Next on the couch – Dr Emma Jackson
Friday 8 May 4.30pm-6pm
ARM Melbourne and online
Emma is an architect who thinks in deep time. Her PhD asked what it might mean to design responsibly in the Pilbara – a landscape shaped by a billion years of geology; it’s a question she hasn’t stopped asking. Early career years were spent at some of Australia’s leading architectural firms (notably ours!) before lecturing and leadership roles at RMIT. In 2023 she launched a studio making large-scale rugs and tapestries – the kind that ask us to reconsider Australia as something ancient and restless rather than just somewhere to build on.
The thread running through all Emma’s work is an obsession with what lies beneath: rock, country, time, and the stories we keep failing to tell about them.
Come along, have a drink, and find out what it means to pour a footing into a four-billion-year-old continent.
Cultural Conversations: The proposition
Architecture is never the only thing happening at ARM; the in-house speaker series makes space in our calendars to think beyond the project at hand.
It’s an informal gathering on Friday evenings, roughly once a month, where we welcome the most interesting people we know (of) to talk about what they’re doing, thinking, or making. There’s no fixed format, no imposed theme, and no requirement for exclusivity. A drink in hand is mandatory. A good conversation is the only brief.
Speakers tend to be working at the edge of their field, with something specific and personal to share. They’re people we genuinely admire, drawn from design, art, performance, urbanism, research, politics, and wherever else the interesting people are. The selection criteria are loose by design – the only real question is: would we want to spend an evening in conversation with this person?
Ideas are fundamental to our work, not incidental to it
The series fits who we are – curious, lateral, and convinced that the best ideas arrive sideways. Speakers are people who’ve spent their careers looking at things differently and who we might not otherwise encounter. It deepens our culture of intellectual inquiry and connections to the wider creative and civic world.
In 2026 the series is curated by associate Nessie Frango in association with ARM’s social club and business support team.