This story is about the history of Perth’s CBH Building and the architects who designed it. The CBH Group’s headquarters in West Perth was build in 1968. It was added to the State Register of Heritage Places in 2015. It was one of the first buildings to use concrete brise-soleil to influence internal temperature.

I studied at UWA, and one of my lecturers there was Ralph Drexel. I’ve heard from many different people that he was responsible for the design of the CBH building. I’ve always assumed that was the case. Then most recently I attended the funeral of Darryl Way. I got talking with Colin Moore and I asked about the CBH Building.

CBH Exterior 1

CBH Exterior – click to enlarge

I asked Colin, “Can you set me straight, because I’ve always been told that Ralph Drexel was responsible for the design, but perhaps it was Darryl Way?” To which Collin replied, “Well actually there was a third person, being me.” Then Colin explained the intricacies of the process of design and the influences. In this article Colin explains the design story behind this important Perth building.

The structure itself has had lots of architectural accolades and is very well thought of. It’s interesting for me that there’s not as much background information about the design itself and the process and people involved. This is often the case with buildings. The company gets its name put to it but the people involved are not always acknowledged. In this article Colin describes how he came to be involved with the CBH Building project and the team who bought all the elements together so well.

Colin Moore:

The Team

As I recall Darryl Way came back from his work experience in London and joined Summerhouse and Associates and became a partner. He was very ambitious for the firm. He recruited Binky Collins, he recruited Ralph Drexel, he recruited me.

I was back from London and I’d been working for, Len Buckeridge. I was bought into the Summerhouse office to do the working drawings for the CBH office building. CBH was an enormously powerful organisation at the time. They used the firm Concrete Constructions to build their silos. That’s partly how they came to be involved with the building. Darryl was very thorough about the consultants and the personnel who were going to run that project.

Off-form Concrete

The decision to use concrete as the building fabric was made before I joined Summerhayes. I’ve always assumed that Darryl would have been talking to CBH and talking about the materials. We were all fascinated in those days with off-form concrete, so Darryl would have been right onto that. It seemed logical. CBH and Concrete Constructions had a good working relationship, as you can imagine, because of the wheat silos all over the country towns.

When I came in, there was already a well developed plan for the building: six floors, classic in a way. The pilotis of course in the West Australian way, not being for people but for motorcars.

(A pilotis is a series of columns so that the building is lifted above the ground as an object on columns between the ground and the first main floor of the building.)

Influence of Le Corbusier

CBH Exterior 2

CBH Exterior – click to enlarge

This was very much a European concept that you would lift the building above the ground, that you would have your very pure building. On the top you would have a garden, disturbed somewhat in this particular case by the fact that we had to have the air conditioning plant room up there. The basic concept for the building was European design influenced by Le Corbusier.

People have written about the building in terms of American influences from people I’ve never heard of. I feel certain that the building was influenced by European design. The team was Ralph Drexel and Darryl doing all the early hard yards and then me coming along later with the task of having to do all the working drawings and get it up and running and built.

Design Issues To Solve

At the time I arrived at Summerhouse the design for the CBH Building wasn’t quite working. It was this rather pure six floors of offices, then there was a separated service tower on the west end and there was a separate escape stair on the east end. We were running out of site because we were pulling these things apart and we were having difficulty getting the entry working. Anyway, I’m tangling with this problem of what to do. I spent a bit of time socially  with a fellow architect called Bob Gare. I talked to him about it. Bob said, “Well, why don’t you simplify things by attaching the independent service core to the west wall and attach the  escape stair and to the east wall?”

We had glass full high glass on the north side, full high glass on the south side. I got the service core tied up firmly to the west end, all encased in concrete, and the same thing with the east end with the escape stair, and rounded off the corners. Tightened it up. Kept the plant room, kept the idea of taking the lift stop to the roof, which was a key ingredient. It was a less flamboyant solution but we all agreed it solved some problems and had its own design logic.

Then we did the working drawings. Ralph made an enormous impact. He’d had that initial impact on the building, and he would have been very much involved. He and Darryl would have been very much as one on that initial design concept. Ralph got called in every now and again, but was put up onto other projects, and Darryl drove that project from start to finish, and beyond, with enormous zeal and dedication. He was the primary contact with CBH.

His relationship with Mick Lane, the CBH Chairman, and with Green, the CBH Secretary, was first name basis. They were in contact everyday. Darryl was the one promoting the design, selling the design and getting the client enthusiastic in the scheme.

Attention To Detail

He was enormously involved in every part of that. His passion for that project was enormous. Far more than Ralph, far more than me, in getting that building built. He drove me mad. “That sign on the car park is not quite right”, “That’s not the lettering type we want.” He was remorseless, and so dedicated to detail.

CBH Interior

CBH Interior – click to enlarge

Ralph was blessed almost with perfect pitch in a visual sense. He was pretty bloody good. He’d come in and say, “Well, what about we do this?” And you’d go and have a cigarette and talk. He was very gifted.

We probably all played our different roles fairly well in that particular little trio, because I was being pragmatic and doing lots of drawing and trying to make things really work. Darryl just had this overall passion for the whole project, that covered everything. Ralph just came in with grace notes and the overall aesthetic view of it. It was quite a good use of the various talents.

One thing is very clear. Geoff Summerhayes was a very good architect but as far as I saw he wasn’t involved with this project. Other than to say, “What’s taking so long and costing so much?”

These were heady times in Perth. They were exciting times. The Sixties. I was fresh back from London. Ralph was at the top of his game. Darryl had recruited various people, and he had this major project with enormous possibilities.

At the time I suppose I thought that the CBH building was ambitious. It was fairly generous in its use of glass, and it was done at a time when everybody was trying to save on air conditioning costs and trying to save on glazing costs.

We were much more focused on saving money, rather than spending money. This building was a little bit different in that it was not a commercial building as such. It was a home for CBH, a specific client. It was a powerful organisation, and big in the West Australian landscape, for many reasons. I felt that it was good that it reflected that, and was a generous building, in many ways.

Something Special

It was an office building, but it did have something special to it. Each floor was designed for a different purpose, so that was really nice. It was fairly complete design. There weren’t too many compromises.

A lot of buildings, you’ll see this is wrong and this doesn’t match this and that, but this was fairly complete in itself. I suppose that’s what we’re always after. We want something that is an entire work of art, only it’s not a work of art, it’s a work of architecture.

While it’s an office building it had a specific tenant, which always makes for a different outcome. You can be very specific about their requirements and do something very strong to represent them, rather than something that’s neutral that would suit various different people over time. I think that probably had a big influence, that you had that sort of long term commitment from the client to be in an office building, which is unusual in itself. It was their home.

It also housed the Australian Wheat Board, but they were all related entities. It clearly was their home. It was built by one of their prime construction company affiliates.They were the people who built the silos that stored the wheat. It was pretty appropriate, I think, for the times, and also had a a heroic feeling about it.

The Sunshades

I regret that we painted it white instead of leaving it grey. We’d used concrete in the walls, the sunshades and the entry. The sunscreens on north side were to control the sun entering. That was Ralph’s influence. Then we thought, “Hell, what are we going to do on the south side?” So we did the opposite to the north side, the concrete panels.

They came down to keep the sun out of your eyes. On the south side, they faced out, opened up, northwards. I thought that was rather poetic. That was good stuff. It would have been great to leave them as concrete but no one quite had enough guts to do it, to leave it grey.

It took a few more decades for the public to see the innate quality of off-formed concrete as being anything other than a sad reminder of concentration camps, prisons and industry. The nastier things of life. That was a little bit of a disappointment, but we bore that.

The Sign

Then the other thing was, I did the penetrations through the concrete, and it was backlit for the CBH lettering. Concrete Constructions went to a lot of trouble to do that. Then they all stood out the front with Chairman, Mick Lane, and Jim Green, and Darryl, and myself. There we were looking back up at the finished letters. Mick Lane said, “Nah, that’s not good enough. Nobody can understand what that is. That’s not CBH.” I was devastated. All that work. Then, indignity upon indignity, I had to design the sign that got stuck like a postage stamp, and those things are still there to this day, but there’s a big sign over them saying CBH.

There were faults in the building. The entry was always a bit understated. Famously, there was something at the top. There was a plant up here. On the model. It fell down, and Ralph stuck it at the entry.  “What about we do this as the entry?” So we did that.

The Lift Cars

There were other things like we spent a lot of time designing the lift cars. We put a big down light just above where all the panel was, inside the lift door. We lined the whole car floor with black vinyl. Then we went around the sides with padded leather. We showed Mick Lane the finished lift. He pressed the call to the lift, and the lift doors opened, and he went to step forward, and you know what he saw was a black abyss. He thought, “There’s no lift car.” It was as though you were stepping into a black hole to fall to your demise. We had to change that.

Darryl’s Passion

So in summary I don’t think Geoff Summerhayes had anything to do with CBH office building, I think he was a very fine architect. I think that Ralph’s contribution was essential to CBH office building. I think the passion of Darryl to get the best building he could out of it was really something. He was the heart and soul of the project. And Ralph and I played our separate parts, but it was Darryl’s passion that turned it into the memorable building it is.