A Melbourne office building designed by Arthur Purnell in the late 1950s. Purnell loved flash cars and drove a Studebaker at the time, which may well be the car shown in this sketch.
I’ve just received a $20,000 research grant from the Sidney Myer Fund to continue my work on the architecture of Arthur W. Purnell, an Australian architect who lived and worked in Guangzhou, China, between 1900 and 1910. In 1904 he and American engineer Charles Paget established the firm Purnell & Paget, which was responsible for designing several important buildings in Guangzhou, including a marvellous cement factory that became the headquarters of the Chinese political leader Sun Yat-sen. Almost all of the firm’s buildings over there were European-style. Purnell returned to Australia in 1910 and maintained a busy architectural practice, working either alone or in partnership, virtually up until his death in 1964. He designed hundreds of buildings in Melbourne, ranging from humble garages to huge grandstands. A significant number of these were influenced by his years in Guangzhou: some buildings were for local Chinese clients, some had Chinese-style elements, and some had Chinese names. Unfortunately Purnell has been totally forgotten in Guangzhou and largely forgotten in Melbourne. The grant money will be used to conserve his drawings and to establish a website.
Following is the front cover for my next book, There’s No Place Like Holmes: Exploring Sense of Place Through the Sherlock Holmes Stories and the text for the back cover. It will be published in March 2008.
‘Derham Groves has had the brilliant idea of considering architecture as a detective story. It is a fascinating thought—that buildings might be crime scenes: in both bodies go missing—and Groves unfolds it in fascinating ways. If modern architecture has notoriously failed to make places where people can live, perhaps it is time architecture was put on trial. If so, the designs of its rooms are vital clues! Derham Groves is on the trail of a particular lost body: the home of Sherlock Holmes. He has students design buildings constructed like brilliant deductions. He designs a Sherlock Holmes Centre where the great man is absent but clues to his presence lie everywhere. An absorbing meditation on the way we read architecture, an engaging challenge to designers and the stories they tell, There’s No Place Like Holmes possesses the rare quality of making what seemed cryptic in architecture elementary, and the obvious once again filled with enchantment.’
Paul Carter, Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne.
‘Everybody knows that architecture is a cover job for the messy realities of everyday life. Yet it remains the most taken for granted and everyday of the arts—nobody suspects the architect. The world of crime fiction with its labyrinthine plots and dead ends, its shared interest in ‘place’ and ‘character’, is used here to preface a kind of forensic architectural theory. Buildings tell stories and stories produce buildings. This is an innovative and insightful book, as much about education as architecture. Just as Holmes used a magnifying glass decode the clues to crime, Groves uses Holmes as a lens onto the role of architecture in the everyday and in the construction of the sense of place.’
Kim Dovey, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, University of Melbourne.
I’m committed to the notion of everydayness and to recording day-to-day events on this blog. Most things that happen are good, but occasionally you’re served a shit sandwich. My car was stolen in front of our house on Friday night. It is the second car I’ve had stolen in 12 months. I’m not rich, but regardless of that I actually like driving old cars. The first car stolen was Dad’s old Holden. To my surprise I got it back after three weeks when the police caught the drongo who nicked the car driving it in Ascot Vale. In the meantime, though, I’d bought another old Holden, which was the second one stolen. Today I got a call from the police to say that it had been found burned-out in Roxborough Park. It was a nice car. There are some fucking nasty mongrels in the world, let me tell you.
