Interview with Derek Wrigley – architect and solar energy activist

Interview conducted Feb 2012 at Emeritus Faculty, ANU
Producer, Interviewer and Editor - Peter Stewart
Engineer - Nik Fominas

Biographical introduction: Derek Wrigley was born in 1924 in Oldham near Manchester, UK in 1924. He excelled in architecture and design at the Manchester School of Art and Science then enrolled for postgraduate study in structural engineering and town planning at Manchester School of Science and Technology, and Manchester University. With little opportunity for architects in post-war England, Derek bought a boat ticket to Australia in 1947 to explore the greater options he had heard about from contacts there. After practicing and building in Sydney, he returned briefly to England to visit his sick father and on the way back took a ‘study tour’ in the USA and Japan to explore the new architecture movements in those countries, including visits to Bauhaus exponents such as Walter Gropius in Harvard and Mies van der Rohe in Chicago.

Back in Sydney in 1951 he was appointed to Sydney Technical College to teach design and construction. STC became the University of Technology and then the University of NSW in the time Derek spent teaching there.

In 1957, Derek was invited by ANU Architect Fred Ward (founder of the Society for Designers in Industry) to join ANU’s Design Unit (the UDU). Derek succeeded Fred Ward as head of UDU on Ward’s retirement in 1961 and was appointed ANU Architect. As head of UDU Derek was responsible for all aspects of design within the campus – site planning, architecture, interior design, furniture, landscape, graphics and signage. In its time the Design Unit was unique in having responsibility for all aspects of university design.

Disillusioned by the inclination of senior administrators to meddle in structure and design, Derek resigned from ANU in 1977 and returned to private practice. Since then he has built and retrofitted a number of private houses with an emphasis on design aimed at conserving energy, material and water use. He has written a number of books and pamphlets as technical guides in house building for owners and builders. Most recently he has designed and is supervising the building of an EcoSolar housein Chifley ACT which will provide a model for testing best practice in domestic housing. Derek is also writing a biography of his mentor, the late Fred Ward.

Interview abstract: Derek Wrigley was born in 1924 in Oldham, near Manchester UK, of middle class parents, to be joined later by a younger sister Shirley who would herself one day work for ANU.  Their father, one of ten children, was a Bluecoat (orphanage) boy, mostly self-taught, with a love of poetry and convinced of the importance of education.  Derek’s father eventually became top Bluecoat boy, and eventually Chief Welfare Officer of Oldham.

Ater graduating from high school in Oldham in 1939, Derek considered electrical engineering as a career, beginning as an indentured apprentice.  After a year, disappointed that he was not engaging the aesthetic elements of life that his father engendered in him, Derek decided on architecture as a vocation more appropriate to his skills.  To this end and encouraged by those latent skills in both art and science in which he excelled in high school, he enrolled in the Manchester College of Art and Science. The college included among its staff teachers influenced by the German Bauhaus movement of the previous decade.  These teachers would have a great influence on his coming career.  Derek was the first member of the Wrigley family to have the opportunity of a tertiary education. He had found his vocation.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, Derek could not enlist in the air force because of a hearing problem, as well as being short sighted.  He was thus free to continue his arts and science education.  He regrets that as a consequence he missed the more worldly experience that he senses would have been good for him in his later development as a practicing architect.

Derek excelled in architecture and design, winning senior student prizes in design and drafting, graduating as an architect in 1945 and achieving the highest marks and winning prizes in the final national RIBA examinations in London. He then enrolled for postgraduate study in structural engineering and town planning at Manchester College of Science and Technology, and at Manchester University.  However, by the time of his graduation there was little opportunity for architects in England, with building materials and therefore work being in short supply.  Instead, after touring war-ravaged Holland by motorcycle to explore Gothic cathedrals and iconic modern architecture for a few months, Derek bought his fare to Australia in 1947 (being a ten-pound Pom was too slow) to explore the options for architectural employment there.

In Sydney, he joined the architectural practice Fowell, Mansfield and Maclurcan, at a salary of £12 per week.  On weekends he launched into practical architecture, using his own £100 savings plus a bank mortgage to design and build his first of several houses in a DeeWhy quarry.   Derek saw DIY design and execution as the best means of developing his New Australian design skills and to experiment with materials in a world of unbelievable sunshine. His first brush with authority was with Warringah Shire Council which rejected his building application as 'not looking like a house'.  Harry Seidler and Sidney Anchor were separately having the same trouble. The threat of legal action by Anchor changed the council’s mind.  In retrospect it may have been a landmark decision for building aesthetics in Australia.

His father’s heart attack in 1951 suddenly took Derek back to England, urgently selling his first DeeWhy house to pay the air fare.  In those days the price of a house and a plane fare were about the same - £2000! (compare the differences now!). After his father’s recovery, Derek visited the notable 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition in London, returning to Sydney via the USA and Japan on a self-funded ‘architectural study tour.’ He met some of the exemplars of the Bauhaus then working and experimenting in those countries, including Walter Gropius at Harvard University, Philip Johnson in New York, and Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Design in Chicago.  Soon after his return to Sydney, having by then seen enough of international life and art to confirm his commitment to Australia, word of Derek’s return became known and he was offered a faculty position at SydneyTechnical College.

Having had the privilege of learning the emerging science of building from Christopher Jones in Manchester, he inaugurated the first course in Building Science in Australia, which subsequently caught on in other Australian architectural schools. He also taught design to the swarm of mature age students then flooding Australian campuses under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme.  STC later became the University of Technology and then the University of NSW in the 10 years Derek spent teaching in Sydney.

From 1952 to 1956, Derek built a second house for his own use, again testing and developing concepts and practice with a more radical portal framed house perched on top of the same DeeWhy quarry (with no further trouble from Warringah Shire Council).  He later expanded this approach by designing another radical house in DeeWhy as a 'laboratory' in which to explore and expand internal light and sunlight, more in tune with contemporary architecture of an Australian flavour.  At this time he initiated the NSW chapter of the Victorian-based Society of Designers for Industry (later to become the Industrial Design Institute of Australia in 1958).

In 1956, following a lecture by Dr HC (Nugget) Coombs (the new Governor of the recently established Reserve Bank of Australia and one of the ‘architects’ of the Australian National University), Derek wrote to Coombs about the need for a Council of Industrial Design to stimulate Australian industry. Surprisingly, this was answered by Fred Ward, a noted designer then working at the ANU and founder of the Society for Designers in Industry in Victoria.  Soon after, Ward visited Derek in DeeWhy, liked his house and home-made furniture, and invited him to join ANU’s Design Unit (the ANUDU).

The swift growth of the ANU campus, particularly after the merger of Canberra University College and ANU in 1960, generated a lot of local design activity.  Although ANU always had a University Architect, most of its buildings were designed by private architects. The ANU Design Unit functioned in parallel with the University Architect, with Fred Ward responsible for designing appropriate furniture for all its buildings.  Derek's skills neatly bridged any gaps.

From the beginning of the ANU there had also been a consultant Site Planner who established a campus aesthetic of sympathetic materials and colours, still obvious in the University Avenue precinct, originally the School of General Studies. Derek's wider interests gradually came into play and following Ward's retirement from ANU in 1961 he was appointed ANU Architect/Designer, working closely with Roy Simpson, then the consultant Site Planner. The concept of Total Design was beginning to emerge, with the need for the design of every material aspect of the site, its buildings and its landscape located under one roof, the Buildings and Grounds Division. This was rational development - but for one weakness. The Buildings and Grounds Division came under the control of management experts who knew everything about money control, but little about design.

In 1965 Derek was given resources for an international tour of universities to examine the dichotomy of local design control and private architectural aspirations.  No equivalent of the ANUDU was found in his tour. Derek's report on his return suggested changes, but the report was quietly shelved.

The struggle between the UDU and the Chancelry lasted for several years and external consultant architects became increasingly idiosyncratic, featuristic, and contrary. Management gained 'control' around 1970 as financial criteria increasingly determined policy at the level of the Universities Commission.  The hodge-podge of buildings that can be seen today were the result. Good planning for a campus requires sensitive design control as much as it requires financial control. Whereas interiors, furniture, graphics and landscape design had all previously been successfully managed by the ANUDU, the perceived loss of control was a bridge step too far for the increasingly corporate and managerial attitudes of university administrators. Derek and his colleagues had seen the ANU campus as a ‘laboratory’ within which the diverse functional spaces might be modelled and tested, while meeting their essential functional needs.  This attitude was anathema to senior officers and certain staff of the university. In 1977, Derek resigned from ANU, having been offered a commission to design much of the furniture for the High Court building in the Parliamentary Triangle.  Part of that commission was the design of the Australian coat of arms in Courts 2 and 3 and the actual construction of the arms in Court 3 in copper.  At the same time Derek created his own office in the old Byrnes Flour Mill in Queanbeyan, restored by him to prevent demolition of this significant building by commercial interests.

Around that time oil market turbulence was making many nervous concerning climate change and energy shortages.  Derek founded the New Millwrights, bringing together like minded colleagues, headquartered in the old Flour Mill.  However, the group was in advance of the wider environmental movement, and soon lost its energy and presence.

Since leaving the ANU Design Unit, Derek had continued his integrative and holistic approach to architecture, but returning to houses, from where he originally started. He designed and built two more solar houses at Burra, south of Queanbeyan, one for himself, then one with his son Ben.  His emphasis has been on the efficient and effective use of available energy and water, two critical elements of design in Australia’s generally hot and sunny conditions – and, in the case of Canberra, the need for warmth in winter and coolness in summer.

In 1979, as a consequence of his 30 year membership of the Industrial Design Council, Derek again found himself putting design to practical use, this time on behalf of people with disabilities. In 1979 he initiated Technical Aid to the Disabled (ACT Region - TADACT) and spent 12 years as their Design Coordinator, organising a group of up to 100 technical volunteers who had their own workshops and were willing to make special aids which were not available commercially. The organisation remains active in Canberra today, creating about 400 aids every year at low cost. Derek also inaugurated a similar group, Disability Aids Collective which extended the value of TADACT by making batches of some of the successful aids and selling them on a non-profit basis.

In 1980 Derek was honoured by the Commonwealth with an OAM for his services to people with disabilities.

Soon after, Derek and his wife moved to a commercially built house in Mawson in which he put into practice ideas on house design. The resulting house is 115% self-sufficient for electricity, 82% self-sufficient in potable water, (100% when his grey water UV disinfection system becomes operational), cooled in summer using buoyancy ventilation (no air-conditioning) and all rooms (including southern rooms) warmed by sunlight in winter.  In 2003 he wrote a booklet outlining the concepts supporting houses designed in this way. 2000 copies were printed, sold and given away but it has been a great disappointment to him that politicians and builders have shown little interest in adopting these principles. Derek calculated that about $4000 per year could be saved in running costs when compared to the typical house being built today.

Derek's research and ideas have culminated recently in a further work-in-progress: an EcoSolar House in Chifley, ACT, for client Steven Wootten. This house will bring together scientific concepts developed by Derek.  Scientific assistance has been given by Emeritus Professor John Sandeman (another ANU Emeritus Faculty member), and the project will be managed by Peter Overton, a like-minded architect with TT Architecture, and visually recorded by Derek’s son Ben, an architectural photographer.

While Derek understands that energy utilities may be reluctant to support projects such as this – being contrary to their narrow financial interests of greater sales and hence profits – he cannot understand why the housing industry or individual builders are not putting into practice the very simple concepts of conservation of environmentally available energy. The EcoSolar House will be monitored so that its performance can be tested against design criteria. The project will be completed in 2012.

Derek has written and self-published three books on the underlying concepts of 'sustainable' houses, arguing that we could produce better housing,relying more on natural, renewable energy, polluting less, and promoting well-being in the process. Sales of these books have demonstrated that the public is hungry for this sort of information, but once more the housing industry appears to be opposed.

Concurrently, Derek is writing a biography of his friend, mentor, and design pioneer, Fred Ward.

At 88 years, Derek does not consider himself retired, and speaks and writes enthusiastically and willingly using such platforms as ANU’s Nature and Science Forum,  ANU Emeritus Faculty, and Rotary branches, and by way of newspapers and TV.  While he sees no early end to his enthusiasm for improvement in the built environment, he is deeply worried that his grandchildren will suffer because a selfish society and an unscientific government does not take global warming seriously -  confusing talk with action,  profit with well-being, and increments in GDP with progress.  He likens this attitude to asking our grandchildren to a lavish meal, then expecting them to pay the bill.

Derek recognises that his creative output has only been possible because of a peaceful house, a loving family, a supportive wife, generous tolerant colleagues and friends, and sunlight. His sister Shirley, who followed him to Canberra from Oldham in England, worked at ANU (Housing, and Continuing Education), now lives in an adjacent suburb and has supported him in his life's work.

Having spent his formative years in the ugliness of the Industrial Revolution in the north of England, he is unequivocally thankful that he found the freedom to develop his design talents and to contribute to his new homeland.  Derek believes that design is fundamental to everything we do and contributes greatly to our well-being and happiness.