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Transcript

UQ Architecture Lecturewith William SmartPresented on 23 May 2017

PRESENTED BY:

Adam JeffordManager APDL, MC

SPEAKERS:

Antony MoulisAssociate Professor

William SmartArchitect

John De ManincorSenior Lecturer

Adam Jefford:

They haven't turned the mic on, so I'll just [03:32] like this and then by the time I finish talking

they'll have turned the mic on, I think. Or not, and the music's off. Fantastic.

Good evening. My name's Adam Jefford. It's my pleasure to welcome you here tonight to the

State Library of Queensland. To begin I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land

and pay respects to their ancestors who came before them and to the elders still living today. The

location of the State Library on Kurilpa Point was historically a significant meeting, gathering and

sharing place for Aboriginal people. We proudly continue that tradition here today. For those of

you who don't know me, I'm the Manager of the Asia Pacific Design Library here at SLQ. I'm

proud to say this is the first lecture series that I've got through and I know many of you have

attended all eight. So thank you as well for your patronage.

Maybe it will make you feel better or maybe worse, but I wanted to share some of the highlights

and the data which is a little bit boring in some ways, about the last eight lectures. Of course

we're very thankful to each and every one of you for coming along every night, but what has been

really interesting for us in the organisation of these events is the patronage online as well. So we

just had a look at the stats for the last seven lectures and there was 4,500 individual viewers who

accessed the seven lectures and more than 6,700 minutes of video watched which for us at the

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UQ Architecture Lecture with William Smart presented on 23 May 2017by Adam Jefford, Antony Moulis, William Smart and John De Manincor

State Library is a new kind of high water mark. So we're really excited. So thank you to each and

every one of you here tonight as well as those viewers who are watching at home, on Facebook,

and maybe to those viewers in six months' time who are watching that video on Vimeo or have

downloaded it because they've been set it for course work at UQ.

That wasn't a bad joke to finish the lectures on. Housekeeping, last time. Toilets, level two, level

three. If you do need to leave tonight could I please request that you leave through the back

door. If your phones are not on 'silent' could you please put them on 'silent'. William put his on

silent like 10 minutes ago, he was that prepared. So we should take leaf out of his book.

The events as we mentioned are being recorded online. We would love for you to Tweet the

event. Instagram seems to work well but of course we are on Twitter and Facebook as well if you

want to share the love. Of course after tonight if you feel compelled to write about, reflect on,

review the lecture and share it with us, we would love to put it on Design Online. We've been

getting tens of reviews coming in and we're very thankfully publishing them. If you have sent

them in, maybe we can turn that 10 into 20 this time.

Later this evening as well we will announce the weekly winner for the Arch-I-Spy competition as

well as the overall winner for that fantastic prize which one of my colleagues will talk a little bit

about later on, but I did want to do just a couple of quick thank-yous. I want to thank the staff, the

technical stuff up in the box behind for making all of this possible. I also wanted to thank my

colleagues in the APDL – Shenoa, Ania and Liz and of course I want to thank UQ for helping us

put on this lecture series. There are many hardworking people there but in particular I wanted to

thank Kelly who unfortunately can't be with us tonight, Fiona and Sandra also for their efforts and

their revision in helping us produce this and get it out to the public.

In Kelly's place it's my pleasure to welcome back a familiar face to do tonight's MC'ing and

introduction of William. So Antony if you'd like to come to the stage we'd love to have you.

Thank you.

Antony Moulis:

Thanks Adam. Well welcome to the eighth and final lecture of the 2017 series. Before I introduce

William, Kelly would like me to extend her thanks to all those who've been involved in the

coordination of the series - Fiona McAlpine, Neeson Murcutt, Tania Pienaar and Erin Lewis from

the School of Architecture and our series partners at the State Library – Anita, Shenoa, Gilson,

Chris on the AV and of course the Asia-Pacific Design Library Manager Adam. Thanks for that.

I'd also like to of course warmly thank Kelly for the amazing series she's put together for us. It's

been a great success in more ways than are visible as Adam was just telling you and so the

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Design Online website and the school home pages can direct you to the lectures if you'd like to

see them again. But now onto William's lecture.

So William Smart opened his architecture office Smart Design Studio in 1997. He operates out of

Surrey Hills in Sydney and the studio has earned a reputation for its highly detailed and refined

architecture. As we were downstairs in the café just before, we overheard one of the people in

the café say 'We have the country's best architect here tonight.' Anyway, the practice has won

numerous awards for their architecture and most recently the 2016 AIA Robyn Boyd Award for

Residential Architecture. I know that William's process of designing is about the hand and the eye

through the sketch books in which he records and imagines spaces. As we will see tonight the

resulting architecture mixes the calm and the spectacular.

So please join me in welcoming William.

William Smart:

Thank you Anthony and Adam and thank you also to the organisers for tonight and all of you for

coming. As I flew down I thought 'No one's going to show up. I'll be up here on my own, but that

would be fine.' I wanted just to talk to you a little bit about our studio tonight and start off with like

a sprint view through the kinds of projects we work on and then just go and look at Indigo Slam in

a lot of detail. This is the project that won the Robyn Boyd Award and the Wilkinson Award and

it's probably been the most exciting point of my life.

Smart Design Studio is 45 people and we all work together. We specialise in architecture and

interiors and most of our work is residential work. We do houses and different houses of different

scales in different locations, and they're always very detailed. We also do small apartment

buildings and we seek out these projects where we feel that we can be creative and do things out

of the box.

Some of the projects are high budget, some are low budget, but there's always got to be a quality

of design. We're starting to do public buildings. This is the Sydney Train's new headquarters

under construction, a hotel, a high rise in the city and another one at Green Square in Perth and

we also do warehouse conversions, Versace's and the red one in the city and then interiors. It's a

big part of our job is interior design and we have an idea that that be the start of the projects. Our

philosophy is architecture from the inside out. So our interior designers don't think of the colours,

details and materials. They start with the spatial opportunities and that's what drives the

architecture. This is a church project finished and lastly a boat.

So Indigo Slam began in January 2012 and I had a phone call from a lady by the name of Judith

Neilson and I've worked with her in the past on White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney. She asked me if I

was free and had time to work on her house. She said it had to start that day and if it wasn't me

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she was going to call Frank Gehry. That's true. Judith is a great patron of the arts in Sydney and

she is kind of really changing the cultural dynamics of our city. She's a wonderful person.

She bought a warehouse in Chippendale and Chippendale is the southern edge of what I would

describe as Sydney's peninsular of tall buildings. Beyond that point is a conservation area. So

that area won't change and then we have the tall buildings of the city. At the time when she

bought it a lot of these buildings here weren't built and she had the vision that this would be a

house on a park in the city. We talked together about what this house might be like and I showed

her a couple of books of different projects and she really responded to these very bold, ambitious

projects and told me the name of the house was to be 'Indigo Slam' which is a book that she'd

read. I felt that amongst that name and the response [12:37] projects there was a desire for her

to express her new freedom in her life as she was divorcing from her husband.

So I proposed to her that we develop a grid for the house, or a language for the house rather and

that language permeate through everything. It's described in the pictures that you see at the top

and we simply take a card or a piece of material and we cut and we fold it. We run that through

everything like a triangular grid on the Frank Lloyd Wright house and it bind everything together.

It responds to these sculptures that I love and responds to these very sculptural buildings. They

were sort of influences at the time.

So in many ways the house reads as a sculpture in the city. It's made from concrete and steel

and wood and brick, responding to a requirement of the brief that everything lasts for more than

100 years and be as manual as possible, such as the manual operation of the windows that you

see on the outside. I'll describe them later. You can see through here a house that's configured

over three levels, plus a basement. We have on this level a generous dining hall for 60 people,

four bedrooms above that and above that private living and dining room. So the language is this

peeling and folding, you can see it in the form, but the architecture is doing everything that a

house needs to do. So it's shading the windows on the lower part, it's opening up to create a

balcony on the first floor, it has a light scoop that bounces light into the upper rooms of the house

and it opens and closes to create privacy from the neighbouring apartment buildings and to read

as kind of a beautiful form in the city.

I wanted it to feel like it was not a conventional house. It's not a conventional person. It's not a

conventional brief. I felt like it had to respond to that. It changes through the seasons and the

different times of the year. So I wanted to just show you how it's constructed.

First of all we have 17 geothermal bores that go 100 metres down into the ground that are used

to control the heating and cooling of the house in a very energy efficient way. We have

underground tanks, we have a cellar down below and as I mentioned before we have a dining

hall that seats 60 plus a commercial kitchen and an entry foyer. We have a staircase on the

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south side of the house which is the side with no windows because it's fronting neighbouring

properties that mean we can't put windows in those locations and it occupies the south side of

the house and links all the levels from the bedrooms which each have en suites, up to the top

floor which has a narrow kitchen through the centre of that space, a TV room through that side

and then a living and dining and kitchen area through there. That is housed underneath this

beautiful sculpting ceiling which reflects the language of the house and out the back we have a

guest house and a garage, and in between we have a courtyard.

The front façade is the element I've described earlier which is this peeling and folding façade and

it's pinned off the building which means that these elements through here are supported by the

glazing munnions. So the house has tremendous weight and lightness at the same time. It's

sitting beneath a steel roof with solar panels covering the building.

So I thought tonight I'd take you on a tour of the house starting with the front gate. The front gate

is made from corten steel and slides down the hill like you were going into a castle. Each of these

batons is 60mls wide and it's just notched out to show the name of the house from the corten

steel so that from front on you can't read it. You can only read it from the side and it's quite hard

to read if the sun's not shining. You walk in as the gate opens and you walk up three stairs into

quite a compressed element and look up to a three storey high portico and each floor level is four

metres apart. So it's a very tall and dramatic entry portico. If you look to the right you'll see these

brass rods that couple all the shutters of the house together. So all of the glass is fixed so that it's

not kind of spoiled by hinges or hardware generally and all of the panels of the house are

openable. So if you wind a handle, six to nine windows will open in series.

You come into this beautiful spare entry foyer where no lights can be seen and you'll notice on

the floor there are bricks. These are regular dry-pressed bricks which were made for the house

and again they respond to that requirement of the brief that everything lasts for more than

100 years. Details everywhere follow the language of the house in the peeling and folding

gestures and on this project we were lucky enough to make all of the hardware. So we made the

door handles, we made every element for the house. You come past a couple of doors here, one

of them is a lift, one is a cellar and the ceiling at this point is very low. We measured that to be

Judith's hand height when she reaches up into the air. The door on the right opens into a very

beautiful lift, very spare and then the black hallway takes you down into the cellar. The cellar is a

brick room underground and we made these vaulted ceilings out of bricks in a traditional way. So

they're bearing structural load and they're real bricks laid up in that way. Then we house the

room with very regular racks on these columns that are made from very slim angles, equal

angles.

So going back up into the foyer, we walk past those doors again into the main entry hall, the main

stair hall of the house. So one of the requirements of this house is that it have a very public

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purpose. So, Judith is involved with a whole host of charities and she holds events there on a

monthly basis and they will accommodate between 50 and 200 people. This staircase is kind of a

part of that foyer experience of coming into the house. As I mentioned before it's on the south

side, so that we use that part of the house which has no natural light or sunlight available to the

rooms. We offer the sunlight to the bedrooms and use this to circulate through the space. The

walls in here are unpainted waxed render and the bricks as I mentioned before are the beautiful

dry-pressed bricks. The peeling and folding language is what describes the way that the

handrails are designed and the balustrades peel and open and it's largely inspired by projects

like Utzon's Bagsvaerd Church, and then beautiful austere spaces by John Porcen as well.

So coming back into that space we'll walk down this hallway, past the stair details where you

notice small vents that allow you to manually control the fresh air coming into this space. If you

slide that little handle the holes will either line up or misalign to open and close the vent. That's a

great image of the wax render. So it's got this beautiful kind of shell-like quality to it.

We go into the dining hall space through this and you'll notice at the top of the image there a

glass bridge. So in some ways the house is very low tech and very crafted and in other ways it's

quite high tech. So there's glass there with no structure in that area.

In through to the room and you'll notice that the furniture is consistent through the house, many

different species of wood but this was all designed and made by a wonderful craftsman by the

name of Khai Liew from Adelaide. The table is made from two halves of a tree. So she bought a

very long tree and we cut it and sculpted that shape out of it. So it's one solid piece of wood. So

this room as I mentioned before has a dining table for 60 and at the end there's a very significant

artwork by a Russian painter of Noah's Arc. Looking back the other way you can see that peeling

and folding language will bind the elements of the room together. On the right side through here

there are very large panels and the baton space acoustic attenuation there. So it controls its

acoustic well and it's hard to see there, but there's red leather in the back of those spaces and it

opens up through to the hallway. Then if you close off the room the colours there are taken from

the beautiful painting at the end of the room and there it is illuminated at night.

So we'll go back out of that space, back into the hallway. I think with most of these projects we

didn't really know how it was going to be used, so just know that Judith has one of the largest art

collections in the country and a large part of this project was for her to house some art works. So

along the way she bought significant pieces like – I'll go backwards – the blue piece at the end

that we had to find a home for that. Where she wanted it, it wouldn't fit. It was too big. Then at the

end of the room she had another piece which she really loved. It's a traditional Chinese

landscape. But when you get up close you realise it's made from about 900 nails that are

punched into that back wall.

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So her idea of this project was that it was going to house a lot of art and as the architecture

unfolded she felt that it was in her words 'too powerful to take it'. So she pulled back the amount

of art and we talked about ways of offering it up in a permanent way. So all of the artwork is

installed forever in her mind and it's all bolted to the wall. You can see with details like this, that

same language of peeling and folding is adapted to suit the artworks. It's always in a different

way. So this right hand line responds to the centre of that vaulted room and the left hand line is a

way of trying to hold that piece of artwork up.

Then you look back into – this is the top floor spaces, into more areas of the house and then

back down through the vaulted space. So imagine before that this side of the building has

neighbours butting up to that, so we can't put walls in. So we brought the light in from above and

that same language of peeling and folding is used to express light in different ways. Some of the

skylights face north, some of them face south in different ways so that they are bright or more

subtle at the different times of the year with how the light moves around. It's always got this

beautiful calm quality to the space. It's kind of extraordinary.

This is obviously the staircase down through the space, again with the brick on the floors, light

from above and at the end of the room there we have a Juliette balcony and if you stand on that

Juliette balcony you come onto the access of the void. So I thought we'd go up there. That how it

looks. So again it's adapting the same language, peeling and folding, and at that point you stand

up at this part of the house, look past the pantry and powder room into the kitchen area. Judith's

idea of this kitchen area is that she can see her friends while she's cooking but no one can see

her. She loves to cook so we just have it closed off and separated from the main space except

for that little opening in the wall and it's top-lit from above. The bench tops are made from a

product called 'super white granite' so it's just a very kind of simple granite and very large

sculpted edges to make all the cupboards easy to open. Through the house we use always – the

timber in the architecture is always oak but there's about six different finishes. We change it

suddenly in each room and there's the details of the bench top through there.

Then the opening through there is made from the same granite. It's laminated pieces. It's not one

single block and it opens up in a beautiful way. So you can see with all these details that the

ideas of the architecture are coming through in every element of the house and that's looking

from the other side. This is her main dining space upstairs. So she has a dining table for 16 and a

little lounge area at the end of that. She loves to have people around. She's a kind of very open

person who will ask you to come round after you've had a meal to have a chat.

What I tried to create with this room was a very kind of bright, sunny room in the city that

addressed privacy from the neighbouring apartment buildings, but had this beautiful kind of

sunny quality to it. One of the ways we did that is to use this light scoop on the architecture to

bounce light above the ceiling. So if you look on, what is it, your left hand image, you'll see a

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maroon line and that window above there is offered up to the light scoop which has a white

surface on the underside to bounce light on the underside. The result of that is that the shadows

are very light in that space. So it has this kind of lovely milky light quality to it at all times of the

day. We also have a clerestory at the southern side of that room that bounces light back into it

through another direction and then these blinds that open and close that space off, because it's a

very long window in that area.

These are the kind of wonderful pieces of furniture that were commissioned for the house. So

every piece of furniture was made for the project and it's pretty much used how I thought. I

always thoughts the blinds would be extended, but opened up so you can look out. This is the TV

room through here and kind of crazy furniture, and this shows how the windows open and close,

the blinds open and close in the different configurations.

So responding to this requirement of the brief that everything be manual made our lives very

challenging. So, we found someone who could make these large vertical blinds if you like, but we

wanted them made from solid wood with an aluminium substrate and we wanted them to manual.

He only had that available with electric motors. The idea of it being manual is that maybe in

50 years' time you won't be able to buy the electric motor anymore to repair it and Judith felt that

everything in the house needed to last for a long time. So, we worked with this manufacturer for

about a year on making everything manual in the system and therefore there's a lot of prototyping

that goes with that as well.

Back in the stair hall here and we'll go down to the bedroom level. So you cross over the glass

bridge which has no structure. The handrails through there are wrapped in white leather and then

there's beautiful details that feel like they're a part of the house. When I was designing and

planning it, I felt like I was in a way designing a palace really. It's that kind of scale. It has those

kind of grand gestures. You arrive at amazing moments. There's senses of symmetry. There's

moments of 'wow'. There's that classic idea of compression and release in how you move

through the architecture. So circulation as well as detail was very important.

Most of the bedrooms are configured like this. So you'll come in through a walk-through robe and

behind the bedhead is an en suite bathroom. Each of the rooms has a different view out to the

city. So this bedroom cannot look out to the park, but can only look up to the sky or down to the

ground behind that piece of concrete. As a result of that it has these beautiful patterns of light

and shadow that fall on the concrete and surprisingly enough light coming into that room.

This room has vertical windows that look down a new laneway in the city or back to the centre of

the park. This is a room for grandchildren and has a long, panoramic view to the city and then

these are the blinds that open and close in different configurations in that space. Then this is the

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master bedroom which his a larger room with a little desk and an ottoman. Behind the bed is the

en suite bathroom and the way to get to it is on the right hand side.

So before I mention these winders of the windows, how they work is that you can see through

there the glass is fixed. You can also see faintly through the glass that the concrete on the

outside is pinned off the glazing munnions. So it's supported in an extraordinary way and what

you don't capture in the photographs is that feeling of weight and lightness at the same time. So

you can look over the top of that sloping concrete element or look underneath it. Now when you

wind the handles all of those shutters in the room are linked together and you can open them at

the top to let the hot air out and at the bottom to let the cool air in and ventilate that window

space. Then we have mesh there to control insects.

It's probably one of those projects where I got about half way through it and thought 'I've really

started something that's too hard.' It was very difficult but I kind of worked my way through all of

these components and designed them all and they were all made in the lost wax casting and

they're machined after that. So you can see the name 'Indigo Slam' is in the handle and then

every piece of machinery on there is expressed. They all look like they're the same. There's

probably 1,000 different components in the whole system. It was hard to do and it was inspired

by this project I've worked on in Sydney to restore these old medical suites in the city and they

have the same kind of handles, but theirs are a lot smaller and they work through a bay window

as well. They're beautiful and this is 80 years old and is working wonderfully today.

This is the en suite bathroom space and the kind of calmness and clarity of that space and the

comfortableness is what we wanted to translate to it. So behind those mirrors on the wall are

cabinets built into the wall. There are no glass shower screens. There are little shelves to put

shampoo and the drawers are concealed behind the marble fronts through there. The details.

They're laundry taps from [32:27] and then through there we made a shower and a bath space

together. So we made this bath in New Zealand just out of beaten copper with handrail parts so

an older lady can get out of the bath and a little corner to sit on when you're having a shower,

and then a slot view to the park, so you could look out to see what the day was like whilst you

had privacy in that space. Then again we tried to make the projects look sort of low-tech in a

way. So the water drains into that gap between the tiles and the heated towel rails don't look like

heated towel rails and that looks through to the road beyond that.

The other en suites in the house kind of have a similar language but each one of them is slightly

different. This one has marble-fronted tall doors to the cabinets and then looking back from the

shower space through there and then quite simple baths sitting in walls that are just very slightly

curved at the ends. Then different bathrooms in different spaces.

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So I thought we'd go out and have a look at the guest house. It's only been recently finished, so

there aren't great photographs of that, but that's leaving the main space and a kind of beautiful

light in those areas. So the guest house has a similar language. The main house has all of its

architecture going horizontally to allow the winter sun to come in and the summer sun to shield

the glass. This side of the house on the right faces south and so all of its design is in a vertical

orientation. The obsession there is privacy for the neighbours. So it's built into a street of working

class terraces and the architecture is drawing alignments from that, but focusing views down the

street and not across the road. There's a garage integrated into that space as well. So the garage

downstairs and a guest apartment above that and then a couple of trees through here.

There's quite a nice story. We spoke to three different landscape architects, one after the other

and they kept coming up with ideas for the house. I just didn't think any of them were really right.

The third one said to me 'I know a young guy. You should talk to him. I think you'll like his idea.' I

told him at the house, we had a coffee and he had this idea that he came back with as a concept

called a companion for 1,000 years, knowing that the brief of the house was to last 100 years. He

decided to plant two ginkgo tree side by side and he tells me they're the oldest tree in the world,

and cut out the space between the two of them. So they'll always sit like brothers or sisters side

by side with an empty space between the two of them. I think it's a beautiful idea. That's it

starting to grow. We helped Judith coordinate the positions for the sculptures and made plinths

for all of those as well and you can see the space between the two trees. They're planted at

different heights, so they'll grow at different rates. Then these are kind of little views out from

different parts of the house. So that's looking up into the guest house through there.

I think for me a lot of the house has turned out much like what I imagined except for the light. I'm

unable to imagine what light is like and I think what I think is really beautiful about it is the way it

captures light and surprises me and a lot of other people. I think that's probably the greatest

success of the house. This is a reflection pool at the front that's intended to bounce light up onto

the walls but I was surprised it bounces light up onto the ceilings inside the rooms and kind of

gives you this ever changing beautiful light. It's sort of captured here with a poem that we put into

the bottom of the pond and it's adapted from a song that I really like and I bounced it back with

Judith, backwards and forwards and then we turned it into this poem.

So I thought to finish the talk tonight I might just show some images of the construction and

drawings and read something that I wrote. I was asked recently to do an occasional address at

the UTS graduation and it forced me to really think a bit about my career, about our industry,

about what we do and I thought I'd share with you an adaptation of that.

'I feel very privileged to be here today and to be honest, a little out of place. I come from an

ordinary background, not the right or wrong side of the tracks or a famous lineage. I'm not a

writer or a talker. I'm more of a drawer and a dreamer. I recognise that we're living in a time of

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tremendous opportunity. Our population is growing and buildings surround us and much of this is

of the highest international standards.

We of course have many extraordinary architects such as Murcutt, Utzen, Boyd and Seidler

who've established these foundations which are further underpinned by the work of our dedicated

architectural community. The role that we have is to embrace the opportunities that come our

way in our own way and make the best built environment that we possibly can. I say in our own

way because our profession requires all different kinds of designers. Some are creative, others

are great at business, or others strong on detail, or some can be great managers and organisers.

We need them all.

So my advice to young people is to find your niche and become great at that. I imagine most of

you are here tonight because of your love of great design and probably because you've engaged

with something that's more than a job or even a career. Architecture for most of us is a vocation,

like a calling that you'd see with a professor, nurse or athlete and is incredibly satisfying. What is

so wonderful about this particular vocation is that what we imagine and then draw actually is built

and created. We create physical objects that endure for many years and shape our cities and

public places, and as well as that, interiors that shape our lives. It's a role with tremendous

responsibility as well as wonderful opportunity.

This message was really driven home to me recently when one of my friends enrolled to study

his passion - interior design. It took him many years to leave his successful career in banking

because of its prestige and financial reward and start studying again. But I now see him with a

new energy and vitality and drive that I've never seen before. The only regret is that he hadn't

done it sooner. But it's also a job that can be incredibly tough, especially if your goal is to get

amazing results.

I always knew that I would fight with builders and engineers, but I never imagined a world of

project managers, developers, design and construct development, and a world where mistakes

happen all the time. You need to be very thick-skinned and very determined. You need to know

when to stand your ground and at all times keep your eye on the end result. I went to see a great

Chilean Landscape Designer, Teresa Moller talk at the AIA. She does amazing work and has

incredible clients like the founders of Google. At the end of this extraordinary presentation

someone from the audience asked if it were easier in South America and she really started to

laugh, and she said 'You can't imagine how much of this is all a fight.' She went to say also that

sometimes she does things that she's told not to, just because she thinks it's right. The client will

say 'Do not do that' and she'll do it anyway. I've noticed this pattern, that most famous designers

have to push really hard to do great work.

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Great design is the result of a vision and a conspiracy of circumstances and participants. It's an

amazing testament to a team's ability to join forces and make something special. It requires

collaboration and is naturally susceptible to the quality of that collaboration. I look at this as

impressive and acknowledge the difficulty of coordinating such large numbers of people to

provide their trade at the exact time to the required quality.

Working on Indigo Slam was a dream commission for us and thanks to Judith Neilson. It was a

very ambitious project with the result of tremendous team work. I'd be lying if I said it was easy. It

wasn't. There were tears, there were difficult moments, there were arguments as well as

moments of great joy. But it was worth every second of it.

Nearly 30 years ago I completed university and then followed the advice of my parents to go off

to Europe, to work and explore with vague plans and little savings. By stroke of luck and sheer

bravado I found a job in the south of France. I was really looking for an adventure at that point in

my life but found so much more there and through completely unplanned accidents really, this

experience in France landed me a job in Norman Foster's office in London when it was very

small. After five years there I decided to return to Australia and work on an Olympic project which

is where I met John. That was the last thing I did before starting my own practice 20 years ago

and now that I look back it all seems like the dots connect together beautifully, but at the time

they all seemed like flukes, connected by unbridled confidence and the will and the lack of

shyness really to ask for what I wanted or what opportunity presented in front of me.'

So I've mis-timed this a little bit but I might confiscate the clicker.

These are shots of building Indigo Slam. Something we dream of now is making a book about the

construction of it that shows the team work, that shows the kind of amazing moments. Because it

was a dream project I went to site every second day for about three years and I was up on all

that scaffolding, checking all the form ties and checking that everything was in alignment

perfectly. I think that's a great photo there. You can see the formwork that's held up for the

concrete off the glazing munnions and that was the most difficult pour of concrete of the lot. We

lost a vibrator into the concrete. There's one still in there.

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This is prototyping all of those folding parts and then building the spaces, and then up on there.

None of us were wearing harnesses or safety gear. It's great. And then building the barrel-altered

space and then gradually this kind of pile of scaffold started to come down and then you saw this

kind of great building. And building the staircase. This is our wonderful old Engineer who's an old

friend of mine. He was down there every second day as well, and then building the spaces. So

you can see it was a very rough and dirty building site for most of the time. And then up into the

ceiling, the geothermal heating and cooling, the baths taking shape.

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So all of these things that turn the windows now have gone to a dark brown colour. The brass

has all oxidised. Again all the materials respond to that brief that they must last for long periods

of time. We made all these little parts for the house, so the floor boxes are made so they'd be the

perfect size for brick and then the handles. Then when it was starting to be revealed we kind of

were surprised by the beautiful qualities of light that were revealed to us. We always thought the

light would be lovely but it never turned out as we imagined.

That’s the end.

Antony Moulis:

Thanks William. I'll now invite John De Manincor, UQ Architecture academic to come up on

stage. Please welcome John.

John De Manincor:

Thanks. It's going to take me a few minutes to recover from that. It's kind of a sensual overload. I

actually feel a little bit dirty. I feel like I've watched a movie of insight into Judith's life that I

probably – you know – it's like the movie that you don't want your teenagers to watch but there

are no characters.

So, I did a bit of Google stalking even though I've known William for a very long time. The first

thing I realised that in all the publicity shots he wears a white shirt, so I've worn a black shirt. But

in a lot of the publicity about Indigo Slam only the AFR article has photos of Judith and I want to

start with a question about this idea of occupation. I don't really want to talk too much about the

questions but you talk about 'Judith this' and 'Judith that' and the occupation of the house. I want

you to describe for us a photo shoot that will probably never happen of all the people in the

house because obviously they're all rich people who don't want their photos taken, but I just

wonder what it's like when it's full. All this idea of occupation of grand children, of parties for 60 or

80 people, yet until we saw the construction shots, it was completely lifeless other than the

beautiful light which is obviously stunning. So tell us a bit about that photo shoot. How would you

curate that shot? Who's going to play Judith if it's not her?

William Smart:

I think what I want to say first of all is that the house operates in many different modes. So there

is that time when they had the opening of the Biennale there. So there was 200 people in the

space at that time and that ended up with 20 or 30 people sitting on Judith's carpet upstairs on

the floor, drinking whiskey. It's that kind of house.

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John De Manincor:

Why don't we get to see those photos?

William Smart:

Yeah, we'd love to. It would be nice to do that as well. You can look at her. She's whitehotrabbit

on Instagram. You can see quite a lot of whiskey drinking in that place.

John De Manincor:

Maybe that's the slideshow that we should see.

William Smart:

Yeah, but I think if I was to curate it, it would be that kind of moment where there are people, all

different kinds of people from different places. I mentor a boy at UTS and he told me that he went

to White Rabbit Gallery one day with their lecturers because they said 'You guys don't know how

to design a gallery. Come and look at a Gallery and see how it all works.' As they were leaving

Judith was there and she said 'This is what we want to do' and 'This is how it works. Is it just a

coincidence?' Then she had them all up inside the house. She said 'Do you want to come and

look at my house. Do you want to come and have a look around?' and she'll show them the

bathroom and the loo and every part of the house. She is just very open in that way. So I think

the image would be that. It would be the neighbours across the road in one of those working

class cottages, but also it would be Penelope Seidler there as well or one of her rich and fancy

friends.

John De Manincor:

So my challenge is therefore to do a slideshow with just Judith's Instagram feed because it would

tell a very different story about other than the purity. But as William mentioned we worked

together, not on the same projects, but in the same office and I didn't realise it was 20 years ago.

It was at a period where a lot of people were actually leaving London, the likes of Nigel Greenhill,

Kevin Curran and Hugh Turner who's been part of the lecture series, and we worked together at

Hassall which for about six months was known as Foster's Light. But you mentioned your

moment of working with Foster and Partners but you did tell me a little sneaky story about Rem

and your passion for working for him. So can you share that because it's a pretty funny story and

then I'll get a little bit more serious?

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William Smart:

When I finished studying and I thought 'I really want to go and travel and I want to work for

amazing people' and I had my heart set on the OMA and working in Rotterdam for Rem

Koolhaas. I wrote to them but they didn't respond and I wrote to other architects that I liked, no

one responded. Then I started calling and…

John De Manincor:

William is obsessive if you haven't worked that out.

William Smart:

I was just thinking 'I can't get through reception. I can't do anything. I'll just call late at night' and

one night I called very late and Rem Koolhaas picked up the phone himself. He said 'What is it

you want?' and I said 'I want to work for you.' I said 'How do I make that happen?' He said 'What

languages do you speak?' I said 'English. That's it.' He said 'You need to speak French. You

need to speak German and then once you learn those languages you can have a job in our

office', and that's sort of one of the inspirations for going to France and working there for a while.

John De Manincor:

Yep. So when we worked together you mentioned at farewell drinks this idea of a house, I think it

was in WA, that you'd had on the – you know, we all do these private jobs. You said 'I've got

enough work. I think there's enough fee in this to last me about six months and I don't know

what's going to happen then', and here you are much later. On your Q&A for your presence here

you talked about not being interested in business. I don't believe you, that you're not interested in

the operation of the practice because to grow a practice like the one you've made with fabulous

clients, you have to find a way to get to them.

So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the growth of the practice from that project to today,

through hairdressing salons, through your own practice, building that office building. As Leonie

said last week, how did it happen?

William Smart:

I think first of all I love these kind of conversations and these lectures because I always see these

people and think 'How did you do it? What are your tips?' When I say I'm not interested in the

business, what I'm talking about is I don't check the bank accounts. I don't like doing fee

agreements or negotiating fees. I acknowledge that we need all that stuff to make the business

work and therefore we have a really fantastic General Manager in our office who does all that for

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me. If I was to organise the fees I would always underquote because I don't give in very quickly.

I'm sort of not interested in that part of it.

What I love doing is I really love drawing. That's my kind of passion and I do everything I can to

draw a couple of hours a day, and with a practice of 45 people that's pretty hard. I could easily

spend my day on marketing or doing lunches and stuff. So I don't do business lunches. I don't do

many dinners. I generally do my work and draw and design and review drawings. I'm involved

with every project in our office. I don't check every drawing but there's a point where I'll check a

whole bunch of drawings in one go. So, sometimes that takes me two weeks solid to check every

drawing. I'm kind of an architect. That's what I like doing. I like doing architecture, I like doing

interiors. I like getting down to the finest detail. I like working with consultants. I love getting on

side and climbing around scaffold with a pair of running shorts on at 7:00 in the morning. It's like

heaven for me. I love doing that sort of stuff.

I also always set up the business when I left Hassall, to be a good practice and a sizeable

practice and I never had in my mind that I was going to be working on my own, although that's

obviously how it started. There were kind of some things that happened really that were fortunate

and again, I didn't really plan it but looking back now it was smart. One of them was I started

doing development applications for people that wanted to do, four to six apartments and I really

like that scale of job. I still like it now. They were always being on sold. So people would do the

DA, they would sell it on and the next person would buy it and they wouldn't engage me to go any

further and the design would be kind of slaughtered. It started just tearing me up. I thought 'I can't

do this anymore. I have to find a developer who believes in quality, that wants to do things that

are out of the box, that wants a creative solution.' I thought Dr Quek from Frasers would be the

right person.

So, I wrote to him. He didn't respond. I wrote again and again. Then one day I called and he said

'I've got a job for you and it's to furnish an apartment that we can't sell in Lumiere.' We did that

and jumped in. It was a lot of fun and it sold to the first buyer that walked in the door. It was kind

of at the bottom of the Lumiere building, so it was compromised by some big transfer columns. It

was an awful planned apartment but we could see a clever way of resolving that through interior

design. Then he asked us to do another one and another one. Then we got the interiors of the

Jean Deville building, Central Park West and then we did that. Then that kind of allowed us to get

into larger projects and then he gave us our own building. But it kind of worked through little

steps like that for us and I think that's how everybody really does it.

But the other thing, I really love detail. So, doing the interiors is essential and that's kind of grown

our company as well. At a point we just said 'We don't want to do interiors in other people's

buildings anymore. We want to do our own' and that's how it really works now.

Page 17 of 23


John De Manincor:

Yep. So William mentioned the Lumiere building which is a project by Foster and Partners in the

city in Sydney, but I was just thinking again about the references. I spent a bit too much time last

night reading the Q&A. Every one of your references is a dead white guy. I wonder if you could

talk about dead white architects for a minute and how they've shaped you and what the future

might hold for architecture in terms of is the dead white guy a dead thing? Or is it a kind of

growing thing?

William Smart:

So I think John's talking about [56:57] Alvar Aalto.

John De Manincor:

Dead, dead, dead, white, male.

William Smart:

There's so much out there, isn't there? There's just like so much to look at and I think what I see

with those people, I really love Lewis Kahn at the moment and for me it's this period where I go

through. I've loved Lewis Kahn for the last couple of years and I was never interested before that.

I just couldn't – I didn't have one remote interest in it at all. People would say 'You'd like it', I'd say

'I don't.' Aalto has only been this year. This is the first year I've liked Aalto.

John De Manincor:

I don't believe you.

William Smart:

True, true, and then what I do is I'll probably obsessive like you say, I'll get books, I'll read the

books. At the moment I'm going through the Lewis Kahn lectures and listening to those. I just

love it and it's kind of completely influencing my work.

What I particularly like about people who have a long career is that you can see phases in their

career and can study those. So, there's a period in Aalto's work where he has his monumental

buildings that are just, you know, very, very different to the early work and I love seeing that.

Obviously I get Architecture Review every month and all the Australian mags and enjoy seeing

what's happening locally as well, but I do love looking back on those great masters and learning

from them.

Page 18 of 23


John De Manincor:

So you mentioned also – I'm going to keep referring to your Q&A about your obsession with

drawing on Saturday and I guess there's this culture or architects being a bit obsessive. So

William's office is in a very prominent street in Sydney. It was a short cut out of the city for me to

avoid some traffic to head off to my old home and the lights are always on. It's a bit Foster-esque

in that sense, in that unfortunately, I don't know if it's a 24/7 office like that, but it's definitely a

kind of 7:00 'til 10:00 place and that's just downstairs. Then the lights go on in William's home

upstairs. How do you find time for the dog? He's got a great dog. How does this work? How do

we find time for work and a kind of ethical work balance for those that we charge with delivering

great projects and their life as well as your own life?

William Smart:

I really love my job. I completely love drawing and being involved with the studio. So I've really

been going for 20 years now on my own and for that time I've probably worked between 75 and

80 hours a week. So I work really long hours and my day starts off with a run with the dog in the

park. Then I go to work at 7:30 and I'll generally go home for dinner and then pop downstairs.

John De Manincor:

By 'going home' means like a 20 second walk?

William Smart:

It is only upstairs. I go home and take an hour off and probably three nights of the week I'll go

back down and just potter around with things. What we try to do in the studio is to not have

people work late unless they want to play with something or if there's that inevitable deadline for

a tender or something that will happen through there. Then as we've grown – we've got 45

people now, so we've got probably about four competitions on a year and they're gruelling really.

You work long hours and that requires the team to keep going.

As for my kind of love, it's 7:30 'til 9:00 is drawing in the mornings and then at night time it's my

drawing time. I find it very relaxing. I find it very enjoyable. Again, in that obsessive way of

working, if I'm designing it's sort of like I feel like I'm breathing. It's kind of riding me all the time

and I really love kind of immersing myself in that way.

John De Manincor:

Does the Business Manager ask you to keep time sheets?

Page 19 of 23


William Smart:

Yep.

John De Manincor:

Would you be bankrupt if…

William Smart:

Yeah.

John De Manincor:

But just again I guess a question of that thing about the obsessiveness and this passion and this

drive and the kind of ethics that go with that. The work that you're doing at the moment ranges

from, I kind of felt a bit dirty. That project is just incredible, the palace. But the Frasers' project is

probably the top notch development client with Dr Quek, but some of the other work is not in that

realm. What do you learn from something like Judith's project that you've got to take a pretty

spec developer on the foreshore in WA? What's the technique of learning from something and

how does it enrich the nasty developer and is it even possible?

William Smart:

I actually don't know the answer just yet, but how the project's changed me is I feel like on one

level it was just a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it and it's ignited this idea of having a lot of fun. It

sounds really basic, doesn't it, but I can tell you what I did.

One of our projects is we decided we would work in an area called Dovich Hill on an old railway

line and get involved with this low budget, non-affordable housing in a sense. It had been a social

housing scheme, but low cost housing that was permeated with all these social agendas. We're

building it and it's about three quarters built and it's no fun building it. It's the toughest D&C, the

roughest D&C contract as you'd ever met, the dirtiest construction site. Everything's a fight with

time and I just thought I have to sit down with these guys and say 'I don't need to do this really.

I'm doing it because I want to do it. I don't have to. Can we make it a bit more fun?' I had that

conversation a couple of months ago and it's been much more fun, so that's kind of what I'm out

to do at the moment.

I'm looking for projects where we can be creative, we can have fun, we can do things that are

unusual. There's a couple of projects we're doing at the moment that aren't quite Indigo Slam but

are almost there. It's really interesting that things come out of the woodwork as well.

Page 20 of 23


John De Manincor:

So Indigo Slam has spurred two more interesting projects for other architects next door. So

there's the Durback Block Jaggers/John Wardle Architects project which is kind of again,

incredible construction work. So we know where Indigo Slam and that site is going. What do you

take into the future? Judith is a one of the kind pretty much on the planet. She's not Aussie John.

There are clients out there who have similar budgets. The budgets are secret. I wanted to ask

him but I know he won't answer.

But if someone like Judith came along with zero money but the same ambition how might you

tackle that?

William Smart:

Look, I'm sort of working on two houses at the moment. One of them is high budget, one is not

and what I'm doing and I think I do this with most of my projects, I'm trying to find out what the

real problem is. So, on one house what we really have to do is there's an amazing view and they

don't want to lose any moment of their view, but I also have to manage privacy and it's hard to

build and all that stuff. So there's kind of trying to unravel what the real problem is and then how

can you allow the house to express that? So for a really low budget project I don't think that that

means it doesn't have to be special. It just probably means you have to stay very tried and tested

and proven ways of building, and then build an amazing space out of it.

One of the projects, it's not about the building. It's about the courtyard that we're building and in a

way that's for free. There's no cost to building the courtyard because it's just going to be grass

actually, but the architecture is the walls that create that space and then what is that space doing

and how does it work? So some things don't cost a lot actually. Some things are really expensive.

John De Manincor:

Yeah. So I'm going to wrap up with a funny question. I think it's a funny question and Antony was

right. As we were walking out of the café this guy said 'Are you going up to the lecture?' and we

said 'Yeah.' He said 'Apparently Australia's greatest architect is speaking there.' I jokingly said

because I've known William a while, I said 'No, he's only the second best.' So who is the next

best architect and what does the future hold for Australian architecture?

William Smart:

The next best Australian architect.

Page 21 of 23


John De Manincor:

After you or the next one that…

William Smart:

I don't think I'm there at all. I think John Wardle is amazing. I think Neil Durbach is amazing. I

think Grimshaws in Australia is doing incredible work. I know more about the New South Wales'

architects than other ones, but I think they're all doing incredible work. Every year I go to the

awards, when the short list comes out for the awards I think 'Oh my God, everything is so good.'

It's really an amazing calibre of work.

I'm also going to put a caveat on that and say I think the top end of our architecture is great. I

think our average architecture is shocking. It's terrible and I think that as much as we're building

beautiful buildings within the city, we're building many more disgraceful buildings and some

people need to be slapped.

John De Manincor:

That's okay. Well I'm going to leave…

William Smart:

I don't want to end with that.

John De Manincor:

Well we started on a highlight. I think I'm going to ask you all to slap your hands together and

thank William for a fabulous…

Antony Moulis:

Yes. Thanks John. Thanks William. It's my duty now to move on to something I know you're all

anticipating and that's to tell you who tonight's Arch-I-Spy winner is and that is Danielle Chavino.

So well done.

Now, thank you Danielle and as Adam mentioned last week – I wasn't here, but I heard tell that

he mentioned – we're announcing the overall winner of the competition and the lucky recipient of

a private trip of the Hayes and Scott iconic mid Century Jacobi House and some one on one time

with the team of the Asia-Pacific Design Library is Stefan Tuck.

My final word for this evening is to invite you to hear more about architecture and attend

semester one visiting critic lecture that's happening at the University of Queensland by Virginia

Page 22 of 23


San Fratello of California-based practice Rafael San Fratello and she's going to give this next

Friday. It's entitled Crafting the Future and it will focus on the future of crafting 3D printed

architecture and the built environment through the use of innovative, accessible, recyclable

materials. So please register through Eventbrite and you can find the link also on the school's

website.

On that note thanks for coming here yourselves tonight and we look forward to seeing you for the

2018 UQ Architecture Lecture Series.

Thank you and enjoy your evening.

[End of Transcript]

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designonline.org.audesignonline.org.au/.../uploads/2017/06/Transcript_Willia… · Web viewBut you mentioned your moment of working with Foster and Partners but you did tell me