Australian project wins architecture award

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

The Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Center in Australia won an Asia-Pacific regional award for architecture reflecting the local countryside. Courtesy UH School of Architecture

The award, announced during an international symposium in Honolulu recently, is the only one of its kind given for culture and architectural design in the Asia-Pacific region. Jurors praised the project "as a simple and poetic conception that picks up the spirit of the land and adds to the existing built and natural environment of the site."

The architects, Glenn Murcutt, Wendy Lewin and Reginald Lark, worked as a team to create the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Center along the Shoalhaven River in New South Wales state.

The center provides living accommodations for student artists and rooms for educational and cultural activities.

"This building demands a connection with the spirit of the community it serves and empowers the community," said Brown, a longtime Honolulu architect, humanitarian and philanthropist. "It has modesty and humility as well as self-confidence and self-possession."

Murcutt, who accepted the award on behalf of the others at the International Symposium on Asia Pacific Architecture, credited an insistence on designing with the mind and hand — and not just computers — with helping to create and realize the project.

Murcutt urged several hundred architects from Hawai'i andaround the world to resist the lure and promise of technological "improvements" that don't really help people.

"Technology is a tool, at best. We have an absolute necessity to design buildings in relations to climate," he said. "People know best about the place they live. They know what best what they need. We have to design buildings that reflect that."

The architects used reinforced concrete, steel and recycled hardwood to build the new education center and worked hard to mesh it with existing buildings and to accommodate the site's topography, views, wind, sun and scale.

It incorporates a wide range of technology to be self-sufficient in water collection, storage and distribution as well as sewage and wastewater treatment. Roofs, for instance, were designed both to collect water, reflect the lines of distant mountains and provide open views of the horizon.

Murcutt, who grew up in a beautiful and remote region of Papua New Guinea and was trained in Europe, warned other architects of buying too much into the current "buzz words" of ecological or sustainable developments.

"Some of the new technologies take an incredible amount of resources and energy to produce, maybe far more than they save," he said.

The award has been presented every two years since 1995.