NSW architect wins funding for coastal design

“I think most people in Australia have a memory of the beach – an affinity with the beach, even if they don’t live immediately near it,” reflects Nicole Larkin, recently announced recipient of the 2025 Marten Bequest. The architect – previously of Tzannes, EM BE CE and Aileen Sage Architects – is now based on the New South Wales South Coast, and it’s the deep care for all things coastal that has helped her win the Marten Bequest.

The $50,000, two-year travelling scholarship is awarded by Creative Australia with Perpetual, part of a national grant program administered by The Marten Bequest Foundation to support emerging Australian artists and architects to advance their practice. Victoria-based Lauren Crockett was another architect to receive the grant this year.

For Larkin, it’s an opportunity to do what architects do best – combine research with practice. She says that she’ll be trying to apply the lessons learned from extensive work researching NSW ocean pools to coastal planning and design more broadly. “The Marten Bequest has just been a great opportunity to do that,” she says. “Architecture is very interesting like that… it’s kind of practice-based evidence. We’re researching, but immediately applying that research, testing it and understanding how effective it is. I feel very lucky to be given a chance to do that at this point in my career.”

The coast has been something of a constant in Larkin’s work. In particular, the ocean pools of NSW have been a recurrent focus – she even mapped all 60 of them on the back of a Byera Hadley Scholarship in 2017!

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“We all have this affinity with the water and fascination with that edge between land and and sea or land and water, and have been designing on that space for a long time,” says Larkin, referring to the practices she’s previously worked with. “It is a part of our national identity. Some people say that the beach can be an elite space… but it is also a place that we fiercely defend as a public space, and the lessons I’ve taken from ocean pools is that it’s an incredibly important resource. Giving people a point of access to the water is about protecting public amenity.”

Merging research and practice, Larkin hopes that the Bequest will allow her to make the most of “reading a landscape through the lens of an architect.” The travelling aspect of is set to include New Zealand, with a specific focus on Māori practices in coastal adaptation. Meanwhile, Larkin also plans to travel domestically within Australia to draw on First Nations knowledge and practices.

“I’d like to get right into how we as a state and a nation are dealing with [sea level rise],” Larkin concludes. “I have a clear idea of that issue and I’m quite interested to see where design can come in and essentially solve some of the contentious issues around that.”

Nicole Larkin
nicolelarkin.com

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