Gordon Stephenson and university planning:a pleasurable professional pursuit

摘要

Gordon Stephenson's 1992 autobiography, On a Human Scale: A Life in City Design, includes a chapter on university design, a field of endeavour which he remarked gave him 'a great deal of pleasure'. He turned his attention to this specialisation from the early 1950s and over the next two and a half decades contributed proposals for the redevelopment of existing and the planning of new universities in Canada, Ireland, Australia and Singapore. Drawing largely on published and primary archival sources, this paper surveys this discrete aspect of his career. The focus is on Australia where most of his university consultancies were commissioned. The discussion identifies the context in which he worked, key individuals with whom he collaborated and the planning ideas and principles that helped shape his contributions. It refers to specific projects to illustrate the application of his ideas in two and three dimensional form.