The Roy Grounds: The Modernist Movement

The Modernist movement was more than just an architectural style, it represents wider social changes which influenced the designers of the time and remains an ephemeral historical snapshot of what is modern.
Roy Grounds was a pioneer within Australian Modern architecture, and worked with the changes of the world to urban environments and construction to create progressive designs and does this while still maintaining the same geometric language across a wide scale of work. Often using residential projects to push new ideas before implementing them in powerful institutional structures.

“The notion of modern then acquired the connotation of what is momentary, of the transient, with its opposite notion no longer being a clearly defined past but
Similar elements are used across his body of work, experimenting with application on his smaller projects before they’re ready to be used on large buildings.
Two very different buildings in their typology, The Roy Grounds House (1953) and The National Gallery of Victoria (1968), with one a small residential building and the other a large internationally recognised institution, clearly show how he is constantly practicing values of symmetry and simple geometries(fig#) and some of the specific elements that are continually reproduced and perfected, large eves with and rising undersides (fig#&#), panoramic highlight windows (fig#&#) and centre courtyards (fig#&#). “Modernity frees people from the limitations imposed on them by their family or clan or by their village community”
The key stylistic elements mentioned previously are very particular as they make reference to some components of the standard Australian weatherboard, extended eaves, garden area, while gently pushing the residents, and Melbourne architectural practice, towards the new modernist lifestyles that were becoming so