Not Modern, Ancient

Architecture is one of the few disciplines through which a culture reveals what it values before it has found the language to explain it. A wall, a threshold, a room held in shadow, a courtyard open to sky - these are never neutral acts. They speak of protection, ritual and belonging. Often, it is only by leaving home that one begins to see more clearly what kind of architecture that home might require.

Returning to Europe, especially to cities as culturally dense as Milan and Paris, does not answer the question of Australian architecture, but it does sharpen it. Distance clarifies what is inherited, what is assumed, and what has settled into view without being properly examined. Looking back towards Australia from here, what comes into focus is the question our work has been trying to approach.

Walking past the Castello in Milan, it was not the monument itself, nor its ornament, that held my attention. It was the depth of the parapets, the weight of the walls and the darkness of the reveals. In those moments I found myself recalling the ruins of Caracalla in Rome, where civilisation appears not in its finished or triumphant state, but as residue. As husk, echo and remnant. Something once complete and emblematic, now stripped back to its essential condition.

There is something revealing in that state. When grandeur falls away, architecture becomes easier to read. Ornament disappears and symbols weaken, yet silhouette, proportion, mass, aperture and space remain. The essential things endure, and in their stripped state they feel both familiar and raw.

This matters to us because it clarifies something we have long been reaching towards. The forms that persist in our work are rarely complicated: a wall, a courtyard, an entry, a chimney, a marker in the landscape. They are not quotations from history or gestures of style, but primary figures, recognised almost before they are named. They carry an echo not because they belong to one culture, but because they sit deeper than style, within a more instinctive reading of space.

Perhaps that response is not only cultural, but biological. Human beings are hardwired to understand certain spatial conditions: prospect and refuge, threshold and enclosure, shadow and light, protection and exposure. These are things we know before language. Long before architecture became image, it was shelter. Long before it became style, it was boundary, opening, procession and room. 

This is what we mean when we speak about the primal. We are not interested in primitive imagery, reduction as aesthetic exercise, or modernity stripped back once more. Our work is not trying to be modern. It is trying to be ancient.

By ancient, we do not mean historical imitation, borrowed Roman language or nostalgia for ruin. We mean something prior to style: an architecture shaped by first principles, by shelter before expression, mass before image and threshold before spectacle.

It is a way of building that can create calm, security, warmth and social ease through space itself.

In Australia, that search carries a particular weight. For those of us shaped by a Western inheritance yet practising on this ground, the question of architectural identity is not straightforward. The colonial frame no longer feels sufficient, yet inheritance cannot simply be discarded, nor can one claim a position that is not one’s own. For a non-Indigenous practice, this requires humility and care. It asks for an architecture less dependent on imported cultural codes and more attentive to place, climate, settlement and human need.

This is not a political proposition so much as an architectural one. It is a reflection on how we want to practise here, in Australia, with seriousness and respect. Rather than inventing a symbolic language, we are interested in returning to elemental spatial truths. In architecture that can be understood through the body. In work that offers security in the fullest sense: physical protection, emotional calm, clear orientation, healthy social encounter and the feeling of being held.

This is why depth matters. Why thick boundaries, controlled entry, protected courtyards, legible procession and heavy silhouette can carry such force. These are not merely compositional devices. They shape behaviour, settle the nervous system, and create the conditions for warmth, encounter, retreat and belonging. Before anything is placed within a room, the architecture itself can begin to establish comfort and compassion.

Looking back at Australia from Europe, what becomes clearer is not that one culture is richer and another poorer. It is that architecture here must often work harder to create depth, memory and security through space itself, without leaning on centuries of inherited form. That may be why we are drawn to a certain restraint. Not because less is fashionable, but because what matters most is what remains when everything extraneous falls away.

What remains is the part that resonates: the familiar but raw silhouette, the wall that shelters, the opening that gathers light, the courtyard that holds silence, the threshold that marks transition. These are the enduring elements. They do not belong to one age alone, but to architecture in its most fundamental state. Perhaps that is why ruins move us so deeply. They do not represent the past in full. They reveal what architecture still is after image, ornament and certainty have disappeared. They expose the primary act beneath the finished work.

For us, that is not a reference to copy, but a reminder of where to begin: not with style, novelty or modernity, but with the ancient idea that architecture exists first to hold life, to protect it, and to give it form.

Related Reading: Travel as Architectural Education & The Comfort of Mass

The Comfort of Mass

Milan Design Week can make inspiration feel almost excessive. There is so much to see, and so much designed to be seen, that the act of choosing a highlight becomes less about objective judgement and more about recognition. You see what you are ready to see, actively and passively. Certain works stay with you because they speak to questions already forming in your own practice.

For me, Linde Freya Tangelder’s Fluid Re-Collection was one of those moments.

The show brought together a large body of work across a surprising range of materials: blown glass lamps, folded aluminium and leather sofas, timber carved chairs, cast metal tables. On paper, it could have felt disparate. In person, it was remarkably cohesive. Each piece seemed to test how one sculptural language might move through different materials while still retaining the same voice, the same hand, the same force of authorship.

What resonated was not refinement in the conventional sense. It was almost the opposite. The work had a primitive quality: forms crudely sculpted, stacked, folded, carved, or seemingly found rather than fully conceived. There was a looseness to it, but not a lack of control. A playfulness, but not frivolity.

The works felt exploratory without becoming scattered. Across glass, metal, timber and leather, Tangelder’s hand remained unmistakable.

That is difficult to achieve. Many bodies of work are cohesive because they repeat themselves. Others are exploratory because they abandon consistency. Here, the cohesion came from something deeper than style. It came from an attitude toward material and making. The pieces seemed to ask what each material could do, how it could hold weight, resist polish, carry gesture, accept imperfection and still become useful.

There was a physicality to the work that felt particularly compelling. The gesture of a chisel, hammer or hand was not refined away. It remained present in the object, not as decoration, but as evidence. The works felt made, and in that making they retained a kind of force. They did not ask to be admired from a distance. They had the quality of things ready to be touched, moved around, lived with and knocked about.

This is where the show began to connect with our own architectural thinking.

At Davidov, we often return to questions of mass, material presence and the comfort that can come from weight. In architecture, mass is not simply heaviness. It can be protective. Grounding. Reassuring. A thick wall, a deep reveal, a solid hearth, a carved threshold or a robust piece of joinery can all create a sense of permanence that is felt before it is understood.

The same can be true of furniture and objects. A chair, bench or stool with mass offers comfort before anyone sits down. It looks capable. It looks durable. It does not appear precious or anxious. It has the visual confidence of something that can absorb use, weather, marks and time. It is ready for life because it does not pretend to be untouched by it.

That quality was central to Tangelder’s work. Many pieces had a kind of hardy, knockabout character, as though they had already lived somewhere before arriving in Milan. They seemed to carry an unknown history of their own. This gave the work an emotional charge beyond its material experiment. The objects did not feel new in the polished, showroom sense. They felt newly encountered, which is different.

This distinction matters. So much contemporary design is preoccupied with novelty, with producing the appearance of the new. But the objects that endure often feel as though they belong to a longer continuum. They may be freshly made, but they seem to have some relationship to older instincts: stacking, carving, sheltering, balancing, holding. They remind us that making begins with force, touch and material resistance.

There was a thread of this throughout Milan this year, at least in the work I found myself drawn to. Designers drilling into mass, texture, primitivism and the sculptural object. Work that resisted polish. Work that felt closer to excavation than styling. Work that suggested the future of design may not be found in ever thinner, smoother or more frictionless things, but in objects with gravity, character and memory.

Perhaps this is also why Tangelder’s show felt architectural. Not because it resembled buildings, but because it shared architecture’s deeper concerns: weight, proportion, tactility, permanence, atmosphere and use. The pieces occupied the space with a quiet force. They had edges, shadows, density and presence. They understood that form is not only visual. It is bodily.

In our own work, we are interested in this same territory: architecture that is refined, but not fragile; composed, but not sterile; materially rich, but not ornamental for its own sake. We are drawn to spaces and objects that can carry life without being diminished by it. The best architecture is not precious. It accepts use. It deepens with occupation. It gathers marks, rituals and memory.

Tangelder’s Fluid Re-Collection felt important because it gave this thinking an object-scale intensity. It showed how a consistent language can remain open, how material experimentation can still feel grounded, and how primitive form can carry both playfulness and seriousness at once.

Amid the abundance of Milan Design Week, it was not the loudest work that stayed with me. It was work with mass, touch and an unmistakable hand. Work that felt both ancient and newly made. Work that seemed already alive with an unknown history of its own.

Related Reading: Travel as Architectural Education

Travel as Architectural Education

I was recently interviewed by Elana Castle for an article in The Age about travel, design inspiration and the ways our experience of place shapes how we think about home. It was a conversation that stayed with me, because travel has long been central to how I understand architecture, first as a student and now through practice.

As I said in the piece, travel served as a series of pilgrimages for me as an architecture student, and it remains a deeply informative pursuit. What I have come to value most is not travel as escape, nor even as inspiration in a superficial sense, but as a form of education. It teaches you to see architecture properly, not as an image, but as something embodied. Something inhabited, touched and remembered through light, weather, sound and time.

This feels increasingly important in a culture where architecture is so often reduced to imagery. Buildings are flattened into photographs and judged by immediacy. What gets lost are the qualities that make architecture meaningful: the weight of a wall, the way a threshold compresses or releases, the dimness of a corridor before it opens into light. These are not things that can be understood from a screen. They have to be encountered.

Travel does not educate by offering a catalogue of forms to borrow from, but by refining judgment. It sharpens your understanding of atmosphere, proportion, sequence and material presence. It makes you more attentive to what endures and less interested in novelty for its own sake.

Much of what has stayed with me has come not from monuments alone, but from vernacular architecture, ruins and places shaped slowly over time. Travelling through Morocco, Israel, Egypt, Peru and Italy, I found myself drawn to buildings where material honesty and endurance were inseparable from beauty. Those experiences reinforced the idea that architecture is most convincing when it feels necessary, grounded and able to age with dignity.

Travel also teaches you how architecture is revealed. The most memorable spaces are often those that unfold with restraint. A narrow entry, a bend in a path, a darkened threshold, a courtyard that appears gradually. These moments stay with you because they involve the body as much as the eye. They remind you that architecture is a sequence before it is an object.

That lesson has remained central to my own work. In the article, I spoke about examining Tadao Ando’s work in Japan, particularly on Naoshima, and how instructive it has been to study the way he controls the experience of entering a space. Doorways, in particular, have become emblematic of how I think about design. They are never simply a point of access, but the beginning of atmosphere and orientation.

When considered carefully, a doorway can compress, conceal, frame, delay or release. It prepares the body for what comes next and heightens awareness of shadow, sound, texture and temperature. In that sense, it contains many of the questions travel teaches us to ask of architecture more broadly.

This is where travel becomes more than reference gathering. The more seriously one travels, the less inclined one is to copy. What it offers instead is a more disciplined eye. It reveals the difference between effect and atmosphere, between abundance and potency. Often it is the sparing use of material that gives it weight. A single stone wall, a dark timber opening, a carefully lit passage can carry more presence than a room full of gestures.

For this reason, travel continues to shape how I think about materials in practice. Most materials are more powerful when used with restraint. They are allowed to weather, to gather shadow and to reveal texture slowly. The buildings that endure are rarely those that announce themselves most loudly, but those whose materials have been chosen with conviction and allowed to age into themselves.

Perhaps that is the deeper lesson travel offers architecture: not style, but perspective. It reminds us that the best buildings are not composed only for the moment of completion. They are made to be lived with, approached repeatedly and understood more fully over time.

To travel well is to become more attentive to that kind of architecture. It is to learn not only by looking, but by moving through buildings and carrying them with you afterward. For an architect, that is a form of education that never really ends.

Related Reading: Before you renovate, visit these destinations for the best in design inspiration - Elana Castle, The Age

A Season Begins Anew at MPavilion

A new season of MPavilion has opened, the third to be held within Tadao Ando’s quiet and exacting contribution to Melbourne. For us at Davidov, the pavilion carries a particular resonance. Circle|Square, the winning chair design we created for the program, has lived within this space for three years now. It has been a privilege to watch people inhabit the pavilion, to watch it reveal itself in different seasons, and to return again and again with a mixture of familiarity and anticipation.

I have visited this place at many times and in many states. In the brightness of morning when the concrete seems almost weightless. At night when the pond becomes a mirror of the city. On busy afternoons filled with chatter and on quiet days where the air seems to hold the structure still. Yet returning tonight, on a mild spring evening with the sun low and the water pushing its rippled reflections along the concrete walls, the building felt new again. Something had shifted, or perhaps I had. The space carried a clarity that was both unexpected and profound.

As a musical performance unfolded, the architecture insisted on being noticed. The pattern of the spacer bar blanks, deliberate and unwavering, established a rhythm that shaped the atmosphere as much as the sound. The slot window, impossibly thin, impossibly long, impossibly straight, cut a single uncompromising line toward the garden. Through it, the landscape became a curated fragment, a reminder of Ando’s belief that to frame nature is to honour it.

For a pavilion, it offers little in the way of shelter. The breeze moves freely across the water. Rain, when it arrives, is felt as much as seen. Yet this absence of protection is not a deficiency. It is the architectural proposition. The structure defines space with walls, openings, and a singular cylindrical core, but it never fully closes. Instead it choreographs thresholds. It separates paving from pond with the certainty of a diagram, while the surrounding trees and even the skyscrapers seem to lean toward the interior as if curious about what is taking place within.

This is Ando’s restraint at its most distilled. Every line, every surface, every void is doing only what it must and nothing more. The discipline is intense. The effect is calming. The lessons are ongoing.

Each visit to the pavilion reveals yet another insight into how Ando crafts space. And in this new season, as the pavilion begins its next cycle of performances, conversations, and quiet moments, it is an opportunity to be reminded of why architecture matters. More than offering shelter, it is because of its ability to frame the way we view our environment and our place within it. 

The Carry List

During my childhood my family and I moved often. 

There was a ritual I learned to resist. I would open drawers, repack small things I had not used since unpacking, then carry them to the next address for the process to be repeated. It was a feeling that made me feel weighed down, inefficient and burdened. 

Inadvertently each move taught me two important lessons, firstly to travel lighter and be conscious about what you acquire, secondly to learn to let go and not fear the act. Of course, learning this as a child when debating comic books or toys is easier than decisions on furniture or art - but the discipline was ingrained.

After completing my architectural studies in 2007 I backpacked around the world for nine months. I still clearly recall meeting a traveller somewhere in Croatia - he was travelling for a few weeks carrying only a small rucksack and a neat box that held a phone, a camera and a few essentials. My own pack, already bulging, felt excessive by comparison. That freedom and lightness he demonstrated have guided me for two decades, whether on the road or at home.

I was tested a year ago. My mother handed me 3 boxes she had been holding since I moved out and no longer wanted to be responsible for them. They contained all kinds of paper work and knickknacks, my report card, invitations, newspapers from the day I was born, and a favourite teddy. As I sifted through the boxes examining each object I asked - If I kept these relics, who were they for and what would they serve? I let them all go. Reflecting back a year later I feel light and liberated. You don't have to be tied to things, nor cluttered by them.

Yes your home is a container for your life - but what do you want it to contain? The spaces we form and curate around us are more than their contents, often it’s the absence that makes way for the freedom we are hoping to possess. 

The White City of Tel Aviv

When I am in Tel Aviv, it is hard not to be seduced by the architectural heritage of the White City ; a collection of some 4,000 buildings constructed from the 1930s onwards, now recognised by UNESCO as the world’s largest concentration of Bauhaus and International Style architecture.

Many of these buildings stand in various states of disrepair. Yet their essence remains striking: the clean horizontality of cantilevered balconies, the narrow “thermometer” windows, the geometric massing and flat roofs. These elements, originally transplanted from Europe and adapted for a Mediterranean climate, have weathered a century of sun, salt, and use. They inspire not only through their original forms, but through the patina of daily life and the countless adaptations that have allowed them to continue serving the dense urban fabric at the heart of the city.

Walking the streets, there is always another discovery. A brise-soleil screen casting delicate shadows, a balustrade with a handmade curve, or a terrazzo pattern worn smooth underfoot. Each detail tells a story of modernism translated into lived experience, shaped as much by residents as by architects. The White City is less a static museum of modernism than a living canvas, where buildings evolve organically with time.

Beyond the Bauhaus legacy, older parts of Tel Aviv reveal a rich layering of styles. Eclectic architecture from the city’s early decades; a blend of European, Middle Eastern, and Art Deco motifs, is now being carefully restored, bringing back a vibrancy that speaks of cosmopolitan beginnings. Just as compelling is Tel Aviv’s remarkable collection of brutalist buildings, many of which rise in unapologetic contrast to the refined modernism of the White City. Together, these overlapping styles form a complex architectural identity that is both regional and international.

To walk through Tel Aviv is to understand how architecture has shaped not only the city’s fabric but also its spirit. The White City, together with the Eclectic and Brutalist layers that sit alongside it, reflects a vision that has continually fuelled the dynamism of Ir L’lo Hafsaka, the city that never stops. Here, the work of architects over generations has contributed to a vitality that feels both historic and immediate, making Tel Aviv a place where architecture and life are inseparable.

The National Library of Israel

Last month, while in Jerusalem, I had the opportunity to visit the recently completed National Library of Israel by Herzog & de Meuron.

I had first seen the site on an earlier trip, when the monumental exterior was nearing completion. The building is clad in Jerusalem stone, its surface patterned with distinctive cuts and irregular openings. Immediately it brought to mind a particular course of stone blocks near the top of the Western Wall that had always intrigued me. (Fig 1) It is a detail anyone familiar with the Old City would have passed countless times, yet here it has been observed with care and distilled into something new and quietly resonant. This ability to translate the vernacular into the contemporary without imitation is one of the project’s most impressive qualities.

Behind this protective stone envelope, the organisation of the library is legible and calm. Circulation flows with ease, guiding visitors almost instinctively. At the heart of the plan, the great reading room sits enclosed behind glass, illuminated by daylight from a vast circular oculus above. From afar, this skylight presents itself as a window into the building, a symbol of openness and accessibility. It suggests that knowledge, though carefully preserved, remains something to be shared, not locked away.

Internally, the architecture feels shaped less by the hand of the builder than by the forces of time. The entry sequence, staircases, and major forms have an organic character, as if eroded by natural weathering or gently carved by centuries of human touch.

Figure 1. The Western Wall, Jerusalem

Outside, Micha Ullman’s Letters of Light adds a quiet counterpoint to the building. The work has two parts. A heavily textured tunnel, set below grade, leads to a concrete cubic room where three skylights are cut in the shapes of the first letters of Israel’s official languages: Hebrew, Arabic and English. Above ground, twenty-two large boulders of Jerusalem stone carry voids that trace the Hebrew alphabet. The letters are not carved as objects. They appear through absence, held by light and shadow. The piece sits calmly against the library’s monolithic form and extends its interest in material, daylight and legibility into the landscape.  

Materially and spatially, the building is defined by a conscious pursuit of survival and longevity. Spaces are robust yet carefully detailed, intended to withstand the wear of generations while offering moments of clarity and lightness. The architecture acknowledges its dual responsibility: to safeguard fragile texts and artefacts, and to invite the public into a place of learning and reflection. This duality - protective yet open, weighty yet transparent - is resolved with remarkable poise.

For a national library, this approach feels entirely fitting. It is a vessel for the preservation of memory, designed to carry cultural heritage forward into an unknown future. By embedding echoes of Jerusalem’s ancient fabric into its very form, the building affirms its belonging to place while remaining undeniably contemporary. In doing so, it stands not only as an archive, but as a living monument - a testament to continuity, knowledge, and endurance.

Impressionism & Architecture: Seeing with Squinted Eyes

On a recent trip to see French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at the National Gallery of Victoria, I found myself moved anew by the power of these works. The exhibition, part of Melbourne’s Winter Masterpieces series, brings more than 100 Impressionist paintings to Australia, many never before seen here; by Monet, Renoir, Manet, Degas, Cassatt, Morisot and their contemporaries.

Though I’ve studied Impressionism, visited the Musée d’Orsay, and attended similar shows, seeing these vibrant, liberated works in person felt incredibly uplifting. There is a sheer delight in the way they frame the everyday, humble houses, winding streets, open fields, each rendered with astonishing energy and economy.

What struck me most was the way the artists stripped buildings back to their absolute essence. Intricate detail is gone, yet the form remains: the rhythm of rooftops, the mass of a wall in shade, the sharp cut of a silhouette against the sky. Roof and base, light and shadow. Architecture distilled to its most elemental. It is something I often think about in our own work: how a space or a building is perceived through narrowed eyes, when the noise is removed and the fundamental is amplified.

One of the most compelling reminders of this came from Monet’s Haystacks series—dozens of paintings of the same subject, yet each transformed by the light and atmosphere of a particular moment. These are fundamentally the same image, but what matters is the time of day, the season, the shifting conditions. This is very much how we think about the spaces we design: as experiences that are rediscovered again and again across the day, the year, and over decades of living in them. Light changes. Shadows move. Material patinas deepen. The architecture is constant, yet it never presents itself in quite the same way.

The Impressionists were not concerned with faithful documentation, but with evoking sensation, the way light falls across a garden path, the mood of a street at dusk. In our architectural practice, we seek something similar. We aim to create spaces that capture a mood, spaces that feel alive and resonant.

Walking through the exhibition, I thought about how, in design, limits can bring freedom. A reduced palette, a simple structure, controlled views and indirect light often result in a building that feels more considered, more deliberate. The Impressionists achieved this through brushstroke and colour; we aim for it through material, form and sequence.

Seeing this exhibition renewed my conviction that our approach shares much with that of the Impressionists: a focus on perception, light, simplification, and the clarity of experience. However, just as an Impressionist painting captures a fleeting moment and invites the viewer in, we aim to create architecture that allows people to inhabit lasting ones.

Perspective & Presence: A Reflection, Tarrawarra & Its New Centre

Over the years, I’ve returned time and again to the TarraWarra Museum of Art. Perched above a sculpted lawn, Allan Powell’s original museum building has long impressed itself into my memory; a massive, blank façade that once struck me as forbidding. Defensive, even. A castle on a hill. But with time, what once felt imposing now reads as protective. Familiar. The same wall that once challenged me now welcomes me, shields me. It’s a shift that speaks less to the building than to my own evolving perspective.

The original 2003 design brought together a museum and restaurant, linked by a courtyard that still feels monolithic and primal. Concrete forms rise from the earth like a modern-day stonehenge; assertive, ambiguous, and sculptural. That in-between space is not transitional but atmospheric. It announces that art, here, is something you move toward with intent.

The recently opened Eva and Marc Besen Centre, designed by Kerstin Thompson Architects, extends the experience with humility and quiet strength. Set behind the Powell building, it gently follows the existing crescent avenue, a gesture of deference and dialogue. The echo in form is deliberate, yet the contrast in materiality is striking: where Powell’s original wall is heavy and massive, Thompson’s new elevation is light, woven, and permeable. A stainless steel mesh softens the back-of-house functions, providing glimpses of the life within while maintaining a measured restraint.

The Besen Centre houses visible art storage, learning spaces, and areas for performance and community engagement. It literally supports the museum, its green roof doubling as the visitor carpark, and symbolically reinforces the museum’s foundational ethos: that art, education, and landscape can exist in quiet, enduring harmony.

The museum’s collection, gifted by Eva and Marc Besen, contains hundreds of works of Australian modern and contemporary art. But more than just a collection, it’s a gesture of cultural trust, a belief in the value of public access to art, and the importance of creating an architectural context that honours it.

Revisiting TarraWarra with the addition of the new centre felt like a jolt of clarity; a reminder of the power of restraint, and the joy that comes from resolution. Durable materials. Controlled views. A reverence for sequence. And above all, a deep understanding that architecture, like art, shifts meaningfully over time.

Reflections from the 2025 Melbourne Design Week Film Festival

Beauty Between the Lines: Light, Shadow & The Legacy of Arthur Erickson

Until recently, Arthur Erickson was a name I only knew in passing. It was just six months ago that I properly encountered his work, and what caught me immediately wasn’t the scale or form, but the light. Or rather, the contrast of it: the deliberate play of light and shadow, the sense of quiet drama. Erickson knew how to make a space breathe; how to create calm through control, and warmth through restraint.

So when Beauty Between the Lines screened as part of this year’s Melbourne Design Week Film Festival, I made sure to see it. What followed was more than a biography; it was a meditation. The film traces his career with patience and clarity, revealing not just the celebrated projects and public acclaim, but the inner world of a man who lived for architecture, and, at times, despite it.

What struck me most was the consistency of vision across his work. Whether designing monumental civic buildings or private residences, Erickson’s sensitivity to landscape, structure, and silence never wavered. The film captures this beautifully. It also delves into his relationships with collaborators, clients, friends, many of which were close, sometimes complicated, always deeply human.

One scene near the end of the film stays with me. Erickson, by that point bankrupt and largely overlooked by the profession, is working on a coastal house. Just before a concrete pour, a serious issue arises. There’s tension, pressure. And then, he picks up a pencil. With quiet confidence, he sketches a solution, seemingly without hesitation. It’s resolved. Elegantly, effortlessly. The pour goes ahead.

Watching that moment, I felt a kind of reverence. It was mastery, distilled. The kind of clarity that only comes after a lifetime of drawing, thinking, making.

Beauty Between the Lines is not a loud film. It moves softly, just as Erickson did. But it leaves a lasting impression. It reminds us that architecture is not just a profession, it’s a life. It demands everything. And if you’re paying attention, it gives something back: a way of seeing, of shaping, of being. Erickson lived that truth completely. And through this film, we get to witness it.

See Arthur Erickson’s most significant works here.

In Pursuit of the Primitive

Over the weekend I watched the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. Set against the backdrop of Cold War anxiety and rapid post-war modernisation, it reminded me how folk music emerged not just as cultural expression, but as a kind of resistance; raw, real, and rooted in something ancient. It felt eerily parallel to the moment we’re living in now.

Today, the world is in the throes of another transformation - AI, hyper-connectivity, and digital immersion shaping not only how we work and communicate, but how we think, relate, and even imagine. It’s exciting, yes. But it also feels precarious. Disembodied. In response, I’ve noticed a shift, not just in myself, but among peers and clients too-toward something quieter, slower, and more elemental.

In our studio, we’ve been thinking about what it means to pursue a “primitive” architecture. Not primitive as in undeveloped or regressive, but in the sense of the essential: forms and materials that speak to permanence, legibility, and human instinct. A kind of architecture that resists noise. That feels analogue; not digital. Solid and earthen; not elusive.

In many ways, it’s a return to fundamentals: heavy materials, clear structure, courtyards, thresholds, walls that frame rather than dissolve. There’s a renewed appreciation for things that age and weather, that hold heat or give shade. Our recent work increasingly centres around these archetypal moves. Simple geometries, grounded floor plans, spaces defined not by novelty but by necessity.

This isn’t nostalgia and it’s not anti-technology. We use digital tools every day. But we’re asking: where’s the counterweight? If the world is rushing toward lightness, fluidity, and frictionlessness, can architecture do the opposite? Should it? Can it offer resistance in the form of slowness, stillness, and solidity?

We’ve found inspiration not in novelty, but in permanence. Ancient buildings that remain legible centuries later. Rural constructions built without drawings, only instinct. Rooms where sound echoes in just the right way. Light that enters once a day with purpose.

In some ways, the most radical thing we can do now is to make something calm. Something that doesn't move. Something that gives weight to your day and allows for ritual and consideration.

Architecture, at its best, is a cultural record: an echo of its time. But it can also be a correction. A reminder that in a rapidly dematerialising world, the most meaningful spaces might be those that are the most grounded. The ones made not of code or cloud, but of timber, brick, earth, and shadow. The ones you can feel.

So we continue, not with grand gestures or new theories, but with quiet convictions. A well-proportioned opening. A shaded courtyard. A wall that does what it’s meant to do. In pursuit not of innovation for its own sake, but of the primitive, simple, enduring, and deeply human.