Glenn Murcutt- a Masterclass

Thanks to Abhay (Mr. Sherawat), I continue to remain fascinated by the works and thoughts of Prof. Glenn Murcutt- an Australian architect. I do not know the names of any of his works off hand though his monograph is a part of the Apeiron library. Tsk. Tsk.

His "MasterClass" is by now an event in itself, where privileged people get to hear Prof Murcutt talk freely. Below are some excerpts.

" ... I have been thinking about how long it takes from deciding to be an architect to actually getting there. It takes 20 years. But how do you hang on that long? How do you sustain the necessary confidence in your work to ultimately start to become a good architect in your forties? These are significant questions for all young architects, who represent the future of our profession."

" With the exception of a few schools, I see the current state of our architectural education as deplorable. If it wasn’t for those few exceptions, I would have no hope at all for architecture’s future. There is no problem with the calibre of our architectural students and young architects...To understand why we see them floundering, you have to go back and look at the grounding they are being given in their education.

Their education is not inducting them into the realm of understanding the nature of materials, nor the fundamental principles behind design. I realize with alarm that our profession has lost whole chunks of empirical knowledge - all the rules of thumb, for instance, that made it impossible to design an awkward staircase, or a fireplace that smoked, or a roof drainage system that flooded. The application of these rules of thumb made even a mediocre architect a reasonable designer".

"...In (the) final term of (my) first year, we had to explore all the ingredients involved in designing a south-facing door in Sydney... We had to know about the prevailing wind and rain, about currents and how they affected access, the detailing of the joint where the weatherproofing went, which way the door could open .These basic design principles are scarcely dwelled on in architectural schools any longer".

"We stopped teaching our architects to go out and measure the real world and to observe natural phenomena, because we believed that sophisticated technology had rendered this quaint sort of measurement obsolete. Instead of all those old-fashioned traditional craft-based materials and techniques, we put our faith in shiny, clever, new materials".

" There is no doubt that our design instruments determine forms we make. In the 12th and 13th centuries, tools chipped and moulded building materials. People were rooted in the process and they intimately understood the elements. We can look at buildings and appreciate how rationally - and therefore beautifully - they are placed, and we can also appreciate the degree of cultural integrity these structures possess... Now, we have buildings largely dictated by computers programmed to reflect parameters that have no basis in design principles. What does that tell us about cultural integrity? What is the possibility of escaping from the minimal base system and economic determinism that drive contemporary building? Perhaps we really deserve the cities we get."

Excerpts from the AS Hook address, 1992.
The sketches and drawings shown here are from the book "Glenn Murcutt: A Singular Architectural Practice". (Murcutt, Cooper & Beck) © the Image Library of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia and courtesy the Images Publishing Group.

The closest i have come to hearing something like this is from Prof. Porus Master in flow, following his favorite riddle- "How do you take a golf ball out from the hole without using tools or hands?", and Baba on "what they know of cricket who only cricket know" during a landscape marking.

Fortunate.