In 1956, Adelaide’s architectural imagination was flying. Bates Smart McCutcheon’s MLC Building was rising above Victoria Square as the city’s first International Style highrise, and as one of Australia’s first buildings to use full curtain wall construction. Robin Boyd’s Walkley House, with its striking glass box design, defied its heritage surroundings in conservative North Adelaide. And Adelaide’s own young meteors – including Brian Claridge, Newell Platten, Keith Neighbour and John Morphett – publicly announced their challenge to orthodoxy with an exhibition of 12 temporary modernist buildings and art in Botanic Park at the Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ Sixth Australian Architectural Convention.
Emboldened by increasing public acceptance of modern design, The Advertiser appointed young architect John Chappel as the newspaper’s official architecture correspondent that year. Over the following three decades, Chappel wrote weekly columns, accompanied by glamorous depictions of contemporary residential architecture, that stirred consumer aspirations for the good life of a modern family home.
The State Library of South Australia’s exhibition Lust for Lifestyle: Modern Adelaide Homes 1950–1965 is the direct beneficiary of Chappel’s remarkable archive, accumulated over those 30 years – a trove of photographs and plans occupying 2.5 metres of archival storage that documents his own projects and those submitted by 97 architecture firms, most of them local, seeking coverage in his weekly reports.
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House at Cross Road, Unley Park, designed by owner Langdon Badger, architectural drawings by Lawson, Cheesman, Doley and Partners (1958). Image:
Photography courtesy of State Library of South Australia
Lovingly curated and meticulously researched by James Curry (School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Adelaide) and the State Library, the exhibition is a spectacular immersion into some of Adelaide’s finest modernist houses, and offers an insight into the lives of their well-heeled and socially mobile owners and the new breed of pace-setting architects.
In one of five short films that accompany the exhibition, James lays out his intent: “The exhibition is structured around an argument. It’s not just a list of buildings. We wanted to say more than ‘Adelaide had modern architecture as well.’”
The result is an eye-popping exploration of the ways that modern living was depicted during the era, inspiring many of Adelaide’s social elites to leave or demolish their traditional family home to commission or move into a modern, architect-designed home.
The display of homeowners who made that leap is a dazzling who’s who of mid-century Adelaide society, including the Michell wool family, interior design and furniture impresario Langdon Badger, pioneering lawyer Pam Cleland, intellectual Robert Clark, Austrian consul Tony Nelson, and speedway, jazz and art-collecting bon vivant Kym Bonython. The postwar confidence and optimism of this generation radiates through personal photographs of family occasions and holidays, their inclusion in the exhibition enriching the stylized black- and-white architectural photos that are as alluring as those of Wolfgang Sievers or Max Dupain.
Of the 15 houses profiled, several may be familiar to enthusiasts of this period: Langdon Badger’s house of 1957–58, designed by Badger with architectural drawings by Lawson, Cheesman, Doley and Partners (Unley Park’s answer to Philip Johnson’s Glass House), Robin Boyd’s 1956 Walkley House in North Adelaide and Peter Muller’s 1964 Michell House in Medindie.
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House at Palmer Place, North Adelaide for Gavin Walkley by Robin Boyd (1956; photograph taken in 1959 by Ingerson-Arnold Studios). Image:
Photography courtesy of State Library of South Australia
But what makes this exhibition such a revelation are the homes created by Adelaide’s architects and landscape designers who have been largely lost to history, along with their buildings: Don Thompson, Dickson and Platten, Brian Vogt, E. Caradoc Ashton (later trading as Woodhead) and Chappel himself.
Concepts of access and accessibility, economy and excess, the house as a place for working, and living in the garden are all explored through the design of these houses and the stories of the people who lived in them.
There are some cracking anecdotes included, too: the time Kym Bonython knocked on the door of Günter Niggemann’s house in Tennyson (Lawson, Cheesman and Doley, 1953) and bought it on the spot, hours before Niggemann departed Australia by ship. The luxury car collection – comprising an Aston Martin, a Ferrari, a Lamborghini and a Mercedes – accessed via a concealed driveway at the Billam House in North Brighton (John Chappel, 1963–64). And the exclusive, strictly word- of-mouth visits to Pam Cleland and Fred Thonemann’s Waterfall Gully home and garden (Don Thompson/John Chappel, 1952–65) enjoyed by A-listers including the Rolling Stones, Liberace, Sir Robert Helpmann and Rudolf Nureyev.
Archival media clippings documenting these houses are also featured – highlighting the interdependence of the media and architects as advertisements of the new – alongside original floorplans, sketches, drawings and recent video interviews.
James Curry, the State Library and contributors such as the University of South Australia’s Architecture Museum have created one of Australia’s most compelling exhibitions of modernist architecture – one that should raise appreciation of, and help reduce the demolition or irreversible vandalism of, this vulnerable era of buildings.
Lust for Lifestyle: Modern Adelaide Homes 1950–1965 is on at the State Library of South Australia until 24 July 2022. slsa.sa.gov.au More
