Australian Dictionary of Biography

Bill Irwin (third from left) with team for Olympic pool design, 1952

Age (Melbourne), 30 December 1952, 2

William Lyle (Bill) Irwin (1917–2000), structural engineer, was born on 30 July 1917 at Ballarat, Victoria, second of three surviving children of locally born parents Harold Beresford Irwin, engineer, and his wife Helen Georgina, née Lyle. His father was a contractor who specialised in concrete bridges. The death of two of his sisters, in 1923 and 1930, profoundly impacted Bill. Educated (1929–36) at Ballarat College, he was a successful student and sportsman, winning prizes for English, physics, and tennis, and for editing the school’s magazine. His brother John later reflected that during secondary school Bill matured from being a ‘daring and imaginative risk taker’ to ‘a calculated risk taker’ (Irwin 2001). In 1937 he commenced studies in engineering at the University of Melbourne (BCE, 1948), while living at Ormond College. At university he met Constance Hartley Berry (BA, 1944), whom he married on 15 March 1944 at St Alban’s Church of England, Armadale.

Irwin’s studies were interrupted by World War II. Having joined the Melbourne University Regiment in 1940, he commenced full-time duty in April 1942 as a lieutenant in the Royal Australian Engineers (RAE). Transferring to the Australian Imperial Force in August, he supervised construction work on the road from Alice Springs to Darwin with the 2/15th Field Company. Later in the war he served overseas with the 2/4th Field Company, in New Guinea and Borneo (July 1945 to January 1946). Demobilised in Melbourne on 31 January 1946, Irwin completed his university studies in 1947 and commenced work for the consulting structural engineers J.L. & E M. Daly.

With the architects John and Phyllis Murphy, Peter McIntyre, and Kevin Borland, all recent graduates of the University of Melbourne, Irwin entered the competition to design the swimming stadium for the 1956 Olympic Games. Their winning entry, announced in 1952, relied heavily on its bold expression of innovatory structural concepts, and attracted international interest. The 1950s was a new era of structure-born design when young architects, in their attempt to develop honesty and vitality in architecture, placed structural systems at the forefront of their designs. For this they needed an adventurous structural engineer, and Irwin was the preferred choice for many award-winning architects of the period. The renowned architect Robin Boyd later referred to the experimental Melbourne designs of the 1950s, and specifically to Bill Irwin’s oeuvre, as a post-war ‘rapprochement between the master designers, the architect and the engineer’ (Boyd 1963, 325).

In 1952 Irwin started his own firm, W. L. Irwin & Associates, at an office in St Kilda Road. Major projects of the 1950s for which he was the consulting structural engineer included the headquarters for Nicholas Pty Ltd (D. Graeme Lumsden, architect), the University of Melbourne’s Beaurepaire Sports Centre (Eggleston, Macdonald & Secomb), and the domed Academy of Sciences building in Canberra (Roy Grounds). The most prominent of his structural designs was the shell-like Sidney Myer Music Bowl (Yuncken Freeman Brothers, Griffiths and Simpson) in the King’s Domain, Melbourne. Opened in 1959, the bowl was awarded the R. S. Reynolds memorial award of the American Institute of Architects in a world-wide competition.

One of Irwin’s earliest employees, Ron Thyer, recalled Irwin’s ‘ability to empathise with clients and understand their needs’ (Thyer 2001), while Boyd described him as ‘an engineer with the courage of his architects’ convictions’ (1967, 459). By 1958 Irwin was lecturing part time in building construction for the faculty of architecture at the University of Melbourne, while his firm continued to gain important commissions, including the multi-storey Robert Menzies School of Humanities at Monash University (1963, Eggleston, MacDonald & Secomb), and the Sports Centre (1967, Montgomery King & Trengrove) and Union House (1967, Eggleston, MacDonald & Secomb), both at the University of Melbourne. By then the transparent glass-clad structures of the 1950s had given way to more opaque, often brick, cladding that removed the design focus from the structural system.

In the 1960s Irwin’s firm became Irwin, Johnston & Breedon Pty Ltd and later Irwin, Johnston & Partners Pty Ltd. Its association with Yuncken Freeman Architects, and its Miesian design ethos, allowed continuing expression of Irwin’s structural design into the 1970s. Collaborations between the firms included the Royal Insurance Building, Collins Street (1965); Scottish Amicable House, Queen Street (1966); the State Government Offices, Treasury Place (1970); and the 41-storey BHP House (1972). Yuncken Freeman’s design architect Barry Patten admitted that ‘the secret of his success was Bill Irwin’ (Bulletin 1969, 4).

A late but highly prestigious project in Irwin’s career was the structural engineering for the new Australian Parliament House, Canberra (1988). Retiring in 1983, Irwin hiked for nine weeks in the Himalayas, and later undertook cycling tours of Sri Lanka, with his brother, and Greece, with his son. His hobbies included sailing and birdwatching. Predeceased by his wife (d. 1993) and his son Stephen (d. 1997), and survived by his daughter Hilary, Irwin died on 7 December 2000 and was cremated.