Architecture Foundation Australia will be presenting the Blue Mountains Architecture Master Class, a residential studio based one week program being held with Rick Joy in the Blue Mountains Australia with Richard Leplastrier and Peter Stutchbury.
The program will be a studio based design ‘charette’, undertaken in small groups, for a project (yet to be determined), on a site within walking distance of the venue. Suggested themes include the exploration of architectural strategies that can moderate between the permeation of the external envelope in Australian coastal architecture and how this might confront more harsh climates and locations. The design program will be supported by talks from the ‘masters’ and on-going tutorial support during the week. All the ‘masters’ will stay with the participants at the venue – Jemby Ringa Lodge at Blackheath, 600 meters from spectacular Evans Lookout. The program will culminate in presentations and crits on the last Friday. More information on the program after the break.
Rick Joy, originally from Maine, has lived and worked in the desert landscape of Arizona for over a decade. Guided by an abiding fascination with the desert’s capacity for sensory stimulation, and a commitment to functionality and craft that survives from his training and work as a contractor, Joy has developed a modern architecture that cultivates sensory experience, harmonizes with the landscape, and eschews formal pretense. After graduating from architecture school at the University of Arizona and working several years for Will Bruder, Joy founded his own practice in Tuscon in 1993. He has completed many fine sensitive projects, among them his Avra Verde House, which attracted international acclaim.
Rick Joy and Peter Stutchbury have taught together on various international programs around the world and Rick was a guest critic on the 2010 Glenn Murcutt Master Class. Rick Joy and Peter Stutchbury have taught together on various international programs around the world and Rick was a guest critic on the 2010 Glenn Murcutt Master Class.
Richard Leplastrier is little known internationally and is almost a recluse – but an outstanding teacher and ‘guru’. He is a Gold Medallist of the Australian Institute of Architects, and received the Finnish 2004 Spirit of Nature Wood Architecture Award for his outstanding small wooden buildings, which has also been won by Renzo Piano, Kengo Kuma, Peter Zumthor and José Cruz Ovalle. He also received the 2009 Dreyer Foundation Award in Denmark made to an architect “who has made an outstanding contribution to architectural thinking and to society”, and he was made a 2009 Honorary Fellow of the US AIA. He worked with Kenzo Tange in Japan and with Jørn Utzon at the time of the Sydney Opera House. He is close friend and contemporary of Glenn Murcutt.
Peter Stutchbury is in many ways a protégé of Richard, and he has been a winner of numerous Australian Institute of Architects Awards and published internationally in GA Houses, Abitare, etc.. He won the 2008 International Living Steel Competition for extreme housing in Cherepovets in Russia, published in the book ‘Houses of Steel’, has held the Catedra (Chair) Luis Barragán in Mexico, was a guest tutor at the 2010 and 2011 Ghost Studios in Nova Scotia and has recently completed a house in Japan for the famous fashion designer Issey Miyake.
Lindsay Johnston, emigrated from Ireland to Australia in 1986 and became Head of the Architecture School and Dean of Faculty at the University of Newcastle. He has been a recipient of architecture awards in Ireland and Australia, including his ‘autonomous’ Four Horizons house and tourist lodges, which have been published internationally. He was recipient of the 2002 RAIA National Neville Quarry Education Award. He now runs the Architecture Foundation Australia.
It is planned that the program will include visits to significant houses in the Blue Mountains by Richard Leplastrier, the recently completed stunning ‘Invisible House’ by Peter Stutchbury, and possibly Glenn Murcutt’s Simpson-Lee House (all yet to be confirmed and subject to client consent).
The Architecture Foundation Australia is a not-for-profit organisation, the chair of which is eminent Australian architect Glenn Murcutt. The Foundation has presented the annual Glenn Murcutt International Architecture Master Class in Australia since 2001, as well as other professional Master Classes in New Zealand, South Africa and Ireland and an annual Summer School for senior architecture students at Pittwater north of Sydney. This program is similar in format to previous New Zealand and Irish Master Classes presented by the Foundation since 2005.
For more information, including registration, please visit here.