Designing Remembrance: Lippincott & Billson, Desbrowe-Annear

A century ago, a public design competition resulted in the grand architecture of the Shrine of Remembrance. For 90 years it has stood as an iconic sentinal in Melbourne's architecture, so it's hard to imagine anything else in its place...

In this series, you'll uncover the the designs that could have been Victoria's War Memorial and the architects behind them.

Transcript

LAURA THOMAS: It’s the fourth of August , 1921, just under three years after the end of the First World War. There’s a meeting in Melbourne Town Hall where the Minister for Public Works, Frank Clarke, moves a motion for a National War Memorial for Victoria to be built in Melbourne. He says the monument should commemorate ‘the services of those who enlisted and fought in the Great War’

It’s a time when you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t been touched by the tragedy of conflict … so the stakes are high. An architectural competition is announced to decide what the memorial will look like, and ‘Australasians and British Subjects resident in Australia’ are invited to try their hand at the design.

A site is chosen – The Grange, it’s called - at the corner of Domain and St Kilda Roads, and by the competition closing date on 30 June 1923, 83 designs have been submitted. Of these, six are shortlisted. The winner, A Shrine of Remembrance, is announced on 13 December 1923.

Today, the Shrine of Remembrance is an iconic sentinel in Melbourne’s architecture. It’s hard to imagine the building looking any other way. Welcome to Designing Remembrance, a series where we uncover the designs that could have been, and the architects behind them.

From accusations of architectural plagiarism to spats over the function of the memorial, you’ll get a glimpse into the past and discover the roads not taken.

LAURA THOMAS: Professor Philip Goad is the Chair of Architecture at the University of Melbourne and Chair of the Heritage Council of Victoria. And in this episode of Designing Remembrance, he joins me to unpack the stories of the fourth and sixth placed designs. Welcome Philip.

PHILIP GOAD: Thank you. Thanks, Laura.

LAURA THOMAS: So who were Roy Lippincott and Edward Billson, the winners of the fourth place design?

PHILIP GOAD: So anunusual duo, if you like.

LAURA THOMAS: And who was who?

PHILIP GOAD: Roy Lippincott was the American, and he was also older than Ed Bilson, or Edward Fielder Bilson, as we should call him. Roy Lippincott was born in Pennsylvania, and he studied architecture at Cornell University, and then he went to Chicago, and he worked for a firm called Herman von Holst, who'd taken over Frank Lloyd Wright's office, the famous American architect. And Frank Lloyd Wright was really the powerhouse behind what we call the Prairie School in architecture today, and the idea of horizontal lines and really abstracted modern forms for architecture. Now in the von Holst office, because the von Holst office had taken over the Wright office while Wright was away, was Lippincott, a young graduate, who was being supervised by Marion Mahony, the great female architect who would later marry Walter Burley Griffin, and the pair would design Canberra here in Australia. So quite an extraordinary supervisor for Lippincott in the von Holst office. And she worked closely with Lippincott, and it was she who really introduced him to the idea of Prairie School design principles. And the von Holst office was in the same building as Griffin had his office. Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony married in 1911; 1912 they win the competition for the capital of Australia, Canberra, and Lippincott is offered a junior partnership with Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony, and in the meantime, Lippincott has already married Walter Burley Griffin's sister, so there's sort of a family connection there as well.

PHILIP GOAD: And Lippincott and his bride arrive in Australia with Walter and Marion in 1914 and Roy Lippincott works first on city plans for Griffith and also Leeton. And then he moved to Melbourne in 1916 and he designed his own house next door to Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony's house, so it's a tight little community in an estate designed by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony. In the office of the Griffins, he meets a young graduate, the first Diploma of Architecture graduate from the University of Melbourne, Edward Fielder Billson. And Ed Billson is the youngest son of the then Minister for Education Arthur Billson. And the two get on very well, and they have some success in 1921 in winning the competition for the Arts Building at the University of Auckland. So it was quite remarkable, this couple of employees in the Griffin office winning this international competition for a university building in New Zealand. And they also do another competition entry internationally, and they get an honourable mention, and that's for the Chicago Tribune skyscraper competition. They're clearly a talented pair in this extremely talented couple's office. And then in March 1922 when they competition comes up for the Shrine of Remembrance, these two employees enter that competition, and they gain fourth prize.

LAURA THOMAS: Tell me a little bit about their design. What vision did they have for the War Memorial?

PHILIP GOAD: Well, being employees in the Griffin office and both really understanding the principles that the Griffins were interpreting through their experience, their personal experiences of the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, what you see in the fourth prize entry is a very strong vertical element, an abstracted obelisk, you might say, an abstracted tower with a sculpture of peace right at the very top. But in front of that is a forecourt, and it's flanked by two resting lions and then a colonnaded forecourt on either side, so suggesting a space of gathering on axis with St Kilda Road. But the important thing about the tall, extremely tall, vertical element, rather like a campanile, is that there's a sense that it might have been a bell tower as well, that this would have been an urban landmark, so a landmark down St Kilda Road, but a landmark that you could actually see from the bay coming into Melbourne. So many of these architects at this time were using the monument to actually, if you like, claim some force or power over the city as how to actually read the city.

LAURA THOMAS: Why was it important to them that it was so tall and could be seen from around the city?

PHILIP GOAD: Well, one thing is that in traditional funereal architecture, marking the place where someone has died has often been done with a tall, broken column, a tall obelisk, based on Egyptian architecture, and even the pine tree as a tall singular element is also seen as a sign of someone's passing. And in here, I think what's interesting is it's very abstracted. I like to think they may have seen the competition drawings for the Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge, another competition, and those drawings would have been internationally published. And at Vimy Ridge, the artist, architect, designed two very strong peer like elements with a space between, but Lippincott and Bilson in their design, they have two pylons, if you like, rising upwards, and they fill the space between with this pedestal structure for the sculpture right at the very top, and the same as at Vimy Ridge, you know, there's always an expectation with these monuments that there should be some commemorative services in perpetuity, essentially. And so the idea of an urban space in front of this giant vertical element is going to appear in so many of the competition entries as well.

LAURA THOMAS: One thing that appears in their competition entry that doesn't really appear in any other is Australian botanicals and reference to native plants. What's that about Philip?

PHILIP GOAD: This is an idea that comes out of the Arts and Crafts movement of the 1880s and 1890s but more particularly out of the way in which Roy Lippincott and Ed Billson would have been educated and trained in the Griffins’ office. The Griffins themselves were captivated by Australian native flora and fauna, and in their buildings would tend to abstract detail, as in Cafe Australia and the like, they would abstract indigenous forms in their ornamental decoration of their buildings and interiors. It was a similar idea that Frank Lloyd Wright used in the Hollyhock House in the 1920s in Los Angeles. So this idea of using particularly indigenous flora was a way of particularly for the Griffins and their pupils, Lippincott and Billson, of if you like, removing themselves from traditional imperial notions of decoration and victory, and using what they would have called universal symbols. And of course, nature is the one of the strongest forms of universal symbol, so abstracting nature to form an ornamental system that is not based on traditional notions of war or militarism and the like.

LAURA THOMAS: While we're talking about the Griffins, I need to hear about their design, because I was amazed when I found out that the designers of Canberra also had a proposition for what this building should be. Can you unpack what they had proposed?

PHILIP GOAD: Well the Griffins, I think, had an extraordinary design for the Shrine of Remembrance. It too was a very strong vertical element, but it was almost as if it was like a Hindu Shikhara, which is a holy mountain made up of tiny holy mountains. So it's an aggregate of little mountain peaks, and they build together to become one great mountain. And in the Hindu shrine, you have a central holy cave, or garbagriha, and the Griffins have abstracted that so that in plan, it looks like a mandala, and the drawings show that it would have been wonderful at night, it would have been like a glowing crystal at the end of St Kilda Road. And if you know the interior of the Capitol Theatre in Melbourne, the glowing coloured ceiling is like the interior of a giant cave, a sacred cave. That's a feeling that you would have got inside the stepped pyramid interior of the Griffins’ entry. What's remarkable, I think, is that the interior of the Griffins design formed a stepped pyramid, is what we actually get with the winning entry by Hudson and Wardrop, externally and internally. But that's another story.

LAURA THOMAS: Why don't you think the Griffins were placed?

PHILIP GOAD: I think at the time there was, at the end of World War One, an extraordinary recovery of connection with Empire. The Griffins’ entry didn't have any of those traditional notions of what commemoration, victory, passing or death was about, and I think it didn't have any of the strong literal aspects of commemorative architecture that almost all of the other entries had, even Lippincott and Billson's. And this idea of Empire was so powerful at the time, it was as if Federation, when Australia had become its own country, some of the strong ideas about nationalism and identity were not placed aside, but war seemed to make many Australians feel part of the Empire even stronger, and so the flag, connections to the Imperial War Graves Commission, continuing visits by members of the royal family and so on and so on. I think we were considered an ever stronger member of the so called Royal family as a nation.

LAURA THOMAS: Right. Let's go back to Lippincott and Billson and their design, you mentioned that they won the design competition for the Arts building at the University of Auckland. Were there any similarities between that design and the one that they proposed for Victoria's war memorial?

PHILIP GOAD: Absolutely. A key feature of the Arts Building at Auckland was a clock tower, another vertical form, abstracted again. And the marvellous thing about the Arts Building at Auckland is that Lippincott and Billson were abstracting the traditional language of the university, which was Gothic architecture. Abstracting Gothic architecture to become more fluid and more naturalistic. So their vertical element at the Arts Building in Auckland is like an abstracted version of Christopher Wren's Tom Tower at Oxford.

LAURA THOMAS: Now what I find quite interesting, and listeners will hear this as they make their way through the series, is that a lot of the architects had either served themselves or had direct connections to service. Did either Lippincott and Billson have this connection?

PHILIP GOAD: As far as is known: Lippincott, no. Bilson was too young at the time. Sono, no direct connection as such.

LAURA THOMAS: Do you think that this was reflected at all in their design?

PHILIP GOAD: I think possibly yes. Being part of the services, many who served in the Defence Forces would have been familiar with the Boer War memorials. Would have been familiar with other memorials that they may have seen while they were training in England or en-route, and the like as well.

LAURA THOMAS: Now they came fourth, which is a brilliant achievement, but they continued to go on to do some pretty incredible things after the competition. What were their legacies?

PHILIP GOAD: Well, Lippincott actually moved to New Zealand to supervise the building of the Arts Building at the University of Auckland. So he moved there in 1921 and they must have been doing the competition here by correspondence, almost.

LAURA THOMAS: Which is pretty incredible.

PHILIP GOAD: It is incredible. And in 1925 Lippincott formally establishes an independent practice on his own in New Zealand, practices there, has quite a successful practice, but returns to the United States in 1939. Billson, on the other hand, stays in Melbourne, does a series of very Griffin-styled houses in the Melbourne suburbs, and he also does the Woodlands golf club down at Mordialloc, which still exists. And all of his work through the 1920s shows the influence of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony, even in the drawing styles. But once the Great Depression hits, and the Griffins by the late 30s have gone. It's almost as if Billson embraces modernism in a very determined way, European modernism: so, abstract, functionalist architecture, so not abstracting nature or fundamental forms that he would have been understanding through the Griffins. Now he moves to, if you like, a machined idea of modernism, and his signature building for the 1930s is the Sanitarium Health Food Factory up in Warburton, which gains peer recognition from the profession. It wins the 1940 Street Architecture Medal, and that building is cream brick, has industrial glazing and a cubic form. It was a highlight of modernist architecture in Melbourne in the 1930s.

LAURA THOMAS: The other architect we're going to unpack today was part of a trio that was responsible for the sixth place design, and that's Harold Desbrowe-Annear. He partnered with Arthur Stephenson and Percy Meldrum, who we do talk about in depth in the next episode of this podcast. So Philip, tell me about Desbrowe-Annear, who was he?

PHILIP GOAD: Well, Desbrowe-Annear is actually the oldest of the people that we've been talking about. So he's older than Roy Lippincott, he's older than Ed Billson, and he is what one might describe as flamboyant character in Melbourne. He's an architect mainly associated with houses, and has a series of, if you like, careers. So around the turn of the century, he was very well known for a series of extremely beautiful Arts and Crafts houses in Eaglemont, in the Eyrie and Eaglemont, and these are timber houses with really beautiful, flowing interior plans characterised by dark stained timber and Australian motifs in stained glass and individually designed door latches, door handles, fireplace surrounds in beaten metal and the like. He also does a house for the artist Norman Macgeorge in Fairy Hills in Ivanhoe. So he's, he's quite, quite different, because those houses are set in often beautiful bush settings, so that the ones in Eaglemont are set in the same setting that the so called plein air painters like Frederick McCubbin and Arthur Streeton are painting in that area of Melbourne.

PHILIP GOAD: But at the same time, he gets a really wonderful commission in 1901 where he designs a triumphal arch for Princes Bridge for the royal visit of the Duke and Duchess of York in 1901, so Federation. So you have, in a way, these two sides to Desbrowe-Annear. You have this interest in the Arts and Crafts and a very domestic, scaled sort of architecture. Then, when he works in the city, it's mperial, it's about axis, it's about celebrating with the classical language of architecture. So it's quite a different idea. And he also is very well connected, so that even after World War One, he does another proposal, working together with the University of Melbourne academic Baldwin Spencer, and he writes about a National War Memorial in 1919 and in this moment, so let's remember the triumphal arch on Princess Bridge for the Royals to go underneath. Then in 1919, 18 years later, he's again in favour of a triumphal arch as a National War Memorial, so an entry arch for the Royals, but then after war, the triumphal arch now becomes a war memorial, sort of an arch of victory. We have to remember the, perhaps the most famous arch of victory, is the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. So at this time in city planning ideas, we're seeing architects like Annear embrace what we call City Beautiful ideas. And this is when city planners are planning axes across the city to connect it, to connect the city for ease of movement ease of legibility, and it's done beautifully with monuments forming these markers of reorganising the city. In the post World War Two years, it would have been freeways reorganising the city, but the City Beautiful movement was really about beautifying the city to make it more functionally operational, and functionally and visually legible.

LAURA THOMAS: And did he come up with this idea before the design competition for Victoria's war memorial was announced?

PHILIP GOAD: He did. He did. So, this is someone who has very strong urban ideas about Melbourne, and also making Melbourne, if you like, a capital worthy of the Empire, and that 1919 idea for a National War Memorial before this competition is held, actually is a triumphal arch situated on St Kilda Road. So it's just moved the arch up, if you like, the road from Princes Bridge. It's on at the intersection of Grant Street, and then another avenue would have run towards the bay. So again, it's water connections, the arrival at the city is signalled by a war memorial and so on and so forth. That it's actually making the city legible across a much larger landscape. And he writes about this again, in a book he publishes called For Every Man His Home, and in that he then extends the idea to have war memorial at the intersection of Bank Street and St Kilda Road on axis with the city grid, and at the very end of Swanson Street he wanted a new Melbourne Town Hall, where Carlton and United Brewery used to be on the axis, so again, using public buildings to, if you like, reorganise the city, understanding that at the end of Bourke Street, Parliament House, of Collins Street, Treasury Building, again, making everything more legible.

LAURA THOMAS: It's no surprise that his submission for the Victorian war memorial competition was a triumphal arch. Was it the same one that he'd designed in 1919?

PHILIP GOAD: Slightly more refined, I would say, larger, but that same idea of a major central arch and sort of flanking piers on either side. And what's interesting about this Triumphal Arch is that above the arch itself is a huge, if you like, tablet, and a giant form that could be read on the one hand, as a giant pedestal for something further that might go on top, or a giant sarcophagus in and of its own right. But the arch itself is supported by a whole series of columns, open columns. We have to remember too, that Annear had designed one of the most beautiful, classically designed, funereal monuments, the Springthorpe Memorial at Boroondara Cemetery. If you've never gone to see it, it's the most moving memorial. Black stone columns, very shiny. There is a series of white marble angels tending to the tomb of Annie Springthorpe, Dr Springthorpe's wife, and above is a rose-coloured stained-glass dome. But you can't see that from the outside, so you get the feeling that had Annear done this his triumphal arch, there would have been something else in it to make it even more special. But really, I think he was using it, the triumphal arch motif, to stake his claim as a forward thinker in the urban design of Melbourne.

LAURA THOMAS: Would it have been similar to the Arc de Triomphe, where cars could go underneath it?

PHILIP GOAD: That's not quite clear. I think in this case, perhaps not. And he would have actually potentially proposed another monument further down. So, so he would have seen the Shrine of Remembrance Triumphal Arch as a sort of a moment in a serial landscape of other monuments. And he would have enjoyed the fact that this would have then not only been seen on axis down St Kilda Road from both directions, but its height on the slightly raised height of where the Shrine of Remembrance is today would have also been seen from the bay and encourage further City Beautiful urban design moves.

LAURA THOMAS: Annear had a connection to service. Both of his sons served. Do we see any influences or messages of that within his design?

PHILIP GOAD: I think you do partly because of this notion of victory. And the idea of returning members of family is a key idea as well. And I think this connection of having, if you have yourself or your members of your family have served, there is that connection to the wider body of men and women who fought in a conflict like the Great War.

LAURA THOMAS: Now, Annear is said to be the lead architect on this design, but he did also work, as we said, with Stephenson and Meldrum. What hand did they have in this design?

PHILIP GOAD: It's interesting because my feeling about this is that Percy Meldrum much younger than Annear would have been the author of the rendering. So he was a brilliant artist, and he was an instructor at the Architectural Association at one time as well. But he was considered of the partnership of Stephenson and Meldrum, the artist of the partnership. And he would also go on to do buildings for Keith and Elizabeth Murdoch down at Cruden Farm. He did stables down there. So he, I think, would have understood Annear's City Beautiful vision, and interpreted that in the wonderful perspective that you can see at the exhibition.

LAURA THOMAS: What did Annear go on to do after the design competition?

PHILIP GOAD: Interestingly, he changed direction in terms of his residential designs, so he was getting large scale houses in Toorak and South Yarra, and they start to include more and more of the classical language of architecture. So porte-cocheres that have beautiful classical columns, and of course, he does the Chapel Street Bridge in South Yarra, with its wonderful arches and its extremely beautiful lamp standards. So if you, if you want to see perhaps the flavour of what Annear's Shrine might have been, you can see it there.

LAURA THOMAS: That's great. Now today, we spoke about the fourth and the sixth place designs. What do you think that they didn't have that the winning design, A Shrine of Remembrance, had? Why was the building that we're sitting in today, the one that was awarded first place?

PHILIP GOAD: Excellent question. I think the winning design had a level of sobriety, soberness, that the others did not. The others were about victory, and I think there was a recognition of extraordinary loss, but also the Shrine of Remembrance, the Hudson and Wardrop design has this wonderful connection to one of the legendary places of battle in World War One that is Gallipoli. The idea that the Shrine of Remembrance might be based in part on the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, which was located in ancient Turkey, I think, is a very powerful reminder that that tragic event at Gallipoli might have some association with the forms that were chosen by Hudson and Wardrop to represent the fallen.

PHILIP GOAD: The other aspect, I think the powerful thing that Hudson Wardrop design did was actually bring light into the interior, and virtually none of the others do that with this commemorative interior, which is so special to the Shrine of Remembrance, not forgetting that the Shrine of Remembrance also does those City Beautiful things which Annear wanted is to, if you like, place an overlay of ideology of nation across the city with the axial location and the like, it was seen from the bay. You can still see the Shrine at various moments from the bay, so it's fulfilled City Beautiful ideals, but I think its level of sobriety and the use of the Doric order reference back to the Parthenon, as well as the stepped pyramid form above all signal it as being somehow more serious, more authentic, and perhaps a fitting way to commemorate the dead than, and a more reflective way to commemorate the dead, rather than flag waving and victory.

LAURA THOMAS: Well, thank you so much, Philip, for sharing your knowledge on this. It's been wonderful to have you.

PHILIP GOAD: Thank you. Thanks, Laura.