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Corrigan, Peter (Russell)
(b Daylesford, Victoria, 6 May 1939). Australian architect and stage designer. He graduated from the University of Melbourne (1966) and then studied at Yale University, New Haven, CT (1966–9), and worked briefly for several notable architectural firms in the USA, including those of Paul Rudolph and Philip Johnson. He was impressed by Robert Venturi’s attempt to use popular culture to forge a new regional idiom (see VENTURI, RAUCH & SCOTT BROWN), and, on his return to Australia in 1974, he began to develop a new ‘poor architecture’ based on a provocative, angular reinterpretation of everyday suburban forms and materials, combined with elements from canonical works of Modernism. In 1975, together with Maggie Edmond (b 1953), he formed the firm of Edmond & Corrigan; and he also began to teach at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in the late 1970s. His work and teaching subsequently had a powerful influence on younger architects in the city. Corrigan typically used bright clashing colours, patterned brickwork and awkward colliding and distorted forms in his buildings. Notable early work included the Resurrection Church, primary school and housing (1974–9), Keysborough, Victoria, and St Joseph’s Chapel (1976), Boxhill, Melbourne. From the 1980s his work became even more eclectic in its sources and richer in its complex collage of patterns and shapes, suggestive of Australia’s increasingly multi-cultural society. Examples include the Belconnen Community Centre (1987), Canberra, with complex layered functions and polychromatic brickwork that challenge the city’s chaste architectural traditions; the Athan House (1989), Monbulk, Victoria, with a sharp, prowlike end; and the multipurpose building (1990–93) for the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, which exuberantly and impudently straddles the Brutalist, single-storey Students’ Union (1978) by John Andrews. Corrigan also designed sets and costumes for a large number of theatrical productions in Australia, which influenced the character of his architecture.
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