Tutorial chair, from Newman College, University of Melbourne.

American-born architect Walter Burley Griffin is best known for designing Australia’s capital city, Canberra, after winning the international design competition in 1912. Working in collaboration with his wife, Marion Mahony Griffin, Burley Griffin introduced international modernism, through architecture, to Australia in the early twentieth century. Training in architecture at the University of Illinois, Griffin was admitted as an associate of the American Institute of Architects in 1899. Between 1901 and 1906 he worked as an associate of the renowned American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.

In 1915 Burley Griffin and Mahony Griffin designed Newman College for the University of Melbourne. Newman College was completed in 1917, and its design draws extensively on gothic and medieval buildings. Burley Griffin also designed furniture – for which he selected just one timber, oak – and interior fittings for Newman College, including these two chairs. Burley Griffin believed that timber surfaces should be simple, devoid of fussy, applied or carved decoration. The designs for these chairs rely on simplicity of materials and on powerful angular lines, and are a modernist take on nineteenth-century Gothic Revival design.

Rebecca Evans, Curator of Decorative Arts & Design