Alistair Knox

Clifton Pugh: Portrait of Margot Knox 1958

I met Margot Edwards during 1948 in Matcham Skipper's Studio behind the Russell Street police station, and it was only a short time afterwards that I became her lover and a constant visitor to her in a loft in Ivanhoe. Margot was only eighteen years old and one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen. S... See more

His ability to maintain his opinions against all assaults won his pupils' unswerving allegiance and their frustrations, at the same time. He demonstrated his building and design ability every day as the work proceeded, irrespective of the observers' personal opinion of it. It could not be denied. He encouraged the rich to become patrons of his grea... See more

Alistair Knox was a designer, builder and advocate for an alternate lifestyle. Between 1946 and 1986 he designed over 1,000 houses, a number of churches, schools and other buildings. The job numbers reached 1266 of these he built about 350. He is best known for his mud brick output of about 300 buildings. These were built in two periods: before 195... See more

There were no regulations in those' days for slabs because there wasn't any slab work being done. It was also before the days of mobile concrete-mixers. In this case two men mixed the whole slab by hand in a single day, a fifty-two bag job, which meant some ten tons of screenings and about seven tons of sand. They scorned a mechanic.al mixer. Men w... See more

Margot and I were very happy at this time, especially because I had become the acknowledged leader of the movement. It was still in its infancy, but it was turning Eltham into a class of its own when it came to creative building. There was only one cloud in this otherwise brilliant sky. The use of natural material is always more difficult than that... See more

Building this house was the re-birth of the original organic concept of the immediate post-war beginnings. It involved a return to first principle devising from what was on hand. Earth for walls, negation of concrete slabs, brick and stone paving direct onto the ground, and the employment of non-professional builders. It recaptured those early days... See more

One Sunday, Alistair Knox and his wife Mernda rode up on their bikes from Heidelberg to Eltham, to find Matcham and ask him if he would work for Alistair and show a couple of chaps how to make mud bricks. One of his clients, who had been a soldier in the Middle East, had been impressed by the earth buildings he had seen there and wanted a small cot... See more

I was now using slab construction, a method I believed I had invented until I discovered that Frank Lloyd Wright had been employing it on his Usonian houses for well over a decade. The curved walls of the house and the three-levelled flat roof were a good example of contemporary design that received a great deal of notoriety , thereby elevating hum... See more

The discipline of limited finance immediately started to produce an aura of inspired improvising that enabled the amateur builders to move into the problem with a new awareness that they were beating the system once more. For the past ten years I had, to a considerable degree, let go the primitive architectural character and produced over a hundred... See more