Bill Lucas

Bill Lucas (31 December 1924 – 10 September 2001) was an Australian architect known well for the houses he designed along the Bulwark in Castlecrag, Sydney. While practicing as a full-time architect, Lucas also worked as a part-time lecturer at the School of Architecture of the University of New South Wales for a decade. Between 1955 and 1957 he worked with Neville Gruzman, Tony Moore and Ruth Harvey where they submitted a competition entry for the Sydney Opera House. According to Taylor, the generic qualities of the Sydney School were namely the use of rough textured, self-finished materials, especially those that suggest rustic origins. A second characteristic she noted, "was a deliberate attempt to blend with and hide amongst the existing natural landscape] environment," with a preference for "brick and tile architecture, spatially complex interiors, strong surfaces and masses, disciplined plan." Many other of the architects named by Taylor, including Lucas, sit uneasily within the defining characteristics she described. Lucas' wartime service taught him to rigorously interrogate design problems and reduce them to their fundamental constituent elements. His thoughtful Rational elementaryism and climatism would later go on to be deployed fully by Glenn Murcutt, an architectural assistant in the Neville Gruzman office around the same time that Gruzman shared his workspace with Lucas.

The Glass House, Castlecrag, reduced to a single platform and sloped roof suspended in the bush with no enclosure of space is the Australian domestic equivalent of the 1851 Crystal Place framed in sawn hardwood and glass, as radical in its reductionist symbolism as Peter Carey's glass cathedral in the novel, Oscar and Lucinda. In Harry Margalit's view, the house was a "seminal building" that had a "cleansing simplicity" and asked the question: "how minimally might one live in the Sydney climate, with its temperate compass of seasons and abundance of fine days...Every aspect is informed by clear intentions, from the site preservation to the lack of applied finishes to the radical transparency."

The 1950s was a time of optimistic experiment which set up the 1960s as a decade of soft-edged Modernism. The two architecture schools, University of Sydney under Leslie Wilkinson with his Mediterranean and Arts & Crafts emphasis pointed in one direction; the University of New South Wales in a more open pragmatic regional direction. Bill Lucas shouldered the responsibility at the beginning of the 1960s for the formulation of the philosophy for design teaching and studios at UNSW, implemented by Peter Kollar, Neville Gruzman, Peter Muller, Milo Dunphy, with the Modern architectural historian Morton Herman, who had traveled with Sydney Ancher in the 1930s and witnessed German Modernism. Each was an individual personality architecturally, but they shared to a varying degree, an empathy with Frank Lloyd Wright's identification with regional landscape and interest in Japanese architecture. Leaving Walter Burley Griffin's Castlecrag for Paddington, came as a deliberate decision that saw Lucas increasingly interested and involved in issues of in urban design and heritage matters, and. much later on, the theoretical exploration, much of it through drawing, of issues surrounding standardisation of building elements and geometries for controlling architectural form. Lucas was that rarity in Australian architecture, a gentle explorer of ideas whose built oeuvre though small, nevertheless, was influential among students and contemporaries.

The Paddington Society

The Lucases became actively involved in helping to prevent the suburb of Paddington from comprehensive redevelopment. They helped set up the Paddington Society which campaigned to prevent Juniper Hall from being renovated and revamped. The reduction of the building to its structural components is also visible in two neighbouring houses designed by Lucas at 76 and 78 The Bulwark, Castlecrag with Neville Lucas The Block House, Castlecrag, commissioned by Con and Addie Saltis, 1960 Moonbah Ski Lodge, Thredbo with Marion Hall Best, 1956–63 Orange Tree Grove, 8 Bennetts Grove Avenue, Paddington, (with Michael Coote) commissioned by Ian Kennedy, 1968 Guriganya Progressive Community School, 1970 Ruth Lucas: Bourke Aboriginal Housing with community, 1970

Awards

Forestry Commission Furniture Competition – 1956