Neville Quarry (1933-2004) was born in Coburg, Victoria, and educated at the University of Melbourne, with his final year of study in 1956 in New Zealand. After several years of travelling, then teaching and building several campus structures at the University of Papua New Guinea in Lae, he moved to Sydney in 1976 to take up a position at the NSW Institute of Technology, which later became the University of Technology, Sydney. He became Professor or Architecture there and later Dean of the Faculty of Design Architecture and Building, then Chair of the Academic Board. In 1981, he was awarded the Union Internationale des Architectes’ Jean Tschumi Prize for architectural education. During the 1980s, he hosted the International Series of lectures in Sydney and Melbourne by well-known and emerging overseas architects and was a panellist on an ABC television show, The Inventors. He wrote and commented widely on architecture, wrote Canberra and the New Parliament House (with Alan Fitzgerald and Peter Mulller, 1984), edited Award-Winning Australian Architecture (Craftsman House, 19XX) surveying the history of RAIA national architecture awards. He was Commissioner to the Venice Architecture Biennale in 1991, producing an exhibition called Architetti Australiani. In 1994, he became the first academic to win the RAIA Gold Medal. In 1995 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia. He won a NSW RAIA merit award for his own house in Paddington in 19XX and, following his retirement in 1998, built three houses at Pearl Beach, and renovated a house at Byron Bay. He socialised widely with his popular New Zealand-born wife Peg, a social worker.
Sources
—Jones, Philip. 2004. ‘Backer of low-cost housing’, obituary in The Sydney Morning Herald, 2 November, p10.
—McGregor, Craig. 2004. ‘A true believer, a great teacher’, obituary in The Sydney Morning Herald, p80.
- Writers:
-
Davina Jackson
- Date written:
- 2015
- Last updated:
- 2015
