Ingham Court House

Ingham Court House
Ingham Court House
	Ingham Court House, 2009
Location	35-39 Palm Terrace, Ingham, Shire of Hinchinbrook, Queensland, Australia
Coordinates	18°39′04″S146°09′22″E / 18.6512°S 146.1562°E Coordinates: 18°39′04″S146°09′22″E / 18.6512°S 146.1562°E
Design period	1940s - 1960s (post-World War II)
Built	1948
Architect	John Hitch of the Department of Public Works (Queensland)
Architectural style(s)	Modernism
Queensland Heritage Register
	Official name: Ingham Court House
Type	state heritage (built)
Designated	28 April 2000
Reference no.	601546
Significant period	1940s (historical); 1948-1950s (fabric)
Significant components	court house
	Location of Ingham Court House in Queensland Ingham Court House (Australia)

Last updated April 09, 2019

Ingham Court House is a heritage-listed courthouse at 35-39 Palm Terrace, Ingham, Shire of Hinchinbrook, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by John Hitch of the Department of Public Works (Queensland) and built in 1948. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 28 April 2000.^[1]

A courthouse is a building that is home to a local court of law and often the regional county government as well, although this is not the case in some larger cities. The term is common in North America. In most other English-speaking countries, buildings which house courts of law are simply called "courts" or "court buildings". In most of Continental Europe and former non-English-speaking European colonies, the equivalent term is a palace of justice.

Ingham is a town and locality in the Shire of Hinchinbrook, North Queensland, Australia. It is the administrative centre for the Shire of Hinchinbrook.

The Shire of Hinchinbrook is a local government area in North Queensland, Queensland, Australia. The shire, administered from the town of Ingham, covers an area of 2,810.8 square kilometres (1,085.3 sq mi), and has existed since its creation on 11 November 1879 as one of 74 divisions around Queensland under the Divisional Boards Act 1879.

History

The Ingham Court House was designed in 1948 by John Hitch of the Queensland Department of Works. The building replaced an earlier court house on part of the site which was retained for other purposes.^[1]

The earlier court house was constructed in 1915 and was a single-storeyed timber building. Following construction of the 1948 Court House, the 1915 building was taken over by the Police Department and altered. The 1948 building was located on the corner of Park Terrace to the north and Davidson Street to the east. It was deliberately designed to establish a more impressive civic streetscape and to signify a self-conscious post war progressivism and expansion. Designed in 1948, its completion took about five years owing to post war shortages of building materials, particularly bricks.^[1]

John Hitch qualified as an architect in England in 1938 and served as a Flight Lieutenant in the RAF during World War II. His early work was influenced by Scandinavian and other prewar streams of modernism. He later won a design competition for government buildings in Reykjavik, where he had served during the war. The buildings were later featured on a series of Icelandic postage stamps.^[1]

Flight lieutenant Junior commissioned rank

Flight Lieutenant is a junior commissioned air force rank that originated in the Royal Naval Air Service and is still used in the Royal Air Force and many other countries, especially in the Commonwealth. It is also sometimes used as the English translation of an equivalent rank in non-English-speaking countries, especially those with an air force-specific rank structure.

Royal Air Force Aerial warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces

The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the United Kingdom's aerial warfare force. Formed towards the end of the First World War on 1 April 1918, it is the oldest independent air force in the world. Following victory over the Central Powers in 1918 the RAF emerged as, at the time, the largest air force in the world. Since its formation, the RAF has taken a significant role in British military history. In particular, it played a large part in the Second World War where it fought its most famous campaign, the Battle of Britain.

World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. The major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China. It included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, and the only use of nuclear weapons in war.

On demobilisation, Hitch worked as a specialist valuer in compensation claims for UK buildings requisitioned during the war years. In 1947 he was one of about six UK architects recruited for the Queensland Department of Public Works and fulfilled a three-year contract in Queensland until 1951. By then he was apparently the last of the group remaining in Queensland; some of the others having broken their contracts and returned to the UK. Hitch entered private practice for some years with Theo Thynne. For most of his time in Brisbane he combined a diverse architectural practice with part-time teaching of Design to senior years in the University of Queensland Bachelor of Architecture course. In 1962 he left the Brisbane practice, at that time being the partnership of Hitch and Sinnamon, and joined Bates, Smart and McCuthcheon in Melbourne where he remained until retirement.^[1]

Brisbane is the capital of and the most populated city in the Australian state of Queensland, and the third most populous city in Australia. Brisbane's metropolitan area has a population of 2.5 million, and the South East Queensland region, centred on Brisbane, encompasses a population of more than 3.5 million. The Brisbane central business district stands on the historic European settlement and is situated inside a peninsula of the Brisbane River, about 15 kilometres from its mouth at Moreton Bay. The metropolitan area extends in all directions along the floodplain of the Brisbane River Valley between Moreton Bay and the Great Dividing Range, sprawling across several of Australia's most populous local government areas (LGAs)—most centrally the City of Brisbane, which is by far the most populous LGA in the nation. The demonym of Brisbane is "Brisbanite".

University of Queensland university in Australia

The University of Queensland (UQ) is a public research university primarily located in Queensland's capital city, Brisbane, Australia. Founded in 1909 by the state parliament, UQ is Australia's fifth oldest university and is colloquially known as a sandstone university. UQ is considered to be one of Australia's leading universities, and is ranked as the 48th most reputable university in the world. The University of Queensland is a founding member of online higher education consortium edX, Australia's research-intensive Group of Eight, and the global Universitas 21 network.

Melbourne is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia and Oceania. Its name refers to an urban agglomeration of 9,992.5 km² (3,858.1 sq mi), comprising a metropolitan area with 31 municipalities, and is also the common name for its city centre. The city occupies much of the coastline of Port Phillip bay and spreads into the hinterlands towards the Dandenong and Macedon ranges, Mornington Peninsula and Yarra Valley. It has a population of approximately 4.9 million, and its inhabitants are referred to as "Melburnians".

John Hitch's time with the Queensland Government, then considered something of a backwater, produced a number of significant and innovative designs. The Department's excessive division of labour and particularly the exclusion of design architects from site visits even in the initial design stage were unwelcome impediments, which Hitch contested with occasional success. The Ingham Court House was his first design project for the Department and he contrived a site visit there, during a near cyclone. His resulting design attempted to incorporate innovative climatic design with "a "contemporary" design acceptable within the departmental and ministerial understanding" and successfully achieved what he called "newly established post-war imagery of a public building".^[1]

In meteorology, a cyclone is a large scale air mass that rotates around a strong center of low atmospheric pressure. Cyclones are characterized by inward spiraling winds that rotate about a zone of low pressure. The largest low-pressure systems are polar vortices and extratropical cyclones of the largest scale. Warm-core cyclones such as tropical cyclones and subtropical cyclones also lie within the synoptic scale. Mesocyclones, tornadoes and dust devils lie within smaller mesoscale. Upper level cyclones can exist without the presence of a surface low, and can pinch off from the base of the tropical upper tropospheric trough during the summer months in the Northern Hemisphere. Cyclones have also been seen on extraterrestrial planets, such as Mars and Neptune. Cyclogenesis is the process of cyclone formation and intensification. Extratropical cyclones begin as waves in large regions of enhanced mid-latitude temperature contrasts called baroclinic zones. These zones contract and form weather fronts as the cyclonic circulation closes and intensifies. Later in their life cycle, extratropical cyclones occlude as cold air masses undercut the warmer air and become cold core systems. A cyclone's track is guided over the course of its 2 to 6 day life cycle by the steering flow of the subtropical jet stream.

The Ingham Court House was designed and constructed as a two storeyed brick and reinforced concrete structure with an impressive entrance and stair hall to the first floor court rooms. Sun control was effected within the building by recessed wall surfaces broken by piers and horizontal metal sun hood spaced to promote convectional air flow. Mechanical ventilation equipment was installed within the roof space under a curved ridge line. This innovative roof profile, which was apparently a casualty of an on-site design change, was a response to cyclonic wind speeds, and anchored down to reinforced concrete perimeter beams.^[1]

Description

The Ingham Court House is a two storeyed rendered brick and reinforced concrete structure with a generally symmetrical facade to Palm Terrace and a less formal asymmetrical grouping to Davidson Street. The fibro-cement sheeted roof has a characteristic ventilated hipped gable arrangement with strongly expressed eaves, in form and pitch reflecting that of the neighbouring earlier court house, which however is no longer clearly visible. The main ridge as built is a departure from the architect's intention as seen in the working drawings, which show a curved ridge of a type which became popular some decades later.^[1]

The north (Palm Terrace) elevation is rhythmically articulated with brick piers, protecting vertical windows and the outer walls of the upstairs Juvenile Court and witness rooms and downstairs offices.^[1]

A central entry at ground floor level leads up to a ground floor public space and an elegant bifurcating staircase, whose intermediate landing forms a projecting foyer space protecting the entry below, and is expressed with a generous glass wall overlooking the street. Smaller upper windows on the western elevation are protected by overhanging eaves and those on the ground floor have light horizontal window hoods, those rooms being mainly toilets and ancillary services. A similar projection occurs on the eastern elevation where windows are larger and to a projecting single storeyed wing housing secondary offices, with a separate podium entry from the street. The south elevation continues the pattern of large vertical windows to the upper floor, serving the Court Room and the general office on the ground floor.^[1]

The corner site includes lawns and large trees to the rear of the building, with a row of vigorously growing palms partly obscuring the front facade.^[1]

Generally the interiors are intact and impressive, particularly in view of the inadequate system of construction supervision customary at the time. The interior generally has timber framed floors, rendered brick wall, painted panels and lightly detailed timber. The influence of Scandinavian modernism may be seen in the understated blond timber finishes and joinery, and the lightness and precision of the planar composition of court room fittings. The main staircase is light and airy, with grey terrazzo treads and risers and an almost freestanding handrail tracing a playful line within the generous volume containing the stairs. The stairwell creates a remarkable focus in a finely contrived sequence of spaces.^[1]

Heritage listing

Ingham Court House was listed on the Queensland Heritage Register on 28 April 2000 having satisfied the following criteria.^[1]

The place is important in demonstrating the evolution or pattern of Queensland's history.

The place is important because of its aesthetic significance.

The place is important in demonstrating a high degree of creative or technical achievement at a particular period.

The Ingham Court House represents an early expression of a Government intention to develop a progressive and sophisticated image through its postwar building program. The building was designed by John Hitch, one of the young English architects recruited by the Department of Works in 1947. The Ingham Court House can be seen as one in a sequence of provincial court house buildings including Tully Court House (1945) and Bundaberg Court House (1956) and also designed by Hitch, by then in private practice. The place is significant for its place in this history of public architecture and government policy and as an important stage in the work of its architect, as well as for its aesthetic qualities of architecture and its technical innovations particularly in climatic control in the tropics.^[1]

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References

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 "Ingham Court House (entry 601546)". Queensland Heritage Register . Queensland Heritage Council. Retrieved 1 August 2014.

Attribution

This Wikipedia article was originally based on "The Queensland heritage register" published by the State of Queensland under CC-BY 3.0 AU licence (accessed on 7 July 2014, archived on 8 October 2014). The geo-coordinates were originally computed from the "Queensland heritage register boundaries" published by the State of Queensland under CC-BY 3.0 AU licence (accessed on 5 September 2014, archived on 15 October 2014).

External links

Media related to Ingham Court House at Wikimedia Commons

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[qhr-1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 "Ingham Court House (entry 601546)". Queensland Heritage Register . Queensland Heritage Council. Retrieved 1 August 2014.