Chapter 1 of 18
Bill Corker
I'm Bill Corker; I'm a partner of Denton Corker Marshall. More specifically, I've worked with John Denton and Barry Marshall since 1972 in practice, but earlier than that, in 1963, we met at university as first year students. John and I finished our architecture course and went on to do planning as a postgraduate course and that was quite influential, I think, in the way we've worked because initially we couldn't get architectural work it just wasn't available or it certainly wasn't available to us and the practice that we worked in as employees, I suppose, did a lot of planning work and when we started practice we were able to continue that work with the National Capital Development Commission which was the commission that was building Canberra at the time and that was very interesting work and we, as young architects, as young planners were commissioned to do various bits and pieces of it small, I might add, but for my part I had no idea that the work that we were doing was so close to the cutting edge of planning thought at the time but I guess when you're young you don't know these things, you just do them and we had quite an interesting time in the early 70s the beginning of our practice, '72 to about '75, '76 when it all came to a halt. In Australian politics, the Whitlam government was the incumbent government at the time they got sacked and everything changed pretty well overnight. So that's the early part of the practice we're doing mainly planning work architectural work isn't happening for us the planning work we were doing in addition to laying out whole suburbs of Canberra we were working on, because we had a landscape arm to our practice we were working on freeway landscapes which were the main arterial roads around Canberra we were working in the Parliamentary Triangle which is the triangle between the city and Parliament House we did a fair bit of work around the Central Lake we did the Belconnen Town Park all sorts of things that I think are going to really come through. We're doing a lot of planning work that was big scale yet we're still waiting on our first architectural commission that was quite literally bigger than a kitchen. Then in the mid-70s we started entering competitions really just to see if we can get work and we were successful in the Melbourne City Square competition...