The changing of the guard: The social and cultural reflections of community in 1970s Melbourne architecture

[article extract] In Europe and North America, as in Australia, the 1970s were a decade of architectural transition. In the 1950s and 1960s various manifestations of late modernist architecture held sway and in Australia a leading proponent of one type of regional-modernist architecture was the Melbourne architect Kevin Borland. Borland, by the 1970s in mid-career, rose to national prominence with a creative, highly-personal and somewhat romantic form of rough-hewn regional modernist architecture. Throughout the 1970s, his much awarded, widely published and exhibited residential and small-scale institutional commissions were acknowledged as a high point of creative Australian architecture. However, during this decade, a tidal wave of post-modern theory and practice swept through architecture, submerging the various pre-existing manifestations of an apparently vitiated late modernism. In Australia, the tidal wave arrived middecade and the initial focus of postmodern architectural change, and the site of its most vigorous and protracted development, was Melbourne.