actually a branch of Architecture.
In Victoria Architecture was classified and taught as a Fine Art.
Some years later I was astounded to hear that Gavin Walkley had commissioned Robin Boyd, a well known Melbourne architect, to design his own new house in Adelaide.
I said to Stefan “how can we accept that the architect in charge of the education of architects can not even design his own house?”.
Stefan replied “but you have to give him credit for realizing that Robin Boyd can do a better job than he can himself and for having the courage to admit it”.
Stefan was right, I was bitter about how Gavin Walkley just wrote me off when I first went to Adelaide but he dedicated his working life to the profession by being involved in the education of architects and serving on the Architects’ Registration Board. I wondered if he was a member of that board when I applied for registration in 1966; I know Dick Roberts was because he wrote me a letter of congratulations when I was granted registration.
Students – Myself and Stefan Pikusa on the Torrens River, Adelaide 1953
I could see that studying in Adelaide was not going to get me any closer to getting my diploma of architecture so gave it up after one year. Eventually I was to find that the RMIT had a correspondence department and I could complete my DipA by correspondence.
However that was put on hold for a while because I met Heather Slape and my priorities changed.
Working at the ETSA building section was really good. They looked after their students and made sure that they experienced every facet of the building process including making site inspections. The Building Supervisor in our section was Max Lieberman, a migrant from Egypt, who was doing a few little developments as a hobby, instructed us on the commercial as well as the construction aspects of building. Max Lieberman I believe is now quite a large developer in Adelaide.
During school holidays students were sent out with construction teams to give us experience of the outside world, to see how our drawings were working on site and give us some physical exercise which wasn’t always the case.
During one term holiday we were attached to a cable pulling gang whose job it was to pull electrical cables through conduits already installed underground.
After setting up the cable pulling winch over the manhole, we were sitting around and I said “what are we waiting for?” the reply was “smoko time”. After smoko we were still just sitting around and I said “what are we waiting for now?” “lunch time”, was the answer.
My drawing board was in a really good position in the office, The ETSA building department was in a nice 100 year old stone building called Hindmarsh Building in Hindmarsh Square and I sat on the first floor next to a large plate glass window overlooking the Square.
During my time at ETSA I was loaned to the South Australian Mines department to work on the planning of the uranium mining town at Radium Hill. To work there I had to get a commonwealth security pass which entailed being investigated by ASIO (or what ever it was called then) who wanted to know who my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters were.
We worked in a secured office building inside a secured Mines Department complex at Finsbury which was on the North West side of Adelaide and suited me because I lived in North Adelaide. A security officer took away the contents of our rubbish bins every evening and if any of us had to go out of the compound during the day, like to the library to do research, we were taken by an army man in a Land Rover.
In those days engineering offices used tracers who were almost always girls. The engineers did their drawings roughly in pencil and the tracers traced them onto linen in ink. Walking through the drawing office one day I noticed all of the girls in the office crowded around one drawing board. As I squeezed through the oestrogen charged atmosphere I took a look at what they were all so vitally interested in. It was a women’s magazine and the heading of the article of their focus was “Birth Control by a Pill”. BIG news at the time.
I had bought my first car, a 1927 Austin 7 two seater tourer, with soft top. This greatly improved my mobility because in Adelaide all public transport stopped at 11.30 every night.
The first Saturday night that I went to the movies with my two ‘New Australian’ friends, we stood on the footpath, outside the movie house to discuss where we would go for a coffee., In that three or four minutes, everyone had disappeared and the movie house was being locked. It was amazing, after five or six minutes, you could not see a person in the street. One of us said “there’s a café just down here” but that was locked up and in darkness so we made our way to the tram stop which was just as well because we just caught the last tram for the day, it was 11.30 PM. Life really did stop in Adelaide after 11.30.
In Mildura and in Ballarat everyone went to a café after the movies or a dance, that was where you had fun with your friends.
Every time a celebrity came to Adelaide some newspaper or radio reporter would say “and what do you think of our fair city?”
I liked when Peter Ustinoff said “Adelaide is a restaurant built in a cemetery”.
I wished they would ask me, I would say that the water in Adelaide must be seriously deficient in iodine.
It is popular to make derogative remarks about Adelaide but I liked living there and I thought that there were more beautiful girls there than at other cities. However it was a sad place for architects.
The Institute of Architects in about 1955 did a survey and found that only three percent of buildings built in Adelaide were designed by architects.
Aunt May, with whom I stayed, always took summer holidays at Middletown, near Victor Harbour, and during her holidays in 1953 I stayed with great Aunt Jessie and great Uncle Bernard Paddick who lived at 32 Barton Terrace, North Adelaide. Their family at that time consisted of the eldest Flora, (it was the policy of the McPhee families to always call the first born son Donald and the first born daughter Flora) Heather and Jessie. Heather was married to Bruce Robson who was a master at Poultney Grammar College, they had two young sons, David and Christopher, (later they had four more children) and they all lived at 32 Barton Terrace. While there I had my 21st birthday and they gave me a Chinese dinner party. They had befriended two Chinese medical students who prepared a scrumptious meal using genuine ingredients that they were permitted to import from China.
Life while living with the Coads and the Paddicks was elegant, ‘would you like sherry before dinner?’ yes please, ‘sweet or dry?’. Breakfast was always at 7.30 except Sundays when they went to early morning mass at St. Peters Cathedral (Church of England) before breakfast and then had a substantial brunch. I slept in while they went to mass. On other days if I was not out of bed by 7.30 breakfast would be brought in to me on a tray. This was the first time I had my own room, bedside table, dressing table, wardrobe and Valet. The valet was a polished wooden structure on which you hung your coat, trousers and tie and it had a shelf at the bottom for your shoes.
I still kept a friendship going with Harry and Erica Fleming and saw them when I visited my parents during holidays. I was best man at their wedding. During 1953 they came to Adelaide and brought Erica’s little sister, Margaret, with them who was now about 17 and had grown into an attractive young lady. Because they were coming I did some research and found that someone from Melbourne had recently started a night club which was up narrow stairs in an old building on Frome Road. We went there often during that week of their visit and found they had a band so we could dance and buy a cup of coffee, laced with whisky, until daylight.
My first car – 1927 – Austin 7
The Electricity Trust held an annual ball which was very popular and difficult to get tickets for but we worked there so had no problem.
One Saturday in 1954 Stefan and I went to the dance held at Burnside specifically to get a partner to take to the annual Electricity Trust Ball.
As we stood on the side of the hall surveying the girls on the other side waiting for the music to start Steve said “have you decided on which one you are going to try for”. I said that I had and it was that blonde in the blue dress straight across. So the music started and I headed straight for the blonde, just as I reached her, a flash guy zoomed in from the side and whisked her away. I found myself looking at the biggest and brightest smile from the girl who had been seated behind the blonde and whom I had not seen before. So returning the smile I said, “would you like to dance”.
During that night I had most of the dances with her and found that her name was Heather Slape and she lived at Burnside. I decided that I would ask her to come to the ETSA annual ball but Steve had the next dance with her and asked her first. So I asked another girl who Steve had been dancing with.
I hired a Morris Minor four seat car for the occasion which cost ten pounds ($20.00) for 24 hours. During the evening I became aware that I really liked Heather and could not let this opportunity be missed and for the second half of the ball danced every dance with her and left Steve with the other girl.
After the ball, since it was my car and I had the controls, I dropped off Steve and the other girl first and took Heather home.
It must have been my DNA that decided that Heather was the one because I was driven by some not previously experienced inner irresistible force to make her mine.
We went out together and from then on danced with no one else to the romantic singing of John Winters at the Saturday night Burnside Dance.
Heather’s parents, particularly her father, at first thought that I was not good enough for Heather. Harold, her father said that I was too skinny and weak looking and that when hard times came I would not be able to get work I was amazed that he placed mo value on academic qualifications.
However when I came back from holidays in Mildura, Heather’s mother and brothers said “next time you go away take Heather with you. She was impossible to live with because she missed you so much”. Heather was 17 years old and I was 21.
Heather’s family consisted of an older brother, Barry a younger brother, John and the youngest a sister called Fay. Her father was called Harold Slape and her Mother Florence (called Florry).
When I stayed there for a meal, usually Sunday mid day, I thoroughly enjoyed the family bantering at these meals which I discovered I was missing while living with a widowed great aunt.
At the Radium Hill project I was given the task of designing the town and the main Mines- Department buildings. The surveyors had set out their survey grid at 45 degrees to North and South because the seam of uranium some hundreds of metres below the ground, ran in a North East direction and they had brought the railway line in parallel with the survey grid. I, as everyone should unless compelled by some forceful constraints like mountains, set out the streets so they basically ran North-South and East-West. That way, it is easy to control the sun penetration into buildings, like keep it out in summer and let it shine in, in winter. This also allowed triangular parks to be established each side of the railway line.
The engineers in charge would not have that. To their engineers’ minds the streets had to follow the surveyor’s grid lines and for no other reason than that the grid lines were on the survey plan.
Similarly when I showed them my design for the Department of Mines office building they said “the plan works OK but you should put some architecture on the building.”
My design had a simple gable roof with a 1.2 m overhang to keep out the hot sun and a complimentary gable over the entrance foyer, was set back from the street with a landscaped entrance and naturally, all designed with good proportions.
The engineers changed the front elevation so that it had a brick parapet wall that stepped from each end to a high parapet in the middle, put it right on the street boundary and provided no sun protection over the windows.
I said to my ETSA. Employers that I apparently wasn’t much use to them and they obviously thought so too and could I go back to my old job.
There was a discovery of brown coal at Lea Creek in the North of South Australia and to exploit it the ETSA had to build a concrete dam on Lea Creek. When concrete dams are built often the engineers add fly- ash, from the powerhouse coal burning boilers, to the concrete which reduces the quantity of cement required with no reduction in strength.
There is however a problem in that the fly-ash causes the concrete to generate more heat than normal as it sets and they have to run cooling pipes through the concrete when it is a large mass like a dam. To find out how much additional heat this process was going to create ETSA commissioned the engineering department of the University of Adelaide to run experiments. These experiments required someone to take the temperature of samples of concrete as they set every 15 minutes 24 hours a day and the ETSA volunteered we part time students to take these readings over night. I won the 8.0 PM till midnight shift and this was every night for two weeks which of course is when young people go out. So after the professor of engineering had set me up, briefed me and gone home, Heather would come to the University laboratory and sit with me. The good thing about it was that I got paid double time for those four hours and I was soon able to afford to buy an engagement ring.
Aunt May Coad had a good back garden where she grew fruit and vegetables from which she provided the domestic needs and made chutneys and preserves with the surplus.
One Sunday in 1953 I was in the garden with her when she doubled up in pain, I helped her into the kitchen and sat her down, she was trying to ask me to get something for her so I guessed it must be medication. I ran into her bedroom and brought all of the bottles of pills in her bedside table but she pushed them aside and was gesturing towards the liquor cupboard so I grabbed the brandy and she nodded. I poured her half a glass which she drank straight down and began to relax. She asked me to phone her doctor to come as quick as he can and to then help her change into her night gown and to get into bed. When I asked if I should take off her stockings she said “oh no!, no man has ever seen me without stockings”. I said “your husband must have”. She replied “my husband never saw me without stockings”.
What a lot people of that generation missed.
Aunt May was in bed for a couple of days then they took her to hospital where she died after another couple of days. She had a blood clot near her heart.
Marjory Coad decided to turn the house into two flats so I looked for other rooms and found a place in Burnside about two kilometres from where Heather lived.
Harry Fleming was now a qualified electrician and moved to Sydney with Erica, now his wife, and their two children. “Harry has fulfilled his ambition and got to Sydney at last” I thought.
Stefan Pikusa was offered a job with Hassell and McConnell, a rapidly rising and progressive architectural practice, which he accepted. A few weeks later they asked Stefan if he could recommend another two promising young men and he recommended Bob Johns and me.
I got on very well with Jack McConnell but not so well with Colin Hassell probably because McConnell was Melbourne trained and Hassell was Adelaide trained. Unfortunately for me McConnell was spending increasing amounts of time in their Melbourne office so I was getting less exposure to him who was a cutting edge architect. Had I had more time with McConnell I think I would have done well within this practice. However my immediate boss, the office ram-rod, Dick Roberts was a dynamic, energetic and forceful man and he taught me a lot especially about how to run an office and how to manage projects. I liked Dick a lot, although he was a hard task master, he was effective and I believe it was his influence that gave me the ability to run my own practice in Alice Springs quite often under difficult circumstances.
Bob Dickson and I worked together on a number of projects there and on one occasion when Bob instructed me to change a design element on a building I considered the change to be unsuitable. I said to him “if your aesthetic sense tells you to do something that is foreign to the integrity of the building design concept then you should review your sense of aesthetics.” He replied “some day, Andrew, someone will take you seriously and punch you on the nose.”
The whole office laughed. Bob took this as an insult, I thought I was giving him constructive criticism as I was taught professionals should do and accept without taking it as a personal insult.
There were some excellent architects in Adelaide who were Adelaide trained but I believe they were good in spite of the BE(Arch.) course and became good architects through educating themselves.
I have lost touch with the architectural scene in Adelaide over the last 30 years but up to 30 years ago every notably good architect had at some time worked for Hassell and McConnell.
Bob Dickson eventually went into partnership with Newell Platten and their office designed many excellent sensitive buildings which today would be called ‘environmentally friendly’.
Keith Neighbour worked with Hassell and McConnell and he and his partner Antonious Lapsys have designed many of the best buildings in Adelaide, like the Hilton Hotel, and in other centres of Australia.
John Morphett who graduated his BE(Arch) with honours won a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, considered the best School of Architecture in the world at the time, and did a post graduate course there. John became the head of Hassell and McConnell (which sometime in the 1970’s changed to Hassell- Architects) until his retirement.
Sometime during the late 1950’s the University of Adelaide established a chair of Architecture but they got their first professor from England which I thought was a cultural-cringe sort of thing to do.
Stefan Pikusa changed to the university course and graduated equal top place with the professor’s son. Stefan left Hassell and McConnell and took up a position of lecturer and later to become the professor of architecture at the University.
At the RMIT, in Ballarat and Melbourne, it was not permitted for the lecturer of a subject to have any-thing to do with the examining of his students in that subject. Exams were set and marked by an independent examiner. Students were not permitted to identify their exam papers except by a given ID number so the examiner never knew whose paper he was marking. If a student put any marks on his exam papers that could identify him he would be disqualified. This was to eliminate any possibility of preferential treatment.
In Adelaide at both the university and the School Of Mines the lecturers set the exams and marked the papers and students put their full name on the exam papers giving every opportunity for preferential or prejudice treatment of the students.
The professor of Architecture at the Adelaide University had two sons who both studied architecture and both were top of their year every year. When Stefan Pikusa (who everyone thought was brilliant) graduated he came equal top with the professor’s second son. Rumours were prevalent that the professor’s sons were given preferential treatment which was probably unfair. If your father was the professor of architecture and you were studying architecture, at home you would surely eat, sleep and live architecture which must give you an advantage over others whose father’s were not architects.
If in Adelaide they followed the same examination procedures as Melbourne there would be no doubt.
Heather and I started a saving plan together so we could marry. We lived off Heather’s wage, which was half of mine, and banked all of mine. This was very frugal living but we were determined.
We married on March 5th. 1955 and lived in half a house with an elderly widow in Wayville.
We continued with our stringent saving plan so that we could buy a block of land and build a house.
To save even more money, since Wayville was close to the centre of Adelaide, we sold the car, now an Austin 8, and bought a Lambretta motor scooter which gave us a fuel consumption of 120 miles to the gallon. The landlady charged us thirty shillings a week rent plus one shilling extra for electricity because we had a refrigerator. A shower cost threepence for five minuted.
Heather and I showered together so we could have a ten minute shower for sixpence.
The first time we did that after five minutes the landlady was bashing on the door of the bathroom shouting “you have been more than five minutes” but when we both walked out in our dressing gowns she was too embarrassed to complain again.
I concluded that people who lived in the city all of their life were insane by the time they were sixty years old.
Few people had a washing machine in those days and neither did we until we had our own house. We did the weeks wash on Sunday mornings by hand in the cement wash tubs. First we had to boil the copper to get hot water, then wash all of the clothes in the same water starting with the white clothes including the sheets, wash them by pushing and squeezing them in the soapy water, then wring the water out of them by twisting and squeezing them, one each end when it came to the sheets, then rinse them in the next tub and wring them out again before hanging them on the line to dry.
While we both worked we shared the domestic chores but once Heather started to have babies she automatically, as was the custom then, became a full time home maker and supportive of my efforts to become a qualified architect and to build a career. After all my success was also her success, we were a unit.
I had been married only a few months when Jack McConnell asked for me to be sent to Melbourne to help that office meet a deadline for the design of a new Balm Paints factory.
They accommodated me in a small hotel on the South bank of the Yarra River, less than a Kilometre from the office.
Jack McConnell was the first architect in Australia to design factories that were not the usual saw-tooth roof corrugated iron monstrosities.
Although he used basically the same materials, like concrete, steel and iron, instead of the structural frame being made of lots of small angle irons welded together to make a messy frame he used large square steel members to make a steel structure that was a bold, clean and aesthetically pleasing architectural statement.
The structure was the architecture as it is in the older Gothic Cathedrals like Westminster Abbey..
He had also designed the new recently opened Heinz canned food factory in Melbourne. These buildings were also functional and comfortable for human activity.
One day McConnell said “I have to go to the Heinz factory to look at a problem. Would you like to come?”. The problem was that McConnell had used an innovative structural idea where the floor beams of the first floor together with the roof beams and columns that joined them formed the homogeneous structure of the entire first floor. These were called verandeel trusses. The people on the first floor actually occupied the space within these giant trusses. This type of truss depends on the design of the welded joint between the columns and the beams to resist the diagonal forces and at one of these joints, the steel of the floor beam had buckled. McConnell had steel experts examine the steel at this joint and it was found that there was a fault in the manufacture of the steel beam.
We looked over the factory and it was exciting for me to see how every detail had been carefully designed so that the whole building was a functional and beautiful space. Even the refrigeration cooling tower at the back was not overlooked because it was at the back. It was a simple, bold and functional expression of its purpose.
I hated being separated from Heather even for the nine hours we were at work every day but now had been separated for two weeks so she came to Melbourne for a long weekend. I caught a train to Ballarat and met Heather’s train from Adelaide which got in about 6.00 AM Saturday morning.
I introduced Heather to my Ballarat family and to the lecturers at the SMB and we got the next train to Melbourne. The hotel was very kind, I had asked them to change me to a double room for three days because my wife was visiting for the long weekend and they gave us the bridal suite for no extra cost.
On the Balm Paints factory we worked long hours and on the day before the deadline we worked all night .
In 1957 we purchased a block of land in Rostrevor a recent subdivision of a farm and our quarter acre block faced Fourth Creek which runs down from Morialta falls. The price was six hundred and fifty pounds ($1,300.00).
The back boundary adjoined the back boundary of the substantial original farm house and we became close friends of the occupants, the Atkinsons.
On the next block to the East lived a Greek family in what used to be the farm implement shed (tractor shed) and before the subdivision they considered that our block was also theirs. When we came to inspect the block, take levels and measure out where the house was going to be built the Greek family would get agitated, none of them could speak English, so I decided that I had better build a temporary fence around our block. The Greeks were not home the day I built the fence but next day when we arrived on the block the Man was shaking the fence, shouting in Greek and shaking his fist at me.
I contacted a friend who could speak Greek and got him to interpret. The Greek man said that this was his land and if I did not take down the fence and stop coming onto his property he would cut my throat.
I got the original owner who had subdivided the farm and through the interpreter he explained how the Greek family did have a lease that had expired but that was all over and he never did own the land and that I now owned that piece of land.
The Greek man was very sorry and invited me into his home where they gave me a glass of wine and a spoonful of jam on a plate to eat with the wine. From then, until they moved, we were friends.
Stefan also lived in Rostrevor at 27 Derwent Avenue and by 1958 had built his new house.
As was often done in those days, especially by migrants, Stefan had built a small temporary house on the back of his block where he and his parents lived until they could afford to build a proper house. So when Stefan moved into his new house, complete with nuclear shelter, he rented his temporary house to Heather and I. This is where Anthony was conceived. Heather had said that she would start a baby as soon as we had the construction of our house underway and I had the concrete raft slab built by then.
I built this house except for electrical, plumbing and glazing, entirely myself which in retrospect was a mistake because it was far too much work for one person to do working only weekends. My older brother Ian tried to run a dried fruit property all by himself thinking that if he could avoid the expense of employing workers he would get ahead financially.
He worked so hard that he became sick and was diagnosed with tuberculosis which not only put him well behind financially but his family suffered. His baby boy died and his two year old daughter, Lorraine, also contracted the disease and was lucky to survive. He was not able to have more children.
I started construction at Easter 1958 and completed stage one a week after Easter 1959. Anthony was two weeks old when we moved in. When I started to build there was no electricity or water to the land and I had to carry the water for making the mortar to lay the bricks in buckets from the creek.
Immediately Heather had confirmation of her pregnancy, because ‘the baby boom was on’ we had to book her into the hospital with the best reputation which at that time was the Adelaide Memorial Maternity Hospital. She chose Dr. Wilber Joint for her Gynaecologist who was considered the top man in Adelaide. I wanted the best for my wife.
On the morning of May 6, 1959 at about 1.30 AM her labour pains started so I took her to the hospital where we waited for about an hour. When the midwife had examined her she told me to phone the hospital at about 4.00 that afternoon and they would tell me how she was going.
This really surprised me. Heather was such a naturally healthy young woman of 22 years, (her 23rd birthday wasn’t until May 12) and she had, with my encouragement, been doing pre-natal exercises and read up on natural birth. I thought she would pop a baby out in no time.
In those days the father wasn’t allowed anywhere near his wife once the hospital had their hands on her until she had given birth and both baby and mum were bathed and well presented.
I went to work and tried to do something.
I couldn’t concentrate, I paced the office floor waiting for 4.00 O’clock.
It was the longest day.
Four o’clock came, I phoned.
They said “congratulations, you have a lovely healthy son”.
“When was he born? “.
Nine o’clock this morning was the reply.
The bastards didn’t even phone to let me know.
I raced around to see Heather and she was distraught, in tears.
She said “I am so desperately tired, I haven’t been able to get any sleep, this place is so noisy”.
Not only was their a continuous stream of stainless steel trolleys rattling along the corridor which was tiled, hospital staff were shouting to each other which echoed along the corridor and there was a steam outlet, probably from a sterilizer, right outside her window that went off like a steam train about every fifteen minutes. I estimated that the noise in that hospital was equivalent to that of a steam railway station, about 90 decibels.
She had asked to be in a share room because her friends said that it is too lonely in a private room.
I complained about the noise so they put her in a private room and of course charged more, but they forgot she was there. She had to ring at every meal time because they forgot to bring it to her. They put an infra red lamp shining on her virgina to help it heal quicker and said it had to stay there for ten minutes. I arrived thirty minutes later to see her sitting in the visitor’s chair, avoiding the lamp, worried that she might be getting too much infra red rays and asked me if I could move it or turn it off. She had been ringing her bell but no one had come. It was a most incompetent organisation and when the baby boom slowed they were the first to close.
We had some trouble with Anthony as a baby because of our inexperience. Although there were a few revolutionaries around who believed in demand feeding babies, we were going to follow the advice of the hospital and feed every four hours.
Heather’s mother also said “make him wait , he will get indigestion if you feed him before four hours are up.”
The poor little boy was so hungry when he did get on the breast coupled with the fact that Heather’s breasts were busting to get rid of the milk, Anthony would gulp down the milk with lots of air and bring the lot up 10 minutes later. Then of course he was even more hungry by the next feed time, it would all happen again and we were upset because he cried so much.
Then our GP said “looking after babies is easy. You just have to give them what they want. The hard part is to know what they want”. We knew what he wanted and when he was fed on demand life was a lot easier.
One of Heather’s school friends married Bob Wearne and we were invited to their place for a barbecue where we met Bob’s brother, Frank and his wife Mignon. Some days later when I was erecting the roof beams on my house Frank arrived to see how I was going. He was very impressed with the design of our house and asked if I could design a house for him. “I have a block of land at Hawthorndene, in the Adelaide Hills, but it has about a 30 degree slope on it”.
“That’s not a problem” I said.
Frank and Mignon were a very lively and likeable couple and they had four baby girls in four years.
Frank spent his developing years working various jobs like wood cutting, cane cutting and shearing but when I met him he was a door to door Electrolux vacuum cleaner salesman, although a good one, he doesn’t want anyone to know that.
I designed his house. The prices he got from builders were all too high. He didn’t have a lot of money, so he said “I will build it myself.”
After building his own house he got a job with John Lander, one of my favourite house builders, and became a very proficient builder. He did a night course on building and became a registered builder.
I found in order to get reasonable contract prices for my logically designed houses I had to find fairly well educated young builders, builders who worked out their prices by taking off the actual quantities of materials and estimating their labour costs properly to arrive at the contract sum. The average house builder in those days did not have to have any qualifications or be registered. When pricing an architect designed house they would price by the square metre and add fifteen per cent because it was different when in fact the cost of labour and materials would quite often be less than an ordinary house of conventional construction.
One of these special builders of mine was John Lander, another was Alan Tossalini. Frank went to work for Tossalini after he qualified as a builder. Later he worked for Baulderstones where he eventually became a project manager of good reputation.
When the house was nearing completion I had arranged to meet an electrician on site at 5.30 and while waiting for him I would work on the hole for the septic tank. He did not turn up on three occasions and on the third occasion I was digging the hole with a great deal of anger and hurt my back, I slipped three disks in my lower spine. Now known as disk protrusions.
My GP sent me to an orthopaedic surgeon who said I had to put a board on my bed and lie flat on my back for six weeks and whatever you do don’t see a chiropractor. These days orthopaedic surgeons say that you should not stay in bed for more than three days or you will start to lose bone density. Fortunately I do not have enough respect for doctors to take them that seriously and found that after getting out of bed for a while my back was much better. While chatting with Mr Atkinson over the back fence he said “my GP has been to America and done a Chiropractic course, why don’t you see him. At least he is a medic and won’t do you any harm”. I saw this Dr. Clive Kneebone and he adjusted my spine so that it was good enough to go to work in a couple of days. He had to adjust my back about once a month until by doing exercises I built up my muscles after which as long as I kept up the exercises I had little trouble for many years.
Soon after completing the house I was approached by Howard Treloar and his wife Barbara who lived about 300 metres up the same road, to get involved with the construction of a local kindergarten. There were a lot of young families in the area with children soon to be at kindergarten age and the council had reserved a block of land just across the creek for that purpose. A committee was formed and Howard and I were charged with the responsibility of raising money and getting the building built. Howard held gambling nights and Barbara and many other young mothers baked cakes and pies and sold them on the street of the shopping centre. It was interesting that the mothers raised more money selling cakes than did the gambling nights.
I had designed two kindergartens at Hassell’s office and knew the ropes.
It was necessary to have approval of the building design from the ‘South Australian Kindergarten Teachers’ Union’ or they would not staff the kindergarten. So I would consult them before starting the design process. They were very helpful and provided a comprehensive brief. When I had completed the drawings I obtained prices from three builders.
Having raised about one thousand pounds ($2,000), Howard and I put together a presentation to use for an application to a bank for a loan. Howard is an accountant and produced a business plan. We needed to borrow about four thousand pounds ($8,000)
We fronted the bank manager’s desk and said “we, The Rostrevor Kindergarten Committee, would like to apply for a loan to build a new kindergarten. Here are the plans approved by the kindergarten Teachers’ Union, here are three tenders for the construction and a business plan showing how we can service the loan.”
The bank manager laughed.
Howard looked distraught and I thought “this is going to be difficult.”
The bank manager said “I will have to get approval from head office but I think I can safely say that your loan will be approved within seven days. I laughed because for kindergartens we usually get a couple of young people saying “If we form a committee and can get some land would you give us a loan to build a kindergarten”. “It is very unusual to be presented with such a complete proposal”.
The Kindergarten was built. Fencing, paths, landscaping and painting were done by working bees of young fathers and mothers.
It must be in the ‘Donald McPhee’ genes to ensure that education is available for our children because :- My father was secretary of the Meringu school committee which started the first school at Meringu,
I was instrumental in getting the Kindergarten started in Rostrevor as described above.
Anthony, my eldest son, got a high School reopened in Fitzroy North in Melbourne in 2002 and is still the chairman of the management board.
After working at Hassell and McConnell for four years I hadn’t seen anything of McConnell for about two years, I happen to mention to a building materials salesman that I was thinking of looking to work in a smaller office where I might get to be responsible for an entire building. Building material salesmen visit every architects’ office so it wasn’t long before I was made an offer by a partnership of two architects who had no staff. Shepherd and Simpson designed modern buildings so I accepted their offer. However I did not get on well with these partners. I thought they were too pedantic and stuck in a rut so their work was repetitive and not creative. To them modern architecture was just another style, they did not conceive that it was an honest expression of the functional and structural solution to a set of design requirements.
Also I was probably not a good employee at this stage of my life. It was when Anthony was a baby and because of our inexperience he cried a lot at night. I would go to work suffering from severe sleep deprivation consequentially a strained relationship between shepherd and Simpson and myself developed.
A member of our social group, Kevin Makin, after listening to me going on about how much better the course in architecture was in Melbourne, decided to go to Melbourne to finish his course in architecture He recommended to his boss to make an offer to me as his replacement. The partnership was Bevan Rutt and Roberts and Bevan Rutt phoned and made an offer which I said I would call in to discuss.
After giving it some thought, I said to Bevan “thank you for the offer but no thanks”.
He lighted a cigarette, sat back and said “would you mind telling me why?”.
“Well, you have a reputation for designing the best Georgian houses in Adelaide and although I appreciate that your designs are authentic and very well done I believe that we, today, should not build using styles from the past” I replied.
He said “you are exactly who we are looking for. Bain Roberts and I love doing our Georgian buildings but we are getting more clients that want modern, contemporary, futuristic or whatever you want to call them, designs and we want you to take care of that part of our practice. I promise you that if you work here you will never have to work on a Georgian design”. I liked the frank open and friendly attitude of this man.
“In that case I accept your offer” I told him.
Bevan Rutt was a well respected member of Adelaide society and was heavily involved with the Lions club and The Guide Dogs for the Blind. Bain Roberts was from an ‘old grazing family’ and architecture was more a hobby for him, although he designed the best Georgian houses in Adelaide.
This job suited me well. I was able to design the modern buildings without interference from my bosses and the work was mostly office buildings, ware-houses, factories and shops but some large houses for those who didn’t want Georgian.
Before long they had to hire a draughtsman to assist me with the modern section of their practice.
By this time I had also built up a private reputation for designing affordable functional, low energy consumption modern houses and had a number of them published in the Adelaide Advertiser, Homes and Building section. Some how a well respected architect, John Chappell, noticed these houses and published them in the Advertiser news paper.
For these buildings I designed and produced the construction drawings at home on weekends.
I believe that good architecture is the product of the logical planning solutions to satisfy the functions that the building is required for and the structure has to be the logical solution to the structural necessities. To express a simple, logical and honest structure is the essence of architectural beauty. I did not use, for example, exposed rafters because it was fashionable to do so, I used this method of construction because it was a simple, logical and economical expression of how the roof of the house is constructed.
Some people adopted honest expressions of structure as an architectural ‘style’ (like exposed rafters) and used them when they were not actually the method of construction.
I hate this type of deception.
Most people when they decide to build first decide on a ‘style’ and try to make the functional aspects of the building fit the choice of style. I do not recognize styles but my architecture will be classified, by others, into a ‘style. For example now in 2007 they call it “RETRO”
Fire place designed like a ‘Pot Belly’ but with open fire. Moulded by my hands using refractory cement.
For all fire places I used a formula : Area of flue = 1/10 of area of opening. Area of throat = 5/4 to 4/5 of flue area. Minimum depth = 450mm.
Heather, Baby Anthony and me at our first house in Rostrevor (Adelaide)
I had a private client in the 1960s, a young accountant with a young family who wanted a Georgian style house. His block of land faced West and he wanted the house to occupy most of the street frontage facing the street which meant facing into the hot Western sun.
I sketched an alternative functional plan that had the house running down the length of the block with the long wall mostly glass facing North onto a private outdoor area. To satisfy his need for the house to look BIG from the street designed a double garage joining to the end of the house with an impressive entrance hall. The garage gave privacy from the street to the private court and the North facing glass allows sun penetration to be excluded in the summer but admitting deep sun penetration during the winter months just by a calculated roof overhang. This is by far the best use of solar energy, there is no need for expensive equipment. The West facing house would be unbearably hot in the summer and cold in the Winter but the North facing house uses solar energy to trap the sun’s warmth during winter months especially if there is a concrete floor to store the energy.
I explained the logic of this alternative design and that it would be more economical to build so for the same money he could have larger rooms.
He said “I understand your logic but I still want a Georgian house and I want the long wall facing the street.” At that time in Adelaide an accountant thought that to be successful he had to live in a Georgian house.
Interior of the open plan Living, Dining and kitchen wing – Rostrevor House, 1958
Probably the largest, but not the best, building I designed for this practice was the office building for the Australian Wheat Board (Grain House) on South Terrace, Adelaide.
GRAIN HOUSE – ADELAIDE
This building was notable for its simplicity and that it was built in only five months. I produced the design and working drawings and got all permits with the help of only one draughtsman between February and April 9 1963.The contract was let on April 30 and the client moved in on September 30th. 1963. Bevan Rutt managed the contract administration very efficiently and I learnt a lot from him.
With domestic sized buildings we did our own engineering calculations but when the building was large and two or more stories we consulted engineering specialists who should be able to design more refined structures than we can.
On this building I had my first clash with structural engineers.
When I received the structural information from the firm of consulting engineers Bevan Rutt and Roberts had used for many years, I found I could not fit the air conditioning ducts in the ceiling space because of steel cross bracing they wanted between the floor beams. When I asked “couldn’t you use the concrete floors to brace the building horizontally?”.
They said that they had the philosophy of making the steel frame structurally complete independent of any other building components.
This would mean that the height of each floor would have to be increased by one foot six inches (450mm) at considerable cost and spoil the proportions of my building. So I argued my case and the engineers conceded that it could work if a steel bar was welded along the top of the steel beams so the concrete slab could grip the steel.
House designed for Paul Le Mercier - Adelaide - 1963
During the 1960’s the world of construction was going through a phase of ‘Modular Co-ordination’ and there were committees set up throughout the world that were communicating with each other about the subject.
Metric standard measurement for Australia, England and America was part of this movement.
Modular co-ordination would enable building materials and building components to be manufactured to world standard modules to make construction easier and more economical.
The second largest building I designed while working in this office was the Stenhouse Insurance brokers’ office building in North Adelaide. As an exercise, I designed this building to comply with international modular measurements even though we were still using feet and inches in Australia.
I adopted a system where every measurement was a product of four inches, which is close to 100 millimetres for each building component. A planning grid of 12 feet (3.6 m ) with four feet (1.2 metres) sub modules because most Australian sheet building materials were manufactured in four feet widths.
When every thing was co-ordinated, window mullions and the modular ceiling grid exactly aligned.
Using the same system with office partitioning, any partition that ran into a wall of windows did so at a window mullion.
This building incorporated underneath car parking which was very unusual in 1964.
Many architects did not like the idea of a modular system because they claimed it restricted their designs but it does not restrict freedom of design if you know how to use it properly. In fact it can improve design.
When the building was complete and occupied I made an inspection and found that the General Manager had placed his row of four filing cabinets backing onto a glass wall. I asked him why he hadn’t placed them on his right hand side where they would back onto a blank wall. He said “young man, I have been working with my filing cabinets on my left hand side for 25 years and I am not going to change now”. Well, I said “ if you had told us two months ago we could have placed your office where the Assistant Managers office is and it would have worked for you”.
The new retail premises and warehouse for Taylor Marine Supplies in Adelaide was the first building where I used precast and prestressed concrete construction. I chose this method of building to minimize the ‘site time’ of construction to minimize the disruption of the busy street on which it was to be built.
TAYLORS MARINE 1964 - ADELAIDE
With the election of the Whitlam federal labor government in 1972, the Dunstan State Government in South Australia and a labor government in New South Wales, Australians became aware of the need to save our heritage which was being thoughtlessly destroyed in the hype of rapid development.
Labor had decided that there were votes in supporting heritage type movements, probably the most influential one being ‘the Builders’ Workers’ Union who saved ‘The Rocks area in Sydney from being demolished.
During 1972 architecture students at the university of Sydney went on strike supposedly to get a less constricting educating in architecture. I was busy with my practice in Alice Springs and coping with the change to metric measurements thinking “how can students go on strike, they can harm no one but themselves.” The organisers were encompassing groups with ideas such as the use of passive sola energy (something I always did anyway), better group housing designing and preservation of heritage type structures. When the movement won their cause none of those good things were followed up except for the preservation of heritage buildings.
Unfortunately Australians took it too far and every one wanted to build ‘heritage’ type new buildings which was a giant retrograde step in architecture and our Australian culture generally.
It was not until about 2007 that Australia began to recover from this regression into the past and real architecture and furniture design began to compare with what we were doing in the sixties.
Today in 2007 people are building what they call ‘Retro’ Style buildings which is a copy of the REAL architecturally significant buildings designed during the enlightened period of the late 1950’s and 60’s.
Todays’ “Retro” style buildings are not a genuine result of the logical structural and functional expression of the building but are constructed in an inefficient current building method and dressed up to look like the 1960’s architecture. This offcourse makes it an expensive method of building because it is faked.
***
While all this was happening Heather was busy too and gave birth to another two sons, Matthew and Peter.
Matthew was born on July 19, 1961 and Peter on December 10, 1964.
Because of the unsatisfactory experiences Heather had at the Adelaide Memorial Maternity Hospital she decided to give birth at Calvary Catholic Hospital in North Adelaide. Then most of the nursing staff were nuns, who were very dedicated, professional and best of all according to Heather they ran a very quiet hospital. The nuns spoke in whispers and silently glided around the hospital corridors.
Matthew was a happy, easy to manage baby probably because we were now experienced parents.
On Tuesdays I caught the bus to work so Heather could have the car to go to a social tennis day at a friend’s place who had a tennis court and swimming pool.
They had a great time although I don’t know how because there would be six to eight young mothers each with two or three little kids, some, like Heather with two toddlers and a baby in a pram.
On Fridays I caught the bus so she could have the car to go shopping.
One lovely summer night we were enjoying our court when there was a bashing on the front door.
“There’s a bush fire coming down the creek. All the men are going to try to stop it”.
The creek which ran past our front was heavily timbered with highly flammable eucalypts and we had retained three medium sized eucalypts on our block, two of them in our court.
I said to Heather “get ready to evacuate the boys and a few essentials.
If the fire gets into the canopy it will be very quick.
If you see that happen escape out the back through Atkinsons’.
Don’t try to escape in the car, you won’t make it.
I grabbed a rake, a bag and a bucket and found the fire about one kilometre up the creek where there was a public park. The fire was burning the under brush and had not yet got into the canopy.
There were about 10 men already there and they had found a hose tap in the park and were trying to get water on the fire but the heat was so intense that they couldn’t get close enough. “I presume someone had phoned the fire brigade?” I asked. “yes, they are on their way”.
The creek turned into the wind and the fire slowed.
We rushed in with the hose.
It wouldn’t reach.
Three of us pulled and it stretched to a remarkable degree and we got some water on the base of the fire and slowed it some more.
We could hear the fire brigade, sirens screaming, going down Montacute Road that passed us to the North.
They missed the turnoff at Forest Avenue.
We could hear them going along Stradbroke Road to the East.
They missed that turn off too.
Then they went along Morialta Road to the South of us.
There’s no turnoff from that road.
Bloody hell don’t they have a map I shouted.
The fire has passed where we can get the hose to it.
We are running in with buckets of water.
In about two minutes it will reach a point where the creek turns down wind and then there will be no hope of our stopping it.
The fire brigade arrived,
A fireman running towards the fire with his hose shouts, “get your hose over here you idiots.”
‘It wont reach’.
The brigade put the fire out in no time but only because we had delayed its progress, they got to it just before the creek turned downwind.
While working at Bevan Rutt and Roberts I decided to take up studying again and complete my course. I had had a lot of experience and was doing the job of an architect. The house was complete and Heather was happily settled in being a stay-at-home full time mum.
I enrolled with the RMIT correspondence school to do a couple of subjects and their service to their students was fantastic. However, the following year, when I applied to do the last two subjects I was told that those final year subjects were not available by correspondence and I would have to do them at RMIT.
I passed my final exams by flying to Melbourne and was granted registration in Victoria in early 1966 and in South Australia a couple of months later and in the Northern Territory before the years end.
In 1977 I was elevated to a Fellow of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects.
The Graduate - at last
Also in early 1966 a salesman from a specialist ceiling sub-contractor told me that a partnership, Bullock and Burton, were looking for another partner to open an office in Darwin. They had already established a practice in Adelaide and Alice Springs, where Lance Burton now lived, and he had developed a client base in Darwin.
Heather and I thought about it. We studied slides of Darwin and talked to people who had lived there.
After discussions with Jim Bullock, Lance Burton, their accountant and their lawyer, I signed a partnership agreement effective from July 1st. 1966.
Heather was about three months pregnant with Andrew.
About one month before we were to set out for Darwin, Jim Bullock told me that their Darwin Clients did not want some new partner doing their projects. They wanted the man they knew, Lance Burton.
Would I go to Alice Springs?.
Heather’s brother, John, had been to Alice Springs to an Apex conference so we invited him around with his slides.
Alice Springs was alright with Heather. It was only a little over one thousand miles (1,800 km) away from Adelaide where Darwin was over two thousand miles.
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