Glenn Murcutt AO

Readers note: This is an excerpt from the 200 Treasures exhibition catalogue, developed in 2017. This content was written as a brief biography on why this person was included in the exhibition.

Glenn Murcutt is Australia’s most celebrated contemporary architect. His beautiful buildings are renowned for their subtlety and sympathy with the environment. Murcutt has focused on residential buildings but has also designed landmark commercial buildings. His architectural style is an accumulation of ideas and life experiences and is heralded as quintessentially Australian.

His father, Arthur, whom he credits with stoking his passion for architecture, had no formal training in this area, but studied the work of architects he admired, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and passed on his enthusiasm to his son. He subscribed to Architectural Forum, and Murcutt recalls continual discussions with his father about what he was reading, as well as his father training him to pay close attention to detail, especially of plants and other aspects of nature.

Murcutt was born in London, the family subsequently moving to New Guinea, which had a ‘profound influence’ on him. In 1941, the war drove them to Sydney. Murcutt studied architecture at the Sydney Technical College and graduated in 1961. Before launching his career with a Sydney firm in 1969, he undertook a walking tour of Tasmania and then travelled extensively in Europe, absorbing ideas from an eclectic range of sources. Murcutt’s signature style is to design buildings that capitalise on the ‘characters of the site’.

He experiments with wind patterns, materials, light, climate and space. His buildings have clean lines and his signature material is corrugated iron, which gives ‘an edge, a fineness, economy, strength and profile’. Murcutt has received numerous prestigious awards, among them the 2002 Pritzker Prize and the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 2009. Never one to shy away from a challenge, in 2016, Murcutt announced he was designing the Australian Islamic Centre in Melbourne.