When David Chipperfield was awarded the Pritzker Prize earlier this year, Katie Wagner observed that significant awards have the potential to change architectural discourse. Here, I reflect, through six fundamental questions, on how my practice may have impacted on Australian architecture, both as a built legacy and as a way of practising.
What home?
Consider two homes. First: House at Hanging Rock. An architect-designed, bespoke home, an aggregate of a family’s choices, reflecting their aspirations, preferences, needs. The occupants exercised choice of home and architecture. Second: my cousin’s office in Frankfurt, Germany. Also architect-designed, and now a makeshift home for Ukrainian families. What was once a desk is now a kitchen, of sorts, for here the occupants have been allocated a home, making do with a given architecture and relying on each other and their things.
What is the difference between these two spaces? How is each a home? I’m fascinated by architecture’s role in the formation of “home.” I define “home” as anywhere that someone feels supported in their purpose by space, whether momentary or ongoing. The design of Hanging Rock House – its orientation to the landscape – contributes to the inhabitants’ wellbeing. There’s a primal pleasure and comfort to feeling the sun on one’s back. And when we visited Frankfurt, I could see that for the Ukrainian woman, the opportunity to cook borsch and host our meal at her makeshift table allowed her to achieve a semblance of home. The garden view was a bonus; the safety, essential.
I think a lot about this reckoning of architecture’s limits when we design housing, whether public or private. What can architecture do? What do people do with the architecture given to them? This question is a summary of my faith in architecture to make a difference, but also a challenging of its capacities, a humility around its impact. It cannot stand in for life. A conceit. Homes are a combination of built form and daily habits. We have to practise space, and “practising” suggests something ongoing, never finished.
Like the Ukrainian woman in Frankfurt, my mother and grandmother started new lives in another country. Having lost everything other than the contents of a suitcase, my grandmother became determinedly unmaterial in her new home. In contrast, my mother focused on home- making – home-building, home-filling, home-arranging gave her great comfort and security. For many migrants who had an incomplete formal education, DIY building work was one means of financial mobility. Together with my uncle, my mother renovated houses – I visited a lot of sites after school. We also moved a lot, so I witnessed her setting up home overnight. Her skill may partly account for my keen interest in architecture as a form of home-making – or of providing the space for others to home-make.
Architects are involved in housing provision at the extremes: at one end, the highly bespoke single dwelling, and at the other, the off-the-shelf multiresidential development. This presents a conundrum for me. In light of Australia’s housing crisis, I feel compelled to focus our distinctly architectural design intelligence toward the generic home of multiresidential. Housing has considerable urban, suburban and ecological consequences for the way we shape our communities. In volume alone, it forms most current construction activity. The dwelling is part of the street, which forms the suburb, which forms the city. The quality of each matters within the greater composite of the neighbourhood.
Arguably, the aspect most instrumental in determining architectural quality is the typology, embedded in the building’s bones. Establishing dwelling type, subdivision patterns, interfaces with street and neighbours, and mutual benefit between public, private and common space, the bones become the architect’s most critical intervention. As we necessarily live closer together, this kind of strategic input can have a profound impact on the quality of our cities. The development application, in particular, is the opportunity to demonstrate this kind of design leadership and to advocate for regulatory change flexible enough to support innovation.
Thompson urges architects to seize development applications as opportunities to demonstrate design quality and advocate for regulatory change, as KTA did at Kerr Street Residences (2022).
Image: Derek Swalwell
What here?
Much of my architectural education in the late 1980s focused on a European history. Introduced to some of the twentieth century’s leading lights, I leaned toward Asplund, Häring, Scharoun, Barragán, Melnikov, Shinohara. I felt a humanity, a modesty, at the core of their architectures that I wished to emulate.
At the end of third-year, I spent seven months working in the Milan studio of Matteo Thun. Bottom of the office hierarchy, I learnt, through some interesting projects, the value of design thinking across disciplines and scales. Aldo Rossi’s same-form-different-scale scenarios – from Alessi coffee pot to Teatro del Mondo – captured this. This context piqued my own interest in cross-disciplinary practice, particularly landscape and architecture.
Through walking a lot, I experienced the value of building less as object and more as definer of street and public space. I also learnt about broken promises: the drawing’s promise versus the actuality. As I traipsed beyond the easy charms of the centro historico to the periferia , the distinctive shadows of Rossi’s Gallaratese housing sketches were nowhere to be found in Milan’s famous fog. Insight gleaned. Why, as architects, do we resist the preconditions of the situation we’re given to work with – the “here”?
While walking the Lurujarri Heritage Trail in 1993, Thompson reflected on ways we form place with our practices and activities.
Image: Kerstin Thompson
How was I to use my training and inheritance of a global discipline, with all its richness and restriction, in ways irreducibly local and specific? In Melbourne, architect and educator Peter Corrigan helped to expand the grammar of architecture to speak a dialect inflected by the here. Edmond and Corrigan’s fire stations became a key reference in how to counter “suburban” as a generic condition by adapting modest, repeat types of civic buildings to dignify the everyday and the ordinary. Here was an architecture that spoke of its situation, describing why “here” is not the same as “there.”
This imperative accounts for Kerstin Thompson Architects’ (KTA) avoidance of a signature style. Each building is an index of its situation through form, material and character. This is most explicit in our work for Victoria Police: same program, different site. The architecture dignifies each place and celebrates why it is distinct.
At Warrandyte Police Station (2007), the luxurious glazed green brick facade references the proud environmentalism of this greenbelt Melbourne community.
Image: Patrick Bingham-Hall
Similarly, Napier Street Housing exploits “neighbourhood character” to yield a hybrid of cottages and warehouses endemic to Fitzroy’s typologies and materiality, and Northcote High School’s Performing Arts and VCE Centre adds to the network of red-brick public school architecture that underpins Melbourne’s suburbs. In this way, architecture can elevate the everyday, celebrate why here is not there, and act as a fundamental locator.
What history?
“What here?” inevitably leads to “what history?” I cannot contemplate heritage without interrogating our histories, re-evaluating who and what constitutes them. As architects, we’re obliged to re-examine our understanding of emplaced heritage and the ways in which we might productively work with it. A lot of our work involves existing buildings and sensitive cultural contexts. In fact, every project is a heritage project, as we’re always starting from a set of preconditions, occupations, existences, hauntings. This is counter to the modernist preoccupation with tabula rasa. A much richer experience of place is possible through revealing and engaging with the multiple moments of a site’s life.
Architecture is the bearer of individual and collective memory. Sound, smell, touch and sight trigger memories and associations formed with the library of spaces and cities that we carry within. W. G. Sebald writes: “Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.”1 Or in those who smell them. Post-occupancy anecdotes of The Stables, Victorian College of the Arts – an adaptive re-use of Melbourne’s former Mounted Police Branch Stables and Riding School – included a student complaint that she could smell the horse piss. How lucky. During an early site visit, I was struck by the distinctive smell coupled with the softness of sound on a ground of sawdust and sand that gently held the horses’ footfall.
Equally able to hold memory are the impure, tinkered-with and adapted forms of, say, a Victorian terrace turned postwar European migrant special. Webb Street House was KTA’s earliest exploration of migrant architectures in inner Melbourne. This is “heritage” within the informality of the everyday, rather than a formal reverence for the “monument.”
But how do we approach change? What do we retain? Whose change or moment is most valuable, and how many moments can co-exist? Typically, change is necessitated by obsolescence: redundancy triggered by the end of a prior use, by regulatory and building performance upgrades, or when a new relationship is required with the surrounds. Our first consideration is whether we can reuse what exists rather than rebuild, with the aim being to minimize physical change while unlocking a site’s potential for new uses and life. We then ask what, if any, degree of change to the building’s fabric is optimal.
Thinking through a spectrum of change allows us to engage with a coexistence of layers: to calibrate the degree of change of use relative to the change of fabric , offering an alternative to the binary of new and old. At Sacred Heart, Abbotsford Convent, for example, the quadrangle – once a place of confinement, enforced exercise and detention – has undergone a major change of use, becoming a space of openness and connection, events and entertainment, with only a bare minimum of physical change. In contrast, continuity of use at Town Hall Broadmeadows required considerable physical change. The closed north facade was opened to transform the building’s connection with the surrounding precinct, while key interior details were retained as a repository of community memories.
Pertinent to substantive new works with heritage is the desired relationship between the existing and the new. A light touch or a heavy hand? Like and unlike? Peer-to-peer? Lyceum Club embodies respect for, not deference to, Ellison Harvie’s 1959 base. Two distinct moments interweave and overlap, both drawn from a modernist repertoire. Melbourne Holocaust Museum rejects the convention of setting back from heritage fabric and instead treats a remainder of the built heritage as a museum artefact, embedded within the new brick facade as a cornerstone of the future.
In The Architecture of the City , Rossi invokes “permanence” with regards to the historic artefact – “a past we are still experien-cing” – as either “propellor” or “pathology”.2 Our challenge is to find a balance between reverence for an exemplar and change for a vital, lived future within a broader urban system. Queen and Collins exemplifies urban vitality over death, as well as the impact of the strategic edit. Its doorways unlock the site, integrating it with the flows and networks of the city.
Future legacy should be a central asset of the initial design. Leave good bones, adaptable bones, for uses may change but resilient built form can serve new purposes, hold new lives. Of existing buildings, we must ask whether a new build could match its quality, life expectancy and material longevity, not to mention its cultural memory. I challenge the appallingly low expectations we have for buildings to endure. As Andrew Nimmo, then president of the NSW Chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects, said in relation to the Sydney Stadium debacle: “When our major public buildings don’t last 30 years, we have a real problem.”3
What landscape?
In 1993, I walked the 80-kilometre Lurujarri Heritage Trail along the coast of north-western Australia, the Country of Paddy Roe, his ancestors and the Goolarabooloo community. It was formative and I learnt two major lessons. The first was about what constitutes architecture. Our camps – an architecture of sorts – allowed me to observe how we form place through our practices and activities. At one camp, alongside paperbarks and a dry riverbed, the women prepared tucker among eskies, fold-up tables and a fire pit within a sandy hollow. When kids ran too close, the women yelled, “Get out of the kitchen!” Of course, this was a kitchen. Architecture without walls.
This was a fine counter to my architectural training, with its insistence on physical structures as evidence of occupation. Architecture is but a strand of our attachment to place. A landscape that we as architects might describe as “empty” is in fact full – of meaning, of stories. Only our cultural illiteracy stops us from reading it.
The second lesson came through walking. Richard, our guide, would account for his Country with stories held in place: reading Country. Walking every day, sometimes for up to 14 hours, you appreciate the ground you might otherwise take for granted, noticing the minutest of variations: tracks of creatures, subtle shifts in the ground’s resistance underfoot, its dryness or wetness, its geology, vegetation and plant communities, and so on. It holds clues to an ecological thinking – “eco-tones” as gradients of ecology – that challenges the arrogance of settlement patterns that attempt to separate natural systems with their drawn lines and title boundaries. This deeply impacted my understanding of landscape as a system. Walking shifted my appreciation of landscape to a performative, cultural and ecological one.
At House at Lake Connewarre, this thinking directed the arrangement of plantings and built form within an ecological banding, from hinterland to lake’s edge. Here, architecture is a consequence of site organization led by an ecology and, importantly, accounts for its impact beyond the boundaries. A house was catalyst for ecological repair.
The Royal Botanic Gardens Visitors’ Centre, Cranbourne also understood the building within an extended system. It challenged architecture’s role relative to landscape, becoming a background to the colours and textures of Australian plants. The architecture forms charged interstitial space, territories and pathways.
I’ve long been interested in forging interstitial spaces – those that relate and connect – through clustering architecture’s figure to establish loose, in-between space or grading conditions along a spectrum. Bundanon Art Museum and Bridge exemplifies this. With a clear, transdisciplinary design intent, a spectrum (from buried to bridged) aligns function and user comfort with climatic, ecological and topographic conditions. Through an array of spaces, climate variation is harnessed for visitor delight and connection with place. To feel climate is a way to connect with Country, to be here. Bundanon reappraises landscape as dynamic system rather than mere visual prospect or passive setting for built form. Resilient buildings, landscapes and infrastructure support the flows of fire, water and all living things in a regional context, complementing millennia of care for Country by the Wodi Wodi people.
What architect?
When I started KTA, in 1994, I had a hunch that practice could rethink certain myths foundational to some of architecture’s most celebrated figures. I thank my RMIT educators for being conscious of these myths and helping our generation to challenge how we conceptualized and talked about space. For example, to question: buildings as supposedly active, in relation to landscapes as passive; the role of “the Architect” as in control, uncompromising, without doubts; and why women were absent – or at least unacknowledged – in architecture’s history.
The limited number of women role models was clear, especially in terms of visible, explicit design leadership. More common were whispered stories of a quieter, behind-the-scenes woman in a husband-and-wife partnership: Marion Mahony, for example. The assumption was that the woman squeezed her practice in between her children’s lives, which she would be largely responsible for – leaving her husband’s professional commitments uninterrupted. This was not for me. I wondered how to become a voice to be reckoned with, how to combine practice leadership and family. There was a price: being present in the industry meant being less present at home. No, you can’t have it all.
I have been asked questions and received ample advice, often well-meaning but with massive blind spots. Most recently, at a talk in Copenhagen where two of the three speakers were women, the two of us were asked how we juggled practice and children. My response was that this question be asked of our male speaker, too. Male colleagues who asked me, “Why stop at one child’?” fell silent when I enquired how often they dropped off, picked up, worked from home, worked part-time, cooked dinner and so on. I note that my partner well and truly shared parenting and running the home.
In the early days of KTA, there were only two of us in the practice, and we became pregnant at the same time. I recall my anxiety at an imagined lament about women architects and the impact of their fertility on project delivery. I also recall breastfeeding my three-week-old in the profoundly insalubrious institutional glow of a VCAT hearing room – I didn’t want to let down our only client. I’m glad for changes in workplace conditions and the parental leave we’ve implemented at KTA.
But how to present – to ourselves, and to the world? Others were keen to position this novelty of the “woman architect.” There have been dubious requests and behaviour – including from clients and consultants – that, frankly, male colleagues would never be subjected to. Refusing to put up with bad behaviour and bullying, and standing up for what we do and its value – especially the value of design – was a cardinal early lesson. If I gave away design, what next?
The individual house formed the beginnings of KTA and its recognition. It could have been the entire practice. But, fearing being pigeonholed, I pursued a wide scope of project type and scale. Time spent teaching in parallel to time on site prepared me for the challenges of civic practice. I became a “pracademic,” moving between academy and industry, design studio and site, intentions and actualities.
I began teaching in 1990 at RMIT. The opportunity to create and lead a studio program meant articulating and pursuing a position, and developing a set of interests and preoccupations. These informed my teaching and, to this day, my practice. This process was formative in finding my own voice and way of being an architect, and reinforced my belief that industry and academy, practice and speculation, are mutually supportive and enriching endeavours. It honed my skills in defining clarity of intent and pursuing this through the messy, imperfect, negotiated and contingent process that is practice.
Balancing the ideal and the actual comes into play relentlessly on site. I started work at Robinson Chen, a fine practice with a parallel building company. With non-existent CAD skills, I was pretty useless in the office. But I’d done lot of hospitality work and I could organize. Chen noticed this skill, after I organized the Christmas party, and asked what I might be best suited to in the practice.
“Site work,” I said.
I took on the role of go-between, moving back and forth from building site to architect’s office. Early morning was site time – figuring out, measuring up with the foreman, meeting with subcontractors – then afternoons were back in office, sketching axonometrics of rain-head and gutter details and faxing them through for quotes. I learnt to be aware of the logistics of building, the constraints and systems of materials and labour, and, as it happened, the misfit between a large renderer’s girth and a tall, skinny skylight. I learnt about buildability in parallel with drawing; how architecture, and the lines we define it by, can direct, fru- strate or align with construction; and how to work productively with these. (The answer? Be poetic and practical.)
If these professional experiences influenced my approach, what of the personal? Like almost half of all Australians, I have a parent born elsewhere. My mother – a displaced Sudeten German – came to Australia by boat in 1958. Fifth-generation Australian born, my father had a country-town childhood. So, I’m a hybrid of this Euro–Australian heritage and character – and also of a self-taught, bolshie, DIY mother and a university-educated, intellectually curious, surgically precise father. He was also a teacher and a beautiful drawer of anatomy, from whom I learnt diagramming, to challenge conventions and to improvise. I benefitted from a stable educational and economic upbringing, but grew up with some instability through their separation. To the latter I attribute my soft skills: diplomacy, negotiation and endeavouring to understand differing positions. The go-between.
My propensity to use bricks might be accounted for by Mum’s family’s brickmaking history, and the places I experienced as a child might have influenced my work. I thought I’d been conceived in a Robin Boyd building – the Black Dolphin Motel in Merimbula, to be specific. This was architecturally very romantic to me, so when my mother told me it was not true, I was disappointed. But it prompted me to speculate on my affinity for Boyd’s architecture – it was both viscerally personal and rationally professional. I had stayed at the Black Dolphin once, as a three-year old; then, as a teenager, I waited tables one summer under the beautiful, blackened beams of its dining hall.
Through feeling the spirit of Boyd’s structure, I think I absorbed some early lessons in living. The buildings we inhabit become embedded in us and can influence the spatial repertoire we play out through our work. I realize that I sometimes re-create an aspect of a feeling of space conjured from distant memory. Architecture is a culmination of this overlap of childhood spatial experience and formal architectural education.
Negative spatial memories also inform my practice, including public spaces that have felt distinctly unsafe, such as a blind corner or a public toilet. (What woman hasn’t kicked open the toilet door to check that it’s all clear?) The Jock Comini Reserve Amenities, beside the highway in rural Victoria, resolve blind corners, provide self-contained suites and allow for unexpected joy from ample natural light.
That said, we need to be aware of the risk of drawing uncritically upon our own individual experience, especially when the profession of architecture has been largely exclusive – lacking in gender and cultural diversity. Perhaps empathy allows us to draw upon our own experiences without presuming to project our world views onto others.
Understanding, sharing and anticipating the feelings of another is fundamental to making humane architecture. Empathy stems both from what we know about another’s position or experience and from our own experience. A different depth of empathy, perhaps, is embodied knowing. An architect requires kinaesthetic empathy – the ability to put themselves in a future space, in all its qualities, as well as in the shoes of another. I’m cautious about claims that a woman architect will do certain types of buildings. I do not ascribe a gender to our buildings. But I do, increasingly, acknowledge where my own experience – including as a woman – has enabled me to bring different insights and solutions to design. This is a case for expanding who practises architecture.
What legacy?
In our field, legacy is contingent upon leadership. Leadership, to me, is the accommodation of differences, conflicts and contingencies with intent. Leadership is not linear or autonomous, nor is it a single flash of genius by one individual. Rather, it is a flocking, a multiplicity of relations, connections, adjacencies; an openness to the input of others and to the gradual alignment of multiple bodies over the duration of a project toward its eventual coalescence into a coherent form. It is finding a rightness of fit between project variables and spatial model.
Design leadership is also prioritization, filtering, distillation and refinement. Always underpinned by intent, it allows for clarity while remaining open. This is a constructive alternative to the approach that is mythologized in the heroic figure of the twentieth-century architect: bullish, resolute, didactic, unyielding in the face of others’ desires.
To design without dogma, yet to accommodate with intent, is quite distinct from compromise, which generally necessitates abandoning intent. It is an especially useful orientation for the messy, negotiated process that is architecting , especially in the public sector, on ordinary buildings where innovating in the face of compliance and other prescriptive standards is a hallmark of anyone serious. It creates the prospect of a legacy for everyday dignity.
I’ve sought to affirm an approach to architecture that combines practice with education, advocacy and research; and that fosters a stimulating, supportive workplace culture that links design and business as mutually supportive endeavours. With the right conditions in place – especially the right level of fees – practice can reap the benefits of proper resourcing: thriving people and thriving practice = better buildings and a more resilient profession.
Foundational to KTA are the beliefs that design quality and business acumen are not mutually exclusive; that a rigorous design culture can also be a supportive workplace; and that an architect can show strength and sensitivity, clarity of leadership and keen listening. Together, these principles enable buildings and landscapes to have integrity and conceptual clarity, to be gentle yet strong, and to be both subtle and transformative.
Finally an acknowledgement of “firsts”: those people who entrusted me and my team, early on, without the degree of evidence often demanded for selection; who provided projects and opportuni-ties that presented a significant turning point in my own, and in KTA’s, trajectory. Because without the firsts, there will be no practices. I hope to enable firsts for others, to practise intergenerational generosity – essential for our profession to thrive.
This is an abridged version of the presentation given by Kerstin Thompson to each chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects during her 2023 Gold Medal Tour. The full Melbourne presentation is available here.
1. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Munich: C. Hanser, 2001).
2. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1982).
3. Andrew Nimmo (then NSW Chapter President), “Architects question plans to demolish stadiums,” Australian Institute of Architects, 29 November 2017; architecture.com.au/archives/news_media_articles/architects-question-plans-demolish-stadiums (accessed 12 September 2023).
