Visiting Daryl Jackson’s studio

Daryl Jackson died last weekend. One of the great Australian architects of the last 50 years. Sadly, the best obituary, by David Wagner, is in the Victorian AIA newsletter and not available on the net. Hopefully ArchitectureAu will publish it soon, rather than the desultory one they have to date. I’ll add a small story.

In the 1990s, as an architecture school teacher at the University of Sydney, I took a small group of senior students to Melbourne as a part of a project on high-rises. We arranged office visits to some major architects, including Daryl Jackson, who would make a beautifully insightful and clear explanation of his approach to a range of projects in an entertaining, lively presentation.

Only later was it revealed to us by my friend and contact at Daryl’s, Mark Roehrs (a Brisbane architect doing a master's at RMIT, now principal with Hassell), what had happened behind the scenes. Given his academia, Mark was given the job of putting the slide show together, but there was a game they played: Daryl had no idea what slide order and projects Mark selected.

Daryl's extraordinary ability was to present a seamless presentation without knowing what the next image was going to be. It was testament to 3 things about Daryl Jackson.

Firstly, he was a great architect, a marvellous entrepreneur of ideas. I’ve enjoyed two buildings at opposite ends of the scale: his own house on the Murrah on the NSW south coast (next door to Philip Cox) and the MCG Great Southern Stand, both handled with aplomb.

Secondly, he was such a great teacher, both professionally and incidentally. And thirdly, that he was such an engagingly nice bloke, an impression indelibly left on all of us in the intimate gathering of 15 students in his studio. Vale Daryl Jackson.

Visiting Box Hill Community Centre

And another time recently when memory drifted to past visits to Melbourne.

Last November I went to the Griffin Lecture at the Shine Dome in Canberra, given by the 2004 architecture gold medal winner Greg Burgess. A quietly spoken but deeply thoughtful meditation on his learnings about working on country with Indigenous people. Even a stilted discussion in front of the stage afterwards didn’t detract from the marvellous way he led the audience through his clarity of thinking.

I spoke with him afterwards to share this story.

In the same vein as I had with senior students, every year I took seventy-odd 3rd-year Sydney students to Melbourne for a four-day visit in the week after Easter. It highlighted the differences between the two cities architecturally, culturally and socially. And eventually led to me being severely remonstrated in a faculty meeting, but that’s another story for another time.

I had written an architecture guide for students to inner Melbourne and the CBD (with the help of the then-student, now very talented architect Dianna Thomas). That kept most students occupied, whilst each day I took a quarter of the students in a minibus tour of suburban buildings by the Melbourne PoMo masters.

And the most popular building in the eight years of touring? The Box Hill Community Arts Centre, by you guessed it, Greg Burgess. An astonishing tour de force, which, of course, he'd handled in a highly collaborative approach, with an environmentally conscious setting by Kevin Taylor and Kate Cullity and the integrated work of artist-architect Maggie Fooke.

As word got out about the building, the students demanded that it be included on every tour, no matter what else I wanted to visit.

A big high five for some big hi-fi.

Going down memory lane about Melbourne, here are a couple of images of ‘big things’ from the past (part of a forthcoming photographic exhibition). These would be described by American theorist and architect Robert Venturi, who had an outsized influence on Melbourne thinking, as ‘ducks’, in contradistinction to ‘decorated sheds’.

First up is the reel-to-reel tape deck. Rotating, of course, whilst the multimeters flickered. Douglas Hi-Fi, 202 Bourke St, Melbourne, VIC 3000. Olympus OM-2, 1983.

Next up is the giant SLR (single-lens reflex) camera on the awning at Bentons Camera & Video, 727 Heidelberg Rd, Fairfield, Victoria 3078. Olympus OM-2, 1982.

And given that Queensland is the home of all things 'big', we can’t go past the giant car ‘stereo’ at Campbell's Car Sound Centre, 3281 Logan Rd, Underwood, QLD 4119. Nikkormat, 1982-3.

In memory of Daryl Jackson, Essendon U19 player, board member (2004-15), and lifelong supporter, imagine the team song being played very loudly on the car stereo (‘cause it’s not been played too often recently).

Cross-Sections are Friday musings from Tone Wheeler, formerly of Tone on Tuesday. Amateurs draw plans; professionals draw sections – never at cross purposes.

Tone Wheeler

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