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University of QueenslandPresentation

2018 Architecture LectureMichael BanneyHeld on 20 March 2018

by:

Adam JeffordManager APDLMC

Janina GosseyeResearch FellowMC

Ashley Paine ArchitectInterviewer

Michael BanneyArchitectPresenter

Adam Jefford:Alright. Good evening. Thank you for your patience. You may know that we're in competition

against Ed Sheeran tonight. So for those of you viewing online and those of you that have made

it here, thank you for taking the time. We've delayed it a little bit just to allow for people to find a

park and to get here.

My name is Adam and I lead the Asia-Pacific Design Library. It's my pleasure to welcome you

here tonight. To begin with I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land that we meet

upon and pay my respect to elders past, present and emerging. The State library on Kurilpa Point

was historically a significant meeting, gathering and sharing place for Aboriginal people and we

proudly continue that tradition here tonight.

I have a little bit of housekeeping before we get on to the main show tonight. I wanted to

acknowledge this is week two of the Asia-Pacific Architecture Forum. I think many of you I've

seen around the state library as well as other events over the last two weeks. Thank you for your

patronage. I can also see Don Watson in the crowd tonight who had a great opening on the

weekend and I know that a lot of staff from UQ were also involved in the curation of the exhibition

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Presentation2018 Architecture LectureMichael Banney - Held on 20 March 2018

there. If you haven't seen it, it's on at the AIA just around the corner and I recommend getting

their.

There is a couple more events. If you are not across them you can go online and check it out.

Most of them are free at this stage so we would love to see you there. Something that we didn't

touch on last week but is definitely something that we would love for you to do, is to provide a

review of any of the lectures. There's some information for you at that URL and if you need help

obviously you can email us here at the Asia-Pacific Design Library or get in touch with your

colleagues at the University of Queensland School of Architecture as well.

One of the great things last year was that we were getting two or three reviews in from people

like yourself every week. So it would be really great to be able to continue to progress new

knowledge, new ideas and your responses in that way. The other thing that we tried last week

and I think it went really well, I hope you think it went really well as well, and that was the

opportunity to ask or load some questions during the presentation. So we're going to go again

and I'll remind you again that my job may or may not be on the line depending on what types of

questions you ask tonight. If you haven't used Slideo before, it's really simple. We've got Wi-Fi

here at the State Library, so you don't even need to use your own data. Just open your phone, go

to whatever browser you use, type in 'slideo.com' and that number 'M683' will take you to

tonight's question area. At the end of the talk Ashley Payne and Janina are going to be up on

stage talking with Michael. That is a really great way for you to share your questions that you

might have. So you can start now if you want or you can add the questions later on. Don't ask

questions of me. I've got no answers.

The other really great thing about it is that if somebody else asks a question and you like it, you

can give it a little thumbs up and that'll push it up so that Ashley and Janina know that that's a

question that the crowd wants answered as well.

Alright, so Janina, if you wanted to come up and talk a little bit about tonight's presentation that

would be great.

Thank you.

Janina Gosseye:Good evening. I would also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we

meet tonight and pay respect to their elders past, present and emerging.

So welcome everyone to the second of eight talks in the 2018 UQ Architecture Lecture Series.

For those of you who haven't yet heard the theme of this year series is In-terre-vention. We have

invited practices whose projects we believe are highly sensitive to the context that surrounds

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them and this is the reason why the middle syllable of the word intervention has been changed to

'terre', the French word for earth. In doing so, emphasis in this year's lecture series is also placed

on the invention component that goes hand-in-hand with each intervention as the projects that

you will be introduced to in this series will demonstrate.

I am of course not solely responsible for the organisation of this lecture series but I have received

immense support from my colleagues at UQ most notably from Olivia Dwyer, Discourse

Engagement and Communications Officer, and also from John de Manincor who's the school's

Director of Engagement with whom I had many lengthy and sometimes heated discussions about

who to invite for this year's series. However, when it came to tonight's speaker, John and I

instantaneously and unanimously agreed. This probably does not come as a surprise given that

M3 Architecture is a powerhouse in Brisbane and cleaned up at last year's Queensland State

Architecture Awards. M3 took away 10 awards and two commendations for eight projects, five of

which went on to win national awards and commendations.

Tonight we have invited Michael Banney, or now I should say Dr Michael Banney, one of the

practices three M's to offer some insight into how precisely they achieved such remarkable feats.

So please join me in welcoming Michael to the stage.

Michael Banney:Thanks. Thanks Janina and thanks for inviting me.

I think it was about 2011 when I stood here last and at that time I was with my three comrades in

architecture - Michael Christensen, Michael Lavery and Ben Vielle. We'd just come off the back

of completing our Masters at RMIT and I remember quite clearly how we used the kind of

masters as the basis for our presentation. We talked a lot in those days about the notion of, it's a

bit of a mouthful, but the notion of specificity that surprises. This has become somewhat of the

backbone of our practice. Those of you who were here seven years ago might recall some of the

language that surrounds this approach. Specificity meaning that we really cherish drilling down

into are exactly what makes a project tick. So this kind of idea of intervention is something that I

guess really rings true to us.

But then of course to us it's really about the surprise factor, how we might find those things within

this field of specificity for a project that offer surprise. I guess when we approach work in this way

as you can see, the idea of submitting ourselves to actuality, sometimes actuality can be stranger

than fiction and really yield back surprise, particularly if we treat it with absolute seriousness in

terms of being a platform for project research.

We also went into a series of kind of modus operandi I guess, and I'm not going to go through

these in any great amount of detail tonight but these sort of set down the kind of conditions of

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engagement with M3 Architecture. It gave the four of us a way of being able to communicate with

each other and know exactly what each other means when we say certain things. This was the

first of them which is the idea of a loaded diagram, how we might communicate ideas to one

another through diagramming. The second one is the sort of subversion of materials, converting

ubiquitous materials to other things. This one was to do with displacing objects using familiar

objects but using them in reasonably unusual ways. This was about multiple interpretation,

coming up with designs that could have any number of interpretations.

This one was to do with engineering logic and repetition, the way in which it seems to occur in

our work, how we really engaged with things that are buildable, repetitive but somehow offer kind

of change. This was about taking small things, extending convention in a way so you see origami

on a very grand scale. This one was to do with extraordinary, so taking really ordinary things,

ubiquitous brick and turning it into an extraordinary kind of building. This one was to do with

pragmatism and poetics walking hand-in-hand, how we might kind of deal with things in such

pragmatic ways, but push them to the limit and turn them into some sort of poetic outcome.

This one was to do with hype - if you can't beat them, join them, if you've got to deal with a

relentless corridor, how you might create something interesting through the notion of hype. This

one was investigating the idea of the elephant in the room, calling things out as we see them

architecturally. The last theme that we talked about was the idea of humour as a kind of recurrent

thing in how we practice.

Something I didn't talk about last time that we spoke here seven or so years ago was the

emerging awareness of us as individual practitioners within our own practice. This was a poster

that Ben made of himself and the idea of the zipper. Ben is very much a systems thinker,

someone who really enjoys the kind of technical side of things and how to put architecture or

other things together systematically but always cognisant of the thrill of the ride at the end of the

day. It's not about the system per se, it's more about the ride that it offers you.

This is a poster from Michael Christensen who of all of us is the great entrepreneur, someone

who this is the kind of metaphor of Liza's leaky bucket and the idea of there's no such thing as a

problem. In fact the leaky bucket can be more useful than a non-leaky bucket if you find the right

use for it it. Michael Avery who has got a very strong emerging awareness of the idea of the

engaging object, how buildings might become animate in an otherwise inanimate kind of field.

This was mine. Mine was really about how materials might be able to be transfigured in a way

and so here you see a really ordinary glass bowl on a very ordinary laminate bench and with the

astute placement of this bowl on the bench late in the afternoon, the bowl and the bench are

transfigured through this moment. But it's really more about are the transfiguration of our lives

from being occurrences to occasions and I guess that's something I've been working a lot with

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probably across last seven years, developing a greater awareness of that as an approach. It's

very much a socially kind of conscious approach to architecture.

I guess this whole idea of specificity that surprises has been a great vehicle for us over the years

in terms of managing multiplicity. Managing multiplicity relates to projects but it also relates to

how we all participate in the practice, bringing our own kind of preferences to bear. As long as it's

got enough specificity and enough surprise, anything is fair game. In fact we kind of love the fact

that every time we get a new project we have no idea where it's going to lead us. I think we are

quite extreme about that.

Last year I was actually asked to put myself in a box, literally and metaphorically, well, probably

more metaphorically I guess. It was part of a travelling exhibition and so I went to Presence of

Mind down the road and bought two bags of banana grams and tipped them into the box. The

little didactic panel that sat beside the box encouraged people to rake their fingers through these

lovely kind of plastic pieces and hear the noise and kind of wonder. But there was this unnerving

moment when you rake your fingers through where you start realising that some of these letters

are fixed in place, these two kind of veins of letters that are stuck. So then there's this moment of

clearing away the letters to figure out what the specificity is within this otherwise state of flux.

I don’t know if you can read it there. I'll see if I can figure out how to use this pointer. I don’t know

if you can read anecdotal evidence through the letters. This idea of anecdotal evidence is

something that I've been developing a stronger and stronger awareness of across the last three

or four years in the course of having undertaken my PhD. Anecdotal evidence of course is a legal

term and it's almost got a bad reputation in a legal sense, not having quite the same power as

direct evidence. So anecdotal evidence in a legal sense, no one piece of anecdotal evidence is

strong enough to concoct a conviction. So what is sought in law is a series of anecdotes or

pieces of anecdotal evidence, each that corroborate the other so that a chain of evidence can be

formed and through that a conviction can be reached. To me this is almost exactly a recipe for

architecture, kind of figuring out anecdote after anecdote after anecdote that surround a project

through which we can begin to understand some kind of meta-anecdote, the sum total of all of

those anecdotes that might yield architecture.

There's a whole lot of connotations of this as a way of thinking about architecture and as a way of

producing architecture methodologically or even ideologically. It's realised some shifts in how I

practice I guess. I've always been somewhat of a drawer. In fact this is a drawing I did in Year 11

at high school where all we had to do was some kind of orthogonal – no, what's it called? A

diametric projection and it could have just been of a rectangular prism but I got a little bit carried

away. We certainly didn't need to shade it or anything, but I've always been an obsessional

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drawer and course that's high school tech drawing. But moving into architectural practice, this

kind of ability to kind of draw and draw and draw.

I used to work with a fellow by the name of Greg Pickworth many, many years ago in an office

that I used to work in. As I would draw Greg would stand over my shoulder and constantly berate

me for there not being enough magic, either magic in the drawing or magic in the explanation of

the drawing, preferably magic in the explanation, and sort of an inexplicable drawing which

without an explanation the drawing would remain kind of magical, but senseless in a sense.

We've also developed other ways of communicating with each other and these are kind of ideas

that get drawn out through collage, posters, that kind of thing. This was kind of a reaction to, or

my thinking on what I would do if I was asked to do an exhaust stack for some of these tunnels

that are going around, a kind of way of being able to represent things very directly and very

quickly without necessarily resorting to drawing per se. I guess some of these approaches have

resulted in the PhD that I completed last year which is in itself called 'Anecdotal Evidence' and it's

a series. It's a collection. It looks like a children's storybook but its title is that of legal substance.

So this book is a series of anecdotes from beginning to end and the anecdotes describe a

personal history, a way of working on a body of work and the sum total of it describes that kind of

approach to architecture more than anything else. Each of these anecdotes is only a page long

and they really kind of delve into a great variety of aspects of personal or practice life, all the way

through. Really the point to this is - there's a lot of points to it, but really the main one that I want

talk about tonight is this which is that when one draws, drawing is laden with some kind of

orthodoxy in a way. I always found that as soon as you draw a line as an architect, it's either a

wall or a door or something architectural in a way. It's hard to escape from that and you

immediately have conversations surrounding the architecture without starting things like this.

So this is a really intriguing scene but it's impossible to know what's going on in this scene

because you see a dog who's looking up to see what's going on, a cat standing in the doorway of

a store, a goat that's asleep. It's a really wonderful drawing but it's impossible to know what it

means. That's really how this idea of a working drawing for ideas. So that drawing could have

only really come about with the text that accompanies it. So the idea of an anecdote, scouting the

architectural world for anecdotes that enable us to illustrate them and illustrate them through

drawing, through collage, through just simple word explanations of these kinds of things, because

everywhere we look and this is the kind of idea of intervention, to talk about intervention it's

necessary first to believe that something is already there. There's already a story in existence

and there's a story or an anecdote already in existence that we're going to add to, that we're

going to build upon, that we're going to tap into, that we're going to extend and I guess that's

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something that we've become really, really interested in and it's become part of my own sort of

working methodology.

So scenes like this, this is a scene in Townsville and its the site for a project that we did which is

called ACT for Kids, and ACT is a shortening for the Abused Children's Trust. This was the site

given to us which is unusual for Townsville being the dry tropics that this was such a green site.

When we went there the first time we were kind of astonished to see this beautiful clearing in the

middle of these trees. You can see the clearing in the foreground beyond the first stand. This

building that we were asked to design was actually for day therapy as well as for day care, as

well as the administration of the Townsville chapter of the Abused Children's Trust. So it was a

very complex brief but a very kind of important brief at the same time.

I grew up in Townsville. I did high school there. So I was very much aware of many of the goings-

on but I really was aware that they're all kind of looking over our shoulder and breathing down our

neck at the same time. I think I can remember this building from when I lived up there before I

had architectural eyes and ears. I can actually remember the smell of it more than the space of it.

So I was really intrigued go back and refamiliarize myself with this building, but more than this

building, this is another one of Birrell's buildings on James Cook University site which is where

this project is sited. It's on one of the sort of back roads of the James Cook campus.

This building by Birrell is a kind of remarkable small building. There's a thing that came with the

brief which is that some of the children who come for therapy and day care at the facility are quite

cynical. So there's a kind of thing about pitching a project that's just got exactly the right amount

of toughness but tenderness. There's a fine line between pandering to them or dealing up

something that's kind of prison like. I guess this building here had in my mind, just the right

amount of firmness and delight if it makes sense.

This is this kind of sidewall which is this really wonderful kind of moment. So we had this idea

that this could be a foundational aspect. There's been a lot built since the Birrell work, a lot of in

ALPOLIC, other kind of materials used over the years and there was also something really

interesting about tapping into some of the foundational language of the campus. But the big idea

that overarched everything for this was the idea of a public building for kids. So how do you make

a public building for kids? So we had this sort of hybrid idea about dealing with high architecture

and the world of children. So you can see here the kind of fusion between Birrell and builder

bricks or loose and IKEA, or shearer barn and copper's logs climbing structures.

The site, you can see it. This is us in the middle here. So, one of the first pieces of research that

was done was about this beautiful piece of landscape and after a little bit of reading on therapy, it

became quite apparent that landscape has this kind of amazing, very positive influence on

therapy. So we developed this plan which had zero tree removal and the therapy rooms placed in

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the middle of the clearing, that beautiful place in the middle of the trees that I described earlier.

We built the administration wing on the car park and the day care centre on the rear of the site.

Part of the idea was to choreograph the movement of the children from the car park through this

foyer space, then through to the exterior and then through into these therapy spaces. The shape

of this building tuned to the kind of canopy of these trees and each one of these rooms relating

exactly to one of the trees beyond.

So through that a series of plans evolved and another idea was a kind of envelopment of this

facility like a gentle fortification, but a fortification that children would feel like going in and

opening up to some of the therapists. I guess breaking through some of these kids in terms of

therapy was a really vital part of the brief. So how you bring people in and deal with them by

letting them move through into the garden and feeling relaxed enough to then open up to

conversations.

Like a lot of projects when a material is kind of understood for good reason, we then sort of get a

little bit obsessed and draw out the nth degree of the material in question and figure out how to

relate it to the various façades of the project. The fusion of copper's logs and the blockwork are

able to seen here, upstairs in the scalloping of the therapy building around the two stands of

trees. This is the way from admin through to the therapy suite. It is a fortified structure because

there's been - some of the perpetrators of some of the acts that have occurred have tried to get

into facilities such as this. So the facility is secured but we tried to do it in a way that it feels like

it's an integral part of the kind of overalls scene I suppose. Through into the central space and

this kind of oculus that enables people to still stand in the centre of this clearing and look up to

the canopies beyond.

The therapy suites themselves are quite simple spaces but then they do all flow out to these kind

of secured courtyard spaces. The interior of it has that kind of fusion between a public building

and that kind of IKEA-like sensibility. There's a kind of interesting thing happened, because this

was government funded we wanted to spend all of the money provided because if we came in

under budget we weren't about to return any money back to the government. So we intentionally

over-documented this and had the quantity surveyor understand a kind of shopping list. There

was one piece of cabinet work that was deleted from this area here which would have really

finished the whole foyer off. So the building was completed with this large white wall. There's a

kind of interesting mark here which are the expansion joints in the Gyprock.

I always remark, well not always, but often in the office about how translatable our drawings are

to the built outcome. I had this little inkling of a building in my brain at one point to do with

imagine if we made a space that was all white but of all the corners of everything we made black

so that the building actually looks like a three-dimensional drawing might? We went to school and

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this was actually one step ahead of our thinking where the building is able to actually do a one is

to one drawing of itself on itself.

This door swing, apparently this door was hitting kids as they were coming in and out through this

door. So this was the way that the teachers had of illustrating or generating some sort of spatial

awareness for these small students. So they taped a Nikko pen to the door of course and scribed

this beautiful arc. So this idea of a drawing on the building I guess had been in my brain but this

is the beginning of a drawing. In fact it came from our architectural drawing and it just reminded

me of drawings that I did when I was a child. Some of these are a little bit non-PC these days but

this one here, we'd do a drawing and then say to the person who was with us 'What's this?'

They'd say 'I don’t know. It's a bear climbing a tree.' I probably shouldn't tell you what these ones

are, but this one here is a giraffe walking past a window. So these were drawings we used to do

back in the 1970s or maybe 1980s. It's particularly the giraffe walking past the window which

obviously recurred to me as this potentially relevant thing because we could do this out of paint

and it would cost almost nothing to do. So hence the arrival of this giraffe walking past a window

to finish this foyer.

I'm going to move onto Brisbane Girls Grammar School which is a client of ours that we've been

working with for a long period of time. I'm going to talk to you about the project that we finished

most recently.

This is the context of Girls Grammar on Gregory Terrace. This is Main Building which is a

Richard Gailey building, a fantastic arched kind of building and then West Wing came along not

long after Main Building, another arched building, as well as some of the original fig tree

plantings. You can see here a fig tree. Now our brief was to make a building that sat in behind

here. So we have the history of Gregory Terrace playing on our mind but we also had this

fabulous old fig tree. This isn't really what the fig tree looks like. This is a panorama that Geoffrey

in our office took but that is the actual tree and the understorey of the tree.

We had this site that we were really working. This is Main Building on West Wing with the arches

through here and the fig tree. We had an idea of making this building with zero demolition. So

we'd nest this new building in between the fig tree and this existing communication centre. So it

had a particular thickness that we are working with. The project really came about from a

conceptual point of view through these three books. I said to the principal of the day, 'What sort

of library do you want?' and she said 'The last thing I want is a library like those bloody boys have

got next door.' I said 'What do you mean by that?' and then she said 'Well, you walk in and you

see all the book stacks lined up and you know exactly where you've got to go and you go and get

your book, and then you leave, and it's just too efficient.' She said 'Have you ever read Shadow

of the Wind?' and I said 'No'. So I set my homework to go and read Shadow of the Wind.

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At the same time I said to the school 'Are there any other books that hold special significance?'

and they said 'Yes. Well, Imagine a Day is read to incoming students on their first day of school.'

I said 'Okay, well that's fantastic. I'll have a read of that.' Then obviously the BCA is one of my

favourite books, so it was weighing on my mind. This is a quote that comes from Shadow of the

Wind which is this really brooding novel full of incest and murder and other things, but this is as a

part of it. There's this library in Shadow of the Wind where apparently it's an endless labyrinth

and if you put a book down you will never find it again. It never becomes apparent why that is,

maybe because you're different from having read it, so even if you do find it again, it won't be the

same book the second time round. But this quote 'a labyrinth of passageways and crammed

bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive woven with tunnels, steps, platforms and

bridges that presage an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry.'

That's what Amanda Bell, the Principal at the school wanted. That's the kind of library she

wanted but at the same time that's a pretty weird and wonderful library. This is an extract from

Imagine a Day which is this really beautiful book where these illustrations are wonderful,

provocative illustrations with really beautiful accompanying text. You may not be able to read it

on screen, 'Imagine a day when a book swings open on silent hinges and a place you've never

seen before welcomes you home. Imagine today', and the image where books become doorways

to other worlds, small things become big things. So it's a really lovely kind of vision of the library

but very different to the Shadow of the Wind of course.

Then there's this one which is the fact that if you want to build atria in a building of this class,

you've got to keep it to two storeys or you'll need to sprinkle the building. I particularly didn't want

to have to sprinkle the building in terms of cost, but also being a book heavy kind of place. So

this is one of the first propositions that was drawn which is to come to grips with the scale of this

beautiful fig tree. We had an arborist tell us that it was about 100 years old and had about

another 100 years to go. In scale terms we thought we could go up to about five stories and be

okay which is about the height of the tree. At five stories, lengthwise we could fit five bays in and

these are all based on the size of a classroom. But the size of their brief didn't require

25 modules, so we had some redundancy.

So the first notion as you can see here was to carve out some kind of void space like this, almost

like a pixelated version of the canopy of the tree but it wasn't anywhere near interesting enough.

So this the second approach evolved where we have a series of two-storey high book collection

rooms that are all interconnected but five separated. So you can rise up within this one and go

into this one, rise up within that one and go into that one, this kind of network of interesting book

collection room spaces with all of the more regular classroom spaces in between. So this kind of

almost ant colony-like, totally interior environment involved. One of the really pleasing things

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about it was this sort of superefficient stack of five floors and with it, I think less than 6 percent

floor loss, the kind of radical change that occurred in the kind of connotation of the building.

These are the floor plans which just really show how straightforward this is. So moving up

through the five floors this standard void just jumps around in its planned location. There's a

certain sense of déjà vu in this building. Part of the idea was that people would get lost and

actually go looking for a book and maybe end up in a completely different part of the library than

where they thought they'd be, and end up finding another book; the idea of the search being as

valuable as the discovery itself, because you might find that what you thought you wanted isn't

actually as good as something else that you find in any case.

Another part of the idea was to have books that line walls rather than books that occupy space,

so the kind of aesthetics of scholarship I suppose. If books become something of the past then

these rooms are still kind of able to function as research space. But there's a sense when you

walk up the stair and end up on the next floor, you are on a balcony that enables you to then

pass back through a doorway there, or there, or there, or there and if you do that then you're

back into another one of those, and so on and so on. You can actually traverse the entire building

diagonally through this manner.

The building itself is glass façade which obviously is subject to some heat gain. The building

actually faces a little further east than we had wanted, just to squeeze it in there. It's sort of east

south-easterly oriented. This fig tree as I said, has got about 100 years left in it. So we did this

solar study and found that it's capable of shading this part of the façade. This overhang shades

that part of this façade. So these fins shade the part of the façade that neither of the other two is

capable of and this was a really interesting way to continue the kind of arched building kind of

language along Gregory Terrace, but through solar means to create that kind of meaning. As you

move through the spaces there is a kind of definite sense of déjà vu, but at the same time the

tree is a kind of navigational device of sorts.

We always thought Girls Grammar's got this fantastic vision of itself which is that it's like a

microcosm of the city. So we had this motion that if the school had a mother it would be the State

Library. So it's got a mother carpet, daughter carpet which references the fig tree of course

whereas State Library references the Poinciana tree. As the evening comes on you begin to

understand the kind of network of the interior.

I'm going to talk about two projects, or no actually, probably just this one project which is going

out to tender in a week or two or three's time. It's a competition we won for the University of

Queensland. So we probably don't need to tell anyone here about University of Queensland plan.

Obviously the Great Court here. This was a competition to build a new sustainable futures

building for the Chemical Engineering Department down here. Obviously we began with this kind

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of central notion about how the campus has grown in this kind of concentric fashion over the

years and the importance of this alignment, seeing as this was the site for the proposed building.

There's also something interesting about the scale of some of the buildings within the great court

and we proposed on the basis of that, though we had this whole area as our site, to build a really

compact building, to drag all of the functions together and is really connected, hyper connected

building. The other value of that is that we were able to keep one half of the site as park land and

then enable a future tower to be built diagonally opposite our project.

Now obviously the great icon of University of Queensland, the sandstone of the University and

the way that the Department's faculties have their entranceways. We began to be interested in

the idea of chemical engineering and how since the Great Court was built out of sandstone, over

the years chemical engineers amongst other people have been instrumental in material research,

material development and the ongoing sophistication in building materials. We began to enjoy the

kind of idea of the shift from sand to glass both in campus terms but also in building material

terms. So we had this idea of a chemically-engineered Great Court type of building outcome.

So these kind of studies were done of various fragments of the Great Court which were then

turned into pieces of façade treatment. We were also really interested in the typology of the Great

Court. This obviously being the great workspace around the perimeter of the Great Court, with

this being the counterpoint, that place of relaxation and so on. So we took that idea and made it

almost like a vertical Great Court, a vertical cloister which forms a kind of atrium all the way up

through this really compact cubic building. In the same way that the Great Court's got its natural

landscape, this we imagined to have chemically-engineered landscape, social landscape in a

sense which we then modelled through various different kinds of uses to be incredibly useful

either socially or collaboratively, or whatever. Then studies of the atrium in terms of how to make

a Forgan Smith tower with various bits edited out through sky and so on. This is the atrium

component of the building extracted from within the great cube which has this sense of liquefied

or glassified sandstone with this kind of landscape that winds its way up through the building.

Then on the outside of course the kind of cubic nature of this has almost like a sandstone block

with these elements of landscape that push through the corners and leak out to the outside much

in the same way as the Great Court does.

This next project is actually in Sydney and it's Women's College. We're very, very fortunate when

the Principal of Brisbane Girls Grammar School left, she went to Women's College at the

University of Sydney and asked us to go down and have a look at the college.

I must admit it was terrifying because this is the College and it's the Sulman & Power. So the

Sulman Medal is obviously the public building medal in New South Wales and this project is a

Sulman & Power building which is this formidable place. Not only is the architecture formidable

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but the place itself is formidable, the kind of lineage of principals, the dedication to scholarship.

It's a really remarkable place to the point where they've even got castings of the Parthenon up on

the wall there. No one's allowed to touch the Parthenon anymore of course, but these castings

were done at a time when such things were allowed. So this is a remarkable Sulman & Power

building.

This is the site plan and this is the Sulman & Power building which is only one part of the site of

course. There's a building here that was built in the '60s by the name of Langley which is kind of

strange. It's almost like an incomplete peace sign or Mercedes Benz sign, but the problem is that

this was kind of fortified. This forms a beautiful internal courtyard but people were able to wander

through here in a very dangerous way, meaning that all of the doors into these social spaces

were alarmed. So if a door was left over for any more than 30 seconds it would sound a

deafening alarm. Langley is this amazing institutional brute of a thing. So many people disliked it

immensely.

So we inherited a master plan that had already been done which actually saw the incremental

removal of Langley. You can see Langley, this three-winged project here which is replaced over

time, remove that wing and build that wing, remove that wing and build this wing, and then

remove that one and build that, so almost rebuilt everything but it just straightened it all out

without actually achieving much more. So we were asked to come in and have a look at the

master plan and see what we could do.

One of the first things that we did was look beyond the site which had never really been done

before to any great extent. This kind of sheds a whole new light on what's going on. We started to

read a whole lot of intelligence into this Langley building because it's not immediately apparent,

but this wing is on the grid of the neighbouring college. This wing's on the grid of this and this is

on the intermediate college. So, this siting is really wonderful in the way that enables Western

Avenue to kind of turn the corner really elegantly and that was probably one of the very first

things that we noticed. But then at the same time I felt compelled to stick my compass straight

into the centre of this three-winged building and see what happened. Low and behold it was

almost like it was always meant to be the arc that you swing around this pretty much touches the

original building right at this point. So we were able to almost conceive of this as a completion of

Langley rather than thinking of the new work that we were going to do as new work, kind of

pretend that this was always imagined. But this is one building with three triangular courtyards

cut from it.

So this is conceived as a brick fortification that pushes right up to the street. Women's is a really

provocative, unorthodox, progressive kind of environment. That's how it was founded. It's almost

the hot seat of feminism in Australia I would suggest. There's something about the place which

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means that pushing right up to the street in a way that's imbued with all of the brickwork of all of

these other buildings, but then at this one moment right here, closest to the street, to smash

down a brick wall and open it right up with this big light-filled, glassy kind of research centre was

felt to be a really appropriate move.

Most of the other colleges as you can see are set back. Even Women's itself is set back from the

street. There's something kind of provocative about a college that pushes right up to the road and

actually welcomes people in. So this was the plan and without going into these in any great

detail, there's a basement. Then the next, it's a multifunction space flanked with all of the

ancillary functions. On the next floor up you can see this library as a mezzanine looking down

over a void into the main space below with a series of tutorial rooms. The main entrance comes

through in underneath here and circles its way up into this facility. Then there's a colonnade that

brings you around through into here with a new residence for the Vice Principal around here. So

that entire assemblage completes this sort of Langley precinct and really touches this very gently.

The next floor up is a series of music practice rooms as well with a studio and access onto this

roof terrace. So the section is quite a complex thing. So this is Langley here, four storeys in

height which flows straight into this main floor level with the basement below. I don’t know if you

can recall the images of Main Building which have these beautiful grassy berms that run up to

Main Building where we proposed to mimic that in this building to put a face on this basement. So

the courtyard of Langley flows straight into this main space and this is the library mezzanine that

flanks it. Then the studio on the top floor which then pops out onto this roof terrace.

This is a model that was submitted to the City of Sydney and I think it more than anything else

probably shows this way of mediating between Main Building and turning the corner and turning

into Wesley College, being a really good, geometric neighbour. Something remains unknown

about how to deal with some of these major surfaces but in the corridor of Main Building, the

administration building, is this incredible old photograph and it's of a play which was performed

for the 21st birthday of the College back in the early 1900s. This is a scene from the play. The

play was called A Mask and the protagonist in the play is a sybil. For those of you who don't

know what a sybil is, a sybil is an oracle and an oracle being someone who can foretell the future

based on the past.

So the sybil announced this parade of women throughout the ages as the sybil's handmaidens.

These are the handmaidens and they were people like Joan of Arc and other great women from

throughout time. Part of the idea of this play was in telling these fantastic stories or these

powerful stories of these women collectively, this might foretell the future of women as well. So

this struck me as it's almost symmetrical and it's almost able to be understood as a repeat. You

could join that end to that end and keep this thing going around and around. So this kind of really

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importance streetscape from Main Building through to Langley, through to this new project saw

this historic photograph turned into a copper screen and deployed as this west-facing sun screen

to the library on the upper floor level. These were some of the kind of important images to show

how this project would turn away, this moment of Western Avenue turn away and defer back to

the tower of Main Building to the Sulman & Power project, so they work in tandem.

So I'm really pleased to say this building is opening in a week. The builder's got an awful lot of

work to do in I think, two days or something. So this is the grassy berm which you can't see it

because of the construction mess. The grass berm is almost complete. The perforated copper

screen. These have worked remarkably well in their hologram-like state, ghosted kind of ladies of

yesteryear. The building itself is called the Sybil Centre. So it's the idea of foretelling the future

with these great women from history kind of surrounding it almost like a crown for a building, the

main entry up through here and disappearing behind a stair up into this main space.

There's various approaches to this and I think the amassing of this, the grass berm that takes you

up. Well you don't walk up it, but it visually leads up into this main space with the copper screen

and the scale of this in terms of the Jacaranda tree alignment and then further along. Another

approach - this approach is from main building, so the kind of connection from main building

down to the Sybil Centre, up the entry staircase and the kind of relentless brickwork on the site.

It's all Bowral Bricks we think. So this is just the current mix of red bricks from Bowral.

This is the courtyard flanking the Langley project where these two significant trees were retained

and worked around very, very carefully. Then internally this really highly connected sequence of

spaces for social as well as learning needs. The staircase is almost like a condenser for all of the

ideas that were going on in the interior. Up to the very top floor and then out onto the roof terrace

where you're up above the tree line, and the copper screen kind of just sticks its head up a little

bit above the roof terrace.

Like a lot of our work the screen is a foil to some pretty hard-working goings-on - drainage pipes,

all kinds of cheap fibre cement walls to clad the building. This is colonnade that returns all the

way back around and conjoins into Main Building but this is probably the image that explains it

better than most from the copper screen on the Sybil Centre, Langley, the colonnade that returns

all the way back into Main and then of course Main Building.

This is an image that a doctor who was flying over in a helicopter to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital

took but it also I think, does a remarkable job of showing how this project nests itself quite neatly,

geometrically into this setting.

Quite a different scale here. This is it a project for my brother actually and he lives in Newcastle.

He is my older brother by a couple of years and this is his house. It's a pretty run-of-the-mill

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Newcastle house. The side yard and the backyard. David studied music and became many

different things musically. Amongst other things he was the resident Conductor of Queensland

Opera. He's an orchestral composer. He is quite a very gifted musician. For a number of reasons

he started his own string academy and used to teach – I'll just go back a couple of slides – he

used to teach from the front room of the house which if any of you have ever heard someone

learning the violin would know how inappropriate that is for the rest of the family. So he used to

teach out of that room.

So I think it was probably his wife that came up with the idea of building a studio in the backyard

to get all that noise out of the house. So moving up the side yard into the backyard is this kind of

classic Newcastle backyard with chickens and an old asbestos-ridden shed. Then looking back

towards the house are this broad set of stairs that takes straight into the living space. There

wasn't much of a brief provided except that David owned this really beautiful, tiny little grand

piano but he had never had anywhere to put it. So it had remained in storage at someone else's

house for a long, long time. There was that plus the fact that the studio really needed to go in the

backyard and it needed to be also capable of being a guest quarters.

So this is the street, car, all the way to the back to the asbestos-ridden back shed. David and

Cathy planted this olive tree when they moved in there and now it's a fully mature olive tree. They

harvest olives and pickle olives and so it's quite an important part of the backyard scene. These

are little garden beds and then through to the back where there's a full-on vegetable garden and

drying yard and so on. This is really the only place for the children to run around, a small patch of

grass.

So one of the first things I did with David was tried to understand how he operates and this is

what he said. He'll have a pupil who will be playing on the violin. Often the parent or parents of

the pupil would come and want to sit down and be part of the lesson. David would sit at the piano

and be up-and-down a little, maybe play a couple of notes and then be up and help this student

with technique, that kind of thing. There were all these kind of approximate angles drawn as to

how this might work.

So quite literally I just dragged that diagram and put it on site, and did it in such a way that if you

imagine a mum or dad or carer as an audience member facing this way, then David's children

could be free to play in the backyard while this was going on. It was an exercise of privacy more

than anything else. David's got a really particular way of teaching string instrument and it's called

colour strings. It comes out of Finland and in fact there's a man by the name of Geza Szilvay and

this is him. He's got the equivalence of a Finnish knighthood for his services to music and he's

got this amazing statistic. It's something like in Australia I think, if anyone here is like me, I played

the clarinet for about three years and then gave up, never to pick it up again. Apparently that's

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entirely normal in Australia because we all – well, not all of us, but many of us probably learnt

under the AMEB system where you learn your scales, your arpeggios and you play increasingly

difficult music. Then ultimately you get bored and quit.

Whereas Geza has got almost the reverse statistic in that I think he's got something like a

90-whatever percent retention rate and not only are they retained, nearly all of them become

professionals. The way that he does this is interesting because first he gets children to love

music. Then he gets them to be able to sing. Then he gets them to be able to read music much

like one would read any other language, and be able to hear it in the student's mind. Only then

does he allow them to pick up an instrument because they should be able to hear what they

should be playing. By then they're addicted and won't put the instrument down. None of these

kids are gifted already, they're just beginners.

So David had met Geza on many occasions and decided that's exactly how he wanted to teach.

So Geza is the patron of David's music academy and they've both visited each other's studios on

many occasions. So of course Finland, you don’t have to be Einstein to figure out that Finlandia

Hall was front of mind in a way, the kind of architectural folklore in a way. The thing about

Finlandia Hall is it's one of the very few white performance spaces that I'm aware of, this really

kind of light-filled, beautiful, bright space. So I had that sitting in the back of my mind, but at the

same time I've had this in my brain which is David and I were absolutely diehards in the

backyard. This is us in New Farm playing cricket and we would literally set up the Ashes. One of

us would be England and the other one would be Australia. We were caught between the

freedom of the backyard and this kind of self-inflicted pressure of theoretical international

stardom. This was great stuff.

So I started having this idea about how, it's kind of like an idea of backyard pedagogy, where

things could be backyard enough to enable people to make mistakes, but international enough to

make people feel like they want to perform and do better. So I had this notion that we could

literally slide Finlandia Hall straight into David's backyard and hence began this process of

planning where Finlandia Hall and then David's studio. So the olive tree, the way we could defer

to this olive tree and begin to work with this idea of how this thing operates. So the audience,

David's workbench, a bathroom, this arrangement that we'd rehearsed, the ability to spin the

piano and use these long stairs as some kind of audience space as well. So the whole backyard

became an auditorium of sorts.

But of course this is not a public building in nor is it an expensive building. It's almost DIY and I

think it was $40,000 something. So we can't afford curves in a project like this. So we do things

like this but we still keep the kind of arrangement as it is. Because this is for my brother, I'm doing

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all these drawings on the kitchen table at home by hand, very few kind of representations of it.

But this is pretty much how it is and how it stayed.

Elevationally a kind of interesting thing happened where David lives in what's called the mine

subsidence area. In Newcastle there's a network of underground mines and if you're in the mine

subsidence area no one's too sure whether or not there's going to be a sink hole at any moment

in time. So there is a requirement that everything's got to be built up off the ground by this height

and then all the stumps need to be networked with concrete so that if there is a sinkhole, the

building hangs in there unlike a slab on ground which would kind of crack. This is a requirement.

So we had to build this up. The old shed was down on the ground and it had this lovely scale

about it. David really wanted a 3.2 metre ceiling height. He'd been used to the acoustics of old

Queenslanders and the kind of resonant floor, the hoop pine timber frame floor and the acoustics

of a 3.2 metre high ceiling. So that's what he wanted replicated. So before we knew it the scale of

this thing the backyard had gotten really quite tall. So hence the kind of modelling of this facade

which treats this as somewhat of stage, tucks the stairs in behind so that we could drag this down

to two metres above here and then cut this proscenium in like the ghost of the old shed. It is

obviously also a proscenium to that external stage.

This little fragment of stone, Ashley Payne - sorry Ashley, whose surname can't be named

happened to be in Helsinki many, many moons ago. Ashley used to work with us and happened

to be in Helsinki at the time when they were re-cladding its marble. The whole façade was being

replaced. Ashley as a gift to our office took this from one of the bins and brought it back and

gifted it to the office. It sat in the corner of the office for a long, long time just gathering dust. So

we decided to make a home for in this kind of dedication to alto in a sense. David's just finished a

PhD call Symmetry and Symmetry Breaking in Music where he's looked at a series of orchestral

scores and dissected them and figured out the structure of these scores. So there's a very simple

gesture in the corner of this room, a mirror placed here to create this, almost like the origin of the

room where we placed this tiny little stone. But before it was given to him I wrote my very first

composition. Those of you who don't know anything about music, this is manuscript and these

are rests. So they're when you don't play anything, when there's silence. The title of this piece of

music was called 'The Rest' and it talks about silence but it also makes you wonder what the rest

of the composition around that fragment might be.

So it was polished and it was scored and it was gifted to David to place in the corner of this room.

All of these shapes are kind of echoes of this one little moment and there's something really

lovely about the kind of pairing of these now two fragments through this idea of symmetry.

I did a sequence of posters just almost like a post-occupancy analysis of this in a funny kind of

way which tried to prove out whether or not I'd done an okay job connecting back to Finlandia

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Hall. So these are just a series of collages that I did just for my own amusement I think more than

anything else, but also in a way to kind of further connect David with some of the origins of what

he'd started in a backyard in Newcastle. Yes, I got a bit carried away with these but of course this

is what it's really all about, the kind of entry moment, that moment of being an audience member

or a parent or guardian with the white backdrop, all kind of blue coding for the kind of audience

zones, the ability to have a number of different configurations going on simultaneously, the ability

to tune this really cheaply with what's it called, Spotlight curtains and Freedom Furniture blue

velour couch. But then externally this is something else again. It's like a fibro version of Finlandia

Hall, the side yard but then it kind of nests itself into the little world of sheds up in the back

corner. As you swing around right into the back vegetable patch it sort of sits into that language

of sheds.

But this is really what it's about is David - I think one of his favourite films is Cinema Paradiso. So

he's always on the lookout for opportunities to engage with his communities, the community that

he's built up around music or even his local street community. So these are kind of events that

he's had in the backyard. But that's the other counterpoint. To be the performer and look out and

the idea of user experience. I think it's all very well to have ideas and some of these concepts I've

been talking about but it's probably all about user experience and foretelling what that user

experience, what it might be.

[music playing]

Then it's for David back to the bench to prepare the next lesson for the following day. Simple

things - lighting to make it feel like a stage and then as the sum goes down the kind of ghost of

the shed kicks in and the studio goes silent. There is bit more but I think I might leave it there.

Thank you.

Adam Jefford:Thank you Michael.

Just while Ashley and Janina get settled, Chris maybe we could switch over to the Slideo channel

please? There's a couple of questions coming up, but maybe Janina we can just start with one of

your questions to Michael.

Janina Gosseye:I think we agreed that Ashley was first.

Adam Jefford:Thank you, Ashley.

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Janina Gosseye:Yes, okay.

Audience Member:Hi Mike. My first question to you was about your PhD you've recently completed. I'm wondering if

you could talk more about what you learnt, how that process has become to affect the practice

that you do?

Michael Banney:Yeah, great question. I think one of the main things that I learnt in the course of doing it was as I

think I said in the talk, I was always a drawer and I would usually get there through drawing. I

think it's that, like every architect I suppose, how do we cut ourselves adrift and end up in that

zone where we can somehow put ideas together? It's an unpredictable thing I think, that moment

of feeling yourself lost in a world of thought. I would be in that place through drawing often, but it

was a bit hit and miss I think.

I think what I realised in the course of the PhD is that drawing has one capability but then it's

equally possible and in my case probably more possible to write something into existence or talk

something into existence, and then illustrated it, and that words can be maybe more nimble than

drawings. So it's quite methodological for me in that I now find myself writing, talking a lot more

and the pencil and butter paper is always around, but it's not a starting point so much as it

probably used to be.

Audience Member:So did it kind of reinforce the kind of architect and the kind of practices that you had already as

an architect? Or did it develop new ones?

Michael Banney:I think what it did was it drew on a latency in me that I'd never really known because I think those

who know me privately would know that I'm a bit of a talker and not so good at talking in a room

like this, but kind of behind the scenes. Within practice the ability to talk is probably a little bit too

overt sometimes and so that's always been there, but then at the same time there's something

private in a way about drawing whereas there's something quite collaborative and public about

talking things or writing things into existence. You can use English language to open up

possibilities in other people's minds for them to end up being able to contribute to more so than

maybe if you've done a drawing and then immediately begin to talk about the drawing rather than

about other possibilities inherent in description that's not a drawing.

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Audience Member:I'm not sure how the questions are going but maybe I've got one last follow-up question to carry

on from there. Your PhD was about anecdotes or your sort of anecdotal way of working in

practice. I was going to ask what makes a good anecdote and how do you filter out the good

ones from the bad ones? Can you talk more about that kind of process?

Michael Banney:Yeah, sure.

So an anecdote is a short story interesting in nature and those two ingredients. being short and

being interesting, that's really all there is to it because if you've got an idea for a project based on

an anecdote or a sequence of anecdotes, your client doesn't want to read a book that thick to get

to the point and nor do they not want it to be interesting. So I think in our practice nothing is off

limits as long as it's interesting and that's it in a nutshell. There's no other rule.

Audience Member:Okay.

Janina Gosseye:I think there might be a question from the audience that follows up on this 'nothing is off limits,

everything is possible' because one of the first questions that came in was how do you manage

the multiplicity of ideas in your projects, particularly if you have to well, take into account a budget

which may require cutting back on the designs? So that's sort of related to which anecdotes or

rich ideas do you keep and which ones - how do you go through this process of filtering the

design?

Michael Banney:Yeah, I think one of the key attributes of the anecdotes we, well I should say, I try to surface are

things based on actualities in the world. So try to have one foot firmly in the world of our clients,

the kind of dirty reality of what's going on in the world, but then drill down so far into that, keep

asking the next question, then the next question and the next question to get to the point where

we're seeing it through different eyes or hearing it through different ears. It's only then that

something magical can evolve out of those actualities.

I think once you're in the world of actualities the kind of pie in the sky factor abates and you're

into the world of getting stuff done, but probably talking about all the same stuff that you would

have talked about but talking about it in a different way and hopefully in a way that yields some

sort of poetic outcome at the end of it.

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Janina Gosseye:Well, can I ask a follow-up question actually, because as you were talking, one of the things and I

think it's written three times on my sheet, is this notion of magic. I kept on wondering if this is

something that comes out of the fact that these projects that you've shown tonight are sort of

educational projects with children, young people and then the music factor. I wonder, does it lend

itself well and how would this match with if you had to do an office building, and how do you

retain that sort of magic that these projects really exude?

Michael Banney:Goodness. I think there's magic everywhere, all around, all the time. In fact I gave a talk to the

first years at UQ the other day and someone asked me about magic and this weird thing that gets

spoken about, the fact that people in the office joke about buying me a 'magic happens' sticker

for the back of my car. I've got to be careful that I'm making people aware that I'm talking about

magic, not paranormal stuff here.

I found myself answering this question about magic in this first year talk the other day by talking

about a situation that involved with my mother when I was a child. So I think I might have been

15 years old and my friend and I had been playing golf. He left his watch on the roof of the car

and our mums came to pick us up because we didn't have licenses. So, they left and he left his

watch on the roof of the car. So they drove off and came back 10 minutes later because he'd

realised that he'd left his watch there. We were still there because my mother was talking to other

people.

So we looked around the car park for this missing watch and it wasn't anywhere to be found. So

we thought someone's taken it or whatever. Then my mother said this kind of remarkable thing.

She said 'Well why don’t we get a rock and put it on the roof of your car because we're all going

anyway and we're going in the same direction. We'll follow you and when the rock falls off, we'll

get out of the car and we'll get the watch.' Everyone just… So anyway, we drove off. This was at

Magnetic Island which is this hilly, headland place. We all drove and drove and drove for what

seemed like way too long and then finally the rock fell off. Mum and I got out of the car and she

walked along to where the rock was and picked up the watch and kept walking and gave it to

Mark.

Anyway, I've told this story, I don’t know, people from my office are probably sick and tired of

hearing it, but there are always two responses to this. One is from people like Ben in our office

who says 'Of course, the right weight rock, strictly positioned. It was always going to happen, a

simple act of physics' and then there's the, 'someone was looking out for you that day' reaction.

But then there's my favourite which is my own opinion which is the conspiracy theory, which is

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that my mother had to watch the whole time and she kind of concocted this weird kind of role play

thing. It's kind of very strange.

I said to my mother recently, 'You know why the watch was found?' and she said 'No?' I said

'Everything goes back to this one moment', which is that suggestion that she made which is it's

so obvious and it's so practical, but it's also mad. The likelihood of it working was so slight that

the reward is immense. Magic is that, right? It's actually smoke and mirrors at the end of the day

but when it works out it's kind of amazing. I reckon you can you apply that to a high-rise building

or a fit-out for a bunch of lawyers.

Janina Gosseye:Ashley?

Ashley Paine :Well I'm just thinking on that issue. I think there was a question here about how you work across

different scales. You just made it, sort of drew an analogy there about working across different

scales of building. There's a question really just about how you manage ideas and how ideas

translate across different scales of practice?

Michael Banney:Yeah, well I think scales is irrelevant to a good idea. You can have a brilliant idea for a toy, or an

interior or a tower, or anything. I once joked that Michael Christensen will design a military

manoeuvre if we were given a chance. I don't think there's anything about the prevailing

circumstances that surround anything. Part of what we value is the notion of going into any given

situation in a state of not knowing.

So if you can actually be capable of almost being an alien or not present for long enough to feel

the emergent qualities of something, I think you can move between scales. You are just there to

find out if you are true to the idea of not knowing. There's many things we haven't done of course

but once given the opportunity we're there find out. I think that's scaleless.

Ashley Paine :But I think it's also true to say that the work has always treated buildings of all scales with equal

kind of passion, enthusiasm and richness of ideas. You showed tonight your brother's backyard

shed effectively alongside multi-million dollar projects for the colleges at Sydney. So is that

something else that is still critical to the way that you guys work, that you think that you can make

architecture at all scales and that all kinds of architecture at all scales is a rich and valuable

fodder for practice, is it?

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Michael Banney:Sort of. I think if I've calculated in percentage terms what my brother's fee was in terms of time

spent, it probably would have been about 150 percent fee. That was partly – I'm exaggerating of

course, but I don't think you can invest yourself so completely in microscopic projects when you

run an office of 18 or so people. But there's something absolutely invaluable about doing them

nonetheless and we do them frequently when we can because they do other things for our

thinking processes.

There is an old rule in our office which is that every project is a fantastic project until proven

otherwise and that's regardless of who's commissioned it, how big it is. We cut our teeth on the

tiniest, tiniest of projects and treated them with the greatest of respect. That's kind of a slow burn

way of building up to something bigger but we'll always go back and do the small things for

people who've got the best intentions.

Janina Gosseye:Well I hear that we don't have time for more questions. So I would like to thank you very much for

a fantastic lecture and thank the audience for the great questions.

Finally, don't forget to come back next week when we have James Legge of Six Degrees giving

another fantastic lecture. So thank you again.

Michael Banney:Thank you.

[End of Transcript]

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