Invention from War: a circumstantial modernism for Australian architecture

Abstract

Between 1942 and 1945, Australian architects and engineers within the Allied Works Council and the US Army Corps of Engineers undertook a vast programme of building works to assist the campaign to drive Japanese forces northward through the Southwest Pacific and avoid invasion.1 Huge distances, lack of time and the need to wage a campaign from the air lay behind US General Douglas Macarthur’s phrase that it would be an ‘engineer’s war’. By necessity, buildings such as airfields, hospitals, camps, warehouses, and other structures had to be light weight, constructed quickly, and inevitably dropped in by air as easily handled pre-cut packages. With the lack of American and European softwoods in the Australasian region, an unlikely local material was pressed into war service – unseasoned or ‘green’ Australian hardwood. It was a material choice that would have profound implications for two reasons. First, in the years of conflict, circumstances dictated the unprecedented innovation and experiment in light-weight timber structures. Second, in an echo of Lewis Mumford’s poignant maxim that ‘war is the health of the machine’2, the systematisation and ruthless economy inherent in wartime timber buildings would influence the development and practice of a particular form of modern architecture in Australia in the late 1940s and the 1950s.