Abraham Harold Krantz was born 15 February 1906 at ‘Tranmere’, a market garden property in Magill, today an inner eastern suburb of Adelaide in South Australia. His parents were David Krantz, a Ukrainian/Russian Jew who had arrived in Australia around 1899, and Isabel Eve Boas, born in Adelaide in 1874 to Dutch Jewish parents. David and Isabel were married by Isabel’s father, Rabbi Abraham Tobias Boas, in the Rundle Street Synagogue in Adelaide on 29 March 1905.
Isabel’s younger brother Harold Boas moved to Perth shortly after his sister’s wedding and established his own architectural practice which in 1923 became Oldham, Boas and Ednie-Brown. His young nephew and namesake Harold Krantz followed in his footsteps and after registering as an architect in Adelaide in 1926, arrived in Perth the following year where Boas was able to provide employment. The uncle who had inspired Krantz to become an architect was a former Perth City councillor and chairman of the Town Planning Commission. While they shared a common passion for architecture, their styles were vastly different, Boas looking to styles of the past and Krantz to the future.
Harold Krantz was registered as an architect in Western Australia on 15 July 1929, however, lack of employment due to the Depression saw him operate a small but successful commercial art business, ‘Poster Studios’, for two years before returning to architecture. His former colleagues John Oldham, Colin Ednie-Brown and Margaret Pitt Morison joined him in this venture which provided employment for many out of work artists. Experiencing the economic value to be found in mass production led Krantz to consider how the same principles could be applied to architectural practice. Krantz, strongly influenced by his Adelaide lecturer and mentor Thomas Alston Macadam, became interested in functionalism; basic, minimalistic design with a focus on cost efficiency. This philosophy shaped Krantz’s subsequent design ethic.
In the late 1930s Krantz, along with Oldham and Pitt Morison, designed some of Perth’s first multi storey blocks of flats including Oddfellows, Arbordale and Riviera, heralding a new era in flat construction and a future direction for Krantz.
