2017 GOLD MEDALLIST 2017 Gold Medallist Peter Elliott 31.03.17.pdf · house stock, which it owned...

2017 Gold Medallist Peter ElliottArchitecture Australia’s tribute to the 2017 Australian Institute of Architects’ Gold Medallist Peter Elliott documents his contribution to architecture in Australia from the 1970s through to the current day, with essays by Dimity Reed, Geoffrey London, Leon van Schaik, Philip Goad and Perry Lethlean.

01 2017 Gold Medallist Peter Elliott. Photography: John Gollings

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To the adage that a practising architect needs to be part artist, part plumber and part diplomat, with Peter Elliott one must also add part social activist, part civic dreamer, acute thinker about cities, lover of yellow and of bluestone, guardian of the small, brutally honest critic, sharer of ideas, culture keeper and practice ethicist, each wrapped up and entwined together. He is, in my mind, the complete and consummate practitioner, conceiving of large and small commissions through a deep respect for architecture and the role it plays in the life of the city. His urban and architectural design work on RMIT University’s city campus over more than two decades might be viewed as an aggregation of small commissions, each perfectly conceived, but they add up to an expansive idea for how such a public institution should take its place in the city, with openness and integrity. And these projects carry a deep reciprocity with Peter as a person and with his practice – an undivided, unbreakable and uncompromised integrity.

—— Carey Lyon Director, Lyons

Peter – what a charming fellow! Warm, friendly and compassionate and a great architect. He is a standout in the field and his architecture has always been a delight to experience. It’s not brash or contrived but calm and thoughtful, with an underlying modesty. Yet the power of his ideas is evident in the quality of his built work.

—— John Denton Director, Denton Corker Marshall

Peter Elliott’s many contributions to architecture and urban design are subtle, deft, beautiful and profound in their imprint on the fabric of Melbourne. In particular, I celebrate his work in universities, his elegant insertions, his ability to fuse vertical and horizontal spaces and their aesthetics, and the way he has knitted buildings and fragments of landscape into transformed and unified precincts.

Over decades he guided the transformation of RMIT University’s city campus from an ad hoc assortment of disparate buildings into a unique urban environment, marrying Gothic, neoclassical, industrial and modern aesthetics into a vibrant whole. RMIT’s tree-lined spaces now entice visitors from neighbouring streets into elegant piazzas and promenades. Bluestone courtyards, gardens and fountains provide islands of peace, capturing the light and offering refuge. At Monash University he reimagined the Alexander Theatre, providing new cultural venues and re-creating the formal central park, enhancing and redefining the modernist style that was the foundation of this extensive campus at Clayton. The sheer physical beauty of Peter’s work is combined with an uncanny ability to find the “bones” of the structures he creates and re-creates. He does so in ways that polish and heighten the cultural spirit of the places he touches. It is fitting that Peter’s tremendous contributions are recognized.

—— Margaret Gardner President and vice-chancellor, Monash University; former vice- chancellor and president, RMIT University, 2005–2014

Peter Elliott was an outstanding student of architecture at the University of Melbourne. He worked hard, paid concentrated attention and contributed to the design project with energy and good grace. He subsequently became a design teacher within studios that I ran. On 11 November 1975, Peter and I were working intensely, completing the examination of our group’s design students. When we broke for lunch at a nearby watering hole, an announcement came over the public address system that Gough Whitlam had been dismissed! The profound shock shared on that day remains an indelible memory.

—— Jeffrey Turnbull Senior Fellow, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne

When we first started working with Peter, he said he was a “black and white” sort of guy. That didn’t stop him injecting slabs of colour into the flat and raw landscapes of Melbourne’s west. His striated and folded reptilian walls are “of the landscape” and his playful, colourful bridge abutments form markers in an otherwise featureless landscape or road journey. Peter has an intimate understanding of scale, speed and motion and he folds all that into big design gestures that are dynamic and memorable on a metropolitan scale.

His designs have changed the face of the Western suburbs of Melbourne, with striking noise walls, bridges and interchanges along the Deer Park Bypass and Western Ring Road. Peter’s infrastructure designs are site-responsive; they embrace architecture, landscape and environment. Peter is a passionate advocate for the best outcome for public infrastructure, whether it’s engineering, landscape architecture or architecture. His designs are timeless and elegant.

—— Lorrae Wild Principal urban designer, VicRoads

Peter Elliott is a remarkably talented architect. He is also remarkably unassuming, a quality less than commonly found among the upper ranks of our profession. His urban design and infill projects are the best of their kind in Australia. And for decades he has repeatedly produced architecture of the highest quality, thoughtful work that is confident yet quiet, subtle, refined and artfully crafted. Architecture that understands civic order, the enduring lessons of time and place, and the cultural and social value of design integrity. He thinks freely, with beautifully fluid sketches and loose diagrams that are further articulated with expansive, urbane discourse. And all this is done with freshness, lightness and his calm yet engaging effervescence.

—— Geoff Warn Director, Donaldson and Warn

Peter has made a remarkable and sustained contribution to the form and quality of our public domains for more than thirty years. In many outstanding projects he demonstrates that architecture’s remit includes not only the creation of exemplary buildings but also the adjoining spatial contexts. His command of urban spatial design and curation is exemplary in the national context and many of Australia’s major institutions have benefited from this contribution, as have the members of the public who enjoy them. This achievement is due to the unwavering clarity of Peter’s vision as well as his fearless and compelling advocacy for the contributory role of architectural design.

—— Shane Murray Professor, Monash Art Design and Architecture, Monash University

02 Victoria University Law School (2003). Photography: Trevor Mein

03 Geelong Grammar School, School for Performing Arts and Creative Education (2015). Photography: John Gollings

04 Deer Park Bypass (2009). Photography: John Gollings

05 Melbourne Grammar School Memorial Hall (2005) Photography: John Gollings

06 RMIT University Lawn Precinct (2012). Photography: Dianna Snape

Reflections

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1975–1985

W e need a few more subversive guerrillas to maintain and accommodate a higher level of creativity and grit. We are overrun by a bureaucratic condition more intent

on prescription and inflexible rules than nurturing creative invention and energy.” Peter Elliott1

Way back in the 1987 Australia Day Honours, Peter Elliott was made a Member of the General Division of the Order of Australia for his services to the community as an architect. This remains a singular achievement, as Elliott’s services were not paid services; they were a set of active and imaginative involvements in the lives of hundreds, possibly thousands, of disenfranchised Melburnians.

In 1975 he was extravagantly bearded, teaching half-time at Melbourne University and starting his architecture practice, having been intensely involved in an astonishing range of inner-city communities. In 1976 Elliott was a founding member of the Fitzroy Housing Repair Advisory Service with Sue Dance, Peter Lovell and Eric Richardson, which they set up to offer advice to local people when the Housing Commission of Victoria issued repair, demolition or “unfit for human habitation” orders on their houses. The service catered for low-income tenants and owners who were bemused and intimidated by the orders nailed to their front doors. The advisory service was awarded the RAIA Urban and Community Design Award Medal in 1979.

Those central areas of Melbourne – Fitzroy, Collingwood and Carlton – now housing some of the city’s wealthiest citizens, were unloved in those years. The residents were poor and predominantly tenants and lived under the threat of the then Housing Commission of Victoria’s powers of compulsory acquisition and demolition.

Elliott was a founding member of the Urban Conservation Advisory Committee and its chairman between 1976 and 1980. Its role was to advise the then Fitzroy Council on matters with architectural implications and in 1977 it focused on Gertrude Street and St Vincent Hospital’s appalling treatment of significant rooming house stock, which it owned around the edges of the hospital, with the intention of demolishing the housing to create a carpark for staff. The issues were the retention of important low-income single-room rental accommodation and the preservation of buildings of major

The early years: architect as community activist

architectural merit. In a remarkably bold, still unacknowledged move inspired by the Conservation Committee’s work, a young Minister for Housing, Jeff Kennett, kept Parliament back until 2 am one morning and compulsorily acquired the properties for public housing stock. So 150 rooms were maintained for single, often itinerant, people. Those initiatives were of vast importance to Victoria, both in the area of urban conservation and in influencing the housing and social programs of the slowly reforming Ministry of Housing.

Elliott was architectural adviser to and a founding member of the Fitzroy Collingwood Rental Housing Association. That co-op, the first of its type in Australia, was a pilot project designed to illustrate an alternative approach to public housing, one that involved tenants in the decision-making processes of the acquisition, renovation and management of their own housing. The success of that pilot led to rental housing co-ops becoming a major component of Victoria’s public housing program. In 1978 the co-op received the RAIA Robin Boyd Environmental Medal for this work and Elliott became the honorary architect for the Carlton Rental Housing Co-operative when it started in 1982. That was followed by seven community childcare centres in Fitzroy and Collingwood.

In an interview in 1987 he said, “The extent of community benefit from the Fitzroy experiments of the 1970s is difficult to gauge although it might be suggested that much of what is now taken for granted as ‘policy’ in urban conservation, public housing and social programs was formulated and tested in Fitzroy.”2 Although Elliott was reluctant to measure the influence of those initiatives, they certainly meshed into and invigorated new thinking and a dramatically different modus operandi in the old Housing Commission of Victoria.

The first significant project undertaken by the renamed Ministry of Housing was the refurbishment of the totally intact inner-Melbourne suburb of Emerald Hill, consisting of fifty-nine excellent terraces and sixty-one shops arranged around what is possibly the grandest set of public buildings in the country. Emerald Hill had been bought by the Whitlam Government from the Melbourne Protestant Orphanage for social housing. Elliott was one of four consultant architects tasked with

The foundation of the practice commenced with a number of small-scale commissions that came directly from my student activities with public housing, community and local government organizations in Fitzroy and Collingwood. At the same time I had a three-year design tutorship at the University of Melbourne. Early projects included children’s playgrounds, childcare centres, public housing and a few private houses. All of these projects were located in inner-urban Melbourne. The first large commission was the Knox Schlapp Public Housing project in Port Melbourne, with thirty seven units in a perimeter block format.

—— Peter Elliott

WORDS Dimity Reed

01 Interview with Peter Elliott, Carlton/Fitzroy Calendar 1974. Produced for the Carlton Association and the Fitzroy Residents’ Association. The Melbourne Times, December 1973.

02 “This House Not for Sale: Conflicts between the Housing Commission and residents of slum reclamation areas.” Report by the Centre for Urban Research and Action, edited by Kaye Hargreaves.

03 Gentleman watering tomatoes, Osborne House, Nicholson Street, Fitzroy. Ministry of Housing rooming house. Photography: courtesy of The Melbourne Times, December 1983.

04 Fitzroy Housing Repair Advisory Service poster.Artwork by Bruce Coldham, 1980.

05 Peter Elliott with his son Louis and Kenzo Tange in Tokyo, 1985. Photography: John Gollings

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06 Knox Schlapp Public Housing, Port Melbourne, for the Ministry of Housing (1985). Photography: John Gollings

07 Andrew McCutcheon with chickens at the McCutcheon House, Clifton Hill (1979). Photography: John Gollings

upgrading the stock within very tight budget constraints in consultation with the tenants.

Peter Elliott runs a unique practice. He is a sole practitioner with a loyal staff of around fifteen. He does no interstate work, can walk from his central Melbourne office to most of his projects, has never had a bad debt and has only done a few houses, two interesting ones being both for architects. One was for then Member of Parliament Andrew McCutcheon and the other was a farmland retreat for the late Howard McCorkell. (“Never work for lawyers or doctors.”)

The McCutcheon house grew from an old shoe factory in a Clifton Hill lane in 1979. Initially, council refused to discuss the proposed conversion as it did not have a street frontage, but McCutcheon searched the history and discovered that the laneway was named a street. “At the time it was like a revolution – a family compound in an empty factory with courtyards, bunks and swings everywhere, a permaculture garden and chickens all over the place.

“McCutcheon was the perfect client. He never intervened. And [he] did a great deal with the builder. He said, ‘We will agree on the price. If it comes in under, I’ll give you a bonus. If it comes in over we’ll split the difference.’ So the builder came in under and got his bonus.”

The new enlightenment era in public housing gave the practice its first major commission, which was to look at the feasibility of medium-density housing on significant disused industrial sites in Port Melbourne. This was the chance Elliott wanted to look at issues of density, alternative urban form and typology. He developed a perimeter block scheme with a central garden court of thirty-seven units. Most were in the terrace house model, opening to the surrounding streets with private front and rear gardens, and with some units slung over the top. Knox Schlapp Public Housing remains in good shape today, almost forty years later, and that is a test of its quality because maintenance of social housing invariably suffers from bureaucratic neglect.

Peter Elliott is a man of extraordinary quality. Generous, thoughtful, funny and kind, he is an architect of great distinction who has possibly affected more lives and contributed more to his city than most could dream of.

1. Peter Elliott, “Urban Guerrillas and Sacred Cows,” Architect Victoria, RAIA Victorian Chapter magazine, March 1987, 19.

2. Peter Elliott, quoted by Ian McDougall in Architect Victoria, RAIA Victorian Chapter magazine, March 1987, 19.

Dimity Reed is a retired architect and writer who now runs two film production companies, Madwoman Productions and Lees Reed Films. She is a director of Launch Housing and is currently making a documentary called Homelessness: Just Fix It.

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W hen working with Peter Elliott, you know that you are in good hands, very good hands. It’s like being in safe waters, navigated by a deep understanding of architectural

invention and convention, and with a thoroughly versed critical eye that lands astutely on key issues. He can be forensic in his analyses and is straightforward in calling things as he sees them but is also fair and measured. He has a strongly defined and clearly enacted ethical position combined with a belief in the professional role of the architect in the community.

Elliott’s earliest exposures to architecture were in the heady world of fermenting change. When I interviewed him in February this year, he recalled, as a student in 1971, landing in a house in Melbourne’s Fitzroy filled with politically active cotenants, observing Jane Jacobs-like resistances to freeways and slum clearance, and listening avidly to George Tibbits’ lectures that plotted how the new highrise apartment blocks of the Housing Commission of Victoria were destroying local communities. He became involved with activities that revolved around the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Shelter, the Uniting Church Research Group and the Fitzroy and Collingwood Councils, all full of new ideas about social housing, inclusion, rental housing associations and tenant protection, “an intense exposure over a short period.”

When Labor won the 1972 federal election, after twenty-three years of conservative government, it turned to this group of activists for guidance on what was needed in social housing. Elliott’s own practice, Peter Elliott Architecture and Urban Design, started in 1975 amid a time of “enormous opportunities” for a young, socially committed architect. His was one of four practices engaged in renovation and conversion work in the Emerald Hill district, a low-income residential area with high heritage value that earlier had been earmarked for private sector redevelopment but was then bought by Whitlam’s government to be protected for use as public housing.

When architect John Devenish was appointed to the Victorian Ministry of Housing in the early 1980s, he commissioned small architectural practices in Melbourne to develop new urban infill housing typologies. Elliott’s practice, among others, completed a range of smaller infill types that deviated starkly from the earlier highrise housing complexes of the ministry.

1985–1995 The practice was consolidated over the next ten-year period, with more public housing and the first major public commission – the Carlton Baths and Community Centre in 1986. At this time we began a decade of small-scale urban interventions at the University of Melbourne Parkville campus, which subsequently led to the RMIT Urban Spaces project. The next big public commission came in 1995 with the conservatory in the Ballarat Botanical Gardens.


WORDS Geoffrey London

Civic presence: a rich tapestry of public commissions

This period provided Elliott with the crucible in which his architectural credo was formed. His interest was firmly in an activist realm where his work could make a difference. He never worked for another architectural practice, but he did share office space with other architects early in his career. This was an avenue to learn how other architects approached things, what they were thinking and doing, in order to form his own opinion relative to them. From this, he determined that he would work in a practice as the sole principal and that his fundamental interest lay in building public architecture, eschewing commercial projects; he has never been drawn to the work or the values that drove that world. Elliott later commented that “there is nothing more exhilarating than working with public buildings.”

He describes the first ten years of his practice as “a decade of very interesting and stimulating public housing.” Elliott’s largest commission at this time was Knox Schlapp Public Housing in Port Melbourne, a perimeter block complex of thirty-seven housing units that demonstrated a strong concern for the public realm and the retention of house-to-street patterns, while also providing an alternative housing type to highrise slab blocks. Other projects included the Capel Street row housing in West Melbourne and the adaptive renovation of Osborne House in Fitzroy and Seaside Lodge in St Kilda, both large boarding houses. He found the work intellectually engaging and the people involved in public housing “brave and bold” in what they were trying to do.

Elliott acknowledges the support of key people early in his career, including two politically active architects dedicated to low-income housing, Andrew McCutcheon and Dimity Reed, and Howard McCorkell from Tract, who had been a significant contributor to the success of Merchant Builders. They “got me going, gave me work, confidence and support.” He also learned a valuable lesson from Peter Corrigan, who exhorted him to document his work, to have it photographed and, in this way, construct his own story.

The Carlton Baths and Community Centre (1986–89) heralded a new direction and a new prominence for Elliott, winning the Victorian Architecture Medal in 1991. This was the project he needed in order to develop his practice around public buildings. Elliott’s intention was to invest the project with a scale sufficient to confer a civic presence

01 Carlton Baths and Community Centre (1986–89). Photography: John Gollings

02 The University of Melbourne Security Station (1994). Photography: John Gollings

03 RMIT University Ellis Court (1996–1999). Photography: John Gollings

04 Knox Schlapp Public Housing, Port Melbourne, for the Ministry of Housing (1985). Photography: John Gollings. Drawings: courtesy of Peter Elliott Architecture and Urban Design

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05 Carlton Baths and Family Resource Centre (2013). Photography: John Gollings

06 Carlton Baths and Community Centre (1986–89). Photography: John Gollings

07 Drawings for the Carlton Baths and Community Centre (1986–89). Drawing: courtesy of Peter Elliott Architecture and Urban Design, 1987

08 Robert Clark Horticultural Centre at Ballarat Botanical Gardens (1995). Photography: John Gollings

09 Paper origami model for the Robert Clark Horticultural Centre. Photography: courtesy of Peter Elliott Architecture and Urban Design, 1994

10 The Gunma Music Centre inTakasaki, Japan (1955-61), by architect Antonin Raymond. Photography: courtesy of Peter Elliott Architecture and Urban Design

Elliott observed that over that ten-year period, “… we learned how to work with the ordinary elements of architecture as fragments of larger buildings or spaces. The original ‘host’ buildings were selectively modified, cut away and added to and, in the process, re-stitched into the larger whole.”1

It demonstrated to Elliott that a matrix of multiple fragments can actually transform urban environments. Van Schaik recognized this and subsequently invited him to work at RMIT, where he produced the celebrated second generation of this kind of work, which transformed RMIT’s city campus. The projects recall the careful urban insertions of architects like Jože Plečnik and engage with a larger idea of design by describing things architecturally in a much broader way.

Elliott’s office has developed clear practice values and he and his colleagues hold to them. They will not reduce fees and they insist on proper process and a well-defined architectural service. It has purposefully remained a modest-sized practice of fifteen, with longstanding loyal staff and a small turnover. Because they are selective about the projects they take on, they have an incredibly high rate of projects that convert to buildings – over 90 percent. Elliott observes that “there are enough people and institutions in Melbourne willing and courageous enough to commission the same architect if they are happy with their work, rather than put work out to tender.” He sees this as “an affirmation of confidence and a sophisticated idea about how you commission architecture – and it’s been my good fortune to benefit from this.”

1. Peter Elliott et al, Episodic Urbanism: RMIT Urban Spaces Project 1996–2015 (Melbourne: Uro Publications, 2015), 148.

Geoffrey London was the Victorian Government Architect and the Western Australian Government Architect. He is a professor in the School of Design at the University of Western Australia and a Professional Fellow at the Melbourne School of Design, the University of Melbourne.

but not so large that it dominated the street. As a result, it is an assemblage of buildings, creating a complex plan of interconnected public spaces. The project asserts the value of the public building in the community, revisits what Elliott regards as “immutable architectural themes – monumentality, geometric ordering, iconography” and, in its confident modern reworking of these themes, reacts against the contemporaneous use of domestic forms, the “big house,” for such buildings.

The buildings evolved from a starkly simplified palette of galvanized steel and the process of its construction. This gave the project a discipline capable of holding together the inventiveness used in the assemblage of various architectural forms, combined with canted planes, distortion and scaling games. For Elliott, this project was a public flexing of his growing architectural muscle, rich with lively ideas, and a demonstration of his confident approach to a modern civic architecture.

Shortly after the completion of the Carlton Baths and Community Centre, Elliott undertook postgraduate study in the RMIT Master of Architecture program introduced by Leon van Schaik. This initiative involved inviting Melbourne design professionals who were judged to have reached a level of mastery to undertake a critical review of their own work and to place it in an explicit intellectual framework. Elliott was in one of the early groups, in the strong company of Norman Day, Howard Raggatt, Ivan Rijavec, Nonda Katsalidis, Alex Selenitsch, Allan Powell and Michael Trudgeon. The master’s degree allowed Elliott to articulate with clarity his attitude towards the city – and he placed his own projects within that formulation. Elliott acknowledges that the program “was a forced discipline that you don’t otherwise put yourself through” and that it provided an important platform for him and a point of consolidation for the practice. Peers like Howard Raggatt, with whom he conducted a joint design studio at RMIT over a period of fourteen years, and Nonda Katsalidis were sounding-boards for Elliott and he recognizes their role in helping to formulate his own architectural position.

The Robert Clark Horticultural Centre in Ballarat (1995) was completed six years after the Carlton Baths. The experience gained from the earlier project and its particular focus on a single building material gave Elliott the confidence to tackle what proved to be a highly sophisticated and very disciplined piece of public architecture. The Ballarat building is of glass and steel, organized in folded planes that have been described as “architectural origami,” its inclined planes suggesting it has been placed there delicately by the wind. It has a complex structure and geometry, refined in its very carefully rehearsed resolution, initially by computer simulation and then by full-scale modelling. And, like London’s Crystal Palace of 1851 by Joseph Paxton and Owen Jones, its benchmark predecessor, it is an architecture formed from its process of assembly and its drainage system.

Concurrently, Elliott completed a range of small projects at the University of Melbourne over a ten-year period to 1996. The university was looking for younger architects to become involved on the campus and, after the first project proved successful, Elliott was commissioned to design about three projects a year. The outcome was a rich tapestry of carefully considered insertions into the campus, an overlay of small urban interventions that contributed a new character and identity to the university, converting forgotten or leftover spaces into memorable places.

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M aybe it is an exaggeration to describe Peter Elliott’s architecture as an architecture confined to a city-state, but geographically – the North Terrace Redevelopment in

Adelaide, South Australia and the Riawunna Aboriginal Education Centre in Launceston, Tasmania being not-very-far-flung exceptions – this is almost the case. The work is in the state of Victoria and predominantly in Melbourne. In the city-state and of the city-state? Matter-of-factly yes, but the intellectual horizon of the practice is far from parochial. Not for this architect that weird badge of local pride – “I’ve never been through the Heads of Port Phillip Bay!” – these heads being the navigable portal to the outside world from Melbourne, one of the Southern Hemisphere’s busiest ports.

The mind of this practice – the architect regards himself as fortunate to have travelled regularly in Europe – teems with thoughts about and experiences of the towns and cities of Europe. Not Asia, not even Japan – while its architecture had an influence, it was not in the usual way in which it haunts many of his peers. Elliott says about Japan: “The early brutalist work of folded origami concrete like the Gunma Music Centre in Takasaki by Antonin Raymond (1961) was part inspiration for the Ballarat glasshouse – and then the Victoria University (VU) Law School …” And he was not captivated by North or South America, also hugely influential in Victoria. So while there is some geographical prescribing in the scope of the work, the mental space giving rise to it is cosmopolitan in a very targeted sense. Aldo Rossi is present in the architect’s musings, as this Italian architect and theorist was when in 1992 Elliott wrote “Forays into the Contemporary Institution: An Architecture of the Public Realm,” a thesis published in RMIT’s Fin de Siecle? And the Twenty-First Century: Architectures of Melbourne. But Mike Davis of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, with his observations of Los Angeles, is not; nor is Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. Jože Plečnik, however, in Prague and Ljubljana, with his editing and amending and seamlessly adding to urban form and space, rumbles through the brain of Elliott’s firm.

The matter of the practice is certainly circumscribed in another way. By deliberate choice there is a total focus on public clients: housing, but few houses for individual clients, no commercial works. Urban landscapes yes, intimate and yet extensive. Large-scale

infrastructure (Deer Park Bypass, 2009), designed to be experienced at speed, yes. You may from all of this get a hint of how the practice has differentiated itself from other practices in a city in which positions are vigorously asserted by architects as they pursue the consequences of their beliefs in the service of their clients.

Why then does this practice attract and merit exceptional attention beyond “the Heads”? It is, I believe, because the practice articulates and asserts quietly but persistently through all of its work a stance about architecture that is not dramatic, not particularly fashionable, but of vital import to what in Practical Poetics in Architecture I term the architectural practice of “Healing our City.” This is the process by which the conversations between buildings and spaces that make up cities are restarted by architects after city districts have been disrupted by autonomous, ideologically or commercially driven lumps of building that ignore any pre-existing condition. This puts the practice alongside many highly regarded European and Asian practices, many winners of or nominees for the RIBA Stirling Prize but none of them “starchitects.” What is it that such well-recognized, diverse international practices share?

Let me take you to the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in 1994. A lunchtime debate is underway. Peter Eisenman, referring to his book Moving Arrows, Eros and Other Errors, is asserting the romance of architecture. Rafael Moneo is countering with the ideals of modernist purity. The exchange is entertainingly, sometimes scarily vehement. Yet to this observer an elephant is absent from the room.

As so often in these bipolar debates, then and now, an entire category of architectural endeavour is not being considered. Both Eisenman and Moneo are arguing about the way in which the world should be remade – one by absorbing it, coding it and presenting it as a puzzle; the other by identifying essences of place and program and ironing out contradictions. Here is how Elliott might have put his third position had he been there and of a mind to argue: “Yes, the world exists. Yes! We interact with it, change it. But my role is to find a companion to what exists, something that sits alongside us and the world we find ourselves in. Something that talks to us and to it, asks it questions, responds in conversation. Notices its characteristics and nudges it towards what it could be. Respects its presence, the

1995–2005 With the practice well established, more major public commissions followed. Three important projects were Observatory Gate at the Melbourne Royal Botanic Gardens, Spencer Street Footbridge across the Yarra River and the renovation of the State Government Offices in the Treasury Reserve. This was a most productive period and the beginning of large, urban-scaled projects such as the Urban Spaces Project at RMIT University, the redevelopment of North Terrace – the premier cultural spine in Adelaide (with Taylor Cullity Lethlean) and a portfolio of education projects such as the Victoria University Law School.


WORDS Leon van Schaik

Companion city: the continuum of urban architecture

01 Deer Park Bypass (2009). Photography: John Gollings

02 Spencer Street Footbridge (1998). Photography: John Gollings

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03 RMIT University Building 9 rooftop extension (2009). Photography: John Gollings

04 RMIT University Lawn Precinct (2012). Photography: Dianna Snape

05 RMIT University cafe (Lawn Precinct, 2012).Photography: Dianna Snape

06 North Terrace Redevelopment, South Australia (2011), project in collaboration with Taylor Cullity Lethlean. Photography: John Gollings

language that brought it into being and adds sentences. Opens it up to new lines of thought in extending conversations.” So it is that Elliott’s urbanism seeks out a “companion city,” not a new or alternative one.1

This is why the practice is so effective at renewing old fabric, as in the State Government Offices in East Melbourne (1997). Or in RMIT University’s Building 1 (2011). These buildings become more what they seemingly wanted to be. The concertina extension to the VU Law School (2003) seems to flow naturally from the heavy rustication of the nineteenth-century base. The very differently “tuned” and scaled concertina on Building 9 at RMIT (2009) seems to complete the design of the original architect, Percy Everett, rather than to Crash! Wallop! a malignant cancer into the existing building. Some notorious “romance”-orientated European practices would have, and lamentably have in other circumstances, done that. This sense of completing or fulfilling latent promise is why the ongoing urban spaces at RMIT (stage 1 began in 1996) and the Spencer Street Footbridge (1998) and North Terrace, Adelaide (2011) seem so “right,” so always intended, so “surely always there.” At Observatory Gate in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne (1999), the new building is set behind the small observatory buildings, embracing them in a calm, readily peopled space. The Robert Clark Horticultural Centre at the Ballarat Botanical Gardens (1995) sets in place a muted but definite resonance with the greenhouses of Joseph Paxton that started the botanical conversation. Here is an architecture that, as at the Riawunna Aboriginal Education Centre at the University of Tasmania (2000), frames archaeological fragments in such a way that they carry as much weight as the existing industrial buildings, buildings heedless of a prior heritage.

Here is a position that is neither “idealist” in the ways that modernism was, asserting the only possible future, nor “romantic,” in that it crashes the individual creations of a “genius” into the face of the city to the applause of an awed but deluded cognoscenti. Here in Elliott’s practice is a position that is conversational, transactional, fundamentally humanist. A position that links back to the architectures of the humanist continuum that people such as Philip Tilden, Charles Voysey and Charles Mackintosh worked in before the “crisis” of world war gave power to those who espoused extreme solutions and displaced this tradition of respectful interaction.

That is not to say that Elliott’s practice eschews an intellectual position. It is to state that this practice aligns itself with those who argue that while the practice of architecture is possible without philosophy or theory, a philosophy or theory of architecture is not worth much without the practice of architecture. And further, in disagreement with both romantics and idealists, it is to argue that the future cannot be determined or controlled by individual invention or will. The future is dependent on chance factors that we can neither predict nor control. So keep talking!

1. Leon van Schaik, “‘Companion City’ Competition: Judge’s Report,” Transition: Discourse on Architecture, no 34, 1991.

Leon van Schaik is Professor of Architecture at RMIT University.

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P eter Elliott’s practice is like no other in Australia. He deftly combines architecture and urban design with modesty and unassuming ease. The results seem utterly natural and right.

At the same time, they conceal an extremely sophisticated and expert knowledge of the city and its multiple scales and a meticulous attention as to how one experiences space and a place. He acts like an urban surgeon: stitching and knitting the city back together, grafting new onto old, removing and revealing, but always leaving the body better than before. Contemporary discourse and architectural history are not kind to such practitioners because the work takes time and because often there is not the singular, heroic work but instead a collection of works, a series of episodes, a minor addition to make a greater whole, or the creation of infrastructure – a bridge, a wall, a submerged space beneath a terrace – that once built we all take for granted.

The award therefore of the 2017 Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal to Peter Elliott is something rather special. It’s an acknowledgement that harks back to 1979, when the same award was accorded to the late Bryce Mortlock, who also quietly made cities. And it was Mortlock for whom Elliott first consulted in the early 1970s on the masterplan and landscaping for the University of Melbourne before venturing out on his own in 1975. That experience was golden. Years later, his masterplanning for Trinity College, Melbourne Grammar School, Geelong Grammar School and International House at the University of Melbourne, among other clients, draws sustenance from that early experience and confirms his practice’s immunity to fashion through a necessary dialogue with context and the spaces between buildings. And these are commissions that last years, sometimes decades. Elliott’s office commands and attracts loyalty.

Peter Elliott admits that he’s largely self-taught. Experience and travel have been constant teachers. Since 1971, he’s travelled to Italy every year; he’s been a keen student of that country’s, and especially Rome’s, oft-chaotic urban tapestry. He’s been an ongoing student of Carlo Scarpa, Jože Plečnik and Luis Barragán, other practitioners who have approached their respective cities as articulate and sympathetic companions. A trip to Japan in 1985 was enlightening: there the folded concrete of Antonin Raymond’s Gunma Music

Centre, Takasaki (1955–61) opened his eyes to new form and new materials. But most of all he’s been a willing and dedicated student of the Australian city: he knows its morphology, whether at its heart or at its periphery. His Deer Park Bypass (2009) and M80 Ring Road walls (2013) are testament to the latter – giant Jeffrey Smart readings in astonishing colour of the city’s bigness at the scale of the road. I like, though, to think of Elliott as Australia’s Patrick Geddes, practising his constructive and conservative surgery, using techniques of observation, survey and deep context analysis – simply in order to do the right thing.

Over the past decade, Elliott’s practice has matured. His 2015 book Episodic Urbanism: RMIT Urban Spaces Project (1996–2015) is a brilliant summary of his design thinking. It chronicles through drawings and text his transformation of RMIT University’s urban spaces over more than twenty years – the sort of story where it’s hard to point to a single achievement. It’s a longitudinal project wedded to incremental change and patient persistence with a client and with a place. It’s also a commitment to harnessing disparate urban fragments across a landscape so that a level of coherence can be navigated, not just by the initiated, but by anyone. In this, Elliott has mastered what he describes as a topographic architecture. He’s interested in walking over and through buildings, that the ground might contain space above and below, and that, like the urban landscapes of places like Sicily’s Noto, Rome or Scarpa’s Venice, the new might be subtly inserted and the old revealed afresh. For Elliott, this idea is captured by his notion of a host city or a host campus and a corresponding host architecture, which then suggests strategies like editing, grafting, the use of fragments and the addition of restorative or parasitic form, which complement approaches that add on, infill, excavate or provide the “new.” This is a design philosophy that welcomes the contingent and does not shy away from constraints. Parameters enrich rather than detract.

Any number of projects demonstrate the depth and cunning of the Elliott office stratagem. There is the Memorial Hall upgrade at Melbourne Grammar School (2005), neatly submerged beside Hugh Peck’s 1928 bluestone hall; and the William Buckley Bridge at Barwon Heads (2011), sitting in parallel to the old – in one gesture, responding to a community’s distress and giving back a new linear

Urban surgeon: education and infrastructure as city making

Public commissions continued with large-scale freeway architecture and bridge designs, including Deer Park Bypass, following onto the M80 Ring Road upgrade, and the William Buckley pedestrian and road bridges across the Barwon River. Education projects covered a wide range of types and scales, including the Melbourne Grammar School Memorial Hall, the Visual Arts Centre for Latrobe University in Bendigo and the School of Performing Arts and Creative Education for Geelong Grammar School. The RMIT University Urban Spaces project continued into its second decade with the completion of University Lawn and Building 11 precincts, along with A’Beckett Temporary Urban Square, rooftop extensions to Building 9 and the refurbishment of the Francis Ormond Building.


01 Geelong Grammar School, School for Performing Arts and Creative Education (2015). Photography: John Gollings

02 RMIT University A’Beckett Temporary Urban Square (2014). Photography: John Gollings

2005–2015+

WORDS Philip Goad02

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public space. There is the rooftop extension (2009) of Percy Everett’s Building 9 at RMIT University, complementing the streamlines of its host beneath but, like Erich Mendelsohn’s Berliner Tageblatt (1923), at the same time proudly announcing the new above. There is Elliott’s 2013 refurbishment of his own 1990 award-winning refurbishment of the much-loved Carlton Baths, an accomplished essay in sympathetic grafting of new onto formerly new; the paring back of detritus to reveal the grandeur of RMIT University’s Building 11 (2015); and the context-creating ensemble of Geelong Grammar’s School for Performing Arts and Creative Education (2015), with its folded metal skin.

I first became aware of Peter Elliott’s architecture as a first-year student in the late 1970s when he presented the Whitelaw and Newhouse Residence in Lethbridge (1978) to us in a guest lecture: an existing bluestone house, which he recovered from a ruin and gave new life. As students we also visited his warehouse conversion (1979) for Andrew McCutcheon in Clifton Hill and were in awe of its transformation. For many of us, this ability to breathe new life into an existing context was a revelation. And this is what Elliott has consistently done for clients and institutions ever since.

One of his current projects is to add new office accommodation to the rear of Victoria’s Parliament House. It is a fitting climax to a glittering career. It’s also within a stone’s throw of one of Elliott’s favourite urban settings, Yuncken Freeman Architects’ Catholic Diocesan Offices (1971–72), with its tough, submerged incisions in the landscape surrounding William Wardell’s majestic St Patrick’s Cathedral. At Parliament Elliott is doing the same, carving into the earth, and with frequent collaborators, landscape architects Taylor Cullity Lethlean, he’s doing what he always does so well. He takes a step back, judges what is important and then acts. With a series of sunken courtyards, roof gardens and terraces, Elliott is creating an urban landscape that can be traversed, inhabited, leant on and sat upon, all so that the existing dialogue between two of Victoria’s most important public buildings might continue. This is humility.

Peter Elliott has a deep sense of serving the community. And he’s done this for more than forty years – as an architect. It’s an example that very few can match. For most of us, we can only look upon it with sincere respect and the utmost admiration.

Philip Goad is Chair of Architecture and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne.

03 RMIT University Alumni Court (RMIT University Urban Spaces project, 2003). Photography: John Gollings

04 RMIT University Building 15 and Alumni Stair (RMIT University Urban Spaces project, 2007). Photography: John Gollings

05 William Buckley Bridge, Barwon Heads (2011). Photography: Sean McPhillips

06 Ideogram by Peter Elliott showing host architecture types.

07–08 Parliament House Office Accommodation project (current). Renders: Floodslicer

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Host City + Host Architecture

add on infill excavate new



A city’s identity is understood through its public spaces. In Melbourne these spaces have been created iteratively, stitched together, grafted and curated over many years. The resultant ensemble forms a collective of ideas and narratives from many generations. This is how cities with resonance are made and assembled over time. One important measure of the quality of urban space is how people experience and travel through the networks of streets, lanes, courts and arcades that make up the fabric of a place.

One of Melbourne’s finest sequences of public spaces is located at RMIT’s city campus on the northern edge of the city grid. These spaces, designed by Peter Elliott, are remarkable as a twenty-year endeavour over an entire city block and are also a testament to his mastery of the architecture of public space.

The redevelopment of the RMIT city campus is captured in the book Episodic Urbanism, which successfully conveys the vast scope and complexity of such an urban undertaking. This is an important document of record, revealing the genesis and delivery of the sprawling commission and, more importantly, providing insight into Elliott’s particular working method and the way he delivers clarity and coherence in such a dense and complex urban setting.

Episodic Urbanism tells the story of the remaking of RMIT’s city campus in the form of a monograph, with contributions from Margaret Gardner (former vice-chancellor of RMIT), SueAnne Ware, William Fox, Robert Nelson, Leon van Schaik and photographers Paul Hermes, Dianna Snape and John Gollings. The book is lavishly illustrated with photo-essays, fine-line drawings and archival images. It has been beautifully designed by Stuart Geddes, who captured the essence of the project with subtlety and finesse. What sets the book apart from recent practice monographs is the way it tells a larger story about ambitions for urban architecture within the contemporary city. It records the progressive development of a whole city block over time and the various influences and events that made it. The book unpacks and reveals the inner workings of the project, showing that exceptional outcomes need equal measures of political savvy, advocacy and cunning and a mature design sensibility.

The idea of Episodic Urbanism is best experienced at RMIT, where, in a five-minute walk, we are taken on a choreographed journey that connects us not only to a sequence of diverse spatial experiences, but also to the layered history of the setting. Beginning at Russell Street, we enter a space unlike any other in Melbourne – a large, unadorned and imposing urban court, framed dramatically by the bluestone walls of the former Old Melbourne Gaol. We then pass through these massive walls via a narrow threshold, entering an immersive garden – a contrasting sensory experience – along elevated leafy terraces, before cascading theatrically down a grand civic stair into the heart of the university, where a vibrant cafe plaza looks out onto waterfalls, terraces, student lawns and sporting courts. As Elliott says, it is “a stage set created through serendipity and time.” A journey that weaves effortlessly between the as-found condition and the needs of a contemporary city campus.

Ware relates how Elliott works with the idea of the incremental city. His approach accepts that a collage of urban pieces developed over many years provides a richer, more nuanced experience than a singular uniting gesture. A myriad of commissions, over two decades, has given RMIT a series of defined spaces with contrasting programs, expressions and experiences. Yet it is apparent that this part of the city has been intuitively curated and stitched together with skilful

Episodic Urbanism: RMIT Urban Spaces Project 1996–2015

BOOK REVIEW Perry Lethlean

01 Episodic Urbanism: RMIT Urban Spaces Project 1996–2015, published by Uro Publications, 2015.

subtlety, as it is impossible to discern project stages, design fads or even a lapse in judgement.

An essay by Nelson poetically references the canons of great city typologies expressed in Elliott’s architecture of public space. Exploring the network of spaces at RMIT, it is apparent that these are not decorative foregrounds to built form but are created to host people, doing things, whether socializing, studying or promenading. The campus is configured around the familiar urban typologies of street, lane, court and plaza, which are examined, tested and reimagined unapologetically. In the manner of an Italian hill town, there is also a theatrical amplification. What might, for example, begin as a conventional balustrade may become monumental, urban and emphatic. A simple change of level becomes an opportunity for an exceptional stair as architectural object and an elevated prospect is transformed into the grand belvedere as meeting place.

A conversation between van Schaik, Elliott and Maitiú Ward engages us with the project’s genesis and its political backstory, particularly the importance of enduring client support. The discussion also reveals Elliott’s particular urban cunning, working opportunistically with the campus as-found. Elliott’s way of working is to forensically examine the site to reveal its potential. Prior to any design additions, layers are pared back and elements judiciously edited. This is an approach that cannot be designed or understood in plan. New layers are then woven back in, each entwined or in tension with the old in a new conversation.

Episodic Urbanism concludes with Elliott’s insightful observations about informing influences – Carlo Scarpa, Luis Barragán and Jože Plečnik, among others. These connect Elliott to ideas of crafted details, composition, juxtaposition and the value of the small and incremental commission. Elliott operates often at an intimate scale but sees its place in the totality of the city. It is an approach forged within a practice founded on modest beginnings,

where briefs were ill defined and commissions often small, where meaningful outcomes were eked out from minimal means. At RMIT the validity of the small commission is apparent. There is a masterful contrast between big, confident urban gestures and a light touch where one finds exquisite crafted details.

There is a sense of modesty in Elliott’s design of public space. This is rare and remarkable in contemporary architecture. As an architect, he is content to operate in between the interstitial spaces and the connecting tissue of the campus. At RMIT, precisely measured design gestures contrast, reveal and make more evident the site’s urban memories. These are not retained as slavish historical moments but utilized for their intrinsic worth. There are no souped-up narratives, overworked ideas or fussy patterning. Unlike the design charlatan, who attempts to convince through words but not deeds, Elliott designs with a simple message done bloody well.

Perry Lethlean is a director of Taylor Cullity Lethlean.

02 Plan of RMIT University in Episodic Urbanism: RMIT Urban Spaces Project 1996–2015, published by Uro Publications, 2015.

03 A spread from Episodic Urbanism: RMIT Urban Spaces Project 1996–2015

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Postscript

I am personally indebted to a small number of exceptional people who took the trouble to foster and mentor me as a young architect. And then there are the many hundreds of people whom I have worked and taught with for more than forty years of practice and academic life, to whom I owe a special debt of thanks for their own blend of talent, inspiration and friendship – for architecture is a collective activity dependent on the cooperation of a multitude of skilled hands and cultured minds.


01 Peter Elliott Architecture and Urban Design office, December 2016. Drawing: An Thai

Awards

2016 Australian Institute of Architects, National Architecture Awards: Education, Architecture Commendation, Geelong Grammar School, School of Performing Arts and Creative Education

2016 Australian Institute of Architects, Bates Smart Award for Architecture In the Media, State Award, Episodic Urbanism: RMIT Urban Spaces Project 1996–2015

2016 Australian Institute of Architects, John George Knight Award for Heritage Architecture, RMIT University, B11 Redevelopment

2016 Australian Institute of Architects, Educational Architecture Award, Geelong Grammar School, School of Performing Arts and Creative Education

2015 Australian Award for Urban Design, Commendation, RMIT University A’Beckett Temporary Urban Square

2015 Australian Institute of Architects, Sustainable Architecture Award, Commendation, RMIT University A’Beckett Temporary Urban Square

2015 Australian Institute of Architects, Urban Design Award, RMIT University A’Beckett Temporary Urban Square

2015 Mornington Peninsula Heritage Award, McCraith House Dromana

2014 Australian Institute of Architects, Urban Design Award, M80 Ring Road and M2 Tullamarine Freeway, Interchange for VicRoads

2012 Australian Institute of Architects, National Architecture Awards, Walter Burley Griffin Award for Urban Design, University Lawn Precinct, RMIT University

2012 Australian Institute of Architects, National Architecture Awards, Urban Design, Commendation, William Buckley Bridge, Barwon Heads

2012 Intergrain Timber Vision Awards, Landscape Award, Barwon Heads Pedestrian Bridge and William Buckley Bridge

2012 Australian Institute of Architects, Small Project Architecture Award, Tower Turnaround “Hi-Pod” Prototype (with BKK Architects)

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2005 CCAA Public Domain Awards, Streets Category Winner, North Terrace Redevelopment, Stage 1, Adelaide SA (with Taylor Cullity Lethlean)

2005 CCAA Public Domain Awards – Precincts Category Commendation, North Terrace Redevelopment, Stage 1, Adelaide SA (with Taylor Cullity Lethlean)

2005 BDP Australia, Urban Design Award, North Terrace Redevelopment (with Taylor Cullity Lethlean)

2004 RAIA, Institutional Architecture Award, Victoria University, Victoria Law School

2004 RAIA, Heritage Architecture Award, RMIT University, Building 20

2003 CCAA Public Domain Awards, Precincts Category Commendation, RMIT University City Campus, Urban Spaces Project Stages 1 + 2

2002 Australian Timber Design Awards, Highly Commended Award, Public and Commercial Buildings, Timber Framed, Riawunna Aboriginal Education Centre, The University of Tasmania, Launceston

2001 RAIA, National Commendation, Public Buildings, Faculty of Arts Precinct, The University of Tasmania, Launceston

2001 RAIA (Tasmania), Public Buildings Merit Award, Faculty of Arts Precinct, The University of Tasmania, Launceston

2001 RAIA, Institutional Commendation, Melbourne Grammar School Centenary Building

2000 The BDP Urban Design in Australia Award, Commendation, RMIT University Urban Spaces Project Stage 1 (in association with the City of Melbourne City Projects Division)

2000 RAIA, National, Walter Burley Griffin Award for Urban Design, RMIT University Urban Spaces Project Stage 1 (in association with the City of Melbourne City Projects Division)

2000 RAIA, The Melbourne Prize, The Observatory Gate, Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne

2000 RAIA, Institutional Award of Merit, The Observatory Gate, Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne

2000 RAIA, Urban Design, Joseph Reed Award, RMIT University Urban Spaces Project Stage 1 (in association with the City of Melbourne City Projects Division)

2000 AISC Architectural Steel Design Award, Spencer Street Footbridge

1999 Australian Council of Building Design Professions, Urban Design in Australia Award, Commendation, Spencer Street Footbridge

1999 RAIA, Urban Design, Commendation, Spencer Street Footbridge

1998 RAIA, National, Lachlan Macquarie Award for Conservation, State Government Offices, 2 Treasury Place, East Melbourne

1998 RAIA, Institutional, Award of Merit, State Government Offices, 2 Treasury Place, East Melbourne

1998 RAIA, Conservation, John George Knight Award, State Government Offices, 2 Treasury Place, East Melbourne

1998 RAIA, The Melbourne Prize, Commendation, State Government Offices, 2 Treasury Place, East Melbourne.

1998 Property Council of Australia Award, Refurbished Buildings – Ballarat Town Hall Refurbishment

1997 RAIA, Institutional, William Wardell Award –Ballarat Town Hall Refurbishment

1997 RAIA, Urban Design, Award of Merit, Collective projects, The University of Melbourne

1997 RAIA, Commercial, Commendation, Robbie Barker Hair Salon, Toorak.

1996 RAIA, New Institutional, Award of Merit, Robert Clark Horticulture Centre, Ballarat

1995 RAIA, New Housing, Commendation, St. Mary’s College, Principal’s Residence, The University of Melbourne, Parkville

1995 AISC Victorian Architectural Steel Design Award for Buildings, Australian Institute of Steel Construction, The Robert Clark Horticultural Centre, Ballarat

1992 RAIA, National Interior Architecture Award, Minchin Apartment, Fitzroy

1992 RAIA, Interior Architecture, Award of Merit, Minchin Apartment, Fitzroy

1991–92 BHP Award of Merit, Steel Sheet and Coil Products Division and Metal Building for the Redevelopment of Carlton Baths and Community Centre

1991 RAIA, Victorian Architecture Medal, Carlton Baths and Community Centre

1991 RAIA, New Institutional, Merit Award, Carlton Baths and Community Centre

1991 BHP Steel Profile Architecture of the Decade Awards 1981–1991, Highly Commended, Carlton Baths and Community Centre

1988 RAIA, Conservation Merit Award, Osborne House, Fitzroy Rooming house for Ministry of Housing and Construction

1987 RAIA, Rejuvenated Housing Merit Award, Professor George Seddon Residence, Richmond

1985 RAIA, National Chapter Robin Boyd Award, finalist, Knox Schlapp Development, Port Melbourne

1985 ACI Architecture Award for Innovation in Architecture, Knox Schlapp Development, Port Melbourne

1985 RAIA, New Housing, Merit Award, Knox Schlapp Development, Port Melbourne (in conjunction with the Ministry of Housing)

1984 RAIA, New Housing, Merit Award, MacLatchy Residence, Fitzroy

1981 RAIA, Rejuvenated Housing Award Medal, McCutcheon Residence, Clifton Hill

1980 RAIA, Rejuvenated Housing Award Medal, Whitelaw/Newhouse Residence, Lethbridge

1979 RAIA, Urban and Community Design Award Medal, Fitzroy Housing Repair Advisory Service

1975 RAIA, Community Design Award, Citation, Playground at the Victorian School for Deaf Children (with the Fitzroy Fun Factory)

2012 Australian Institute of Architects, Architecture Award for Urban Design, University Lawn Precinct, RMIT University

2012 Australian Institute of Architects, Joseph Reed Award for Urban Design, William Buckley Bridge, Barwon Heads

2012 Victorian Coastal Awards, Coastal Building and Design Award for the Barwon Heads Pedestrian Bridge and William Buckley Bridge

2010 ASI Steel Clad Structures Building Design Award, Deer Park Bypass for VicRoads

2010 ASI Creative Innovations Steel Design Award, Deer Park Bypass for VicRoads

2010 RAIA, John George Knight Heritage Award, RMIT University, Building 9 Rooftop Extension

2010 RAIA, Institutional Alterations and Extensions Award, RMIT University, Building 9 Rooftop Extension

2010 RAIA, Colorbond Award for Steel Architecture, Deer Park Bypass for VicRoads

2010 RAIA, Urban Design Award, Deer Park Bypass for VicRoads

2008 The Adelaide Prize, Glenelg Tramline Extension With Taylor Cullity Lethlean and Ian Dryden

2006 RAIA, National Lachlan Macquarie Award for Heritage, Memorial Hall, Melbourne Grammar School

2006 Urban Design Award, BDP Australia, North Terrace Redevelopment Adelaide (with Taylor Cullity Lethlean)

2006 Australian Institute of Landscape Architects, National Merit Award in Landscape Architecture, Design Category, North Terrace Development – Stage 1, Adelaide (with Taylor Cullity Lethlean)

2006 RAIA, Institutional Alterations and Extensions Award, Memorial Hall Melbourne, Grammar School

2006 RAIA, Regional Prize, Latrobe University, Visual Arts Centre

2006 The Adelaide Prize, North Terrace Development, Taylor Cullity Lethlean with Peter Elliott Architects


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