sketcher, drawing teacher, architect and builder, was employed in 1854 by Henry (Harry) Hudson, the builder in charge of erecting the University of Sydney to architect Edmund Blacket’s designs. In 1915 a fellow builder, George Parker Jones, remembered Crux as having been in the habit of exhibiting his skill in free-hand drawing. 'Hudson took a great fancy for that art’, Parker wrote, 'and we discovered that Mr Crux was quite capable of teaching us drawing and geometry’. A class comprising the three Hudson and two Jones brothers met at Crux’s residence in Castlereagh Street for a year or so until the work on this stage of the university buildings was complete.
In 1857 Crux exhibited as both painter and architect at the Sydney Mechanics Institute, showing Water Mill (watercolour) and an unidentified architectural design. The latter may have been for the first St Barnabas’s Church of England on the Parramatta Road (now Broadway), Sydney, his only known original architectural design. Its foundation stone was laid on 28 August 1858. This 'very plain structure of brick intended to contain between 500 and 600 persons’ opened just over five months later. It was soon nicknamed 'Parson Smith’s barn’ because of its simple domestic style – a proper 'working men’s church’, Bishop Barker noted approvingly, located 'in the neighbourhood of squalor, and where offensive sights and sounds continually arrested the senses of the passers by’. (The 'barn’ was later buried under extensive Gothic Revival additions and was extensively damaged by fire in 2006.)
At the same time Crux was employed as drawing master at The King’s School, Parramatta. A lecture he delivered on the subject of drawing at the Parramatta School of Arts in October 1858 was judged 'novel and engrossing’.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 1989
