As a child in Richmond
in the 1870s, Helen Mitchell would, at the end of her organ lesson ... ‘promptly
... gallop down to the YarraRiver,
strip off and swim nude with the local boys.’ In her fascinating doctorial
thesis on him, now published as Harold Desbrowe-Annear:
A Life in Architecture, Prof. Harriet
Edquist suggests that one of the boys may have been
Harold Desbrowe-Annear (1865-1933). Helen Mitchell
became Dame Nellie Melba (1861-1931), the formidable prima
donna; Desbrowe-Annear became one of the most
innovative Australian architects of the first twenty-five years of the twentieth
century.
Whilst absorbing most of the principles of
Modernism, Desbrowe-Annear adapted the English
Arts-and-Crafts movement to an Australian environment.
Edquist also claims that Desbrowe-Annear was
the first Australian architect to accept suburbia as the normal Australian way
of life and that the small Australian house could indeed be architecture. Later,
after completing 71 Barkly Street,
in the 1920s he developed this house type within the Classical language of
architecture. Desbrowe-Annear’s work cuts across
the usual architectural stylistic categories of Boom, Federation, Bungalow etc.,
into none of which he readily slots.
Desbrowe-Annear
completed his articles with William Salway from
1883-89, who was then moving stylistically from Boom Mannerism towards a more
picturesque asymmetry. Desbrowe-Annear’s architect
contemporaries, born in the 1850s and 60s, included
Willian Pitt (architect of St Kilda Town Hall (33)),
Nahum Barnett, Henry Hardie Kemp, Walter Butler,
Robert Haddon and Beverley Ussher. Working in Swanston
Street and studying at the
NationalGallerySchool,
further up the street, Desbrowe-Annear hung around
in bohemian cafés with artists such as Frederick McCubbin,
John Longstaff and Arthur
Streeton.
Over 1888-1902, he taught at the Working Men’s
College (now RMITUniversity),
where he pioneered the teaching of history in the architectural drafting
course. This course is now in its 118th year and the History of Architecture
subject, which I now teach, in succession to
Desbrowe-Annear, is only a year younger. It is the oldest architectural
course in the state, possibly in Australia.
Desbrowe-Annear
was especially influenced in his works and in his teaching by the most
significant nineteenth century writer on art and architecture, John Ruskin and
by the structural rationalism of Viollet le-Duc,
the French architect, restorer, and writer; who had
earlier influenced older architects in Victoria,
such as Alexander Davidson and William Wardell.
Desbrowe-Annear
collected a remarkable professional library and was a founder of several other
libraries.
Desbrowe-Annear’s
first published work is a drawing (1890) in the Building and Engineering
Journal, of St Kilda Primary School tower (34). His first building,
in Domain Road
went up later that year. He became involved with the fledging Royal Victorian
Institute of Architects.
In 1893,
Desbrowe-Annear’s first substantial building in Melbourne
was built. It was the Warren
house, on the corner of Hughendon and Lansdowne
Streets in East St Kilda. Like the Priory (28) in 1890, it was
Romanesque, influenced by H.H. Richardson in Chicago.
Sadly, it was demolished in 1972. In 1895 his renovations to William Pitt’s
Princess’ Theatre, Spring Street, were completed:
Desbrowe-Annear was active in theatre in Melbourne.
Later he befriended artists such as Blamire Young
and the Lindsays and other writers and poets in
bohemian Melbourne.
In 1897, Desbrowe-Annear
designed the Springthorpe Memorial in BoorondaraCemetery,
Kew, one of
the most ambitious funerary works in Australia:
a neo-Greek temple set in a garden, with sculpture and decorative arts
components. It embodied principles of the English Arts-and-Crafts.
In 1900, Desbrowe-Annear
launched the T-Square Club, a ‘guild’ for architects, artists and craftspeople.
It lasted only three years, but led to formation of the Arts and Craft Society
here (without Desbrowe-Annear). For the 1901 Royal
Visit, he designed a very popular celebratory arch over PrincesBridge,
and an addition to the SeeYupTemple
in South Melbourne.
Later that year,
Desbrowe-Annear moved to live at Eaglemont and gave a lecture on a topic
not previously of interest to architects in Australia:
on planning the decent five-to-six room villa, after all, the most common
domestic type here. This interest, as Edquist
observes, follows in the steps of Frank Lloyd
Wright, Charles Voysey, and
Baillie Scott, but very few other architects in the world at this time.
(This was twenty years before that of Le Corbusier,
for instance).
Desbrowe-Annear
was concerned to avoid the waste space of passages, to have the largest room as
the dining room, create vistas, for rooms to be well ventilated, to have
bedrooms near bathrooms, to install built-in or recessed cupboards and
wardrobes, to secure privacy, to introduce sunlight to every room, to create a
broad ‘piazza’, instead of a narrow verandah and install single-hung sash
windows (his invention), all at a time well before Californian Bungalows of the
1920s. (Piazzas had been used by A.J. Mcdonald
twenty years earlier, but in public buildings).
In Eaglemont, he designed three
extraordinarily innovative houses in The Eyrie, in 1903, with (American)
balloon-framed timber, clad with (Voyseyan)
roughcast. Their piazzas reveal views, framed by a shaped valence and
balustrades, which were painted twelve to fifteen years earlier by the
HeidelbergSchool
artists: Roberts, Conder and
Streeton. The architect of the suburban house, had appropriated, by
framing, the very views first selected and enshrined by the artists’ works on
the suburban frontier.
Externally, battens grid the walls, tracing
the configuration of the timber frame beneath, forming a module for
Desbrowe-Annear’s narrow sash windows in horizontal
series, similar to the rationalisation of Viollet le
Duc. This system is developed further at
71 BarklyStreet,
where windows are in continuous bands and this grid is continued into the
valences. The house is a single form, without added sub-forms (the piazzas are
under the main roof envelope), and not just behind a street facade. Elevations,
however, appear open and permeable. (At
Barkly Street,
subsequently glazed). Entries are tucked into a recessed corner porch,
sheltered by a low-point of the folded, over sailing roof.
Another influence,
was the Swiss Chalet vernacular admired by Ruskin, and a source for the American
bungalows: a bulky, jettying upper floor, earthy
natural materials and careful siting in the landscape, emphasised by the
recessive ground floor. This, and the band of windows across the
front are both characteristics anticipating
International Style Modernism. Interiors have no passages, so all rooms have
access to views.
Presumably, the views at Barkly Street
are to the south and west, where the piazzas are. There is a short first floor
passage probably due to the narrow site, but all rooms seem to have views. At
Eaglemont, Art Nouveau valences overhead define internal spaces, furniture is
built-in, timber roof-beams are exposed internally and decorative stained glass
is used sparingly.
In the UK
and USA,
early bungalows were vacation houses or a retreat which as
Edquist explains, was certainly Desbrowe-Annear’s
aim in moving his family to Eaglemont, and in a different way, may have been for
his clients moving to the resort suburb St Kilda. Edquist
says that Desbrowe-Annear believed the house to be a
shelter built to nurture family life and quoting Robert Winter, ‘a symbolic
retreat from the materialism of society ... into a quieter place.’ John
Blair who grew up in Eaglemont with
Desbrowe-Annear’s sons, has memories of ‘Dessy’
as ‘gross, irascible and cigar-smoking’, not all sweetness and light.
Desbrowe-Annear entertained his bohemian friends
frequently and ‘certainly lived beyond his means’.
Four or five other houses followed in the
Heidelberg
district, over 1903-10, then in 1910, artists’ houses: for John
Longstaff at Eltham and Norman
McGeorge at Fairy Hills, Ivanhoe.
In June the same year, between these two
houses, the brick and timber Solomon De Beer house at 71 Barkly Street
was tendered. Now it stands close to the street and on its narrow site, close to
side boundaries. It is unclear if this was so in 1910. It has been altered.
Oddly it is symmetrical to the street and quite monumental, with subtle v-shaped
elevations to its piazzas. Nothing is yet known about De Beer and no
architectural drawings survive. This house is one of a group of four brick,
double-storied houses Desbrowe-Annear designed then
in affluent suburbs: South Yarra,
Kew
and Malvern, as well as St Kilda; a transitional phase in his practice and
clientele.
In the Domain Road, South
Yarra house (1913), is a two-storied bow window, a detail lifted by Howard R.
Lawson (12) for his Manhattan Bungalow, 346 Dandenong Road,
St Kilda East. It would be interesting to note any further influences of
Desbrowe-Annear on Lawson’s St Kilda works.
Through wealthy clients of his artist friends,
from 1913 Desbrowe-Annear began to attract
substantial domestic commissions in South Yarra
and Toorak (as well as a series of more modest houses influenced by the clean
lines of Californian Bungalows. The Desbrowe-Annears
themselves moved to South Yarra.
His houses in this period included Inglesby, 97 Caroline Street, South
Yarra (1915) and Broceliande, 224 Orrong Road,
Toorak (1916, demolished) are amongst his finest. Plain roughcast blocks, with
narrow, deep-set windows, were carefully placed. Edquist
is convinced that these were influenced by the sheer Modernism of
Adolf Loos’ Steiner House, Vienna
(1916); not directly at this moment during the war on Germany
and Austria,
but indirectly through the work of Irving Gill. Californian Arts-and-Crafts
architect’s houses were assemblages of pure cubist forms, such as his Dodge
House (1916). Unlike the English immigrants to Melbourne Robert Haddon and
Walter Butler, Australian-born Desbrowe-Annear moved
easily between both English and American influences.
After World War I,
Desbrowe-Annear’s interest in the new discipline of town planning
developed, including campus design and war memorials and their meaningful
placement. He won the competitions for the design of the University
of Western Australia
in 1914 and with T.R. Ashworth for the ChurchStreetBridge
(1920). It opened in 1924. Rather conservative Beaux Arts plans for the urban
design of central Melbourne
followed in 1922-27, yet even these contain interesting, even prophetic ideas.
There are at least eighteen of his urbane
‘town houses’ in Toorak and South Yarra
(1919-33), which have been dismissed for their ‘retrogressive’ Regency manner.
Edquist has consistently argued that this is a
superficial impression and has explained the subtle complexity of their
designs. They include: Cloyne, 611 Toorak Road,
Toorak (1926, (29)), the Baillieu house, 729
Orrong Road, Toorak (1926), Katanga, 372 Glenferrie
Road, Malvern (1931) and invariably their gardens. For Darryl and Joan Lindsay,
he designed Mulberry Hill, Baxter in 1915, identified as Spanish Colonial
Revival by Bryce Raworth.
There have been several other
Desbrowe-Annear works in St Kilda, but little
remains. At St Joseph’s
Primary School, 28 Sandham Street,
Elsternwick are most of the extensive schoolroom additions he completed to house
the ChiselhurstCromartySchool
for Girls in 1909-10. A house at QuatQuatta Avenue,
Ripponlea (1914) survives, an interesting comparison
with Edward Billson’sTintara
(38), nine years later, just across the railway tracks.
Desbrowe-Annear’s kiosk at Point Ormond, Elwood
(1915), a house in Merton Avenue,
Elsternwick (1917) and the Meyer House, 448 St Kilda Road
(c1925) are all demolished.
Desbrowe-Annear
never travelled; he was a great Australian nationalist: ‘... Ideas from other
countries cannot help us; they must be our own, born of our own necessities, our
own climate, our own ways of pursuing health and happiness.’
References
Blair, John (b.
1897). Taped memories.
Cazaley’s
Contract Reposter.
21 & 28 June 1910.
Edquist,
Harriet. ‘The Landscape of Desire: Harold Desbrowe-Annear,
Eaglemont.B. 52-53.
1995/96. pp 83-94.
Edquist,
Harriet. Harold Desbrowe-Annear. 1865-1933.
A life in Architecture.
Doctorial Thesis.School
of Architecture
and Design.Faculty of the Constructed Environment.RMITUniversity.
March 2000. 2 Vols. Passim. From which several
of the following sources derive, noted: particularly, Vol.1, p 188 & Vol. 2, p
438. I thank Prof. Edquist for the kind loan
of this work.
Edquist,
Harriet. Harold Desbrowe-Annear. A life in
Architecture. Miegunyah Press,
Carlton,
2004. The work was published after the completion if
this chapter, too late to for new material to be incorporated here,
Hetherington,
John. Melba. A Biography.
Cheshire.
Melbourne
1962. p20. Quoting, Russell Braddon.Joan
Sutherland.Collins.
Sydney
1962. p21.
Peck, Robert.
vonHartell.
Trethowan.City of St Kilda.
Twentieth Century Architectural Study. May 1992.
(Unpaginated).
Raworth,
Bryce. A Question of Style: Interwar Domestic Architecture in
Melbourne.M Arch Thesis.The University
of Melbourne
1993.pp 86&87.
Winter, Robert.
‘The first Generation’, in Robert Winter. Ed.
Towards a Simpler way of Life.
The Arts and Crafts Architects of California.University
of California
Press.
Berkley
1997. p9.