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Articles by Naomi Stead
Borland Crossman House revamp stays true to the original
Looking through photographs of the Borland Crossman House, first completed by Kevin Borland in 1978 and newly refurbished by WOWOWA, I noticed an oddity. One of the images shows the house from the street, rising above its curved front brick wall. It’s an image with all the hallmarks of regular architectural photography – formally composed, artfully bleached, full of portent. But in the foreground is a bog-standard wheelie bin, standing askew, its flipped-open lid a startling flash of red.
Sans-Arc Studios adds tasty quirk to Adelaide eateries
A few weeks back I went to Adelaide to see a new gelato shop in Glenelg, designed by local architects Sans-Arc Studio. Counterintuitive, you might think, to visit such a place on a freezing day in midwinter. I thought it a useful test: would it be forlorn, rendered placeless without the energy of the summer hordes? Hardly anyone was there, it’s true. It would have been rude not to partake, so I ordered a blood orange sorbet, sat in the corner and observed.
Innovative multistorey car park built for adaptation
I have a nerdy, niche interest in multistorey car parks in cinema. It’s an acknowledged trope: Nothing Good Ever Happened in a Parking Garage. From All the President’s Men to Pulp Fiction, The Italian Job to Fight Club, these structures have a ready-made spatial ambience, a sense of the ominous, menacing and clandestine – a perfect location for noir meetings and nefarious drop-offs, ambush and sabotage, helter-skelter pursuit.
Incidental Architecture keeps it simple in the Blue Mountains
When an architect describes a project as “dear to their heart”, it’s usually worth paying attention. The Sydney-based small practice Incidental Architecture says this of Gingkin, an off-grid house named for its location on a remote site west of the Blue Mountains. According to co-director Matt Elkan, “it exemplifies an awful lot for us”. It also seems to exemplify the spirit of the moment.
Best architecture: Melburnians are going wild
At this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale the Australian pavilion’s Home, led by an all-Indigenous creative team, pondered what Country means even when you’re far away – how to create space for gathering, memory and ritual in a strange land. It was a welcome refuge from the techno-utopian cacophony of the biennale at large, offering a place to be grounded by architecture in ways that didn’t feel possible in any other nation’s pavilion.
Community counts at Brunswick’s Balam Balam Place
Architecture Brunswick’s open access community centre, Balam Balam Place, is a small marvel of public generosity. By Naomi Stead. SHARE Copy Link Bluesky Facebook X LinkedIn I’m sitting on a low brick wall at Balam Balam Place, Merri-bek City Council’s new civic and community centre, chatting with caretakers and operators Millie Cattlin and Joseph Norster.
Shanghai Picnic at Rockbund Art Museum
Architecture The second architectural biennale at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum brings ordinary joys to a public space. By Naomi Stead. SHARE Copy Link Bluesky Facebook X LinkedIn Who doesn’t love a picnic? If such a curmudgeon exists, I’ve yet to meet them. But not every city lends itself equally to picnicking: not all have the public spaces or cultures to enable this very particular kind of baggy, informal, convivial gathering.
Sculptor-photographer Thomas Demand on reframing reality
It seems apt that Thomas Demand would be giving me a detailed description – and I’d be fabricating a vivid picture in my head – of an upcoming exhibition neither of us has yet seen, of which no images are forthcoming, that’s being installed in Sydney while I’m in Melbourne and he’s in Berlin. Such layers of mediation and distancing are, after all, central to the work of this sculptor turned photographer turned megastar artist-at-large.
Enrico and Franca Taglietti memorialised at Canberra Museum and Gallery
The allegory is almost too perfect. It’s 1955, and a bright young Milanese architect, briefly visiting Australia, travels to Canberra to scope out the site for a new Italian embassy. Bewitched by the light and landscape, the open space and the freedom from Italy’s weight of history, he falls in love with the nascent national capital, making it his home and the site of his life’s work over the subsequent six decades.
Australian House: The Robin Boyd Award
There are plenty of dodgy award programs in world architecture. Some are venal, many are vacuous – and so are the glossy coffee-table publications they engender. Australian House: The Robin Boyd Award is an exception. The Australian Institute of Architects’ national awards are unusually rigorous, and the Boyd award – recognising the finest new house of the year – is always a career-defining honour for the recipient.
The Bondi Junction Boot Factory redevelopment
On the top level of the redeveloped Boot Factory in Bondi Junction, designed by Archer Office for Waverley Council, there’s a jaw-dropping new civic space known as the “cloud room”. Reached via a stair that’s itself a marvel of folded black plate steel, the room occupies the whole top floor, crowned with a magnificent raked ceiling of radial timber fins that converge on a large central sky window. It’s a remarkable space, like being inside a hollow timber pyramid with its top lopped off.
Retain, Repair, Reinvest
Designers are often dismissed as idealistically naive when it comes to the economic and policy levers of housing provision. But Melbourne’s OFFICE – a non-profit design and research practice – makes an important contribution with Retain, Repair, Reinvest Volume 1: Ascot Vale Estate. In late 2023, just before then Victorian premier Daniel Andrews left office, he declared that all 44 of the state’s public housing towers would be demolished and redeveloped.
Théo Mercier’s Mirrorscape sand sculpture at Mona
I’ve often felt it’s the sandstone escarpment that steals the show at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona). Sure, there’s the amazing collection, but the real star is the exposed bedrock in which the museum is embedded: the walls of its tunnels and cavernous main chamber striated by veins and scrabbled by the teeth of machines.
It’s all happening at the redeveloped St Kilda Pier
St Kilda. What a town! Kugelhopf and rumball, pigeon and seagull, Espy and Stokehouse. At present the toothy leer of Luna Park is scaffolded over for a facelift, but everything else is still there: the palms, the stately paths of the Catani Gardens and, of course, the pier, which has just reopened following a major redevelopment. I went to see it on the Invasion Day public holiday, a day of spectacular cloudage – a pageant of piled white confections gliding overhead.
Restored Lucas Glass House a highwire act
Bill and Ruth Lucas might be the most influential Sydney architects you’ve never heard of. The 1957 Glass House is certainly their most cultishly admired building. Following conservation and restoration works by Cracknell & Lonergan Architects, it has won the Lachlan Macquarie Award for Heritage at the Australian Institute of Architects national awards, announced in Adelaide last Thursday.
Sydney Metro City line on track for greatness
The best show in Sydney just now is not at the Opera House or the art gallery. It’s at the front of the leading carriage on any Metro train. They’re automatic, so there’s no driver to get in the way.
Commonwealth design competition entries reimagine residential aged care
It’s hard to think of another sector with a greater need for design innovation, or any group more desperately under-served by their built environment than those living in residential aged care. Many architects have feared to tread into this sector, seeing it as highly technical, resistant to innovation, and unglamorous. It has attracted neither the profession’s full attention nor its combined talent.
Architecture Australia turns 120
Making it into the pages of Architecture Australia has always been a major milestone – for architects and writers alike. Often, it happens only once in a career. More often, it doesn’t happen at all. Appearing in this magazine has meant, or at least has felt like, being written into Australian architectural history. I vividly remember the first time I wrote for AA . Back in 2000, then assistant-editor Justine Clark commissioned me to review a rooftop terrace extension in Balmain.
Grand designs? Why many Australian architects say their career makes them unhappy Original
For years there have been suggestions of widespread poor wellbeing among architects. In many ways this is not surprising. It’s well established the profession has a culture of long hours and (often unpaid) overtime, relentless and pressured deadlines, high responsibility and liability and surprisingly low starting pay, even after five years of university education.
Grand designs? Why many Australian architects say their career makes them unhappy
World Written by Naomi Stead, Director of the Design and Creative Practice Enabling Impact Platform, RMIT, RMIT University For years there have been suggestions of widespread poor wellbeing among architects[1]. In many ways this is not surprising.
How the Biennale of Sydney’s has reactivated White Bay Power Station
Back in 2020, then New South Wales treasurer Dominic Perrottet suggested the disused White Bay Power Station should be demolished. It seems he was spooked by the shadow of every treasurer’s most feared animal: the white elephant. His comments drew instant public outrage and a sharp rebuke from then minister for planning Rob Stokes, who whisked him off on a tour of the site in full Ghostbusters-style hazmat gear.
Sydney Brutalism will make you reconsider the polarising design
It’s the mark of a timely book that when you see it, you’re amazed it didn’t already exist. There is much great brutalist architecture in Sydney, but it’s scattered and easy to forget about. When you see it gathered within the covers of Sydney Brutalism by Heidi Dokulil, you think: Ah yes, there you are. Brutalism continues to be polarising.
Tasmania’s Taylor and Hinds Architects honour truths of Indigenous survival
Extirpation is an ugly word: it describes the form of extermination that comes from digging out a living thing, roots and all. Of all the sites of colonial atrocity in Australia, Wybalenna in lutruwita/Tasmania most embodies that practice. It was the first colonial mission, in operation from 1834 to 1847, set up by the man still problematically known as the “great conciliator”: the missionary George Augustus Robinson.
Best architecture: accolades flow as housing policy steps up
For many architectural folk there were two related highlights in 2023. First was Kerstin Thompson’s receipt of the Australian Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal, the profession’s highest accolade. It caps off a fruitful few years for Kerstin Thompson Architects (KTA), with the Bundanon Art Museum and Bridge, Melbourne Holocaust Museum and Kerr Street Residences all applauded.
Spring Bay Mill
Back in 2011, when environmentalists Graeme Wood and Jan Cameron bought the Gunns Triabunna woodchip mill – a key asset in Tasmanian native forest logging and a crucial battlefield in the state’s forest wars – then premier Lara Giddings memorably described it as the vegetarians having bought the abattoir. But what’s a vegetarian to do with the slaughterhouse when its killing days are over? There was no firm plan.
Nightingale Village
I’m sitting in a small apartment in Nightingale Village, surely Australia’s most-anticipated and most-discussed urban housing development of the past decade. With me is Cam, who’s telling me what it’s like to live in a Teilhaus – German for “part house” – otherwise known as a micro or studio apartment. To my right is the built-in bed alcove, screened from the main space with a curtain.
Victorian Pride Centre
Recently, wandering around inner-northern Melbourne, I came across some paste-up graffiti: Let Queens Read. It’s both a curiosity and a sorrow that these words now have a place in the long story of LGBTQIA+ struggles in Australia.
Flipside Circus
There must be at least a million wannabe architects in Australia, based on my research at parties. And every one of them has toyed with a design for re-using shipping containers. It’s easy to see why: they offer a mode of building that is elemental, even instinctive – the arrangement of discrete blocks of space, the assembly of smaller, simpler units into a larger, more complex composition.
Studio Bright’s Garden Tower House
I’m standing on a footpath in inner-urban Melbourne, notebook in hand, gazing down a narrow side lane at Studio Bright’s Garden Tower House. The neighbour comes out, ostensibly to check the letterbox. “Whatcha lost?” he asks, all quasi-friendly suspicion. Nothing, I say. Just looking at the building. I ask him what he thinks of it. “It’s different,” he ventures, reluctant to be drawn.
Sydney Modern: beauty and the beast
Sydney Modern has been received by the city’s art-loving public with a giddiness bordering on euphoria. This is not surprising, given what it stands for: government investment in culture and more room for today’s big art, of the kind that literally wouldn’t fit in the old Art Gallery of New South Wales building.
Anthony Clarke’s architecture of care
Consider the phrase “holding space”. It’s a curious socio-linguistic artefact – an escapee from the therapist’s suite, now fallen in with the activist and wellness crowds and increasingly appearing everywhere, especially online. It’s been used to mean a range of things: from bearing witness, to exercising non-judgemental compassion, to practising deep listening without jumping to solutions.
A watershed moment: Architecture education and climate change
Are architecture students and academics alarmed about climate change?
Sydney Opera House 2.0
Not long after Jørn Utzon’s scheme was announced as the winner of the Sydney Opera House design competition in January 1957, a discussion appeared in The Australian Women’s Weekly, a publication not widely associated with sophisticated architectural critique.
Fish Lane Town Square
The forgotten spaces of cities – the kind immortalised by novelist J. G. Ballard – hold a particular fascination for architects. These “gapscapes” – often left over between or around heavy infrastructure – are sometimes known as urban voids or counter-sites, but have been most influentially theorised under the French term terrain vague.
MPavilion - The Lightcatcher
The seventh MPavilion commission, designed by the Venice-based architects MAP Studio and named The Lightcatcher, has just closed after an extended summer season that stretched well into autumn. In its final days, I watched as a small but intent crowd of participants sat within, weaving Australian animals out of dried grass and wool, arrayed loosely around the Gunditjmara artist and master weaver Bronwyn Razem. There was a sense of industry and absorption.
The Garden House
Louise Wright and I are sitting in Baracco and Wright’s Garden House – the architects’ own weekender, or “sometimes house”, or “sort-of house”, as they have variously described it – on the eastern edge of Western Port, an hour and a bit from Melbourne. It’s both warm and bright for autumn. An enormous dragonfly has entered through a large sliding opening and is zigzagging around, rising eventually to the ceiling where it sets up a great agitated clatter.
Lust for Lifestyle
What is it about mid-century Modernism? It’s everywhere, and everybody loves it – from Eames chairs to Aalto vases, from Richard Neutra houses to Georg Jensen cutlery, MidMod mania is flourishing even after the Mad Men moment. The influence of social media is surely at play: it’s never been easier for fanciers to find one another and share their enthusiasms. The exhibition Lust for Lifestyle: Modern Adelaide Homes 1950-1965, at the State Library of South Australia, adds to the appreciation.
The quiet glamour of 52 Reservoir Street
Imagine you’re an architect. You’ve been asked to consider the design of a commercial office building in Sydney’s Surry Hills. It’s a plum location near Central Station, but a tricky site – south-facing, skinny and long, bounded by tall buildings on either side, with only a narrow frontage onto Reservoir Street, and a tiny – like genuinely tiny, only about one metre across – opening to Foster Street at the back.
Who made the shortlist for the National Architecture Awards?
It’s that time of year again, when we ponder the cream of the architectural crop: the finalists in the Australian Institute of Architects’ National Awards. The calibre of the field is always superb, and the competition invariably fierce. Anyone who has worked in architecture knows how hard it is to bring a good building into the world. There is talent involved for sure, but also tenacity, intensely hard work, and a dose of luck.
New look for Upfield railway line
An architecture critic needs to be a good eavesdropper. Over the years I’ve lurked in many a new building, watching and listening as members of the public have performed sophisticated critiques of their own. Often these are implicit – how people move through and occupy a space, which bits they are drawn to, or avoid, or vandalise. But they’re sometimes also spoken aloud: folk might not use the specialised – some say jargon-ridden – language of architects, but they sure know what they like.
Permanent Camping
What is it about little buildings? From huts to shacks to follies to tiny houses, from “cabin porn” to cottage-core, the appeal of small spaces shows no sign of, ahem, diminishing. One of my favourite reveries comes from the Anglo–German novelist W. G.
Architect John Ellway’s green thumb
Frank Lloyd Wright once famously quipped that the difference between doctors and architects is “the physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines”. If you’re looking for camouflage, vines will do the trick: they’ll conceal errors in composition or construction, enough to make them invisible from outside.
Australian War Memorial
When Scott Morrison announced on November 1, 2018 that the government would provide $498 million over nine years to fund a major redevelopment of the Australian War Memorial (AWM), he described the place as “the soul of the nation … sacred to us all. It transcends politics, it transcends all of us.” Despite Morrison’s overt religiosity and hyperbole here, he’s not wrong.
Australian War Memorial
When Scott Morrison announced on November 1, 2018 that the government would provide $498 million over nine years to fund a major redevelopment of the Australian War Memorial (AWM), he described the place as “the soul of the nation … sacred to us all. It transcends politics, it transcends all of us.” Despite Morrison’s overt religiosity and hyperbole here, he’s not wrong.
Designing hope: The role of architecture education in the climate crisis
In architecture schools across the world, conversations about how to respond to the climate crisis are happening right now. Fervent and well-intentioned conversations, perhaps tinged by idealism or militancy, perhaps by panic. Sometimes these are led by students, sometimes by staff and leadership, sometimes by all three working together. In places, the conversation is very advanced, while elsewhere it is halting, conflicted, or barely beginning.
Work-related mental wellbeing in architecture
Concerns about mental health and work-related wellbeing within the architecture profession are not new. For some years, there has been a strong shared perception, and growing anecdotal evidence, of a challenging work environment and high levels of stress and anxiety among architectural practitioners and students alike.
The Business of Architecture*
Home / Community / Profiles / experience / Five Questions / Is Architectural Practice Making Architects Sick? Naomi Stead , Professor Naomi Stead, Head of Architecture at Monash University, is one of the champions of a proposed new research project currently under development, Mental Wellbeing of Architects and Architecture Students: Culture, Education and the Workplace, which aims to examine links between architectural culture and identity and mental wellbeing.
Research in large practice
This guest-edited dossier from Architecture Australia addresses the state of research in large architecture practices in Australia, examining the scope, ambition and impact of research activities on the business and culture of practice. How can research secure and enlarge the architect’s influence? In this Dossier, we examine some models and motivations for design research in large architectural practices.
Research in large Australian practices: A roundtable discussion
Click to enlarge Ann Lau, director, Hayball. 1 of 8 Caillin Howard, managing director, Hames Sharley. 2 of 8 Kellie Payne, studio director, Bates Smart. 3 of 8 Michael Hegarty, national practice leader, GHD Woodhead. 4 of 8 Diane Jones, director, PTW. 5 of 8 Michaela Sheahan, researcher, Hassell. 6 of 8 Rob Asher, design and research and development lead, Cox.
Architecture, undistracted
Last week it was White Night in Melbourne. I’m embarrassed to say I was tucked up asleep in bed (it had been a long week!) But my Instagram feed attests that the architectural community, along with several hundred thousand of their friends, were out all night prowling the streets, marvelling at the spectacle of a city shown in literally a new light.
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