Utzon close up

You forget just how beautiful it is close up… sure, we all know the stories around the Opera House – how badly Utzon was treated by the NSW government, how fantastic the building is from the water and the city, how it’s become the template for how an iconic building can act as a catalyst for change for a burgeoning city… and in a sense it’s the kind of building one is often immune to. But, some years after I lived with the building every day, I’m struck now by just how viscerally thrilling the Opera House is close up, both inside and out

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Peter Stutchbury’s House

Visited Peter Stutchbury’s house on Clareville Beach which he built 25 years ago, which completely blew me away. It had the most profound effect on me of any house since visiting Ric Leplastrier’s own house across the water from there 11 years ago. I loved the youthful exuberance, the playful experimentation, and the joy that ripped through every aspect of the project. I loved the lack of fear, the letting go, the demonstration that modern architecture need not be neat, sanitised and chock full of pious restraint. I loved the trees growing through it, the outside bath filled with a garden hose, the hardboard finishes and the abundant life that spilled out of it. Sure, they have a different climate from us in the UK, but why the fuck are most architects so pathetically anal and obsessed with rigour, order, control, imagined and delusional logic – as if somehow those things WERE architecture… If I could ever do a building a tenth as good, with a tenth as much spirit, I’d be happy.

Categories Glenn Murcutt

Murcutt, Leplastrier and Stutchbury

Lunch at Lindsay Johnston’s on the Hawkesbury with the great trio of Australian Architecture: Glenn Murcutt, Richard Leplastrier and Peter Stutchbury

Lunch at Lindsay Johnston’s on the Hawkesbury with the great trio of Australian Architecture: Glenn Murcutt, Richard Leplastrier and Peter Stutchbury – such a pleasure to spend time with them

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Glenn Murcutt

Great meeting with Glenn Murcutt yesterday at his house in Mosman who was, as ever, incredibly illuminating on so many things from revisiting the principles Bingie Point (Magney) House, to timber shrinkage at (now his) Marie Short House, to the Pritzker Jury on which he now sits…. on how he won’t do any more talks, travel or teaching, on his mosque in Victoria, on the Broken Hill Opal and Mining Museum, on his time in England in the 60’s, on my mother’s old boyfriends in Australia in the 50s and 60s, on the specifics of Sydney’s climate, on the Berowra Waters Inn (which I visited by boat the day before), on Ghost Lab, Rural Studio and Studio in the Woods… and of course, the death of his son Nick earlier this year. What a guy…

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