Leverage: Positioning practice and challenging expectations
One of the privileges and pleasures of curating a conference is the selection of the keynote speakers, as individuals and in relationship to one another – imagining and composing in your mind resonances, lively dialogues and conversations. As co-curators of the 2020 National Architecture Conference (which could not go ahead, ultimately, due to COVID-19 restrictions), Emma Williamson, Kieran Wong, Justine Clark and I were drawn to Jude Barber and Kerstin Thompson for their intersection of organizational innovations, profound built work and vital advocacy for architecture. The following passage is woven from two independent Friday-afternoon conversations, one week apart, about the why and how of their spirited practice.
Education: formative influences
Kerstin Thompson: I studied at RMIT in the 1980s, and the profession and the academy were absolutely integrated, mutually defining. Peter Corrigan was a profound influence on the vitality of that relationship and practice-led speculation. For me, there was a strange tension between my interest in Robin Boyd’s work, and his strong influence on the evolution of modern architecture in Melbourne, and the late modern lineage advocated by Corrigan. Venturi and Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas [1972], for example, was the text in the early eighties at RMIT, promoting that quest for the ordinary and the ugly and the dislike of what was seen as “taste.” That taught me to look for a local answer, to look at the parochial as the possibility for a dialectic that is of this place. What we were getting was Scott Brown’s and Venturi’s take on localism. Jude Barber: I was fortunate to go to
