Glenn Murcutt Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Glenn Murcutt (born 1936) is an Australian architect who has spent his career as a sole practitioner, designing mostly houses in rural New South Wales. Influenced by Mies van der Rohe and by the woolsheds and farm buildings of the Australian bush, his long, light pavilions of steel, timber and corrugated iron respond precisely to sun, wind and rain, an approach summed up in the phrase “touch this earth lightly”. He received the Pritzker Prize in 2002.

London, Papua New Guinea and Sydney

Murcutt was born in London in 1936 to Australian parents and spent his early childhood in Papua New Guinea before the family settled in Sydney. He studied architecture at the Sydney Technical College, graduating in 1961, travelled in Europe and worked for Ancher, Mortlock, Murray and Woolley before opening his own practice in 1969.

Houses in the landscape

His early works include the Marie Short House in Kempsey (1975), a farmhouse of timber and corrugated iron with operable louvres. The Kempsey Museum, the Ball-Eastaway House and the Magney House at Bingie Point (1984), with its curved roof and long wall of glass to the sea, refined his language, followed by the Marika-Alderton House in Arnhem Land (1994), built with an Aboriginal family.

Public buildings and teaching

With Wendy Lewin and Reg Lark he designed the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Centre at Riversdale (1999), and with Hakan Elevli the Australian Islamic Centre in Newport, Melbourne (2016). Murcutt has taught widely and runs an international master class in Australia.

Recognition

He received the Alvar Aalto Medal in 1992, the Pritzker Prize in 2002 and the AIA Gold Medal in 2009.