Kenneth Frank Woolley
(b Sydney, 29 May 1933). Australian architect. He was a trainee in the New South Wales Government Architect's Branch in 1950-54 while studying at the University of Sydney, where he graduated in 1955. He continued as a design architect for the government until 1963, except for 18 months (1956-7) spent in Europe, including a period working for Chamberlin, Powell & Bon in London. Woolley achieved early recognition as the project architect for the Fisher Library (1957-62), University of Sydney, and the NSW State Office Block (1960-64), Sydney. Both are modernist, largely glass-walled buildings that drew inspiration from the work of Mies van der Rohe, but sun-shading was incorporated in their fa?ades by the projection of floor slabs. In 1961 Woolley began to design a series of low-cost house types for the speculative housing market, principally for the firm of Pettit & Sevitt, and these provided radically improved models for suburban housing. His own house (1961-2) at Mosman, Sydney, built of untreated brick and sawn timber with a tiled, monopitch roof, is one of the most celebrated houses of the SYDNEY SCHOOL. Designed on a square module and stepped in both plan and section to fit its steep bushland site, it paralleled contemporary Dutch structuralist ideas in its spatial richness, achieved with rigorously limited means. In 1964 Woolley became a partner in the practice of Ancher, Mortlock, Murray & Woolley (after 1975 Ancher, Mortlock & Woolley). Larger brick-and-tile buildings in the idiom of the Sydney school include the Students Union (1964-7) at the University of Newcastle, reminiscent of work by Alvar Aalto, and terraced hillside housing (1965-8) at Darling Point, Sydney. After the 1960s Woolley's architecture was characterized by a great flexibility of design approach, governed by his concern for appropriateness to place. Important later works include the orange-tile-clad Australian Embassy (1973-8), Bangkok, which responds to the local climate with an open undercroft bridging a lake; the serpentine Park Hyatt Hotel (1986-9), Sydney, which follows the curving shoreline of Campbell's Cove; and the ABC Radio and Orchestral Centre (1987-92), Sydney. In 1993 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects.
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