With advancing age, one is prone to reminiscing about the past, often through rose coloured glasses. In such a mood, I came across this forgotten epistle hidden deep within my hard drive. It was penned by Senior Building Science Lecturer Derrick Kendrick and delivered on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the graduation of his most skilled and admiring students. It’s worth noting that the first year architecture class comprised 45 students, none of whom were female—such deprivation! Five years later, at graduation, only 18 remained. This was due in part to Professor Rolf (ex-British Army) Jensen’s belief, referred to by Derrick, that “it was not impossible to teach everything”. The attrition might also have been caused by students fleeing to an arts course where there were many women.
Cartoon by graduate Ross Bateup
Grand “Yourinal” 50 Year Reunion Dinner, held at Ayres House, Friday 3 November 2017.
TALK TO 1963 ARCHITECTURAL STUDENTS INTAKE COMPLETING FINAL YEAR IN 1967 AND LATER. By Derrik Kendrick.
Good evening, students! Have you all signed the attendance register?
Thank you, Bill, for that very kind introduction, and thank you, David Hassell, Doug Gardner, and Bernard Durack, for your kind invitation to be here with you tonight.
I actually had time to prepare this ten-minute talk to you when, quite often, 50–odd years ago, I was never really given adequate time to prepare anything for most of my lectures in Building Science. Everything was always last-minute and ever so busy in those early days.
Recently, I calculated that you, ex-students, are now all probably around 71 or 72 years of age, and I can tell you I had my 90th birthday in May earlier this year. Quite a different scene, therefore, today, compared with yesteryear. Today, we meet as a group of oldies and now reflect on where we were then and where we are today.
I am especially honoured to be here with you as the last living full-time lecturer that you had all those fifty-odd years ago! This occasion is therefore quite special for me and just a little bit emotional as it would also have been, I am sure, for my late colleagues Albert Gillissen and Professor Gilbert Herbert. Albert is in the PowerPoint display, and Gilbert, as he is now known, has a 2014 photograph on the display table. They never changed!
This Mr Kendrick, whom you knew fifty-odd years ago and who is now known as Derrick, was that polite young Englishman with the always-green tie, but is now a naturalised dual Australian citizen who uses far too many swear words he learned while living here. He became an Australian some 30 years ago because he liked the international respect he received as an Australian, and what overseas people saw in me and most Australians that they did not have in their own cultures. That quality was, indeed, an essential Australian trait of “always calling a spade a bloody shovel.” Indeed, I now have the unusual reputation that was given to me recently by a civil servant who had unfortunately crossed my path and who said of me that I was the oldest and rudest ninety-year-old that she had ever known and that I had used the most ever swear words in any conversation that she had ever heard! But I still believe I am basically the same person that you all knew all those years ago. I just came out of my shell a little bit after the strict constraints of the regime of life in the old School at Uni, and I no longer put up with crap. Oh, sorry about that. Can I have your permission to swear like that if I require emphasis?
The other day, I was throwing out some old architectural magazines, and I came across a re-published article from June 1964 in Architecture Australia by George Molnar, Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Sydney University and well-known cartoonist for a Sydney newspaper, that reminded me of the way things were fifty-odd years ago. He had written: “It is generally accepted that the function of a School of Architecture is to provide some sort of architectural education. This education is being judged by how usefully the young graduates can perform as draughtsmen in large offices. This is wrong.”
He then went on to write: “The function of the School of Architecture is to produce architects. This seems to be self-evident, but it is not so. Given the different interpretations of what an architect is, the teaching of the different architectural schools varies greatly.”
He then writes: “To my mind, the answer has been the same since the architect first appeared in history. His role is to create buildings, the characteristics of which are Firmness, Commodity and Delight.”
He then goes on to mention the contributions of Walter Gropius and Pier Luigi Nervi, and then adds: “Delight reigns supreme” … “The architect is foremost an artist. Scientific, practical, but (always) an artist.” … “Architecture is a vocation (and) in his work he makes use of all the findings of science, industry, engineering, economics, and art, and with the advancement of science this field is getting wider all the time. In other academic disciplines, it is easy to deal with the tremendous increase in knowledge. Other Faculties can specialise in several branches and create new departments. Architecture cannot do that. An architect is a coordinator. The ideal would (therefore) be to teach the student all the knowledge he will need, but this is impossible,” says Molnar.
But our dear Adelaide Professor of Architecture and Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Rolf Arthur Jensen, didn’t think like that. According to Rolf, it was not impossible to teach everything. He insisted on giving his students everything that was then available and more besides, anticipating the future, and you ex-students suffered accordingly, and you also benefited from the consequences of his policy. Looking back, you were probably associated with the most busy architectural teaching staff ever and the most over-worked student lives ever, not just in Australia, but in the whole world. That would be my observation.
Now I do understand, from what I have picked up over the years in reading the architectural press, that many of you have done very well for yourselves in your architectural and extended work areas. Some of you have indeed made a name for yourselves nationally and internationally. So, may I first congratulate you on surviving the course, and then suggest that you tell yourselves you have become very successful graduates, and that the work has had a considerable impact and made a real difference. The University of Adelaide, the old School and that most demanding of architectural Professors, Rolf Jensen, along with Albert Gillissen, Prof Gilbert Herbert, Neville Hoskings, Wally van Zyl and others, including Professor Frank Bull, would be really proud of what you have achieved, as I am so pleased to be able to say this to you tonight.
Now, let me change direction a little. I do believe I owe you all some apologies, but I would also like to share a little about my personal learnings from our shared lives.
I should first of all apologise to all of you for smoking in class and putting you all at risk. I gave up smoking my 70 Senior Service a day when I was under great stress due to a broken home about 45 years ago, by stopping suddenly, cold turkey, when in hospital for a knee operation. The story also reminds me of my three children showing me a Wayville Showgrounds display in a large room, where there were black and white photographs of people’s lungs following the killing of an estimated 3000 people by smog pollution in London in the winter of 1954. I have also shown later-year students these same slides in the final year as a warning, just as I warned you about discotheque ear damage caused by the new rock-and-roll amplified loud music that reached very high noise levels, exceeding 104 decibels. I hope you still have your hearing.
I should also apologise to you (unless you went on into a UK legal practice) for wasting your time by teaching you about the Waldram diagram for daylighting design of buildings using those grey overcast skies of London. For those of you who have never heard of this diagram, it looked like a real window viewed from the inside of a room. It was used by expert witnesses in Rights of Light law cases in the UK (or in Australia, very occasionally) to show the loss of indoor daylight by proposed new buildings that would obstruct the view in the nearby skyline scene. This technique had then been purloined for supposed daylighting design purposes in new buildings and was part of the self-indoctrination we had all received by studying the then-current daylighting literature based upon these grey overcast skies of London. Several years later, after you had all graduated, I was openly praised, as you can read in the Daylighting Conference proceedings held in West Berlin in 1980, for challenging this very basis of so-called daylighting design with a paper entitled “Dynamic Daylight” that was supported by a 15 minute time-lapse sound and colour film that I made to illustrate my case. But subsequently, nothing ever happened, and the Waldram diagram and its grey overcast skies just continued on.
Nothing ever changed because of this personal self-indoctrination from reading the daylighting literature of these grey overcast skies of London. Indoctrination by others or self-indoctrination from a particular set of literature documents or videos is just as powerful and as difficult to remove from a person’s mind as are religious beliefs when they are indoctrinated into young children. Indoctrination, by whatever means, always prevents clear thinking and must always be guarded against. That is the end of my serious stuff for this evening.
Now, a further change of direction for the last few minutes of my talk. I wanted to change the tone to tell you something more about myself. About ten years after you had all graduated I sensed that I had lost my feeling of contact with students. So I got in touch with ACUE (the Adelaide Centre for University Education) and made an appointment with Bob Cannon, the Director, to seek his help.
After two hours of discussion (and remember that I was now changing from being a polite POM to becoming an Aussie), I said to Bob Cannon, as one disrespectful professional does to another, you know you’ve given me no bloody advice whatsoever to solve my problem, you’re just a complete bloody waste of time. Bob then looked at me and said, I guess so, but if you go away and concentrate on your navel, you may be able to come up with your own solution to the problem. And that was it.
So afterwards, I sat down and cogitated and thought about things. Across from my office was the replacement staff member for Gilbert Herbert, one Harry Parsons from SAIT. He had this wonderful relationship with fourth-year students, mainly because he could always tell jokes. They just rolled off his lips at any instant, time of day or evening and seemingly just at the drop of a hat, as they say. For example, he would say: “As Cardinal Richlieu said to the actress …” and then would follow this marvellous punch line that I would immediately forget. Or at some other time, he would respond with: “Ah, Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 3, Scene 5: … “ and then would follow this amusing and apt quotation. One day I decided to remember his quotation: “Shakespeare, Richard 111, Act 2, Scene 3; …” and I deliberately remembered this reference, and when I got home, I got out my copy of Shakespeare and looked it up. The words printed there were just nothing like what he had just said! Harry’s jokes were all made up nonsense to suit the occasion. He was just a special kind of con artist in joke-telling.
And so it came to pass, as they say, that I concluded that I had no ability whatsoever to tell jokes and that that was the cause of my downfall with current students. I don’t recall ever telling you students a joke, and old man Jensen, he never laughed and never had any sense of fun, either that I can recall.
My navel gazing had produced this result of my inability, and so what was I going to do about it? Being a lecturer I was always aware of the need to instruct students in lateral thinking and so I applied this rule to myself and came up with the result: I have no ability for telling jokes and that this was the cause of my downfall and so why do I not develop this talent of having this complete inability to tell jokes and make this my new teaching gimmick.
As a senior lecturer with these new first years, I was only scheduled to teach them in the third term, and so I informed the lecturer-in-charge of this class to introduce me on day one by telling the students that they should beware because, as the third term lecturer, he can’t tell jokes to save himself. I therefore started with them from a negative position, and I could then surely only get better.
Third term arrives, and the class commences, and I introduce myself and the subject matter that I would be dealing with, and then say, you’ve probably heard already that I can’t tell jokes and that when I do, it’s a form of punishment and torture to experience this. I then propose to them to illustrate this inability as a mild warning just once for their edification. And I would start by picking out a girl in the front row, and I would try to commence a conversation with her that goes something like this. [As it turns out, the one I pick is a daughter of one of the new lecturers we have!]: Joke then follows.
And to finish off the last lecture for the term with the students, I would then say that they have all been good students, and I now want to thank them and then tell one of my best jokes from a special collection that I have learned especially to overcome my deficiency: Special good joke then follows:.
Thank you.
END.