In praise of a house and its joy as a home

The Alex Jelinek designed, modernist “round house” in Deakin.

by Helen Musa

At arts and design festivals in Canberra in recent years, much has been made of the “Canberra modern” movement in architecture.

Evident during the formative years of the Australian National University (formerly Canberra University College) when Canberra was a hotbed of intellectual thought.

On reaching its apogee in the ’50s and ’60s, it was a move towards modernist architecture bearing a strong resemblance to its earlier European antecedents, with figures such as Roy Grounds, Robin Boyd and Harry Seidler at the forefront. 

One name is missing from the pantheon and now Canberra born-and-raised art historian, Roger Benjamin, has written a book, “Growing Up Modern, Canberra’s Round House and Alex Jelinek”, with a unique perspective on this phenomenon.

In part a love song to the house commissioned by his late father, the philosopher Bruce Benjamin, it is told through a series of focused narratives about brilliant émigrés such as architect Jelinek; his partner, the artist Lina Bryans; Benjamin’s parents and the housekeepers employed to look after the kids. It also offers an architectural analysis of how to care for a heritage property.

It’s also a rattling good yarn about the fun kids can have growing up in a designed house. Even the family cats get a special mention for appreciating the heated mosaic tiles of the toilet floor.

I share with Benjamin the powerful but all-too-rare Australian experience of having grown up in a purpose-built, architect-designed house and can relate to his excitement over small touches, like his father’s insistence on a vegetable-drying cabinet.

Art historian and author Roger Benjamin outside the Deakin “round house”… has written a rattling good yarn about the fun kids can have growing up in a designed house.
Photo: Helen Musa

Reactions will depend on who’s reading. If you’re an architect, you’ll probably view the house itself as the main character. If you’re a word person, like me, it’s the buzz around the curved dining table, where thrilling discussions with leading minds of the time took place, with Manning Clark and AD Hope regular visitors. There’s even a poem written by Hope to mark Bruce Benjamin’s 31st birthday. 

For art readers there’s the special attention paid to the artworks with which the Benjamin parents filled the house in 1957, paintings by Ian Fairweather, 18 seminal pieces commissioned from Melbourne furniture artist Schulim Krimper and two family treasures, a Khmer Buddha head and a fine Chinese scroll for which that curved dining table was designed.

The house, which won Australian House of the Year in 1958, was the first one designed by Czech émigré Alex Jelinek and part of the book is given over to recounting Jelinek’s fascinating background and art influences, worth a book in itself, as Benjamin’s interviews with him were to reveal.

 

A teenager during Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, he later became an expert draughtsman and studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, taking classes in painting and, relevant to the house he designed at 10 Gawler Crescent, Deakin, in landscape architecture.

Loathing the post-war Communist regime, he joined in hijacking a plane out of Czechoslovakia, becoming what he called “an architectural refugee”.

First published at Canberra City News, July 5, 2023