Award-winning Australian architect Gregory Burgess has brought a new exhibition to the University of Melbourne as part of the Alumni Survey Series at the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning.
Titled Seeking Resonance: the life-architecture of Gregory Burgess, the exhibition explores connections between design, place and soul and will be on show in the Dulux Gallery from September 15 to October 19. Founding his Melbourne-based practice Gregory Burgess Architects in 1972, Burgess is recognised for his participatory design approach to his projects, and for his buildings for Indigenous communities in Australia, including the Burrinja Cultural Community Centre and the Koorie Heritage Trust Cultural Centre among others.
He sees architecture as a way to move into a deep relationship with client, country, and purpose and strives to create buildings which become an animated, responsive presence rather than simply an object.
We caught up with Gregory to find out more about the exhibition, his own architectural projects, and the creative process behind it all.
Seeking Resonance: the life-architecture of Gregory Burgess is on show from September 15th – October 19th at the Dulux Gallery at the University of Melbourne. Come along for the Opening Night on September 15th, RSVP here.
You've exhibited all around the world. How do you think exhibitions inform architectural thinking and practice?
The first exhibition that I was invited to join was a big threshold experience for me. It was the Four Melbourne Architects exhibition in 1979 at the Powell Street gallery in South Yarra. I'd only been practicing for about seven years and going public like that meant being confronted with the real value and meaning of my work. How do I know what its value is? What have I been doing? What's the potential of it?
I'd just come through a series of difficult situations personally with my brother dying tragically, finishing a relationship, and just generally being challenged personally and inwardly. So, when the Four Melbourne Architects invitation came, it was difficult because I wasn't feeling confident about what I'd been doing, and the other featured architects (Peter Crone, Norman Day, Edmond & Corrigan) were a bit more experienced in the public realm.
Because I was feeling quite creatively blocked at this point, I started writing what mattered to me, what seemed important, what was coming to meet me from the future. I pursued some discussions about the potential of healing in my life, to deal with personal situations and inner life issues.
That piece of writing on a series of foolscap pages was a big breakthrough because it unblocked everything. It was like a cork coming out of the bottle so that my sense of my life and work began to flow again in an integrated way. I displayed the writing as part of the exhibition and you’ll see it as well in the Seeking Resonance exhibition.
So the vulnerability of being involved – or publicly on show - in the Four Melbourne Architects exhibition ended up being a catalyst to bring together your personal life and your work?
Yes. You have to reflect on what you've been doing. What have I understood about what I've been doing? Have I really understood the potential of architecture, and myself for that matter, to really contribute to the world and answer those questions? Who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing? Where am I going? All these very basic questions, which are quite challenging to look into deeply.
Reflection was so important. And for the Seeking Resonance exhibition that I'm working on now, the same things are there; the challenge of personal life, the sense of needing to question meaning: Are you stagnating? Are you really changing or transforming in a way that is in the direction that you need to? Are you being lazy or are you not really seeing the wood for the trees and what's important in life?
So I think exhibitions are a catalyst, but also they're an opportunity to explore deeply the connection between architecture and life. I think that's the key thought.
You have been recognized for your collaborative approach to your work and projects. How did this come about?
The collaborative approach has always been there. It was there in my student days, the sense of playful exploration about what's possible and the sense of serving others, of sharing the middle space, the third space of encounter, the overlapping space.
I was brought up in a time of the hero architect in the 20th century, but my feeling always was to be more of a collaborator or a participant, or to encourage people to participate in the process, to have a sense of empowerment by being listened to and engaged in a generative conversation about the meaning of things, depending on the client and what sort of project it is. How to key into country or site. How to observe the needs of place and people for restoration, rejuvenation. How to respond sensitively and comprehensively to your surroundings and the spirit and beauty, and sometimes the difficulty, of particular locations and communities.
Perhaps I was also reacting against the hero architect theme, the architect as personality rather than as a facilitating soul serving a community.
It’s been noted that you value the spirit and meaningfulness of a project over profit or economic aspects, and that you see yourself as someone to serve the community. What do you think about architecture and development driven by profit? Is it sometimes necessary for architects to survive?
We are all different and some people are more orientated towards profit for various reasons, whether it’s livelihood, greed or to perhaps to prove themselves in a particular way.
For me, part of my approach grows from having a sense of my work as a vocation rather than a job, or rather than as a means of making money. If you love your work as a vocation, then it's a very different life experience and experience of architecture than if your main purpose is to make a lot of money or to do a lot of buildings, or even just be involved in aesthetics or fashion rather than the social values and the artistic values. In other words, how do we develop our work as a living presence in the world? I think that's important too.
There are always opportunities to reveal deeper meaning, or considerations for community or environment with any project. You're making these decisions all the time, some small and some much larger, but the opportunity is always there.
If you are deciding towards a certain direction of mainly commercial-based or mainly community based or whatever it is, then that's what you become and that's what your work reflects. This is where it's so important as architects, or just as human beings, that we're conscious of what we're becoming.
That's why reflection is so important in attending to the inner life, the soul life. It makes a difference. You're building a strength in yourself that can maybe creatively resist things that take you down a certain path. But we all bounce around to a degree. We've all got to earn some money, but it's a matter of how you do that, what's the spirit of your connection with the world and community, how you're showing what's important or what are your aspirations; what matters to you.
You have made quite a few significant buildings for Indigenous communities around Australia. How did this come about?
One of the first things that I did when I started my own practice was to go down to the centre offering Aboriginal legal and health care in Gertrude St, Fitzroy. That was about 50 years ago. I volunteered there. They were looking at a site across the road for a cooperative legal aid and health service, so I did a brief and some sketches. So that was the first Indigenous project I was involved in, and it's been a long association.
Some time later, I worked on the Aboriginal Australia art exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. That resulted in a deepening of connection with Aboriginal culture and people from different parts of Australia. So then it was this whole series of projects that followed on from that including Brambuk and Uluru.
I recall a memorable moment in my month of working together with the Anangu of Mutitjulu community at Uluru on a new cultural centre. Walking the site with elder and artist, Nellie Nungarrayi Patterson, she began to talk passionately about the way the building needed to express the Anangu and NPWS rangers working together as one. Demonstrating the idea, she cupped each of her hands and curved them into one another, like two interlocking arms of a spiral galaxy.
This was a moment of epiphany. Her gesture startled me. I had been exploring these same dancing shapes in my early morning drawings. I immediately sketched her gesture in the sand at our feet. The pair of complementary curves created the sense of a shared space, of polarities with the tension between the two held in dynamic balance – reconciling, harmonising, in process of becoming one. This form was recognised by Anangu as Liru and Kuniya, the two sacred snakes, whose drama had played out on this site the women had selected for the building. This seed form became the leitmotif for the centre as a whole.
Do you have any project that you feel particularly close to?
I actually feel very close to most of my projects. It’s hard to choose between them. But the Brambuk Centre in Gariwerd, the Grampians was an important one, and the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre at Uluru. The Eltham Library. Box Hill Community Arts Centre. There a lot of projects there, a lot of houses and cultural community projects. So each one I'm proud of in a different way.
Do you have any advice for architects or aspiring architects?
Try and connect up your human life with your architectural life, so that architecture is not a separate thing, it's something that really reflects our subtle and deeper values and higher aspirations. Your life and work feed each other.
Also, the way we feel into the world or sense into the world is important and affects our quality or capacity as an architect as we mature.
The search for meaning in the world and in your work is really a wonderful thing; to keep curious, to keep compassionate, to keep playful, and to care. To care for the world and for our lives in the world. One of the main reasons for any work is to become more conscious of how we're affecting each other and how we're affecting the world. The potential for care and healing is always there.
Images: Top - Working on the Brambuk Living Cultural Centre
Middle - Eltham Library and Community Centre
Bottom - The Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre
By Gregory Burgess & Sophie Hill
