Thank you Peter.
So, if we get started. So today, we want to do an interview with you, about the 1956 Olympic Swimming and Diving stadium in Melbourne, but before we get into that, why did you become an architect?
Well, I didn't have a say. I didn't want to do architecture, and after I finished it, I did medicine. What happened is this, is that I became, I matriculated at 16, and it was right during the war. War was on. And in, it's hard to understand, but in 1943 when I started, a child, a 16 year old child had absolutely no say in anything because, it's nothing like today. It was a situation where, I was just, I had to do what I was told. And my father wanted me to carry on the practice, and he said, and you go ahead and he just enrolled me in architecture.
And, you know, you couldn't buy any clothes, you couldn't buy any food, you couldn't. There was no travel at all. The war was on and everything was very difficult. And I was 16. And of course, you didn't get signed up until you were19. I think it was 19, I think. That's when you got signed up in the Army and so forth. But I'd been in 5 or 6 years of school cadets. So, you know, I could fire the 303 and charge with a bayonet
But, so I, I started. Once I started, I, well I really enjoyed it because life was much better there than at school. I could get a girlfriend, for a start off. It was absolutely marvellous. So, I got a girlfriend straight away in the first year, and I had a marvellous time in those first three years.
So, I didn't really have to study, do much about the course, because I, I’d actually, gosh, you won't believe this when I tell you. I started working in my father's office when I was 7 years of age. At school time, at school holidays, I'd come to the office, and do the office messages. I'd get the sandwiches for the, for the draftsmen. I'd go, we were in a building called Henty House in Collins street. And I'd go down the lift, and there was a sandwich shop in the basement. I got the sandwiches and I’d bring them up to the draftsmen. And, in those days, all the prints were done at Anderson Willis in Market Street, which wasn't far from the office.
So, I used to take the tracings around to Anderson Willis, get the prints, blueprints, and take the blueprints back to the office. And gradually they gave me things to draw and so forth. And by the time I was 12, I could go to the, we did a lot of hotel work. Did hotel work almost exclusively, my father. He’d been in the Army with the guy that was in charge of the licensing call, every hotel was licensed, and there was a library of their plans, of their buildings.
So, when a new job would come in, I’d go around to the library and the registration board. I was allowed to go in and get the drawing and trace it, and then take it back to the office and draw them up. Now, I could do that. These little hotels in Carlton and Fitzroy, and the inner areas of Melbourne and South Melbourne, and these little hotels were made up of, small two storey building with a series of individual rooms. And because of 6 o’clock closing, they needed bigger bars. So, the jobs were to knock down holes in walls and expand the bar. So, when the people finished work at 5 o’clock, they could get in and out quick. And what they used to do is they’d get towards 10 to 6 and they’d bought a whole lot of beers like that and they’d stand them up, because you couldn't serve after 6, but you could drink after 6.
So, I had to do these drawings at 12 years of age about making holes in walls and making bigger bars. So, when I started at 16, in the office, I'd actually had, you know, the poor kids that were standing with me. They didn't even know what a ------- HB pencil was, and they didn’t know anything. And I could just sit back and relax because I could do all the stuff that they were giving us, and enjoy myself. So, I had three years of real, absolute joy. It got a bit serious after the third year. Yep. So, I don't know why I'm telling you this. For some reason.
Yeah. We asked you about, how you became an architect.
Oh, that's how I became an architect. And when I did the course, and finished it. And when I finished it, I enrolled in first year medicine. I only had to do 2 subjects. I was exempt from two subjects, oh, 4 subjects we had to do in those days. So, I was doing medicine, when we won the Olympic Swimming Pool.
So, were you doing both?
No, working on the Olympic Swimming Pool was going to take full time. Yeah. So, it was an incredible opportunity to win the Olympic Swimming Pool competition. I mean, I was only 22, and the situation, we saw the chance of a lifetime. Particularly the design was the first time in the World that it had been constructed the way we designed it. So it was a marvellous opportunity, so, I had no turning back after I did the architecture, back to medicine.
But, for all, all during my architectural course, I used to work in the Alfred hospital on a Saturday night in the emergency.
Oh wow.
So, that's how much I liked medicine, because I can see what practising architecture was like with my father and that's what I didn't like. I didn't like the way in the 30’s, it's hard for you to realise at the Registration Board. But the registration board and they came up in the 1920’s, and there wasn't an understanding or appreciation of architect’s work and architects were treated like, I don’t know what they were treated like, but they were nothing.
In our society they were nothing. It wasn't until after the war when Brian Lewis got, you look for example, at the University. There were three students doing architecture, and they were all part of the engineering faculty. And when he established, an individual school for architects, he enrolled 80 students, 100 students in my year, in the first year. So, you know, he got things going.
That was probably one of my questions. So, did you have any mentors in your early career and how were you influenced?
Oh yes. Roy Grounds, Robin Boyd, Fred Romberg. Only three. Yep.
So, what was the, what was what were the main influences on architecture around the time of the pool and how did you come up with the?
Yes, there's a very direct story about that. Brian Lewis introduced in our final year a guy called Norman Mussen, who was an engineer in an architectural firm, Mussen Mackay and Potter. They were an architectural firm, but he was a partner in the firm and he did all the engineering work at the firm. So, Lewis got Mussen, Norman Mussen, to be in charge in 1949, my final year that was to, to take over the engineering and structure part of the course.
Now, and architects here will know what I'm saying about this. Of course you won’t have this today because we changed it. But in those days, the way architects were trained about structure and about, like, what you did, is you were given a series of formula to design columns, beams and slabs. And you’d design them, you’d use these simple structure like b m equals Fz. Where B is the bending moment, the F is the safe working stress and the Z is the module service. Just use that formula if you’re designing a beam or column, and that was it. And that was what engineering was. To design those sort of basic structural things with formula. This guy came along and he said, I tossed it, I toss all that out. They said, we don’t do that like this. He said, all the engineers are trained in nth degree designing columns and beams and slabs, and that sort of structure. He said, what we need architects to do, is to understand the structure, how it stands up, where the stresses and strains are in the building, trace them through and be able to analyse the structure and know how to alter it or extend it, or to build your own structure. You need to know that.
As well as this, because it was incredibly new, he introduced us to the idea of having pre stressed concrete beams. Now, a pre stressed concrete beam structure. Now I’ll show you on this. If you’ve got a beam, like, we’ll save that. If you've got a beam that’s slab spanning between the columns, spanning across like that. When the load comes on it, it deflects like that. You don’t see that deflection. That's what it's doing because the load’s pushing it down, you understand. An architect will be sick of me saying this but I’ll finish this in a sec. So, if you introduce a force into it, to push it up like that. When the load comes onto it, it comes back to the neutral axis. Now that's a way of actually producing the structure. And in 1949 it was just being introduced.
The idea of pre stressing, post tensioning. It's the same thing, you can do to get the tension into the structure when it’s up, and I'll explain that to you how it works. And he explained this to us and we were all absolutely fascinated. I was absolutely over the top of my head with it.
Now, in 1949, I graduated in December, and I had this, this introduction to this. I had already bought this land in 1947. And, I was working on, and how I would, where I would live on this 6 acres because goes right up the hill or mountain, all over. This is one. This is the 6 acres. So, it goes through to another street you came down. You come down from here.
Yeah.
Down there. The different colours are the different, allotments. My two, the third one is allotted upon. Of course, that is all subject to flood, whereas some of the others aren’t, and, so, what was I saying? Oh yes, in 1949 I’d had this absolutely fascinated with the, on the work with the engineering I’d been doing. And there's tremendous strain, a tremendous, pressure in Melbourne on reducing a structure and trying to make buildings cheaper. All the soldiers had come back, and they wanted housing like they’re demanding housing today. Demanding housing and they wanted to get married, have children, have a family, and they wanted a house to live. And they, the whole was, everything was about, how do you reduce the amount of stuff and how do you make it cheaper so we can all afford it and that sort of thing?
So, in 1949, I had this information about pre stressing and post tensioning. I had to work out how to build that thing that you saw there. That was the design I made. It had to be 40 foot up in the air. And I had to have a platform to live on that was above the flood. And that's where I started tossing around the whole idea of counterbalancing forces. 40 foot cantilever in one direction and 40 foot cantilever in the other direction, and the truss, which was 80 feet long all together. The members in it are no bigger than two inches. So, we had no cranes to lift them or anything like that. So, we just made it in nine foot sections. Carried those sections of the truss up. Laid them on the hillside here, welded them together, stood them up over the central port. Now that, that's how that house was built. But in the house, in the design of the house, I couldn't build it until we’d won the pool.
But the pool, when it came to the idea, that’s where we can see this. The pool competition conditions, said we have to construct the simplest and cheapest form. The, the size of everything in this was given by the Olympic Committee. The pools were fixed in their position. They wanted 5,000 seats coming up on either side. They wanted it roofed in. Ah, and so the competition therefore was about how do you design the structure? Traditional way of designing the structure is having these beams supported two thirds of the way up the column here. So, we go in reverse order in this beam here and then arching across here. That was the most conventional and average way a person knew and most economic way of constructing it. But I could see the immediate opportunity of using, pin joint here, pin joint here, pin joint here. So, the thing sort of wobbles and having this whole seating coming down tending, wanting to drop down here by gravity and therefore pulling in this direction and by pulling in this direction, they were inserting forces which were resisting the normal load coming on. And then to stabilize it, cables coming down to the ground and the jacking device in the bottom of all these to actually give further pulling to further reduce it. So, we reduced the tonnage by 30%, 33%. And, luckily Professor Francis from Melbourne University was one of the judges. He did, checked, you’d very rarely put your computations in with a sketch plan. But we put the computations in there. He checked them out and he confirmed that it reduced the steel. We won it because it reduced the steel.
Can you tell us about the competition? So, we know that it was a competition. Do you know why there was a competition? And that was that something that happened at the time, were there?
Well, I think the Institute of Architects, and possibly the Registration Board as well, pressed for a competition.
Okay.
They wanted to involve the architects to do something. So, the competition was wide open to everybody.
Yeah. Was it just, Victorian based architects?
Oh no, no, no. Whole of Australia.
Whole of Australia?
I couldn’t get Harry Seidler out. He had to have a go. In Sydney, everybody all over Australia.
Can you tell us about your time working with the other architects on the project?
Kevin Borland and John Murphy. Yes, I can tell you how that happened. They were my friends, in final year. John Murphy came top of the year, I came second and Kevin Borland came fourth or something like that.
But we were all close friends, and we all came together mostly through the architect’s review. But, anyhow, what happened, because we were all top students, the Grounds, Romburg and Boyd entered the competition. Grounds, Romburg and Boyd, yes. I don't think Romburg was formed by then, but Grounds and Boyd, anyhow, told us they wanted us to draw up their competition, their design for Carlton Football Ground. Because that's where the stadium was going to go. So, they did a, their design was a very polite design, beautifully proportioned. But we were required to do, you know, very fine drawings of the whole thing. And, we did this, but they didn't win. And, luckily the people that did win, the other didn’t not go ahead because they did a terrible sort of design. There’s a whole story about how they won. So, I was asked to put up all the drawings, at the museum, right by the institution. And, so we saw our drawings up there and as well as everybody else’s and I saw Harry Sadler's design for the Carlton Stadium, and it was wires, tension, and parts, you know this incredible structure but, the judge, they had some dumb judges. That should have won that Carlton competition, but it didn't. And I could see that Grounds and Romberg’s design was, you know, was a polite design, very polite. But no, not dynamic or that. They call it the Games. That's what it was asking. So, what happened is that, they didn't go for any more competitions because, Boyd became one of the judges for the pool, the Boyd we were working for. There were eight judges, Lewis and Boyd, the city architect, the engineering. They had a builder on the judging panel as well turn up, he had a say, that was something. He was there as well. So, we, because we worked together, and because we were close friends, when I was inspired after seeing this Harry Snowden’s design, I said to the others, ‘look, let's let's do this pool competition’.
We all agreed, we had nothing else to do, just. We were in practice, but we didn't have any much work. And so, we got to work, and, we drew up the whole thing, and particularly we could see in the competition, you must get this economic, you must get the cheapest possible thing. They didn't say reduce steel, do this or that. They didn’t say some inventive kind of construction. They just kept saying, we want it, it must be the most economic. Because Melbourne people were criticizing the Government and Government had gone ahead and gotten the Olympic Games, which, it was incredible Melbourne got it after the War. So that's how the three of us came together.
Did you go to any of the events? Did you go to the swimming?
Oh, sure. Yes, we went to all of the events.
Were you a fan of swimming or diving at the time? Or because you designed the pool or did you go to any of other events, in Melbourne to do with the Olympics?
Oh, yes. Yes. the other event I got, I got the job for doing, they, they had, every they hired a whole series of architects for every intersection in Melbourne in the City.
And they all had to design something and they gave me the, the central place, the, the, railway station, Spencer, Flinders Street railway station. Where the clocktowers are. And I ah, don’t know if there is a drawing here. And I, I designed a torch, a steel torch, 50ft high. That was suspended over the intersection and it was steel frame torch. I had the gas flames coming out the top, and because I’d had to, sheet it in, but not have wind resistance, I sheeted in with little pellets this size that would be not resistant to the wind, but it looked solid, it looked a sort of solitary, a most marvellous thing. It was incredible. And I had it, from steel cables coming across to hold it, coming back to the, steel posts in the footpath. Another one like that. The posts holding up everything and, so it held up on that and hangs over the centre there. It was one of the most, I think it might be in here. It was one of the most sensible things I ever did, that tower.
It was constructed?
Beg pardon?
They constructed it?
They built, they built the whole thing. Oh yeah. Yeah, they built it, and it stood up. It didn't fall down. That's the interesting thing about this build, it'll never fall down. If it fails, it'll spring up in the air like, you know, like a Jack in the Box. If you open the box, woop. That's what it’ll do because it’s under such tension, holding it down. It will spring, land right on Government House.
I’ve got photographs if you want to see that, that actually.
So, we know the pool changed from the Olympic pool, and it's now…
It became, oh, it's gone through many stages. Yes.
So, have you been involved in any of the changes?
Yes, well Kevin Borland did the change of making it into a new music hall, and that failed because the seats were fixed. Like, if I'm sitting in one of the seats and the pools are there in front of me like that. Because the pool, the seats came up from either side of the pool. You could see in this thing here. And the seats came up either side of the pool in the centre, and, but he converted to a music concert hall, and the band and the performers were down on one end, so it meant you had to sit in the seat and turn like this to watch the thing. It would be like going to the theatre and that was the stage. And the seats, were side on to the theatre. So, it wasn't a success. And then I had to undo all of his work that he did and I took on the job for the Collingwood Football Club, because we were the architects of Collingwood Football Club. So, that's how we got the job. And um, the fact that I was the Collingwood architect and Collingwood rented the building. So, I had to convert the building back to, of course he built, Kevin built in the sides of the box.
Yeah.
And, I had to pull all that out and get it back to its form that it was, and get Collingwood in there.
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