Design and Art Australia Online

Arthur Baldwinson,1908-1969

Arthur Baldwinson is one of Australia’s first generation of prominent modernist architects who experienced the European modernist movement first hand. His modernist contemporaries include Roy Grounds and Frederick Romberg in Victoria and Sydney Ancher and Walter Bunning in New South Wales; their respective Australian architectural careers in modernism began in the late 1930s. Baldwinson’s active professional career as an independent practising architect was relatively short (1938-1960).

Baldwinson was born in Kalgoorlie, West Australia in 1908. He trained in architecture (1925-1929) under George R. King, the head of the architecture programme at the Gordon Institute of Technology, Geelong, Victoria. Baldwinson’s work, especially in the areas of drawing and rendering, was exemplary and this led King to ask him to stay on as “Architectural Instructor”. Baldwinson held a teaching position from 1930 until 1932 when he left for London.

In London, Baldwinson was first employed in the office of Raymond McGrath, an architecture graduate from the University of Sydney. Whilst there, Baldwinson worked with such major talents like Serge Chermayeff and Wells Coates. McGrath’s practise at the time included designing the interiors for the BBC’s studios at Portland Place, London. Concurrently with work, McGrath was compiling one of the first international surveys of residential modernism for publication, Twentieth Century Houses (1934); some of the plans that accompany the photographs appear to be drawn by Baldwinson.

In mid-1934, Baldwinson worked for the firm Adams Thompson and Fry during the period when principal partner and co-founder of MARS (Modern Architectural Research group), Maxwell Fry, in collaboration with social reformer Elizabeth Denby, was designing the progressive, modernist housing scheme for the Gas Light and Coke Company, Kensal House in Ladbroke Grove, London.

In October 1934, Maxwell Fry formed a partnership with Walter Gropius with whom Baldwinson worked directly until early 1937. Gropius departed for the United States in March 1937. Baldwinson was actively involved in the design and drawings of Gropius’s commissions including: Isokon 3 medium density project, Windsor; the E. W. Levy House, Chelsea; the Donaldson House, Sevenoaks; the Impington Village College, Cambridgeshire and the Christ’s College project for Cambridge University.

In January 1937, Baldwinson began his return trip to Australia with a determination to plant the flag of “the new architecture”; he took up a position with Stephenson & Meldrum, first in their Melbourne office, then later in Sydney as Stephenson & Turner.

In early 1938 Baldwinson entered the annual Victorian Timber Development Association (TDA) prize for residential timber buildings and won in three categories. Soon after this success, he established his own practice in Pitt Street, Sydney. In 1938-1939, he formed a brief design partnership with fellow-West Australian, John Oldham (Oldham & Baldwinson) to design a housing project near Coomaditchy Lagoon, Port Kembla, New South Wales.

In 1938, Baldwinson had his first solo commission, Collins House at Palm Beach; the site was difficult, on a steep north-facing sandstone and clay slope with extensive views of Barrenjoey Head and Broken Bay. Baldwinson designed a red-stained weatherboard house on a sandstone plinth comprising an external stair ramp, two bedrooms, upper level verandah and “playroom” on the lower level. The house received considerable media attention when it was completed.

Before the second World War disrupted his career, Baldwinson was on the organising committee for the formation of the Australian Modern Architecture Research Society (MARS) and Australia’s first industrial design organization, the “Design and Industries Association of Australia” (DIAA), while focusing on designing modernist houses, drawing on his British experiences with McGrath, Gropius and Fry.

During the Second World War, Baldwinson worked for the Commonwealth Aircraft Factory designing and constructing buildings engaged in the manufacture of Beaufort Bombers. By 1943, he had been promoted Chief Architect of the Beaufort Division, Department of Aircraft Production (DAP). Baldwinson later developed an all-steel pre-fabricated “Beaufort” house for DAP post-war sale to the Victorian Housing Commission in 1946. This was Australia’s first factory-manufactured prefabricated that did not require traditional trade skills to assemble and erect.

In 1946 Baldwinson returned to Sydney and formed a partnership with Melbourne engineer, Eric Gibson. As Gibson and Baldwinson, Gibson managed the office in Melbourne and Baldwinson the Sydney office. In this partnership Baldwinson produced his best residential designs for a number of Sydney’s Contemporary Artists Society (CAS) members. These avant-garde clients included Alistair Morrison, William Dobell, Harold Clay, Geoff and Dahl Collings, James Andriesse, Max Dupain and Elaine Haxton. These works form an outstanding cohesive group best described as the “Artists Houses”. In 1950 he concluded his partnership with Gibson and in early 1951 applied for a lectureship at Sydney University. By 1952, he was a Senior Lecturer in the architecture faculty, a position he occupied until his death.

In 1953, Baldwinson formed a partnership with Charles Vernon Sylvester-Booth; in 1956 Charles Peters joined the firm to form Baldwinson, Booth and Peters. The partnership lasted until 1958 with Baldwinson concentrating on residential designs, which he favoured, while Booth and Peters pursued commercial work. One of their designs, Hotel Belmont, in Belmont, Newcastle won the NSW RAIA Sulman Award in 1956.

During this partnership, Baldwinson also designed the Mandl House, Wahroonga (1953) and the Simpson-Lee House, Wahroonga (1957). He also designed and built his own residence at 79 Carlotta Street, Greenwich (1954) funded by his teacher’s salary. The Carlotta Street house is a white-bagged brick building with tallow-wood tongue and groove siding and is the most precise essay on Baldwinson’s restrained modernist philosophy.

Baldwinson’s palette of materials was consistent throughout his practice: bagged brick, weatherboard or vertical tongue-and-groove cladding and concrete contrasted against the irregularities of regional sandstone. Although his practice was occasionally involved in commercial commissions, his greatest accomplishments lie in the adaptation of the principles and materials of European modernism for site-specific suburban Australian houses. He helped to pioneer free-plan concepts, site-adjusted residential design, the “scientific kitchen”, flat roof treatments and the functional placement of windows and doors to create a distinctly regional variation of European modernism. In his development of a Sydney basin form of regionalism, he is a precursor to the much-debated “Sydney School” of residential architecture of the later 20th century.

Internal disputes forced the dissolution of the Baldwinson, Booth and Peters partnership whereupon Baldwinson immediately formed a new partnership with recent Sydney University graduate Geoffrey Twibill. The partnership lasted until late 1959 during which Twibill played a major role in the design of the Commonwealth Film Studios, Roseville, and the prefabricated design of the Overseas Telecommunications Commission’s (OTC) modular housing in the Cocos Islands.

In 1960, Baldwinson closed his formal practice but continued to accept private commissions in the Sydney suburbs, designing the Hauslaib House, Point Piper (1960), the Pennington House, Whale Beach (1960), the Robinson House, Castle Cove (1963) and his last completed house for the artist Desiderius Orban, in Northwood (1968).

The last years of Baldwinson’s life were devoted to teaching and travelling. In 1969 he died in Sydney from congestive heart failure as a complication of influenza.

References

Arthur Baldwinson. www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A130117b.htm

Michael Bogle. PhD thesis “ARTHUR BALDWINSON. REGIONAL MODERNISM IN SYDNEY 1937-1969.” RMIT, 2009.

Greg Holman, “Arthur Baldwinson, His Houses and Works”, B.Arch. Thesis, University of NSW, 1980.

Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW. PXD 356 (includes Architectural & technical drawings, 2,686 architectural plans and private papers.)

Writers:

Staff Writer
Michael Bogle

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2011