How Sydney Discovered Frank Lloyd Wright

Alfred Hitchcock was in town to promote his latest thriller, North by Northwest (1959) and John Reid was about to commence building his Bruce Rickard-designed house at Castle Hill, north-west of the city. It called for the kind of rustic random coursed masonry which featured in the set in the tense closing scenes of Hitchcock’s movie, jutting out at the top of the mountain. Reid rang Hitchcock and inquired about the house, which had been specially constructed for the film and was not an actual Frank Lloyd Wright house. Hitchcock was helpful and suggested to Reid he contact the studio and have MGM send him stills from the movie.

The Reid house is on Old North Road as it approaches the ridge on the steep slope looking south over Castle Hill. Reid showed the stills to the stonemasons, who at first reacted with disdain, but when Reid insisted, they agreed. The resulting rustic effect of the irregular finished masonry so impressed them they used it in later work.

Years later, Peter Bogdanovich shot The Mystery of Natalie Wood (2002) at the Reid house, which has five scenes in various locations in and around it. Rickard houses exude cinematic appeal: Rickard’s own house at Finlay Road, Warrawee, was used for The Rage in Placid Lake and The Café Latte Kid. The television series Underbelly was filmed in Rickard’s Curry House 2, at Bayview.

Bogdanovich’s television film tells the story of Natalie Wood’s life and tragic death, which fulfilled the prophecy told to her mother by a gypsy that she would be “a great actress and drown in dark water”. Her attempted suicide, her arrival under the carport, a violent argument with Robert Wagner in the kitchen, and her walk to the front entrance across the Japanese pool, shot from overhead through a delicate filigree screen of leaves, were filmed at the Reid house location. No one could possibly suspect the movie was filmed in Sydney instead of Los Angeles, so convincing and specific down to the finest of detail is Rickard’s Australian version of Wright. Clive Evatt Jr took over Rickard’s first house at Warrawee (1959), which Rickard had intended for himself, preferring a Wright house over one by his erstwhile brother-in-law, Harry Seidler. Evatt’s decision highlighted the rivalry between the two styles of architecture—the European international style and its organic American landscape-oriented rival.

Sydney once looked more English than England, but following a major cultural shift after the Second World War it was indistinguishable from America, so convincing was the remake. We were now Americans and the transformation was complete on many levels, from music to cinema, popular dance and even, with important qualifications, architecture.

How such a radical transformation of Australian architecture was accomplished is poorly documented. Bruce Rickard stands at its very centre. How he came to be in America in 1955 was itself something of an accident, though a more fortunate accident cannot be imagined.

Bruce Rickard was the youngest son of Arthur Lancelot Rickard. His grandfather was Sir Arthur Rickard. Until 1930 and the Depression, Sir Arthur had been a wealthy real estate entrepreneur in Sydney and founder of the One Million Club, later the Sydney Club, which he established to promote immigration, hence real estate profits. Lance’s son could not have been less like his father. Deaf from a young age, Bruce was packed off to Barker College by his mother as a boarder before he turned eight so he did not interfere with Lance’s busy social life. Rejection by his parents would have lifelong consequences. His father died in 1949 when he was nineteen.

On finishing architecture at East Sydney Technical College—forerunner of the University of New South Wales—Bruce Rickard married Mary Charley and a week later embarked for England on the Orontes with the intention of studying landscape architecture. This turned out to be a waste of time, as the course at University College London contained little design and was a largely horticultural. But his stay in Europe exposed him to a wide variety of manmade English landscapes and, most important for their lasting impact, the wild fjord landscapes of Norway and the sublime Austrian alpine scenery which he adored.

By chance, while he was in London, Rickard heard about a scholarship offered at the University of Pennsylvania under the newly appointed head, Ian McHarg, a Scot from Glasgow. McHarg was about to transform the profession of landscape architecture, not only in the US, but later worldwide on the publication in 1969 of his seminal work, Design with Nature. A survivor of tuberculosis that he contracted while at Harvard, McHarg was a great walker and talker who pioneered programs on ecology and design in the new medium of television, reaching into American households. He had served in a paratroop regiment in North Africa, Italy and Greece behind enemy lines demolishing German military installations and was now a formidable combatant for the natural environment.

McHarg brought with him to Penn such formidable design personalities as Philip Johnson, who designed the sculpture court at MOMA in New York. At the time, Johnson was working with Mies van der Rohe on the Seagram Building in Manhattan. Through Johnson, Rickard gained access to recently completed works by Marcel Breuer, Eero Saarinen and Wright, on top of which he got to visit and see inside all of Johnson’s latest houses, notably the glass house at New Canaan. The catholic range of his exposure, encompassing the great American landscape tradition in addition to the displaced Europeans, is significant. One might have expected Rickard to emerge from all this a devotee of the new International style, but he did not. Instead it was landscape, and the blending of architecture in harmony with landscape, that drew him into Wright’s orbit.

We tend to underestimate the 1950s. The decade may look dull and conformist from a distance but was far from it. Robert Menzies confronted an all-too-real communist threat on the waterfront, the Labor Party split irrevocably, and soldiers returning from the horrors of the Second World War brought back a strong drive to create a fairer and more equal society of opportunity. Architecture in Sydney split between followers of Frank Lloyd Wright and those who sought to apply the abstract machine imagery of European Modernism. Wright’s followers here have never been properly acknowledged. Each, in his own way, was remarkable. The historian Jennifer Taylor’s insipid attempt to categorise them as the “Sydney School” is misleading and inadequate. There was no such “Sydney School”, not in the true art history sense. For the most part they were individuals, and such disparate personalities!

What set off and ignited the Frank Lloyd Wright explosion was an event in 1958 for which Bruce Rickard supplied the volatile ingredient—an entire weekend with family and friends and other like-minded architects spent reviewing his hundreds of slides of Wright projects.

Rickard arrived back in Sydney in July 1957. A week later he was interviewed by a Sydney Morning Herald reporter. Given what he had experienced in America, his comments seem timid in comparison to what Robin Boyd would write three years later in The Australian Ugliness, but his observations, though less scathing, do in some way anticipate George Johnson and Boyd on suburbia:

Most Australian houses have those awful little gardens—and half the time you can’t see the flowers because of the front fence … If only people would forget about fences—side ones and front ones—and think in terms of “our street”. You look down a street and see an unbroken stretch of grass all the way along, and the same from the road up to the front door.

Little has changed since in Australian suburbia despite the urgings of Rickard and others.

Rickard was instrumental in founding the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects, which assisted in professionalising and differentiating it from the earlier notion of the landscape gardener. A landscape architect, according to Rickard, was someone who designed open spaces—such as a university campus, a new suburb, or—from time to time—an individual house and its garden.

Those involved were interested in joining landscape and architecture, bringing them together in built form and landscape, in a way that no longer saw our native landscapes and ecology through an English lens. The transition involved much more than casting a stylistic net over architecture but, in a mirroring of Frank Lloyd Wright, contained tragic echoes at a personal biographical level as well. Wright was a romantic personality writ large, a celebrity figure in his day known across America and celebrated by Ayn Rand in a thinly disguised portrait as the character Howard Roark in her 1947 novel The Fountainhead, which was made into a film two years later starring Gary Cooper. Wright’s style was contagious. Some Australian followers adopted his architectural style along with his eccentric lifestyle.

Peter Muller came closest to Wright. A handsome man, Muller suffered an unlikely tragedy when his wife died when her aircraft collided head-on into an approaching plane over the Mediterranean. Muller’s collaborator, Adrian Snodgrass, would later contribute as an academic and lecturer at the University of Sydney and specialist on Chinese architecture in a profoundly Buddhist-inspired mysticism.

An early follower of Wright, Australia’s “Gothic detective”, John James, much like Victor Hugo’s fictional character Quasimodo, for several years inhabited the upper regions of Chartres Cathedral while he traced the blend of numbers and geometry used by its master stonemasons to design and cut its stones. On his retirement from architecture, James founded “The Crucible”, a self-help community west of the Blue Mountains not unlike, in certain respects, Wright’s “Fellowship” apprentices at Taliesin.

Ian McKay was another Wright admirer who worked with Philip Cox on the C.B. Alexander Presbyterian Agricultural College at Paterson in the upper Hunter in 1964. He left a successful commercial career to focus on craft houses in an essentially Wrightian idiom for the comedian Paul Hogan and his manager and sidekick John Cornell, houses set in the hinterland behind Byron Bay. Working directly on an intensive crafted set-piece, McKay created a striking masterpiece reminiscent of Taliesin at Mangrove Mountain, north of Sydney

If anyone could be said to have initiated a Wright-based school of Sydney architecture it was Neville Gruzman. His Wright-inspired houses mixed a range of influences in a wayward self-important idiom. A number of outstanding students worked for Gruzman in an office he shared with Bill Lucas: Glenn Murcutt, John Hamilton Doyle, who introduced and developed the Wright details, Terry Dorrough, Graham Brawn, and later George Guest. Murcutt, like Gruzman, was initially influenced by Wright, before being drawn to a minimalism of tin-and-glass derived from Mies van der Rohe. The overall impact on Sydney was a wave of “Prairie style” houses from Wright’s golden period in Oak Park set among tangles of twisted angophora limbs that hovered above the chaotic sandstone ledges of the North Shore. The 1950s was a period of cultural struggle that has largely gone unrecorded, and heroes such as Rickard have fallen into obscurity.

All had style, the problem being that it wasn’t necessarily theirs. Style is an outward manifestation of a consistent inner mood or temperament, often described under the German philosophical term of zeitgeist, or spirit of the time. The Wright influence in Sydney was less an expression of some convergence of spirit, or common feeling, than it was an attempt to imitate and impose from an external source on local circumstances which had little direct connection, other than the desire by those involved to link architecture with Sydney’s native ecology. It was a halfway measure that moved things a step farther in the right direction. Bruce Rickard stands in the gap, an intermediary caught between an earlier English-inspired colonial tradition, and a true authentic sense and reflection of ourselves—the real thing—that would only emerge later.