His modernist contemporaries include Roy Grounds and Frederick Romberg in Victoria, as well as Sydney Ancher and Walter Bunning in New South Wales; their respective Australian architectural careers in modernism began in the late 1930s.
A talented sketcher, Baldwinson was encouraged to study architecture and in June 1925 enrolled at the Gordon Institute of TAFE, Geelong, Victoria.
[1] Baldwinson won the William Campbell sketching competition in 1930 and next year was admitted as an associate of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects (RVIA).
[3][4] Baldwinson's winning entry was described in the RVIA Journal "to be congratulated upon the very excellent standard of his work throughout, which in the opinion of the assessors, in every way merits the award of the R.V.I.A.
The field notes also exhibit evidence of considerable skill with the pencil on the part of the competitor and of precision and care in the measuring of the work.
After saving £42 for the fare, in April 1931 Baldwinson reached London where he was employed as a casual illustrator and in the office of the Australian-born architect Raymond McGrath.
He became convinced that new building techniques allowed the architect to create original forms, cleansed of surface ornament and free from historical style.
In mid-1934, Baldwinson worked for the firm Adams Thompson and Fry during the period when principal partner and co-founder of MARS (Modern Architectural Research Society), Maxwell Fry, in collaboration with social reformer Elizabeth Denby, was designing Kensal House, the progressive, modernist housing scheme for the Gas Light and Coke Company.
Baldwinson designed a red-stained weatherboard house on a sandstone plinth comprising an external stair ramp, two bedrooms, upper-level verandah and playroom on the lower level.
The quiet, unassuming modesty which had so endeared Arthur Baldwinson to his friends may help to explain why his achievement was relatively unrecognised in his lifetime.
These avant-garde clients included Alistair Morrison, William Dobell, Harold Clay, Geoff and Dahl Collings,[16] James Andriesse, Max Dupain and Elaine Haxton.
[18] Baldwinson's palette of materials was consistent throughout his practice: bagged brick, weatherboard or vertical tongue-and-groove cladding and concrete contrasted against the irregularities of regional sandstone.
Although his practice was occasionally involved in commercial commissions, his greatest accomplishments lie in the adaptation of the principles and materials of European modernism for site-specific suburban Australian houses.
He helped to pioneer free-plan concepts, site-adjusted residential design, the 'scientific kitchen', flat roof treatments and the functional placement of windows and doors to create a distinctly regional variation of European modernism.