A CARPENTER AND AN ARCHITECT

Elizabeth Carpenter joined Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp (fjmt) when it was still Mitchell/Giurgola and Thorp (MGT) back in 1994. And she’s been there ever since. When you find a practice where the values and ideas of how to run a business align so completely with your own, it makes sense to stay, she says.

The beginnings of her career weren’t quite so strategic, however. Carpenter says her main impetus for going to study architecture at the University of Sydney in the first place had less to do with the discipline and more to do with the location. “I must admit the lure of the mainland was probably the driving factor for why I decided to do architecture,” she recalls, “wanting to try something different.”

But by the time she was ready to look for a job in Australia, after a period working overseas, her thinking was a little more focused. She heard