Australian Dictionary of Biography

Kevin William Borland (1926–2000), architect, was born on 28 October 1926 at West Melbourne, only surviving child of Victorian-born William Joseph Borland, ironworker, and his South Australian-born wife Doris Frances, née Quinn. His socially and politically active parents were members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), which shaped Kevin’s lifelong passion for social justice and left-wing politics. Educated at Errol Street State School, North Melbourne (1930–37), and University High School (1938–41, 1943), he took a year off school to work as an office boy for the Melbourne architect Best Overend. In 1943 he obtained his Leaving certificate and was secretary of the North Melbourne branch of the CPA’s Eureka Youth League.

Matriculating in March 1944, Borland commenced architectural studies at the University of Melbourne (BArch, 1951), but after one year, having turned eighteen, he volunteered for service in the Royal Australian Naval Reserve. He was mobilised in July 1945 and served in the frigate HMAS Murchison, which operated in the western Pacific. After demobilisation in January 1947, and supported by the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, he returned to the university where his teachers included Roy Grounds and Robin Boyd. He joined the university branch of the CPA that year and was a member until at least 1955.

In 1952, with his university friends John Murphy, Phyllis Murphy (née Slater), and Peter McIntyre, Borland entered and won the national competition to design and build the Melbourne Olympic Swimming Stadium (1952–56). They were assisted by the structural engineer Bill Irwin, with whom Borland worked on many subsequent projects, including the innovative Rice House (1952–53) at Eltham, featuring a series of linked thin shell concrete parabolic vaults. Borland’s early years of practice were otherwise characterised by conventional contemporary-modernist residential commissions, which reveal his early fondness for the work of both the Sydney architect Harry Seidler and Seidler’s former professor at Harvard, Walter Gropius.

Borland married Margaret Agnes Aitken, a dental nurse, on 6 May 1954 at Holy Advent Church of England, Malvern. The couple were to have six daughters and one son: Fritha, Jody, Polly, Kate, Lucy, Emma, and William. In 1955 Borland commenced his architectural teaching career at the Royal Melbourne Technical College (later RMIT), where he was a popular part-time design teacher until 1972. He entered into partnership with the architect Geoffrey Trewenack in 1957, his most significant building from this period being the octagonal Preshil Junior School Hall, Kew (1962), the first of many Borland commissions for this progressive school, at which all his children were educated.

In 1965 Borland parted ways with Trewenack and formed Kevin Borland and Associates. A guest lecturer at the Australian Architecture Students’ Association convention held in Perth in May 1966, he met the international speakers Aldo van Eyck and John Voelcker, both stalwarts of the Team 10 group of modernist architects. In July-August that year he travelled overseas for the first time for an architectural tour of Asia and Western Europe. Denied a visa to enter the United States of America in August, he instead travelled to Russia, where the conditions of everyday life completed his disillusionment with communism. While in Europe he reconnected with Voelcker and van Eyck and visited the English architect Ralph Erskine in Sweden. His contact with this global architectural avant-garde decisively influenced the future development of his style.

With his former student and friend Daryl Jackson, Borland designed the brutalist Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre, Malvern, in 1968–69. His next project, Paton House, Portsea (1970), marked the emergence of his mature, somewhat rugged, timber residential design idiom. Significant examples in this style include the Nichols residence, Eltham (1973), and the Crossman flats, Launching Place (1973). With Max May, Philip Cohen, and Osric Spence, he founded Architects’ Group Pty Ltd in 1973, for which his major project was the award-winning Clyde Cameron College, Wodonga (1975–77). Built for the Whitlam government’s Australian Trade Union Training Authority, it was a vigorous and masterful late assertion of brutalist architectural principles. From 1977 he maintained an independent and primarily residential practice, with significant projects including the Mount Eliza North Primary School (1977), the Fitzgerald residence, Kingston, Hobart (1979), and the Roger Evans residence, Queenscliff (1983).

A passionate, fun-loving, and larger-than-life character, imbued with a profound sense of social justice, Borland lived by the motto ‘architecture is not for the faint-hearted’ (Evans 2006, 12). In the decade following the death of his friend and mentor Robin Boyd in 1971, Borland’s designs, more than those of any other architect, shaped the trajectory of Melbourne architecture. Between 1972 and 1983 his designs received eight awards or citations from the Victorian chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA), and another from the Tasmanian chapter.

During this period Borland sought an academic appointment. In 1978 he had tutored final-year students at the University of Melbourne and in 1980 he returned briefly to RMIT. That year he was appointed foundation professor of architecture at Deakin University, Geelong. The next year in May his wife Meggie died aged forty-nine. His time at Deakin also ended unhappily: although revered by students, he alienated key staff and the university chose not to renew his contract in 1983. Increasingly marginalised by a profession embracing postmodernism, he was briefly a visiting fellow with the universities of New South Wales and Western Australia, before accepting a two-year appointment in 1985 as director of architecture for the Building Management Authority of Western Australia.

In 1986 in Perth Borland married Huan Chen Tan, an architect who had been a student of his at Deakin. They returned to Melbourne the next year and together designed a home at Newport (1989–90), for which Borland received his final award from the Victorian chapter of the RAIA. Having suffered a stroke in 1993, he died on 5 November 2000 at a nursing home in North Fitzroy and was cremated. He was survived by his second wife and his seven children, including the portrait photographer Polly Borland. The Melbourne Olympic Swimming Stadium, Rice House, Preshil Junior School buildings, Harold Holt Swimming Centre, and Clyde Cameron College are all listed on the Victorian Heritage Register, while several of his residential designs enjoy heritage recognition or protection. In 2008 the Clyde Cameron complex received the RAIA’s 25 Year Enduring Architecture Award.