Adelaide Architecture.
Edmund Wright - The Architect who gave us the 'look' of Adelaide
with Keith Conlon

Edmund Wright House is a highly ornate classical two storey former bank building on Adelaide's main thoroughfare, King William Street. It was saved from demolition by an extended and widely supported protest campaign in the 1970's; the victory was a watershed for South Australia's heritage buildings.

Why do we call it 'Edmund Wright' House? On the 150th Anniversary of his arrival in Adelaide, I went in search of who he was, and what he left behind. The city's dominating nineteenth century clock towers for a start... The Victoria Tower of the GPO and the Albert Tower of the Adelaide Town Hall almost opposite are the quintessential 'look' of Adelaide. And Edmund Wright gave us both.

The young engineer and architect was only 25 years old when he emigrated from England in 1849. Within a decade he was mayor of the city, and he had won a competition for the grandest and tallest building design, the future Adelaide Town Hall. After a delay, and a second competition, his plans came to fruition in their full classical grandeur in the 1860's.

Before it was completed, Edmund Wright won another grand competition in partnership with E J Woods. They created the other bookend tower at one end of central Victoria Square - the GPO. There were again plenty of pitfalls on the way to completion of another defining edifice. The tower was shortened, for instance, by six metres.

As you admire its classical lines and carved columns and stonework today, spare a thought for young Edmund. The GPO turned into a kind of Sydney Opera House of its day...the first contractor resigned over the quality of the stone supplied, work stopped for six months and a government architect took over and changed the plans.

The GPO eventually opened in 1875. Edmund Wright has surely left a landmark, a sign of progress and ambition of the capital, and a crucial contributor to the look of Adelaide.

Further north along King William Street, on the Currie Street corner, stands another piece of the puzzle as to why we gave the symbolic old bank a few doors away his name. Here he is again, winning another competition, and adding to the heritage atmosphere of Adelaide.

The Bank of Adelaide is a bold, classical statement for an institution that was central to the state's commerce for more than a century.... Before it fell over after a property boom collapsed.

By this building's time, the late 1870's, Edmund Wright had left his mark all over the colony. He named the architect Stuckey's widow, Agnes, and took over his work on major heritage buildings such as Christchurch in North Adelaide; St Peter's College in Hackney, St Ann's Church in Marion and the great Birksgate homestead at Glen Osmond. He also won the right to plan the beautiful Venetian Style Uniting Church in Brougham Place and the nearby mansion Kingsmead is also his design.

There are buildings in Kapunda and Burra, and the Glenelg and Port Adelaide Town Halls are all part of Wright's legacy.

The greatest triumph for the profile architect was a long time coming, however. With his Melbourne Co-designer Lloyd Taylor, Wright again won an architectural competition for Parliament House in the King William Street and North Terrace corner. That was in 1873, and sagas about the siting and the costs, and attaching the great marble slabs and more meant that it was not opened till 1889, a year after Wright's death.

And then only half of it was built. With the help of a £100,000 donation by newspaper proprietor Lavinton Bonython, the parliament building was finally completed fifty years later, in 1939. The 'gross disfigurement' was gone, and Wright's great South Australian granite and marble monument to democracy was at last in place.

He could well have been a Cabinet Minister within, as wide were his interests. He was the engineer of the pioneering horse train system in the city. He consulted on the design of the Cape Jaffa Lighthouse. As a city councillor, and engineer, he was vitally concerned with the construction roads, bridges and drainage.

And, of course, he designed the elaborate Italianate classical building we now call Edmund Wright House (His colleague Lloyd Taylor shared the task). With its exquisite stone carving by imported acclaimed British sculptors and sumptuously decorated banking chamber, the Bank of South Australia was highly regarded. Adelaide's sculptor laureate John Dowie said it could be shifted to Paris and it would still be noteworthy.

Yet it was going to be bulldozed! It had been dropped from a list of heritage buildings by the Hall government when its new owners protested. Mainline Corporation planned a 19 storey building for the site.

The old bank became a rallying point for South Australian sick of losing grand old buildings - The Exhibition Building, the E S & A Bank, the Theatre Royal and the South Australian Hotel. More than 85,000 signatures were gathered as a small committee kept the building open for inspection. At the eleventh hour and a bit, the Dunstan government changed its stance and bought the King William Street landmark for $750,000.

It was a watershed. In 1978, a century after the Bank of South Australia building was opened; pioneering heritage legislation was passed. And South Australians increasingly realised that the old bank and other such buildings are an essential part of our psyche in Adelaide. They are also a very attractive part of the city's charm for visitors.

It is right and proper, then, that the architect who gave us so may of our major classical buildings should score the 'naming rights'. He arrived 150 years ago to stamp his elaborate and enduring mark on Adelaide...Edmund Wright.