(b Melbourne, 18 Dec 1905; d Melbourne, 7 March 1981). Australian architect and teacher. He was articled to Blackett & Forster, Melbourne, in 1924 and attended the Melbourne Technical School. After working for RKO and MGM studios in Hollywood (1930-32), he set up practice with Geoffrey Mewton (b 1905) in Melbourne until 1936. In 1938-9 he worked in England for Raymond McGrath, then returned to intermittent practice in Australia. Grounds was an early supporter of Modernism in Australia but soon developed a simple regional idiom using timber, brick or blockwork and glass, strongly reminiscent of the work of William Wilson Wurster in California, whom he admired, but also recalling the Georgian forms of Australian colonial architecture. His early domestic work is exquisitely understated, as seen in the fan-shaped 'Quamby' block of flats (1939-41), Toorak, Melbourne, his own house (1937), Mt Eliza, and the house 'Iluka' (1950), Mornington, both in Victoria. Grounds became a lecturer at the University of Melbourne in the late 1940s and in this role had a considerable influence on younger architects in Melbourne, notably Robin Boyd (see BOYD, (1)). From 1953 to 1962 he practised in partnership with Boyd and FREDERICK ROMBERG in the firm of Grounds, Romberg & Boyd. Around 1950 Grounds instigated a fashion in Melbourne for strong geometrical plan forms; he built triangular and circular houses and a house for himself (1953) at Toorak with a circular courtyard cut into the centre of a square plan. He also used primary geometrical forms in some of his larger buildings, for example the circular, dome-shaped Academy of Science (1957-9), Canberra, probably inspired by Eero Saarinen's Kresge Auditorium (1954) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Grounds's largest project was the Victorian Arts Centre (1959-84), Melbourne, with a triangular art school and an astonishing tall spire, circular in plan, over the auditoria (for illustration see MELBOURNE); only the rectilinear, fortress-like National Gallery of Victoria was completed before his death, and a subsequent extension of the brief resulted in substantial alterations to the other buildings of the project. Grounds was knighted in 1969.

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