Godsell’s designs, both built and unbuilt, demonstrate a commitment to experimentation, and his ability to “shift from timeless form to playful contraption” gives his buildings a performative aspect that is admired across the globe, says Philip Goad.
Carter/Tucker House (2000) by Sean Godsell Architects.
Sean Godsell occupies a special place in Australian architecture. He is known as a loner, as a holder of a torch for an architecture of rigorous principles, and as a champion of the idea of the architect as a special form of artist – one with the ability to connect the practical making of buildings with the poetic making of poignant dialogues with both the city and the wider Australian landscape. Across a career spanning more than 25 years, Godsell has been relentless, some might even say unforgiving, in his dedication to this goal. Yet it is this unwavering commitment – demonstrated by a series of buildings executed with lean precision and striking visual acuity – that has earned international respect and drawn global attention to his work. The award of the 2022 Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal to Godsell is thus recognition of a small and fine body of work and of a practitioner who has, against all odds – both political and pecuniary – devoted his career to the pursuit of aesthetic excellence.
Born in Melbourne in 1960, Godsell graduated in architecture from the University of Melbourne in 1984. His final-year thesis was a brilliant and spartan proposal for roofing the Flinders Street railyards (now the site of Federation Square). One of his proposed buildings was a cube held aloft: a monument in the city. This aspect of Godsell’s interest in the urban has never been adequately acknowledged. While best known for a string of award-winning one-off houses, the true potential of his aptitude for understanding and responding to the morphology of the historic city is represented by his Vatican Chapel in Venice and by the RMIT Design Hub (2007–12) in Melbourne – the double-skinned, frosty highrise prism that combines the vertical and horizontal themes of his residential work with a certain voluble muteness of form that echoes the ideas of Adolf Loos and Aldo Rossi. In this regard, Godsell’s unsuccessful competition entries for major public buildings – which include multiple art galleries and the Australian Pavilion in Venice – will bear productive scholarly scrutiny in decades to come as exemplars of what might have been. But most know Godsell’s work through his houses, which, while admired for their compositional and structural discipline, have implications for building at a larger scale – the scale of the city.
Sean’s childhood home in the Melbourne beachside suburb of Beaumaris was designed by his father, David, in 1960.
Architect-designed houses have been part of Godsell’s daily life since birth. He grew up in the beachside suburb of Beaumaris on Port Phillip Bay. Home to numerous architects and their families who were committed to a progressive suburban lifestyle, the local community was dedicated to its coastal landscape. His father was the gifted architect David Godsell (1930–86), and the family home (1960–61) was a clever reinterpretation of Usonian house principles adapted to a steeply sloping, sandy site. The tall, blond, eldest son was an excellent sportsman who briefly played Australian rules football for St Kilda while studying architecture. But he was rarely at university. Godsell preferred working with and for others, including his father, and Maggie Edmond at Edmond and Corrigan, for whom he documented social housing at Carrum. After travelling in Japan and Europe in 1985, he worked in London for distinguished British modernist Sir Denys Lasdun from 1986 to 1988. From 1988 until 1992, he was part of The Hassell Group in Melbourne, where he designed and documented the Northern Metropolitan College of Technical and Further Education (1989–92) in Heidelberg. In 1994, he established his own practice, Godsell Associates, which later became Sean Godsell Architects.
Godsell’s architecture has always been informed by the act of making – drawing full-scale details by hand comes as second nature to him and as a necessary part of an architect’s reason for being – and by the consistent, almost dogged, exploration of formal and spatial types. This latter practice is open to criticism by others, but is defended by Godsell as intrinsic to his way of thinking and, by extension, designing. Godsell’s mode was heavily influenced by that of his father, whose passion for architecture involved perfection, precision and a belief in Louis Sullivan’s idea of architecture being an accomplice to “an unfolding Democracy.”1 Acutely aware of Australia’s proximity to Asia, Godsell has deep interests (as did his father) in the contemporary architectural synergies between East and West. A professed admirer of Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara’s scientific rigour in planning and formal refinement, Godsell has a preoccupation (among others) with corridors and their potential as passages, verandahs, living galleries, pathways, internal laneways, and tantalizing routes to the unfolding of the interior. He speaks often of “the connected plan,” an interior that can be divided, traversed or opened up at will. Within the plan, the corridor is the tactical device to realize a path – horizontal, vertical or spiralling – that might take a visitor to a house’s heart, pass through a concealed court open to the sky, or culminate in a living or sleeping space that opens dramatically to an astonishing panorama.
In formal terms, almost all of Godsell’s buildings involve long, stretched rectangular blocks, whether elevated, extruded vertically, partially incised into the landscape or inserted seamlessly into an existing urban morphology. In dense, inner-urban locations, early projects like Godsell’s first house in Faraday Street, Carlton (1992–93) and MacSween House, Kensington (1995), and later ones like the additions to Edward Street House, Brunswick (2008–12) and Green House, Carlton (2011–14), are meditations on density and typology. Here, Godsell speaks of a site’s genetics balanced against the individual thumbprint of a client.
While Godsell’s oeuvre has most often been associated with single houses, he also has strong interests in temporary accommodation and its application for the broader social good – in particular, Future Shack (2001). Other schemes, like Park Bench House (2002), Bus Shelter House (2003–04) and Picnic Table House (2009), were well-meaning, if sometimes flawed, design responses to homelessness, using the repetition and systems thinking of humble technologies. Evidence of this interest can be found, too, in his vaulted, modular “kit of parts” shade structures for t he Bugiga Hiker Camp in Gariwerd (Grampians National Park) (2008–16), which come close to the lightness of Indigenous building. This idea of optimizing a construction system was also applied to townhouse projects in Elwood (1996–99) and Toorak (1998), and at Woodleigh School on the Mornington Peninsula, where Godsell added an art facility (1998–99) and a science building (1999–2002) to Jackson Walker’s innovative 1970s design. Godsell’s contribution to Woodleigh is an endlessly long stoa shaded and supported by a carapace of oxidized steel and ironbark portals.
A steel portal structure embedded into the side of a sand dune on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, Peninsula House gained international recognition.
This idea of a “second skin,” protective or defensive – which could be a literal carapace close to the building’s edge or a complete parasol distinct from the protected “body” beneath – has been applied by Godsell to a number of house series as a climate-responsive veil of extreme visual delicacy. Vertical timber slats were used for Peninsula House (2000–02) and House on the Coast (2014–17), while oxidized steel industrial floor grating characterized Kew House (1996–97), St Andrew’s Beach House (2003–06), Glenburn House (2004–07) and Tanderra House (2005–12). At RMIT Design Hub, translucent glass discs are used for this purpose and House in the Hills (2015–18) employs a steel-framed parasol of battened flaps. The carapace and the parasol act like tree or shrub canopies, the most effective natural mediators of the natural elements. But Godsell’s buildings should not be taken too literally here as empirically derived “solutions.” Instead, they are totems: polemical statements to encourage the continuing project to find a climate-appropriate house for Australia. It is in their risky position as icons of a way forward that their potency lies.
Godsell’s work has always displayed a frequent and beguiling oscillation between the monumental and the informal or contingent. Carter/Tucker House (2000), at Breamlea on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula, was an early example: a three- level battened box that, on approach, appears as a silent prism; however, on inhabitation, battened flaps open and the house comes alive. This ability to shift from timeless form to playful contraption cuts across almost every Godsell building, giving them a performative aspect that is rarely emphasized. He describes houses that can be “unpacked” and this unpacking has informed non-residential buildings, like Melbourne’s first-ever MPavilion (2012–14) and his Vatican Chapel (2018). Closed, each building looks like a honed megalith; one squat and horizontal, the other skinny and tall. Open, each offers untold ways of adjusting for light, shade and the movement of people. Here, Godsell’s buildings defy scale and type.
Summarizing his own work, Godsell is typically Australian in the grandeur of his self-deprecation: for him, his buildings and unbuilt projects represent continuing experimental struggles in “making something out of nothing.” There exists in them, too, a certain pathos in form, leavened by the interaction of the human hand in the building’s making and habitation. His buildings also – and it is not too dramatic a statement – make a claim for the timeless and, as this author has written elsewhere, “continue to stand strong against the chattering tides of images and instantaneity that characterise our age.”2
On a personal level, despite perceptions of an eremitic existence, Godsell has conscientiously given back to his profession over the decades. He remains in constant demand to speak with students and peers and, most recently, was instrumental in launching the Institute’s Generation Exchange, a mentoring program that connects senior architects with emerging practitioners.3 For Godsell, this is important. Mentorship is how the profession survives and passes on collective memory, experience and expertise; learning from elders is something to be cherished. Speaking with Godsell, there is at once a disarming humility balanced by a stubborn idealism.
Over the length of his career, Godsell’s work has been constantly sought for publication by the world’s most respected architectural journals. It has been the subject of two monographs and a special issue of the Spanish magazine, El Croquis.4 He has received prestigious awards and recognition from the American Institute of Architects, the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York, World Architecture, Time magazine, the Chicago Athenaeum and the International Biennial Barbara Cappochin Architecture Prize. The singularity of Godsell’s minimal architecture crosses architectural borders: in it, others find echo of architecture’s sometime forgotten fundamentals. If that can be seen as an old idea, so be it. There are moments when the discipline’s founding tenets need recalling and it is therefore entirely fitting, and a cause for genuine celebration, that Sean Godsell be recognized by his peers at home. And for that, the Gold Medal is the appropriate and ultimate prize.
1. Louis Sullivan, lecture to the inaugural meeting of The Architectural League of America, 1900, reprinted in Louis Sullivan, “The Young Man in Architecture” in Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New York: George Wittenborn Inc., 1955 reprint [1947]), 223.
2. Philip Goad, “Finding Australia: Nine Houses by Sean Godsell”, Sean Godsell: Houses (London: Thames and Hudson, 2019), 16.
3. Sean Godsell, “Generation Exchange,” Architect Victoria , vol 1, 2022, 109–12.
4. Sean Godsell: Works and Projects (Milan: Electa, 2005); Sean Godsell: Houses (London: Thames and Hudson, 2019); El Croquis: Sean Godsell 1997–2013 – Tough Subtlety , no. 165, 2013.
Published online: 5 May 2022 Words: Philip Goad Images: Courtesy <i>The Herald</i>, Dayne Trower, Earl Carter, Hayley Franklin, John Gollings, Wolfgang Sievers
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Carter/Tucker House (2000) by Sean Godsell Architects.
A steel portal structure embedded into the side of a sand dune on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, Peninsula House gained international recognition.
At RMIT Design Hub (2012), translucent glass discs are used for this purpose.
Godsell describes houses that can be “unpacked” and this unpacking has informed non-residential buildings, like Melbourne’s first-ever MPavilion (2012–14).
Godsell’s buildings defy scale and type.
Sean’s childhood home in the Melbourne beachside suburb of Beaumaris was designed by his father, David, in 1960.
In 1980, Sean began studying architecture at the University of Melbourne while playing for St Kilda in the Victorian Football League.
During the 1980s, Sean worked for Peter Sanders, who was running a small office in Richmond.
Sean and Hayley Franklin in the office at 49 Exhibition Street, Melbourne, c. 2014.
Setting out House in the Hills, rural Victoria, in 2016.
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