Engineering Melbourne’s “great structural-functional idea”. Aspects of the Victorian post-war “rapprôchement” between architecture and engineering

In 1963, Robin Boyd wrote about a post-war “rapprôchement” between the disciplines of structural engineering and architecture. Etymologically, the term suggests the movement of two entities that draw closer to each other, either in an unprecedented fashion or resuming a suspended interaction. World War II and the “anxieties and stimulations” of the post-war period, to use Boyd’s expression, accelerated the process of overcoming longstanding educational and professional disciplinary barriers. They were the driving forces behind what he denominated the
“great structural-functional idea” of the 1950s. Architecture schools embraced modernist/functionalist ideals, producing graduates with considerable technical knowledge - true “romantic engineers.” The global post-war fascination with unconventional structures played its part. Occasionally, Antoine Picon argues, architecture’s “symbolic and aesthetic discourses” walk a “strictly technical path.” Under the banner of Le Corbusier’s Esthétique de l’Ingénieur, architecture and engineering converged. New technologies made collaborations with engineers habitual. According to Andrew Saint, however, partnerships were rarely affairs of equals since “architectural jobs came to architects first.” The diversification and growing number of engineers also transformed them into a labour force, Picon suggests, affecting their prestige and, possibly, their historiographical fortune. Scholarship on post-war Melbourne architecture has generally privileged the architect as the protagonist in the creation of innovative structures, only occasionally acknowledging consultants. This does not reflect the concerted nature of design commissions and frequent evanescence of disciplinary boundaries. This paper aims to highlight the major playing grounds for this alignment within design professions. It also hints at the complex relationship between the contributions of Victorian engineers and their recognition by post-war newspapers and architectural journals, opening the analysis of Melbourne’s post-war architecture to the discourse of professional representation and arguing the importance of “unbiased” histories of the built environment.