Australia celebrates prolific career of UW-trained architect
After earning a pair of UW architecture degrees, Jennifer Taylor, ’67, ’69, spent half a century documenting the buildings of the land down under. She wrote definitive books, such as “Australian Architecture Since 1960,” and taught the next generation of architects at the prestigious Sydney University.
Taylor, a native-born Aussie, passed away at 80 years old last year. As a fitting bookend to a brilliant career, her memorial service was held inside the pinnacle of Australian architecture: the Sydney Opera House.
More about Jennifer, courtesy of UW Professor Emeritus Grant Hildebrand:
A native of Australia, Jennifer had come to us from Brookes Architectural School in Oxford, England. While in England she had married fellow Australian Thomas Taylor. They came to Seattle in 1964, Tom having accepted a position in the School of Medicine, where he would be twice honored for distinguished teaching. Jennifer completed the professional Bachelor of Architecture program in 1967, and the Master of Architecture, with emphasis in history and theory, in 1969.
The Taylors returned to Australia in 1970. Jennifer’s first major book, “Australian Identity,” was published two years later. It was followed in 1982 by “Architecture as a Performing Art,” a biography of John Andrews, Gold Medalist of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects. In 1986 Jennifer finished the magisterial “Australian Architecture Since 1960.” She then looked northward to Asia, producing, among much other work, “The Architecture of Fumihiko Maki; Space, City, Order, Making,” the definitive biography of the dean of Japanese architects. Her marriage with Tom having been dissolved, Jennifer spent her later years with Dr. James Conner, with whom she prepared “Architecture in the South Pacific, the Ocean of Islands,” a pioneering study published in 2014.
In concert with her writing, Jennifer rose to the rank of professor at the prestigious Sydney University, where few such professorships were held by women. The quality of her teaching brought her the inaugural RAIA National Education Prize in 2000. She was equally involved in her profession, serving on three RAIA Gold Medal juries, and counting among her close friends Glenn Murcutt and Romaldo Giurgola. Her latest teaching was at Queensland Technological University in Brisbane, for she had designed, for Jim and herself, an exquisite pavilion that looks northward to the sun and the sea from her beloved Stradbroke Island off the Brisbane coast. In 2010 she received the inaugural RAIA President’s Prize for her lifetime commitment to architecture as a thinker, writer, critic and historian.
Jennifer died in Sydney on December 7, 2015, closing a life of extraordinary achievement. The venue of her memorial service attests to the affection and respect she won in the country of whose architects she became teacher, colleague, chronicler, and friend.