JOSH BATTERTON Artefact

IN CONVERSATION Josh Batterton & Carey Lyon JB

CL

JB

CL

Is representing this plurality of ideas something that interests you more than singluar convicted resolution within the context of a project?

Yes, I came from an education in the 80s where pluralism was kind of what we all cut our teeth on and you know, I haven’t really withdrawn from that perspective.

The world is made up of lots of so-called multiple realities but having said that not everything on those bookshelves is equal either. You’ve probably familiar with a book like Keith Windschuttle’s “The Fabrication of Aboriginal History”, which is kind of a pretty ugly diatribe about one side of the history wars. Clearly, I don’t support that view and there’s lots of other books on that shelf that would countermand that perspective. When I used that in my PHD I was interested in the fact that there were competing ideas and that you as an architect as you’re clearly doing in your project, you need to work out how to navigate your way through those competing ideas and make your own judgment.

In relation to the bookshelf, you have entangled yourself within “a community” of ideas within books: Importance of a multiplicity of voices – This as a reflection of society and the importance of not soloing yourself within an echo chamber of individual thought. How does this effect you position as the leader of a practice engaging in a very broad range of ideas?

I personally (and as a practice) do not come to projects with a closed idea of what it would be. Obviously, we just have our own interests that repeat across projects. This thing we are doing here at Perth, we are genuinely interested in what’s important to them, and you do use those as a bit of starting point to generate ideas that suite that project.

Side issue: Edith cowan university is the only university in Australia that is named after a woman. She was an extraordinary progressive woman. She has been in the press for the 100-year celebration of her death last week. So there is this whole interesting narrative

JB

CL

within ecu about powerful progressive women that is being built across the road from the Yagan Square project, which is in part named after at least, the very male warrior Yagan. So, immediately that is casting our mind towards an urban context with two different narratives within the urban space of a city. So that is the process we use.

This discussion between client and designer is one of the most exciting parts – you’ve discussed these conversations as very much at two-way street or exchange - Maybe you could talk to some of the things that you have learned within this dialogue you have with your clients.

That is a great question. If you wanted me to immediately lead into your subject matter of indigenous architecture that’s obviously a great Segway to talk about that. So as an example, when we started our work on the Koorie Heritage Trust, which is a modest project within Federation Square, but significant because they were up on King st and they felt literally in the margins of the city, so to move to Fed Square was very symbolic. To move in and to bring indigenous culture into the literal civic cultural heart of Melbourne. But at one of the very first meetings we had with some of the team from the trust, their first reaction was the project was all about Birrarung and the river, how to reconnect to the river. It hadn’t been the first thing on our mind, we had a whole bunch of other things we had been thinking about, but it immediately just said to me that clients bring ideas that you don’t necessarily don’t carry in your mind and you have to have an open mind that is sufficient to hear it for starters, and then having heard it, to work out if you want to do something about it as an architect.

That happens to us often. The and we find that an exciting part of the work that we do. We’re dealing with smart and interesting clients most of the time and their not short of putting out ideas that are important to them so we are trying to respond to those.

JB The people you are talking to are leaders in their field or organization because they are so experienced in the subject that they are talking to?

CL

Yes, and they enjoy having the conversation about how design and how architecture can actually make their ideas come to life. We ran a workshop on this project in Perth last week. As a part of the client group, the vice chancellor of the university who happens to be a chemist, he happened to have this idea for the university; “this uni is about a collision of technology, business and creativity”. That is the stated objective of the university. Why would you as an architect not be interested in saying to say to him, how can the design of the building contribute to the university genuinely creating a collision between business, technology and creativity.

As opposed to being the architect who says, I know what I do. I have a very architectural response that doesn’t vary much between project to project and I will shoehorn your ideas in to my framework.

That is the opposite to the approach we take.

JB Do you think that working on public projects lends itself more to creating a discourse between the greater population once the building is finished?

CL

Yes, we have commercial clients occasionally. Even when that happens, the same sort of conversation will happen. The little job we did for the AIA, at 41 Exhibition st. That was a commercial project, but they were interested in the discourse on what sort of contribution the building can make to the city. Obviously if you’re dealing with hard assed developers, you can’t really have a conversation. We have worked with clients who say “mate, its real estate, stop talking to us about that stuff”.

How much floor area, how much can we rent, and we’ve got to make it look nice so that we can charge the rent we want to charge to make the development work.

That is the flip side and to be honest we just don’t have much time for that. Life is too short deal with those sort of clients.

JB Lyons as a practice has an Interest in the plural not the singular – How did your thinking in relation to this change or adapt when designing you own house in Gariwerd, where the conversation is shifted from building and city to building and bush – This reaches a kind of crescendo with the literal representation of sorry directed at the bush CL

What was interesting on that project because I don’t do houses. I have literally never designed a house, and I’ve always worked on larger project and the skills and the way I think architecturally has always been more connected to the city and civic thinking or public projects.

It was interesting to me to take a a similar process to a smaller house in the bush, in the same way my mind was trying to be open with the complications of building in the city, the whole bunch of things from other the client of the city of the context or things that we will work with on projects to do the same thing on a small house to see what I could make out of it. So there were a whole bunch of strands on that projects. So the indigenous history was a powerful one, as your original email that Sam Hunter sent to me, you deal with what’s appropriate for an old whitefella architect and I felt comfortable and still feel confident that I could occupy my space within the discourse without moving into stuff that is inappropriate for me to engage with such as cultural knowledge that is owned by indigenous communities whereas “sorry”, whether you like that lament or not, I could say that and mean it.

You can have your white fella critical position on what’s happened in history, and own that space, but once you buy in to cultural knowledge, you do need to have an indigenous colleague or partner to help you you navigate what’s appropriate for you to work with and what’s not appropriate. We were asked to do the Koorie Heritage Trust because I know the CEO and my wife and I have supported the trust for a couple of decades. And they asked if I would do the project, and I said that I would only on the condition that we would do it in collaboration with what was then IAV and what is now IADV with Jefa

Greenaway and Reuben Berg at the time. And they were like our cultural guides. And we couldn’t have done it appropriately without them. The use of certain representations, patterns, colors, the flag. All of it needed to be done as a partnership.

So it is a dilemma, I agree.

JB It seems that the cliché best practice is to have the Architect as conduit, who is listening and reinterpreting what the indigenous client or collaborator is saying.

CL

I know greg burgess who I know well and very much respect, I wouldn’t criticize him at all, but the is the approach he took on some of those earlier projects, and they’re beautiful projects. I think they say as much about Greg in the end as they say about the communities.

But at the time it was extraordinary that a well known architect would take the time to sit down, listen, think, and help articulate in a design sense how indigenous knowledge could be brought out in architecture. So they are important projects, but we have moved on a bit.

Same with Glen Murcutt, the house he did up in the NT. Kim Dovey is a lecturer and professor at Melbourne Uni and he wrote a very scathing critique of that in AA which received a lot of press. You’re of the generation that understands cultural appropriation better than our generation did.

As an example at Melbourne University, they have a reconciliation action plan. A core part of that plan is to use future built environment projects to actually build the RAP into their projects. We proposed some stuff in the competition they ran, then we did get Jefa Greenaway involved. In hindsight, we kind of could have done the stuff that we did in our own way, but it’s not as powerful as having an indigenous person working with you and helping organize meetings with the traditional owners and so on. And it really does bring a bit of authenticity and integrity to the endeavor.

So that’s our practice approach. But it means that not every project can do that.

There are only so many arms and legs.

JB I would argue that many of the ideas embedded within your projects are highly legible as if to say that the Architecture wears its heart on its sleeve – Maybe we could discuss this in relation to the conversation that such moves enable with the broader population outside of

architects – this is juxtaposed with the rhetoric

and consistent tropes associated with less

contemporary architectural periods, where the conversation is very introspective.

CL

On all sorts of levels. We do a lot of public buildings, a lot of community buildings. The level of engagement is high. But the engagement might be the way spaces are used, the connection to spaces, the landscape. We just did a fantastic community new library in Springvale, which has an extraordinarily diverse community. We put a lot of effort in to trying to make a building that spanned a lot of cultures, including some of the installations, so there is a kind of genuine engagement within the building. Of course, we are experts within our own discipline, so do we expect the public to engage with some of the things that we talk about within the discipline of architecture and we wouldn’t assume that would be the case on our projects.

But people do engage. The line we have traditionally used is architects will often talk about haptic architecture, but everyone is really talking about the users of projects having a brain and they actually think, as much they actually touch, feel breath and smell the buildings so you know were a bit of a cynic on things made of timber, you can touch it and smell it, its authentic. But thinking about a project is not authentic. We like to give our clients the respect and the people that use our buildings the respect that they do think, and thinking is a key part of the experience and if the building helps them think, we think that’s a success.

JB I’m very interested in this idea Conflating a discursive process into a discursive object.

Are you able to talk to the work you have undertaken with Paul Carter and how this collaboration has changed an outcome or influenced your methodology

CL

If you’ve ever heard him lecture, he’s naturally discursive. He’s a genuine intellect and operates much more than we do, in the world of ideas. And so we enjoy collaborating with him. And its two way; He started off as a writer and historian and what he is more interested in now is how to turn ideas into actual practice. To make stuff, to do stuff, and we like extending ourselves in terms of the ideas we deal with so he likes working with us because he knows we know how to turn his ideas in to things, with him. And we like working with him because he is always pushing boundaries. We worked with him on the Springvale community Centre. He did a lot of work on the history there in fact he, with his son Ed Carter, they did some installations including a pretty extraordinary light fitting that hangs in the foyer. I think that’s why Paul is good, he’s not interested in just talking about ideas. He is interested in turning them in to some form of creative practice. He’ll have a lot to say about Yagan Square.

JB I’m interested in the mapping of thoughts: I noticed in your PHD presentation that you mapped an ideogram of lines as a sort of progressive process. Do have a way to manage the representation of such text based ideas?

CL

If you have joined the meeting we had with the team over here half an hour ago you would have seen the way we work in action. I’ve always been a bit text based, I tend to write things down.

We will often do lists of ideas. What are the things that are interesting us on the project? Let’s write down 15 ideas and then diagram things that start to suggest and architectural strategy behind the idea. You then start to join the diagrams together that start to form into the final project. So it is an iterative process. The challenge for you is to take it all in and say, this is what I’m really interested in in my major project. There are six ideas not one idea. Or there are x ideas.

Then start to work into each idea with the architectural strategy that might be completely unrelated to each other. The idea of synthesis doesn’t matter to begin with. Pick on idea and go for it, then pick another and go for it. Then you’ve got to

be mindful with all those strategies on how you drag all of those ideas together into something that works together, which is what I call the discursive object, which is different to the object which is just done by cutting out ideas. When I was taught you were told that you’ve got too many ideas, you’ve got to distill them and have the one guiding idea. Once you have the one guiding ideas, youre off and running. We just do completely the opposite.

JB Almost like the idea of an Architecture that doesn’t agree with itself?

CL Yeah totally, but the hard part is to come from lots of different angles, then find a way to put it together so it not just bad collage.

JB Looking back on some earlier works, do you see ideas embedded within these projects that you now disagree with, or that an opinion expressed within it has changed?

CL

To be honest, no, I’ll be satisfied that I have no regrets in an architectural sense.

I can’t feel like I made any bad moves.

I was probably like you are when you’re a younger Architect. You’re a bit more polemical, you want to take a strong polemical position to position yourself amongst what other architects are doing, so I probably did a fair bit of that 25 years ago, but I’m a bit more relaxed and comfortable in the work that I and practice does so I don’t feel the need to be quite so strident in my polemical attitude. I feel like everything that I and the practice does has some genuine integrity to the way thought about and made the architecture.

JB Something I have heard Jefa Greenaway mention when asked about how to embed indigenous knowledge within a project are these three questions: Who have spoken with?

How far along on the journey are you?

What are the key design principles that have embedded an indigenous prospect or opportunity within this project?

Looking at that last point about opportunity, what is your method behind the filtration of ideas?

CL

Often they’re prioritized as to whether they work architecturally. Some ideas don’t work in an Architectural sense. We tend to sift them out if we think there is some interesting architectural quality to them. You are thinking as an architect at all times.

Form the point of view of what Jefa is saying, he would say, without putting words in his mouth, there is a more generic indigenous knowledge that is easily sharable. Then there is more closed knowledge that is closely held.

Architects can easily work in the former but can’t in the latter. You can’t steal stories but you can, touch the earth lightly to use a notable example. That’s generic cultural knowledge e.g. planting indigenous plants to at least recover some sense of indigenous landscapes, but to use a cultural design without permission, there are lines where you have to sieve and distill what ideas are appropriate and relevant.

We prefer to sieve as little as possible and pile everything on top as everything else to see where it gets us. It’s a much more exciting process.

You filter out the bad ideas that you in your mind know are bad, but mostly the filter is architectural. If you can’t make a good bit of architecture out of that idea then you probably just forget about it.

a commercial office building. By doing a small bit of carving on the street, we could get some built in seats next to the coffee shop. A public gesture or gift back into the public realm.

JB Do you feel a relinquished sense of agency once that project is completed and the work is released in to the wild?

CL

JB I like the idea that every building is public building, foregrounded in the understanding that Public space is more important than ever as a point of resistance to the online media space. How is this represented within your projects?

CL

It’s a public medium, architecture. Even a privately held house has a public dimension to it. You can’t really avoid the idea that architecture enters into some discourse or some conversation with a public communal space or context or dialogue. To do otherwise would be kind of absurd. So that is a slightly polemical statement to say that this architecture is very much an enclosed hermetic idea, you go, well of course there’s some public dimension to it, but in our own projects, it takes lots of manifestations.

On 41 exhibition st, which is really just

Of course, you’re designing something and you have your own ideas of what the building is about, and you then give it over into the public world and see how it goes. Is it used the way you thought it might be used. I’d have to say SAB mostly met our expectations in terms of what we intended the building to do. I feel like it was pretty successful on the matchup between aspiration and the effectiveness of it in architectural terms.

But nevertheless it still surprised us.

You spend three years designing it, and we knew exactly what was going in it, but it hadn’t really occurred to us that because it was centrally timetabled, and the classes would be all be scheduled on the first day, literally on the first day the building was completely full. I can still remember walking through with team on the first day going, “yesterday it was a builders site, being handed over and today it started and it was like an incredible flip from one to the other”.

I’ve never had a more extraordinary experience as an architect. Normally buildings warm up slowly, and you open them, and people get used to using them and they build a bit of momentum. It’s like a sort of train station. It’s got that metropolitan crazy busy quality to it.

JB Is this the measure of success of a project the volume of discussion, or that the discussion is as you intended it to be?

CL

No no no, the measure of success is whether the object of architecture actually works. Not what you can say about it. When you build something and you hand it over for public use, the flip is all the theory drops away, and the object is the object. That’s also an exciting thing. Explaining is helpful too, but the so called autonomy of the object kicks in to gear and just is what it is. It’s no longer

under your control as the designer in a good way.

JB What are the most important considerations for an architect undertaking projects of indigenous cultural significance? We could perhaps discuss process in relation to Yagan square or the Koorie heritage trust.

CL

Differentiate between open knowledge and more closed cultural knowledge.

On Yagan Square there is nothing to stop us doing deep research of the site and the city, which we did. From that we generated a bunch of ideas that were not really directly to do with indigeneity. They were more just to do with recovering some history. The whole site was built on to swamp lands. There were various tracks that passed through the swamps lands. Some of the project is about trying to bring some of that back. The client set up a working group with the wajak community who once we’d developed the ideas, really took them on board and helped amplify them and then also worked with a cultural program which is what I’m sure you’ll talk to Paul about; the so called Creative template for artists to get involved in the project with a very clear narrative form.

JB

TM

IN CONVERSATION Josh Batterton & Tom Mosby Maybe we could begin by discussing what it meant for the Koorie Heritage Trust when the premises shifted from the fringe of the city on King st, to the cultural heart at Federation Square I came on as the CEO back in 2012, back at a time where the Koorie Heritage Trust was really on the cusp of either moving forward or closing down. For a number of reasons, one of the key ones being that we had been operating at an organization of about 25 years, which is quiet a long time. We were located at King st at that time, operating from and fantastic building that the board had invested in. it was just in the wrong place. The reason why we had looked at that building originally was because of the possibility that Docklands would be built and that it would really take off and we would be well positioned to be at that gateway down to it. I personally don’t think that it is that sort of destination place, even today.

So the type of traffic that we needed to sustain the organisation in terms of visitors just wasn’t there. We also weren’t located in the best place to attract that traffic. That end of King st is not the nicest part of the city. I suppose the trust was floundering at that time. The board made the decision to sell the building, realize the asset in that building and look for a place that would make us more relevant to the city and in a place that would be easily accessible by visitors. Fortunately for us, we were looking at the possibility of a building Gertrude st, or a place in North Melbourne. We also looked at an area in Collingwood. They were all possibilities, but we thought again, we are putting ourselves on the edge of the city. We need to be in the centre of the city. Its an acknowledgement of Victorian aboriginal people as central to a contemporary urban city and the importance of that.

Luckily for us at the time, Federation Square had the building that we are in come up and we were able to negotiate the lease for the ground and top floors of the building. Melbourne festival, who were here at the time, occupied the first

JB

TM

floor.

For us coming here to Federation Square is firstly a recognition of Victorian Aboriginal people as central to Melbourne as a city, part of a cultural precinct given the location to ACMI and the NGV and also across the river. It was also a recognition of the historical importance to the land where Federation Square is as a gathering place. They were all reasons why the Federation Square move was significant for us, which was really about placing us in the Centre of Melbourne.

Last week I conducted an interview with Carey Lyon, which was fascinating. I’d love to get your perspective on the process undertaken by Lyons along with Jefa Greenaway and Reuben Berg in relation to the way the project sought to represent Koori Culture.

For us one of the key things for us was working with a recognized architecture firm and the kudos that comes with something like that, but at the same time ensuring that the design principles reflected indigenous and was indigenous led as well. The importance of Jefa and Reuben as both directors of Indigenous Architecture and Design Victoria, was a key thing for us. Getting Carey and his team, but also making sure that Jefa and Reuben worked in partnership to deliver a contemporary design vision for what we wanted. One of the key brief elements for me, was that we wanted a contemporary design. There is a certain style of design, where people think of indigenous where they of serpent colors, patterns. That really tends to reflect design from the central desert and northern territory. For us it was really about reflecting Victorian Aboriginal people, and the fact that the traditional historical design is different to what you would see anywhere else. That’s where Rreuben and Jefa’s input was important to achieving that. We also ran a series of consultation workshops. We went out to the regions as well, because the trust itself doesn’t represent any one particular group. Yes, we are on Wurundjeri Boon Wurrung land and we do acknowledge that, but we sit above the community and language group politics. For us it was important that we not only consulted with local traditional owner groups, but also

that we spoke to the regional groups as

well, because it is about reflecting all of

Victoria.

JB During my talk with Carey, we discussed how

the scale of project that his practice engages

with demands consultation and collaboration

with traditional owner groups. How does

the small scale project, of which there are

thousands happening at any one time, create

a connection when the appropriate elders are

already overstretched with commitments.

TM It’s an interesting one, because it does

reflect, which is fantastic, a real desire that people actually do consult. Its something that we really encourage as well, when people actually want to reflect indigenous, land, place and consult in a meaningful way from the outset. The issue is the fact that we get to a stage where everybody, which we would love, actually wants to do that, but it does stretch some of the groups, so I don’t really have an answer to that to be honest.

IN CONVERSATION Josh Batterton & Paul Carter

JB Are you able to speak to the consultation

process undertaken in the Yagan Square

project with the Wajak working group?

PC That was an unusual urban design redevelopment project because the government had signed or agreed a compact consultation understanding with a representative group from the Noongar community. So that engagement strategy, KKW strategy.

I’m not quite sure when it was put in place, but it was certainly present as a guiding method for consultation right through the process. As you know, the planning agency responsible for delivering Yagan Sqaure had established a Whadjuk working group. Whadjuk are the division of Noongar people who live around Perth. The idea was that all themes, topics or questions that implicated Noongar culture interests, intellectual property, spreading out in to general considerations about the historical and current associations of the land where Yagan Square was to located, should be discussed. So the idea was that the Architect, landscape designers and the public artists should not only be alive and responsive to the views of the Whadjuk working group, but should to incorporate their expertise in to certain parts of the process, and I think that referred mainly for example to plantings in the landscape, Public art.

There was collaboration between the landscape architects and Richard Wally who was one of the protagonists in this Noongar strategy. I wasn’t aware of that entire environment to begin with. Lyons had asked me to provide some bridging between bi and multicultural ideas and senses of place and programming in the context of their design for Yagan Square. When that process began, it was perfect because we actually already had a highly organized Noongar consultative group, in particular, Richard.

So I had someone to talk to, and ask how do we develop cross, inter, bi cultural dialogues or understandings which will benefit and protect Noongar interests and communicate their values to wider audience. As part of the

documentation that I prepared coming out of those conversations along with my own research, the important role played by this white ethnographer, Daisy Bates, emerged. Daisy Bates is a very Interesting character; Firstly she is a woman and secondly, she formed this relationship with Fanny Balbuk, and the two women around 1908 or 1909, together are preserving information about the genealogies, the place names, the habitual and seasonal routes taken by Noongar people. So as you can imagine in our somewhat polarized public environment now, that testimony is quite controversial. This is partly because Daisy Bates is felt to have been a social determinist who failed to understand the continuing and resilience of Noongar culture. On the other hand, there is a certain amount of controversy around Fanny Balbuk and her life, and to what extent it should serve as a model for contemporary Noongar people, in the sense that it is said that she was to have violated the law. I had identified Fanny Balbuk’s role in terms of the resistance that she exhibited to building on her land and there was this passage that has been quoted by other people and has been used elsewhere in Perth, so its not highly original. What was original was to actually design a typography that captured the gesture of the digging stick.

Because it emerged through the creative template process, I don’t remember any particular controversy about taking it on. By then I had formed friendships with one or two Noongar elders, one of which who wasn’t particularly keen on it.

He said “I don’t think Balbuk should be celebrated like that, but hey the process has been followed and the working group is happy for you to take this one on”. My argument had been all along that this was not about, an aboriginal knowledge holder, it was about an encounter between two cultures and communities, and it was a translation. So what happened there was about celebrating a resistance fight and acknowledging that Daisey bates also fought her own battles for recognition. So in a broader sense it was an affirmation of women’s power in a public place.

JB

PC

It seemed like the process of community engagement in your Dandenong project was covert, or informal. How do you think the results of this may have changed if you were allowed to meet a designated community representative group?

I worked again with the council more recently, and my impression is that they don’t really have aboriginal representation or lines of communication.

On this more recent project, I was asked by the council to approach the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung communities about an approach that I wanted to take forward. I think that the council doesn’t really have protocol, and when I brought back very positive news and said that I had negotiated these permissions, they cancelled my involvement and they seemed to be extremely concerned that this collaboration might go ahead. So I never found out why that was, except that I suppose they had been shown up in a sense for not doing the things they said they had been doing.

With this project, the discussions that I had with people around the former site; business people form different cultural backgrounds, that was in the context of actually trying to understand what appetite if any there was in the local community for this new public space. I wasn’t charged or seeking to engage with aboriginal leadership grounds as my role wasn’t to do that. My role was to find out what the multicultural community wants from this new public space and it seemed astonishing that no one had appeared to has asked that question before. So once again the council’s behavior was very odd and as you read in the book, when we attempt to do what we were asked to do, they want to control the people that we were allowed to speak to.

I had to talk to a broader range of people, not just to get an idea of what they wanted, which is a fairly impertinent question, but just to listen. What kinds of mechanisms did they have for meeting, for exchange, for building trust across languages, religions etc.

JB

PC

This discussion between community (or client) and designer is one of the most exciting parts of a project .Maybe you could talk to some of the things that you have learned within this dialogue.

There are basic protocols or expectations that, generally speaking, I wouldn’t really put myself in the position that your question implies, in other words I wouldn’t really be looking to make something and then going out to consult, its usually the other way round.

You go with a gift obviously, you do you background research and then really just go and listen and explain a little bit about what you can contribute. If the general momentum is towards a new project, I call it a forming situation, then you come to it as creative interlocker. Usually, it is story based. It is not about planning or architecture, it is really about cultural narratives, but of course generally speaking those narrative express themselves physically in the design of places or associations with places and so on. The cross over is not to obscure, but for me it would begin by hitting it off rather than coming with an idea or expecting people that you’re talking to come with ideas.

JB

MN

IN CONVERSATION Josh Batterton & Marika Neustupny Within some of the projects that you work on today, how do some of the Japanese architectural ideas contribute to an Australian architectural identity?

One of the interesting things about NMBW is that I have this Japanese and Czech background, but the other two don’t have it, the other two being Nigel and Wendy. We collaborate in all the projects, each person is involved to a lesser or greater degree. All of us are very conscious of the design intent, and I guess we’re all together because we agree on a general kind of politic, or something. We believe in the same sorts of things. So I think that is point one, that the bigger picture intention is possibly different to the way that we do something, but we also agree, in general, on the way of achieving the intention.

That way is very open. What that means is that if I happened to have this cultural background, then its all ok to bring in, just as anything is ok to bring in. Having said that, really our starting point is trying to understand the exact condition of the site, and the brief and the whole context of where something is. It’s a completely locally based starting point. Anything else that we each bring along, is really done through a kind of analytical iteration with those material that we have found that relates to the project.

I am interested in that era, (Shinohara/ Kikutake) because in Japan it is very obvious that western design thinking entered into the whole country at around that time. It had been in the country for about a century beforehand, but it hadn’t gained momentum and the way it was incorporated was very cumbersome prior to around this time.

Its really after the war that that work started to engage with Japanese Architectural culture, rather than just putting it there. That something or other comes from another place, and that something may just exist in a bubble and everybody has to say yes or no, actually becomes something that is at one with.

This is very difficult because in migrant theory we can’t just say that I am just going to meld into Australian culture.

That would just negate that background.

Its kind of a new identity that can happen

by bringing a different culture into an

existing culture of a place.

JB In relation to the Harry Butler Institute project,

how did the process of collaboration occur?

MN The number one thing about

collaboration is that it takes more time

than not collaborating. Its more fruitful,

and more intense, but I think a better

product comes out of it. It defiantly takes

more time. Realistically, there has to be a

lot of determination by all parties who are

involved to make it work, because the

time commitment will be greater. There

is a whole financial side of that as well,

which actually can’t be dismissed. If you

can’t work that out, its not going to work.

JB Within the New Academic Street project, were

there any particular learnings along the way?

MN The first thing to say, is that Carey Lyon is a genius to have thought about that idea of inviting these practices together. We’ve now done quite a few project in collaboration with Lyons.

We’ve mentioned money before, but Lyons has always been very clear about how to divide up money before submitting. That’s a notable thing. The most important thing is the selection of who is going to go together, and I think Carey is very conscious of that. We’ve done lots of other collaborations as well with lots of other practices, which have all been great, I can’t think of any that haven’t ended well. Occasionally there are misunderstandings along the way. It’s about seeing eye to eye on the overall process of a project. People have to commit to a reasonably similar degree on the basis for the project.