Douglas Calderwood was born in Johannesburg, the son of DY Calderwood, mine manager of the New Kleinfontein Gold Mining Company. Educated at King Edward VII School. His architectural studies were done at the University of the Witwatersrand. Thereafter he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on a foreign student’s scholarship. On his return he was appointed Chief Research Officer, National Building Research Institute (NBRI) of the SA Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), whereafter he became Head of the Architectural Division.
Calderwood’s doctoral thesis was published in 1953 as “Native Housing in South Africa” with funding from the CSIR. This focussed on the prevailing issue at that time: how to implement the new (1948) Nationalist government's post-Second World War township building programme and minimise costs. In the service of the CSIR, as a state-funded instrument for researching of the so-called ‘Native Housing problem’, Calderwood was charged with drawing up national standards for state funded housing while minimising cost. In his commendation of Calderwood's thesis, William Holford, then Professor of Town Planning at the University of London, describes the work as 'a breath of fresh air' because it shows that 'the technical, the social and the economics of housing must be looked at together'. Calderwood designed three housing types designated NE 51/6, NE 51/8 and NE 51/9 (where acronym ‘NE ’is non-European dated 1951 types 6, 7 and 9). While Calderwood stressed that these were intended as a demonstration of the outcome to the rational design process, they were nevertheless taken up by government and housing authorities to be reproduced in the thousands across South African for three decades from the 1950s. [Commentary précised from Haarhoff, 2010 (See Appropriating Modernism: Apartheid and the South African township.)]
Calderwood served as President of the Transvaal Provincial Institute of Architects for the term 1957/58. Calderwood was working at the National Building Research Institute when the University of the Witwatersrand invited him to manage the new Building Science course there in 1967. Calderwood overhauled the curriculum and improved its relevance. It was his subject, industrial organisation and management, rooted in Calderwood's father's mine management techniques, that characterized the whole building degree. In the course the importance of human relations in the building industry - welfare, incentives, conflict management, even body language, were taught.
He married Pauline Pearson of Port Elizabeth in 1949 by who he had two sons.