Bill Brown - concrete pioneer and consultant

摘要

Dr William Piper Brown died on 21 December at the age of 90. His earliest experience with construction was as an apprentice to the structural steel fabrication firm of Edward Campbell and Sons, later to join Charles Ruwolts. During this time he attended night school at Swinburne Technical College, completing a Diploma of Civil Engineering in 1937. With the advent of the war he was seconded to the Navy as a civilian engineer to work on the design and installation of antisubmarine defences, in particular the 5km submarine boom in Darwin Harbour. At the end of the war, Brown joined the Commonwealth Experimental Building Station at North Ryde and subsequently transferred to the Building Research Establishment in the UK where he spent four years studying European approaches to the rebuilding of cities and infrastructure, then taking place on an unprecedented scale.