Talking up and speaking out: Activist and advocate
Committed to conveying the value of architecture in all its forms, Don Watson has been active in saving and protecting some of Queensland’s finest buildings. His teaching colleague Michael Keniger describes how Don’s work, and his “unrelenting support for
The Marketplace student conference in Brisbane in 1979 attracted more than
600 student delegates to join in the five days of discussion of ideas, opportunities, concerns, dilemmas and architectural endeavours. Hosted by The University of Queensland and the Queensland Institute of Technology (now QUT), many of the keynote speakers were from overseas, including Bill Mitchell (USA), Paul Oliver
(UK) and Pancho Guedes (South Africa). Among the opening presentations by international and interstate architects, a highly informative if somewhat parochial session was presented by Don Watson and Richard Stringer, titled “Queensland from the general to the particular.”
Don articulated and defined the key qualities, characteristics and history of the Queenslander house type, and of the use of timber in Queensland buildings – much of which would have been new to many of the delegates. Further, he and Richard illustrated the virtues of the idiosyncratic, exposed timber framing to be found in early Queensland buildings arising from research undertaken for the National Trust. Strategically, Don used the occasion to position the key features of Queensland architecture among the examples brought from elsewhere. By popular demand, the presentation was repeated later in the conference.
Don had earlier sought out filmmaker Max Bannah and encouraged him to shoot a documentary, Timber and Tin, that further illuminated the nature and construction of the Queenslander house type. Timber and Tin (written and directed by Bannah and Kent Chadwick) was screened at the same conference and, over the years since, has acquired a cult status as a rare recording of fundamental construction methods of the Queenslander. The ability to define and apply rigorous evaluation to an area of enquiry and to position the findings and outcomes so as to argue for the related lessons to be learnt and actions to be taken is the absolute foundation of Don’s contribution to the knowledge and enrichment of the culture of architecture in Queensland.
Early in his career (1974–81),
Don was involved with the creation of Brisbane’s Community Arts Centre. Initially engaged to seek out and evaluate possible locations for the centre, he then helped to determine the availability and viability of Coronation House in Edward Street in the heart of Brisbane’s CBD, where the centre came to be located. He prepared the preliminary plans for the conversion of the property and drew together a successful case for funding, leading to his appointment by the Australia Council to undertake the documentation of the renovation and fitout scheme, from sketch plans through to working drawings.
He continued as a member of the board and worked to ensure the success of the arts centre by organizing streams of public events and exhibitions.
One of the most memorable of these activating streams was the series of fortnightly “Architecture is a Community Art” lectures, which ran from 1981 to 1985. The series offered a public platform for the presentation and discussion of many aspects of architecture and succeeded in revealing the breadth of architectural endeavour. It was shaped and directed by Don in his own time and largely at his own cost, drawing upon his ability to identify speakers whose work and views would be of resounding interest.
With some organizational support from UQ, Don managed to attract, persuade and, on occasion, cajole a seemingly endless line-up of informative speakers. Although these speakers came largely from Australia’s east coast, Don was extremely effective in establishing links with international visitors who might be enticed to include a visit to Brisbane in their itinerary. Speakers came on a goodwill basis, with minor assistance with travel and accommodation available on occasion. The success of the series was due to its pragmatic organization and fluid forward planning. The talks were open to all comers, including members of the public, and most of the sessions attracted a full house.
In retrospect, the range of issues and projects discussed at these lectures was remarkable. Speakers included both prominent and early-career architects, together with critics and commentators, specialists from other disciplines and, on occasion, policymakers. Local speakers included Rex Addison, Spence Jamieson, Robert Riddel, Geoffrey Pie, Lindsay and Kerry Clare and many others. Rick Leplastrier, Peter Myers, Peter Corrigan, Rory Spence, Elizabeth Farrelly, Harry Seidler and Carey Lyon were amongst the national speakers – and the field of international speakers included Reyner Banham, Peter Cook, Bruce Goff, Alison Smithson, Charles Correa, Ingrid Morris and other luminaries. The impact of the series was to energize the interest in architecture in Brisbane, to foster discussion and debate, and to enrich the understanding of the wider community in the nature and value of architecture as a discipline.
Aside from being in continual demand as a public speaker on facets of Queensland’s architectural heritage, Don employed his graphic and design abilities to assist with the design and curation of many exhibitions. At UQ in August 1979, with Brit Andresen, he curated an exhibition to mark the completion of the university’s Great Court. Accompanying historic drawings and photographs of the design and construction of the university’s most significant public space were large-scale folded, freestanding screens with cut-outs following the profiles and silhouettes of university worthies whose images populated the screens. Intended as a pop-up to be taken down after several months, the exhibition remained in place in the Forgan Smith Tower for more than 20 years. Other noted exhibitions included Peter Cook’s Tower Projects in 1984. Held in the
Ray Hughes Gallery in Red Hill, it featured a seminal drawing of the towers and fan bridges scheme Cook had proposed to link the Expo site on South Bank with the Brisbane River’s north bank.
This signature drawing has been published many times over in articles, books and journals featuring Cook’s work – literally putting Brisbane on the map in terms of its international standing.
At UQ in the eighties, third-year student schemes were often structured to engage with emerging issues concerning the future nature of the city. While I was co-teaching with Don in 1982, it seemed likely that the chain of vacant woolstores lining the Teneriffe bank of the Brisbane River would be targeted for demolition. Students prepared design proposals for each of the woolstores and intermediary vacant sites. Don and I submitted our own design, titled Teneriffe Terrace, to the Transition Urban Housing competition.1 An exhibition of the combined Teneriffe schemes gave substance to an overarching proposal to retain and repurpose the stores as residential apartments. The proposal attracted the interest of both Brisbane’s lord mayor, Sallyanne Atkinson, and the local state member, Don Lane. However, the accompanying report was rebuffed by the city planners as implausible and unsupportable. Today, all of the stores have been retained and most have been converted into loft-style residential apartments, suggesting that our advocacy was well directed – just well ahead of its time.
Aside from the notable impact of Don’s and Judith McKay’s research into the history of Queensland architecture and Queensland architects’ careers, their most crucial contribution has been to guide architectural archives of Queensland practices to be lodged with UQ’s Fryer Library. Don helped to establish the
protocols and recording processes appropriate for the documentation of fragile drawings, models, photographs and related records. Some 15,000 drawings and other records have been lodged for preservation, forming a significant resource for future students, architects and researchers. Consequently, Don helped to guide the establishment of an architectural study area in the library where the reading and recording of large plans, models and other materials is accommodated – a further contribution to the education of future architects and to architectural research.
Over his career, Don has joined campaigns to help protect the best of Queensland architecture from demolition or insensitive alteration. These actions have often entailed detailed research and the preparation of alternative schemes. Notable campaigns supported by Don include the Save the Regent (Theatre) campaign in 1978, for which he prepared an alternative scheme for the whole block of theatres, centred on the Regent as a Queensland performing arts centre. The campaign to oppose the proposal to convert the Brisbane Treasury Building into a casino (1990–91) was supported by Don’s provision of a more thorough history of the building. To object to the vandalistic stripping of Brisbane’s Bellevue Hotel of its verandahs in 1974, and its overnight demolition by government edict in 1979, Don undertook further research to better communicate the chain of events and the implications for the legacy of Queensland’s historic architecture and heritage assets.
In recent years, Don has provided invaluable assistance to the Queensland Chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects by helping to guide the chapter’s responses to projects and proposals affecting heritage assets, including significant buildings and public places. Along with others, he assisted the chapter president, Richard Kirk, in helping to shape the chapter’s submissions and appeals concerning the likely impact of the Queens Wharf development on the heritage status of Brisbane’s former government precinct; further, he assisted with a review of the eventual proposed scheme. Additionally, in response to changes proposed to the Queensland Cultural Centre by the state government, and at Kirk’s invitation, Don prepared the Institute’s submission for the inclusion of the precinct on the state heritage list.
The submission was accepted by the Queensland Heritage Council, which duly approved the listing, confirming the significance of Queensland’s premier cultural precinct as a state heritage asset.
Over the whole of his career,
Don has committed himself to conveying the value and nature of architecture in all its forms. The breadth of his unrelenting support for the work of others and for architectural causes is almost limitless. Throughout all of his endeavours, he has deflected attention away from himself.
It is extremely fitting that his many resounding contributions to strengthening the standing of architecture should be recognized by the award of the Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal. In some way or another, we are all in Don’s debt.
Footnote
1. The submission was published in Transition, vol 3 no 3/4, 1982, 51.
From his celebrated Campbell House to his many extraordinary buildings for TAFE colleges across Queensland, Don Watson’s built works prove “that geometry can be liberating, that history can be projective and that colour is to be celebrated.” Janina Gosseye considers the legacy of Don’s works, which display great variation but also abiding common factors.
I first had a proper conversation with
Don Watson in 2013, at an event where he received an honorary doctorate from The University of Queensland.
In the months prior to this exchange, and following my arrival in Brisbane in the winter of 2012, I had already heard a lot about the man; descriptions ranged from accomplished historian to avid gardener, from encyclopedic polymath to incorrigible cusser, from eccentric educator to genius designer. In the years since, I have also learned that Don is a wonderful cook. He always selects the finest ingredients, he invests a lot of time and care in the preparation of a meal and he isn’t afraid to experiment with the recipe. Don applies the same approach to his architectural designs.
His favourite ingredients are geometry, history and colour. He works doggedly (almost obsessively) on his projects – never considering them quite complete – and he enjoys improving on the recipes that others have defined for particular building types.
Among Don’s early projects are Fashion Valley (1974) and the interior of Brisbane Airport’s temporary International Terminal at Eagle Farm (1975). The former he designed while working for Geoffrey Pie, while the latter is a commission that he received after becoming an architectural consultant in 1974. Both projects were located in Brisbane and involved little more than the judicious application of several coats of paint. Fashion Valley, a renovation of the T. C. Beirne Department Store by Robin Dods (1902), beautifully exemplifies Don’s interest in geometry and colour. Inspired by the work of American artist Frank Stella, he had the exterior facades of the building painted in tones of primary colours according to the surface orientation of each particular element. The result was a giant piece of op art, a visual illusion that the building changes colour as you move around it. Similarly colourful and comparably inspired by geometry were the supergraphics of the temporary air terminal, which Architecture Australia in 1976 described as “bold colour schemes,” creating “an appropriate atmosphere” in each area of the building.1 The walls of the departures lounge were adorned with stylized clouds to prepare passengers for their impending air travel, while the green trees and hills in the arrivals area summoned a “back to earth” feeling. Finally, geometric shapes and bands of colour echoed the busy atmosphere in the arrivals and departures hall.
From 1979 to 1989, Don combined his private consultancy with a position as half-time lecturer at UQ. During this period, a collaboration with Frank Spork in 1981 resulted in several town-planning applications as well as one realized building: the Southpoint Offices in South Brisbane (1982).
Two things happened in 1989, a pivotal year. First, Don won the RAIA
Robin Boyd Award for his design of the Campbell House, a project that skilfully wove together his interests in history and geometry. The building’s site, on the Brisbane River, was constrained by contradictions between its outlook and optimum orientation, which triggered an exploration in geometry and led to a symmetrical “pinwheel” plan, generally one room thick to encourage breezes to pass through the rooms. The client’s desire for a “Walter Taylor house”2 inspired Don to blend references to traditional Queensland housing, South-East Asian building and Arts and Crafts design. He did this so successfully that a 2004 publication erroneously labelled it an “excellent example” of a 1920s Art Deco house.3
The second key event of 1989 was a radical reorientation of Don’s career. That year, he joined the Queensland Department of Public Works, where he spent two years in the Health, Law and Order section before being reassigned to the Special Projects and TAFE (Technical and Further Education) division. Over the following years, Don designed about a dozen extraordinary educational buildings for TAFE colleges across South-East Queensland as well as several other civic projects. Each of these designs differs radically from the others in its formal expression, but all demonstrate a clear interest in geometry, history and colour.
The drive to amalgamate disparate yet appropriate historical references into a “difficult whole” – a term coined by Robert Venturi in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture – can be read most clearly in Don’s earliest TAFE designs, such as the technology buildings at Toowoomba TAFE (1995), the computing and amenities building at Ithaca TAFE in Red Hill (1995) and the applied science complex at Logan TAFE in Meadowbrook (1996). The campus masterplan that Don designed for Toowoomba TAFE organized the buildings around a north–south spine of open spaces. Four elongated structures (designed by Don) defined the outline of a new campus courtyard in the north, which he linked to parklands in the south through the reinstated oval of the former Royal Agricultural Society of Queensland showgrounds. Thomas Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia was a key reference, from which Don derived both the concept of the axial campus plan and the design of the lecture rooms alongside the campus courtyard. Each of these lecture rooms was topped with a drum-shaped skylight, the shape of which came from the complex geometrical manipulation of the rotunda spaces in Aldo van Eyck’s Amsterdam Orphanage (1960).
In Red Hill, the narrow and sloping plot for Ithaca TAFE’s new building resulted in a distinctive trapezoid plan, with two fan-shaped lecture theatres placed
at the western edge (where they could benefit from the slope of the terrain) and a square courtyard at the core. For the exterior facades – particularly the western wall – Don drew inspiration from Louis Kahn’s sketches of the ramparts buttressing the rock beneath the Athenian Acropolis, to which he added a slender steel staircase, “stolen” from Frank Gehry’s Loyola Law School in Los Angeles (built between 1980 and 1990). The interior courtyard, in turn, evokes a Japanese garden – to accommodate a collection of bonsai found on site – revealing Don’s fascination with Heinrich Engel’s book The Japanese House (1964). Don readily admits that Ithaca TAFE has a somewhat split character, but is quick to point out that
“you don’t experience the different bits at one spot anyway.” Accordingly, many of his buildings have not one but multiple personalities, which are unified by controlled geometries and a strong relationship to their site.
The same is true for the L-shaped building that Don designed for Logan
TAFE in Meadowbrook. Among its most eye-catching features are the honorific downpipes, which drew inspiration from Michael Graves’s Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Center Bridge project (1978).
Like Don’s earlier designs, this building had a distinctive colour palette – in this case hues of blue and yellow – and also featured the type of patterned masonry that, by then, had become a staple of his architecture and would come to play a leading role in his next TAFE project: the Morningside Campus student centre (1997).
This student centre is a pivotal project in Don’s career. It confirms his obsession with geometry and his love for patterned masonry, but also reveals a shift toward a greater emphasis on environmentally sensitive design ambitions. The key to this project is the central courtyard, which sets the stage for a landscaped amphitheatre establishing the adjacent woodland as the main focus of the campus. The U-shaped building surrounding this courtyard is covered in an undulating cloak of opaque metal and translucent acrylic panels in camouflage design to assimilate it into its natural environment. At Morningside, Don’s experimentation with patterned masonry reaches a climax. The central courtyard is paved in blackand-white bricks laid in a giant swirl that tapers out onto the walls of the building.
As Don’s work evolved, his love for nature increasingly came to play a leading role. Although environmental sensitivity as well as climate-responsiveness can be recognized in all his projects, these aspects come to the fore very clearly in the Arts and Environmental Tourism
Centre at Noosa TAFE (2003) and in his extensions to the Cobb and Co Museum in Toowoomba. As with Morningside TAFE, both these projects depart from the bold colour schemes of his earlier work in favour of softer, more natural tones.
In the Noosa Arts and Environmental Tourism Centre, Don applied a multitude of ecological design principles, such as the alignment of rooms with the cardinal points to simplify shading and solar protection, the collection of rainwater in tanks, the integration of multiple-mode ventilation systems and the use of ecoconsiderate materials. Nevertheless, this project also stays true to the geometric lineage of his work: its layout is based on a right-angled triangle, the hypotenuse of which aligns with the oblique orientation of the existing contours that define the ridge on which the building is sited. Thus the complex effortlessly alternates built elements with shared open spaces, resulting in a “studied informality.”4
In 1999 and 2010, Don designed two extensions for the Cobb and Co Museum in Toowoomba, which had been rehoused in the late 1980s to the floriculture building at the old showgrounds. These extensions reiterate themes of his earlier projects, including strong geometric shapes – the elliptical courtyard is noteworthy – and a deference to context; to protect mature trees on site, the front facade has a distinctive curvilinear shape. However, as with Noosa TAFE, Cobb and Co no longer features patterned brickwork or bold colour schemes. Instead, natural colours and materials take precedence, raising the question of how Don’s work might have evolved further had this not been his last project as a civil servant.
Don Watson’s work proves that geometry can be liberating, that history can be projective and that colour is to be celebrated. The architectural dishes he has prepared with these basic ingredients are all extremely varied, each one proving a recipe for success. Many of Don’s projects have garnered awards and accolades. I could not have been happier to learn that the Gold Medal can now be added to this list and look forward to the future meals that this beautiful mind will cook up for us to enjoy.
Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research (with Naomi Stead and Deborah van der Plaat, 2019).
Footnotes
1. “Brisbane Airport flies out of the Dark Ages,” Architecture Australia, vol 65 no 3, June/July 1976, 79.
2. Walter Taylor (1872–1955) was a talented contractor and designer, whose own house, The Gables (1916), was located nearby.
3. Patrick Dixon, 150 Years of Brisbane River Housing (Brisbane: Dixon Partners, 2004), 93–96.
4. Paula Whitman, “Studied informality,” Architecture Australia, vol 94 no 4, July/August 2005, 68–73S