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Abstract

This paper positions the Salvation Army Reform Centre for Girls in Toowong (completed 1962), also known at the time as Kalimna Vocational Centre for Delinquent Girls, in the modern history of the architecture of southeast Queensland. Placing the frame of the building’s response to Brisbane’s subtropicality into conversation with other, intersecting, histories, the paper reflects on the relationship between an (architectural) history of intentions and an (institutional) history of their compromise. Designed by Robin Spencer for the Brisbane architectural firm E.P. & A.I. Trewern, Kalimna operated as a detention centre and correctional facility for young women who were committed to the institution’s care by the court. Its new buildings attended to the Salvation Army’s own wish to modernise the centre, privileging permeability and a conditional freedom and securing the expression of these values in its architecture. Following its closure as a reform centre in 1977, the institution has, though, drawn attention for its mistreatment of its wards, and the architectural history of this site has become entangled with inquiry into the history of institutional child abuse that has given rise to a number of State and Commonwealth led efforts to right a systematically maintained wrong. This paper explores the undercurrents of the building’s subtropicality and of the benign intentions of design for climate in this institutional setting.