The man who turned Melbourne’s east into a mudbrick experiment

Alistair Knox designed more than 1,000 buildings across Melbourne's east between 1946 and 1986 — most of them in mudbrick, most of them by hand, and most of them still standing in suburbs like Warrandyte, Donvale and Eltham.

The boy: Born in Middle Park on April 8 1912, Knox attended Scotch College in Hawthorn, leaving school a few months before his 16th birthday to work as a bank clerk in the State Savings Bank of Victoria.

• However, it was attending Art Gallery night classes at the Public Library Building that revealed his true passion – art and, by extension, architecture.

The designer: In 1946, Knox enrolled at the Melbourne Technical College to study architecture. He never completed a diploma, but took what he learnt into building houses.

• That same year, Knox built two houses in Eaglemont, but quickly realised normal building materials were too scarce following World War II. This led to one of his most significant ideas – using mudbrick.

What’s that? “Mudbrick” is made using a mixture of clay, soil, sand and water combined with straw. 

• Also known as adobe – the Spanish word for mudbrick – the practice of building with these natural materials dates back as far as 12,000 years ago.

The builder: Being largely self-taught in design and construction, Knox was one of the key figures to pave the way for people to build their own houses.

• Knox’s first mudbrick creation in 1947 was simple: a 65-square-metre rectangular dwelling in Montmorency.

• He quickly started building on top of a slab, a method he believed he had invented, until he discovered Frank Lloyd Wright had done so about a decade prior.

The innovator: In the second phase of his career, spanning from the 60s to the late 70s, Knox started incorporating the use of recycled stone and timber.

• Common features included second-hand bricks, verandahs, timber linings and brick and slate floors.

• Knox’s work took on a more artistic slant during this period, with landscape architect Bruce Mackenzie remarking that a Knox house “grew in the landscape in the way that trees adapted … to inevitable forces”.

Speaking to Women’s Day magazine in 1980, Knox said “a house should be … like a natural plant in a natural setting”.

• “The house is part of the environment and the environment is part of the house,” he said.

The legacy: Knox died on July 30 1986 at the age of 74, after designing about 1,260 buildings and building about 400 houses.

• The University of Melbourne awarded him an honorary degree as a Doctor of Architecture in 1984.

• In 1999, Nullumbik council changed the name of the Eltham Town Park to the Alistair Knox Park.

Where are they now? The majority of the signature mudbrick homes he designed and built in Eltham and Warrandyte are still standing, albeit with restorations required or renovations delivered.

• Key examples include the “Fisher House” on Mullens Road in Warrandyte and the “Oehlman House” on Floods Road in Warrandyte North.

Thumbnail Image Credit: Lynne Cooke/Tony Knox