Graeme Gunn, Melbourne architect, academic and advocate died this month aged 91. You can read obituaries here, here and here.

As one says: “Gunn’s contribution to architecture was monumental. He received the President’s Award for Lifetime Contribution to Victorian Architecture in 2001 and was later made a Member (AM) in the General Division of the Order of Australia in 2012 for his work. In 2011, he was awarded the highest honour in Australian architecture, the Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal.”

This week, I want to pay tribute to his work in the 1970’s as an extraordinarily gifted designer and thinker about housing in suburbia, and the reforms necessary to avoid the predicament that we are in today. It was in designing grouped housing that he showed a better way to provide for community and privacy, using clever plans, courtyards, and Australian inspired landscaping.

Let’s look at three schemes in Melbourne, and a seminal book, before moving to Canberra.

Molesworth Street Kew

This is a series of townhouses around a linking cobbled driveway. Built in plain concrete block, the sharp definition and angles of the houses provided a modern take on the terrace house, albeit more spacious with courtyards and providing for the ever-present car.

Winter Park and Vermont Park

David Yencken, a progressive builder, founded Merchant Builders to shake up housing. In these two developments designed by Graeme Gunn, they built housing grouped closer together than usual in suburbia, but with better privacy, thus providing some communal open space in perpetuity, for play and enhanced family play life.

Using courtyards rather than backyards, the houses had a relationship between an inside and outside that gave climate comfort.

They were sensitively sustainable, well oriented, shaded with pergolas and verandas and screened with walls and planting, showing his ability and agility in creating privacy for each, whilst being part of a greater community. A lifestyle of higher amenity than usual in suburbia.

A Mansion or no House

Increasingly frustrated with the difficulties in achieving these designs, in 1976 Gunn wrote a searing book on the issues, together with Yenken and economist / planner John Patterson. The issues he fingered are no less potent now: absurd regulations and minimum standards, ignorant and willful authorities, bank's lending processes, council zonings, all of which precluded sensible development. In this case you can judge a book by its cover, even if it as battered as mine above.

The book has been long out of print but has not lost it’s potency. Coming hard on the heels of Robert Menzies dictum for the ‘forgotten generation’ to have a home of their own, it was highlighting a crisis failure, then as now. I know of no other time a leading architect has nailed his colours (and B+W designs) to the mast, and shown a care for housing in general, rather than the house in particular.

And Ron Tandberg’s cartoons resonate just as strongly now, almost 50 years later.

Canberra

In the late 70s, the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC), developers of Canberra, were keen to continue the ideas explored most forcefully in a built design by Ian Mackay on Swinger Hill in Woden. Their MO was to invite leading architects from all over Australia and so they engaged Guy Maron of Adelaide to develop new schemes and, following the book’s publication, Gunn was invited to work on several schemes for grouped housing in Spence and Kambah.

I was fortunate enough to be seconded from the Commonwealth Department of Housing and Construction to assist these luminaries. Both were instructive, kind, and I formed a life-long affection for both, and their work.

It was a potent time and a close-up view of Graeme Gunn’s thinking revealed his ideas for simple forms with pitched roofs, courtyards, indoor-outdoor links, carports rather than garages, built with bare materials, all creating a masterplan of tight urban housing.

Unfortunately the NCDC had descended into the No Can Do Club after the departure of the Sir John Overall, the founding commissioner, in 1972. None of the schemes progressed as planned.

Coda

During the design phase, Graeme Gunn asked me to visit his practice when next in Melbourne, which I did, only to discover it was really an interview to see if I wanted to join the firm. In one of those roads not taken, I declined. I've wondered ever since what would have happened if I had continued to work with Australia's master suburban housing architect? Vale Graeme Gunn.

design-i #3, 30 Oct 2024. Researched and written by Tone Wheeler, architect / Adjunct Prof UNSW / President AAA. The views expressed are his.

design-i is a new column on design ideas that replaces Tone on Tuesday. Old ToT columns can be found here and you can still contact TW at [email protected].