Roy Grounds

Australian architect

Sir Roy Burman Grounds (18 December 1905 – 2 March 1981) was an Australian architect. His early work included buildings influenced by the Moderne movement of the 1930s, and his later buildings of the 1950s and 1960s, such as the National Gallery of Victoria and the adjacent Victorian Arts Centre, cemented his legacy as a leader in Australian architecture. Artist Marr Grounds was his son.

Born on 18 December 1905 in Melbourne, Grounds was educated at several schools, including Scotch College Melbourne and Melbourne Church of England Grammar School. In the mid 1920s, he began his articles with the architectural firm of Blackett, Forster and Craig, where Geoffrey Mewton was doing the same. By 1928 they were both studying at the University of Melbourne Architectural Atelier, where they won first prize in an Institute of Architects Exhibition for a house costing under £1000. They both also won scholarships to further their studies later that year. After graduating in 1928 they travelled to London together with another student, Oscar Bayne, where they all shared digs. After working in London for a while, Grounds then worked in the United States for two years. It was there that his son, Marr Grounds was born.

On his return to Australia in 1932, Grounds shared an office with Mewton, who had already set up a solo practice the previous year, where they worked on projects separately, but published under "Mewton & Grounds". One of their first projects that is attributed to Grounds was radically modern for Melbourne located in the hills of Upper Beaconsfield, Wildfell, built in 1933, was a long flat roofed rectilinear composition of white painted brick, with red and cream brick details and corner windows. This was followed in 1934 by the Milky Way Cafe in Little Collins Street, a venture of the United Milk Producers Society to encourage milk consumption, with modern tubular steel furniture and flush recessed lighting panels. While Mewton produced many designs in a Modernism combining the brick volumes of Willem Dudok with European Bauhaus starkness, Grounds' distinctive work was influenced by the simple, rough modernism of US West Coast architect William Wurster. The most notable expression of this influence are a series of houses including Portland Lodge, Lyncroft and the Ramsay House, all on the Mornington Peninsula, the Fairbairn House in Toorak and the house for the Chateau Tahbilk winery. Grounds also designed in a more Streamline Moderne style, with his own family holiday house on the peninsula nicknamed "The Ship" due to its long horizontal asbestos cement sheet flat forms topped by a pipe railing and a glass walled lookout, and the similarly styled Rosanove House in nearby Frankston. In about 1937, Grounds ended the partnership with Mewton, spending time in England again until 1939. Grounds returned and established a solo practice between 1939 and 1942, and designed a series of unusually modern flat developments in the Toorak area which further established his reputation as a modernist: Moonbria, with its balustrades topped with Swedish blue tiles and Quamby 1939 41, both situated in Toorak, are buildings which consist of studio, one or two bedroom apartments. During World War II he served in the Royal Australian Air Force (1942 45) as a Flight Lieutenant, performing works and camouflage duties. After the war, Grounds retired for a few years, returning in 1951 as a senior lecturer at the School of Architecture at Melbourne University. In 1953, he resumed his architectural practice and produced a series of houses, including his own, based on pure geometric shapes. The Leyser House was triangular, the Henty House was circular, and his own house was square, with a central circular courtyard. This theme was repeated in later projects, including the circular Round House in Hobart, and the square Master's Lodge at Ormond College. When Grounds, Frederick Romberg and Robin Boyd formed their partnership in 1953 all were well established in Victoria. Each brought substantial work to the practice, which they usually worked on separately, and the firm became very successful. Grounds' first large commission was for the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra. The construction of its reinforced concrete dome was a considerable technical achievement. Opened in 1959, it won the Meritorious Architecture Award of the Canberra Area Committee of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) and the Sulman Award for Architectural Merit. The Academy building also led to other work in Canberra, initially for the firm and later Grounds himself. Grounds opened a Canberra office in the Forrest Townhouses (1959), which he designed and partly financed. In 1959 the firm was awarded the commission to design the National Gallery of Victoria and Arts Centre, with Grounds named in the contract as the architect in charge. When Boyd and Romberg were mildly critical of the preliminary geometric designs that Grounds showed them, relations between the partners became strained, and in 1962 Grounds left the partnership, taking the commission with him and setting up his own company with Oscar Bayne. Under a building committee chaired by the philanthropist Ken Myer, Grounds devoted the next twenty years of his life to the completion of the Arts Centre. His longest serving architectural associates throughout this period were Alan Nelson, Fritz Suendermann, Lou Gerhardt and Allan Stillman. While the gallery was brought in on time and budget, the complicated Yarra River site for the Concert Hall and Theatre Complex resulted in building delays and criticism. Unlike the fate that befell Jørn Utzon on the Sydney Opera House project, Grounds managed to hold on to his commission from the Victorian Government despite tumult within his company in the late 1970s. Grounds showed Queen Elizabeth II the massive excavations shortly before his death. Much of the theatres' interior designs were completed by John Truscott after Grounds' death. One of his last designs was Hobart's iconic 18 story octagonal tower and Wrest Point Hotel Casino complex.

Grounds died on 2 March 1981. In 2011, with the opening of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania, two houses designed and built there by Grounds in 1957–1958 for Claudio Alcorso on the Moorilla Estate—the Courtyard House and the Round House—became respectively the entrance and the library of Australia's largest private museum.