RCH150 and Department of Paediatrics Connections

Sir Arthur George Stephenson (1890–1967). Architect of the original RCH Parkville site and paternal grandfather to April Fay - Campus Administrator, Department of Paediatrics.

Seen here at the RCH Parkville site (3rd from left), April's grandfather Sir Arthur George Stephenson was an Australian architect, born in 1890 at Box Hill, Victoria, Australia.

An instinctive internationalist and a tireless traveller, Stephenson specialized from 1924 in institutional and hospital work. In this most difficult and complex branch of modern architecture he sought solutions adapted to the functions of modern medicine, listening 'with sympathy and acute intelligence' to the men and women who would work in his buildings. He was a controversial reformer whose reputation was established with St Vincent's, the Mercy and Royal Melbourne hospitals, and with the Royal Prince Alfred in Sydney, monuments to his revolution in hospital design. Many of the major hospitals built in Australia from the 1920s to the 1960s reflected Stephenson's influence; in Melbourne they included the Royal Children's Hospital (and a large campus for 'crippled children' for the children's hospital at Somers and the early 1930s as the Orthopaedic Branch of the Children’s Hospital), the Mount Eliza Centre, a complex of buildings and structures built 1929-30, in 1931 the Lord Somers Camp, Queen Victoria, Alfred, Eye and Ear and the Freemasons.