Time out with David Yencken

Grant Meyer MPIA CPP

(First published in Planning News, February 2017)

Professor David Yencken AO has had a long and distinguished career working across the built and natural environments. He was responsible for the establishment of an art gallery devoted to Australian painting and two motels in Australia in the early 1960’s. His growing interest in design, architecture and landscape then led him to establish, in partnership with John Ridge, the influential company, Merchant Builders, in the mid-1960s. This involved a new style of project housing in Victoria that brought together a more understated architectural design with native landscapes. He subsequently went on to form Tract Consultants, and then assumed leadership roles with the Australian Heritage Commission, the Victorian Ministry of Planning and Environment, the University of Melbourne, and then a number of citizen action and environmental entities.

This interview took place in an inner Melbourne café, and David was in an expansive and reflective mood. Quietly spoken and ever the gentleman, his style is understated, yet the passion for his life’s work is very evident. Now in his mid-80s he is sharp and still very interested in the world around him.

GM: Describe your childhood and how you came to live in Australia

DY: “I was born in Berlin in 1931. My father, although an Australian, by a series of accidents ended up in the British diplomatic corps. My childhood was spent in many different places reflecting his calling.”

“He had postings to Washington, Berlin between 1928 and 1931, Cairo in the British High Commissioners Office as Deputy between 1932 and 1936, and then Rome where he spent a couple of years. In April 1939, he was posted to Madrid, right at the end of the Spanish Civil War and shortly before the outbreak of World War II. He died in Spain in an air crash in May 1944.

“In 1940, when the Germans reached the border of Spain and France, it was very unclear what would then happen, whether Spain would join the Axis group or whether Spain would be invaded. And so, the children in the Allied embassies were nearly all evacuated. Because we were Australians, we were evacuated back to Australia. We spent two and half years here from 1940 onwards before heading back to Spain and school in the UK.

“In retrospect, my time in Australia was very influential. I doubt that I would be living here if I had not had that experience. It was a very powerful influence on me as a child. It left a big imprint on me, especially the landscape. It was so very powerful. It added greatly, as I later realised, to my overall understanding of landscape.

“I studied at Cambridge University. I spent three years doing a history degree – so you can see I’m not trained as an architect! And then I came back here on what I thought was going to be a short trip. On arrival, driving down from Sydney to Melbourne in a car that had been lent to me, I realised that this was a landscape that was very familiar and much loved.

“Later in my life when I was at Melbourne University teaching in the landscape program, I taught a subject called: ‘Perceptions of the Australian Landscape’. As part of that subject, I asked students to write down their early childhood feelings of the landscape. In all instances, the students identified them as being of profound importance.”

David was renowned for many achievements over the course of his career. One of the most significant was his association with the introduction of motels, a United States phenomenon, to Australia. These experiences are all eloquently captured in his engaging 2014 book: ‘A Tale of Two Motels – The Times, the Architecture and the Architects.’ (2014)

In the early 1960s he was able to muster together some finance, with the help of some backers, secure control of first one and then a second site, and engage the services of some highly regarded architects and designers, including John Mockridge and Robin Boyd. In the foreword of the book, Philip Goad, Professor of Architecture at the University of Melbourne writes:

“Yencken was keen to invest each motel with design integrity and design pedigree, a radical concept given the mostly aesthetically carefree and commercial nature of most motel designs then and since.”

David describes his mindset at the start of embarking on the motels as follows:

DY: “I was learning on the go with a vengeance. I took a lot of trouble to read books, American books; they were very influential. It took me a long time because I didn’t have much money, and people around me knew I had no background in this area.”

GM: What did you learn from the motels experience?

DY: “So much. I learnt first of all about architecture and building. I learnt about the significance of good design, although I think I must have always had some strong instinct about design. I learnt that building is mostly organisation. And initially I made millions and millions of mistakes. I simply compensated by working unbelievably hard. For example, driving hire trucks down from Melbourne in the middle of the night. In some miraculous manner, I was able to get the first motel up within budget. It was such a relief that when it came to running the motel I never doubted that it was going to be a success.

“I came to appreciate the importance of what I call integrated design. That is bringing together designers of many kinds to work together to produce an integrated whole. It was something that was happening in embryo in the two motels. It meant that successful projects needed to include designers of many kinds: architects, landscape architects, interior designers and graphic designers and that they should all be designers of the highest skill and quality. And that’s the biggest lesson that I took away from this experience.”

GM: How did you come to become involved with Merchant Builders?

DY: “It was a very logical step from motels to housing. Motels of the type I was building essentially involved domestic architecture and building. They were simple buildings; design complexity was created by the size of the enterprise, the way the different elements were put together, whether there was a full-scale restaurant and things like that. It applied both to the design and construction.”

In the book, ‘Merchant Builders Towards a New Archive’ (2015) it is described as follows:

“In 1965… Melbourne entrepreneurs David Yencken and John Ridge founded one of the nation’s most influential project house building companies. For the next 26 years, Merchant Builders set not just new benchmarks for residential architecture in this country. In short what the company was able to do was to take architect designed homes to a mass market.”

Ridge had a timber merchant business and had been good friends with Yencken for a long time. The architect Graeme Gunn was also intimately involved in the early planning.

DY: “ We set up the company and then thought about what to name it. We couldn’t think of anything to agree on. Johnny was very superstitious so if the name ever had any problems associated with it he didn’t want that name. We ended up with Merchant Builders.”

“Our initial houses were project houses, that is houses available for inspection and purchase from display centres and built on clients’ land. Display houses of this kind played a prominent part in the company’s work throughout its history. Later the company began to build groups of town houses in the inner suburbs in locations such as Brighton, South Yarra, Kew and Richmond. And then later again we experimented with cluster and other forms of group housing in the middle suburbs.

“That included a project called Elliston in Rosanna using four architects working with a subdivision design that we didn’t do ourselves but liked very much.”

The book ‘Merchant Builders Towards a New Archive’ describes Elliston as follows:

“This was an architecture of subdued good taste, heightened privacy and little pretension. The street was negated and the house a self-contained introverted haven. Elliston turned its back on the suburbs deliberately to posit an alternative of homogeneity and an integrated landscape of garden and house.”

The book went on to describe David’s subsequent activities as follows:

“The radical cluster developments of Merchant Builders led to the formation of the Victorian Cluster Code Committee in 1971, chaired by Yencken and this undertaking culminated in the creation of the Cluster Titles Act of 1974. Merchant Builders won the inaugural Robin Boyd Environmental Award for ‘changing the face of residential Melbourne’ in 1972, and Graeme Gunn’s designs for Merchant Builders won three Victorian Architectural medals.”

GM: What was the legacy of the Merchant Builders work?

DY: “I hope it shows what’s possible, a new suburbia. I don’t expect that we will be replicated precisely nor should that happen because times have changed. We wanted to show what could be done by people who wanted to make a difference. And I really think we did!”

GM: Describe your subsequent work with national heritage

DY: “The world was changing and the governments in Canberra and then in Victoria were changing. The years from 1972 on were the Whitlam years. I was invited to be a member of the Committee of Inquiry into the National Estate. This Inquiry was set up to investigate the state of Australia’s national heritage, places of natural value, cultural value, heritage, sites of aboriginal significance along with the built environment.

“That was a wonderful experience. I spent a year going around visiting many different parts of Australia. I was then appointed as the Chair of the Interim Committee on the National Estate whose work was awarded the RAIA Robin Boyd Environmental Award in 1976, and following that was appointed as the inaugural Chair of the Australian Heritage Commission, a supposedly part time position that I held for six years. It was during this time that I represented Australia twice as a joint leader of the Australian delegation to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, in 1980 and 1981.

“It was also around this time that we started the consultant firm, Tract. It started as a group doing work on development opportunities and then turned in its second phase into a consulting firm focussing on urban planning and design and landscape architecture.”

David held the position of Chairman and Managing Director of Tract from 1973 to 1979. In 1982 he became Secretary of the Victorian Ministry of Planning and Environment.”

GM: How did your appointment with the Ministry of Planning and Environment come to be?

DY: “I knew Evan Walker well (Minister for Planning between 1982 and 1985). He said to me, if we win the election, will you come and work for us? This was on the back of six really hard working years with the Australian Heritage Commission, and I really wanted a break. But then I realised after 27 years in opposition, this was a time that would never be repeated, something completely new. So, I said yes.

“A lot of our work in the initial instance focussed on the central area of Melbourne because there was such a sense of neglect and lack of policy direction. This lack of effective action was being expressed in papers like The Age on a very regular basis. We had a big program and that included Southbank. But also, smaller projects such as streets and laneways, boulevards, planting, greening of Swanston Street – something I really would have liked to have seen more of. This was, however, only a small part of the work of the Ministry.”

GM: What changes did you observe in the nature of the role?

DY: “Governments can change so quickly and government attitudes can change so quickly too. And indeed, this was the case with the Cain Government. By the time that I left, five years later, the specification for a job such as mine had changed from one pole to the other. It started off with a search for people who had ideas and could bring them into being. By the time, I left it was a search for people who were good at damage control.”

GM: Describe your relationship with Evan Walker?

DY: “Oh terrific, always had been. Evan was there for four of my five years and Jim Kennan was there for the last year. Evan as an architect by training had an instinctive understanding of urban design, and Jim Kennan as a lawyer by training was very good on all the legislation.

“Evan and I shared a very similar world view. There was so much agreement we barely had to discuss things. Evan was always a great supporter of Merchant Builders and we knew each other very well.

“Evan also had really good advisors. They were mature and sensible and they made all the difference. Chris Gallagher and Michael Henry, people like that. They helped to ease a lot of tension between the Department and the Minister’s office and for that I will be eternally grateful.”

GM: You’ve had a very long association with the University of Melbourne, most recently as Professor Emeritus. How did that come to be, and how did you find it?

DY: “Much earlier I had a commission to write a book and I had strong connections with the University so it was something I was interested in doing anyway. The Landscape Chair was vacant so I applied for it and was fortunate enough to get it. I then asked for the chair title to have Environmental Planning added to it which was agreed. I was also the head of the School of Environmental Planning in the faculty. I have always liked interactions with students. I always sensed it would be a very pleasurable way to end one’s career, hoping to inspire one or two students at least.

“I introduced a new subject ‘Perceptions of the Australian Landscape’. I invited people with different backgrounds to come in and offer different perspectives: an indigenous person to talk about country and landscape; an Australian literature specialist to talk about how the Australian landscape has been depicted in literature; art historians to talk about how painters have treated the Australian landscape.

“Right at the beginning of the subject I took the students on a four-day field trip. My feeling was then and is now that when people have to bunk in together and sleep on the floor it is tremendously binding.

“We looked at all kinds of different things, remnant vegetation, different farming and conservation practices, old and new gardens, people who were trying to maintain a viable farming business while active with Land Care. I asked landowners, botanists, local Koorie representatives and many others to talk to the students. That subject was great fun and got a fantastic response in student evaluations consistently, year after year.”

David went on to author a number of books on topics including the lack of long term planning in Australia, and significant environmental issues facing Australia.

GM: In more recent years you were involved in citizen action and good governance movements including the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Australian Collaboration, the Australian Round Table, and The New Democracy. What was your motivation here?

DY: “People tend to work in their own boxes and silos for understandable reasons. It’s hard enough to do what you’re trying to do without having to think about the relationships outside. I tried to bring groups together so they could talk about the things they were doing and learn from each other.

My engagement with these bodies marked another important stage of my working life. However, I have retired from most of these bodies now because I really needed to simplify my life a bit.”

GM: Do you keep abreast of current affairs?

DY: “I read The Conversation every morning, as well as parts of The Guardian and The Age.”

GM: Is this a good time of life for you?

DY: “Yes, it’s a terrific time of life while your health holds up. I’m physically as well as I could reasonably hope to be although inevitably there are things that cease to function as well as they used to!”

GM: Do you have advice for young people considering a career in architecture, planning, landscape or the natural environment?

DY: “Have a go. These are all wonderful areas to work in. There’s enormous scope to do great things. And if after being enthused and stimulated by courses and lecturers and having gotten your first job, and you get frustrated by a boss, who you don’t like working for, don’t give up because that’s all part of the learning process.

“Think too about the value of joining an advocacy organisation and doing something within an area of your interest there on a part time basis because you learn so much that way.

“It was certainly the case with me. I got my planning education from being on the Committee of the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA). It was particularly important for me because I didn’t have a formal planning education or background. While on the TCPA Committee I learnt an enormous amount from a great diversity of people.”

GM: If you reflect back on your whole career, are there one or two people that have had the most influence on you?

DY: “Robin Boyd and John Mockridge were very powerful influences on me in the very beginning. There were others too. Working with them, sharing ideas with them during the development of the first motels. I was in my twenties at the time with no relevant experience. They gave me confidence early in my career and confidence is critical. And they really tried to help. I think mentors are very important. I can also say with absolute honesty that the greatest pleasure I have in life is when I am constantly learning. That’s the thing that I look to at all times.”

GM: You continue to accept speaking invitations, such as the recent Boyd Foundation event encouraging quality architecture and design. Why?

DY: “I like to try and propagate the ideas and vision that have informed all my work. I’m still very interested to get people to think about alternatives and do things that are better.”

Grant Meyer is Manager Integrated Planning at Maroondah City Council. He can be contacted at [email protected]

David Yencken can be contacted at [email protected]