Oakden, Addison and Kemp


Oakden, Addison and Kemp was an Australian architectural firm in Melbourne, Victoria. While it was short lived, existing from only 1887 to 1892, they designed a number of outstanding projects, and all three members designed many more notable projects in earlier and later partnerships.
The firm began as Terry & Oakden, a partnership of architects Percy Oakden and the prolific Leonard Terry from 1874 until Terry's death in 1884.George Henry Male Addison and Henry Hardie Kemp then joined in 1887, creating Oakden, Addison & Kemp. Addison, who had started a Brisbane branch in 1889 established his own practice there in 1892, leaving Oakden and Kemp practicing until Kemp moved to Sydney in 1895, dissolving the partnership in 1896.
In 1900 Oakden took on Cedric Henry Ballantyne to become Oakden & Ballantyne, until Oakden died in 1917.
One of the earliest projects of the partnership was North Park, a large mansion for Alex McCracken, of McCracken's Brewery, completed in 1888, which was amongst Melbourne's first examples of the Queen Anne style. The South Australian Insurance building completed the same year in Collins Street, part of the Rialto / Olderfleet group, is an interesting essay in the Gothic revival, with elements in the rarely used material, architectural terra cotta. Another large project of that busy year was the Queens Coffee Palace on the corner of Rathdowne Street and Victoria Street, overlooking the Carlton Gardens, in an exuberant style described as German Renaissance. The building never opened as a hotel, instead eventually become apartments, then a Catholic women's hostel, before being demolished c1970. Their broadly Queen Anne design for the 1889 London Chartered Bank in Queens Parade, Fitzroy North, is a local landmark, its three storey restrained red brick form accentuated by a conical roof. That same year they designed Alton, a large house on the slopes of Mt Macedon, in a style that has been described as Arts & Crafts, and notable for the first floor walling of hung terra cotta tiles.
The firm also took on the design of a massive project, the 12 storey Australian Property Investment Co. Building in Elizabeth Street, amongst the tallest in the world in 1889. Later known as the APA building, it was Australia's tallest building until 1912, and Melbourne's tallest until 1929. It was also designed in the new Queen Anne fashion, the tall spikes and spires of the roof adding to its verticality.
The next year they designed the more conventional, but still tall, premises for the YMCA headquarters, with its mansard roofs and internal hall. The YMCA never occupied it, due to the financial crash of the 1890s, which also curtailed the work of the firm.

List of works

Percy Oakden

Terry & Oakden

Oakden, Addison & Kemp

Oakden & Ballantyne