24/6/02

Glenn Murcutt wins 2002 laureateship of the Pritzker architectural prize.
Presented 29 May 2002 at the Campidoglio in Rome.

It was just a matter of time before the Australian architect Glenn Murcutt would win the Pritzker Award. Murcutt, now approaching 66, is an established world master. Ten years ago he received the RAIA Gold Medal, and in the same year the prestigious Alvar Aalto Medal in Finland. Murcutt is a master of the distillation of architectural elements, of place and space, with well over 100 completed works. Although Murcutt is a master of the essence of the single, freestanding house in a landscape (usually the Australian bush), and would deny any interest in larger scale projects, his recently completed Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Centre, at Riversdale, New South Wales, refutes that reticence. Taking advantage of a bend in the Shoalhaven River, near Nowra — beloved and much-painted subject of the late Arthur Boyd — Murcutt drew up a landscape-inspired, linear accommodation building, combined with a gentle embrace of the site contour on a virtuoso yet relaxed disposition, that mediates between lush river pasture and the steeper bush behind.

Unpredictably again he completed a cubic, almost Mycenaean courtyard house on a dramatic gradient completed in 1991 for the painter Ken Done, in Mosman Sydney. His urban exercises have been masterpieces of elegant discretion. Yet he is best known for his corrugated, galvanised iron roofed and clad houses, perched in the wild beyond the cities; for the romantic metaphor that alludes to the light poise of the aboriginal dwelling upon the earth.

Once in Sydney, in l998, leaving Murcutt’s own North Shore office, I let slip that I had to catch the local ferry. Murcutt showed, manoeuvring his small yellow Citroen, that he was a brilliant driver as we looped past the missed ferry to catch it at the next stop some twisting kilometres further on. In Murcutt’s world one is wholly self-reliant and doesn't miss anything, ever.

Which is why he always receives a special accolade from Finland, and is invited back repeatedly. Now, with the Pritzker Award (US$100,000) firmly under his belt, Murcutt is in good company amongst other laureates, Norman Foster, Hans Hollein, James Stirling and Rem Koolhaas in architecture’s undisputed hall of fame.