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.