Selected works 1988–2020
“Justine, we know it is your day off, but John was wondering if he could have a quick word.” Amanda Ritson, then John’s amazing PA, has rung me at 5 pm on a Wednesday. I am editor of Architecture Australia, but today I am at home with a baby and a three-year-old (it’s all a blur, really). It is close to witching hour. John comes on the line, his charming and self-deprecating self – “I know you’ve probably finished the layout, but I’ve just got one more photo …” I can’t remember if we used the extra image, but in my hazy recollection, this was just one of a fair few Wednesday afternoon phone calls.
A few years later, the kids are bigger and we are lucky enough to visit John and Susan at their house on Bruny Island. They are marvellous hosts. John bundles us into a jeep to see the farm. We come across a lamb huddled next to its dead mother. Rescued, the lamb joins my partner, Paul, and the kids in the back seat. To this day, John is known in our house as “the architect who got Dad to hold the smelly sheep.”
Like anyone who has worked with John in some capacity, I have lots and lots of stories – of charm and tenacity, of generosity, and of pushing everything until the very last minute possible. But these are the two that stay with me.
John is delightful and frustrating – knowingly so. I was aware of this when I came to work with him, Stefan [Mee] and their colleagues on JWA’s second monograph. What is most enjoyable is his genuine pleasure in collaboration, his real interest in other people’s ideas, knowledge and experience, and his open and inventive responses to what it might
