James Henry Esmond Dorney (17 September 1906 – 25 December 1991) was an Australian architect, known for a series of notable Streamline Moderne apartment blocks in Melbourne in the 1930s, and a series of inventive Modernist houses in Tasmania in the 1950s and 60s, where he has been credited with bringing Modernism to the island state. He is best known for the second house he built for himself in 1966 (reconstructed after being destroyed by fire in 1978), a remarkable design on a hilltop overlooking Hobart, Tasmania. Owned by the Hobart City Council since 2006, it is regularly open to the public.
Early life
He was born to Marie Louise Kiernan and James Henry Dorney in Melbourne, Victoria, and grew up from his teenage years in Elwood.
Dorney studied Architecture at the University of Melbourne in 1925–1926, until he was expelled for racing his Delage around the university campus. He later claimed to have been disenchanted in any case, dismissing the course as "a meaningless pursuit of Classical Revival."
He enrolled instead at Brighton Technical College, and commenced articles in the office of Australia's then most radical architects, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney Griffin.
In 1929, he began taking commissions of his own, and in 1931 established his own office, just as the full effects of the Great Depression were being felt, and there was little work. He spent some of his time in the period taking art classes, and studying engineering with Henry Allen, design engineer for the prominent firm of Johns & Waygood. In 1931 he married local girl Margaret Lambie, and the couple had two sons, John and Earl.
Architectural career
With the help of his mother and his father-in-law as clients, he began designing apartment blocks, especially in the Elwood area, eventually completing perhaps about 18 in that suburb alone. His early output was prolific, including houses, flats and maisonettes in Brighton, Caulfield, Armadale, Malvern, Kew and Middle Park, and his own house (demolished) in Sandringham. His early designs were occasionally Tudor Revival, but he also developed his own distinctive style, that combined Arts & Crafts and Prairie Style influences, employing panels of horizontal banded tapestry bricks and his own unique angular balusters. Starting with Windermere in 1936, many of his designs were strikingly Moderne; they featured dynamic compositions of contrasting horizontals and verticals, often with thrusting semi-circular ended balconies or window bays.
The projects for his relatives began with the conversion of the family home Chenier, into flats in 1934 for his mother; a later project was the 1939 beach front flats at 751 Ormond Esplanade named St Kiernan's, a play on his mother's maiden name Kiernan. In 1948 the name St Kiernan's was transferred to another block of flats designed by Esmond at 57 Ormond Esplanade (an interesting Modernist design with huge picture windows), but neither block is now known by that name. In 1940 he designed the Garden Court flats on Marine Parade for his father-in-law, John Robert Lambie, who lived there for the next 20 years.
World War II
Dorney's career as an architect was interrupted by World War 2, when he enlisted and served as a pilot in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve from 1940 to 1945.
At the fall of Singapore, he was redeployed to Java and worked behind Japanese lines, establishing secret radar installations. Spending some time in a POW camp, he eventually escaped and remained with Chinese guerillas until the end of the war. This period of forced design inactivity generated a revolution in his architecture.
Post World War II
Dorney returned to Australia, and moved from his home in Melbourne to Hobart, Tasmania, citing health and personal reasons. He designed a series of remarkable houses, beginning with his first tiny, circular house on the Fort Nelson constructed in 1949, and became the most noted post-war modernist architect in his adopted state. He did however continue to work in Victoria, designing amongst other projects Sandringham Hospital (1956–64), Caritas Cristi Hospice (with Stephenson and Turner)(1962).