Stories of Earth: Echoes in Architecture

A one-day event intended to reframe, reconnect and restore. 

In his 2024 essay, ‘Enough? Architecture and the Sufficiency Imperative’, Professor Daniel Barber asks:

In its quest for efficiency and performance, sustainable architecture has only made us want more—more buildings, more extraction, more stuff. What if architects crafted new desires, within planetary limits?

As we hurtle towards exceeding those planetary limits, join some of the world’s most celebrated architects as they present a hopeful vision for a purpose-led profession – rooted in a return to people, place and planet, over profit alone.

Inspired by the richness and remoteness of the Australian outback, four global greats join some of Australia’s most respected architects to explore a common theme: our connection to earth.

These stories not only find expression in architecture, but review how to build a common future for humanity; for those with land as well as the landless; where there is poverty or privilege, and for the urban, rural and isolated.

We are bringing together international stories of responsible architecture because we know architecture can create new desires within our planetary limits.

SPEAKERS:

Marina Tabassum
The first confrontation in professional life surfaced with the commodification of architecture as I witnessed the global tendency towards instant gratification and industrially-produced anthropogenic materials devised to standardise the entire globe. The perennial quest for identity that was a struggle since childhood seemed more diluted with high-flying capitalist culture.

Niall Mclaughlin
The way to make good architecture – that is, to respond with dignity to the relentless jostling of theoretical positions and of the buildings themselves – can be to say very little indeed and just to enquire into what a particular place might, by way of buildings, most need

Rick Joy
What we're trying to do is be very honest with ourselves and really respectful of the place, so we can come to some truth and work from that moment

Marusa Zorec
There are places that we return to again and again because by inhabiting them we rediscover something essential about ourselves

Uncle Dean
Culture is life, without it we have nothing and become lost