In being awarded the Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal in 1998, Gabriel Poole was recognised one of the country’s most original and environmentally-attuned practitioners.

While he and his wife, artist Elizabeth Poole, continue to run their design company, they have recently simplified their lives to concentrate on what really matters to them.

Gabriel Poole has spent most of his working life designing houses and investigating ways to make housing better. He has also spent most of his working life on the sub-tropical Sunshine Coast of Queensland, where his architecture not only responds to the local landscape and climatic conditions, but rejoices in them.

His most celebrated works are lightweight structures, raised pavilions with permeable walls and screens that dissolve the boundaries between inside and out. He is equally known for his practical inventiveness, which has led him to novel construction solutions and the use of unorthodox materials. In the process, has also kick-started a new architectural movement in Australia.

Over the past three decades many architects have trained in his offices, and many more have been inspired by him, and the distinctive approach to architecture that has developed in South-East Queensland, as practised by architects like Lindsay and Kerry Clare, John Mainwaring and by Troppo Architects, can be traced back to his influence.

Architectural historian, Jennifer Taylor describes Gabriel’s work as “a fanciful architecture of freedom”. It is founded on the desire for people to appreciate living in his houses as an immediate sensory experience: of the natural environment, the sounds, the breezes, the richness of materials, the changing colours and light.

Given the openness this communion with nature demands, he also expects his architecture ‘to work’ for him – to modulate that light, and, through cross-ventilation and other passive means, to control temperature and, therefore, comfort. His overriding objective, however, is to create volumes that offer a feeling of enrichment, a spiritual dimension, which he describes as “a space where the soul can play”.

Read the whole article in Indesign Magazine #32, at newsagents February 14th.