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Photographs by Nic Walker
A “radically different way of seeing and working...” Opposite page, Glenn Murcutt, the master only wombats defy. Below, from top to bottom: Richard Leplastrier’s hands describe Australia’s wind currents; the Riversdale Arthur and Yvonne Boyd centre’s lawns; a masterclass student ventures
Glenn Murcutt is midsentence when it hits, the grief that
into Murcutt’s Fredericks/White
comes out of nowhere, like a summer storm. One moment he’s discussing what he loves, the nuts and bolts that give rise to his poetry. The next he is broadsided, undone again. “Such a loss,” he mutters, hunching slightly, as if winded. “It has been terrible, terrible ...” By rights, it shouldn’t be like this. At 75, Murcutt should be on the victory lap of a singularly illustrious career: father of the glasswoodcorrugated vernacular that has become Australian architecture to the world; the only local to win the Pritzker, architecture’s Nobel prize; the Royal Australian Institute of Architects gold medal; the Alvar Aalto medal; the Royal Danish Academy of Architects’ Green Pin award; the US Thomas Jefferson Foundation medal in architecture and the American Institute of Architects award. He’s an honorary fellow of just about every selfrespecting architects’ guild, a visiting professor from Yale to Denmark, and was elevated to the Pritzker jury this year, despite never having designed outside Australia, where he has ruled himself out of award contention. Not bad for a dyslexic kid who struggled through school, then college, unable to understand why most teachers were unable to understand him. None of it has provided the slightest protection against tragedy, however. Four months prior, his son, architect Nick Murcutt, died of lung cancer at 46, leaving two young children, his private and professional partner of 14 years, Rachel Neeson, whom he married 14 hours before his death, and a career in its prime. “It is by far the worst thing that has ever happened in my life,” Murcutt says. “I just loved that child so much. Losing parents is not easy, but to bury your child ... and such a beautiful child, such a talented young man, such a good human.” It stopped a tireless practitioner in his tracks. Murcutt hasn’t worked in a year, could see no point to a profession he had come to dominate, that has been his obsession since childhood – turning the woodblocks his father brought home from his joinery into houses lit with torch batteries. “I just sat there and cried and cried,” he says, when we meet in early July. “Until about two weeks ago, I couldn’t have given a stuff about architecture.” Days earlier, he has finally picked up pencil and paper again, (almost incredibly, he still works entirely by hand) with a slew of commissions building up, from a Melbourne mosque to a new centre at Mungo National Park in NSW and an opal and fossil centre in Lightning Ridge. “I started again this week,” says Murcutt. “I’d worked hard last week. I’d done good drawings and I got a lot of things organised. I worked ’til 10pm at night, which is what I used to do.”
house at Jamberoo, NSW – “one of the most documented homes of his career”.
HUNTERS AND
GATHERERS
Glenn Murcutt has survived the worst year of his life, with a little help from his friends, to work and teach again. They are Australian architecture’s éminence grises, and a decade after they set out to colonise the world, one architect at a time, the lesson remains the same, Brook Turner writes: if you want to design, you have first to learn to hunt .
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07/10/2011 - 16:08