Frederick Romberg

Frederick Romberg
Frederick Romberg in 1937
Born	21 June 1913 Tsingtao, China
Died	12 November 1992 Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Nationality	German
Occupation	Architect
Awards	Inaugural President’s prize, National Architecture 2006 - National 25 Year Award
Practice	Grounds Romberg and Boyd (Gromboyd), later Romberg and Boyd
Buildings	Stanhill Flats, Newburn Flats, ETA Foods Factory, MacFarland Library, Ormond College, ICI Staff Recreation Centre, Holy Trinity Lutheran Church

Frederick Romberg, (Friedrich Sigismund Hermann Romberg), (21 June 1913, in Tsingtao – 12 November 1992, in Melbourne), was a Swiss-trained architect who migrated to Australia in 1938.

Romberg was known as the "middle term" in the architectural partnership of Grounds, Romberg and Boyd (Gromboyd) formed in Melbourne 1953 and dissolved in 1962. Ascribed his Swiss education as well as his awareness of great European academic tradition, he brought in the heritage of Switzerland and Germany to be re-formed into architecture appropriate to Australia with an intellectual preparation of design and execution. He led the way in exploring empiricist reinterpretation of modernism in the 1940s, His buildings are characteristically empiricist in intention and form, using local materials within the formal framework of modernism. In the 1950s, his buildings adopted forms of Australian rural architecture, and, beginning in 1983, gradually became well known in outskirt suburb areas of Melbourne’s architectural community.

Frederick Romberg, second child of Prussian parents Kurt and Else Romberg, was born on 21 June 1913 in Tsingtao, China with German origin. When he was born, his father worked in the Colonial Office in Tsingtao who was once a doctor of law and a judge in Berlin. He was later returned to Berlin with his parents in September 1913. About 7 years old, he was sent to stay for a year with his maternal grandparents in central Berlin and attended the Stresemann Real-Gymnasium, where the principal Walter Schadow, a supporter of Weimar Republic which has a broad vision of world affairs and Western cultural heritage. After his first enrolment in law at the University of Geneva, he later enrolled and spent five years between 1933-38 in an architecture course at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH-Zurich), one of the world’s leading technical universities. The earlier semesters of the course had a strong component of technical subjects such as mathematics, geometry and building statics. He developed a remarkably consistent and rigorous language of architectural form by handling with its ideology of modern movement, ribbon windows, cantilevers, roof gardens, open plan and new urban typologies. After the graduation from the ETH-Zurich, he joined Otto Rudolf Salvisberg’s office as an architectural assistant for 6 months and on one project, the seven storey laboratory building in Basle. Later in 1938, he arrived in Melbourne and became a registered architect in 1940. In his professional career from the 1940s to 1950s, he gradually refined his European modernist education into an appropriate local architecture design.