QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Aesthetic escape to Queensland

His proposal for a pedestrian mall in Queen Street was also rejected, and he was among the first to argue for the use of the Brisbane River as a significant civic asset. Langer’s commission by Mackay City Council in late 1948 to provide a future plan for its civic buildings was recalled a half-century later with a showing at the city’s Exhibition and Convention Centre of some of the hand-coloured drawings he produced for the project. His work continues to be a rich source of research and inspiration for later generations of architects. One of his more stylish designs, a 1954 furniture showroom in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, was given a new lease of life 55 years later. The site had become a rather tired outlet for ‘factory seconds’ whitegoods and appliances. At the expiration of that lease, the property was gutted and rebuilt, appropriately enough, as an architectural practice, incorporating many distinctive design elements which hearkened back to the property’s Langer heritage. He was active in many professional and cultural organisations, including the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, and was a founding member and inaugural chairman in 1966 of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects. He also served as the first chairman of the Queensland division of the Royal Australian Planning Institute. He served three terms as chairman of the Queensland Art Gallery Society. Gertrude, who had created her own reputation as art critic for The Courier Mail since 1953 and as a patron of the arts, held the same position for four terms.

Karl continued lecturing at the University of Queensland and at the Queensland Institute of Technology (today QUT), before his death in Brisbane in 1969. His funeral was conducted in the chapel of St Peters Lutheran College at Indooroopilly, which he had often declared to be the building of which he was most proud. Gertrude continued her active life in the art and culture scene in Brisbane, popular and highly-esteemed, until she died in 1984. The house in Swann Road, though now a little altered, is registered on the Queensland Government’s cultural heritage list.

Background: The very epitome of style, Dr Gertrude Langer inspects a sculpture at a Brisbane art show on 3 April 1940. Image (digital ID 192031) courtesy State Library of Queensland

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