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• Saunders Grant Application Form annual deadline June 2

Grants:

SAHANZ offers an annual grant in memory of the founder of the Society- "The David Saunders Founders Grant", The Saunders Grant is intended to support research by beginning researchers who are members of SAHANZ.

David Saunders

David Saunders was instrumental in forming SAHANZ and as foundation President he registered SAHANZ as an incorporated association in South Australia on 12th of September 1985. David Saunders was Professor of Architecture at the University of Adelaide and also President of SAHANZ when died in Adelaide in September 1986.

Educated at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and at the University of Melbourne where he also later completed his Masters degree on the architecture of 19th century Melbourne architect Joseph Reed, David Saunders was a Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne where he remained from 1956 to 1968. In that time, he became the first academic in Victoria to specialise in Australian architectural history. Saunders was also editor of the pithy and incisive architecture broadsheet Cross Section, taking over from Robin Boyd as editor in 1955 then passing this task onto Neville Quarry in 1961. David Saunders was also an architect and in 1962 he designed his own house in Parkville after his return from the United Kingdom as part of a Nuffield Fellowship. The exposed materials and strident honesty of this post-war interpretation of the terrace house startled many and paralleled interstate experiments in English New Brutalism.

In 1968 Saunders moved with his family to Sydney where he took up the position of Senior Lecturer at the Power Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney. In 1977 he was then appointed to the Chair of Architecture at the University of Adelaide where took a decisive role in redirecting that school's curriculum.

David's contribution to architectural history in Australia was substantial. He was the author of several texts on Australian architecture including the important Historic Buildings of Victoria (1966). He gave substantial service to the National Trust and the South Australian Heritage Committee. He was also the first Australian President of ICOMOS, the international professional conservation organisation.

As Judith Brine observed of David Saunders in his obituary in 1986:
"His career was one of dedicated service to the conviction that Australian art and architectural history was of great importance and interest. He not only demonstrated its academic potential in his own work but... provided the tools for others to work in the same field. His contribution as a teacher in training others, several of whom in their turn are now also eminent architectural historians, cannot be overestimated".