The Murcutt Symposium is not a conference in the conventional sense. It is an immersion. Three days of tours, talks and chance encounters where architecture is experienced not as abstraction, but as lived practice. In September, the State Library of NSW hosted the biennial gathering, drawing architects from across Australia and abroad to engage with Glenn Murcutt, Francis Kéré and a line-up of speakers committed to architecture as both craft and care.

A pin, not a medal

The most emblematic moment came on Friday evening, when Glenn Murcutt awarded Francis Kéré a pin of his own design. “I didn’t want a medal, too pretentious,” Murcutt explained. Instead, he conceived something understated: a white gold pin crafted by JamFactory in Adelaide. Its form is generated by cutting through a cone, the radius shifting to create an elliptical junction. In Murcutt’s words, the cut transforms something rational into something poetic. “That is what architecture is about,” he said.

The gesture was tactile and personal. I had the privilege of being the pin-holder this year, and its weight – quiet yet luminous – seemed to embody the symposium itself: a community of architects bound by humility, intimacy and shared belief in the possibilities of design.

Related: Piers Taylor on the podcast

The program in three movements

The symposium unfolded across three distinct yet connected days:

• Thursday 11th September: Building tours to Nicholas House at Mount Irvine and Simpson Lee House at Mount Wilson. Guests sketched, shared lunch under the trees and listened to Murcutt’s introductions in situ, encountering architecture as it should be: lived, touched, drawn.
  
• Friday 12th September: Alumni events culminated in the Murcutt Oration. After a rooftop reception, the audience witnessed Murcutt award the pin before Kéré delivered a deeply personal lecture on community, resilience and architecture as action.
  
• Saturday 13th September: A full-day symposium at the State Library opened with a smoking ceremony, followed by conversations and presentations. Catherine Lassen chaired a dialogue between Glenn Murcutt and Francis Kéré, setting the tone for the day. This was followed by a presentation from Piers Taylor reflecting on design practice, then a panel discussion, Healthy Buildings Breathe with Kerry Clare, Lindsay Clare, Che Wall and Rod Simpson.
  
• In the afternoon, Carol Marra spoke on design for change, beginning with the metaphor of an umbrella as a simple yet profound building strategy, how opening it for shade and its presence alone modifies the environment around us. The symposium closed beautifully with Catherine Hunter’s moving reflection on 30 years of filming Murcutt’s practice, calm and personal in tone, followed by a touching remembrance of those who have shaped and supported his journey but are no longer with us — a reminder that architecture is always surrounded by community, even in moments of loss.

The rhythm of the program, tours, oration and symposium was less about hierarchy than continuity. It was about moving between places, conversation and reflection, reinforcing architecture’s capacity to connect across scales.

Lessons from Glenn Murcutt

Murcutt’s address distilled decades of practice into deceptively simple principles:

• Never rush to success.
• The essence is clarification of the past.
• Do ordinary things extraordinarily well.

He spoke of architecture as “an architecture of making,” rooted in the nature of materials, in joinery, in the patient act of building with what is available rather than importing what is not. “The computer can’t hesitate,” he reminded us. “But we must.” It is in hesitation, in muddling through, that architectural answers are found.

Architecture as action

Francis Kéré, in turn, placed emphasis on architecture as a collective endeavour. His stories of drawing with communities, of designing for change, underscored architecture as an act of action, not abstraction. Carol talked about the relationship between climate and typology, courtyard houses in 30-degree heat and vernacular practices from China – which was not academic, but lived reality.

Technical strategies such as Krinner screw foundations, prefabricated steel floors and net-zero operations were presented not as innovations for their own sake but as context-responsive methods. As Rod Simpson reminded us, regulations are too often copied wholesale from European climates and applied to the Australian context, where they can fail to respond to the diversity of our environments. In this framing, architecture was inseparable from anthropology, geology and the politics of who can do what.

What lingers is not only the notes or technical details, but the intimacy of the gathering. You don’t merely listen to Glenn Murcutt or Francis Kéré; you share a bus, a meal, a sketching session. You bump into peers in hallways, and conversations unfold as naturally as the tours.

This is perhaps the symposium’s greatest gift: a community sustained by proximity, humility and care. For those yet to experience it, I encourage you to join in two years’ time. You will leave with more than architectural lessons; you will leave with renewed belief in architecture’s capacity to connect us, to each other, to place and to poetry.

That spirit of continuity now extends beyond the symposium itself. The Murcutt Foundation has launched a campaign to complete the first feature-length film on Glenn Murcutt, to be released for his 90th birthday in 2026. Support the project here: https://www.pozible.com/profile/murcuttfoundation

Glenn Murcutt Architecture Foundation
murcuttfoundation.org

Studio Orsi
studioorsi.com.au