Work & Careers Management

Architect Glenn Murcutt hunts for light in

Australia's new homes surge
This Pritzker-winning Australian architect has a life built on both despair and a quest for reasons to
hope.

Michael Bleby Senior reporter

Nov 14, 2015 – 12.15am

This should be Glenn Murcutt's moment of triumph. Home building is

surging and the man who showed Australia and the world 40 years ago how
to design good houses, should be in his element.

But he's not. Murcutt, who won the Pritzker Prize, the 'Nobel' prize of global
architecture, in 2002 – a year before Sydney Opera House designer Jørn
Utzon – sees little to celebrate.

The country is building more homes than ever [http://www.afr.com/real-

estate/apartments-push-housing-approvals-up-20151102-gkohuj] and Murcutt, whose
ground-breaking 1970s work showed houses could naturally stay cool in
summer and warm in winter, is despairing. The man who has made liveable
houses an art form decries the McMansions that rely on airconditioning and
heating, rather than thoughtful use of design and material.

Architect extraordinaire Glenn Murcutt: decades of professional triumph have been marred by personal
tragedy. Louise Kennerley

At a time when urban sprawl is recognised as a risk to the country's social

fabric by creating a nation of distance-based haves and have-nots
[http://www.afr.com/business/construction/housing-market-reveals-growing-divide-
between-haves-and-havenots-state-of-cities-report-20150708-gi7m2z], he hates
nimbyism and he fantasises about turning the idle backyards of Sydney's
leafy Mosman into terraced housing.

And Murcutt holds little hope for improvement. He decries the endless,
inefficient use of space and ecological inefficiency of Australia's residential
housing.

"My head is just hitting on a wall when you think about it all," he says.

Marked by tragedy
His despair is also personal. The House of Murcutt is a structure shaken to
its foundations by deep personal tragedy. He became a single father after he
and his first wife divorced in the early 1980s. He raised their two boys before
remarrying in the mid-80s (remarrying again in 1998). In 2011, older son
Nick – also an architect – died of a rare form of lung cancer, aged 46.

All the while, Murcutt kept working to a punishing schedule and creating
houses that earned him a world-wide following. His annual masterclass
draws experienced architects from around the world.

Murcutt, whose 12-page biography details a string of local and global awards
and teaching assignments, never had a CV until friend and fellow architect
Romaldo Giurgola asked for one so he could nominate Murcutt for an
honorary fellowship of the American Institute of Architects in 1995.
Exterior of the groundbreaking Marie Short House, by Glenn Murcutt. The home is in Kempsey, NSW.  Anthony
Browell, courtesy Architecture Foundation Australia

Giurgola – best known as the architect of Australia's new Parliament House

in Canberra – had to prepare it for him.

"Aldo typed me my first CV!" Murcutt chuckles. "How sweet is that? He's
such a gorgeous man."

That CV now includes being on the Pritzker jury panel. The week we meet,
in fact, Murcutt has just returned from deliberations in Washington DC to
decide the 2016 prize, which will be awarded next February. He's too
discreet to say anything.

A picnic in the office

​This is an unusual lunch. I have come with a picnic hamper – collected from
Pop Up Picnic in Surry Hills – on my way to the University of NSW's
architecture school. Murcutt occupies the grand-sounding Harry Seidler
Endowed Chair of Practice and agreed to meet for an hour over lunchtime
on a Thursday. A suitcase-sized cardboard hamper has all we need for our
lunch, including a small picnic blanket.

The Simpson-Lee house, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. It is regarded as a significant project in the way
Glenn Murcutt's work evolved. Anthony Browell, from The Architecture of Glenn Murcutt.

Murcutt is teaching when I arrive. I wait in the fifth-floor corridor, and peer
through the open doorway into the room where Murcutt sits with students.
It's a nursery of bright young things of the country's built-environment
future. Paper rolls with line drawings curl like giant toilet rolls. The tables
are littered with glue tubes, laptops and cardboard models.

The professor comes out, smiling. His large double-breasted blue blazer
flaps like a lab coat. We briefly discuss where to go, and eventually I unpack
the Pop Up Picnic a floor below, in a shoebox-sized office Murcutt shares
with the faculty's other part-time experts.

As I pull out the cardboard packets of baguettes, salad and dessert, I ask his
plans for the coming weekend. In a way that sounds formal and almost pre-
prepared, he lays the topic of his family on the wood-veneer table

"My surviving son [Daniel] and I are going up to our farm where we've got
quite a lot of work to achieve over three days," he declares. "My eldest son
Nick died, and he was a really practical architect and very good on
machinery and things – I had him all trained to do everything on the farm.
He died and my younger son [who is not an architect] is as unmechanical as
Nick was mechanical. I'm trying to get him [to] do insect screens, how you
look after the orchard, giving the orchard the sort of watering it needs at this
time of year, so that it'll bear fruit – having a couple of hundred mangoes
after Christmas, and things like that."

A classic Glenn Murcutt house, this one on the NSW south coast, "touching the earth lightly".  

In the beginning

I sympathise with Daniel. Not having a DIY bone in my own body, I laugh
and ask Murcutt to wish him all the best from me.

He laughs at my joke.

"I'm the one that needs all the best!"

It's an awkward start. To be the surviving son of the House of Murcutt – and
a non-technical one at that – would be tough. After all, this is a family whose
history is intimately linked with construction. The 79-year-old Murcutt
learnt the fundamentals of the trade from his father, a sometime sheep
shearer and boxer who made his fortune prospecting for gold in Papua New
Guinea and then used his money to buy harbour-front blocks in Sydney,
build houses and sell them.

Using natural elements to keep the Marie Short House in Kempsey, NSW, cool in summer and warm in winter
encapsulates a philosophy that led to architect Glenn Murcutt winning the coveted Pritzker Architecture Prize in
2002.  AP
"I learnt about the logic of building things together because I built buildings
with my father," he says.

His early years in the lower PNG Highlands also taught Murcutt what he
now calls "architecture of the essential", as life – literally – depended on it.

PNG's last cannibals lived in the region. They killed the family's neighbour –
"put his head in a hessian bag, put it on the airfield and ate the rest of him",
Murcutt recounts. It was a situation in which observing, listening, smells
and wind changes were all crucial to survival and crucial to shelter.

"I learnt about all this as a child in those first six years," he says.

Paternal influence
Despite not being an architect or builder by training, Murcutt's can-do
father imported architectural magazines to learn how. You get the image of
a man of great self-reliance and confidence – and of someone who
demanded the same of his children.

"He built boats, built houses, made his own bricks out of cement ... " Murcutt
says.

Baguettes make for an interesting lunchtime interview. Chewy bread is not

something you can eat quickly, or subtly. The recording of our conversation
sounds like two giants munching cotton wool.

Murcutt employed those early lessons of observation skills when he was

asked to design a house in Crescent Head, north of Port Macquarie on the
NSW coast in late 1973. He recognised the onshore northeast winds could be
used to cool what is now known as the Marie Short House
[http://www.ozetecture.org/2012/marie-short-glenn-murcutt-house/], and did this by
putting glass and metal louvres on both sides of the house to channel
through cooling air. A curved pitched roof with slots on either edge expels
hot air out of the roof space in summer.

The Fredericks / White House at Jamberoo, south of Sydney, close to Kiama on the coast. It reworked many of the
ideas first tested in the Marie Short house.  Anthony Browell, from The Architecture of Glenn Murcutt

A further set of louvres on the north-facing roof was angled to let sun in
through glass panes as it shone lower in the sky in winter and exclude it in
summer.

"As the sun got higher than 55 degrees, the retractable metal louvres shaded
over the glass and you only got bounced light, whereas in winter time, the
sun just pours in. It works beautifully."

Shaded and sheltered verandahs are usable year-round. More than two
decades later, in 2004, the house won the top national award for enduring
architecture.

Sustainability is critical
Sustainability is another pillar of Murcutt's construction that must, as he
puts it elegantly, "touch the earth lightly".

"Where does the material come from?" he asks. "Has it ruined another place
completely? Have you put it together in a way where it's going to last 150-200
years? Or have you put it together in a way that's going to last 20 years?"

Current housing leaves him despairing. Settlers escaping the slums of

England saw a single house on single block of land as the best of both
country and urban life.

"They got it wrong both ways. You certainly don't get any aspect of country
life. You certainly don't get back-to-back housing."
But the answer to suburban sprawl isn't high-rise either, he says, pointing to
Paris, which does it well with a dense blend of housing four to six storeys
high.

Murcutt lives with his third wife, Wendy Lewin – also an architect – in
Mosman, a wealthy suburb on Sydney's north shore. Mosman's large,
unused backyards would be perfect to create new rows of terraced housing,
he says.

"If you combine those backs, you can get some of the most fantastic increase
in housing in the backyards – of courtyard houses, two and three storeys
high. The biggest problem we'd have is increasing the load on infrastructure,
such as sewerage."

He knows how the locals would react to the idea, however.

"They'd go bananas. They'd do everything to keep it as it is."

Blueprint for density

The baguettes are dispatched and with his now-free hands Murcutt
sketches on my notepad how housing could be built more densely on
smaller blocks.

"You say to yourself: 'Is there any hope?'."

But he hasn't given up completely. Murcutt also designs larger buildings,

such as a mosque in Newport, the Australian Islamic Centre, on Melbourne's
west that is due to open in March. It's a large building, with 96 triangular
lanterns on the roof, each three metres tall and with coloured panes of glass
that will change the light inside the building according to both the time of
day and season.

"I have no real faith at all," he smiles. "I told the imam that I don't. He said:
'You don't know. You couldn't have designed this without having faith'."

Murcutt does have faith – in the use of light and space and the natural
elements that make good houses. He also has faith in his students.

I suggest dessert. There are two little pots, one white and pink, the other
dark chocolate. In the warm brick room, the berry option is more appealing
and Murcutt opts for that.

Our one-hour lunch has stretched for more than two. Aren't the students
waiting? I ask. Murcutt waves my concern aside.

"I'll give them more time later."

As we wind up, there is also a resolution on a personal level.

"When his brother was dying – I didn't know about this, but [Daniel] wrote
to the oncologist ... and said 'I have two lungs, please accept I'm there to give
one of my lungs to my brother'," Murcutt recounts.

His eyes are tearing up. "He didn't tell me a thing about it until much later".

The family-building connection keeps going. Nick's widow Rachel Neeson

continues their award-winning Neeson Murcutt practice and her new
personal partner Stephen Neille teaches with Murcutt, it turns out.

There are other grounds for hope. A week later and after their weekend
away, Murcutt sends me an SMS eating humble pie. Daniel's DIY skills
proved his original assessment wrong, he says.

I await an SMS saying he sees hope for housing, too.

POP UP PICNIC HAMPER FOR TWO

From Pop up Picnic [http://popuppicnic.com.au/sydney/picnic-hampers/hamper-

menus/#http://popuppicnic.com.au/sydney/picnic-hampers/hamper-menus/hampers-
packed-for-pairs/the-perfect-picnic/],

1B/96 Buckingham Street, Surry Hills, Sydney

Poached Chicken & dill baguette

Roast beef with shaved parmesan baguette

Persian feta, watermelon, mint, melon rind & poppyseed salad

Superfood slaw of Chinese cabbage, kale, macadamia nuts & organic black
chia

Cabot matured cheddar, truffled pecorino, chutney & crisp bread

Chocolate mousse

Meringue with summer berries, chantilly cream

Picnic rug

Plastic glasses

Spoon

Plates

Total price (incl GST) $162.99

Michael Bleby covers commercial and residential property, with a focus on housing and finance,
construction, design & architecture. He is based in Melbourne. Connect with Michael on Twitter.
Email Michael at mbleby@afr.com