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At a time when architects around the world are addressing environmental concerns, it is worth studying the work of Australian architect Glenn Murcutt. He has designed a number of eloquent steel, aluminum, and glass buildings that seem to float above their sites. Along with their sensitive siting, these structures also attend to the climate and context with a Modernist vocabulary, belying "the notion," writes Anne Whiston Spirn of the University of Pennsylvania, "that ecological architecture must be rustic architecture with sinuous forms, half-buried in the ground, or nostalgic imitation of vernacular building forms." This is, she adds, "an ecological architecture appropriate for our time." She's right. Editors
Glenn Murcutt's buildings strongly assert their manmade quality in their environment. But the architect's reverence for the natural world is the main key to his work. In his houses, whether in urban or rural locations, he strives to connect the owner to nature's ritual cycles. His unshakable faith in the absolute value of nature has led to his use of analogies between natural and architectural principles as catalysts of the design-generating process: the continuity and logic of structures, the importance of limits and articulations, adaptation to climate, and the restraint and efficiency of forms.
Murcutt, who practices just outside Sydney, also has an extensive knowledge of the complex Australian landscape, and endeavors to offer his interpretation of it in built form. For each new project, his thorough analysis of the site becomes one of his design tools: topography, flora, prevailing winds, temperatures, sun angles, rain, vistas, become part of the brief, determining siting, orientation, openings, and materials. Murcutt also attempts to let the constraints of the site shape the design so that disturbance is minimized - an attitude reminiscent of Ian McHarg's pragmatic use of ecology.
An interest in traditional societies is evident in Murcutt's work as well, particularly the way they dwell in relationship to place -- landscape, climate, resources -- and how they see it as sensible and timeless. During his first trip to Europe, in the early 1960s, Murcutt was impressed by the geometric shapes of the Greek villages and their clever, spectacular settings and by Finland's Modern architecture softened by local tradition and inspired by the landscape.
Murcutt often refers to design as...