When receiving the 2020 Australian Institute of Architects Emil Sodersten Award, the highest accolade for interior architecture in any given year, the two architecture practices that authored this project – Durbach Block Jaggers and John Wardle Architects – defined their collaborative design process as one based on a kind of humorous improvisational exchange.
Standing before Phoenix, the astonishing new arts facility for impresario Judith Neilson, it seems that those exchanges are also evident in the play of form and fenestration across the facade. We cannot help but see them as a series of good natured jostling riffs, on both the standards and the inventions of the other.
The philosophy of humour is an interesting one; Immanuel Kant conflated the characteristics of humour, music and games of chance to detect an experience he defined as pleasure in the shifting of ideas of the mind. Arthur Schopenhauer refined this observation to characterize humour as the momentary disparity between an abstract idea and real things, or between expectation and experience.
Exploring the interiors of Phoenix with Neil Durbach and, later, conversing with John Wardle,
