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Originally opened in 1912, the Leongatha Masonic Hall on the corner of Bruce Street and Masonic Lane has served the local community for one hundred years.

 

The current building of clinker and brown brick is a more recent construction, enveloping the original 1912 hall with a new facade and adding to the lodge in the 1930s. Low slung and minimal in detail, the Leongatha Masonic Hall is typical of architecture of the Streamline Moderne movement. Unlike many Art Deco buildings which focussed on a vertical emphasis, Streamline Moderne buildings often featured horizontal emphasis. This is evident in the wide entranceway to the lodge on Bruce Street. This section, constructed in the 1930s also features a flat roof which is another common feature of Streamline Moderne buildings. The gable on the left hand corner of the Bruce Street facade is in fact the original 1912 lodge with a more modern facade. The Functionalist metal windows installed beneath the gable are accentuated by the addition of ornamental buttresses which are capped with neat stone carvings. The entrance itself is flanked by classically inspired columns with Ionic capitals.

 

Leongatha is a town in the foothills of the Strzelecki Ranges, South Gippsland Shire, Victoria, Australia, located 135 kilometres south-east of Melbourne. The town is the civic, commercial, industrial, religious, educational and sporting centre of the region. The Murray Goulburn Co-operative Co. Limited, is a farmers' co-operative which trades in Australia under the Devondale label, and has a dairy processing plant just north of the town producing milk-based products for Australian and overseas markets. First settlement of the area by Europeans occurred in 1845. The Post Office opened as Koorooman on 1 October 1887 and renamed Leongatha in 1891 when a township was established on the arrival of the railway. The Daffodil Festival is held annually in September. Competitions are held and many daffodil varieties are on display. A garden competition is also held and there are many beautiful examples throughout the provincial town. The South Gippsland Railway runs historical diesel locomotives and railcars between the market and dairy towns of Nyora and Leongatha, passing through Korumburra.

The former Simpson was designed by Joseph Emberton. This architect tried to combine functional qualities with elegance. The final concept, with its emphasis on the horizontal, was inspired by German examples. ------ Image copyrighted.

This building in downtown Lansing, Michigan was completed in 1938. It was home to Knapp's Department Store until 1980. It was an office building from 1983 to 2003. It has been vacant since.

 

The building, listed on the National Register, is expected to be transformed into a mix of residential, office, and retail space. The renovation is expected to start in 2011.

This wonderfully sleek and stylised Art Deco mansion built in the 1930s may be found in the Melbourne suburb of Essendon.

 

The clean uncluttered lines of the mansion are very Streamline Moderne in design. The mansion is made almost entirely of clinker bricks and features a wide circular breakfast room with French doors and floor to ceiling windows with an equally round sun room above. It has very functionalist windows and a rounded portico at the left of the photograph with a balcony above. The mansion is entirely devoid of decoration except for the use of dark feature bricks along the window ledges and a painted concrete panel above the breakfast room full length windows.

 

The whole property is surrounded by its original low brick wall which also features a capping of darker peaked bricks to match those of the window ledges. This same style is mirrored in the edges of the garden beds. The garden itself is quite large and features terraces of lawn edged by large garden beds of creepers, ground covers and perenials such as geraniums. There are some well established trees in the garden which have probably been there since the house was first built in the 1930s.

 

Essendon was etablished in the 1860s and became an area of affluence and therefore only had middle-class, upper middle-class and some very wealthy citizens. The modernity of this mansion, which is so different to that of its Queen Anne and Arts and Crafts style neighbours was built by either an architecturally inspired family or the parvenu who may have built this new mansion in place of an older house. A mansion like this built in the finest pocket of Essendon suggests that it was built for an aspiring upper class family of some means. Even in the 1930s world of labour saving devices and minimalism, this mansion would have required a small retinue of servants to maintain.

 

Set well back from the road on a large corner block, this wonderfully sleek and stylised sprawling Art Deco villa may be found near to Lake Wendouree in the provincial Victorian city of Ballarat.

 

The clean uncluttered lines of the villa are very Streamline Moderne in design. The villa is made almost entirely of clinker brick, with the exception of some brown feature brick banding along the upper section of the gable, in a geometric pattern under the eave and above the windows. The villa's windows are made of cast iron, and are large and Functionalist Moderne in design. The villa features a wide circular porch with concrete pillars and very tall chimneys, both signature design elements of Ballarat’s most renowned architect of the 1930s, Herbert Leslie Coburn (1891 – 1956). Streamline Moderne was known in Australia as Modern Ship Style during the 1930s. This nickname was used because the buildings designed in this style often looked very much like the cascading upper superstructures of ocean liners with their towering decks, railings and porthole windows. The whole property is surrounded by its original clinker brick wall with brown and red feature brick decorated newel posts.

 

Ballarat born Herbert Leslie Coburn grew up to be a renowned Ballarat architect, practicing from 1905 to 1956. He taught Architecture and Building Construction at the Ballarat School of Mines from 1922, resigning in 1948 due to ill health. The Royal Victorian Institute of Architects awarded Herbert Coburn a Silver Medal for the designs of an Anglican Gothic Suburban Church in 1913 while he was still a student of the institute. In 1917 Herbert became associated with Percy Richards, and they formed a partnership in 1918, Richards, Coburn, Richards, which lasted until 1933, when they separated owing to artistic differences. Whilst Percy Richards wished to retain a more traditional style in keeping with the popular conservative tastes of their clients, Herbert Coburn wanted to be at the vanguard of architectural design and was very interested in following the sleeker and stylised designs of the Streamline Moderne movement which was coming out of Europe. Herbert Coburn therefore started his own architectural practice. Coburn studied for formal qualifications by correspondence with the International Correspondence School, obtaining an architectural diploma two years later. His rooms were in the Clyde Chambers at 313 Sturt St, Ballarat. He was a Fellow of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects. Some of Herbert Coburn's architectural achievements include: St Patrick's Primary School in Drummond Street Ballarat (1935), the Shire of Wimmera Council Offices in Firebrace Street Horsham (1936), Paterson's Furniture Store in Horsham (circa 1936), the Railway Hotel in Maryborough (1938) and the clock tower of the Stawell Town Hall (1939). In addition to these, there are many beautiful, well designed and executed modernist Art Deco villas around Ballarat that bear his distinct architectural style.

 

The community minded Herbert Coburn was elected a Councillor with the City of Ballarat in 1938, and Mayor in 1945. Herbert’s motivation was the 'proper development and advancement of his city.' He held the position of Councillor until 1952.

 

The Cardoza Hotel, at 1300 Ocean Drive, was designed by enry Hohauser and opened in 1939. Affectionately known as the "Jewel of South Beach", the Cardozo marks birth of the Art Deco Era as it was the first of its kind to be renovated. Owned by Grammy Award-winning entertainer Gloria Estefan, and her husband, producer Emilio Estefan, Jr., this 43-room landmark, located just a few steps from the ocean, is renowned for its celebrity-watching opportunities.

 

The Cardoza Hotel is curvilinear with wrap-around windows and continuous eyebrows. Although there is a strong sense of horizontality, accented by the bands of eyebrows and modified string courses, both the side and front facades have emphatic central bays as well. The central bay of each has a slight pediment with flanking decorative metal discs. The fenestration is not symmetrical on this facade. The left side has two small windows rather than the grouping of four long windows on the right.

 

The Miami Beach Architectural District, also known as Old Miami Beach Historic District, or the more common, Miami Beach Art Deco District, is roughly bounded by the Atlantic Ocean, Alton Road and Collins Canal/Dade Boulevard and 5th Street. With 960 vibrantly colored historic buildings, it contains the largest concentration of 1920s and 1930s resort architecture in the United States.

 

Miami Beach Architectural District #79000667 (1979)

Uptown Theater - 1350 Third Street, Napa, CA 94559

Built: 1935/1936 Style: Streamline Moderne Architect: Alexander Aimwell Cantin

Napa Valley Journal (8/12/37): “The last word in ultra-modern theater construction” The opening production was “Ever Since Eve” starring Marion Davies and Robert Montgomery plus featurettes. The original theater seated 1400 patrons. According to the article the original staff of 15 was carefully selected from among the large group of applicants. The resident manager was Tom Malloy Junior, and his assistant was Norman Wyatt. They were described as “two fine showman”. Six usherettes were joined by cashiers and doormen for front-of-house support. Francis Gerth was head doorman, and his assistant was young Ray Nasuti. Two cameramen and an electrician manned the projection booth. The theater was built in 1935-36 and was under the ownership of the Napa Realty Company until it was purchased by the Blumenfeld Theater Group in 1965. It was transferred to the Toechini family in 1990 where it resided until George Altamura purchased it in December 1998.

Anchor Bar

Grand Rapids - Michigan

View On Black

Although not famous for its Art Deco architecture, the provincial Victorian city of Ballarat, which was established between the 1860s and 1880s when the area was at the centre of a gold rush, does have some fine examples of interwar and post war architecture when the gold boom was replaced with wealth generated through grazing and agriculture.

 

The former Ballarat Girls School, now part of Ballarat Secondary College, is a beautiful example of post war Art Deco architecture. Although built between 1954 and 1955, the school's main building of honey yellow clinker bricks is very Art Deco in its design. It features an emphatic vertical fin and a stepped facade and roofline. Minimalist in its decoration, it has Functionalist Steamline Moderne windows. Even its round porch lamp, is very modern in design. All these features give the building a very elegant and striking appearance in comparison to the 1860s architecture surrounding it.

The former State Government offices building in Ballarat's Camp Street was designed by Chief Government Architect Percy Everett (1888 - 1967) and opened in 1941 to house the local state government offices and courthouse. A commemorative plaque announcing that building was opened by the then Premier of Victoria, the Honourable A. A. Dunstan M. L.A. appears to the right of the main entranceway. Created of clinker brick and concrete in Art Deco style, it is remarkably similar in design to the Russell Street Police Station in Melbourne (also designed by Percy Everett), and a good example of the era. It features Functionalist Moderne windows and doors, hexagonal Art Deco lamps and very stripped back detailing. The main entranceway is crowned by Dieu et Mon Droit emblem on the King George VI which is painted and gilt.

 

It's curious that this beautiful building sits in Camp Street given its contrasting architectural style to the otherwise Victorian-influenced street. The building faces Sturt Street rather than Camp Street, and has been beautifully maintained.

 

The State Government Offices are now located in Mair Street, and the city's court house has moved to the corner of Albert and Dana Streets. This building is now part of the University of Ballarat's Arts Academy.

 

Percy Everett is also known for having designed Heatherton hospital (1945), the Fairfield Golf Clubhouse (1934),

Essendon Technical School (1939), the State Accident Insurance Office in Melbourne (1941), the William Angliss Food Trades in Melbourne(1941), the Russel Street Police Headquarters in Melbourne (1942–1943), F.G.Scholes Block (Wards) Fa Hospital in Fairfield(1949) and the RMIT Building 5&9 in Melbourne(1938).

 

These divine Art Deco bijou flats that overlook Royal Park are locatd along The Avenue in the Melbourne suburb of Parkville. Very Streamline Moderne in style, they have rectangular Functionalist style metal window frames and a simple geometric pattern above the upper flat. The Deco design in the wrought-iron balconies is picked out in a deep red which compliments the white stucco work.

 

The whole angular building is softened by a jacaranda tree, some vermilion roses and a lush green creeper

Land of the Sun Theatre (1949)

Designed by renowned Edinburgh based architect John Begg in the Streamline Moderne style in 1935. He done work as far afield as India and South Africa. This was his last design before his death in 1937. Built as a car showroom.

This neat Art Deco cottage villa with wonderful red brick detailing may be found in the South Gippsland town of Leongatha.

 

Sitting neatly amid its pretty cottage garden, the cottage is quite small, but its detailing makes up for what it lacks in size with stylishness. The use of Fibro cement sheets to build the cottage suggests it was built in the late 1930s. Other giveaway signs are the neat cottage style windows which are typical of the "Metroland" suburban style which was common throughout Britain and her dominions in the interwar years. It is the brickwork on this cottage and its stained glass nook windows that are perhaps its most charming features. The rounded Streamline Moderne enclosed vestibule of red brick with simple banding, the matching red brick stepped chimney and the geometric Art Deco designed stained glass nook windows to either side of the fireplace are all typical of the uncluttered lines of Australian Art Deco architecture in the late 30s, just before the Second World War. Unlike its neighbours, which are Victorian and and Edwardian, it is very stark in detail and stands out amongst the crowd. As most houses in Leongatha were built and well established by this time, this Art Deco villa is somewhat of a rarity in the town.

 

Leongatha is a town in the foothills of the Strzelecki Ranges, South Gippsland Shire, Victoria, Australia, located 135 kilometres south-east of Melbourne. The town is the civic, commercial, industrial, religious, educational and sporting centre of the region. The Murray Goulburn Co-operative Co. Limited, is a farmers' co-operative which trades in Australia under the Devondale label, and has a dairy processing plant just north of the town producing milk-based products for Australian and overseas markets. First settlement of the area by Europeans occurred in 1845. The Post Office opened as Koorooman on 1 October 1887 and renamed Leongatha in 1891 when a township was established on the arrival of the railway. The Daffodil Festival is held annually in September. Competitions are held and many daffodil varieties are on display. A garden competition is also held and there are many beautiful examples throughout the provincial town. The South Gippsland Railway runs historical diesel locomotives and railcars between the market and dairy towns of Nyora and Leongatha, passing through Korumburra.

 

Originally called the “Music Museum and Grainger Museum”, the “Grainger Museum” is a small Streamline Moderne Art Deco building, built between 1935 and 1939, a repository of items documenting the life, career and music of the well known Australian composer, folklorist and pianist, Percy Grainger (1882 – 1961).

 

Built on one of Melbourne’s grand tree lined boulevards, Royal Parade in Parkville, the autobiographical museum was constructed in two stages between 1935 and 1939, on land provided for the purpose by the University of Melbourne. The Grainger Museum was designed by the staff architect of Melbourne University, John Stevens Gawler (1885 – 1978) through his architectural firm Gawler and Drummond. The building, built of brown clinker bricks is typical of Streamline Moderne design in Australia in the late 1930s, yet it also has undertones of the Arts and Crafts movement. It has very little detailing on the outside, with a severe arched entranceway, two windows featuring Art Deco grillework, a few decorative panels of brickwork (quite typical of John Gawler’s work) and the remaining windows consisting of glass bricks. The name of the museum appears above the main entranceway in stark Art Deco lettering made of cast iron which have been painted black. The museum is circular and features a small central courtyard accessed by two sets of French doors. The courtyard facades are detailed with decorative brickwork.

 

The Grainger Museum received input from Mr. Grainger in its design as well as its purpose, as well as funding provided by the composer. Mr. Grainger had contemplated establishing an autobiographical museum in the early 1920s, following the sudden suicide of his mother Rose, to whom he was very devoted. The museum contains large quantity of material from Mr. Grainger’s life, including art and furnishings from his home, musical instruments that he used, compositions, recordings, reformist clothing, published scores, field recordings, photographs, books and personal items belonging not only to Mr. Grainger, but also his mother. It also contains a curio case of whips that Mr. Grainger used in sadomasochist sexual acts which were in a trunk given to the museum with strict instructions that it was not to be opened until ten year after his death. The trunk also contained photographs of the composer after sessions of self flagellation. The museum also contains large amounts of material concerning some of his musical contemporaries, many of whom have fallen into obscurity. The Grainger Museum was officially opened in December 1938, and was staffed and maintained by Mr. Grainger throughout his life.

 

Sadly, the Grainger Museum suffered some initial setbacks with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, when the building was used for storage for the duration, rather than its original purpose. The museum’s designs were also problematic, as the building was prone to leaks and required extensive waterproofing. The majority of objects were not put on public display until the 1950s when Mr. Grainger visited Australia with the intention of finishing his autobiographical project; something he failed to do as he set sail for his New York home with the task still incomplete. During the 1960s the Grainger Museum was opened to the public regularly for the first time and was sometimes used for concerts and musical workshops for jazz and other avant-garde music, which would have pleased Mr. Grainger, who sadly had died some five years before this eventuality. The Grainger Museum quietly closed its doors in 2003 for extensive renovation, restoration and conservation work. It reopened seven years later 2010, and has been open selectively ever since, showcasing Mr. Grainger’s life and works in a smart, well set out and discreet fashion.

 

Percy Aldridge Grainger was born in Brighton, Melbourne. He showed precocious talent in music, and at the age of 13 he left Australia to further his ability by attending the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1901 he moved to London, where with the assistance of his mother, he established himself as a successful society pianist, and developed a career as a concert performer and composer. During his time in London, he also collected original folk melodies and helped revive interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th Century. Mr. Grainger left England in 1914, and moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life, residing in White Haven, a suburb of New York with his mother, Rose, who was always his greatest supporter and exponent. Mr. Grainger took up American citizenship in 1918. After his mother committed suicide in 1922, he involved himself more with educational work, and created his own experimental and unusual musical compositions. He particularly enjoyed musical experiments with fantastic music machines that he imagined, and perhaps hoped, would supersede human interpretation one day. During this time, he also made adaptations of other composers' musical works. In 1926, while returning to America from a tour, he met Ella Ström, a Swedish-born artist, whom he married before an enraptured audience at one of his concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in 1928. Mr. Grainger already had a great interest in Nordic music, but his wife’s lineage only served to drive his passion for such music even more. As he grew older he continued to give concerts. He also revised and rearranged compositions of his own, preferring this to writing new music, of which he produced little. After the Second World War, he suffered ill health which reduced his productivity and activity in his passions, and he considered his career to be a failure. He gave his final concert in 1960, less than a year before his death. The piece of music with which Percy Grainger is most generally remembered is his pretty piano arrangement of the folk-dance tune “Country Gardens”.

 

The architectural firm of Gawler and Drummond was a prolific, though rather undistinguished firm that designed a range of domestic, industrial, commercial and church buildings. These include the McRorie house in Camberwell in 1916, the Fitzroy department store Ackmans Ltd in 1918, the Loch Church of England in 1926, the Korumburra Church of England in 1927, the Deaf and Dumb Society's church at Jolimont in 1929 and the Nyora Church of England in 1930. The Percy Grainger Museum is perhaps Gawler and Drummond’s most distinguished work.

 

The Grainger Museum was open as part of the 2014 Open House Melbourne Weekend.

Although all the rooms of the Rone - Empire installation exhibition are amazing for many different reasons, there are two major standouts. The Dining Room is one. As a well proportioned and elegant space, it runs over half of the original Burnham Beeches floor plan. It features two long tables covered in a Miss Havisham like feast of a trove of found dinner table objects from silverware and glassware to empty oyster shells and vases of grasses and feathers.

 

The Dining Room installation I personally found especially confronting. In 1982, I visited Burnham Beeches when it was a smart and select hotel and had Devonshire tea in the dining room at a table alongside the full length windows overlooking the terraces below. I was shocked to see a room I remember appointed with thick carpets and tables covered in gleaming silver and white napery, strewn with dust and leaves, and adorned with Miss Havisham's feast of found dining objects.

 

Melbourne based street artist Rone (Tyrone Wright) used the decaying glory of the 1933 Harry Norris designed Streamline Moderne mansion, Burnham Beeches in the Dandenong Ranges' Sherbrooke, between March the 6th and April 22nd to create an immersive hybrid art space for his latest installation exhibition; "Empire".

 

"Empire" combined a mixture of many different elements including art, sound, light, scent, found objects, botanic designs, objects from nature and music especially composed for the project by Nick Batterham. The Burnham Beeches project re-imagines and re-interprets the spirit of one of Victoria’s landmark mansions, seldom seen by the public and not accessed since the mid 1980s. According to Rone - Empire website; "viewers are invited to consider what remains - the unseen cultural, social, artistic and spiritual heritage which produces intangible meaning."

 

Rone was invited by the current owner of Burnham Beeches, restaurateur Shannon Bennett, to exhibit "Empire" during a six week interim period before renovations commence to convert the heritage listed mansion into a select six star hotel.

 

Rone initially imagined the mansion to be in a state of dereliction, but found instead that it was a stripped back blank canvas for him to create his own version of how he thought it should look. Therefore, almost all the decay is in fact of Rone's creation from grasses in the Games Room which 'grow' next to a rotting billiards table, to the damp patches, water staining and smoke damage on the ceilings. Nests of leaves fill some spaces, whilst tree branches and in one case an entire avenue of boughs sprout from walls and ceilings. Especially designed Art Deco wallpaper created in Rone's studio has been installed on the walls before being distressed and damaged. The rooms have been adorned with furnishings and objects that might once have graced the twelve original rooms of Burnham Beeches: bulbulous club sofas, half round Art Deco tables, tarnished silverware and their canteen, mirrored smoke stands of chrome and Bakelite, glass lamps, English dinner services, a glass drinks trolley, photos of people long forgotten in time, walnut veneer dressing tables reflecting the installation sometimes in triplicate, old wire beadsteads, luggage, shelves of books, an Underwood typewriter, a John Broadwood and Sons of London grand piano and even a Kriesler radiogramme. All these objects were then covered in a thick sheet or light sprinkling of 'dust' made of many different things including coffee grinds and talcum powder, creating a sensation for the senses. Burnham Beeches resonated with a ghostly sense of its former grandeur, with a whiff of bittersweet romance.

 

Throughout the twelve rooms, magnificent and beautifully haunting floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall portraits of Australian actress Lily Sullivan, star of the Foxtel re-make of Picnic at Hanging Rock, appear. Larger than life, each portrait is created in different colours, helping to create seasonal shifts as you move from room to room.

 

Although all the rooms are amazing for many different reasons, there are two major standouts. The Dining Room is one. The Study is the other. It features walls of books covered with a portrait of Lily Sullivan, and the entire room is partially submerged in a lake of black water with the occasional red oak leaf floating across its glassy surface.

 

I feel very honoured and privileged to be amongst the far too few people fortunate enough to have seen Rone's "Empire", as like the seasons, it is ephemeral, and it will already have been dismantled. Rone's idea is that, like his street art, things he creates don't last forever, and that made the project exciting. I hope that my photographs do justice to, and adequately share as much as is possible of this amazing installation with you.

 

Although not famous for its Art Deco architecture, the provincial Victorian city of Ballarat, which was established between the 1860s and 1880s when the area was at the centre of a gold rush, does have some fine examples of interwar and post war architecture when the gold boom was replaced with wealth generated through grazing and agriculture.

 

The former Ballarat Girls School, now part of Ballarat Secondary College, is a beautiful example of post war Art Deco architecture. Although built between 1954 and 1955, the school's main building of honey yellow clinker bricks is very Art Deco in its design. It features an emphatic vertical fin and a stepped facade and roofline. Minimalist in its decoration, it has Functionalist Steamline Moderne windows. Even its round porch lamp, is very modern in design. All these features give the building a very elegant and striking appearance in comparison to the 1860s architecture surrounding it.

Hamilton GO Centre, built in 1933, is "the only example of Art Deco railway station architecture in Canada". this is the main concourse.

The current Bair’s Otago Hotel located at 18 – 22 Bair Street Leongatha, dates from 1939 and replaced the original hotel which has timber verandahs and cast iron lacework. The 1939 Bair’s Otago Hotel was designed by architect Trevor C. McCullough for Arthur C. Bair, whose father, Robert Bair, had purchased the site at the second sale of Leongatha township allotments held on 18 June, 1889. The first building on this site, known as Bair’s Coffee House, was constructed in 1890 and was subsequently renamed the ‘Otago’ upon the grant of a full hotel licence in March 1891. Due to the lack of any suitable public buildings at that time, the first hotel was to be the venue for Woorayl Council meetings until the new Shire Offices were opened in November 1891. The association of the Council with the Hotel continued for over 90 years, as Council adjourned to the Bair’s Otago Hotel on each meeting day for their midday lunch. This practice was finally discontinued in 1985.

 

Bair’s Otago Hotel is a two storey manganese brick and render corner hotel built in an amalgam of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne architectural styles. It displays typically strong vertical Art Deco elements in the façade, and horizontal canopies with rounded corners, which are more typical of the Streamline Moderne movement. The hotel features vertical counterpoints of flag pole, rain heads and downpipes and an end bay with a central pier of full height brick. The cantilevered street canopy expresses the corner with a semi-circular end below a band of face brickwork containing the upper windows and a recessed upper verandah with a projecting balustrade and canopy. The corner of Bair’s Otago Hotel features a splendid rounded glass brick infill to the upper floor, horizontal step and groove mouldings to the stepped parapet and the sign on the parapet in typical Art Deco lettering. Sadly, the original acid-etched glass windows of the hotel with a koala motif and the name of the hotel were removed during the post war years and have since been lost.

 

Historically, Bair’s Otago Hotel demonstrates the development of the hotel industry in the Shire through the interwar period. Whilst many earlier hotels were adapted to Art Deco or Streamline Moderne style in this period of change in the hotel trade, the Otago was completely rebuilt in a much more comprehensive expression of an amalgam of the two styles. It is a notable part of the historic interwar character of Bair Street.

 

Trevor C. McCullough was a Melbourne based architect and builder who designed and constructed a number of commercial buildings in the Shire during the interwar and immediate postwar period including Bair's Otago Hotel (1939), Elizabeth House (1940) and extensions to the Mirboo North Butter Factory (1949).

 

Leongatha is a town in the foothills of the Strzelecki Ranges, South Gippsland Shire, Victoria, Australia, located 135 kilometres south-east of Melbourne. The town is the civic, commercial, industrial, religious, educational and sporting centre of the region. The Murray Goulburn Co-operative Co. Limited, is a farmers' co-operative which trades in Australia under the Devondale label, and has a dairy processing plant just north of the town producing milk-based products for Australian and overseas markets. First settlement of the area by Europeans occurred in 1845. The Post Office opened as Koorooman on 1 October 1887 and renamed Leongatha in 1891 when a township was established on the arrival of the railway. The Daffodil Festival is held annually in September. Competitions are held and many daffodil varieties are on display. A garden competition is also held and there are many beautiful examples throughout the provincial town. The South Gippsland Railway runs historical diesel locomotives and railcars between the market and dairy towns of Nyora and Leongatha, passing through Korumburra.

Greenwood's former Greyhound bus station differs from most of the company's other moderne stations in both its small size and more minimalistic design lacking the heavy dose of light blue. The building was added to the National Register sometime in the past year.

Originally called the “Music Museum and Grainger Museum”, the “Grainger Museum” is a small Streamline Moderne Art Deco building, built between 1935 and 1939, a repository of items documenting the life, career and music of the well known Australian composer, folklorist and pianist, Percy Grainger (1882 – 1961).

 

Built on one of Melbourne’s grand tree lined boulevards, Royal Parade in Parkville, the autobiographical museum was constructed in two stages between 1935 and 1939, on land provided for the purpose by the University of Melbourne. The Grainger Museum was designed by the staff architect of Melbourne University, John Stevens Gawler (1885 – 1978) through his architectural firm Gawler and Drummond. The building, built of brown clinker bricks is typical of Streamline Moderne design in Australia in the late 1930s, yet it also has undertones of the Arts and Crafts movement. It has very little detailing on the outside, with a severe arched entranceway, two windows featuring Art Deco grillework, a few decorative panels of brickwork (quite typical of John Gawler’s work) and the remaining windows consisting of glass bricks. The name of the museum appears above the main entranceway in stark Art Deco lettering made of cast iron which have been painted black. The museum is circular and features a small central courtyard accessed by two sets of French doors. The courtyard facades are detailed with decorative brickwork.

 

The Grainger Museum received input from Mr. Grainger in its design as well as its purpose, as well as funding provided by the composer. Mr. Grainger had contemplated establishing an autobiographical museum in the early 1920s, following the sudden suicide of his mother Rose, to whom he was very devoted. The museum contains large quantity of material from Mr. Grainger’s life, including art and furnishings from his home, musical instruments that he used, compositions, recordings, reformist clothing, published scores, field recordings, photographs, books and personal items belonging not only to Mr. Grainger, but also his mother. It also contains a curio case of whips that Mr. Grainger used in sadomasochist sexual acts which were in a trunk given to the museum with strict instructions that it was not to be opened until ten year after his death. The trunk also contained photographs of the composer after sessions of self flagellation. The museum also contains large amounts of material concerning some of his musical contemporaries, many of whom have fallen into obscurity. The Grainger Museum was officially opened in December 1938, and was staffed and maintained by Mr. Grainger throughout his life.

 

Sadly, the Grainger Museum suffered some initial setbacks with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, when the building was used for storage for the duration, rather than its original purpose. The museum’s designs were also problematic, as the building was prone to leaks and required extensive waterproofing. The majority of objects were not put on public display until the 1950s when Mr. Grainger visited Australia with the intention of finishing his autobiographical project; something he failed to do as he set sail for his New York home with the task still incomplete. During the 1960s the Grainger Museum was opened to the public regularly for the first time and was sometimes used for concerts and musical workshops for jazz and other avant-garde music, which would have pleased Mr. Grainger, who sadly had died some five years before this eventuality. The Grainger Museum quietly closed its doors in 2003 for extensive renovation, restoration and conservation work. It reopened seven years later 2010, and has been open selectively ever since, showcasing Mr. Grainger’s life and works in a smart, well set out and discreet fashion.

 

Percy Aldridge Grainger was born in Brighton, Melbourne. He showed precocious talent in music, and at the age of 13 he left Australia to further his ability by attending the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1901 he moved to London, where with the assistance of his mother, he established himself as a successful society pianist, and developed a career as a concert performer and composer. During his time in London, he also collected original folk melodies and helped revive interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th Century. Mr. Grainger left England in 1914, and moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life, residing in White Haven, a suburb of New York with his mother, Rose, who was always his greatest supporter and exponent. Mr. Grainger took up American citizenship in 1918. After his mother committed suicide in 1922, he involved himself more with educational work, and created his own experimental and unusual musical compositions. He particularly enjoyed musical experiments with fantastic music machines that he imagined, and perhaps hoped, would supersede human interpretation one day. During this time, he also made adaptations of other composers' musical works. In 1926, while returning to America from a tour, he met Ella Ström, a Swedish-born artist, whom he married before an enraptured audience at one of his concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in 1928. Mr. Grainger already had a great interest in Nordic music, but his wife’s lineage only served to drive his passion for such music even more. As he grew older he continued to give concerts. He also revised and rearranged compositions of his own, preferring this to writing new music, of which he produced little. After the Second World War, he suffered ill health which reduced his productivity and activity in his passions, and he considered his career to be a failure. He gave his final concert in 1960, less than a year before his death. The piece of music with which Percy Grainger is most generally remembered is his pretty piano arrangement of the folk-dance tune “Country Gardens”.

 

The architectural firm of Gawler and Drummond was a prolific, though rather undistinguished firm that designed a range of domestic, industrial, commercial and church buildings. These include the McRorie house in Camberwell in 1916, the Fitzroy department store Ackmans Ltd in 1918, the Loch Church of England in 1926, the Korumburra Church of England in 1927, the Deaf and Dumb Society's church at Jolimont in 1929 and the Nyora Church of England in 1930. The Percy Grainger Museum is perhaps Gawler and Drummond’s most distinguished work.

 

The Grainger Museum was open as part of the 2014 Open House Melbourne Weekend.

Melbourne based street artist Rone (Tyrone Wright) used the decaying glory of the 1933 Harry Norris designed Streamline Moderne mansion, Burnham Beeches in the Dandenong Ranges' Sherbrooke, between March the 6th and April 22nd to create an immersive hybrid art space for his latest installation exhibition; "Empire".

 

"Empire" combined a mixture of many different elements including art, sound, light, scent, found objects, botanic designs, objects from nature and music especially composed for the project by Nick Batterham. The Burnham Beeches project re-imagines and re-interprets the spirit of one of Victoria’s landmark mansions, seldom seen by the public and not accessed since the mid 1980s. According to Rone - Empire website; "viewers are invited to consider what remains - the unseen cultural, social, artistic and spiritual heritage which produces intangible meaning."

 

Rone was invited by the current owner of Burnham Beeches, restaurateur Shannon Bennett, to exhibit "Empire" during a six week interim period before renovations commence to convert the heritage listed mansion into a select six star hotel.

 

Rone initially imagined the mansion to be in a state of dereliction, but found instead that it was a stripped back blank canvas for him to create his own version of how he thought it should look. Therefore, almost all the decay is in fact of Rone's creation from grasses in the Games Room which 'grow' next to a rotting billiards table, to the damp patches, water staining and smoke damage on the ceilings. Nests of leaves fill some spaces, whilst tree branches and in one case an entire avenue of boughs sprout from walls and ceilings. Especially designed Art Deco wallpaper created in Rone's studio has been installed on the walls before being distressed and damaged. The rooms have been adorned with furnishings and objects that might once have graced the twelve original rooms of Burnham Beeches: bulbulous club sofas, half round Art Deco tables, tarnished silverware and their canteen, mirrored smoke stands of chrome and Bakelite, glass lamps, English dinner services, a glass drinks trolley, photos of people long forgotten in time, walnut veneer dressing tables reflecting the installation sometimes in triplicate, old wire beadsteads, luggage, shelves of books, an Underwood typewriter, a John Broadwood and Sons of London grand piano and even a Kriesler radiogramme. All these objects were then covered in a thick sheet or light sprinkling of 'dust' made of many different things including coffee grinds and talcum powder, creating a sensation for the senses. Burnham Beeches resonated with a ghostly sense of its former grandeur, with a whiff of bittersweet romance.

 

Throughout the twelve rooms, magnificent and beautifully haunting floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall portraits of Australian actress Lily Sullivan, star of the Foxtel re-make of Picnic at Hanging Rock, appear. Larger than life, each portrait is created in different colours, helping to create seasonal shifts as you move from room to room.

 

Although all the rooms are amazing for many different reasons, there are two major standouts. The Study features walls of books covered with a portrait of Lily Sullivan, and the entire room is partially submerged in a lake of black water with the occasional red oak leaf floating across its glassy surface. The Dining Room features two long tables covered in a Miss Havisham like feast of a trove of dinner table objects from silverware and glassware to empty oyster shells and vases of grasses and feathers.

 

The Dining Room installation I found especially confronting. In 1982, I visited Burnham Beeches when it was a smart and select hotel and had Devonshire tea in the dining room at a table alongside the full length windows overlooking the terraces below. I was shocked to see a room I remember appointed with thick carpets and tables covered in gleaming silver and white napery, strewn with dust and leaves, and adorned with Miss Havisham's feast of found dining objects.

 

I feel very honoured and privileged to be amongst the far too few people fortunate enough to have seen Rone's "Empire", as like the seasons, it is ephemeral, and it will already have been dismantled. Rone's idea is that, like his street art, things he creates don't last forever, and that made the project exciting. I hope that my photographs do justice to, and adequately share as much as is possible of this amazing installation with you.

 

The current Bair’s Otago Hotel located at 18 – 22 Bair Street Leongatha, dates from 1939 and replaced the original hotel which has timber verandahs and cast iron lacework. The 1939 Bair’s Otago Hotel was designed by architect Trevor C. McCullough for Arthur C. Bair, whose father, Robert Bair, had purchased the site at the second sale of Leongatha township allotments held on 18 June, 1889. The first building on this site, known as Bair’s Coffee House, was constructed in 1890 and was subsequently renamed the ‘Otago’ upon the grant of a full hotel licence in March 1891. Due to the lack of any suitable public buildings at that time, the first hotel was to be the venue for Woorayl Council meetings until the new Shire Offices were opened in November 1891. The association of the Council with the Hotel continued for over 90 years, as Council adjourned to the Bair’s Otago Hotel on each meeting day for their midday lunch. This practice was finally discontinued in 1985.

 

Bair’s Otago Hotel is a two storey manganese brick and render corner hotel built in an amalgam of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne architectural styles. It displays typically strong vertical Art Deco elements in the façade, and horizontal canopies with rounded corners, which are more typical of the Streamline Moderne movement. The hotel features vertical counterpoints of flag pole, rain heads and downpipes and an end bay with a central pier of full height brick. The cantilevered street canopy expresses the corner with a semi-circular end below a band of face brickwork containing the upper windows and a recessed upper verandah with a projecting balustrade and canopy. The corner of Bair’s Otago Hotel features a splendid rounded glass brick infill to the upper floor, horizontal step and groove mouldings to the stepped parapet and the sign on the parapet in typical Art Deco lettering. Sadly, the original acid-etched glass windows of the hotel with a koala motif and the name of the hotel were removed during the post war years and have since been lost.

 

Historically, Bair’s Otago Hotel demonstrates the development of the hotel industry in the Shire through the interwar period. Whilst many earlier hotels were adapted to Art Deco or Streamline Moderne style in this period of change in the hotel trade, the Otago was completely rebuilt in a much more comprehensive expression of an amalgam of the two styles. It is a notable part of the historic interwar character of Bair Street.

 

Trevor C. McCullough was a Melbourne based architect and builder who designed and constructed a number of commercial buildings in the Shire during the interwar and immediate postwar period including Bair's Otago Hotel (1939), Elizabeth House (1940) and extensions to the Mirboo North Butter Factory (1949).

 

Leongatha is a town in the foothills of the Strzelecki Ranges, South Gippsland Shire, Victoria, Australia, located 135 kilometres south-east of Melbourne. The town is the civic, commercial, industrial, religious, educational and sporting centre of the region. The Murray Goulburn Co-operative Co. Limited, is a farmers' co-operative which trades in Australia under the Devondale label, and has a dairy processing plant just north of the town producing milk-based products for Australian and overseas markets. First settlement of the area by Europeans occurred in 1845. The Post Office opened as Koorooman on 1 October 1887 and renamed Leongatha in 1891 when a township was established on the arrival of the railway. The Daffodil Festival is held annually in September. Competitions are held and many daffodil varieties are on display. A garden competition is also held and there are many beautiful examples throughout the provincial town. The South Gippsland Railway runs historical diesel locomotives and railcars between the market and dairy towns of Nyora and Leongatha, passing through Korumburra.

The Vapor Blast plant, somewhere on the north side of Milwaukee.

The Golden Gate Bridge spans 8,981 feet across the Golden Gate, the opening of the San Francisco Bay onto the Pacific Ocean, connecting San Francisco on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula to Marin County. Designed by engineer Joseph Strauss and architect Irving Morrow, it was the longest suspension bridge span in the world when it opened on May 27, 1937. It has since been surpassed by eight other bridges, but still has the second longest suspension bridge main span in the United States after the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York.

 

Before the bridge was built, the only practical route across the Golden Gate was by boat, which held San Francisco's growth rate below the national average. However, many experts believed that the 6,700-foot strait could not be bridged. It had strong swirling tides, strong winds, and reached depths of 500-feet at its center.

 

In 1916, former engineering student James Wilkins wrote an article with a proposed design for a crossing in the San Francisco Bulletin. The City Engineer estimated the cost at an impractical $100 million and challenged bridge engineers to reduce costs. Joseph Strauss, an ambitious but modestly accomplished engineer, responded with a plan for bookend cantilevers connected by a central suspension segment, which he promised could be built for $17 million. Strauss spent the better part of the next decade drumming up support and construction began on January 5, 1933.

 

As chief engineer in charge, Strauss, with an eye towards self promotion downplayed the contributions of his collaborators who were largely responsible for the bridge's final form Architect Irving Morrow designed the overall shape of the bridge towers, the lighting scheme and Art Deco elements, and used the International Orange color as a sealant. And Charles Alton Ellis, collaborating remotely with Leon Moisseiff, was the principal engineer, producing the basic structural design, introducing Moisseiff's "deflection theory" by which a thin, flexible roadway would flex in the wind, greatly reducing stress by transmitting forces via suspension cables to the bridge towers

 

In 2007, the Golden Gate Bridge was ranked #5 on the AIA 150 America's Favorite Architecture list.

 

California Historical Landmark No. 974, San Francisco Landmark No. 222 (5/21/1999)

The Golden Gate Bridge spans 8,981 feet across the Golden Gate, the opening of the San Francisco Bay onto the Pacific Ocean, connecting San Francisco on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula to Marin County. Designed by engineer Joseph Strauss and architect Irving Morrow, it was the longest suspension bridge span in the world when it opened on May 27, 1937. It has since been surpassed by eight other bridges, but still has the second longest suspension bridge main span in the United States after the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York.

 

Before the bridge was built, the only practical route across the Golden Gate was by boat, which held San Francisco's growth rate below the national average. However, many experts believed that the 6,700-foot strait could not be bridged. It had strong swirling tides, strong winds, and reached depths of 500-feet at its center.

 

In 1916, former engineering student James Wilkins wrote an article with a proposed design for a crossing in the San Francisco Bulletin. The City Engineer estimated the cost at an impractical $100 million and challenged bridge engineers to reduce costs. Joseph Strauss, an ambitious but modestly accomplished engineer, responded with a plan for bookend cantilevers connected by a central suspension segment, which he promised could be built for $17 million. Strauss spent the better part of the next decade drumming up support and construction began on January 5, 1933.

 

As chief engineer in charge, Strauss, with an eye towards self promotion downplayed the contributions of his collaborators who were largely responsible for the bridge's final form Architect Irving Morrow designed the overall shape of the bridge towers, the lighting scheme and Art Deco elements, and used the International Orange color as a sealant. And Charles Alton Ellis, collaborating remotely with Leon Moisseiff, was the principal engineer, producing the basic structural design, introducing Moisseiff's "deflection theory" by which a thin, flexible roadway would flex in the wind, greatly reducing stress by transmitting forces via suspension cables to the bridge towers

 

In 2007, the Golden Gate Bridge was ranked #5 on the AIA 150 America's Favorite Architecture list.

 

California Historical Landmark No. 974, San Francisco Landmark No. 222 (5/21/1999)

One of the busses on the Orange Line, Metro's North Hollywood to Chatsworth route across the San Fernando Valley. The route was once a Southern Pacific branch railroad line. The tracks were removed and the busway was built in its place.

 

Originally called the “Music Museum and Grainger Museum”, the “Grainger Museum” is a small Streamline Moderne Art Deco building, built between 1935 and 1939, a repository of items documenting the life, career and music of the well known Australian composer, folklorist and pianist, Percy Grainger (1882 – 1961).

 

Built on one of Melbourne’s grand tree lined boulevards, Royal Parade in Parkville, the autobiographical museum was constructed in two stages between 1935 and 1939, on land provided for the purpose by the University of Melbourne. The Grainger Museum was designed by the staff architect of Melbourne University, John Stevens Gawler (1885 – 1978) through his architectural firm Gawler and Drummond. The building, built of brown clinker bricks is typical of Streamline Moderne design in Australia in the late 1930s, yet it also has undertones of the Arts and Crafts movement. It has very little detailing on the outside, with a severe arched entranceway, two windows featuring Art Deco grillework, a few decorative panels of brickwork (quite typical of John Gawler’s work) and the remaining windows consisting of glass bricks. The name of the museum appears above the main entranceway in stark Art Deco lettering made of cast iron which have been painted black. The museum is circular and features a small central courtyard accessed by two sets of French doors. The courtyard facades are detailed with decorative brickwork.

 

The Grainger Museum received input from Mr. Grainger in its design as well as its purpose, as well as funding provided by the composer. Mr. Grainger had contemplated establishing an autobiographical museum in the early 1920s, following the sudden suicide of his mother Rose, to whom he was very devoted. The museum contains large quantity of material from Mr. Grainger’s life, including art and furnishings from his home, musical instruments that he used, compositions, recordings, reformist clothing, published scores, field recordings, photographs, books and personal items belonging not only to Mr. Grainger, but also his mother. It also contains a curio case of whips that Mr. Grainger used in sadomasochist sexual acts which were in a trunk given to the museum with strict instructions that it was not to be opened until ten year after his death. The trunk also contained photographs of the composer after sessions of self flagellation. The museum also contains large amounts of material concerning some of his musical contemporaries, many of whom have fallen into obscurity. The Grainger Museum was officially opened in December 1938, and was staffed and maintained by Mr. Grainger throughout his life.

 

Sadly, the Grainger Museum suffered some initial setbacks with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, when the building was used for storage for the duration, rather than its original purpose. The museum’s designs were also problematic, as the building was prone to leaks and required extensive waterproofing. The majority of objects were not put on public display until the 1950s when Mr. Grainger visited Australia with the intention of finishing his autobiographical project; something he failed to do as he set sail for his New York home with the task still incomplete. During the 1960s the Grainger Museum was opened to the public regularly for the first time and was sometimes used for concerts and musical workshops for jazz and other avant-garde music, which would have pleased Mr. Grainger, who sadly had died some five years before this eventuality. The Grainger Museum quietly closed its doors in 2003 for extensive renovation, restoration and conservation work. It reopened seven years later 2010, and has been open selectively ever since, showcasing Mr. Grainger’s life and works in a smart, well set out and discreet fashion.

 

Percy Aldridge Grainger was born in Brighton, Melbourne. He showed precocious talent in music, and at the age of 13 he left Australia to further his ability by attending the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1901 he moved to London, where with the assistance of his mother, he established himself as a successful society pianist, and developed a career as a concert performer and composer. During his time in London, he also collected original folk melodies and helped revive interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th Century. Mr. Grainger left England in 1914, and moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life, residing in White Haven, a suburb of New York with his mother, Rose, who was always his greatest supporter and exponent. Mr. Grainger took up American citizenship in 1918. After his mother committed suicide in 1922, he involved himself more with educational work, and created his own experimental and unusual musical compositions. He particularly enjoyed musical experiments with fantastic music machines that he imagined, and perhaps hoped, would supersede human interpretation one day. During this time, he also made adaptations of other composers' musical works. In 1926, while returning to America from a tour, he met Ella Ström, a Swedish-born artist, whom he married before an enraptured audience at one of his concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in 1928. Mr. Grainger already had a great interest in Nordic music, but his wife’s lineage only served to drive his passion for such music even more. As he grew older he continued to give concerts. He also revised and rearranged compositions of his own, preferring this to writing new music, of which he produced little. After the Second World War, he suffered ill health which reduced his productivity and activity in his passions, and he considered his career to be a failure. He gave his final concert in 1960, less than a year before his death. The piece of music with which Percy Grainger is most generally remembered is his pretty piano arrangement of the folk-dance tune “Country Gardens”.

 

The architectural firm of Gawler and Drummond was a prolific, though rather undistinguished firm that designed a range of domestic, industrial, commercial and church buildings. These include the McRorie house in Camberwell in 1916, the Fitzroy department store Ackmans Ltd in 1918, the Loch Church of England in 1926, the Korumburra Church of England in 1927, the Deaf and Dumb Society's church at Jolimont in 1929 and the Nyora Church of England in 1930. The Percy Grainger Museum is perhaps Gawler and Drummond’s most distinguished work.

 

The Grainger Museum was open as part of the 2014 Open House Melbourne Weekend.

The current Bair’s Otago Hotel located at 18 – 22 Bair Street Leongatha, dates from 1939 and replaced the original hotel which has timber verandahs and cast iron lacework. The 1939 Bair’s Otago Hotel was designed by architect Trevor C. McCullough for Arthur C. Bair, whose father, Robert Bair, had purchased the site at the second sale of Leongatha township allotments held on 18 June, 1889. The first building on this site, known as Bair’s Coffee House, was constructed in 1890 and was subsequently renamed the ‘Otago’ upon the grant of a full hotel licence in March 1891. Due to the lack of any suitable public buildings at that time, the first hotel was to be the venue for Woorayl Council meetings until the new Shire Offices were opened in November 1891. The association of the Council with the Hotel continued for over 90 years, as Council adjourned to the Bair’s Otago Hotel on each meeting day for their midday lunch. This practice was finally discontinued in 1985.

 

Bair’s Otago Hotel is a two storey manganese brick and render corner hotel built in an amalgam of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne architectural styles. It displays typically strong vertical Art Deco elements in the façade, and horizontal canopies with rounded corners, which are more typical of the Streamline Moderne movement. The hotel features vertical counterpoints of flag pole, rain heads and downpipes and an end bay with a central pier of full height brick. The cantilevered street canopy expresses the corner with a semi-circular end below a band of face brickwork containing the upper windows and a recessed upper verandah with a projecting balustrade and canopy. The corner of Bair’s Otago Hotel features a splendid rounded glass brick infill to the upper floor, horizontal step and groove mouldings to the stepped parapet and the sign on the parapet in typical Art Deco lettering. Sadly, the original acid-etched glass windows of the hotel with a koala motif and the name of the hotel were removed during the post war years and have since been lost.

 

Historically, Bair’s Otago Hotel demonstrates the development of the hotel industry in the Shire through the interwar period. Whilst many earlier hotels were adapted to Art Deco or Streamline Moderne style in this period of change in the hotel trade, the Otago was completely rebuilt in a much more comprehensive expression of an amalgam of the two styles. It is a notable part of the historic interwar character of Bair Street.

 

Trevor C. McCullough was a Melbourne based architect and builder who designed and constructed a number of commercial buildings in the Shire during the interwar and immediate postwar period including Bair's Otago Hotel (1939), Elizabeth House (1940) and extensions to the Mirboo North Butter Factory (1949).

 

Leongatha is a town in the foothills of the Strzelecki Ranges, South Gippsland Shire, Victoria, Australia, located 135 kilometres south-east of Melbourne. The town is the civic, commercial, industrial, religious, educational and sporting centre of the region. The Murray Goulburn Co-operative Co. Limited, is a farmers' co-operative which trades in Australia under the Devondale label, and has a dairy processing plant just north of the town producing milk-based products for Australian and overseas markets. First settlement of the area by Europeans occurred in 1845. The Post Office opened as Koorooman on 1 October 1887 and renamed Leongatha in 1891 when a township was established on the arrival of the railway. The Daffodil Festival is held annually in September. Competitions are held and many daffodil varieties are on display. A garden competition is also held and there are many beautiful examples throughout the provincial town. The South Gippsland Railway runs historical diesel locomotives and railcars between the market and dairy towns of Nyora and Leongatha, passing through Korumburra.

The current Bair’s Otago Hotel located at 18 – 22 Bair Street Leongatha, dates from 1939 and replaced the original hotel which has timber verandahs and cast iron lacework. The 1939 Bair’s Otago Hotel was designed by architect Trevor C. McCullough for Arthur C. Bair, whose father, Robert Bair, had purchased the site at the second sale of Leongatha township allotments held on 18 June, 1889. The first building on this site, known as Bair’s Coffee House, was constructed in 1890 and was subsequently renamed the ‘Otago’ upon the grant of a full hotel licence in March 1891. Due to the lack of any suitable public buildings at that time, the first hotel was to be the venue for Woorayl Council meetings until the new Shire Offices were opened in November 1891. The association of the Council with the Hotel continued for over 90 years, as Council adjourned to the Bair’s Otago Hotel on each meeting day for their midday lunch. This practice was finally discontinued in 1985.

 

Bair’s Otago Hotel is a two storey manganese brick and render corner hotel built in an amalgam of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne architectural styles. It displays typically strong vertical Art Deco elements in the façade, and horizontal canopies with rounded corners, which are more typical of the Streamline Moderne movement. The hotel features vertical counterpoints of flag pole, rain heads and downpipes and an end bay with a central pier of full height brick. The cantilevered street canopy expresses the corner with a semi-circular end below a band of face brickwork containing the upper windows and a recessed upper verandah with a projecting balustrade and canopy. The corner of Bair’s Otago Hotel features a splendid rounded glass brick infill to the upper floor, horizontal step and groove mouldings to the stepped parapet and the sign on the parapet in typical Art Deco lettering. Sadly, the original acid-etched glass windows of the hotel with a koala motif and the name of the hotel were removed during the post war years and have since been lost.

 

Historically, Bair’s Otago Hotel demonstrates the development of the hotel industry in the Shire through the interwar period. Whilst many earlier hotels were adapted to Art Deco or Streamline Moderne style in this period of change in the hotel trade, the Otago was completely rebuilt in a much more comprehensive expression of an amalgam of the two styles. It is a notable part of the historic interwar character of Bair Street.

 

Trevor C. McCullough was a Melbourne based architect and builder who designed and constructed a number of commercial buildings in the Shire during the interwar and immediate postwar period including Bair's Otago Hotel (1939), Elizabeth House (1940) and extensions to the Mirboo North Butter Factory (1949).

 

Leongatha is a town in the foothills of the Strzelecki Ranges, South Gippsland Shire, Victoria, Australia, located 135 kilometres south-east of Melbourne. The town is the civic, commercial, industrial, religious, educational and sporting centre of the region. The Murray Goulburn Co-operative Co. Limited, is a farmers' co-operative which trades in Australia under the Devondale label, and has a dairy processing plant just north of the town producing milk-based products for Australian and overseas markets. First settlement of the area by Europeans occurred in 1845. The Post Office opened as Koorooman on 1 October 1887 and renamed Leongatha in 1891 when a township was established on the arrival of the railway. The Daffodil Festival is held annually in September. Competitions are held and many daffodil varieties are on display. A garden competition is also held and there are many beautiful examples throughout the provincial town. The South Gippsland Railway runs historical diesel locomotives and railcars between the market and dairy towns of Nyora and Leongatha, passing through Korumburra.

The current Bair’s Otago Hotel located at 18 – 22 Bair Street Leongatha, dates from 1939 and replaced the original hotel which has timber verandahs and cast iron lacework. The 1939 Bair’s Otago Hotel was designed by architect Trevor C. McCullough for Arthur C. Bair, whose father, Robert Bair, had purchased the site at the second sale of Leongatha township allotments held on 18 June, 1889. The first building on this site, known as Bair’s Coffee House, was constructed in 1890 and was subsequently renamed the ‘Otago’ upon the grant of a full hotel licence in March 1891. Due to the lack of any suitable public buildings at that time, the first hotel was to be the venue for Woorayl Council meetings until the new Shire Offices were opened in November 1891. The association of the Council with the Hotel continued for over 90 years, as Council adjourned to the Bair’s Otago Hotel on each meeting day for their midday lunch. This practice was finally discontinued in 1985.

 

Bair’s Otago Hotel is a two storey manganese brick and render corner hotel built in an amalgam of Art Deco and Streamline Moderne architectural styles. It displays typically strong vertical Art Deco elements in the façade, and horizontal canopies with rounded corners, which are more typical of the Streamline Moderne movement. The hotel features vertical counterpoints of flag pole, rain heads and downpipes and an end bay with a central pier of full height brick. The cantilevered street canopy expresses the corner with a semi-circular end below a band of face brickwork containing the upper windows and a recessed upper verandah with a projecting balustrade and canopy. The corner of Bair’s Otago Hotel features a splendid rounded glass brick infill to the upper floor, horizontal step and groove mouldings to the stepped parapet and the sign on the parapet in typical Art Deco lettering. Sadly, the original acid-etched glass windows of the hotel with a koala motif and the name of the hotel were removed during the post war years and have since been lost.

 

Historically, Bair’s Otago Hotel demonstrates the development of the hotel industry in the Shire through the interwar period. Whilst many earlier hotels were adapted to Art Deco or Streamline Moderne style in this period of change in the hotel trade, the Otago was completely rebuilt in a much more comprehensive expression of an amalgam of the two styles. It is a notable part of the historic interwar character of Bair Street.

 

Trevor C. McCullough was a Melbourne based architect and builder who designed and constructed a number of commercial buildings in the Shire during the interwar and immediate postwar period including Bair's Otago Hotel (1939), Elizabeth House (1940) and extensions to the Mirboo North Butter Factory (1949).

 

Leongatha is a town in the foothills of the Strzelecki Ranges, South Gippsland Shire, Victoria, Australia, located 135 kilometres south-east of Melbourne. The town is the civic, commercial, industrial, religious, educational and sporting centre of the region. The Murray Goulburn Co-operative Co. Limited, is a farmers' co-operative which trades in Australia under the Devondale label, and has a dairy processing plant just north of the town producing milk-based products for Australian and overseas markets. First settlement of the area by Europeans occurred in 1845. The Post Office opened as Koorooman on 1 October 1887 and renamed Leongatha in 1891 when a township was established on the arrival of the railway. The Daffodil Festival is held annually in September. Competitions are held and many daffodil varieties are on display. A garden competition is also held and there are many beautiful examples throughout the provincial town. The South Gippsland Railway runs historical diesel locomotives and railcars between the market and dairy towns of Nyora and Leongatha, passing through Korumburra.

The Camberwell Police Station and Court House Complex on the Corner of Camberwell Road and Butler Street in the Melbourne eastern suburb of Camberwell, was designed by Public Works Department architect, Percy Edgar Everett (1888 - 1967).

 

The complex was built by W. A. Medbury between 1938 and 1939. in the Streamline Moderne style which had been influencing Australian architecture since its first appearance in the early 1930s. The complex is set on a diagonal axis. The buildings are constructed of red, brown and manganese bricks and contain Percy Everett's trademark pattern detailing.

 

The complex still retains a law enforcement function to this day, as the court house is now used for Administrative Appeals Tribunals and the police station still functions.

 

Percy Everett's other architectural works include; the Fairfield Club House in 1934, the Essendon technical School in 1939 and the Russell Street Police Headquarters in 1942 and 1943.

I can't tell you how much is original and how much is renovated. I do wish I could have gotten a good shot of the bar to the left of this photo.

A rare example of Streamline Moderne architecture in San Francisco.

 

I couldn't find who was the original architect.

"Riawena" is a wonderfully stylised Streamline Moderne Art Deco Villa in the Melbourne suburb of Thornbury. Its name is taken from the Australian Aboriginal word for "fun" or "sport", which is an unusual choice in the 1930s, when so many people were naming their houses after English or American places.

 

Standing on the corner of a busy main thoroughfare and a much quieter side street, this well proportioned stand alone villa is extremely large and sprawling, with its original garage next to it behind a high wall. The clean uncluttered lines of the house, the speed lines around the pedement of the rounded portico, feature bricks in geometric patterns and the overall low slung design of the house are very Streamline Moderne in design.

 

The whole property is surrounded by a low fence with plain pillars and wrought-iron swirls inserts and a gate featuring a geometric Art Deco pattern.

 

The tree in blossom in this photograph is a prunus; a genus of trees and shrubs, which includes the plums, cherries, peaches, apricots and almonds. This is an ornamental variety, which burst into blossom almost a month before usual owing to an unusually warm spell of weather just prior to the photograph being taken.

I tried to look at some of the interiors of the nearly 400 art deco hotels and historic buildings in the only Art Deco Historic District on the National Register found in about a square mile of Miami's South Beach (SoBe) Here's a better photo of the old lobby photo on the far wall here: www.flickr.com/photos/catchesthelight/6736502733/in/photo...

Located at Carrer del Comte d'Urgell, 29 in the centre of Barcelona. The Urgel Cinema opened on 20th September 1963 with Otto Preminger's "Carmen Jones". It has a seating capacity of 1,832 and was designed by local Catalan architect and interior designer Antoni Bonamusa.

 

It was built for the Balana group of chinemas and is still operated by them. It is the premiere cinema in Barcelona.

 

This image of the auditorium, as see looking back from the screen, is courtesy of the website www.gridskipper.com/travel/barcelona/

 

For more information on the Urgel Cinema: cinematreasures.org/theater/23603/

Although not famous for its Art Deco architecture, the provincial Victorian city of Ballarat, which was established between the 1860s and 1880s when the area was at the centre of a gold rush, does have some fine examples of interwar and post war architecture when the gold boom was replaced with wealth generated through grazing and agriculture.

 

"Drewan Court" is a wonderful set of Streamline Moderne red and brown brick flats built on the front of an old Gothic Victorian mansion in Lyons Street. With rounded balconies and Functonalist windowframes, "Drewan Court" achieve the refreshingly sleek style that was popular in the mid to late 1930s.

 

Unlike many Art Deco buildings which focussed on angular detail, Streamline Moderne buildings often placed emphasis on rounded edges, as though they were standing up against a great wind. The rounded concrete rendered windows are prime examples of such architectural features. Aside from these and a small amount of feature brickwork, the detail on these flats is minimal.

 

Over the years, the building fell into disrepair; it's undergoing renovation and is slated to reopen in 2015 as a performing arts and film center.

Originally called the “Music Museum and Grainger Museum”, the “Grainger Museum” is a small Streamline Moderne Art Deco building, built between 1935 and 1939, a repository of items documenting the life, career and music of the well known Australian composer, folklorist and pianist, Percy Grainger (1882 – 1961).

 

Built on one of Melbourne’s grand tree lined boulevards, Royal Parade in Parkville, the autobiographical museum was constructed in two stages between 1935 and 1939, on land provided for the purpose by the University of Melbourne. The Grainger Museum was designed by the staff architect of Melbourne University, John Stevens Gawler (1885 – 1978) through his architectural firm Gawler and Drummond. The building, built of brown clinker bricks is typical of Streamline Moderne design in Australia in the late 1930s, yet it also has undertones of the Arts and Crafts movement. It has very little detailing on the outside, with a severe arched entranceway, two windows featuring Art Deco grillework, a few decorative panels of brickwork (quite typical of John Gawler’s work) and the remaining windows consisting of glass bricks. The name of the museum appears above the main entranceway in stark Art Deco lettering made of cast iron which have been painted black. The museum is circular and features a small central courtyard accessed by two sets of French doors. The courtyard facades are detailed with decorative brickwork.

 

The Grainger Museum received input from Mr. Grainger in its design as well as its purpose, as well as funding provided by the composer. Mr. Grainger had contemplated establishing an autobiographical museum in the early 1920s, following the sudden suicide of his mother Rose, to whom he was very devoted. The museum contains large quantity of material from Mr. Grainger’s life, including art and furnishings from his home, musical instruments that he used, compositions, recordings, reformist clothing, published scores, field recordings, photographs, books and personal items belonging not only to Mr. Grainger, but also his mother. It also contains a curio case of whips that Mr. Grainger used in sadomasochist sexual acts which were in a trunk given to the museum with strict instructions that it was not to be opened until ten year after his death. The trunk also contained photographs of the composer after sessions of self flagellation. The museum also contains large amounts of material concerning some of his musical contemporaries, many of whom have fallen into obscurity. The Grainger Museum was officially opened in December 1938, and was staffed and maintained by Mr. Grainger throughout his life.

 

Sadly, the Grainger Museum suffered some initial setbacks with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, when the building was used for storage for the duration, rather than its original purpose. The museum’s designs were also problematic, as the building was prone to leaks and required extensive waterproofing. The majority of objects were not put on public display until the 1950s when Mr. Grainger visited Australia with the intention of finishing his autobiographical project; something he failed to do as he set sail for his New York home with the task still incomplete. During the 1960s the Grainger Museum was opened to the public regularly for the first time and was sometimes used for concerts and musical workshops for jazz and other avant-garde music, which would have pleased Mr. Grainger, who sadly had died some five years before this eventuality. The Grainger Museum quietly closed its doors in 2003 for extensive renovation, restoration and conservation work. It reopened seven years later 2010, and has been open selectively ever since, showcasing Mr. Grainger’s life and works in a smart, well set out and discreet fashion.

 

Percy Aldridge Grainger was born in Brighton, Melbourne. He showed precocious talent in music, and at the age of 13 he left Australia to further his ability by attending the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1901 he moved to London, where with the assistance of his mother, he established himself as a successful society pianist, and developed a career as a concert performer and composer. During his time in London, he also collected original folk melodies and helped revive interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th Century. Mr. Grainger left England in 1914, and moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life, residing in White Haven, a suburb of New York with his mother, Rose, who was always his greatest supporter and exponent. Mr. Grainger took up American citizenship in 1918. After his mother committed suicide in 1922, he involved himself more with educational work, and created his own experimental and unusual musical compositions. He particularly enjoyed musical experiments with fantastic music machines that he imagined, and perhaps hoped, would supersede human interpretation one day. During this time, he also made adaptations of other composers' musical works. In 1926, while returning to America from a tour, he met Ella Ström, a Swedish-born artist, whom he married before an enraptured audience at one of his concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in 1928. Mr. Grainger already had a great interest in Nordic music, but his wife’s lineage only served to drive his passion for such music even more. As he grew older he continued to give concerts. He also revised and rearranged compositions of his own, preferring this to writing new music, of which he produced little. After the Second World War, he suffered ill health which reduced his productivity and activity in his passions, and he considered his career to be a failure. He gave his final concert in 1960, less than a year before his death. The piece of music with which Percy Grainger is most generally remembered is his pretty piano arrangement of the folk-dance tune “Country Gardens”.

 

The architectural firm of Gawler and Drummond was a prolific, though rather undistinguished firm that designed a range of domestic, industrial, commercial and church buildings. These include the McRorie house in Camberwell in 1916, the Fitzroy department store Ackmans Ltd in 1918, the Loch Church of England in 1926, the Korumburra Church of England in 1927, the Deaf and Dumb Society's church at Jolimont in 1929 and the Nyora Church of England in 1930. The Percy Grainger Museum is perhaps Gawler and Drummond’s most distinguished work.

 

The Grainger Museum was open as part of the 2014 Open House Melbourne Weekend.

Originally called the “Music Museum and Grainger Museum”, the “Grainger Museum” is a small Streamline Moderne Art Deco building, built between 1935 and 1939, a repository of items documenting the life, career and music of the well known Australian composer, folklorist and pianist, Percy Grainger (1882 – 1961).

 

Built on one of Melbourne’s grand tree lined boulevards, Royal Parade in Parkville, the autobiographical museum was constructed in two stages between 1935 and 1939, on land provided for the purpose by the University of Melbourne. The Grainger Museum was designed by the staff architect of Melbourne University, John Stevens Gawler (1885 – 1978) through his architectural firm Gawler and Drummond. The building, built of brown clinker bricks is typical of Streamline Moderne design in Australia in the late 1930s, yet it also has undertones of the Arts and Crafts movement. It has very little detailing on the outside, with a severe arched entranceway, two windows featuring Art Deco grillework, a few decorative panels of brickwork (quite typical of John Gawler’s work) and the remaining windows consisting of glass bricks. The name of the museum appears above the main entranceway in stark Art Deco lettering made of cast iron which have been painted black. The museum is circular and features a small central courtyard accessed by two sets of French doors. The courtyard facades are detailed with decorative brickwork.

 

The Grainger Museum received input from Mr. Grainger in its design as well as its purpose, as well as funding provided by the composer. Mr. Grainger had contemplated establishing an autobiographical museum in the early 1920s, following the sudden suicide of his mother Rose, to whom he was very devoted. The museum contains large quantity of material from Mr. Grainger’s life, including art and furnishings from his home, musical instruments that he used, compositions, recordings, reformist clothing, published scores, field recordings, photographs, books and personal items belonging not only to Mr. Grainger, but also his mother. It also contains a curio case of whips that Mr. Grainger used in sadomasochist sexual acts which were in a trunk given to the museum with strict instructions that it was not to be opened until ten year after his death. The trunk also contained photographs of the composer after sessions of self flagellation. The museum also contains large amounts of material concerning some of his musical contemporaries, many of whom have fallen into obscurity. The Grainger Museum was officially opened in December 1938, and was staffed and maintained by Mr. Grainger throughout his life.

 

Sadly, the Grainger Museum suffered some initial setbacks with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, when the building was used for storage for the duration, rather than its original purpose. The museum’s designs were also problematic, as the building was prone to leaks and required extensive waterproofing. The majority of objects were not put on public display until the 1950s when Mr. Grainger visited Australia with the intention of finishing his autobiographical project; something he failed to do as he set sail for his New York home with the task still incomplete. During the 1960s the Grainger Museum was opened to the public regularly for the first time and was sometimes used for concerts and musical workshops for jazz and other avant-garde music, which would have pleased Mr. Grainger, who sadly had died some five years before this eventuality. The Grainger Museum quietly closed its doors in 2003 for extensive renovation, restoration and conservation work. It reopened seven years later 2010, and has been open selectively ever since, showcasing Mr. Grainger’s life and works in a smart, well set out and discreet fashion.

 

Percy Aldridge Grainger was born in Brighton, Melbourne. He showed precocious talent in music, and at the age of 13 he left Australia to further his ability by attending the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1901 he moved to London, where with the assistance of his mother, he established himself as a successful society pianist, and developed a career as a concert performer and composer. During his time in London, he also collected original folk melodies and helped revive interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th Century. Mr. Grainger left England in 1914, and moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life, residing in White Haven, a suburb of New York with his mother, Rose, who was always his greatest supporter and exponent. Mr. Grainger took up American citizenship in 1918. After his mother committed suicide in 1922, he involved himself more with educational work, and created his own experimental and unusual musical compositions. He particularly enjoyed musical experiments with fantastic music machines that he imagined, and perhaps hoped, would supersede human interpretation one day. During this time, he also made adaptations of other composers' musical works. In 1926, while returning to America from a tour, he met Ella Ström, a Swedish-born artist, whom he married before an enraptured audience at one of his concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in 1928. Mr. Grainger already had a great interest in Nordic music, but his wife’s lineage only served to drive his passion for such music even more. As he grew older he continued to give concerts. He also revised and rearranged compositions of his own, preferring this to writing new music, of which he produced little. After the Second World War, he suffered ill health which reduced his productivity and activity in his passions, and he considered his career to be a failure. He gave his final concert in 1960, less than a year before his death. The piece of music with which Percy Grainger is most generally remembered is his pretty piano arrangement of the folk-dance tune “Country Gardens”.

 

The architectural firm of Gawler and Drummond was a prolific, though rather undistinguished firm that designed a range of domestic, industrial, commercial and church buildings. These include the McRorie house in Camberwell in 1916, the Fitzroy department store Ackmans Ltd in 1918, the Loch Church of England in 1926, the Korumburra Church of England in 1927, the Deaf and Dumb Society's church at Jolimont in 1929 and the Nyora Church of England in 1930. The Percy Grainger Museum is perhaps Gawler and Drummond’s most distinguished work.

 

The Grainger Museum was open as part of the 2014 Open House Melbourne Weekend.

Amyron Apartments.

 

See this site for more info on the architect: www.le-mystere-leonard.com/

 

To purchase a print of this photo - by itself or in my 2010 Shanghai Art Deco Calendar - go to: www.redbubble.com/people/meckleychina

Originally called the “Music Museum and Grainger Museum”, the “Grainger Museum” is a small Streamline Moderne Art Deco building, built between 1935 and 1939, a repository of items documenting the life, career and music of the well known Australian composer, folklorist and pianist, Percy Grainger (1882 – 1961).

 

Built on one of Melbourne’s grand tree lined boulevards, Royal Parade in Parkville, the autobiographical museum was constructed in two stages between 1935 and 1939, on land provided for the purpose by the University of Melbourne. The Grainger Museum was designed by the staff architect of Melbourne University, John Stevens Gawler (1885 – 1978) through his architectural firm Gawler and Drummond. The building, built of brown clinker bricks is typical of Streamline Moderne design in Australia in the late 1930s, yet it also has undertones of the Arts and Crafts movement. It has very little detailing on the outside, with a severe arched entranceway, two windows featuring Art Deco grillework, a few decorative panels of brickwork (quite typical of John Gawler’s work) and the remaining windows consisting of glass bricks. The name of the museum appears above the main entranceway in stark Art Deco lettering made of cast iron which have been painted black. The museum is circular and features a small central courtyard accessed by two sets of French doors. The courtyard facades are detailed with decorative brickwork.

 

The Grainger Museum received input from Mr. Grainger in its design as well as its purpose, as well as funding provided by the composer. Mr. Grainger had contemplated establishing an autobiographical museum in the early 1920s, following the sudden suicide of his mother Rose, to whom he was very devoted. The museum contains large quantity of material from Mr. Grainger’s life, including art and furnishings from his home, musical instruments that he used, compositions, recordings, reformist clothing, published scores, field recordings, photographs, books and personal items belonging not only to Mr. Grainger, but also his mother. It also contains a curio case of whips that Mr. Grainger used in sadomasochist sexual acts which were in a trunk given to the museum with strict instructions that it was not to be opened until ten year after his death. The trunk also contained photographs of the composer after sessions of self flagellation. The museum also contains large amounts of material concerning some of his musical contemporaries, many of whom have fallen into obscurity. The Grainger Museum was officially opened in December 1938, and was staffed and maintained by Mr. Grainger throughout his life.

 

Sadly, the Grainger Museum suffered some initial setbacks with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, when the building was used for storage for the duration, rather than its original purpose. The museum’s designs were also problematic, as the building was prone to leaks and required extensive waterproofing. The majority of objects were not put on public display until the 1950s when Mr. Grainger visited Australia with the intention of finishing his autobiographical project; something he failed to do as he set sail for his New York home with the task still incomplete. During the 1960s the Grainger Museum was opened to the public regularly for the first time and was sometimes used for concerts and musical workshops for jazz and other avant-garde music, which would have pleased Mr. Grainger, who sadly had died some five years before this eventuality. The Grainger Museum quietly closed its doors in 2003 for extensive renovation, restoration and conservation work. It reopened seven years later 2010, and has been open selectively ever since, showcasing Mr. Grainger’s life and works in a smart, well set out and discreet fashion.

 

Percy Aldridge Grainger was born in Brighton, Melbourne. He showed precocious talent in music, and at the age of 13 he left Australia to further his ability by attending the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1901 he moved to London, where with the assistance of his mother, he established himself as a successful society pianist, and developed a career as a concert performer and composer. During his time in London, he also collected original folk melodies and helped revive interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th Century. Mr. Grainger left England in 1914, and moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life, residing in White Haven, a suburb of New York with his mother, Rose, who was always his greatest supporter and exponent. Mr. Grainger took up American citizenship in 1918. After his mother committed suicide in 1922, he involved himself more with educational work, and created his own experimental and unusual musical compositions. He particularly enjoyed musical experiments with fantastic music machines that he imagined, and perhaps hoped, would supersede human interpretation one day. During this time, he also made adaptations of other composers' musical works. In 1926, while returning to America from a tour, he met Ella Ström, a Swedish-born artist, whom he married before an enraptured audience at one of his concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in 1928. Mr. Grainger already had a great interest in Nordic music, but his wife’s lineage only served to drive his passion for such music even more. As he grew older he continued to give concerts. He also revised and rearranged compositions of his own, preferring this to writing new music, of which he produced little. After the Second World War, he suffered ill health which reduced his productivity and activity in his passions, and he considered his career to be a failure. He gave his final concert in 1960, less than a year before his death. The piece of music with which Percy Grainger is most generally remembered is his pretty piano arrangement of the folk-dance tune “Country Gardens”.

 

The architectural firm of Gawler and Drummond was a prolific, though rather undistinguished firm that designed a range of domestic, industrial, commercial and church buildings. These include the McRorie house in Camberwell in 1916, the Fitzroy department store Ackmans Ltd in 1918, the Loch Church of England in 1926, the Korumburra Church of England in 1927, the Deaf and Dumb Society's church at Jolimont in 1929 and the Nyora Church of England in 1930. The Percy Grainger Museum is perhaps Gawler and Drummond’s most distinguished work.

 

The Grainger Museum was open as part of the 2014 Open House Melbourne Weekend.

Set well back from the road on a large corner block, this wonderfully sleek and stylised sprawling Art Deco villa may be found near to Lake Wendouree in the provincial Victorian city of Ballarat.

 

The clean uncluttered lines of the villa are very Streamline Moderne in design. The villa is made almost entirely of clinker brick, with the exception of some brown feature brick banding along the upper section of the gable, in a geometric pattern under the eave and above the windows. The villa's windows are made of cast iron, and are large and Functionalist Moderne in design. The villa features a wide circular porch with concrete pillars and very tall chimneys, both signature design elements of Ballarat’s most renowned architect of the 1930s, Herbert Leslie Coburn (1891 – 1956). Streamline Moderne was known in Australia as Modern Ship Style during the 1930s. This nickname was used because the buildings designed in this style often looked very much like the cascading upper superstructures of ocean liners with their towering decks, railings and porthole windows. The whole property is surrounded by its original clinker brick wall with brown and red feature brick decorated newel posts.

 

Ballarat born Herbert Leslie Coburn grew up to be a renowned Ballarat architect, practicing from 1905 to 1956. He taught Architecture and Building Construction at the Ballarat School of Mines from 1922, resigning in 1948 due to ill health. The Royal Victorian Institute of Architects awarded Herbert Coburn a Silver Medal for the designs of an Anglican Gothic Suburban Church in 1913 while he was still a student of the institute. In 1917 Herbert became associated with Percy Richards, and they formed a partnership in 1918, Richards, Coburn, Richards, which lasted until 1933, when they separated owing to artistic differences. Whilst Percy Richards wished to retain a more traditional style in keeping with the popular conservative tastes of their clients, Herbert Coburn wanted to be at the vanguard of architectural design and was very interested in following the sleeker and stylised designs of the Streamline Moderne movement which was coming out of Europe. Herbert Coburn therefore started his own architectural practice. Coburn studied for formal qualifications by correspondence with the International Correspondence School, obtaining an architectural diploma two years later. His rooms were in the Clyde Chambers at 313 Sturt St, Ballarat. He was a Fellow of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects. Some of Herbert Coburn's architectural achievements include: St Patrick's Primary School in Drummond Street Ballarat (1935), the Shire of Wimmera Council Offices in Firebrace Street Horsham (1936), Paterson's Furniture Store in Horsham (circa 1936), the Railway Hotel in Maryborough (1938) and the clock tower of the Stawell Town Hall (1939). In addition to these, there are many beautiful, well designed and executed modernist Art Deco villas around Ballarat that bear his distinct architectural style.

 

The community minded Herbert Coburn was elected a Councillor with the City of Ballarat in 1938, and Mayor in 1945. Herbert’s motivation was the 'proper development and advancement of his city.' He held the position of Councillor until 1952.

 

Very nice two-dimensional Art Deco cutout at the top of the first floor elevator of Empress Court located at 142 Queens Road in Churchgate; designed by G.B. Mahtre.

The central fire station in Columbus, Indiana is a good example of streamline moderne architecture. It was built in 1941 by Leighton Brothers.

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