A cold rain had failed to dampen the turnout for a March 4 lecture by renegade Australian architect Glenn Murcutt. “I don’t think I’ve seen the room so full in some time,” said Donna Robertson, dean of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, as she looked out across Crown Hall. Among the people stuffing the center court were UIC architecture students and local architects Carol Ross Barney, John Vinci, and Helmut Jahn.
Murcutt’s early Laurie Short House was a classic Miesian steel-and-glass box, though it had sliding louvered screens to control sunlight. But during a 1973 trip around the world he began to see the limits of modernist purity. In LA he visited a Miesian house he’d admired for having “the simplest sort of bony architecture.” He quickly saw the downside–its glass walls and flat roof trapped the heat of the sun inside. Insulation could have helped keep out the heat, but the house didn’t appear to have any. He asked the architect, Craig Ellwood, how he dealt with this problem. “He looked at me as if I was really stupid and said, ‘Why, we air-condition the buildings.’” This was at a time when the Arab oil embargo had created acute gas shortages and energy consumption was on the country’s mind.
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His buildings, he says, are “my interpretation in built form” of that landscape. Of the more than 500 projects he’s completed, only two are air-conditioned. Energy-efficient double-skin facades are now a hot innovation in curtain-walled skyscrapers in Europe, but Murcutt developed a triple-skin facade decades ago–it uses adjustable louvers on the inside, insect mesh, and slatted blinds on the exterior to keep heat out and cool air flowing in. He also uses panels that slide apart to open up rooms to the outside and “butterfly” roofs, whose raised wings bring winter light deep into the interior, provide shade in the summer, and drain rainwater into a central gutter. Sometimes a pool stores the rainwater, which can be used to water gardens or to fight periodic wildfires and which reflects sunlight into the house.
Murcutt wanted his 13 students to look over the empty site and design their own visitors’ centers. “We went to the site the second day,” says one of the students, Matt Hohmeier. “By looking at the site we determined an approach which responded to the environment of the site–where the sun is coming from, where the wind is coming from, the quality of the soil.” Murcutt had an unconventional criterion for the siting of the center. “He wanted us to take the approach where you take the worst part of the site, the most messed up part of the site, so that you can then change it. That’s kind of a different approach–some architects want to put up the building on the best part of the site.”
At the end of the lecture someone asked how Murcutt’s work in the great open spaces of Australia was relevant to architecture in America, and he again pointed to his own house. “That is much more my scene,” he said. “It is not the Chicago scene, absolutely, but it does relate in that urban sense in that one little building.” The important thing, he said, is “understanding the nature of your place.”
