I want to be an architect! Education and teaching as an architectural obsession

Alice Hampson had the good fortune to be taught by Don Watson for five of her ten semesters in the UQ architecture department in the 1980s. With his commitment to so many facets of architecture, and to the individual learning style of each student, Don was “unlike any other lecturer” and pivotal in the careers of many of those he taught.

For Don Watson, architecture was a fascination, a skill learnt early and a lifetime addiction. Long-term friend, architect and erstwhile collaborator Russell Hall jokingly explains that most babies enter the world with a cry, but baby Donald exited the womb squealing, “I want to be an architect!” Don is not embarrassed that his early childhood building blocks (the English construction toy Bayko1) may have been responsible for a discipline that his lecturer Ian Sinnamon (mis?) interpreted as being toilet-trained too early. Blessed with architectural stimulation from an early age, he later discovered that this was not unusual: many of his students at

The University of Queensland (UQ) in the 1980s had had an influential early experience, such as a new house, a renovation or a relative in the business.2

When Don’s parents purchased land for a holiday house, their excitement rubbed off as they compiled a dossier of design ideas. But first, Searl and Tannett – an emerging practice – renovated their Brisbane house, Totnes. Responding to Don’s interest, Des Searl (1915–95) presented the budding architect with a portfolio of the firm’s perspectives. Totnes was high-set. The elevated floor was typically treated as a piano nobile, with a non-existent lower storey recessed within the verandahs behind a battened arcade between perimeter stumps.

As for many children, “under-the-house” was a formative playground for Don, with the sub-verandah space transformed into an evolving model city. Later, the addition of a concrete slab provided a workshop where he inexpertly made furniture with his orthopaedic surgeon father, including a desk to which was added an Eames chair – a birthday present from Wests, Karl Langer’s iconic furniture shop.3

By then, Don’s parents were buying Home Beautiful, House and Garden and, occasionally, Architecture and Arts (co-founded by 2005 Gold Medallist James Birrell). The March 1955 issue of this magazine (briefly renamed Architecture and Arts and the Modern Home), guest-edited by David Saunders (1928–86), was particularly memorable, taking Don far beyond the familiar. An article titled “The Ideal House” included Japan’s Katsura Imperial Villa; Le Corbusier, Jeanneret and Gropius from Europe; and numerous Americans, including Lloyd Wright, Breuer, Neutra, Mies and the Eameses. To nine-year-old Don, this world – so far removed from his own – was perplexing but also fascinating.

With Don encased in a body plaster after a spine graft, the family celebrated his completion of primary school in 1959 at Birrell’s Breuer-inspired Centenary

Pool. At subsequent medical consultations on Wickham Terrace, Don was in awe of Birrell’s brutalist concrete carpark under construction opposite. During secondary schooling, his architectural education was extended by George Braziller’s affordable Masters of World Architecture, volumes of which he acquired regularly. To matriculate for architecture, he attended

evening art classes at the Central Technical College, studying en route at Centenary Hall, Jim Weller’s Niemeyeresque addition to the State Library of Queensland.

Brisbane was far from an architectural wilderness. The prevalent light timber-framed construction adapted well to post-war austerity, with memorable work by other architects: Hayes and

Scott, Theo Thynne, John Hitch, John Dalton, Dan Kelvey, Maurice Hurst and Robin Gibson. By then, Don was well able to discriminate between good design and pastiche or gimmickry, and he credits Brisbane’s humble postwar houses of 10 squares (90 square metres) for planning ingenuity. Memorable exhibitions he attended as a schoolboy include the Museum of Modern Art’s Visionary Architecture (1960), and the 6th Australian Planning Congress, where Langer and

Harry Seidler competed across the gallery as star attractions. He valued his copy of Buildings of Queensland, the Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ contribution to Queensland’s centenary.

Don enrolled for the degree course at UQ (1964–69) – three years full-time followed by three years part-time at night – interspersing his study with vacation jobs with Lund Hutton Newell. His lecturers included Bill Carr, Ian Sinnamon, John Railton and Peter O’Gorman. Colleagues included Richard Allom, Doug McKay

(his future brother-in-law and student collaborator4) and Rex Addison. Joining the RAIA as a second-year student meant a subscription to Architecture in Australia (now Architecture Australia) to counterbalance international subscriptions – including student membership of the Museum of Modern

Art in New York, which led to an early copy of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (Robert Venturi, 1966), which he found as challenging as he had Mies’ Farnsworth House a decade earlier. But for him, a job at James Birrell and Partners (1967–69) was infinitely more exciting than university studies.

After graduating in 1970,

Don worked for Hayes and Scott before travelling overland with Ian Sinnamon and Rex and Susan Addison – an intensive course in British colonial, Middle Eastern, Greek, Roman and European architecture overlaid by widely dispersed works of the modern masters. In Britain, he studied at the Royal Institute of British Architects, visited recent work and was impressed by Edinburgh’s transformation by the Fringe Festival. After returning, Don worked for Geoffrey Pie (1938–2018) during a property boom, with numerous development proposals and adaptive re-use projects for an adventurous developer, Jack Roberts. Inevitably, the good times came to a sudden end, but Geoffrey obtained a job for Don with the National Trust.

By the late 1970s, the architecture department at UQ was being transformed after the arrival of Brit Andresen (2002 Gold Medallist) and Michael Keniger (National President’s Award, 2017). In 1979, a fulltime position was converted into two halves – an arrangement that suited Don, giving him a regular income and a full-time position that, after two years, reverted to six months a year, leaving time for research.

Only when Don was lecturing in the 1980s did we meet – although I later discovered that he was responsible for the graphic interiors of Brisbane Airport’s temporary international terminal, where, as I child, I had emotionally farewelled my parents when they travelled overseas each year. He was unlike any other lecturer at the school. Firstly, rather than a proper office, he occupied what we thought was a storeroom adjacent to the second-year studio. It instantly made him part of the studio landscape. Secondly, no other lecturer was as franticly committed to so many facets of architecture simultaneously: design, local history, exhibitions, lunchtime and public lectures, school morale, new technologies, research collections, and the engagement of students – a process for which he had a sage methodology. Thirdly, he was the only lecturer who didn’t have time to walk, instead dashing in and out of his “office” as you crossed his path while peppering him with questions. Later, when employed at the Queensland Department of Public Works, Don was asked to slow down to give the automatic doors time to open.5

In the 1980s, UQ design teaching consisted of four and a half days of contact (studio-based, with drawing boards for all), regular individual tutorials and in-school public critiques. Don believed that different students were receptive to different approaches and ideas, at different times in their development. He exposed students to wide-ranging inputs, enabling each to find their own role within architecture. He sought to build vocabularies by numerous talks and by projects requiring documentation of existing buildings that might then be extended or otherwise modified. Design projects included urban

renewal of Brisbane’s inner suburbs, re-use of heritage buildings and projects of varying scales – often with unique but overlapping briefs for each student, with much in common as well as differences to stimulate discussion. He encouraged his students to identify advantages and opportunities, and problems to be overcome, fostering an understanding of the impact of climate, topography, orientation and vegetation. Don’s ability to invent architectural puzzles to engage inquisitive minds with the possibilities of architecture was masterly.

His own inquiring mind readily explored new technology. He was an early adopter of computer-aided design (CAD), collaborating with a talented recent graduate, Peter Ritson, on several projects, including a program (SITE) to randomly generate site plans for each student.

(In one of the earliest published examples of the use of CAD in Australia, Don employed the program to illustrate

OWA’s submission6 for the Completion of Engehurst exhibition at the 1980 RAIA conference The Pleasures of Architecture.) He explored the potential of passive design for an art gallery at Armidale, which led to an exhibition of student designs at the regional art gallery. Later, his students’ proposals for theatres and galleries for regional centres toured Queensland.

Don’s lunchtime lecture program explored current work by emerging and established architects, work relevant to design projects, and contemporary issues. He also asked students to describe their experiences in their year out and staff to talk about their own houses. He instigated a long-running fortnightly public lecture series at the Brisbane Community Arts

Centre (one of his own adaptive re-use projects). Occasionally, speakers stayed longer, allowing greater student engagement and leading to enduring relationships. These included Richard Leplastrier (1999 Gold Medallist), Will Alsop, Chris Rose,

Peter Cook and Alison Smithson, with the last two engaging in forthright debate at a fifth-year crit. Also scheduled were weekly school lunches, hosted alternately by each student year group, as well as by academic and support staff. Ever conscious of the value of practice to inform teaching,

Don worked for Frank Spork – who had been a colleague at Geoffrey Pie’s – during two non-teaching semesters. As students, we visited his construction sites and others further afield in intensively planned trips away from the school.

In parallel with his teaching, Don built research collections at the university’s Fryer Library. For a decade he pioneered local history in graduating theses, oral histories and his own research, assisted by his future wife, the historian and curator Judith McKay. Above all, he engaged students by offering a vast array of subjects that generously included those beyond his core passions in architecture. With Don as year coordinator, the four-and-a-halfday program occupied the entire week.

I was among a lucky group of students to be taught by Don for five semesters out of the full course of ten. He proved pivotal in the careers of many of his students.

After a decade of short-term, part-time contracts, Don’s academic career came to an abrupt end in 1989, when a recommendation for a full-time, tenured appointment was overturned. Rejecting another half-time contract, Don resigned and joined the Queensland Department of Public Works. Concurrently, his first house commission, Campbell House, won the Robin Dods Award at the Queensland Architecture Awards7 and, later that year, the national Robin Boyd Award. Ready to work on a larger scale, Don went on to win numerous awards. A decade later, after continuing his relentless work regime and then suffering from pneumonia, he negotiated a year’s leave of absence. During this time, he taught full-time at Queensland University of Technology – running public lectures, teaching history and design, and exhibiting student work, in a repeat of his contributions at UQ – before returning to the Works Department until its multidisciplinary consulting group was closed down from 2012.

Personally, Don’s teaching – an exposure to so many thrilling facets and champions of architecture – enticed me to discover what more delights architecture held. Don Watson provided, for this Alice, a true through-the-looking-glass opportunity.

Footnotes

1. Don Watson. “Bayco Blocks: Purposeful Play?”. In Ron Ringer (ed.), Materiality: Brick and Block in Contemporary Australian Architecture (Wetherill Park: Dry Press Publishing,

2015), 558-59. 2. From teaching experience, Don believed that childhood exposure to design and building was more useful than a mature determination to study architecture. 3. As a schoolboy, Don received some sage career advice from Langer: “Be like bamboo, always bounce back.” 4. In a 1967 national student competition, he and McKay shared first prize with Ken Maher (2009 Gold Medallist). 5. Don’s speed reportedly became an issue when the security cameras were unable to register more than a blurred image. 6. This alliance between O’Gorman, Watson and Andresen was established for the competition, with OWA being a joke after keynote speaker Rem Koolhaas’s OMA. 7. Unusually, the house was nominated by the awards jury, rather than by Don – who did not even have a formal practice at this time and, since he had been working as a lecturer, was not a registered architect, although he was a supportive member of the Institute.

Don Watson and Judith McKay with Kenneth Wiltshire, chair of the Australian Heritage Commission, who launched A Directory of Queensland Architects to 1940 at the Fryer Library in 1984. Photograph: University News, 10 October 1984, University of Queensland Archives Don and Judith’s books are standard references on Queensland architecture and are yet to be replicated in other states.