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Sep 30, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | David Neustein |Tim Winton |Cate Kennedy |Daniel James
A monograph and an international magazine highlight small Australian architecture practices innovatively exploring narratives particular to their region When it comes to new buildings, ugliness is almost as immutable as gravity. Today’s designer appears powerless to resist forces exerted by bland software systems and bureaucratic codes, corporate workplaces, mercenary construction contracts and unskilled labour.
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Sep 30, 2024 | themonthly.com.au | David Neustein |Tim Winton |Cate Kennedy |Daniel James
A monograph and an international magazine highlight small Australian architecture practices innovatively exploring narratives particular to their region When it comes to new buildings, ugliness is almost as immutable as gravity. Today’s designer appears powerless to resist forces exerted by bland software systems and bureaucratic codes, corporate workplaces, mercenary construction contracts and unskilled labour.
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Aug 31, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | David Neustein |Stan Grant |James Bradley |Katherine Wilson
The Melbourne-based architects whose focus on sustainability and landscape continuity means they hope to never produce a new building Mauro Baracco and Louise Wright are in the future. From where they’re standing, 10 or 20 years from now, the architectural profession looks quite different to the one we’re familiar with today. For a start, there are no newly constructed buildings, nor is there any work on undeveloped land.
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Jun 28, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | David Neustein |Margaret Simons |Jonathan Green |Anthony Ham
Three design innovators are developing new materials and methods so that existing buildings could consume less energy As someone who designs buildings for a living, I feel equal parts pride and dread when I consider that buildings account for more than half of Australia’s electricity consumption and around 18 per cent of direct carbon emissions. Finally, I think, undeniable evidence that architects are important! Dreadfully, dreadfully important.
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Jun 17, 2024 | 
architectureau.com | David Neustein
In 1987–88, a young Philip Thalis traded his hometown of Sydney for Yves Lion’s Paris office, where he joined the team working on a speculative housing project called Domus Demain (The Home of Tomorrow). Domus Demain attempted to define a new model for apartments in which all of the “technological” components of the home – the kitchens, baths, basins, toilets and service risers – were consolidated in a linear “active band” that stretched and stacked across the building’s facade.
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Apr 25, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | David Neustein |Marian Wilkinson |Lucia Osborne-Crowley
NMBW Architecture Studio’s innovative inner-Melbourne office conversion exposes the true cost of Modernism’s ‘less is more’ Lifted off the ground on stone platforms, the steel and glass totems designed in the last century by German Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe seemed to arrive on a blank slate, as if detached from everything that had come before.
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Feb 5, 2024 | 
smh.com.au | David Neustein
ARCHITECTURE Sydney BrutalismHeidi DokulilNewSouth, $49.99 The timing of this new book on Sydney's brutalist architecture is poignant. On one hand, the postwar architectural style is experiencing a revival, its sculptural forms and deep shadows finding a new generation of connoisseurs on social media, in architecture schools and heritage circles.
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Oct 26, 2023 | 
themonthly.com.au | David Neustein |Don Watson |Elizabeth Finkel |Sarah Krasnostein
The architectural practice proving that refurbishing public housing can be less expensive and disruptive than demolition for new projects Writing in 1977, the architectural historian Charles Jencks ecstatically pronounced modern architecture dead and issued an exact cause, date and time: Modern Architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grâce by...
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Jul 27, 2023 | 
themonthly.com.au | David Neustein |Judith Brett |Melissa Lucashenko |Claire Connelly
“Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect,” wrote Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi (with Steven Izenour) in their seminal 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas. While other American architects had their eyes set on the exotic piazzas and palazzos of Europe, Scott Brown and Venturi chose to sift through the kitsch of the Vegas Strip for ideas relevant to an era of billboards, highways and urban sprawl.
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Apr 7, 2023 | 
architectureau.com | David Neustein
The fortified tower and the walled garden are intriguing motifs for a suburban house extension. On one hand, these elements are essentially defensive, speaking to ideas of individualism, security and territory. On the other, they are ancient city archetypes that capture the collective imagination, inviting a public gaze. With its two small towers bracketing a screened courtyard, Studio Bright’s Garden Tower House brings to mind both of these possible readings.
