Top Karen Lambert and Richard Leplastrier's son, Mallee, sleeping in the window of the family's one room house; above RAIA Gold Medallist Richard Leplastrier works at home. In the left foreground is the 18 Footer World Championship Trophy he designed. It was made by Phillip Stickien.

43° South
Notes for a house on Bruny Island, Tasmania
Southern Ocean. Full maritime exposure, facing Roaring Forties. Winds to 100 knots. Cloudy Bay called ‘La Baie Mauvaise’ by the French. Three Dune system rising 150 feet. Landform and landscape wind-sheared at severe angles. Looking for the Lee. Dolerite cliffs. A shuttered courtyard and three small rooms opening onto it—facing the North Sun. Wind-sheared roof form. Recycled timber structure. Workshop made in Sydney. Shipped to Tasmania. Kit assembled on site. Fully retrievable. A retreat for study and re-creation. Built by Jeffrey Broadfield, boss, with Greg Brown, Greg Edwards, Larissa Johnston, Conrad Johnston and Jason Hammond. David Travalia, Tasmanian architect in association; Jim Gandy, engineer.

34° South
Notes for a house on Sydney’s northern peninsula
Pacific Ocean nurtured. Warm East Coast current, controls climate, mild subtropical. Sunken flooded river valley—strata horizontal sandstone. Flora, fauna intact over millennia. Landlocked. A house in a Long Room. Water access only. Recycled timber plantation plywood, fully dismantleable for future re-use. Built by Jeffery Broadfield with Lee Hillam and friends.

27° South
Richard Leplastrier’s site notes for a house at Mapleton, Queensland.
Rainforest, damp, humid—lift life above the forest floor. Torrential rain, cover outside areas. Fully openable. The act of clearing to let in the light. The security of open ground. Unseasoned hardwood Structure. Fully retrievable. Self sufficient in all services. Built by Brian Paylor and Phil Green.

Comment by Peter Stutchbury
Yesterday we visited Richard Leplastrier’s most recent work; a coastal building of humility and intelligence.

We fell silent on entering, noticing firstly the fine edge of stainless steel masking timber entry boards, the remarkable workmanship and precision of thinking that placed entry doors perfectly parallel and evenly offset with their timber mat insert partners; also the thick, bold double colonnade of heavy, finely finished, recycled structure intricately assembled and forming a screen or human threshold to the room beyond.

All this before our entry step had touched the ground.

A similar awakening 24 years ago when first viewing Richard’s Palm House undoubtedly shifted my own architectural perceptions.

Our profession benefits from a diversity of thinkers. Richard has pioneered and developed a fringe that is progressively becoming understood. His work and values influence students and practitioners alike; with even the most pragmatic opponents respecting his quality of thought. Public lectures are packed. We are fortunate that through him we have access to the thinking of other formative masters: Lloyd Rees, Jørn Utzon, Professor Masuda Tomoya and Kenzo Tange, to whom he attributes the current of learning that ‘architecture stems from the life within and the structure of the landscape without’.

His public concerns and contributions, in particular the conservation and reuse of historic industrial harbourside structures, has led to a revitalised way of thinking that sets sights on the strands of human endeavour that compose memorable places. In this fashion, with colleagues Tom Uren and Roderick Simpson, he is slowly enlightening city planners about the opportunities sadly missed by other more privately orientated cities.

Perhaps Richard’s most significant teachings concern our public responsibility to respect this land and its original people as the very foundation stone from which an emerging Australia can be built. This is deeply reflected in both his buildings and his own way of living.

Based at Lovett’s Bay on the fringe of a tidal estuary and national park, accessible across water, Richard, Karen, Aero and Mallee embrace a simple, honest existence. In a breathtakingly ordered room, working verandah and a bathroom outhouse, he and family set a living example of simple hospitality and a lifestyle akin to that of indigenous precedence.

Their home is small and accurate, opening carefully to the land and sky. The only furniture a chair of his mother’s, a crafted, self-designed work table, a trestle and a variety of art. Such discipline is a memorable statement and an active constant in Richard’s work.

It is not possible to summarise Richard Leplastrier’s contribution to architecture because it extends well beyond the built work. He is an educator, craftsperson, facilitator and inspiration to all who meet him. I commend the RAIA for its vision in awarding the 1999 Gold Medal to a person who might be considered outside the mainstream, but whose degree of respect and influence has unquestionably enlightened the way we see the practice of living architecture.

Peter Stutchbury is a principal of Stutchbury & Pape, an office based on Sydney’s northern beaches. He graduated from the University of Newcastle and has since regarded Richard Leplastrier as a mentor. He is now working with Leplastrier, Paul Pholeros and Sue Harper on their competition-winning scheme for an Aboriginal education centre on UNewcastle’s Callaghan campus.

Comment by Rory Spence
Richard Leplastrier is a single practitioner who has been designing small buildings in Eastern Australia since 1971. He grew up in coastal suburbs of Perth, Hobart and Sydney and developed a passion for sailing and boat design. He studied architecture at the University of Sydney, where he met Lloyd Rees, whose humanistic response to the everyday life and built forms of the city, in its harbour context, affected his perception of his environment as much as Rees's drawing classes. These early experiences encouraged an acute sensitivity to climatic forces and the underlying forms of the natural landscape overlaid by the patterns of human use.

Leplastrier worked for Jørn Utzon, 1964-66, mostly on Utzon’s proposed house at Bayview, then spent 18 months in Kyoto, studying traditional Japanese architecture (especially temple complexes) and attending classes by Professor Masuda Tomoya. The two precedents of Japan and Utzon were powerful influences on his own approach to design, especially in relation to constructional expression and the interconnections between architecture and landscape.

His sympathies lie as much in pre-industrial traditions as in those of the modern masters. He is fascinated by the origins of human settlement and the ‘essentials’ of living. His work stimulates reflection on archetypal patterns of human behaviour and resonates with memories of many cultures, integrating western and non-western traditions. Throughout 27 years of practice, he has placed great value on the cultural layering of the city as well as its topographical underpinning and he has been a passionate and pioneering advocate for Sydney's historical and natural values, always seen from a forward-looking, inclusive and optimistic perspective. He is an inspiring teacher and has had a significant impact on many younger architects, often through student projects that have explored major urban design issues. His enthusiasm for sailing has led to the design of a series of lightweight timber boats, as well as the Ben Lexcen Trophy for the World 18 Foot Skiff title. Leplastrier’s mostly domestic buildings demand an involvement with place and encourage a sense of the reality of the present moment. He guides one through his buildings in such a way that one's awareness of surroundings is intensified, drawing the landscape into the architecture. He has continually explored the concept of an adjustable house that can be attuned to climatic circumstances, like a yacht adjusting to changes in the wind. His houses open up to the external world—to weather conditions, sounds and smells of the locality; the dwelling as permanent camp, challenging conventional interpretations of 'comfort' and reconnecting us with the natural world.

The buildings reveal their tectonic form and the intrinsic qualities of their materials, which include fine native timbers alongside mass-produced synthetic components. While they are grouped irregularly in response to landscape setting, individual pavilions are often broadly symmetrical around one axis, suggesting a sense of social focus or gathering—a celebration of human rituals.

Leplastrier’s own small house gathers these phenomenological concerns: a living platform around a pre-existing hearth, enclosed by a timber and plywood shell, without glass, its shuttered openings framing views of the long, steep-sided, greater room of Lovett’s Bay.

Rory Spence lectures in architecture at the University of Tasmania and has been studying the work and life of Richard Leplastrier for many years. His article on Leplastrier's houses at Mapleton, Queensland, and Bruny Island, Tasmania, was published in the April 1998 edition of 'The Architectural Review' (UK).

Architecture and Place: The Medallist’s Manifesto (1993)
I work as a single practitioner in architecture, making harbours for people—their houses. As white Australians, we have a great interest in the private realm—yet as soon as we move outside this exclusive domain and into our common ground, our civic responsibilities in place-making and caring dissolve. We show little understanding of both the qualities of place that exist inherently with landforms, and the interconnectedness of landform, building and time. This lack of understanding of landform’s primacy in effecting place has given rise to a mindless smother of building that indiscriminately covers ridges, slopes and valleys alike.

Accompanying this is an immature attitude to time and building. Time is one of the great prime-movers of place, for the great cities are made by accretion, like the slow gradual building of the coral reef or the palimpsest—an old document on vellum worked and reworked over time. As a result of these insensibilities, the things which gave our places their original natural magic have in great measure been lost, and much that has been well built and enjoyed has, over the years, been needlessly ripped out and replaced by work of dubious value. Surely it is a question of beginnings; where things come from. One has to learn to see below the surface. Perhaps this is the true meaning of understanding. As my old teacher Masuda Tomoya said, ‘the architect must see back to the origins’.

This was sheeted home to me recently when I accompanied two friends on a circuit through Claustral Canyon in the Blue Mountains. We went in on ropes, abseiling down through stepped caves that were like giant intestines sculpted in sandstone by an underground river. We swam with our packs through the darkness of these flooded interiors, finally emerging in the green luminous light of a deep chasm. Having rested, we climbed out via the steep, tortuous path, weighed down by wet ropes and gear. I found that my fitter friends were soon ahead of me. The rhythmic climb, I discovered, moves one to rumination. How incredibly set the path seemed. I wondered about its use over time, musing over the beauty and inevitability of its line through the landform. Reaching the top, exhausted and needing a break, we followed the easy contour around the edge of the scarp and came upon a large mattress of rock some 30 metres long. It was curved like a boomerang and undulated in sections with many small accommodating hollows. To the east was a splendid view over the terrain and to the west, behind, were rock outcrops which protected us from the bitter westerly winds. It felt like a good place, so we stopped. Lying back comfortably in the contours of this warm rock, I thought to myself that it would not only be possible, but also pleasant, to live here almost as it is. Intuitively, one starts browsing around such a place, and almost immediately I found the groovings in the rock where the Aboriginal people had been sharpening their tools. It had been a home for some thousands of years. What was house to them was house to me. Our place was their place. And what about that track? Perhaps it too had been in use over millennia. The way we animals move through the terrain is a telling clue in the understanding of landform. Wallabies in the Hawkesbury sandstone district near my house appear to have a two-way system at work. One path is the gentle traverse, the indirect low energy approach; the other is directly up and down the contour; fast access, high energy. This is their ‘getaway’ track. Now when white culture arrived here, the Aboriginal people had been tracking this country for tens of thousands of years. Their lines across this place must have been very clearly formed. They knew very well to ‘stick to the ridges’, for they showed this to our explorers. There is an easy continuity in the routes via this region’s ridge lines—whereas the valley route tends to terminate against the scarp. Besides, the ridge track is easily drained, since the water falls to each side, making it easy to keep a track. No doubt the first white settlers arrived here to a complex, strange topography. But they would have found a track system well in place: Sydney’s present arterial trunk roads generally run on the ridges. Old South Head Road was probably the first. These routes grew directly over the earlier tracks and the tracks before them. Our tracks over their tracks. Layer over layer. It seems that things lead back, beyond cultures, to the land. Lloyd Rees, the landscape painter, once said: “Yes, the Aboriginals are indeed an amazing people—and one should never forget that it was this land that made them that way in the first place.”

Let me continue in this vein, on the landform as the bones of place. This morning I rose early at my friends’ Hobart house to enjoy the light. It’s a Hobart house because it sits as one of The Spectatorsin contoured amphitheatres of residencies between the weather-making mountain and the winding stage of the estuary that leads to the Southern Ocean. A city of great drama. The verandah was glazed at both ends, again typically Hobartian; providing protected pockets against the weather. Looking out over the city blocks ominously rising up and slowly obscuring one’s view of the harbour, one sees strong undulating hills rolling down to the water-plane and stepping away into the distance. The liquid plane slices the landform in a perfect contour, giving us the foreshore edge that connects the points and bays which foster the beautiful rhythm of the place. They are highly significant elements. Take Droughty Point, for instance. Seen down-river from Sullivan’s Cove, it catches the afternoon light on its duck-bill profile of creamy golden grasses. It is one of the landscape phenomena that cradle the city. It should never be built upon.

But let’s get back to those hills in a general sense. They all have ridges, spurs and their valleys for the water run-off. These streams start insignificantly at the top and slowly coalesce with others in their descent to become a creek proper with its outlet to the bay. Like the trunk of the tree to the branch to the twig to the vein. Same system. Water always finds the easiest passage, so these natural thoroughfares make good walking ways. They are generally not good places to build. Yet our culvert mentality has treated such potent places as drains, piping them underground and often building over them. Rarely have they been dedicated to leisure and recreation, and kept as open space. Imagine the rich variety of connections possible from the wild Mt Nelson/Mt Wellington Park down to the waterfront and its continuous foreshore walk. We must gradually reinstate these ‘ways’, parcel by parcel, block by block, over as many years as it has taken us to bury them.

Could I just comment briefly on the issue of building and time? Imagine our city as some living tapestry where the landform is the warp and the constructed elements the weft. Through time it develops a sense of oldness and charm. Things only become truly beautiful with appreciative use. Naturally, over the course of years, it gets worn out in patches, so some locales need renewal, others only resuscitation. We can’t make sensitive decisions without respect for the warp and the weft: one has to understand the strands and all the underlying layers of place in order not to lose its cohesion or pattern. It’s similar to the making of a wonderful garden which also needs time for maturity. We don’t go ripping out all that we’ve planted after 20 years and start again. We nurture what is good and make sensitive changes to what is not. Now in our cities, we have many fine buildings whose original use has been changed, but their simplicity of form and strength of structure is such that they can be readapted time after time. This can give those buildings and their surroundings a very special quality, a richness, the embroidery of the city.

For instance, in Sydney at the moment, we are fighting to save the Woolloomooloo finger wharf from demolition by a government bereft of imagination and vision. All they want to do is pull it down. The wharf is some hundreds of metres long and pushes straight out into the harbour like a peninsula. It is superbly built of ironbark; each giant column being the boxed heart of a tree. It was faithfully constructed by people with confidence in the future. It was a working building and was called the ‘cathedral of commerce’ because of its lofty spaces and the hum of activity generated by its wool export function. It is the final link in the chain of wool buildings from the woolsheds on the inland plains to the monolithic brick woolstores of Ultimo-Pyrmont. But that is not all. It became one of the portals of the city. The troops left here on active service in two world wars. Families gathered here to farewell their loved ones, many of whom they never saw again. It was their last point of contact. Others arrived here from devastated Europe as refugees and migrants. For them, it was their first point of contact.

These sorts of buildings indelibly imprint themselves into the psyche of the people—these buildings are the experience of a city. They should never be demolished. Give them a chance to live, adding a new layer to those that have gone before. Only from an understanding of this ‘interconnectedness’ will there become a genuine breadth and depth to our appreciation of the spirit of place. Our common ground.

This is a transcript, edited by Andrew Sant and Jerry de Gryse, from the speech given by Richard Leplastrier to the ‘Our Common Ground: A Celebration of Art, Place and Environment’ conference held in Hobart in 1993 by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects and the University of Tasmania’s Centre for Environmental Studies. The publication of Common Ground papers is still available from de Gryse at 208b Collins Street, Hobart.

My Teachers: The Medallist’s Mentors
Following my parents, Lloyd Rees was my first real teacher. In a long friendship that started in my student days and lasted for 30 years until his death, his love for beautiful cities, architecture, painting, sculpture, drawing, politics, social issues and the human drama all gently washed over me.

And then came Jørn Utzon: a man of great dignity and deep intelligence. He seemed able to reduce the most complicated issues to simple terms; an essential drawing of the Opera House could be on your thumbnail. His appreciation of natural phenomena was acute; he was able to transpose these qualities into architecture without imitation. He grew up in the reflected light of the shipyard of Elsinor with his naval architect father, so his understanding of complex curved form was complete. He taught me to read the sections of a yacht hull by shifting stance off its centreline and he talked of harmony. But above all, as Peter Myers has pointed out, he understood the power of the ancient sites whose original uses have been lost and which exist now, entirely unto themselves, as places of great beauty— places of Les Murray’s ‘perpetual dimension’. Utzon has made one of those places for us in Sydney.

My third real teacher was Professor Tomoya Masuda from Kyoto. He opened doors into a profound culture. By examining the pictographs of their written language, he looked at the origins of words. He said that the architect must see back to the origins—where else does original work spring from? He discussed the Zen philosopher Dogen, whose notion of essential time was just beforethe actuality, hence raising issues of potency, moment, anticipation and preparation in art. He talked of the power of implication over explication; that matters suggested are more potent than those revealed. Show part but not the whole. Latency. Thoughts that just keep welling up through the backwash of the mind.

So in accepting this award, I am most mindful of that which has been passed on to me by others. Mindful also of the complex support web of Karen Lambert, our kids, my close friends and peers Peter Myers, Glenn Murcutt, Swetik Korzeniewski, Rory Spence and those younger colleagues, both architects and builders, whose work continues to inspire me.