STORIESINDESIGN
Thoughtful, unscripted conversation with people from across the design community.
STORIESINDESIGN
Níall McLaughlin
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The RIBA Royal Gold Medal winner was recently in Australia as Níall McLaughlin Architects' plans for the first new cathedral in over a century in Sydney were announced. He met Timothy Alouani-Roby during his visit to discuss this project, as well as ideas about community, tradition, inspiration and the history of architecture.
STORIESINDESIGN
I think buildings are not images. I think that they're profoundly unlike images and they're experienced with all of the senses and with the whole body. And I think you feel a really good building in your heart or in your belly, first of all.
SPEAKER_01Neil McLaughlin, winner of the Reba Royal Gold Medal 2026, was recently in Australia as his practices plans for the first new cathedral in over a century in Sydney were announced. We met during his visit, and I invite you to join the conversation as we start speaking about his international rugby experience project in Ireland.
SPEAKER_00When we did the rugby building in Limerick, we the person who was chair of the interview panel was a guy called Paul O'Connell. Do you know that name?
SPEAKER_01I do know the name.
SPEAKER_00He was captain of the Lions and Captain of Ireland and everything else. But uh I went into the interview in Limerick, and um they said the kind of typical question I'd asked, I said, Have you ever been to Limerick before? Do you know anything about the town? And I said, Well, the last time I was here was in 1973, and Erlingus, the Irish Airline, had just got their first new jumbo jet, and we flew down in the jumbo jet from Dublin to Shannon, and then it was going to go on to New York, and we got the bus back up later in the evening. We played a team called Young Monster, and I said, The weather was terrible. I said it was like Passion Dale. You were pulling one leg out of the mud while the other was sinking in. But there was a guy called Speedy who seemed to be able to run over the surface of the mud, and he put four or five past tries pastures by halftime. And there was a little pause, and Paulo Khan said, That was my father. So if I don't win this commission.
SPEAKER_01You know, I actually might start on a I was gonna say a slightly lighthearted note, but it's also obviously a very serious matter for me about the rugby, rugby league, rugby union point with the project in Limerick. Just a personal curiosity, did rugby league ever come up in the research in the context around what was originally built as the rugby museum?
SPEAKER_00No, it never did. It was um there was never any discussion of rugby league. But to be to be honest with you, you probably need to understand the context of rugby in Ireland. Rugby league, if it exists, I know nothing about it in Ireland. It's just not a sport in in Ireland. People don't, but people do so you say rugby, there's no conversation about what it's like. And people know that there's a thing called rugby league over there in places like Australia and the north of England, that they have very little connection with it, very little understanding with it. So it doesn't, in a sense, it doesn't surprise me in the Irish context that it wouldn't. Because as far as they're concerned, there's just one kind of rugby. And I'm sure that's terrible, but that's the way they are thinking.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I could talk for hours though. It's not it's not the Irish uh people's fault or anything like that. It's uh more of a more of an English matter, but I won't start on it. But well, let me say thanks for making the time to join me. I know you have a very pat schedule this week. Uh I was at your lecture at Sydney Uni on Monday. Did you enjoy it? Yeah, very much so. And I I enjoyed the I don't know if rigor's the right word, but like the length of it, it was was refreshing that you seemed to take your time to really go into some serious thorough themes and go into some of your project work. It felt the opposite of superficial. And I know speaking to a few of my friends around, it it provoked quite a bit of thought and discussion and a lot of positivity.
SPEAKER_00I'm delighted. That's very good.
SPEAKER_01So I thought what I might do today is we'll talk about a few of these projects and obviously the the project that's just been announced in here in Sydney. But I also mind just dot around as some uh a few of the points that I noted down from your talk on Monday to ask you a bit more about them. And I thought maybe a place to start was um you mentioned at one point, I think describing yourself as having a bit of a monastic streak or a bit of a monastic um personality, I can't remember the exact phrasing. So I wonder if if we could use that as a way in to start talking about your own personality, if you like, and then also some of your architectural philosophy or style or career path.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I don't know what I meant exactly when I said I've got a monastic personality because I wouldn't say I've got an entirely monastic personality, but I've always been fascinated by monasticism. And um, all the way through my life I've gone out of my way to visit monasteries, and I've been fascinated by the history of monasticism and how it came about and what it represents as an idea about the world. I mean, that principle of living in community, that principle of the kind of ordered life. Um, and I'm I'm kind of fascinated by how much of our culture comes from monasticism in a way that people don't necessarily understand. So it's definitely a kind of a deep interest of mine. I can't remember at the lecture the context in which I said it, although it it may have been that people often say that there's a kind of sense that even if I'm designing a building that's not a religious building, that I'm looking for a sort of some sense of transcendence or something in the architecture, that there's some sense that the architecture has an underlying I mean, in the case in the cook in the context of a secular building, it's not right to say it has an underlying sacred character, except it probably is something like that. I think to me there is something about architecture which is um which which which is looking for transcendence. And I'm I'm I'm aware of that, and I I I design with that in mind.
SPEAKER_01I think that last point is what was lurking behind my question, really, the thought how does how does that kind of description relate to your architecture? So again, not quoting you here, but I think some of the atmosphere of the talk seemed to speak to a um a distaste for kind of a superficial uh relationship to architecture, and it's a it's uh it's an approach to architecture that that I think you built that isn't about showy um superficial hero moments, and it's more about an ability to be maybe immodest or paired back or in some sense transcendent. Like, are any of these words resonating with you in in terms of how you describe don't want to I don't want to use the word style, but your architectural philosophy?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that I mean it would be wrong to think that I'm not interested in what things are like visually. I'm very exercised by that, and I want my buildings to be beautiful, and so there isn't a sense that I'm that I'm not I'm not interested in those things, but the sort of superficial way in which buildings tend to get consumed as images, I would be very skeptical about. I think buildings are not images, I think that they're profoundly unlike images and they're experienced with all of the senses and with the whole body. And I think you feel a really good building in your heart or in your belly, first of all. And there are there are things about architecture that I'm primarily guided by. The first thing I think you should a good building should do is it should sort of situate you and orientate you and make you feel as though you're you're you're you're open to the world in a positive way so you can do constructive things. So whether it's living at home, whether it's working or being in a library or worship or going to a museum, there's a kind of there's a sense that the building is um is is is is is is allowing you to be situated and um to feel confident that you so you can kind of forget the building in a way. And something I say very often is that good buildings often exist just below the thr the threshold of our conscious experience. Most people are not going around noticing buildings actively all the time. Uh even interesting buildings, if you use them all the time, they could they they become a little bit habitual. You sort of feel them and you know they're there and they're all around you and they they they work well for you, but you're not, you're not you're not, you're not, they aren't, you aren't overtly seeing them all the time. And it's that aspect of the way that they're both slightly beneath the threshold of our attention, but they're profoundly structuring our lives in ways that we're not always aware of, that I'm very interested in because it it puts a responsibility on the architect because you're creating something which has got very strong subliminal power where people aren't necessarily noticing it all the time, but they're deeply affected by it.
SPEAKER_01So I think connected to that, I'd like to ask you about another really consistent strand from the talk on Monday, which has to do with community, community over time, and maybe specifically uh intergenerational community. I think there was a there there were a lot of mentions of uh architecture in relation to past and future, so the generations that have come before us and the generations that are to come. Can you speak to your understanding of architecture? I know we're we're very big picture and kind of abstract here, but can you speak to your conception of architecture in terms of its importance and relevance to those concepts of time and tradition and community?
SPEAKER_00Okay, so one of my interests uh I'm interested in uh the earliest architecture. And the reason I'm interested in it is that uh it's likely to tell you something about what people were doing or why they needed to do it when they started making buildings as we understand them. Now, I don't want to get too precious about the distinction about people sheltering in caves or people making temporary shelters when they were living an a mobile lifestyle in the landscape. I want to talk about the first sort of fixed buildings and to say why would people start to fix themselves on the earth and build buildings over and over again on the same sites? They're doing something, and that's something they're doing began in one or two places and spread out. And I think we no longer fundamentally think about or understand what architecture is doing at the most basic level. I go back to that subliminal quality it has. So we think about buildings as being entirely necessary, we can't imagine living without them, but somehow for a very long time we did, and life was okay. So why did we start living with them and why do we become so dependent on them? Because if you don't understand that, you're not really getting to the bottom, what architecture is. And my thought is twofold. One of them is that at a time in certain societies where people were living in extended or bigger communities, and those communities were involved in what are called delayed return economies. In other words, we all we all as a community invest into this now, but we don't get the dividend from it until some point in the future. You needed some way of holding that community together over time. And I think architecture did that in a number of ways. One of them is to represent extended time. Because if you're living without buildings in a mobile situation or landscape, you're seeing the cycle of nature, you're seeing the turn of a year, you're seeing the turn of generations. But in the sense it keeps returning on itself in a circular way. And that's a concept of time which you live within the day, the the you know, the the seasons, the the length of a life. If you want to think about your community beyond that, you have to have some way of representing that. And I think that's one of the first things that buildings started doing. And there's an um an anthropologist, archaeologist who I'm very interested in, called Ian Ian Hodder, who talks about the first houses as being what he calls history houses, because they started burying their dead beneath the floor. And so they become representations of ancestry. And there's an argument you could make that the fundamental purpose of a house is to connect the dead to the not yet born. It's a kind of a generational connection. That's one aspect of it. The second aspect is when you look at the earliest monumental structures like temples and even stone circles in my part of the world, in Britain and Ireland, it seems as though they were not built as fixed monuments, but as things that people were changing all the time. And you have to ask yourself, why would these communities living such a, you know, such a tough life be spending about a third of all of their human social material resources on this activity, which is construction? What were they doing? And I think one of the key things they were doing is that the process of construction in itself as an activity was something that bound communities together because it cre it created obligations. So once you're constructing this thing together, you're bound into a chain of interdependence. And it was so the active construction rather than the object of a climate emergency that we're in now, when we're beginning to think about buildings not as being objects which have got a short-term life, which are made for the moment that they're designed as kind of fashionable expressions of the now and don't have durability in mind. If we move away from that into some idea as buildings that get passed across generations in time, so that their embodied carbon is contained in the building, and you have this idea of creative reuse. Or if you think about the kind of materials, you know, the materials like steel and glass and concrete, in a way they have no history. They're made in fire with very high energy, and there they are as products that are handed to you on a plate. But if you think of earth and stone and wood, they come to you already with a history, with a character and you know, and and the the lineaments and the texture of the material are already speaking of their of their own history in the world. So you have this idea of extended time that starts to come in our age, at this time of the 21st century, which a hundred years ago wouldn't have been understood. And so this sense of duration, I mean, I love the idea that I might work on a building that was passed on to me by another architect who's now gone, and I'm paying respect to that architect who are reinventing the building in a way that suits present purposes, and then I'm passing that on to another architect in the future who may not know me, but who I'm asking to pay respect to my intentions. And so you get involved in this kind of human chain that that extends through time. And you'll notice when I'm talking about this, I'm talking away from the object and towards the performance, towards the activity that people are doing. And one of the reasons I'm doing that is I do worry about the effect that advanced forms of technology are having on architecture, particularly on architectural design. So, for example, most people in my office are very, very worried about what's going to happen with artificial intelligence. It seems to be able to just, you know, at a snap produce things that superficially look kind of interesting. And what I would say about technology, it's always had this characteristic that it's good at making better and better objects. That's what technology does well. It creates more, you know, more and more, you know, uh it's it's it you know, it it can become more and more sophisticated at making objects. And so if I insist that a building is an object, then I find architecture of an activity is going to really struggle to deal with the challenges of something like AI. But if I go back to my Neolithic now, my early Neolithic, and say the object was never the fundamental intention. There was a process of initiating, producing, tending for, reorganizing, caring for, and ritually extinguishing buildings that was intergenerational. And its purpose was to allow communities to see themselves involved in an activity together that made spaces that they could then inhabit where they would see themselves. Then you see architecture as being a performance. And I could challenge you and say, take any building you want and look at it not as an object but as a representation of performances. There's two performances involved. One, how it's made. You know, the the the arches over the brick window are telling you how somebody laid that brick. Um the timber column or the steel column is telling how somebody forged or made that column. But the door handle is telling you how to open the door, and the room you walk into is telling you ways that you could use the room. So you could see that at some level that we never really think about. Architecture is always representing either performances in the past or performances in the future. And I think that's for me a richer way of thinking about it for our term.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, as you speak about this, as you've as you put it, uh um uh performances and representation of performances. What I notice in in the different things that you describe is you're always talking basically about what people do, about what humans do with the architecture. So even when you first mentioned uh and you're interested in really early architecture and um burial sites and whatnot, it's not because you're interested in what it tells us about the object in and of itself. It's uh I think the phrase the phrase you used was what people did with it or why they did it. So it's kind of this idea about performance very much has to do with humans and what humans do and how humans should live. Now I did want to ask connected to that uh uh a slightly more grounded question about your practice, actually, which is which is what you showed in the lecture about uh putting together a lineage of plans that uh in some way relate to the project that you might be working on. So the the poignant example was the chapel that you were um doing in England at a certain point, and you laid these plans out, including the Azuntor's chapel in St. Benedict's in Switzerland and so on. Can you describe that process of how you uh create this lineage of I suppose relevant or pertinent plans from history and whether that relates to this idea of extension over over time?
SPEAKER_00So, first of all, in terms of our process in the office, if we're designing a building, very often as a group sitting around the table, I'd be encouraging people to think about aspects of the brief that at this time we're not necessarily embodying in a proposal of something we might physically do, but we're just talking about what it is that this brief is bringing that um would be would be qualities that we expect the building to have, or things that we would want, the ways that we would want to build the building to allow people to thrive. And they can be quite generalized conversations, and we could we could we could refer to paintings or poetry or music or anything else to try and build this kind of collection of of references that allow us to feel what it is that we want the building to be in spirit, but at some point you've got to ground that in architectural culture and it in the kind of building art. And for me, plans are really extraordinary things, they're like kind of pieces of DNA or something, they're these kind of coiled up little pieces of energy that have an extraordinary connection to history because they're the synthesis of a whole set of ideas that have been layered together over time. And the simple black and white drawing is culturally absolutely loaded, it's so full of kind of potential energy. So I find them as these kind of like like these kind of energy bars or pieces of DNA that you bring into the project, and they embody and ground certain ideas in a particular tradition. So for example, when we were designing a building for it sounds quite abstract, might put it that way, when we were designing a building for people with dementia I was asking the question, what's it like to not be able to remember where you've just been and therefore you can't remember where you're just about to go to? That must be a very disorientating experience. What's it like to live in this continuous present tense? And then the question was, what buildings have can we remember that embody that sense of a continuous present that in a sense where if you were in that state of mind, that would be a good building to be in. And I remember visiting Louis Beragan's house in Mexico City, and you walk from room to room, and each room looks into a different garden, and eventually after the walk around, you find yourself back in the room you started with. And then I thought, oh, that's like um Schindler's house in Los Angeles, it's got a similar quality. And then I thought that's like the plan of Mies van der Row's country house. So we got those plans up, and suddenly what was a kind of a more generalized perception about what it's like to be in a state of mind had termed that the three plans are related to each other, and they have foiled up inside them this extraordinary architectural history. And if you look at the plan of our Alzheimer's Centre in Dublin, you can see those three buildings in it. So we are we are, in a sense, able to ground more abstract forms of thinking within the building art by using the plan as a kind of a bridge. And I'm fascinated, it's not just that. Anybody who's a kind of a student of architecture, look at uh Corbusier's Villa Garche, look at Mies van der Rot's Tugendad House, and look at Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallen Water House. I'd argue they're the same building. They've just been dressed in different clothes. And when you look at the plan, that's so obvious, you can see the same elements being manipulated by the architects. And I fancy that the three of them were watching each other. You know, oh, if he's done that, right, and I'll do that. And then if he's done that, right, I'll show those two, I'll do that. There's a kind of a dialogue that's happening between those buildings purely within the plan itself. It's like a secret script.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's interesting because that dialogue it sounds like it could either be conscious or unconscious. So there could be instances where someone's looking over their shoulder and getting a bit of inspiration and letting their design be informed by that. But then on the longer term, deeper history level, as you say, it's almost as if putting these plans together from totally disparate times and places, the DNA idea like unlocks some kind of secret hole that's bigger than the parts that comes out of it. Would that be a fair description of the city?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but the thing I was educated into when I studied at University College Dublin, we were we were educated to use precedent in a particular Away. So it's not straightforward imitation. What you're doing is you're looking at the plan and you're interrogating it in a certain way. Or you're looking at the section and you're interrogating it in a certain way. You're not looking to say, well, I'll just lift that wholesale. And the way in which you use that, the way in which you lever off those references is the important thing. So in the slide I showed as a lecture for the chapel we designed in Oxford, we had a plan. We had a plan from Rudolf Schwartz in the 60s in Frankfurt. We had a Zumter plan from Switzerland in the 80s. We had our plan, we had San Vitale from Ravenna in the 4th century. We'd so many different plans, but they all had something in common. And what we're doing in the office is we're looking at those plans and saying, see the way they have something in common, then what is it? And how could our plan join that set of plans so that it feels like it's one of that collection?
SPEAKER_01And it feels like that very active interpretation is what might distinguish your work from, say, AI or technology. It's that ability to uh AI could synthesize up like countless plans, but it can't necessarily make the same qualitative human judgment that you just described doing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but we have to see what becomes of AI. Who knows what what it'll be able to do? Um but to some extent, we need to be, we we can't hand that to AI. We we need to be. I'm a bit like I was I was a school I was a schoolboy in the 70s, and when pocket calculators came out, I had to do the sum in my head before I'd put it into the calculator, because I felt a bit of my brain would die if I didn't. And I'm the same now with navigation apps. I think, where am I going? How am I going to get there? Right, I'll work it out in my head, now I'll put it into Google Maps, because I don't want that bit of my brain to atrophy. And I think all of us need to, because at the end of the day, these things are are coming in, are tools that can do really interesting things for us, but the danger is they're they will create a world where we depend on them to the extent that we can't do that ourselves anymore. And I think for architects to be able to manipulate space fluently and move from more generalized perceptions back into ways of carving and creating architectural space, if we lose that ability, we've lost a huge amount of our identity.
SPEAKER_01Okay. I think I have one more philosophical or conceptual question before we maybe turn to a few more grounded project examples, which is to ask about this repeated description of architecture as a microcosm that you brought up. So architecture as as a microcosm or as an allegory. Why is that way of thinking uh advantageous or beneficial for your practice?
SPEAKER_00Um I think that it goes back to this sense of what uh what impulses architecture was answering when it came about in the world. And there are certain really deep human impulses when it comes to complex ways in which we are emotionally and intellectually as to take in any individual consciousness who's emotionally and intellectually engaging with the fur the world, the first problem that they've got, or the first yeah paradox they have to deal with is community. Because we come together as a group of people, all of whom feel that our consciousness is how how the world should be, and we have to interact with other people, and the conflicting desires and demands and behaviors that come from that put a huge load on human cognition, on the human spirit. And so we have to find some way of representing community in a positive sense. The second thing that any human consciousness is always having to deal with is looking at the world around us, the you know, the natural world, the universe, the cosmos, and the deep mystery that most of us feel about how such an extraordinary and ordered world, where we can never see the end or the edge of the order, how such harmony can exist and yet be so far beyond us. And to me, that's the two things that the humans are always trying to figure with. And typically we try to figure with the second one by dealing with the first one. So we come together in community through all sorts of things, like religion, like education, like sport, and we set up in relatively contained spaces ordered forms of play or ordered forms of ritual in which some idea of contestation and harmony and ritual and procession are played out. And to me, that's what architecture is about. It's both about representing on one hand and containing on the other hand. And you could think of a rugby stadium as being a campaign space in which the community come together to perform a ritual by a set of rules in which ideas of contestation and harmony are played out and understood by everybody. You could think of a sacred space in the same way. You could think about uh an art gallery or a university building in the same way. So that sense of um taking complex things that we have to reckon with and we have to sort of try and work out for ourselves, we're always trying to represent them and bind them at the same time because they're in a way, um, dangerous is too strong a word, but unleashed, they're disruptive. They have to be bound and controlled, and at the same time represented and understood. So I feel that architecture, like all of the other arts, is doing both of those things. I mean, I made the analogy in the lecture to drama. If you go to a play, very complex aspects, very complex aspects of the human spirit are played out in the play, in the contained space where all that contestation can be resolved so that people can both witness it and resolve it and contain it at the same time. And I think architecture has a very similar character, although it operates on a less overt level. And so that's when I talk about um uh buildings being like microcosms, because you can make versions of the world in which ideas that we hold about the world can be collectively witnessed within that bounded enclosure so that when we go back out into the world, we're able to kind of figure the bigger world in relation to the smaller worlds that we've made for ourselves within the house, within the chapel, within the sporting stadium, within the university, within the care center. All of those things are bounded worlds, which have their own rules and properties, which the architecture serves, which allow us to mediate our relationship with the bigger world. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And I can really see why drama is an example that stands out because it's kind of a catha it's a whole cathartic thing that you're describing as well.
SPEAKER_00That's a great word.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, architecture is catharsis.
SPEAKER_00Did you see um did you see Hamlet, the film? It's it was in the Oscars this year, but there's this amaz there's this amazing moment at the end of the film when all the dramas are being played out about tragedy and death and loss, and the key protagonist goes into a theater and she's looking at this event taking place on the stage, and suddenly the camera just spins around and looks from the stage out at her and and the whole audience and the whole theater behind them, and you suddenly feel the sense between this kind of this community of people and this ritual that's happening in front of them. It's really architecturally really powerful.
SPEAKER_01Okay, terrific. Um well, let's turn uh briefly to to on our way to finishing up to where we are today, actually, in in Australia. You're based in London usually, but we're here in Sydney, and uh you recently announced the project that you're going to be working on um with the Broken Bay Diocese. Uh could you tell me a bit about that project? And we can maybe use that as a springboard to talk about your wider perceptions of Australia and Australian architecture.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Um we were invited to return a letter to the diocese. We received a brief, beautifully written. Um and asked to return a letter to the diocese responding to the brief. Um and what was really nice about the brief, if you just reflect on everything we've been talking about, was it said, we want a new cathedral, but we don't want you to say that the cathedral should be like this or should look like that or be like any other building we've seen before. We want to begin with the Christian liturgy. We want to think about the way we've processed through space, the way the community come together and actively engage with it. And thinking about that set of ritual human interactions, which are at the heart of the cathedral, we want to then see how building out from that we get to the point where we can talk about a building that could only be built in Australia now by us. Fantastic brief. So we responded to that, and we were shortlisted down to a small group of architects who were interviewed. And at that interview, I put forward a brief presentation about how I would begin to think about it. And the thing that I said in the presentation was that if you look at the diocese of Broken Bay, which is the sort of northern part of Sydney, that it looks, when you look at the map of it, first of all, like a kind of administrative boundary. You say, well, why would that be a diocese? What what what line what are you drawing a line around here? And when I looked at it more closely and then sort of took away, you know, all the kind of colour tones and so on, and began to look at that on a map. I realized that it's actually the the catchment area or the drainage basin for the the Hawksby-Nepane river system. And when you lay the river system onto it and put all the parishes down, you see they map beautifully onto each other. So I said, that's what your diocese is. This is the natural world that your diocese is in. And I began to think about then how that river system was made, its history in terms of the deep geology of the place, and how, given that geology of sandstone and so on, how the river cut through it and made these spaces in the land, how those spaces were then planted and taken over by Blue Gun Forest, how the first human inhabitants came in and uh were able to forage for food and create meaning and build a culture and civilization there, and how that changed with the various other incursions until we get to the point where we are now. And I thought, wouldn't it be beautiful if the cathedral could somehow embody that that history and be to use the word we used before a kind of microcosm?
SPEAKER_01So that's the layers of the history, right?
SPEAKER_00The layers, yeah. So the the building that we proposed, we said, you know, there's a basement formation of rock here, which is a deeper metamorphic Aurigneous rock. Could we make the crypt, which is below the ground, and is the kind of necropolis, which is a place for burials and so on? Could you make it out of that basement rock? But then the stone that rises up towards the light is the warm gold Sydney sandstone. And could you make cliffs and bluffs out of that? And between those, could we put these tree-like columns that are like blue gum trees that branch out and ramify to create the open lit space of the cathedral itself? And could we take the floor of the cathedral and map the river system onto it in some beautiful carved artwork that somebody would do, so that anyone coming in from anywhere in the diocese, whatever their history or background or origin or where they came from, they would feel at home in this place because this place represents that diocese in in its kind of deepest sense in terms of its history. So the rituals that are then played out there, the you know, the Christian liturgy, the liturgy of the word, and the liturgy of the Eucharist are happening on the on a representation of the ground of the deeper natural history and the deeper culture of the place.
SPEAKER_01I'm curious to ask uh what your general experience and awareness has been of Australia in the past as well. I know you mentioned that I think you'd been part of the Glen Merkot um workshop at or symposium at different times, and um there were a couple of anecdotes around different Australian architects that you've met. What's your own personal story of engagement with this this country, this continent been in the past?
SPEAKER_00Um the first Australian architect I'm conscious, I can consciously remember meeting was Pete Stutchery, and I met him at a conference in South Africa probably 25 years ago. And we were both speaking at their the the South African Institute of Architects conference, and we were with a group of other architects from around the world. And um I remember one thing that were architects from five continents, but we were all wearing the same shoes. Um we spent a week together, it was really great fun. Um, and we stayed in touch since then. And the first time I've been invited to Australia was to a conference, um, which I think it was um Lindsay Johnson who who who who retired now but would uh ran the Glen Market masterclasses for many years, and he had a conference on De Rubben Island, which was uh on the Hawkesbury River, which is an amazing coincidence given that we were then asked to come and look at this diocese. But I was able to talk about it with some confidence because I could tell the panel from the diocese that I'd already spent three nights on Nelson Island and the Hawkesbury River, so I knew what I was talking about. And we had a really good conference there, and there was a wonderful man called Uncle Max, who was known to the group from the Glen Market Masterclass, who gave us an extraordinary smoking in ceremony there and an amazing description of country. I mean, really uh eye-opening for me in terms of my understanding. Um so that's the first trip that I remember. And then after that, I went to a conference in Melbourne, maybe five or six years later, uh architects from around the world speaking there. And that time I brought my family, and we travelled around the east of Australia at least, uh, up the up to Queensland and so on. Uh, we had a very good two weeks here and spoke at the conference. And on that occasion, um, Rick Le Plastrier took took us out sailing in his boat. There's a wonderful Bangladeshi architect called Marina Tabasons, who may some of your colleagues may know, and he took Marina and my family out sailing in his boat. So that was a wonderful experience. Um, and then about 18 months ago, I was asked by the Glenn Merkett Foundation and by Peter Stutchry to travel with five architects across Australia. So we flew into Perth and from there we took this um plane up to uh a place called Telfur, which is a kind of mining, a great big kind of copper mine, uh, up in the very northwest. And travelling down then from Port Headland across the Gibson and Sandy Desert to the West Vicarongle Ranges, into Pallas, um, down to the extraordinary pairing of mountains, Aluru and so on, and then down into the Flinders Range, across the Blue Mountains, and down an amazing journey. It's over three weeks, sleeping in swag bags on the desert floor every night or in the forest every night, and with architects from America, from Europe, from Asia, really interesting group, traveling every day, meeting local Aboriginal communities, talking to them about their understanding of country, understanding community and the way it worked for them, um, doing workshops with them, a couple of lectures across the way. That we ended up at um in Sydney, each of us giving a talk at the end of the trip, um, in in I think the the the art gallery in Sydney. That was an amazing, amazing experience. Life-changing, I would say.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, terrific. Yeah, I'm jealous. I haven't been to all those places myself. Well, I think we might finish up there. I know you have a very busy schedule. I hope this brings some sense to listeners who weren't able to um attend your full lecture this week in Sydney, and they will be able to keep tabs on your work here in Australia. So thanks for making the time for that. Thank you very much indeed. I enjoyed it.
SPEAKER_00Nice to meet you.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for listening to this episode of Stories in Design. Please subscribe and review, and you can find out all about what we do at indesignlive.com.