Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2023 i Architecture Australia

The Australian Institute of Architects works in the belief that everyone benefits from good architecture. Good design is not something to be reserved for a wealthy few. Our regional towns profit from highly considered built environments as much as our cities. And our homes, be they in suburban areas or remote desert communities, are just as worthy of architectural design as our big public structures. This core belief influences us all: staff, volunteers, National Council and Board of Directors. As I approach the end of my term as National President, I am moved by the immense amount of work – some that I took part in, some that I witnessed firsthand – the Institute did to uphold these principles in the past year. While there is always more to do,…

(COUNTRY) Larrakia Over a number of years, Sydney-based practice Incidental Architecture has forged an ongoing relationship with Nungalinya College in Darwin. Nungalinya is a tri-partisan Christian college (Catholic, Anglican and Uniting churches) teaching languages and leadership to First Nations students from across Australia. The students are mostly female, mostly mature age, and typically arrive from busy communities and lives with heavy commitments. They need a calm environment where they can focus on their studies, be supported and feel safe in the urban context of Darwin. Incidental Architecture principal Matt Elkan visited Nungalinya with World Vision in 2011 and an initial relationship was forged. In the years that followed, Incidental Architecture practice members were part of a church group from New South Wales that returned to the college annually to provide…

The train stopped on Peter Muller’s farm. No platform, just a track to Glenrock, a Georgian mansion with fluted sandstone Doric columns that Muller started renovating in 1964. I was 14 and carried a roll of drawings to receive a few hours of his tutelage in the conventions of architecture and the complications of materiality, prevailing winds, the inheritance of the landscape and light. That was 40 years ago. I disturbed Muller at work on an Oberoi hotel for Luxor. He had turned to hotel design after a stint as director of the National Capital Branch of the National Capital Development Commission, where he was responsible for commissioning Australia’s new Parliament House in 1977. “I asked Bert Read to draw a hypothetical scheme for the New Parliament – I wanted…

GXN is a vocal advocate for greater circularity in built environments. The group led the design of Circle House, which is Denmark’s first circular social housing project – 90 percent of its building materials are intended for future re-use. GXN also authored the influential Building a Circular Future report (2016), which captured the business and societal cases for circularity in built environment industries. Closer to home, 3XN and GXN (along with local practice BVN) led the radical upcycling of Sydney’s 1976 AMP Centre, creating the Quay Quarter Tower and saving an estimated 8,000 tonnes of embodied carbon. PHILIP OLDFIELD Could you tell me a little bit about GXN and its relationship to 3XN? LASSE LIND GXN was established 16 years ago. In the beginning, it was an attempt to make…

(GOLD MEDAL) Kerstin Thompson The Gold Medal is the Australian Institute of Architects’ highest honour. It recognizes distinguished service by architects who have designed or executed buildings of high merit, produced work of great distinction resulting in the advancement of architecture, or endowed the profession of architecture in a distinguished manner. The 2023 recipient of the Gold Medal is Kerstin Thompson. Thompson is an outstanding architect whose design practice is renowned internationally as a significant and innovative reference point in Australian architecture and urban design. For more than three decades, she has contributed generously to architectural discourse across the country through her work as a designer, educator and highly respected keynote speaker. Further, she has displayed dedication to the profession through extensive efforts with the Australian Institute of Architects, including…

Assertive and respectful, measured but rich – these are ways we can see Kerstin Thompson’s work with existing buildings. All of these projects, going back to the mid-1990s, have been guided by a dogged pursuit of what a site and building can do. While Thompson’s new building work responds directly to either an urban or a broader landscape, the heritage and re-use work develops a more immediate conversation with what was already there. This relationship between new and old can be seen as a companionship. To triangulate Thompson’s approach to existing buildings and heritage, we can consider three significant projects undertaken by the office in recent years: the Melbourne Holocaust Museum (2022), the Wertheim Factory conversion (2013) and Broadmeadows Town Hall (2019). Spanning public, institutional and commercial typologies, these projects…

During the final throes of organizing a Design Speaks symposium co-curated by Kerstin Thompson and Phillip Arnold, I received a call from the Institute with the name of the 2023 Gold Medallist. “I think you’ll be happy,” I was told. And I was – Kerstin had deservingly achieved the highest honour. I immediately called to congratulate her – and to warn her that although it might seem that our time working together would end with the symposium, we were about to embark on another big project: compiling the Architecture Australia tribute to her practice (page 77). Kerstin’s architectural work demonstrates a depth of thought that is not only visible in the drawings and built outcomes, but also astutely articulated in words by Kerstin herself – not always such a natural…

Australian architecture has lost one of its quietly brilliant changemakers. Les Clarke was a born pioneer. He was also a skilled masterplanner, a thoughtful friend, an unconventional problem-solver, and an encouraging mentor. He gave hundreds of Australian designers their break and helped his practice weather several recessions through innovative thinking and openness to change. He knew a good idea when he had it or heard it, and he backed people to pursue theirs. If Clarke had a motto, it was, “Go for it.” Clarke co-founded Clarke Hopkins Clarke Architects in 1960 with fellow RMIT architecture graduates David Hopkins and Jack Clarke. In 1973, when he founded and designed Eltham College, “chalk and talk” still ruled in schools. Standardized facilities were built quickly using design templates. In Victoria, the Public Works…

Clarity and serendipity: Negotiating the in-between Just as Kerstin Thompson Architects’ built projects revolve around interstitial spaces, Thompson’s cultural contributions have influenced “the grey zones of invention and possibility,” countering myths and opening up spaces for discussion. Early in 2001, Kerstin Thompson presented the work of Kerstin Thompson Architects (KTA) at a public lecture at the University of Melbourne under the title “Gradient architectures.” She spoke eloquently of the practice’s interest in the in-between and the interstitial; of “building the moments between opposites”; of incremental change, visible seams and stepped calibration; of an architecture “activated through occupation.” Recently arrived in Australia, I sat in that darkened theatre, entranced. The glowing images showed a compelling body of work, but what really captured my attention was the rigour and care of the…

(COUNTRY) Wurundjeri In the famous fifteenth-century painting La Città ideale di Urbino, a rotunda sits symmetrically on rigorously paved ground, with a harmonious backdrop of palazzi.1 It’s one of many utopian visions that propose rational, human-scaled architecture as key to civilized urbanity. Although it is 500 years and half-a-world distant from the project I’m standing in, it doesn’t seem that far away in intent, or critical moves. The Student Precinct Project at the University of Melbourne deploys the same tactics of organizing ground plane, centrality, view and perspectival drama, albeit in an energetic, messy varsity version and for a more inclusive understanding of humanity than Renaissance society encompassed. The principle of diversity underpins this massive project. Contemporary campus design is no longer the province of sole architecture practices, and the…

Being present in a place requires a stillness that feels like a luxury in our busy lives. It requires us to enact deep listening, to practise ngara – to listen, to think, to feel. In that listening, we can find Country, even in the deeply urban spaces. In these times of biodiversity collapse, climate emergency and ecological injustice inflicted by settler-colonialism, never has the invitation to ngara been more important for humans – particularly architects, designers and planners. We, the authors, contemplate what urban Country means during a walk in Melbourne’s Docklands – a tower-filled, post-industrial, urban renewal precinct that began as a hallmark of neoliberal planning in the mid-1990s. We meet at the end of a tram line, beneath the eight-lane Bolte Bridge in a park named after an…