Kenzo Tange Lecture: Sean Godsell, “Your Feet Against My Feet: Upside-Down Architecture”

Event Description

“…never have three of the primordial elements been so threatened as they are today: the air killed by pollution and carbon dioxide, the water, which is contaminated on the one hand and getting scarcer and scarcer on the other. The only winner is fire, in the form of a heat that is parching the earth, upsetting the seasons and, by melting the glaciers, inviting the sea to invade it.”

—Umberto Eco, “Beautiful Flame”

Australia is hot and dry. Over 70% of the country is arid or semi-arid and sparsely populated. We are basically a giant desert about the same geographical size as the mainland US but with approximately the same population as greater Los Angeles. Despite our vast mineral wealth, water remains our most precious commodity, and fire and floods are our constant concern. For us, “the bush” is a mystical, mythical place. Australians know of the Outback, the Never Never, the Dreamtime, and the Songlines of our Indigenous communities. Here, “the bush” mediates between our colonial coastalism and the endless emptiness of the rest. These are dreamy, half-real skies.

Speaker

Sean Godsell was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1960. He graduated with First Class Honours from The University of Melbourne in 1984. He spent much of 1985 traveling in Japan and Europe and worked in London from 1986 to 1988 for Sir Denys Lasdun. In 1994, he formed Sean Godsell Architects. His work has been published in the world’s leading Architectural journals, and he has lectured and exhibited in the USA, UK, China, Japan, India, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, and New Zealand as well as across Australia.

In July 2002, the influential English design magazine Wallpaper* listed him as one of ten people destined to “change the way we live.” His Future Shack housing prototype was exhibited at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York in 2005 and the facade prototype of the RMIT Design Hub is on permanent display at the V+A Museum in London.

He has received numerous local and international awards, including the 2022 Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal. His work has been published in the monographs Sean Godsell (Electa, 2005), Sean Godsell: Tough Subtlety (El Croquis, 2013), and Sean Godsell: Houses (Thames and Hudson, 2018). In 2013 and 2014, he was visiting professor at the IUAV in Venice. He is adjunct professor of architecture at Deakin University.

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