One of the heroes of Australian architecture of the 1950s and 1960s, James Birrell, has won Australia's greatest architecture prize, the 2005 RAIA Gold Medal | The Age
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One of the heroes of Australian architecture of the 1950s and 1960s, James Birrell, has won Australia's greatest architecture prize, the 2005 RAIA Gold Medal.

Royal Australian Institute of Architects national president Warren Kerr said the Melbourne-born Brisbane-based architect had made a "spirited and distinguished contribution to the discipline of architecture", during a career of more than 50 years.

Now 76 and retired, Mr Birrell grew up in Airport West, almost alongside Essendon Airport. He attended Essendon High School and later studied at Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT University) and the University of Melbourne under Robin Boyd and Roy Grounds.

Mr Birrell recalls playing football in Fairbairn Park, Moonee Ponds, opposite the incinerator designed by famed US architect Walter Burley Griffin.

"I knew nothing of the man then but I knew that there was something special about that place," he said. "Later, when I used to go to the pictures in his Capitol Theatre in Swanston Street, I spent more time looking at the ceiling than I did watching the screen. The building was more exciting than the pictures."

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AdvertisementHis fascination with Burley Griffin's architecture led him to write his biography in 1964.

In 1955, aged 27, he applied for the position of Brisbane City architect, not knowing that he was stepping into a political and industrial cauldron following the sacking of the city's design and planning staff.

"I reckon I must have been the only candidate, because they accepted my application immediately," he said. "I was then blackballed by the RAIA and architects. Almost no one spoke to me for nearly two years."

But during six years as city architect, he oversaw the design of more than 150 projects, including at least two that rank among the finest modern buildings in Australia: the Wickham Terrace car park and the Centenary Pools.

Abstraction, expression and inventive construction all register strongly in Mr Birrell's architecture. No building probably better expresses his vision of architecture as art than the Wickham Terrace car park built more than 40 years ago. It features an unusually wide spiralling concrete drum attached to the side of the building as a continuous exit ramp and a sweeping flyover on-ramp.

His Centenary Pools centre, Brisbane's first Olympic-standard swimming and diving pools, is one of the highlights of Australian architecture of the 1950s and 1960s.

It features a series of geometric forms loosely arranged about a raised podium, tucked into the side of a hill overlooking a park. Mr Birrell's design incorporates a raised restaurant - now a fitness centre - of reinforced concrete, steel and glass that is built out over the main pool.

Other landmark buildings Mr Birrell has designed include Union College and the J. D. Story administration building at the University of Queensland, and the main library at the James Cook University of North Queensland.

The Age