Derek Fuller Wrigley: February 16, 1924 - June 22, 2021
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Derek Wrigley, a consummate designer whose work through the 20th century and into the 21st was a series of significant yet quiet triumphs for people and their environments, has died. He was 97.
In a career that spanned more than seven decades, Wrigley never wavered from the belief that design had the power to change the world for the better. He made Canberra, a city of bravery, optimism and experimentation, his home and design laboratory.
Often hidden in plain sight, Wrigley's works range from iconic homes and street furniture, graphics and disability aids to solar devices, institutional furniture, landscapes, sculpture and even a landmark tower.
Wrigley was a designer in all senses of the word, but the term still falls short. It is almost impossible to define someone who wore so many hats - a pioneering designer, architect, teacher, author, photographer, sculptor, mentor, inventor, manufacturer, engineer, philosopher and innovator. He was also a son, brother, husband, father, grandfather, friend and colleague.
Architecture was Wrigley's springboard into design.
"When you design something, it doesn't matter how good it looks, if it doesn't work. Appearance is not as important as functionality - the balance in good design should be 51 per cent functionality, 49 per cent looks," Wrigley said.
Derek Fuller Wrigley was born in Oldham, Lancashire on February 16, 1924, the elder of two children for Harold and Rose Wrigley (nee Bradley). Wrigley's sister, and lifelong friend, Shirley was born in 1931.
After failing his high school certificate, Wrigley became an indentured apprentice at an electrical manufacturing firm in Manchester, which lasted only a few months. Deemed medically unfit for active service during the Second World War due to partial deafness, Wrigley soon turned his efforts to study and was accepted into the architecture course at the Manchester College of Art.
Wrigley presented a measured drawing of his own bicycle, which he had completed at age 16, to gain entry to the course.. Alongside his architecture qualifications, he acquired credentials in structural engineering, civic design and town planning.
Wrigley's results were so outstanding that he was ranked first in the all-England architectural exams in 1945, even attracting coverage in local newspapers.
After the war, Britain was far from thriving. Although he gained employment in an architectural practice, Wrigley decided to emigrate to Australia. He was too impatient to wait for acceptance into the assisted migration scheme, so he paid his own way.
After an adventurous trip on board the 'Largs Bay', Wrigley arrived to stay with pen-friends in Manly. This sense of urgency, impatience and can-do attitude would serve him well throughout his life.
Aged 23, and with just the £100 in his pocket, Wrigley purchased an abandoned quarry in Dee Why, NSW, and set about designing and building a home for himself. Occupying a small cabin on the site, Wrigley made a living teaching at the Sydney Technical College and spent his spare time hand quarrying the stone to build OB1 - Owner Builder 1, the first house.
Soon after completion, Wrigley sold OB1 to fund his passage home to visit his ill father. Upon returning to Australia, he set about doing it all over again for OB2, the second home to be built on the large site.
Wrigley met Hilary Archer in 1952, and they married in 1954. Wrigley's family came from England for the wedding and his sister Shirley stayed on in Australia. Derek and Hilary lived in OB2 until it, including Wrigley's handmade furniture, was sold to radio shock jock John Laws.
In 1953, Wrigley became a founding member of the NSW Chapter of the Society for Designers for Industry, which subsequently became the Industrial Design Institute of Australia and eventually the Design Institute of Australia.
Wrigley played a pivotal role in the growth of the design profession in Australia, and went on to found the Industrial Design Council of Australia in 1956 with Victorian designer colleague Fred Ward.
In 1957, Wrigley and Hilary moved to Canberra at Ward's invitation, so Wrigley could take up the post of assistant university designer at the Australian National University.
Wrigley also started work on OB3, a home for his growing family, on Jansz Crescent, Griffith. Derek and Hilary's three boys, Ben, Simon and Adam, grew up in the house.
Wrigley worked alongside Ward and the multi-talented Hans Pillig until 1961 when Ward departed the ANU to take up lucrative commissions with the Reserve Bank of Australia and the National Library of Australia.
Wrigley took over as university designer and architect and soon grew the ANU Design Unit team to include landscape, graphics, furniture, building and industrial design.
The fledgling national university provided the perfect environment for Derek to develop his theories of "total" or "integrated" design and functional design, the premises of which he had gleaned from his own practice, research and personal interactions with leading modernist figures like Walter Gropius, Phillip Johnson and Mies Van Der Rohe.
Having travelled the world, Wrigley found that no other university had a similar in-house design team and saw the ANU as a truly unique opportunity. The ANU also provided a valuable training ground for young designers like Gerald Easden, Charles Bastable and John Stevens who went on to have highly successful design careers.
Wrigley's design experiments over his 20 years at the ANU included the development of state-of-the-art lecture theatre seating, the university crest and typeface, hundreds of furniture types, sound and lighting devices, exhibitions, sculpture, buildings, landscapes and more.
He was also seconded from the ANU to design furniture with Ward for the Australian Academy of Science, and completed work for the National Capital Development Commission designing street furniture and lighting and even the headstone of the Governor-General Lord Dunrossil at the request of the prime minister.
Wrigley also made significant contributions to Canberra society including as an active member of the Canberra Art Club, an initiator of the Craft Association of the ACT (now Craft ACT), Wood Group of the ACT, Inventors Association ACT and the Design in Education Council.
After leaving the ANU in 1977 to follow his growing interest in solar passive design, Wrigley was soon commissioned to design furniture for the High Court of Australia and to produce a sculptural coat of arms for Court 3.
Wrigley was also working on OB4 in Little Burra and at this time and he purchased and restored the historic Byrne's Mill in Queanbeyan to set up his architectural practice and establish a sustainability advocacy organisation, The New Millwrights.
OB4 was his first major venture into solar research and started a passion for solar passive design and the invention of mechanisms to improve the way people live, concepts that would define the next chapters in his career.
Wrigley had met Maxine Davies in 1973 and they married at Burra in 1980. They lived in OB4 with Maxine's two sons and daughter.
In 1979 Wrigley established an ACT Branch of Technical Aid to the Disabled (TADACT), which later earned him an Order of Australia. His work with TADACT saw him and other designers providing pro-bono services in the design of bespoke devices to improve the lives of disabled people in the region at a time when the commercial market rarely supplied such opportunities.
In 1989 Wrigley began to build OB5 with his son, Ben, also in Burra, NSW. OB5 was his second last experimental solar passive house and in. In 2014 Wrigley's son Ben, and his wife Sarah Houseman, undertook the challenge of building Wrigley's sixth experimental house, the EcoSolar House in Chifley.
In 1991, Wrigley and Maxine moved to a townhouse designed by Gary Willemsen in Mawson. He soon set about retrofitting the property with over 20 concepts for energy saving and simpler living, including mechanisms for reflecting sunlight (and heat) into existing southern rooms, early examples of double-glazing and solar panels as well as innovative ventilation and heat-recovery systems.
Wrigley's focus on sustainable new building shifted to the idea of improving existing homes, which comprise 90 per cent of our cities. This saw him publish his first and very popular book, How to Make Your Home Sustainable, in 2004.
Rather than shying away from it, like many of his generation, Wrigley was an early adopter and embraced changing technology with gusto and used it to the best of his abilities to enhance his design and philosophical pursuits.
Despite his age, Wrigley never fully retired and continued experimenting with low-energy and low-resource retrofitting of existing houses, writing about design in education, lecturing and speaking and publishing several books including Fred Ward: Australian Pioneer Designer (2013) and Design Awareness in the Modern University: The ANU Design Unit (2019).
He was awarded an Order of Australia, a life fellowship of the Design Institute of Australia and was inducted into their hall of fame; he was a fellow of the Australian Institute of Architects and was the namesake for the annual Derek Wrigley Award for Sustainable Architecture and an associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
Wrigley once said that designers never retire - they are having too much fun. He also mused that if he could have his life over, he would have no hesitation in being a designer again.
Even in his last months, Wrigley was still searching for his own real definition of "design", something he planned to have updated in the dictionary and a subject he had dedicated his entire working life to.
An excerpt from Wrigley's last reflections on this definition seem a fitting close to a life of design: "Design is a ubiquitous, positive, fundamental human force for the betterment of everything on our planet - natural or human-induced".