Enriching the community: The life and times of Frank Costello (1903-1987)

Abstract

Frank Costello's long career represents a series of illuminating encounters with the development of Australian planning, design practice and education. His career stretched from the 1920s to the 1970s, first in Sydney and subsequently in Brisbane where he was the senior architect-planner at Brisbane City Council between 1941 and 1952. He also worked for a decade in the Queensland Department of Works. He had a parallel career as an educator, commencing part-time at Sydney Technical College in 1937 and from the mid-1940s at what is now the Queensland University of Technology where the final phase of his career came as a senior lecturer in architecture with special responsibility for town planning. Post-war Brisbane gave him the opportunity to put into practice much of the modernist 'organic' theory that he had accumulated from his extensive studies and travels abroad. This paper recounts Costello's life and times as a journeyman planner whose life stories and professional philosophy is illuminatingly representative of the evolution of mainstream Australian planning values and the limits to practice.