Douglas Snelling Pan-Pacific Modern Design and Architecture

Douglas Burrage Snelling (1916–85) was one of Britain’s significant emigré architects and designers. Born in Kent and educated in New Zealand, he became one of Australia’s leading mid-century architects, of luxury residences and commercial buildings, and a trend-setting designer of furniture, interiors and landscapes. This is the first comprehensive study of Snelling’s pan-Pacific life, works and trans-disciplinary significance. It provides a critical examination of this controversial modernist, revealing him to be a colourful and talented protagonist who led antipodean interpretations of American, especially Wrightian and southern Californian, architecture, design and lifestyle innovations.

Preface 1. Childhood 1916–1937 2. Allure of Hollywood 1937–1940 3. Early Australian Career 1940–1955 4. Architectural Maturity 1955–1966 5. Diversions, Instability and Retirement 1966–1985 6. Furniture 7. Interiors 8. Architecture | Landscapes 9. Contexts and Conclusions

Davina Jackson (M.Arch) is a Sydney-based author, editor and curator, and a visiting research fellow with Goldsmiths College, University of London. She writes for British and European publishers on modernist architecture and design in Oceania and on creative applications of technology in urban contexts. In recent years she has produced books, exhibitions, articles and guest essays explaining themes she has named ‘smart light cities’, ‘viral internationalism’, ‘astrospatial architecture’, ‘data cities’ and ‘virtual nations’. During the trans-millennial decades, she was a professor of multi-disciplinary design at the University of New South Wales, an editor of Architecture Australia, and a director of companies which produced the world’s first three ‘smart light’ festivals in Sydney and Singapore.