“When I’m designing, I’m often either trying to fashion the silver bullet or cut the Gordian knot.”
“I’m one of the team growing ARM’s presence in New South Wales. Our work is ideas based, so everything we design is a one-off because every client and every community is unique.
I see the buildings that we design as part of a bigger fabric that we call cities or towns rather than having a myopic focus on just the site or building that I’m working on. This is one of the reasons I’m interested in urban design and planning, including matters of public policy, the way we shape cities and how and why we regulate those things. I think you need good architects thinking at this scale and working together to deliver a city of cultural depth and refinement, as ARM always has.
As well as architectural practice, I’ve worked for the Australian Institute of Architects. I have also lived and worked in Melbourne, Sydney and Darwin. This has given me an understanding of business, negotiating divergent views and the art of genuine and useful compromise, managing commercial relationships (including from the client side), understanding sensitivities of time and cost, and providing client-focused outcomes in a range of contexts.
I’m good at unpacking complex problems and taking disparate elements and trying to distil them into an elegant solution. Often when I’m designing, I’m either trying to fashion the silver bullet or cut the Gordian knot.
It’s a bit like searching for truth: there are plenty of alternatives, but once you find it, the narrative unfolds, ideas start to sing in harmony, the design comes together, and the new world is revealed as both intelligible and wonderful.”