n
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 .
030
30-Features-FINM
07/10/2011 - 16:08
31-Features-FINM
01/11/2011 - 11:20
Australian architecture’s blue eyed bunch... Left to right: Brit Andresen, Peter Stutchbury, Lindsay Johnston, Richard Leplastrier, Glenn Murcutt at the Riversdale centre for the 10th masterclass in July this year.
dropped thread of our conversation, his grand passion. What could he possibly have left to achieve, you wonder, especially at such a time. “The next job,” he says, without hesitation. “It’s very easy to do bad work, very hard to do good work, and the better you are, the harder it gets. Every job is a challenge, because anything we’ve done that’s any good just makes everything in the future vulnerable. No one realises, but I find architecture terribly hard.” “Glenn worried he wouldn’t work again,” his friend and protégé Peter Stutchbury says the next day. “But he will, because he is who he is. And he will do it with an even deeper respect and he’ll do it all the time thinking of Nick. He might even do it with Nick in mind,” Stutchbury adds. “Not even with him in mind – the work Nick couldn’t do.” In a sense, the tragedy of Glenn Murcutt’s life occupies a
parallel universe to the masterclass that bears his name, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this winter at Riversdale, Arthur Boyd’s original Shoalhaven property (together with the adjacent Bundanon he donated it to the public in 1993) on the NSW south coast. The moment in which grief breaks through happens to one side, away from the students wandering the property, while Murcutt is showing me his breakthrough public commission, the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd education centre, explaining its ingenious, Chinesebox design: the cantilevered roof pitched to channel light into a building that flares back from a single column, pared to a blade so that eye and wind alike shoot straight to the view; every niche and angle an elegant solution to an entirely practical problem. In another sense, that tragedy is central to what has always been a lesson in humanity as much as a global design course, delivered by the singular posse that has gathered each year on this bend of Shoalhaven River, beneath Riversdale hill, familiar
from the Boyd canvases painted here, usually with at least one Godzillasized parrot marauding in the foreground. Even without Murcutt, they are some of this country’s greatest practitioners: architect’s architect, RAIA gold medallist and the master of the ‘nonhouse’, Richard Leplastrier, 71, protégé of Jørn Utzon, Lloyd Rees and Tomoya Masuda; Brit Andresen, Queensland University’s Norwegianborn professor emeritus, the first woman to receive the RAIA gold medal, who has been conjuring the light and shade of her native birch forests up north for decades; and Stutchbury, whose projects have ranged from the Olympic archery pavilion in Sydney to designer Issey Miyake’s Japanese home, and who – a generation younger – is being groomed as the masterclass’s next Murcutt. They come to teach what many – not least the students who have come from around the world in the middle of a global downturn, paying 8000 pricey Australian dollars for the privilege – consider a dying art: architecture as a studiobased practice, relying on pencil and paper, a pair of legs and a pair of eyes, rather than the nearly limitless, often pointless possibilities of computeraided design. “Universities are all about computers, but they can’t design for you or help you find the rhythm of a building,” Murcutt says on the first night, standing at the great refractory table that runs the length of the main hall. “Your hand arrives at solutions before your mind has even understood them. What we are looking for is an architecture that is a response to place, not an imposition on it.” Or as Leplastrier puts it: “Most of us here are more interested in unbuilding than building.” That prelapsarian mindset is what attracted the US Pritzker jury to Murcutt back in 2002, as an antidote to the bloated, egodriven maximalism of the last boom. “Glenn Murcutt occupies a unique place in today’s architectural firmament,” jury chairman J. Carter Brown said. “In an age obsessed with celebrity, the glitz of our ‘starchitects’, backed by large staffs and copious public relations support, dominates the headlines. As a total contrast, our laureate works in a oneperson office on the other side of the world ... yet has a waiting list of clients, so intent is he to give each project his personal best.” It was also what originally inspired the fifth musketeer,
Lindsay Johnston, the Irish former Newcastle University dean of architecture, to conceive the masterclass, back before Murcutt won the Pritzker, or indeed before the environ mentalism the group helped pioneer became the rule, rather than exception. “I thought there was a radically different way of seeing and working here that wasn’t happening anywhere else,” Johnston says, “and I thought it would be good if we could spread it around the world.” And it’s definitely what drew this year’s crop of 33 students, aged from the mid20s to 70s, mostly midcareer practitioners on sabbatical, adding Jamaica, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic to the 55 countries from where previous participants have come. One by one, they rise to their feet on the opening night to say why they came. “I have been practising and teaching architecture for 35 years and in those years the basic principles of architectural performance have been lost,” Bo Frederiksen, an architect, lecturer and critic (at the Danish Royal Academy School) says by way of introduction. “I would like to incorporate some of Glenn’s very basic architectural values into my practice.” “I’m here because of computers,” says Petra Kondres Tomazic, from Zagreb, who got her master’s two years ago. “I still find them strange; they have made things very complicated; it could be much simpler.” Luca Fancello from Olbia, Italy says he is here “to learn a new approach”. “I want to learn what it is to build for the landscape and not against it. In my country we have always built against the land,” says Naita Chamberlain from Jamaica. “I can’t believe I can call Glenn Murcutt ‘Glenn’,” blurts Gerard Damiani, a US architect and academic at Carnegie Mellon, still recovering from the epiphany that was the class visit to Murcutt’s Fredericks/White House in Jamberoo. (“It’s one of the most documented homes of his career,” he whispers, surveying the living room reverentially. “I’m so used to seeing it in two dimensions, it’s an outofbody experience.”) The twoweek residential course, first at Riversdale then at CarriageWorks, in the innercity Sydney suburb of Redfern, is indeed up close and personal. “You will see no discomfort with any one of the four people up there in each other’s presence,” Stutchbury says. “It’s just not common that significant
032
32-Features-FINM
01/11/2011 - 11:20
there”, Stutchbury continues, sitting in Boyd’s former studio, a Newcastle University and primlooking weatherboard founder of the Glenn Murcutt cottage down the slope from the masterclass outside Murcutt’s centre on the third day of the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd class. “Everyone is walking on Education Centre overlooking the same ground. Glenn is one of the Shoalhaven. the best architects in the world, and he is sitting there with 25 yearolds, drawing with them and washing their dishes.” He means that literally. Meals are communal, from construction to demolition, and everyone bunks together in the wing designed for school groups, albeit with the usual exquisite Murcutt touches, including the bunkside windows that wake you to a dawn straight off an Arthur Streeton cigar box. And they do wake you. Blinds are forbidden. So is heating (“Why would you want to fill your lungs with that muck?” Murcutt says one breathfrosting morning. “Just put on another jumper.”) The tidemark running the length of the white external wall of the sleeping wing is more of a challenge. “Look at that brown line,” he instructs the students. “It’s the precise height of a wombat’s arse. They get up there and rub themselves along. I’ve never worked out how to stop them.” And that is the real lesson: noticing, paying attention, diagnosing. More than design, the students are being taught to hunt. “Every architect must have a hunter’s mind: a mind that is absolutely tuned to everything about them and understands absolutely the pattern of things and can pick up the slightest shift and react,” says Leplastrier, who honed his skills as an inveterate sailor and working with Utzon on the Sydney Opera House. “He had a hunter’s mind and it was given to him by his father, who hunted with guns and dogs and who was a naval architect. He ran the shipyard at Helsingør. As a young fellow, Lindsay Johnston, the former dean of arcitecture at
architectural minds sit comfortably together like that. There’s a lot of competition in architecture, it might be unspoken, but there’s just absolutely zero in this team of people; they are there for the benefit of students and each other.” The latter reference is more than passing; that intimacy has been honed on the harder passages in their lives. “In many ways we’re family; we love each other,” says Stutchbury, who has a youngest sibling’s wraparound view of his elders. “We probably carried Glenn last year, because Nick was very sick and Glenn was a mess. But that’s part of it. Brit lost her husband [and professional partner Peter O’Gorman] 10 years ago; Rick has had his own hardships, his brother committed suicide when he was younger, that was a turning point for him. “And I’ve had a very difficult period over the last 4½ years. My wife left me; I’d had great stability in my life and I lost it. I was really susceptible. They all carried me that year, but it was Brit who really gave me the wisdom to move on. She is quite
unspoken about the things she really feels, but the two weeks here with her after my wife left were just incredible.” The class was conceived around the intensely fraternal relationship between Stutchbury and Leplastrier, who have known each other since the former’s last year at university (see The Tracker, p.38). Murcutt, whom both had known for years – particularly Leplastrier, who first taught with him at Sydney University in the 1960s – was approached as the only headliner with the international pulling power to anchor such an event. “When we started here, Glenn was sleeping separately,” Stutchbury says. “Then we all started sleeping in the ‘veran dah’ [the centre’s nostar accommodation]. He could see the friendship between Rick and I and he decided he didn’t want to sleep by himself as the big mentor, so he extended his hand. Glenn’s not necessarily an easy person to get to know, but I certainly know him now – and adore him. ” The upshot is that there are “absolutely no pedestals up
The only thing left to do is relax Quest Serviced Apartments provides you the very best in flexible accommodation for life on the road. From dedicated workspaces to fully equipped kitchens and our unparalleled personal service, you’ll have space to balance both work and life. Wherever you do business, Quest is there for you.
Call 1800 334 033 or visit questapartments.com.au
34-Features-FINM
01/11/2011 - 11:20
Clockwise from top left: Topographical drawings of a proposed Arthur Boyd art gallery and museum site at Riversdale for the masterclass’s student project this year; students and tutors, including Glenn Murcutt with beer, centre, at the Sunday night commencement dinner for the masterclass – meals and sleeping arrangements are communal; Jamaican architect Naita Chamberlain examines detail at Glenn Murcutt’s Fredericks/White house at Jamberoo, NSW; other (hand) drawings for the masterclass project.
Utzon walked under these big steel hulls. And it was that training with his father that gave him the ability to solve the problems of [the Opera House’s shells] so brilliantly. The engineers couldn’t solve them; Utzon solved them.” With his towering, Learontheheath looks, a Nigerian hunter’s pouch slung over one shoulder, Leplastrier looks the part. “This is where the shit hits the fan,” he says at the top of windswept Riversdale hill as the students are dragged uphill and down dale on the first morning until the landscape is written into every sinew and bruise. “It’s a powerful place, where the great stone backbone of the animal emerges.” Andresen’s oeuvre, too, has an entirely natural evanescence. “Her work breaks down into a landscape and disappears, as a bird sometimes disappears inside a tree,” Leplastrier explains. “It’s very finely wrought and incredibly delicate, finegrained and broken light, it’s very beautiful.” But Murcutt? The man who crossed the woolshed with a Japanese tea house? A great white hunter? Yes, it turns out. His father, Arthur, was a quintessential adventurer, a pros pector, builder, architect manqué who made a boat to sail the Pacific with a thenunknown Errol Flynn (it sank off Port Moresby), designed and built a very Murcuttlooking family home and subscribed to Architectural Forum. His son was an outstanding athlete, a maker of boats and model planes, who spent his early life in PNG. Much is made of the resemblance between its longhouses and his own horizonhugging work. But the lesson was more visceral than that. “PNG brought us very close to nature because we could be very easily killed by it,” Murcutt says. “Or by the Kukukuku, the cannibal people who surrounded us. The kunai grass was 1.5 metres high and the Kukukuku were about 1.49 metres – we had to watch for movement; survival depended on observation. That was the great lesson.” Quite independently, Stutchbury makes the same point, referring to the time he spent as a kid in the desert country of western NSW. “Landscape became the teacher. If you scarred the land, the drainage would change and it would erode within
months. We once had the army come through the place in tanks and the imprints have stayed there to this day, 30 years later. As an architect you’re a hunter, inquisitive and observant and knowing when to act and not to act.” As he speaks, slightly nonplussedlooking students wander the lawn outside. The day before, barely 24 hours into the course, the students – overachievers that they are – began working on designs for the building that will be this year’s project: an Arthur Boyd art gallery, with accommodation, to be situated anywhere they choose on the property. Now the students are back outside to look again. “They were rushing to design too quickly, without reading the landscape properly,” Johnston explains. “There’s a tendency to want to find answers,” adds Andresen. “In fact, it’s slowing down and keeping the questions open that is important. Gathering a depth of understanding before starting to think what to do.” To Murcutt, that is close to being the point, not to mention a significant part of his drive to teach. “Looking back, the education system failed me,” he says. “I had to repeat matriculation just to get into the University of Technology; I repeated sixth class to get into high school from being sent to a school for backward children. And I got into 1G, the class above the lowest class in high school, which was 1G repeats. “It was shocking and I did feel very much at a loss as to why this was happening, because I knew I had this ability that was different. You have convergent ability and divergent, the former is great for exams, the latter isn’t. But architecture is an education in divergence; no question has a single answer. You get architecture students who have got 98.4 [in final exams] but it’s about much more than that and, as a result, far too many students far too short on ability are doing it.” It’s certainly way harder than the masters make it look, as the students discover on the final day at CarriageWorks, when they present finished designs. One group’s accommodation design consists of doorless sleepouts in stone, scattered across the Riversdale hills. It seems to tick every ecominimalist box. A dead cert. But the masters smell a rat the size of the marsu
pials that herd in their hundreds just beyond the Boyd centre’s lights at night. “You have to be careful of leaving things open in this country; that’s a wombat path, they’ll rub their bums all over that,” Murcutt says, doing a fair imitation in his chair. Or, as he says to another group: “You’re so damned close to a really beautiful solution, but you’re not there. You’ve come up with something, but this isn’t MasterChef; this is really hard.” In fact, those crits are character studies in themselves. Andresen’s are bullseyes: kind, but cleareyed and incisive. Leplastrier, swathed in an ancient camelhair coat like something out of Waiting for Godot, stares at drawings a few feet away through binoculars; breaks into great jags of poetry. “I’m reminded of moored ships; the steep flat sides of tankers,” he says. “It’s a good thing,” he adds. “I came for Glenn, he’s renowned around the world, but I discovered Richard and Brit,” Matej Gašperič, a Slovenian sole practitioner with 20 years’ experience, confides. “They come for Glenn, and Peter is becoming internationally recognised, in part because of the masterclass,” says Johnston. “But Richard is the secret weapon. Even though he’s almost unknown beyond an elite around the world, he almost has the largest impact. It couldn’t have happened without Glenn, but it wouldn’t have had the success it’s had without Richard.” Some of this year’s students have come for Stutchbury, too, as a result of his recent appearances at Canada’s Ghost 13 architectural conference and the Irish masterclass he taught with Leplastrier and distinguished Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa. “I’m silent in their presence because I respect them and I want them to speak first,” he says. “I’m just a link in a chain. I see Rick relating to Utzon, Glenn relating to Rick. All that information is being passed down through them. My responsibility is to pass it on. “I hope the people that come here see generosity and I hope they see honesty and I hope they see friendship and I hope they see love. Because they are the qualities that make great people. And great architects.” n
036
36-Features-FINM
01/11/2011 - 11:20
THE TRACKER Richard Leplastrier, the man behind what some consider Australia’s greatest house, isn’t just the Murcutt master class’s secret weapon, he’s Australia’s.
Peter Stutchbury remembers the moment that
made him an architect. It was 1974 and the university student had been chasing waves along Sydney’s northern peninsula, bunking in a shed at the back of a friend’s beach house. He had heard about an intriguing project nearby, a house that was just a rammedearth wall, a steel frame hovering above it like a dragonfly on a rock. “So I drove up and snuck onto the site,” Stutchbury recalls. “I walked in and my dreams came to life. I could see it in my head, finished.” But it wasn’t finished – yet. “As I was standing there I heard a car pull up and two doors shut. I was scared of being caught inside this beautiful jewel of a house, so I just jumped into the bush and lay there as these two men, Richard and his client, David Walker, walked in laughing and started talking about the building,” Stutchbury says. “Rick was 33, 34 and he was just electric.” As for Walker: “That house was inspired by the client, the brief was ‘a cross between a Georg
Jensen watch and a Citroën GS’. They were two men starting out... each with qualities of genius, and it was 45 minutes that lifted me into knowing where I belonged.” The Palm Garden House, as it’s known, remains “the most important bit of thinking in residential architecture in Australia”, Stutchbury says. “Anyone who has seen it is deeply moved by it; not the odd person, everyone. And it’s part of Rick’s mystique: a lot of the things aren’t seen or spoken.” Leplastrier’s distaste for publicity has been singleminded. Glenn Murcutt is sure it has cost him. “What it means is he has not been as well known as me. The publication of my work in international journals has given me a life that has been amazing.” “I really don’t like wasting my time with it,” Leplastrier says of the pursuit of profile. “I value my position in our community too much. I live in the most wonderful community; you don’t like to be set apart.” That, too, is a lesson learnt from Utzon, not least from the ‘crucifixion’ that led to his departure from Australia, and Leplastrier’s own escape to Japan back at the end of the ’60s “when the Opera House busted up. I learnt a bit about humility and I learnt a bit about staying out of the mainstream,” Leplastrier says. “And Utzon also said architecture was an old person’s profession because it’s a measure of your life experience, which is true.” So is he doing his best work at 71? “I’m probably doing my wisest work, but I wouldn’t say my best,” he says. “When you’re young you think you can do
everything. Later you stop risking so much, you see the repercussions of things.” Which may be one reason Leplastrier agrees to talk in the first place. The refrain of the masterclass, including Murcutt, is that you have to “give knowledge away to keep it”. Leplastrier has more reason to know that than most. When fires swept Pittwater on Sydney’s northern peninsula in 1994, he lost his house, including 50 sketchbooks and hundreds of photographs. “It was all my travels through Africa and India to Europe by motorcycle, all the drawings and notes, the
Master of the nonhouse... Richard Leplastrier, above, talking to students at Riversdale. For all the differences “our work belongs together as we belong together,” he says of the masters. Below, the Palm Garden House on Sydney’s northern peninsula.
slides. I was going to write something myself about these places and why I thought they were wonderful. I was speaking to Lloyd Rees [who taught him drawing] and he said, ‘As an artist I look forward to some of my work going out because then I know it’s guaranteed a life. If you want to keep something, you should get rid of it, put it out into the world.’ And he was right.” There is no disguising his love of the Palm Garden House, even today. It’s there in his description of it, better than any photograph, which is lucky given their scarcity. “It is on the margins that place; it has a frisson,” he says. “It has a shell roof of corrugated copper and inside that is a skin ceiling that’s like a cello, made out of 6 mm thick redwood and polished like a musical instrument. And as this roof rolls over away from the wall it starts to dissolve, disappearing at its edges like a mirage. And there is the garden, like a Rousseau painting, the heart of the house, with just these canvas [walls] that roll up.” Leplastrier had his children late (eldest son Aero has just decamped to study pure mathematics). After the fire, he built a house for his family at Lovett Bay that is almost as legendary again, and as invisible. “The kitchen is outside and the bathroom is a short walk from the house and there’s no glass and decks all around and they eat on the floor,” says Lindsay Johnston. “I said to Richard once, when the kids were young, ‘Why don’t you get a table that they can sit at and do their homework?’ He said, ‘There’s something about a table that has a sense of permanence I just don’t like.’” n
038
38-Features-FINM
01/11/2011 - 11:20