COLIN MADIGAN REMEMBERS ERIC PARKER

THE GUEST SPEAKER’S PRESENTATION AT THE INAUGURAL ERIC PARKER MEMORIAL DINNER

THE UNIVERSITY STAFF CLUB, CALLAGHAN CAMPUS
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE
11 AUGUST 2001

Introduction of the Guest Speaker

Col Madigan was born in Glen Innes on 22 July 1921 and turned 80 last month. He is the son of a practising architect and worked with his father in Glen Innes from the age of 14 doing perspective renderings of the office projects.

He enrolled in Architecture at East Sydney Technical College in 1937 under the tutorage of Miles Dunphy and Harry Foskett. Entering the Navy in 1939, he saw action in the Pacific and was sunk after being bombed by the Japanese. As a result, he spent 9 days in the water before being rescued under quite extraordinary conditions.

His ordeals in the Navy are currently included in a travelling exhibition entitled “Armidale 42: A Survivors Account: Memory and Imagination”.
It was at that time that his association with Eric Parker began a life long friendship.

In 1948, 2 years before he completed his architecture studies, he formed a partnership with Maurice Edwards and Jack Torzillo, an unusual move for a student at any time.

Col graduated in 1950 and married Ruby in 1951. They celebrated their 50th anniversary earlier this year.

In 1967 and 1970, Col received the Sulman Award and the Blacket Award in 1969.

In 1981, he was awarded the RAIA Gold Medal, the highest professional award to be bestowed on an Australian architect.
His work in Canberra resulted in his being awarded the Canberra Medallion. His buildings there include the High Court Building and the National Gallery of Australia, now the centre of planned and contentious alterations by other architects.

Last year he stole the show when he presented a Mixed Doubles debate with Angelo Candalapas at the RAIA National Convention in Sydney.
The recordings of this event are worthy of close listening.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Col Madigan.

SPEECH BY COL MADIGAN ON THE EVENING OF
SATURDAY 11 AUGUST 2001

INAUGURAL SPEECH FOR THE ERIC PARKER MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP

I am very pleased to be here this evening to talk about Eric Parker in the presence of his wife Ruth and their children Hilary and Nigel, and I’m very honored indeed to be asked to deliver the Eric Parker Memorial address.

Eric was a very impressive human being 6 feet 1.1/2 inches tall, good looking, great style, a sharp enquiring intellect and a formidable talent for being funny, which leaves one in no doubt that he would have left a significant mark not only on this School, but all those who came in contact with him.

My wife Rube and I miss him terribly.

Eric introduced me to the works of George Bernard Shaw and if an introductory paraphrase is required for this talk about the teacher to student relationship, I would use the following quotation from Shaw’s Back to Methuselah.

“Imagination is the beginning of creation
You image what you desire
You will what you imagine
And at last you create what you will”

I think that sums up the design process.

I thought I should tell you how I met Eric and talk about those early days how they influenced our lives and the architecture we have been involved in. I am sure Eric has left a significant mark on this School of Design based on some of the things I will tell you, because I have always believed Architecture reflects life.

We both came through the great depression as kids. At school, the Gallipoli landing scene was always in view. My mother made cakes to sell to various people in the town and we grew our own vegetables in the rich black soil of Inverell. I was born in Glen Innes in 1921, 42 miles east of Inverell.

Nobody had much work in the depression and the unemployed were paid to ringbark all the trees. Those times held the political issues of the uneven distribution of wealth, the first awareness of environmental decay and erosion and the fiscal tyranny that still intrudes into our very existence. Those who thought deeply about the problems were called red raggers. Our parents would talk about them.

Eric was born in Artarmon in 1922, so let me take you back in time because we both started architecture together at Sydney Technical College.

In 1938 Eric was studying physics at Sydney Technical High School as a Leaving Certificate subject. Physics was a necessary entrance subject for Architecture. I came down to Sydney from Inverell … in those days in the overnight steam train from Glen Innes, it was the great age of steam, the big engine that hauled us down the track was a 38 class, it would put a cinder in your eye if you put your head out.
My Dad was an architect in Inverell and I worked in his office from the age of 14. I know about rafters, purlins and collar ties. I coloured plans in the various colours, yellow, green, blue and red. They did not teach Physics at Inverell High. I found a boarding house in Flood St, Bondi … a drafting job in O’Connell Street, City. The Bondi tram past Sydney Technical High near Victoria Barracks in Paddington. So I booked in for night classes to study Physics. Fortunately with a great teacher, he also taught Eric.

This gave Eric and me the necessary qualifications to check in at Harris Street, Ultimo for the 6 year architectural course.

Physics of course goes to the heart of the matter, and Materials, we must understand the nature of materials. John Stewart Collis, a great modern ecologist, puts it like this:

“All we know is that when we contemplate the universal void, the fields of space, the everlasting horizons of unlimited nothingness, certain manifestations, which we call life and matter, appear before our eyes. Given the delicate labours of the physicist it is the privilege of modern men and women to behold the bricks that have been appointed for the foundations of the earth.”

Our space ship home.

So … hardly a day passes when I have not marveled at the masonry of creation and the mystery of design … and that’s our subject. That’s what Eric taught … he was always a deep thinker.

Different sessions … day school for Eric and night shift classes for me. I missed Eric at Paddington but we met for the first time as we signed in for the course. Miles Dunphy signed us in. I remember his slow meticulous hand writing in the ledger. Parker was just under my name; the year was 1939.

Menzies told us we were at war. What did it mean to us? We were at night school, working every weekend on assignments. Eric was working at the Forestry Commission in Harrington St, where he met Ruth. Ruth would come in from Mona Vale each day … start off about 7.00am, go by bus to Narrabeen … tram to Manly and ferry to the quay.

I would often meet Eric about 5.30pm walking down Harris Street from Railway Square where we caught the trams … pick up a doughnut with jam in the middle and take in Miles Dunphy’s lecture on the History of Architecture … all of it in Banister Fletcher’s wonderful book … pre-historic monoliths to Gothic cathedrals. The modern movement had only just started kicked off by the Russian revolution in 1917. Four years before we were born.

The flat roof era, inspired by the Bauhaus endeavors to solve the worker’s housing problem after the total devastation in Europe in World War 1 would have to wait for Harry Seidler to bring it to Sydney in 1950. First year at Tech was about the Greek and Roman orders. We drew these up while the fascists in Europe organized their war machine.

While we were five to six weeks away by ship from England, in those days we called it home, the atmosphere in Australia grew dark and grim as the war on the Russian front unfolded. The Pacific Region came sharply into focus for the first time. The whole nation went onto a war footing.

We both joined the Navy in 1941.
In December of that year Darwin was bombed. I have always thought the war years were a great step for our nation’s independence, the inevitable march to a republic.

Eric took some shore leave in 1943 to marry Ruth.

We met only once during the war at Milne Bay when our ships fortuitously anchored close to each other.

In 1945 the atomic age burst on our lives with the devastation and horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Ben Chifley had legislation ready to nationalize the banks.

In an effort to see Eric I took my chances with the sharks and leapt overboard, reached his ship only to find him in the poop deck peeling potatoes.

So our generation came out of a hard war into a virgin green field of architecture. Night school for the next 4 years. In the first few weeks of study after the war we were all in uniform, fighter pilots, commandos, and Navy personnel. Eric Daniels, who later went to Newcastle with Eric, was a young midshipman. By contrast there was a sort of architectural innocence abroad. For inspiration, the pre-war architectural year books of old Sydney Technical College students were in vogue. Syd Anchor’s work was there.
Art deco and Greek revival were still there and the modern movement masters were just emerging from the mist of war memories. Most had gone to America, to Harvard and M.I.T. certainly no professional clients were about, as they are now. Quantity surveying was an option and the structural engineers were in the same state as the architects – starting afresh.

Some young mechanical engineers were in Canada and the USA learning about air conditioning, They would return shortly and set up their infernal machines to take one third of the building contract. Meanwhile we made the windows work to open before the mechanical engineers established themselves as a force to be considered.

What interests me is the change in values since that time.

For a while we were the master builder, an exalted position. The old foreman would provide slippers to wear for the final inspection. The quality we produced in the early years was unquestioned.

But today the disinherited sons and daughters of architecture chair the value management meetings reviewing design. They are also construction managers, contract managers, the real estate tenant manager, etc. etc. and they all dictate terms for the architect to follow. We’re lucky if we are allowed to develop the detail. We know that God is in the detail, as Mies Van Der Rohe informs us.

All this happening because the economic man, the economic rationalist says we cannot afford the luxury of not acting economically. Profit must rule and this attitude denies the very real luxuries, like visual health, beauty and permanence which man as a consumer desires more than anything else. It would cost too much. What a contradiction; it seems the richer we become, the less we can afford these qualities. But Eric would have know about this.
It is challenging to recall the historical development of the position I find myself in, which has evolved since my Navy experience where I contemplated the stupid and ludicrous position of survival in war. I read “The adventures of the Black Girl” in her search for God by George Bernard Shaw shortly after a sea battle ordeal. This helped to dissipate an old fashioned belief in a God of Wrath. I was converted to creative evolution by Bernard Shaw. Some years later at Sydney Technical College, Eric gave me “Man and Superman” to read. The theory helped me understand the creative design process. Shaw put creative evolution forward as a necessary faith, co-existing with the necessary economic basis of socialism for the 20th Century.

His faith in creative evolution propping up his thesis of economic equality and filling the capricious political legislative void.

In the way Shaw puts it, creative evolution is not a rationalist philosophy but rather a plausible scientific religion, relying on instinct and will, with emotion and thought working together. This arrangement suits the sentiments of the artistic design process. Shaw conceived the will as a creative energy as did the biologist Lamarck.

How is awareness of spirit communicated to students? Eric was a great teacher and I’m sure he would have told you about Shaw. We were both steeped in it.

Shaw coined the phrase the ‘Outsider”
Colin Wilson has taken up Shaw’s outsider theory in his contemporary work. His pursuit of “Faculty X” and the phenomenon of imagination; Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology; Chardin’s omega point; Maslow’s peak experience, all seem to me to be the same as Shaw’s life force, seeking an agent to work through anywhere, including architecture and environmental philosophy to articulate the consciousness of life itself through the efforts of wanting to know. I find in Plato’s ‘Theory of Forms’ the everlasting, unchanging and unobtainable quality references that the creative evolutionary process pursues. We all try and look a little further into the dark.

Abraham Maslow affirms that students have the potential to be great, and he asks that question of them to suppress their feelings of insignificance.
We graduated in 1950. I married Rube. We met in our office. Rube was selling subscriptions to architectural magazines to support a singing career. We kept in touch with the Parkers. What times we had together full of learning and laughter. Eric had a great sense of humour. The original minister for funny walks. We survived many an overseas journey together. Eric would always look up a student or two in Hong Kong or Singapore. The four of us traveled everywhere. Sadly Eric died 7 years ago. We miss him terribly. That funny walk is irreplaceable.

He came first to Newcastle in 1957 with Eric Daniels to start the Department as a branch of NSW University. Head of School for some years. Then University Planner in 1965 and finally in 1974 Professor and Dean of Architecture until his retirement. We went painting together.

I enjoyed attending the review committee to help select the recipient of the first Eric Parker Memorial Prize. In a sense students are always on the frontier. Here you are at the knowledge bank. The currency is critical enquiry.

I thought you should know these things.

You will go out after graduation and fight the good fight, but remember architecture like all subjects, no matter how specialized, is connected to a centre – a design process linked to the very life process itself and its struggle for higher consciousness whilst stumbling on its evolutionary way. The various subjects are linked like rays emanating from a sun.

When we look at the good work let it be known that the reaction is a surge of pure delight, which makes us feel freer and stronger. But in more practical terms this subliminal pleasure builds the optimism and intelligence of our time which in the final analysis for the question of life are the qualities that matter.
There will always be a beyond to conquer.
Life and architecture are interrelated.

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