Walter Bunning (1912-1977) was born in Brisbane and educated at the Slade School at Warwick, Queensland. He studied architecture at the Sydney Technical College, where he won the Kemp Medal in 1933. In 1935, the New South Wales Board of Architects awarded him a two-year travelling scholarship (taken 1936-1939) and he worked in several London architectural offices. On return to Sydney, he became an RAIA NSW councillor, 1939-1942, and worked for H. Ruskin Rowe and the Allied Works Council. In 1944-1945, he was Executive Officer with the Commonwealth Housing Commission, where he wrote an influential town planning and housing design tract, Homes in the Sun (1945). After setting up his own practice in 1945, he produced various houses and a town plan for St Mary’s, a former munitions dump in western Sydney. He also was appointed chairman of the NSW Town and Country Planning Advisory Committee – a role which required him to review schemes for Cumberland, Northumberland and Illawarra; the Opera House competition and other civic schemes during the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1946, he went into partnership with Charles Madden as Bunning and Madden. Their firm’s major works (not all designed by Bunning) were Anzac House (1956), the National Library in Canberra (1968), Grace Bros Parramatta store (1956, remodelled 1972), the Nuclear Science Institute and canteen at Lucas Heights (1960), Liner House (1960); the Hayden-Allen Building at the Australian National University in Canberra (1960), Bruce Hall at the ANU (1961), the Elanora Flats, Dover Heights (1961), the Captain Cook memorial and Parkes Place development, Canberra (1970), the Siding Spring Observatory, Canberra (1970) and International House at the University of Sydney (first stage completed 1967). In 1951 he became a Fellow of the RAIA and in 1954 a Fellow of the Royal Australian Planning Institute. He wrote many articles in journals and newspapers on architectural and planning topics. In 1958, he was appointed as a Trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW. In 1960, Charles Madden died and Bunning appointed employees Kevin Smith and Noel Potter as partners,; Arthur Robb an associate. In 1966 Bunning became Chair of the Ian Buchan Fell research project in housing at the University of Sydney; in 1967-1969 he was a juror on the Prince Philip Prize for Australian Design; in 1968 he was Commissioner of an inquiry into the development of Paddington; and in 1970 he was elevated to Life Fellow of the RAIA and became Chairman of the NSW Committee of the Industrial Design Council of Australia. As well as these achievements, he was President of the NSW Art Gallery and a member of the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Authority until the onset of his final illness in 1977. His travels were to the United States (1956, 1960, 1962, 1965), London and Europe (1960, 1965), South America (1965) and Japan (1969).
Sources
—Bunning and Madden. 1970. The Work of Bunning and Madden: Architects and Town Planners. Sydney: Bunning and Madden.
—Who’s Who in Australia, 1977
—Johnson, Peter. 1977. Obituary, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 October.
—Press clippings archived by the NSW RAIA Heritage Committee
- Writers:
-
Davina Jackson
- Date written:
- 1999
- Last updated:
- 2015
