Head of the school of architecture at the University of Technology Sydney, Anthony Burke was recently appointed with Gerard Reinmuth of Terroir to the position of creative director for the Australian Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Burke spoke to A&D about architecture and academia, the recipe for good architecture and what buildings he wished he had design.
How do you think you approach architecture differently with your academic background, compared to other architects?
I think of architecture as a history of ideas and the best architecture for me, the kind I aspire to in my own work, has both an intellectual and material depth to it.
The best projects, like the best art, allow you to spend time unravelling intellectual concepts as part of a spatial experience. Being a teacher and researcher, I'd say I probably pay a lot more attention to the way in which we work and the ways in which architectural ideas are part of a broad and ongoing cultural discussion.
You have worked at different universities around the world. What has been the most unique experience you’ve had?
I can’t overestimate the value of travelling as part of the education of an architect. Up to this point, one of the most unique experiences I've had was just after I finished my masters at Columbia in New York and was asked to assist Japanese architect Shigeru Ban to run a masters studio. Working with him and taking students to Istanbul to look at temporary housing that he built after the 1999 Izmit earthquake was extraordinary. He showed me the value of allowing yourself to just get involved.
How do you see students approaching architecture today compared to the way you approached architecture when you were a student?
Architecture is always about passion, and I don't think this is any different with today's students — the passionate students will be successful.
When I was a student there was much more emphasis on formal composition and the cult of the monograph. The architect was regarded as an individual and the work they did was equally self-contained in its aspirations. To me that aspiration has been replaced by a generation who understand an entirely different sense of connection to each other and to the world in which they operate.
This sets students and the way we educate architects today apart. It's partly to do with technology, but it's more to do with a broader sense of responsibility and a connected way of thinking about the world. I think this generation is much less interested in composition and more interested in testing the limits of what architecture is capable of.
What is the most interesting aspect of architecture for you?
What makes excellent architecture excellent is so hard to pin down. There will never be a recipe for good design — it always has to have something unexpected about it to be truly wonderful. I think it's also the continual tension between a genuinely optimistic, creative and curious group of people and the serious professional and public responsibility architects feel. Watching the ways different practices design through activating this tension and their sense of the contemporary is endlessly fascinating.
What is the best piece of advice anyone has ever given you?
My dad told me to always draw with a sharp pencil. He knew nothing about architecture but I've turned this into an allegory for many things.
Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut, image courtesy Architravel
What is one building you wish you had designed and why?
My top two are Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp. Some friends and I were touring Europe in 1994 and we went to a Christmas midnight mass there with snow on the ground. The experience during the day was amazing, but turned into the sublime with the experience of the mass at midnight. Ronchamp showed that Corbusier continually looked for new ways to work, and even this late in his career was prepared to attempt something new.
Notre Dame du Haut by night
The Storefront for Art and Architecture Gallery in New York by Steven Holl and Vito Acconci (1993) is the other (pictured below). It's a tiny project, not even an entire building, but it and the organisation that runs it represent a way of thinking about architecture and its critical possibilities, a relationship to the city and the public, and an optimism that has had a massive effect on generations of architects.
If you could change one thing about the way architecture is approached or carried out, what would it be?
To produce excellent architecture simply takes time. If there is one thing I would love to change it's the sense of an appropriate time scale for the work we do which is being further and further cost managed out of the way we produce buildings and educate architects.
Certain big names are able to set their own timeframes for projects which means they are able to demand space for thinking, testing and reflecting on design. Getting a sense of necessary time back into our process would be that thing.
