Page:Ian Charlton.ogg/2



Reload page to restart the player. Anyway, well, education, this is architectural education (yes) I guess in 1950 I started at the University of Queensland and graduated at the end of 1955. And they were very early days, as you know, and as I say in the write up here that the lecturers at the time were pioneers in true sense of the word because they were establishing a course and developing it and you sometimes hear criticisms of the lecturers but I had great respect for the majority of the lecturers. Professor Cummings and Bruce Lucas, you know they're famous names and the course in those days was in its infancy but it was, you know, on the whole, well it turned out a number of reasonable architects, I'll put it this way.

Do you remember who was in your class? I do indeed, yes. They were the days of small classes, we started off with 8 people in the degree course and after 1 year the number dropped down to 6, would you believe. And the first year was Dan Nutter, John Curro, Ian Charlton, Harry Davis, Fred Lafferty and the two that dropped out who's names I can't remember exactly, they subsequently went into pharmacy and various other things. And the Lecturers that we had through the course which I've listed here were Professor Cummings, Bruce Lucas, Athol Brentnal, John Hitch, Ron Voller, E.J Weller and Dr. Karl Langer and they were the lecturers and they were practising architects with experience and I think you can do a lot worse than that starting off a course. As far as the course was concerned by today's standard I think its field was very broad and the syllabus since then has been honed in to have an architectural bias because in our time we had to virtually do a first year science course with maths A, maths B, chemistry and physics just straight, you know, courses. Now chemistry and physics I'm not saying are not important, but there is a way of putting chemistry through plastics and all those sort of things and the key things in physics as far as an architectural practice is concerned.

So what year did you actually do your first design studio? In the first year of the course (there was a design studio) there was yes.

And you must have just missed out on the move to the St Lucia campus? Were you..? Well most of our time was spent down at George Street and we came out here for the science subjects and now, did we ever go into the tower? I think we must have, but that's interesting that I can't remember, we used to call it the bloody tower I think and that was what it was known as, but down at George street we were in the prism the QUT administration building (on the top floor) on the top floor, yes.