Mark van den Enden, practice design manager at Suters, has national and international architectural experience, including in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
His interest in public spaces has seen him involved in projects such as the award-winning Melbourne Convention Centre and the Caroline Springs Library and Civic Centre in Victoria.
A&D asked him a few questions about his work, public spaces and whether there is more to architecture than how a building looks. 
You have been involved with a lot of public projects. Do you think Australian architecture designs interesting and engaging public places?
Absolutely. Architecture in Australia is a very unique response to the challenges of the brief, climate and in many respects to the tribal culture of our cities. Perhaps the challenge for our work as a profession going into the future is how do we ensure what we do has meaning to the patrons who use a building over and above providing accommodation and shelter?
Are public spaces integrated into projects adequately? If not, why do you they are not?
I think as a profession that integrates with other disciplines, architecture is getting better — talking and engaging more with other disciplines. Within our practice we talk about ‘curating a precinct’ and engaging our collaborators around a project where each discipline can finish the other’s sentence. Perhaps the other answer to this question is whether the public apprehends the built environment by discipline or in a continuum of experience.
You’ve been involved with something called bioclimatic performance specifications. What is it?
Developed in 1996, the Bioclimatic Performance specifications were a way of deciding how to best retrofit an existing university building well before ‘re-lifing’ and our carbon constrained future were on the agenda. This was particularly relevant for RMIT, with a $600 million property portfolio of existing building stock in Melbourne’s CBD.
You worked on the Qatar Science and Technology Park in the UAE. Where do you see the UAE heading in terms of its architecture? Can we learn anything from their experience?
I think if anything, the Dubai experiment is an illustration of how not to build a city. It was an economic exuberance of unparalleled proportions that was extra-ordinarily wasteful in terms of natural resources and an investment in the UAE’s future that may prove to be ill spent. Perhaps the lesson for us is to do less with more and invest in economic capacity building, not just space through speculation.
Architecture is sometimes seen to be more about how a building looks than how it operates. Do you think this is true? If so, why?
I think as a future-thinking profession we need to recognise a profound change in how society is experiencing space and building and the globalised nature of how images are disseminated. Perhaps we need to also change both how we communicate our ideas and what we do to meet this new challenge.
What is one building you wish you had designed and why?
Still looking.
What do you think will have the biggest impact on architecture in the next 10 years?
In our increasingly carbon-constrained future, architecture as we know it will change significantly in the next 10 years, perhaps at a faster rate than in the last 50 years. The pressure is on the architectural profession and on decision makers and clients procuring buildings to understand this profound paradigm shift. The major capital cost (traditionally perceived as the cost of construction) will be overtaken by a building’s long-term costs associated with energy use and the consumption of natural resources.
