Glenn Murcutt Monograph

The new Murcutt monograph is a priceless record of his faultless projects, says Patrick Lynch.

Glenn Murcutt, Architect. 01 Editions NSW Australia. 184pp. AUD $1,650 (£758).

The work of 'Australia's most famous architect', 2002 Pritzker Laureate Glenn Murcutt, is presented in an unusual format. The large book, Glenn Murcutt, Architect, is accompanied by eight folios, each on a different project, with detailed descriptions, photographs and scaled construction drawings. It is so expensive (AUD $1,650 or £758) that only certain architects, also born around 1936, could have reasonably hoped to find this in their Christmas stocking.
The book is written by the most important critics alive – with essays by Kenneth Frampton, David Malouf, Phil Harris and Juhani Pallasmaa – and it is offered from a position of quiet confidence and sincerity. Murcutt is 72 years old and at the top of his game. Proposals for a cultural centre, museum
and an as yet unbuilt hotel are of the same high standard as his magisterial houses, which appear as fresh and timeless as anything produced by an architect working today.
Frampton suggests a variety of references for this uniquely Australian architecture – Greek, Japanese, Italian – but as Murcutt points out, the variety of climates in his enormous country enables him towork in different ways in a habitat he understands. Pallasmaa references Murcutt's early life
in New Guinea, spent around skiffs and aeroplanes alongside his ingenious and adventurous father. He made his first aeroplane when he was 12, and architecture, agriculture and aviation are fused in his designs for volatile weather conditions, such as his aerodynamic design for the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Centre in Riversdale, New South Wales (1999), where the ultrathin eaves profile protects against sun and wind-blown rain.
Pallasmaa draws out the poetry in this aluminium and timber architecture, stressing that Murcutt's houses are 'the tools of dwelling to meet the practicalities of life,' but in a Bachelardian sense they are also 'instruments with which to confront the cosmos' and 'create human horizons for the reading of
geography, landscape and natural phenomena'. This technical agility and phenomenological aptitude is combined with the ability to situate human actions within the 'archaeology of human culture,' Pallasmaa claims.
What sets Murcutt apart from his international peers is an architectural intelligence that accepts both the autonomy of a building and the autonomy of the place where it sits. Paradoxically, he makes human habitats appear as part of their settings but distinct – a quality of poise that is at once grounded in and elevated from the natural world, as in the suspended veranda of the Simpson-Lee House at Mount Wilson (1989-94). We usually call this approach 'organic', but this architecture is anything but mimetic of natural forms. Rather, Murcutt possesses an ability to synthesise what
Frampton refers to as Mies van der Rohe's appreciation of the 'tectonic and typological convergence between vernacular buildings and the normative types of contemporary production'. This produces rusticated and sophisticated buildings, such as the house for painter Marika Alderton, where the hinged facade of sliding panels functions both as 'equipment' and 'background'.
The key to this ability to make perfect judgements about which parts of the building to suppress and to reveal lies, I think, in the concentrated thought made visible in the working drawings. Ideas are refined almost to the point at which the personality of thearchitect disappears into the impersonality
of a perfected plan. Lurking within are figural spaces that only become fully articulated in the sectional drawings, as in the 1:20 crosssection of the Simpson-Lee House where the chimney's proximity to the kitchen suggests a very primal mode of inhabitation. The assemblages of materials are like ornamental collages of details of architectural fragments. The compositions are thus highly linguistic –
he literally articulates joints. The tectonic and the typical are fused into a language of almost brutal causality, but the affect appears casual.
This beautiful book offers us hope in the power of the architectural imagination to migrate to different places across different times, reminding us of Bachelard's belief that 'The space we love is unwilling to remain enclosed. It deploys and appears to move elsewhere without difficulty; into other times, and on different planes of dream and memory'. Pallasmaa and Frampton suggest that this exemplary work not only justifies faith in tradition but in the innovative capacity of architects to renew, through their own modesty and circumspection, the discipline of architecture.
I am convinced by this publication. It justifies, as Murcutt suggested when he accepted the Pritzker, that 'underlying the jury's decision there is hope, even as individuals, that we as architects have an opportunity to make a difference, where we leave for future generations principles worthy of our time'. Every school of architecture deserves one.