Stories of Earth:

Late in the Australian winter, 2024, four international architects met in the Australian outback near Broome on the far north west coastline. What happened after that was a genuine first. Marina Tabassum, Rick Joy, Marusa Zorec and Niall McLaughlin joined Peter Stutchbury and four others to spend three weeks driving across the rich, remote desert landscape; stopping in aboriginal townships and communities; and visiting sites with real meaning, like the ochre pits in the West McDonnell Ranges outside Alice Springs.

We heard the impact of this epic journey in the presentations from all four speakers at a one day symposium held in Sydney on 14 September to an audience at Chau Chak Wing building at UTS.

Rick Joy

Rick Joy shared the landscapes, experiences and artists that influence his work; of canyons that are abstracted and reflected in his architecture, the importance of sunlight striking the tip of mountain ranges in Tucson, desert sunsets or - looking from the other direction, looking back at his work from a distance, where his buildings visually recede into the landscapes they stand in. 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. We heard this understanding of how things go together in Rick’s eye for detail and his description on how to finish materials and love of precise detailing.

Marina Tabassum

In her 2021 Soane Medal address, Bangladesh architect Marina Tabassum shared that the first confrontation of her professional life was about with the commodification of architecture, as she witnessed the global tendency toward instant gratification and industrially produced anthropogenic 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 experience the effects of climate change and displacement. Marina started 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.

Marusa Zorec

Marusa Zorec tells us Slovenia’s past is one characterised so much by conflict, which has somehow imposed a negative on the past. So many buildings and spaces are not appreciated; so often rejected for what they represent in the minds of so many. As a result, so much of the built heritage is derelict.  This brought Marusa to the work she has become known for - modern intervention 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 a stone and brick, with vaulted rooms inside - spaces  that Marusa is driven to liberate with considered, contemporary  work that bring daylight and places for community while balancing construction standards and conservation.

Niall McLaughlin

Underpinned by an abiding interest in the lessons to be drawn from the Neolithic and Palaeolithic periods of human settlement, Niall ranged across 10,000 years of human existence to argue the essential value of architecture lies in its ability to express temporal depth. Put another way, the first houses gave us a history - encouraging us to believe that we could jointly invest in more ambitious activities whose returns were not immediately evident. This expanded horizon transformed human culture.   

Niall structured this impressive dissertation into 10 yarns, alongside 10 remarkable projects that involved explanation of the structural poetry of a rugby scrum,  parallels between remote  communities with excerpts from Virginia Woolf's "Jacobs Room", and the imagined possibility of ancient ochre pits as a diaphanous portal to another world.

Photography: Boaz Nothman