‘Make Big Plans: for little plans have no magic to stir men’s blood and in themselves may never be realised. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die’. Daniel Burnham, US Architect and Planner, 1910.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge turns 90 this week. My addition to the celebrations is through a series of lithographs by Robert Emerson Curtis, and in this story, there is a curious link to the author of the very idea of the ‘big plan’.

Curtis was an artist, cartoonist, illustrator, painter, graphic designer, printmaker and draughtsman. He was born in England in 1898, educated in Chile and at Farnham Grammar School in England and came to Australia with his family at the outbreak of WW1, working on the family farm until 1919 when he moved to Brisbane. He worked as an illustrator and cartoonist in Brisbane until he sailed to the USA in 1922.

His cabin-mate and close friend was Charles Chauvel, the pioneer filmmaker. Curtis studied at the Art Institutes of San Francisco and Chicago and that sparked his lifelong interest as a commercial artist documenting modern industry. In Hollywood he met and married Ruth Baldwin, moved to Chicago, and had a daughter.

In Chicago Curtis worked as an architectural draftsman in the office of Daniel H. Burnham, designer of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the plan of Chicago, the Flat Iron building in NY and over 1.3 million sqm of shopping space. Burnham was later described by critic Paul Goldberger as "the most successful power broker the American architectural profession has ever produced”. And he was the author of the quote at the top, the by-word of every ambitious planner. 

Following his time working in Burnham’s office (designing a new town plan for San Francisco) Curtis returned to Sydney in 1928 and started recording the erection of the Harbour Bridge. He visited the chief engineer, Dr J J C Bradfield, showed him his portfolio and was allowed to 'go all over the Bridge, so long as he kept out of the bloody way’. 

He quickly sketched several times a month in crayon and later drew exactingly in pencil for lithography. On opening day, 19 March 1932, he hired Charles Kingsford-Smith to fly him around the harbour. The work was published in 1933 as ‘Building the Bridge: Fourteen Lithographs Celebrating the Construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge’ with foreword by Bradfield, who said 'in these drawings are expressed the strength, the labour, the romance of a great undertaking’. (The book was reprinted in 1981 as The Bridge by Currawong Press). 

The publication led to commissions from many industries including BHP, MacRobertson’s chocolates and the Commonwealth Munition factories during WW2, in which Curtis worked as Camouflage Officer in Australia and with the RAAF in New Guinea. He was appointed an official war artist to record the nation’s industrial war-time production and more than 200 works are in the Australian War Memorial collection. 

From 1959 to 1962 he returns to his starting theme, documenting the Gladesville Bridge for the NSW Department of Main Roads, at the same time creating a visual record of the erection of the Sydney Opera House for the SOH Trust. These works were published in 1967 as ‘A Vision Takes Form: Sydney Opera House (A.H. & A.W. Reed) and the original paintings and drawings are held in the building itself.

It seems fitting that the ‘big plan’ for the Sydney Harbour Bridge was documented by an artist with a keen eye for the romance of a big undertaking, and moreover for the sheer hard work that kept so many from poverty during the depression. Next week we celebrate 50 years since the opening of the Snowy Mountains scheme and ask: “is it time for another great infrastructure project?”

Tone Wheeler is principal architect at Environa Studio, Adjunct Professor at UNSW and is President of the Australian Architecture Association. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and are not held or endorsed by A+D, the AAA or UNSW. Tone does not read Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Linked In. Sanity is preserved by reading and replying only to comments addressed to [email protected]