William Hardy Wilson

• Name — William Hardy Wilson • Born — 14 February 1881 • Birthplace — Campbelltown, New South Wales, Australia • Died — 16 December 1955 • Place of death — Richmond, Victoria • Education — Newington College Sydney Technical College • Occupation — Architect, artist, author • Illustration — Drawing of Hyde Park Barracks by Wilson. • Illustration — Harold Cazneaux photograph of Newington College War Memorial, designed by Wilson. William Hardy Wilson (14 February 1881 – 16 December 1955) was an Australian architect, artist and author. He "is regarded as one of the most outstanding architects of the twentieth century".

Wilson was born in Campbelltown, New South Wales in February 1881, the second surviving son of William and Jessie Wilson, and attended Newington College (1893–1898). He was a younger brother of Barrister David Wilson KC (1870–1965). The following year he was articled to Harry Kent at the firm of Kent & Budden and studied at the Sydney Technical College at night. During this period he took instruction in art from Sydney Long.

Upon completion of his articles he went to England and successfully sat for the intermediate (1906) and final (1908) examinations of the Royal Institute of British Architects. In London his circle of friends included George Washington Lambert and Arthur Streeton, and he served as secretary of the Chelsea Arts Club. Wilson travelled widely in Europe and the United States of America and became interested in the American Colonial style of architecture. After returning to Sydney in 1910, he married Margaret Rachel Reid McKenzie (d.1939), and in 1913 he went into partnership with Stacey Neave in George Street. Wilson exhibited regularly with the Society of Artists, and with other artists he founded the Fine Arts Society. In 1923 his work was hung in the Exhibition of Australian Art at Burlington House, London.

In 1927, Wilson left his architectural partnership and lived for three years in London before returning to Australia to live in Melbourne. He moved to Flowerdale in north-west Tasmania in the 1930s, where he contributed philosophical essays to the local newspaper. After the death of his first wife he married Elsie MacLean, and from 1940 they lived between a property at Wandin, near Mount Dandenong, and Kew in Melbourne. Wilson was an anti-Semite and during the 1930s and 40s an enthusiast for the cause of German and Italian Fascism, an enthusiasm based in large part on his embrace of climatic theories of creative development and, indirectly, the philosophies of Bergson, Nietzsche, and Hegel. He blamed Jews for thwarting his professional advancement and published in 1939 a plan for a guarded settlement for Jewish refugees in the Dandenongs. Wilson died in Richmond on 16 December 1955, survived by his second wife and by the son of his first marriage.

William Hardy Wilson made drawings of a variety of subjects including early Australian domestic architecture, colonial homesteads and churches, and poultry and other birds.

• Illustration — Purulia • Illustration — Eryldene • Illustration — Macquarie Cottage • Illustration — Montrose House, 71 Gaskill Street, Canowindra NSW - formerly Bank of NSW (Westpac) building