Glenn Murcutt // Recollections of a Student
While reading a piece entitled “Raised to Observe: Glenn Murcutt”, I decided to relate this interview to a personal experience for this particular post. Between July and December 2013, I was fortunate enough to have personally met and been a student of Professor Glenn Murcutt in his Regional Design Graduation Studio. It is only with hindsight that I realised it was in fact the first time the issues of sustainability and building systems had ever been raised in my design courses which perhaps does show that as a student of architecture, we don’t give much thought to how our design or the processes of realising our designs will actually impact on the environment.
Murcutt first identifies that for him, sustainability “is to maintain or keep going; to continue…to grow in balance…[whereas] we overharvest or poison the land.” (Davidson, 386). Generic as this definition seems, he clarifies further, which is where I feel the discussion becomes interesting: “…we look at the TV news to see what the weather is like rather than experiencing it.” (Davidson, 386). Here is where I begin to relate. I feel that here, Murcutt identifies for us the fundamental problem of our current urbanity: that as a result of it, we have distanced ourselves from nature and from interacting with nature. It is therefore possible to argue that our lives and processes of modern living are unsustainable because we are no longer aware of nature and thus we do not ‘see’ our footprint as affecting our urban way of life.
While it is true, there is plenty of talk of climate change, of deforestation and of landfills overflowing, but facts and figures are merely shown to us in the news, it is never truly before our eyes. Because we never experience the impact we have on the environment, we become complacent, believing, wrongly, that our cities can continue as they are, fuelling a system of unsustainability with our ignorance. Architects are partly to blame for this, Murcutt for example believes that “There has been a resistance by architects to environmental design, as many regard climate-responsive architecture as being unable to create beautiful work; they see much of the work as ugly.” (Davidson, 393). Unsustainability is the price we are paying for beauty.
This lack of considering sustainability could not be said of working in his Regional studio set in Wollemi National Park. I found myself constantly thinking about the natural experience, justifying an architectural experience as part of the natural one, not against it. There was a shift in values and more importantly, a conscience process of considering how a building and its processes would affect the environment we were building in. I can honestly profess that until this particular studio, I had no conception of waste water management, of how much electricity people would need to use and of the living machine, a biological system which transformed black water and excrement into clean reusable flush water.
While it can be argued all of Murcutt’s interventions are in regional areas and that his work could never be applied to an urban setting, I believe this is not the case. Murcutt advocates a strong understanding of detail, showing how “The timber floors I lay are screwed, because if you nail them you can’t reuse them. I use lime mortar in brickwork because it can be scraped off and the bricks can be reused…It’s a way of thinking. The process for determining how elements are connected is also knowing how they can be retrieved and how they can be reused.” (Davidson, 390-391). Processes, unlike buildings can be applied globally. There is no reason why in our own urban contexts we cannot also consider how elements of a building are to be taken down, not simply drawing the line at its assembly and inhabitation.
There is an arguable inherent problem within the architectural profession that we believe the design process ends with a building’s completion. It does not. A truly sustainable process recognises the entire lifespan of a building and plans for its deconstruction and reuse. This is the most important lesson that I took from Murcutt’s studio course. It was not about aesthetics or form or even urbanity. It was a new mindset, a conscious process of thought about sustainability and sustainable processes that a building is an embodied, living organism which, as he says “must touch the earth lightly.”
References
Davies, Cynthia. (2010). “Raised to Observe: Glenn Murcutt”, in Constructing a New Agenda: Architectural Theory 1993 – 2009. Sykes, Krista (ed.). New York: Princeton Architectural Press, p. 385-393.