Elevating the Natural

The architect Glenn Murcutt, a self-employed, independent spirit who has never worked outside of Australia, has won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor.

Murcutt is best known for designing small, rural houses that combine a Modernist aesthetic with a deep sensitivity to the environment. Over a 40-year career, he has built a body of work whose central theme is the desire to heighten our awareness of the natural landscape--its sounds, smells and climate. His best designs rest on the landscape with an almost reverential delicacy.

Yet, unlike previous Pritzker Prize recipients, Murcutt has never completed a major civic building. His largest project to date is the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Centre--a $1.3-million, 8,690-square-foot research and study facility in Riversdale, New South Wales, just south of Sydney.

“Getting the prize was a terrible shock,” the Sydney-based Murcutt said during an interview over lunch in Los Angeles. “What is amazing is that it has gone to someone of my stature. I work with no staff, no secretary, no computer-aided design. I don’t even have a cellular phone. It is a small operation--just me.”

Established by the Hyatt Foundation in 1979, the Pritzker Prize each year honors a living architect who is judged to have made “consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.” Previous winners include Richard Meier and Frank O. Gehry of the United States; Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands; Renzo Piano of Italy; Kenzo Tange of Japan; and, last year, the Swiss team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.

Jorge Silvetti, a Pritzker juror and chairman of Harvard’s graduate school of architecture, said the decision to select Murcutt reflects an effort to “broaden our perspective, to look beyond Europe, Japan and America. Architecture can occur at many scales. And Murcutt is a person who has a healthy obsession with basic architectural issues--the environment, light, materials, technology. His work is about going deeper into these issues, rather than trying to create something novel with each project.”

Born in 1936, Murcutt grew up in Upper Watut, New Guinea, where his father worked as a gold miner. The nearest European settlement was 10 miles away, and the family lived in a simple wood-frame house raised on stilts. The experience imbued Murcutt with a heightened sensitivity to the natural environment, a driving theme in his later life as an architecture.

“It was extremely wild,” Murcutt said of his early home. “And it could be a very dangerous place to be, with wild pigs and scorpions. But the nights were cool, and we were surrounded by a field of Kunai grass, which grow to about 5 feet tall. Beyond that, there was a rain forest that looked like broccoli.”

It was Murcutt’s father, an avid architecture fan, who introduced his young son to the works of earlier Modernists such as Mies van der Rohe and Charles and Ray Eames. Murcutt also cites a later trip to Europe as having opened his eyes to Modernism’s range, in particular a visit to Pierre Chareau’s 1928 Maison de Verre in Paris. The house’s glass-brick facade and exposed I-beams were muscular expressions of a unique, industrial aesthetic.

“That house was extremely important to me,” he said. “Chareau showed me that Modern architecture could be open-ended--not just white buildings with horizontal slots. It was about using the technology of the day.”

What sets Murcutt apart from the early Modernists is that his most significant works are set in rural areas, far from the buzzing urban context that was the traditional playground of the avant-garde. As such, a more relevant precedent may be Chareau’s studio for Robert Motherwell, built in Long Island in 1946 and demolished in 1985. The studio’s long, arched roof, which recalled a Quonset hut, was made of inexpensive, corrugated metal. Its long, mechanical window allowed light, air and nature to spill into the space.

Murcutt’s Marie Short House, completed in 1975, similarly explores the relationship between industrial forms and natural landscape, but with a lighter touch. Built at a bend in the Maria River in a lush rural setting, the house is raised slightly on short stilts to protect it from floods and snakes. An enormous, corrugated metal roof provides shade. The perimeter walls are designed as a system of adjustable, horizontal louvers to control the flow of air through the interiors.

Most of the house’s structure was made of timber left from a nearby sawmill. The louvers are made of steel, with a baked enamel finish. “When the wind is blowing in the summer, it has a wonderful cooling effect,” Murcutt said. “In the winter, the louvers have a tendency to heat up, and you can warm your back against them in the mornings.”

By comparison, the Magney House, completed in 1984, is a bolder technological statement. The house’s long, low profile is carefully positioned to take advantage of the northern light. The asymmetrical, winglike form of the roof--the design’s most prominent feature--allows water to collect into one central gutter. The water is then recycled for drinking and heating. The exterior walls defy conventional construction practices, with brick along the interior and corrugated metal outside, to provide better insulation.

Murcutt’s Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Centre uses similar techniques on a larger scale. The structure includes a 180-seat covered theater, which opens onto terraced outdoor seating. A lightweight metal roof folds up and down to mimic the slope of the landscape.

But Murcutt has had less success working in Australia’s urban centers, where he has often been frustrated by government bureaucracies. In 1993, Murcutt was hired to design a proposal for major addition to Sydney’s Custom’s House, on a site overlooking the harbor.

Murcutt suggested demolishing a series of 1960s additions to the original structure, a U-shaped stone structure built in the 1870s. A new glass structure was designed to frame the courtyard’s fourth side, which would house escalators and stairs. The courtyard was covered by a sawtooth, mechanical roof, which could open on warm days. Above, enormous reflecting panels would draw light and air into the space. The panels could be adjusted depending on weather conditions and the sun’s position.

But once the design was complete, the local council asked another firm to come up with a more traditional counterproposal, and Murcutt eventually pulled out, refusing to compete.

“My father gave me a healthy disrespect for the government,” Murcutt said. “The argument against my work is that my buildings don’t ‘harmonize’ with the natural environment. But I see harmony as something different--disparate sounds in combination with each other. What they’re asking for is monotony, and I can’t tolerate that.”

This year’s Pritzker Prize ceremony will be at Michelangelo’s Campidoglio in Rome, Italy, on May 29.