Building blocks of change

Samuel Mockbee was a pioneering architect, driven by a need to address the inequalities of America's deep south. In a corner of Alabama, he fought to improve the lives of the poor, while remaining faithful to their spirit. Caroline Roux pays tribute to his work

Sir Peter Shepheard, Architect, Dies at 88

April 28, 2002

Sir Peter Shepheard, Architect, Dies at 88
By ERIC PACE

Sir Peter Shepheard, a British modern architect, planner and landscape architect who was a dean and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, died on April 11 at his home in London. He was 88.

Glenn Murcutt: Crocodile Dundee With a T-Square

April 25, 2002
Glenn Murcutt: Crocodile Dundee With a T-Square
By JANE PERLEZ
MORUYA, Australia — WHEN Tom and Dee Magney hired Glenn Murcutt to design a weekend house near the beach, after years of camping out on the remote windswept site, they asked for a place that would bring the wilderness indoors. "Glenn said, `I'll give you one big veranda,' " Mr. Magney recalled.

The result was a long metal pavilion with a northern exposure over the Pacific Ocean, 70 miles from Canberra in southeast Australia, designed to capture the light in winter. A gently swooping metal roof mirrors the shape of the surrounding hills. Its sheen blends with the silvery grasses; over time the metal has dulled to a color that matches the gray fur of the kangaroos that come by at dusk. The locals call it the chook house, the Australian term for a chicken pen. "It's a tough site," Mr. Murcutt said with characteristic bluntness, "and I designed a tough building."

The house, completed in 1984, became one of the most admired works of Mr. Murcutt, this year's surprise winner of architecture's most prestigious award, the Pritzker Prize, which was announced last week.

Few thought that Mr. Murcutt, 66, was a contender. And for good reason: the prize usually goes to celebrity names — Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Sir Norman Foster — who head big firms with institutional and commercial projects in world capitals. Mr. Murcutt, by contrast, works alone, designing modest environmentally conscious homes inspired by farm sheds and Aboriginal structures he has inspected in the continent's remotest regions.

He has refused to work outside Australia, insisting that the best architecture comes from an intimate understanding of culture, climate and environment. Although influenced by Mies van der Rohe and by the Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto, Mr. Murcutt is uncompromising in his attachment to the Australian landscape.

"I can design for other places," he said. "But it's important for me to be working in my own culture, in a place that is my own life. I don't think it is appropriate to design in one country and produce it in another country." Moreover, he said, working outside Australia would mean a complete change in work habits.

Mr. Murcutt is that rare species in top-flight architecture: a sole practitioner. He works without a computer at home in Sydney in a 13-square-foot office that he shares with his wife, Wendy Lewin, also an architect. He is passionate in his distaste for the computer, now the compulsory tool of virtually every architect. "Stupid things, they are," he said. "They are not truly logical: click on this, click on that." Further, he says, the computer destroys the eye-hand connection that he considers vital to good architecture. He works on a drafting board with pen and ink. "Computers make buildings more like cardboard than buildings," he said.

Such dissenting views earned him the attention of the Pritzker jury, and Mr. Murcutt said he had been receiving congratulatory faxes suggesting that it was a good omen that recognition had diverted from the large power buildings. "Here we have a one-person office that should serve as a role model," said Jorge Silvetti, a Pritzker juror and chairman of the architecture department at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. "It shows that it's possible to have a serious practice that investigates issues important to people's lives but doesn't depend on size or marketing."

Mr. Murcutt's passion has been residential. He insists that he designs houses, not homes. "I don't call them homes," he said. "The people in them makes them homes. They're houses."

Since the house at Moruya, Mr. Murcutt has designed a variety of residences, including a new interior for an old terrace house in Sydney for the Magneys, a prefabricated metal house for an Aboriginal artist in the tropical Northern Territory and a Mediterranean-style home in a Sydney suburb for Ken Done, an artist.

But he is not exclusively an architect of houses. He has created some restaurants and a small-scale local history museum at Kempsey on the coast north of Sydney. With Ms. Lewin, he designed a $1.3 million teaching center for the arts, known as the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Center in Riverdale, New South Wales, honoring the Australian painter Arthur Boyd, who died in 1999.

On the drawing boards is a winery in the countryside and a 75-room hotel on the southern coast of Australia, at Moonlight Head, in Victoria, where the winds roar in from Antarctica. The hotel is being built in climatic extremes: cold in winter but with the threat of bush fires in the summer. Because it must be able to withstand an "ember attack," sprinklers will be installed on the roof. Mr. Murcutt and Ms. Lewin are working with an engineer to devise a system that will treat the waste from the hotel so it can be used as fertilizer and to irrigate nearby pastures.

The couple and her 13-year-old daughter, Anna Lewin-Tzannes, live in in Mosman, a harborside suburb of Sydney. "You wouldn't want to know," Ms. Lewin said with a laugh when asked about their house. A narrow structure about 100 years old, the house is about to undergo renovation that will result in "better space, better light," Ms. Lewin said. For their own getaway, Mr. Murcutt bought one of his early works, a 1972 farmhouse on a working cattle farm in Kempsey, and 10 years ago added a guest house.

Mr. Murcutt was deeply influenced by his father, Arthur, who ran a gold mine in New Guinea, where young Glenn grew up until the outbreak of war there in 1941. Later, his father built boats and ran a joinery business, where Glenn was first exposed to American architecture magazines.

By the time he was well established in the late 1980's, Mr. Murcutt came in contact with Aboriginal design, which reinforces his deep sensitivity to the environment. It was a great revelation, he said. "I was shown bark shelters with bent bark roofing. They would take a tree, cut the tree in long lengths and then bend it to form sheeting." The bark worked in much the same way as his metal roofing. Afterward, Mr. Murcutt explored territory inhabited by Aborigines in the vast desert regions of northern Australia, closely examining their way of building.

Like his new houses, Mr. Murcutt's renovations have been considered revolutionary in Australia. Pleased with their Moruya weekend house, the Magneys wanted to downscale in Sydney from an elaborate Victorian mansion filled with English mahogany to a "very selfish house — nowhere to look after grandchildren."

Mr. Murcutt suggested they look for a house with a northerly exposure in fashionable Paddington. They found a run-down terrace house overlooking a nature reserve of eucalyptus trees and ferns. The Magneys lived there for three years, and every six months or so Mr. Murcutt would visit, armed with his tools of trade.

"He would come with greaseproof paper from the supermarket and a little notebook 3 inches by 3 inches," Mrs. Magney said. "He sits and sketches and sketches, then goes away, and he comes back with a sketch that's pretty good. Refining and refining, that's why the houses end up the way they do — good to live in, good to look at."

Mr. Murcutt tore out the entire inside of the house, leaving a shell of three walls. From the original warren of rooms, several large spaces emerged. He designed a generous entrance room, with a study for Mr. Magney, a tax lawyer, built discreetly to the side. He floated a slightly elevated bedroom, reached by four stairs, at the end of the entrance. A side staircase reaches down to the main living area. This is a large room with an open-air kitchen, an Aalto birch dining table and a living area of Aalto couches, chairs, coffee tables and bookshelves. The soft northern light floods in from wall-to-ceiling glass doors. An outdoor deck faces the nature reserve, and a long ornamental pool provides a soothing coolness in Sydney's hot summer.

"I could live in it," Mr. Murcutt said. "It orients very well. The light quality is very good, the space is very good. I think I've respected the historic aspect of the house."

But neighbors disagreed. They disliked the terra cotta color he chose for the exterior and back walls of the garden, intended as a reminder of Aboriginal art. Mr. Murcutt fought the zoning council to win approval for so much glass. He blazed a trail. Now the trend in the area is for sleek interiors inside old exteriors. The interior at Paddington is painted all white, offset in the entrance by a painted English 19th-century desk that Mrs. Magney inherited from her father and a long Louis VI gilded mirror, a reminder of their former lifestyle.

Did Mr. Murcutt cringe at the antiques? Apparently not. "He's very polite," Mrs. Magney said. "He makes suggestions. He spends time summing you up." One detail, however, was too much. When the architect visited the Moruya house and found a metal barbecue grill in front of the glass windows, he quietly hauled it out of sight.

After returning to Sydney this week from a conference in Norway, Mr. Murcutt said he had no plans to change the way he worked. "I have so much work to achieve here," he said. "If I worked in other countries I'd have to engage other people. I've got a good life. It's hard, but it's a good life."

He is not even planning to replace the computer he formerly owned. It was used solely as a word processor for form letters declining requests that poured in for a Murcutt work.

Alison Brooks architects

“I wanted to address some of the big, big problems that need to be addressed, particularly in London,” Brooks says. “The quality of housing and the quality of public space really suffered in the 1980s under Thatcher, and there’s been, in the last 10 years in London, a movement to start investing in the public realm and looking at things that haven’t been looked at in a long time: new forms of housing, sustainable housing, urban design and infrastructure—all of that stuff that Britain’s been pretty far behind on. So that was my big ambition.”

April 15, 2002
Australian Architect Receives Pritzker Prize
By HERBERT MUSCHAMP
lenn Murcutt of Australia has won the Pritzker Architecture Prize for 2002; the announcement is to be made today by the Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the award. Mr. Murcutt, 66, lives and practices in Sydney. The prize, which carries a $100,000 grant, is to be presented at a ceremony on May 29 at the Campidoglio in Rome.
Mr. Murcutt is best known as a pioneer in sustainable, or green, architecture, which attempts to diminish the impact of buildings on the natural environment. His designs are formally rigorous, minimal structures that recall the work of Charles and Ray Eames. But Mr. Murcutt's selection by the Pritzker jury can be seen as an acknowledgment that sustainability now overrides aesthetic criteria in the urbanizing world.
Environmental advocates estimate that sealed buildings produce half the world's greenhouse gases. Much of this pollution has become concentrated in the atmosphere over Australia, where the ozone layer has been damaged by emissions that can take up to 15 years to migrate from industrialized nations in the Northern Hemisphere to Australia and elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere.
For Mr. Murcutt, who also breeds livestock, this damage has been felt beyond architecture. To contend with the hazards of harsh ultraviolet radiation penetrating a compromised ozone layer, "I have had to change my animals from white to black-furred," he said in a recent telephone interview.
Mr. Murcutt, who cites Freud, Jung and Thoreau among his influences, is a solo practitioner. All aspects of a building's design are rendered by his own hand. There is a three-year waiting list for prospective clients. Most of his projects are private houses.

This personal approach echoes that of early modern architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, whose work was rooted in the craft tradition. Mr. Murcutt's work is, in turn, a further development of Miesian spareness, in which the surrounding landscape provides a richness not seen in the design itself.

Mr. Murcutt's public works include a local history museum and visitors center in Kempsey, New South Wales; a Roman Catholic presbytery and community hall in Sydney; a visitors center in the Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory; and the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Center in Riversdale, New South Wales. His innovations in sustainable design have also been adopted by architects for large projects in urban settings.

Pritzker Prize watchers may note that it has been 11 years since an American architect received this honor, and many may suspect that this is not a simple case of oversight.

The Pritzker jurors are J. Carter Brown, Giovanni Agnelli, Ada Louise Huxtable (a former architecture critic for The New York Times), Carlos Jimenez, Jorge Silvetti and Lord Rothschild.