The inaugural Murcutt Symposium was held in Sydney, with house tours, talks and social events spanning three days 11-13 September.

The climax of the Symposium was an unscheduled, and very personal moment when Glenn Murcutt chose to acknowledge the distances travelled by so many and the passing of dear friends in recent weeks, and the support given to him by all those who attended this first ever Murcutt Symposium.

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The inaugural Murcutt Symposium was held this week in Sydney, with house tours, talks and social events spanning three days 11-13 September.

Celebrated Australian documentary film maker, Catherine Hunter, has filmed Glenn Murcutt and his work for around 30 years. Two short films by Catherine on Murcutt's life and work have been aired to acclaim worldwide: Spirit of Place and the Cobar Sound Chapel. But Catherine's footage extends beyond these films at a time when funding for arts and cultural works is dwindling. At the close of Catherine Hunter's presentation, the Foundation announced a crowd funding campaign, to be matched by funding from the Foundation, to complete the work of 30 years and produce the definitive documentary on Glenn Murcutt: his life and works.

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The inaugural Murcutt Symposium was held in Sydney, with house tours, talks and social events spanning three days 11-13 September.

Sydney-based architect Carol Marra's work on the publication 'Design for Climate/ design for change' synthesises precedents drawn from vernacular architecture that has developed in response to specific place-based climatic, cultural and other conditions. Those precedents are explored and explained, and applied in case studies under conditions that are changing along with our climate. These include design for bushfire, heat, flood and wind - elements that are increasingly a feature of natural disaster.

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The inaugural Murcutt Symposium was held in Sydney, with house tours, talks and social events spanning three days 11-13 September.

A highly interactive afternoon session led by 2010 Gold Medal winning architects Lindsay and Kerry Clare, Ché Wall and former Environment Commissioner, Rod Simpson, questioned whether our current planning and building regulatory settings are really achieving gains in the race to decarbonise our buildings. Limits to natural ventilation and drive towards airtightness can lead to buildings that overheat in Australian conditions unless reliant on mechanical ventilation to avoid the unintended consequences like poorer indoor air quality and mould.

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The inaugural Murcutt Symposium was held in Sydney, with house tours, talks and social events spanning three days 11-13 September. On Saturday 13 September we experienced the irrepressible energy of Dr Piers Taylor - founder of the UK's Invisible Studio and alumni of the 2001 Murcutt Masterclass.

Piers opened his keynote address by announcing "I am hardly an architect...I have never had a roadmap and I haven't really had a career"! In a talk titled 'Muddling On', Piers' work shares the focus on learning through making and an intense study of local conditions as the driver for design decisions. Throughout Piers' work in teaching and practice is a endless curiosity that generates an architecture of invention and testing; aiming to reduce waste in the fabrication phase so that form is often a result of this search, and not wilful shape-making.

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The inaugural Murcutt Symposium was held in Sydney, with house tours, talks and social events spanning three days 11-13 September.

On Saturday 13 September, Francis Kéré and Glenn Murcutt spoke with long term scholar of Murcutt’s work, Catherine Lassen of the University of Sydney. Covering many shared themes, a focus was on the need for design and construction to be understood as a single pursuit and not separately as is often taught, and on showing caution to the speedy decisions that are able to be made using computing power. Good decisions sometimes require 'hesitation' that only a human can discern.

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The inaugural Murcutt Symposium was held in Sydney, with house tours, talks and social events spanning three days 11-13 September 2025.

On Friday 12 September, a packed auditorium witnessed a moving ceremony as Glenn Murcutt AO awarded the Murcutt Pin to Francis Kéré; paying tribute to the sustained commitment shown by Kéré to work for, and with, his community in Gando, Burkina Faso, to build schools and other infrastructure using a combination of traditional materials and methods, augmented with contemporary approaches that are handled simply.

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For more than 20 years, the Murcutt Foundation has placed a real focus on teaching and learning in the landscape - running both a summer school for students of architecture about to launch in to the academic year, and in the Glenn Murcutt Masterclass aimed at architects who are looking to recharge after years of practice. 

So what’s different about this way of teaching and learning? How does it seek to complement what’s taught in schools of architecture? 

Come with us as we listen in to two of the masters, Rick Leplastrier and Peter Stutchbury - both recipients of the Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal for architecture - and from students who were part of the summer school held in 2024....

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When you’re Rick Joy, small moments of surprise reveal themselves.

A lot of these moments are captured in images that Rick speaks to in this podcast, so you’ll have to imagine them, or head to StudioRickJoy.com to see some of the projects he speaks to like his Desert Nomad House, Amangiri Resort, Princeton Transit Hall or the Woodstock Vermont Farm.

Rick shares the landscapes, experiences and artists that influence his work; of canyons that are abstracted and reflected in his architecture, inspiration from sunlight striking the tip of mountain ranges in Tucson or - looking back at his work from a distance, where his buildings visually recede into the landscapes they’re designed for.

Many of the early projects were designed and built by Rick who was on the formwork for the massive rammed earth walls he’s known for. You hear this in Rick’s eye for detail and his description on how to finish materials and his love of precise detailing.

Rick also looks back at the start of his career, designing to modest budgets and all of it built with Rick’s own hands. 

And stay till the end, for Rick on drums… 

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In a recent address, Bangladesh architect Marina Tabassum revealed that the first confrontation of her professional life was witnessing the commodifying of architecture drifting toward instant gratification and industrial-scale materials devised to standardise the entire globe.

This may be why her work is so grounded in the practical needs of the people of her country who are on the frontier of climate change and displacement of peoples it brings.

Marina starts by describing the natural forces that are continuing to shape Bangladesh thanks to more than 700 rivers that form the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta. We hear that water shapes and reshapes the terrain - giving rise to new land while absorbing other land back into the vast waterscape of this delta…and all under a colonial system of property rights that assumes land is a fixed asset!

Marina Tabassum joined Rick Joy, Marusa Zorec, Niall McLaughlin, Peter Stutchbury and four others in a driving epic over three weeks across the rich, remote Australian desert landscape; before speaking at an event called Stories of Earth: Echoes in Architecture, hosted by the Murcutt Foundation in September 2024.

Marina starts us out on that journey; showing us a swag, a pair of boots, a water bottle…and the milky way that she saw for the first time.

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In a truly magnificent arc that spans about 10,000 years, the UKs Niall McLaughlin weaves together 10 projects with 10 yarns drawn from characters from Australia’s red centre. 

From the first signs of settlement in the neolithic period, to buildings designed to dissolve in the English landscape, Niall shares a visual essay on the structural beauty of a rugby scrum and a truly wild tale from the 9th C of a ship suspended in the air that inspired a place of quiet spiritual reflection.

According to Niall, the first houses gave us a history. They encouraged us to believe that we could jointly invest in more ambitious activities whose returns were not immediately obvious. This expanded horizon transformed human culture. It also gave us our present conception of architecture, which is, above all, a representation of temporal depth.

Niall McLaughlin joined fellow architects Marina Tabassum, Rick Joy, Marusa Zorec, Peter Stutchbury and four others in a desert odyssey over three weeks in Australia’s rich and remote desert landscape; before speaking at an event called Stories of Earth: Echoes in Architecture, hosted by the Murcutt Foundation in September 2024.

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As the trees lose their leaves in the Slovenian winter, the landscape is dominated by strong verticals. It’s a landscape that Marusa Zorec describes as big on solitude; but one in which she finds freedom.

Welcome to Slovenia! A country of 2 million people that is around the same size as Lake Eyre in South Australia! Marusa’s talk is an example of how a 3 week journey through the rich and remote Australian outback shaped her thinking - as it did for Marina Tabassum, Rick Joy, and Niall McLaughlin who all joined Peter Stutchbury and others to drive across the red centre; from Broome to the Chau Chak Wing building at UTS, Sydney for an event titled ‘Stories of earth: echoes in architecture’ in September 2024. 

Marusa Zorec tells us Slovenia’s past is one marked by conflict, which has somehow imposed a negative on its memory. So much so that many buildings and spaces are just not appreciated; so often rejected for what they represent in the minds of so many.

As a result, much of the built heritage is derelict. This brought Marusa to the work she’s become known for - modern interventions in older buildings. It’s patient work, requiring her to listen to the stories of the sites she works with. As she puts it; so many of the buildings she works with are stone and brick, with vaulted rooms inside. These are spaces Marusa is driven to liberate with contemporary thinking that brings daylight and places for community while balancing the latest construction standards and conservation.

Marusa speaks to one of her early projects, interventions in a Franciscan monastery in Ljubljana, and more recent projects like the Square and open air altar at the basilica of Mary Help in Brezje, the Renovation of Plečnik house - the museum-home of one of Slovenia’s most well known architects - and an Institute for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People in Ljubljana.

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After more than 5 years in the making, ‘Glenn Murcutt: Unbuilt Works’ brings to life 10 projects designed by Glenn Murcutt AO that remain unbuilt. This remarkable book, authored by architect Nick Sissons and published by Thames and Hudson, was launched on 25 July 2024, at the State Library of NSW.

In researching the book, Nick Sissons visited the Murcutt Collection held by the State Library on more than 80 occasions; working through early sketches, drawings and correspondence to identify the projects, interviewing - and working closely with - Murcutt to faithfully render those works on their original sites. Large format photo-realistic renders bring to life all of the projects in the book, with text, sketches and working drawings prepared by Murcutt at the time. The projects included a house designed in 1969 for Murcutt's mother on a site in Seaforth.

But the book doesn't treat Murcutt's unbuilt projects in isolation. Instead, references are made to built projects that were being designed at the same time. For example, the house on the central coast explores themes similar to those being explored by Glenn Murcutt, Wendy Lewin and Reg Lark at the Boyd Centre on the NSW south coast. 

The book also includes essays from Glenn Murcutt and Laura Harding, a Sydney-based architectural designer, writer, critic and educator who taught in the design studio led by Murcutt at UNSW.

Speaking at the event Sissons described the layers of record that are held in the Murcutt Collection; ranging from early sketch ideas that are often discarded, to the ‘diamonds’ that reveal themselves in the final layer of working drawings. Murcutt spoke of important early mentors, like the great Spanish architect Jose Coderch, who first described how the start of every project brings a certain anxiety that drives design exploration and that ultimately proves Murcutt's dictum that architects do not 'create', but 'discover'. 

But such discovery does not come without commitment to doing the ordinary extraordinarily well, as Murcutt is often heard to say. In fact, as Murcutt puts it:

“With every compromise you knowingly make in your work…when that compromise is built, that represents your next client” - Glenn Murcutt AO

'Glenn Murcutt: unbuilt works' demonstrates that Murcutt is one who has consistently refused to make compromises over the 55 years of architectural practice. Copies can be purchased through Thames and Hudson here.

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This is the second part of a conversation between Rick Leplastrier AO and Glenn Murcutt AO from 2014 at the University of Newcastle.

It opens with Murcutt’s recollections of meeting famed Spanish architect Jose Coderch in Barcelona in 1973 as part of a travelling scholarship; and Cordech’s famous invocation of effort, love and suffering in architecture. 

We’re also taken to the moment Rick meets the client for what would become one of his most celebrated projects; the Palm Garden House. 

And Murcutt shares with us how his early practice specialising in modest alterations and additions grew to produce some of his most well known new works like the Marie Short House, and the house at Mount Irvine - all achieved as a sole practitioner seeking to build, as he says, a vocabulary of his work.

We hear again about working with materials, the joy of detailing well….and why it's important to always do the ordinary extraordinarily well.

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In this conversation from 2014 at the University of Newcastle, Rick LePlastrier AO and Glenn Murcutt AO share lessons that have shaped their practice; from early groundings at university; fundamentals like drawing and observation, learning from nature’s own lessons and what goes in to teaching architecture well.

We pick it up with a question about when an architect completes their best work, and the risks that come with recognition and fame...

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