Do you remember what you had for lunch last Thursday? I certainly don’t and I suspect George Campbell wouldn’t either. But if you ask him about the budget and duration of a project he completed in 1963, it quickly becomes clear why he is such a fitting subject for a profile in any publication focused on the business of architecture.
“Completed that for $20,000,” he’ll say. “Took three months.”
Put simply, Campbell is a businessman through and through. Now in his mid 90s, Campbell came to architecture initially because he excelled in art at school. “We did clay modelling, plumbing, carpentry, art and I used to kill at every one of those subjects,” he recalls. “But maths and English I virtually failed, because I wasn’t interested in them.”
At 15, he wanted to leave school and work in his father’s furniture removal business, but his family insisted on him completing his education. So it was off to the Melbourne Technical College, which later became the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). In a case of fortuitous timing, it was the year that renowned architect Harry Winbush became head of the Department of Art and Architecture, a position he held for a quarter of a century. Campbell says he passed the entrance exam with
