Born in 1935, Allan Rodger studied at the Universities of Dundee and Durham, practised architecture in London, and taught at the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews. He was appointment Chair of Architecture at the University of Melbourne from 1974 until retirement in 1996, including periods when he served as Dean and Head of Department.
Allan was a pioneer in ecological thinking, and an early proponent for fundamental changes in architectural thinking to address the challenges of climate change (when it was still labelled the ‘greenhouse effect’). This intellectual passion extended from community-based design and the importance of local knowledge, to the larger scale of what he termed the ‘agro-urban system’. He was deeply involved in programs of self-help housing in Victoria and was a Foundation Director of the CERES Project in Brunswick.
At the global scale he was active in UN-Habitat, International Union of Architects (UIA) and the Commonwealth Human Ecology Council. Allan remained very active in International conversations on climate change, and was co-convenor in 2020 of a joint, International Union of Architects (UIA) and International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) project on Indigenous Ecosystem Corridors and Nodes within peri-urban rural, regional and transcontinental systems.
In 2015, Allan was awarded the Australian Institute of Architects’ 2015 Leadership in Sustainability Prize for over forty years’ of contribution at a local, national and global level in research, community understanding and architectural education in the field of sustainability.
He will be remembered as an innovative thinker whose work has helped to place the challenge of climate-change high on the agenda for all built environment professions.
He is survived by his children Jane, Michael and Paul and eight grandchildren.
A memorial will be held on Thursday, 7 July at Studley Grounds, 121 Studley Park Rd, Kew.
