ArchitectureAU – People

2013 Gold Medal: Discriminating Shapes

Sir Peter Cook — Wed, 22 May 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Some time in the 1970s an elegant young man slipped quietly into the Architectural Association in London and, being ourselves very primitive and Eurocentric at the time, we didn’t recognize him as being what we thought of as Australian because there was no blonde hair or brawn and not that much of an accent.

He attached himself to the unit headed by Elia Zenghelis and Rem Koolhaas, who ran a tight, even – dare I say it – modernist ship, but soon he started to hang out with romantics and the narrativists such as Nigel Coates and clearly had a more developed formal talent than most of those around him. Thus, he pretty quickly emerged as a star.

Tim Greer: Cloudy Bay and beyond

Justine Harvey — Thu, 16 May 2013 02:00:00 +0000

Justine Harvey: You’ve made a successful career in Australia as a director in the Sydney practice Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects (TZG) but you’re originally from Christchurch. What was behind the move?

Tim Greer: I grew up in New Zealand and loved my life here. I started working in Sydney and found it an incredibly optimistic and inspiring city back in the ’80s. It seemed like a perfect place to be because it had amazing civic architectural aspirations, that didn’t seem to be fully realized. I’d lived in lots of cities and spent a couple of years travelling the world and it just seemed like an exciting place to be. There was no grand plan; it just grew on me and stuck. It also helped that Australia is so close to New Zealand and I do come here [to New Zealand] a lot: two or three times a year at least. I’ve just done a little building in New Zealand with one of my friends.

Richard Kennedy: Qianhai Water City

Richard Kennedy — Mon, 06 May 2013 04:03:17 +0000

James Corner Field Operations is the lead consultant for Qianhai Water City – eighteen square kilometres of new city for four million people at the western edge of Shenzhen, China, a key location in the Pearl River Delta. After winning an international design competition in 2010 for the planning of the region, we have been consulting directly with the Urban Planning, Land and Resources Commission of Shenzhen Municipality, first as lead designers for the masterplan, then as lead designers for the Qianhai Pilot Zone (the central financial district), and most recently as lead designers for the schematic design of the entire landscape network, including over twenty-five square kilometres of green public landscape.

Landscape was fundamental to our approach to the project, which was the reason we captured the client’s imagination from the start. We took two positions at the outset. First, we had the view that any new city built at the industrial west end of Shenzhen would need to radically improve water quality if it aspired to be a new, vibrant, sustainable, twenty-first-century urban district. We saw water – and the waterfront – as the most important resource to work with – the defining feature of the territory.

Anupama Kundoo: Wall to wall

Justine Harvey — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 03:00:00 +0000

Justine Harvey: Firstly, I want to ask you about the Venice Biennale; it must have been very exciting to be involved and to show your exhibit in the historic Corderie of the Arsenale. Were you pleased with the end result? There were certainly some very good reviews in The Wall Street Journal and other media.

Anupama Kundoo: Yes, The New York Times and others, like The Wall Street Journal – who have taken a critical look at the whole Biennale – have flattered us very generously so, for me, it builds on a lot of my work (you will realise how old I am!) since 1990 when I started my practice.

Adam Cruickshank

Lynn Churchill — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 03:30:00 +0000

As a contemporary Australian designer, Adam Cruickshank produces work that draws from a complex synthesis of influences, including those absorbed during his travels in India, South-East Asia, Malawi and Zambia, where artisans work intuitively with materials and tools. In particular, though, spectacular memories of the first light of day striking the Namibian desert have transformed his mind’s eye, leaving lingering visions of dramatic patterns flowing across the vivid red, unbearably hot dunes.

Since then Adam’s speculations on the possibilities of form and structure, and his crafting of crisply faceted surfaces, have been enabled by his fascination for technology. What drives his design is the capacity of the virtual world to create and test design moves that seemingly transgress the structural logic and symmetry we have come to expect from the world of objects that surrounds us.

Beatriz Colomina: Paper architecture

Niki Kalms, Ari Seligmann — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 03:00:00 +0000

Nicole Kalms: In the introduction to [the exhibition] Clip/Stamp/Fold you state that “the proliferation of new technologies of communication and reproduction had an enormous role in defining historical and contemporary avant-garde practices.” How do you think current communication technologies are defining contemporary practices?

Beatriz Colomina: Well, that’s always very difficult to say. It’s easier to go back in history and see what actually happened. It is impossible to think about the avant-garde – not just in art, but in literature, in architecture, etc. – without thinking about its engagement with the media. For example, [the movement] futurism didn’t really exist – not even the group of artists existed, and no work [existed] whatsoever – before the publication of the The Futurist Manifesto in the pages of the most important newspaper in Paris, Le Figaro, a newspaper that was revered in Europe. If the manifesto had been published in a local Italian newspaper, futurism would not have gone anywhere. But in Paris it had a transformative effect. It not only advertised something that didn’t quite exist, but it recruited members of the group to join this not-yet-existing movement. The newspaper made the project happen.

Profile: Felix

Ray Edgar — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 06:14:00 +0000

In March 2012 on the front lawn of the architecture building at the University of Western Australia (UWA), an unbuilt masterpiece by Pier Luigi Nervi was finally realized. It was fifty-four years late and 130 kilometres south of its original site. The soaring white cathedral had been commissioned by Western Australia’s Benedictine monks at New Norcia. But students resurrected it, among forty other buildings, for the UWA project Unbuilt Perth. Using free augmented reality software on mobile phones and tablets, visitors could walk inside the virtual building at real scale.

“If you tag a GPS co-ordinate you can stick three-dimensional content into the environment and the phones will pick up where it is,” explains Rene van Meeuwen, UWA assistant professor and founder of Perth architectural practice Felix. By pointing their device at a tagged photograph of the Nervi building a 3-D image of it appears on screen. Moving the device causes the image to also move, creating a sense of immersion in the building.

Profile: Collins and Turner Architects

Maitiú Ward — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 07:13:00 +0000

It’s not about trinkets, or decorations. It’s about materiality,” says Huw Turner emphatically, swerving to avoid the glossy panel-work of an oncoming Range Rover. Huw is both knowledgeable and deeply passionate about architecture, characteristics that have no doubt helped to shape the highly refined, singular residential work of Collins and Turner, the practice that he shares with his partner in life and business, Penny Collins. Barrelling down the narrow, congested streets of Sydney’s well-to-do suburb of Paddington, though, this intensely focused passion is proving to be a worrying distraction. We’re in a rush because Huw has a barbecue with some of his old clients to get to and we have just two hours to tour three of his houses. Fortunately, all of the projects are located in and around Paddington and nearby Bellevue Hill. These lushly vegetated neighbourhoods, many of which enjoy spectacular outlooks down to Sydney’s famous harbour, are a long way from the kitchen table in dreary London where the Collins and Turner architecture practice began.

Collins and Turner’s first commission was for a small retreat in rural Bombala, New South Wales. Penny and Huw were working for Foster and Partners’ London office when an opportunity came up to design a house for an old friend in Australia. “We were visiting the owner and he said he was going to try to get Glenn Murcutt to design the house,” recalls Penny. “We asked that he let us look at it first.” Despite the fact that Penny and Huw were living in the UK, with no actual practice to speak of, the owner agreed.

Peter Wilson awarded 2013 Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal

2013 Gold Medal jury — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:15:00 +0000

Peter Wilson has been awarded the 2013 Gold Medal in recognition of an outstanding body of architectural works of great distinction, widely published and exhibited over more than thirty years, and for his longstanding contribution to the development of architectural drawing as a tool of representation and research. As an expat Australian, Peter Wilson has served as a remarkable statesman for Australia.

Peter Wilson was born in Melbourne in 1950. After studying architecture at the University of Melbourne, he went on to the AA [the Architectural Association School of Architecture] in London in 1972, where he met Julia Bolles-Wilson. Originally established in London in 1980, the partnership ultimately evolved into Architekturbüro Bolles+Wilson, based in the

2013 Pritzker Prize citation: Toyo Ito

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 23:55:00 +0000

Throughout his career, Toyo Ito has been able to produce a body of work that combines conceptual innovation with superbly executed buildings.

Creating outstanding architecture for more than forty years, he has successfully undertaken libraries, houses, parks, theatres, shops, office buildings and pavilions, each time seeking to extend the possibilities of architecture. A professional of unique talent, he is dedicated to the process of discovery that comes from seeing the opportunities that lie in each commission and each site.

Marisha McAuliffe: Design process

Christina Waterson — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 04:53:37 +0000

Marisha McAuliffe is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology School of Design. I first met Marisha in 2008 when I was a subject for one of her PhD research interviews. She asked questions about my creative process that I had never been asked before and haven’t been asked since.

Christina Waterson: How did you get into this type of research?

Tom Dixon

Deborah Niski — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 04:00:00 +0000

Deborah Niski: You’re such a prolific designer. What spurs you on to design the next thing – is it a search for perfection, or an exploration?

Tom Dixon: Well I don’t think it’s perfection. I’m always dissatisfied with what I did before. And I’m genuinely interested in making things, so it’s as if I found a fantastic hobby. That was how I became a designer and that’s still the joy of it, you just can’t get bored. There is always something new happening: new manufacturing technologies, or new categories that you want to tackle. I’ve engineered my setup so that I can just have ideas, and see them through to production. It’s not that simple … there is always some new problem to crack, or a technique or new material that keeps me awake.

Int. Women’s Day Scholarship

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Sydney architect Rana Abboud has been awarded the 2013 International Women’s Day Scholarship from National Women in Construction (NAWIC).

Valerio Olgiati and unclaimed meaning

Andrew Burns — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 05:02:36 +0000

The recent talk (February 2013) in Sydney by Valerio Olgiati, part of the Australian Institute of Architects International Speaker Series, presented an opportunity to consider the possibility of architecture to hold meaning, and the nature of that hold.

I have not visited any of Olgiati’s projects, but am familiar with the various texts on the architect and enjoyed his recent lecture, given after the architect spent a full month travelling around this continent, unusual for someone of such profile.

Meet Cameron Foggo

Michael Barrett — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 02:00:00 +0000

I was drawn to anything design orientated from a young age as both of my parents are designers. My father started his career by making cane furniture, which was very cool at the time, in our garage. When I was a child, I liked to watch and occasionally staple things together with the very dangerous and exciting high-pressure staple gun. He eventually opened a showroom. I remember at age six or seven drawing pictures of how I thought the window display should look – I was always trying to provide creative input. His business evolved over time and, many years later, I joined the family business. My prior work as an artist was quiet, while furniture design was quite exciting, so it quickly became something I was very passionate about. The initial years working for my father served as an apprenticeship of sorts. I spent a lot of time modelling his designs for clients. I learned a lot more on the job than I believe I ever could have from any other avenue. Eventually I created my own designs, which were commercially successful and things just built from there.

It was a floor lamp… the process involved a big block of Oregon and a chainsaw. You’re now based in Sydney after some time in Christchurch.